Triton (23 page)

“Just so you know, I sleep shirtless.” He whipped off his T-shirt and fell backward onto the mattress, fingers clasped behind his head.

“I think you already know how I sleep.” With a timid glance over her shoulder, she wiggled out of her shorts and dove under the covers.

“But it shouldn’t matter,” he said. “Back to back, right?”

“Right.” Her breath warmed his neck, just inches from his ear. It was too much. His pulse raced into overdrive, and in the humid darkness, he found her lips and kissed her. They made out beneath the sheets, breathing heavily and trying not to make a peep, turning their cocoon into a sweaty furnace.

Sky rubbed her body against his side, and their combined body heat scorched his skin. He held her as close as he dared—lest she vanish into thin air.

Cedar pulled away for a moment. “Can you control when you’re taken?” The question had puzzled him for a while. “Can you do it at will?”

“It just happens,” she said.

“Why? What were you doing? What were you thinking about?”

She didn’t answer at first, and Cedar thought he’d offended her. Then her whisper tickled his ear. “The first time I was sleeping. The second time I was thinking about you.”

“About me?”

“How you were screwed up and I didn’t care how you felt about me and how I didn’t need you . . . it was really calming actually.”

He chuckled. “Points for honesty. And when you came back?”

She shifted next to him and propped herself up on her elbow. “You think there’s a pattern?”

He just stared at her. “When you came back . . . what were you thinking about?”

She stared at him for a moment, and then a hint of understanding flashed in her eyes. “Both times I was terrified,” she said. “Like . . . scared enough to stop my heart. The first time, I coughed up my feeding tube. The second time I saw a bunch of sacks filled with human fetuses.”

“And you were calm when you were taken?”

She nodded.

“Why weren’t you taken that first night, when we were all sleeping in the suite?”

“I didn’t sleep that night; I was too scared.”

Cedar’s eyebrows nudged upward. “And right now . . . why haven’t you been taken right now?”

“Who said I was calm around you?”

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes stayed locked on his. Cautiously, she took his hand and pressed it against her chest—and through her ribcage, he could feel her excited pulse, like a hummingbird’s wings.

Though Brynn’s eyes
were closed, she didn’t sleep a wink. She couldn’t. Not with that thing right under their hull.
The
Triton
.

She could feel it down there, lurking beneath the waves, doing God knew what. Its alien presence prickling the back of her neck.

She rolled over to face Naomi, and almost shrieked when she came face to face with her wide open bloodshot eyes.

“You’re not asleep?” Brynn stammered, adrenaline pouring into her blood.

Naomi shook her head, her face a mask of terror. “We shouldn’t have come here,” she whispered. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“Why not?”

“Because now it’s on this ship.”

Cedar opened his
eyes and knew something was wrong. Sky was sitting up next to him, her face alert and scared.

He bolted upright next to her. “What is it?”

She faced him with terrified eyes. “There’s something out there. Right outside the bridge . . . it’s coming for us.”

“Sky, we’re safe,” he reassured her. “It can’t get onto the bridge.”

“I want to go look,” she said.

“Nothing can get through that blast door. As long as it’s out there and we’re in here, we’re safe.”

“It’s what
took
me, Cedar. I need to go look.” Then, before he could stop her, she scrambled off the mattress and darted toward the blast door—and opened it.

“Sky, wait!” Having no choice, he sprinted after her, followed her past the dim officers’ quarters, and burst out through the crew-only door into the hallway, where he caught her wrist.

He tugged her to face him. “Listen to me, we don’t know what’s out here—”

Then, through his peripherals, at the distant end of the corridor, he glimpsed a shadow dart into the aft elevator lobby.

He glanced up, his blood chilling to ice, but he was too slow to see it straight on. The long, flickering stretch of hallway loomed ahead of him, abandoned. “Sky, we need to get back to the bridge.”

“No.” She tugged her hand free and started down the length of the ship—her frightened eyes darting to each closed stateroom door they passed.

Her strange new sixth sense raised hairs on his neck. Unsure how to handle her, he proceeded after her on tiptoe. They reached the lobby, and Cedar peeked around the wall. He found it empty. Nothing stirred. Not even a shadow.

No, not quite nothing.

The floor number display atop one of the elevators changed, ticking off the decks. Going
down
. Eleven . . . ten . . . nine . . .

Someone had boarded the elevator.

The elevator stopped on deck two, and Sky went rigid next to him. “We have to follow it,” she whispered.

“
Why?
”

“Because we have to kill it.” She darted for an open elevator.

Cedar caught the doors with his arm, preventing them from closing. “Sky, come on now . . .”

She targeted him with the full intensity of her golden-green eyes, giving his heart the jitters. “There’s something else on this ship,” she said. “It took our food from the suite, it was sneaking around near the bridge when you guys were checking out the island, and it burned that message into the floor. It’s what took me, and I need to know what it is. I need to face it. If you’re not going to come, Cedar, then get out of my way.”

“You’re crazy.”

She smiled weakly. “That’s why you like me.”

Cedar stared at her for another moment. She was right, of course. He would follow her anywhere. He sighed and entered the elevator and pounded the button for deck two. “Why is it that pretty girls are so damn persuasive?”

“Shut up. You’re curious too.”

Sky felt the
eerie pull before the elevator reached the bottom. She could feel it tugging at her, tugging at her organs, her heart.

She swiveled away from Cedar, on the verge of puking, grossed out in her own skin. “I think it’s trying to take me,” she whispered.

He wrapped his arms around her and tilted her chin up, leveling his blue eyes with hers. “You have a choice.”

She nodded, fear prickling her insides. And then she felt something else. Something shifting underneath her, below the water, thirty feet below the bottom of the ship’s hull.

Triton was
moving
.

“Guys, something’s happening,”
said Jake, peering off the bridge. All around the cruise ship’s bow, ripples vibrated the waves. “I think you better see this.”

Naomi leapt out of bed and rushed to the array of monitors. “Sonar’s picking up movement.”

Brynn appeared at Jake’s side, her eyes intent on the water.

It happened in an instant.

Lights flashed underwater. A line of bluish-white squares blazed under the bow, stretching to infinity and flooding the bridge with light. Another row of lights flashed on underwater, and then another, and another. Soon, the entire ocean glowed from within.

The Triton, lit up like an underwater city. He could make out its shape now: an equilateral triangle, sloping upward to a point in the center. A three-sided pyramid. Miles wide.

A thousand feet away—previously cloaked in fog—it’s peak jutted out of the surface.

All at once, the cruise ship lurched. The deck dropped out underneath them and sent them staggering.

The Triton was moving, displacing huge volumes of water—going
down
.

“It’s sinking,” said Naomi, her voice laced with horror. “It’s sinking, and we’re anchored to it.”

On deck two
, Cedar felt the ship drop underneath him, and he noticed they were walking downhill.

“Cedar and Sky, get back to the bridge,
now!
” Jake’s voice hissed over their radios.

“No can do,” Cedar radioed back.

Just then the cruise ship let out an agonized groan, its metal hull creaking and moaning with stress.

And then the deck shot up, buckling his and Sky’s knees. They sprawled out on the floor. The ship listed hard to port, then swung back to starboard.

“What the hell was that?” he radioed.

“Anchor chain just snapped,” came Jake’s reply. “The Triton’s sinking. Where are you? What are you doing?”

Cedar smirked. “We’re off to hunt us a nephilim.”

“You’re what?” Jake
yelled into the radio, but they had already signed off. “I think they’re confused about who’s hunting who.”

“Uh, Jake . . .” Naomi’s voice trembled behind him. “The Triton’s sinking.”

“I know. I’m staring right at it.”

“No, it’s
sinking
. We’re losing it, we’re losing our chance.”

He swung around. “What do you mean?”

“We’re losing the Triton, Jake. It’s going to the bottom of the ocean. It’s now or never.”

Suddenly, he understood, and his heart clanged. “Do we have time?”

“Only if we go right now.”

He cursed and thrust the radio into Brynn’s hands. “Keep trying to reach them. Naomi and I will be back in a few hours.”

“
What?
Where . . . where are you guys going?” Her voice wavered.

Jake watched the peak of the Triton sink toward the crashing surf. “We’re going down in the minisub . . . before we lose this thing in the goddamn Marianas Trench.”

“And Brynn, put the throttle into reverse,” said Naomi, following Jake off the bridge. “That thing is creating a lot of suction as it sinks . . . if we don’t counter with the thrusters, the
Cypress
will be pulled right into it.”

Alone on the
bridge, Brynn watched the vast pyramid they had named the Triton sink into the pounding surf. Water boiled and frothed around its edges, steadily submerging it, and one by one, the lights along its wooden hull receded into the depths. Powerful currents rushed around the cruise ship to replace the huge volume of displaced water. Brynn throttled up a notch to counter the force.

And it occurred to her how dangerous this was. If the water started pulling harder than they could, they were toast.

Screw this. She jammed the throttle into full reverse, and was relieved to see the underwater lights begin to inch forward. At least they
could
still move backwards. Better safe than sorry.

How big was this thing anyway?

She counted twelve of those rectangular lights, each the size of a yacht, along the length of the
Cypress
, which she had heard Naomi say was almost twelve hundred feet long—so a hundred feet per light.

She counted the number of rows up to the peak, and lost count at eighty. However much that was. She was no good at math.

Just then the Triton’s lights flashed with blinding intensity, then dimmed, stamping her retinas with a ghostly checkerboard afterimage. Following the flash, an electric wave skittered across her skin, like static. With a sizzle and pop, the bridge of the
Cypress
went dark.

A blackout.

She blinked, disoriented, unable to focus for an entire thunderous heartbeat. The only light shone through the windows from the Triton. Every LCD monitor, every instrument, every indicator light had gone dark as midnight.

An electromagnetic pulse.

A few years ago, her brother had been obsessed with EMPs, and as a result of suffering through his endless ravings, Brynn recognized the telltale signs of fried electronics.

The Triton had just hit them with an EMP.

The cruise ship began to drift forward again, and Brynn reached for the throttle—only to find it in full reverse already.

And then she understood.

According to Naomi, the azimuth thrusters below the
Cypress
were powered by a diesel-
electric
transmission—which meant the EMP had shut down those too.

Without engines, their ship was no better off than a piece of driftwood. Brynn could only gape as the current pulled them toward the mountainous peak jutting out of the ocean.

The phrase
dead in the water
came to mind.

Nephilim

The lights fizzled
out in the minisub launch bay, plunging Naomi into blackness. The electric winch ground to a halt, and the hanging minisub swung back and forth against the backlit bay door.

“What just happened?” said Jake.

Naomi jammed the lever back and forth. “Come on,” she muttered in frustration. The minisub dangled on the crane, half inside the ship, half outside. If they disconnected the sub now, it would crash into the edge of the bay. If they could just get it a few more feet . . .

“Lightning?” said Jake.

She shook her head. “We must have blown a transformer. I’m not surprised; all this stuff was damaged in the tsunami. We’ll have to manually crank it out the rest of the way.”

Jake gripped the edge of the launch bay door and leaned his body out. He peered down the length of the cruise ship, and the Triton’s blue glow lit his hard jaw from underneath. “Uh—Naomi?”

“Yeah?”

“The entire ship’s dark.”

“What do you mean . . .
dark?
”

“The blackout. It’s the whole ship . . . all the lights are out.”

“Huh?” Naomi ran to the ledge and yanked him back to get a view herself. Sure enough, the
Cypress
faded into the night, its decks stacked like so many burnt out cinders. Not a twinkle shone from the dark vessel.

“What about the emergency lights?” said Jake. “Those should be on a different circuit, right?”

“Right.” Naomi peered around the minisub bay, now completely black. “They’re supposed to come on automatically in case of a power outage.” Yet all was dark. “Something’s not right about this.” She unclipped her walkie-talkie from her shorts and called the bridge. “Brynn, come in . . . what’s your status up there?”