Triton (30 page)

Whatever that meant.

Cedar watched the
oxygen gauge dip below ninety liters, just enough for their return trip to the surface—still shaken by Brynn’s theory.

His sister believed he had grabbed the steering wheel to save them, and some kind of guardian angel had stepped in to intervene.

That’s why he didn’t remember.

He didn’t believe a word of it. Sure, his concussion had wiped from memory the exact moment of his decision, but his mom died because of him; it didn’t matter who lived.

“This is our point of no return,” said Naomi, tapping the gauge. “We need to surface.”

“Give her more time,” said Cedar.

“We need to surface,” she repeated. “This isn’t up for debate. If we wait any longer, we’ll suffocate before we reach air.”

“Make more time.”

“Did you not just hear me?”

“You added in a margin of error,” he said. “There’s more time.”

She glared at him. “Because I don’t
know
, Cedar. I don’t know how fast we’re breathing. I don’t know how low the levels can get before we pass out. I don’t know how much carbon dioxide we can breathe.”

“Only one of us needs to stay conscious to undo the hatch,” said Cedar. “Give her five minutes.”

Naomi threw a pleading glance at Jake, who cleared his throat.

“Five minutes,” he said. “Then we surface. With or without Sky.”

“We don’t have to surface,” said Cedar. “If we don’t surface, we buy her another hour.”

“And commit suicide if she fails,” said Jake. “She could be
ten
hours from the airlock.”

“No. She’s close.”

“Oh, so now you’re telepathic?”

“Yes. I am. She’s close.”

Sky lifted her
foot to climb another step but stepped through empty air instead. She lost her balance and collapsed.

The top.

Too long. It had taken her too long to climb the stairs; the sub—with Cedar, Jake, Naomi, and Brynn—had left.

She curled into a fetal position, her lungs and intestines writhing in agony. She had failed.

But . . . but what if they hadn’t left? What if they stayed? What if Cedar, in his infinite stupidity, convinced them to put their lives on the line for her? To
wait.

What if they were relying on her?

She couldn’t stop.

She tried to lift her head, but couldn’t. Like her abused legs, her neck muscles had given out. She propped herself up on her arms, her entire body trembling, and flopped onto her back—and for the first time, she glimpsed the structure of the Triton.

She had climbed into a chasm inside its double hull. Looming above her, and as far as she could see down the pyramid’s slope, a dizzying web of wood trusses braced the outer hull. Struts hewn from trunks the size of redwoods—trees of biblical proportions—dwarfed to toothpicks beneath the Triton’s crushing dimensions. The bonelike matrix strained and creaked under the pressure of the surrounding ocean. From somewhere nearby echoed the roar of falling water.

Transparent gas-filled sacks the size of blimps bulged within the voids in the structure, swelling into every last inch of empty space. Shock absorbers . . . sheltering the inner hull with womblike care.

The sight awed her, but she had to move. She dragged herself into a sitting position, and realized—with a dull clang of her heart—that she would
never
find the airlock.

Beneath the sacks, the three faces of the pyramid sloped gently away from her, no doubt extending
miles
before the outer rim. Even if she could crawl through the gaps between the sacks—and do it under an hour—she had no idea which way to go, no idea which side the minisub had entered the airlock.

She swiveled around, scanned three hundred and sixty degrees. But aside from the waterfall crashing somewhere off to her left, every direction appeared identical, just an endless maze of pulsing, slime-covered sacks—

The sound of the waterfall whipped her head around. A
waterfall?

Not a waterfall.

Seawater. Pouring in through a breach in the outer hull. There was only one thing in the ocean large enough to breach the Triton’s hull.

The 1,187-foot, 110,000-ton cruise ship, MS
Cypress
. From its wreckage, Naomi had piloted the minisub straight to the edge and down.

Using the breach in the Triton’s hull as a point of reference, Sky could copy the maneuver and arrive at the airlock from the inside.

With a burst of energy, she bounced to her feet and squeezed between the first two sacks, brushing her shoulder on the squishy mucous membrane, and hurtled toward the sound of the waterfall.

“That’s five minutes.
We’re leaving.” Naomi swiveled the joystick and throttled up, and the sub lurched toward the airlock’s exit.

“Just listen to me—” said Cedar.

“We waited five minutes and used up ten more liters of oxygen. Now we’re leaving.”

“Just
listen
,” he said, as the dark chamber of the airlock slid past them. “Nothing is waiting for us up there, Naomi. No life, no family, no civilization. Once we surface, there’s no coming back down.”

“We’ll find a way,” said Jake.

“No, Cedar’s right,” said Naomi. “Without the proper equipment, we can’t refill the oxygen tanks or recharge the batteries. This is a one-time-use vehicle for us.”

“So we’re giving up?” said Cedar.

“Yes.”

“Right now, we have a
chance
,” he pleaded. “If we go back up, we have no chance. We’ll die of dehydration—like cowards.”

“The Triton might come back up,” she said, though his words lingered uncomfortably in her mind. Her hand trembled on the joystick.

“I know you don’t believe that,” he said.

“Listen, Cedar . . .” Jake squeezed his shoulder. “No offense, but you know Sky, she’s not exactly . . .
reliable
. Frankly, I think we’re expecting too much from her.”

Cedar locked eyes with him. “You don’t know her like I do.”

“I’m sure I don’t,” he said. “Carry on, Naomi. Get us the hell out of here.”

She nodded, and the sub cleared the airlock, floated upward. Her eyes froze on the cold, pitch black sea above them.

The last ones on earth . . . what if it really was up to them?

“Guys, Cedar never trusts anybody,” said Brynn. “If he trusts Sky, then I do too. I think we should wait for her.”

Jake sighed. “You do realize if she can’t open the airlock, we die.”

“We die anyways.”

Naomi’s hand hovered over the sub’s buoyancy control, uncertain. Like Cedar said, leaving meant giving up.
Giving up
 . . . like she had given up on life a year ago. The notion of doing it again made her heart twinge. What if she had been given a second chance for a reason? So that now—faced with the nothingness that awaited at the surface—she would make a different choice.

A different choice
.

“No . . .” she whispered, her resolve strengthening with each second. “Sky can do it. Cedar’s right, we have to give her time.”

“So it’s three against one,” said Jake.

Naomi swiveled and caught his eye. “I won’t keep us down here unless we all agree . . . you know that, right?”

“Jesus, we’re really doing this . . .” He dragged his hand across his face and exhaled through his fingers. “Our final hour, and this is what it comes to . . . and I’m a coward.”

“You’re not a coward,” whispered Brynn.

“I feel like one. I can’t go to my grave with that kind of weight on my conscience. Take us back into the airlock, Naomi. We’re doing this.”

“You sure?” she said.

“I’m sure.”

So they would stay down.

Naomi licked her lips, which had dried to sandpaper, and turned the sub around. They plunged back into the tomblike airlock, and in so doing, placed their lives irrevocably in Sky’s hands.

Even jogging at
the edge of breathlessness and puking, the journey to the edge took most of an hour. At last, gasping for breath, Sky perched on the rim and peered off the vertical, mile-high drop to oblivion. The gas-filled sacks stretched down the side.

The slimy wood of the inner hull offered no handholds, nothing to grab onto. Even if she could climb down, it would take a hundred years to reach the bottom.

They were out of air.

She could think of only one way to cover the distance fast enough: free fall.

Time to test her theory that the huge balloons of gas were shock absorbers. Before she could chicken out, she spotted her landing—a particularly billowy air sac floating a thousand feet below her—and leapt into the hands of fate . . .

Like a breath
of air, the hour was gone. Cedar felt a nervous weight crushing his sternum. It didn’t matter, really. She had done her best.

Trusting her had been the right choice. It felt good to trust. To surrender, to just accept. And part of him was glad they never got the chance to say goodbye to each other.

He would have screwed it up, anyway. Goodbyes sucked.

“That’s it,” said Naomi, tapping the oxygen gauge. “Air tanks are empty. She’s not coming.”

Brynn took a tentative breath. “How come we can still breathe?”

“It’s just the air in the cockpit now. Over the next few minutes, carbon dioxide will replace all the useable oxygen and we’ll die of asphyxiation.”

“Lovely,” said Jake.

“Hey, at least you don’t have a weight on your conscience,” said Naomi.

Sky’s stomach floated
up inside her, crawled up her throat. She screamed. The humid wind rose to a whistle in her ears, whipped her cheeks and stung her eyes, drew tears. Oh God, what had she been thinking?

She had leapt to her death.

Yet a second passed, and another. Still, she fell. The balloons floated past her in slow motion.

The giant air sack loomed in front of her like a planet. She closed her eyes, shielded her face with her elbows, and tensed her body for the blow.

The membrane whipped her stomach, pain like needles stabbing every inch of her skin. She shrieked, but the slimy material swallowed her and suffocated her, sealed her inside a slimy womb. Then it flung her out, punching the wind out of her.

She struck another sack and was deflected downward, glanced off a third, and plummeted. Wheezing, she yanked in her arms and legs and curled into a ball so she didn’t snap in two—and just in time.

She plowed sideways into a fourth sack, and her organs crunched against her ribs, jerked her spine, then squashed back as she was catapulted into another cluster of sacks and bounced back and forth like a pinball.

Please, let this end soon
 . . .

She peeked—and terror flooded her veins. She was flying straight at solid planks. Her body splatted against the Triton’s outer hull, peeled loose, and dropped.

She smashed into solid ground and somersaulted to a stop on her face, bruised everywhere, bleeding, and wishing she were dead.

Jumping . . .
bad idea, Sky
.

Moaning, she dragged herself into a crawl. Had she fallen all the way to the bottom?

Not even close.

She’d fallen on a structure that connected the outer hull to the inner hull, a tunnel of some sort, fully enclosed. Planks sealed with tar. Watertight.

The airlock.

She’d fallen on the airlock.

She sprang to her feet, and her eyes darted. Controls . . .
where?
Inside. They would be inside. She limped across the roof of the airlock toward the inner hull—where stairs descended into a loading dock.

At the bottom of the stairs, below a word carved in an alien language, an ornately engraved lever jutted from the wall.

Inside the sub
, a grim silence weighed down the remaining traces of oxygen. Brynn curled up against Jake’s chest. The carbon dioxide made each breath feel useless, like she was only breathing out. Never in.

Each time she exhaled, prickles of panic scampered across her skin.

“Any last words?” said Naomi.

“I love you guys,” said Brynn.

The others murmured it back.

“What happens when you die after the apocalypse has already happened?” said Cedar. “After everyone has already been beamed to heaven. Where do we go?”

“Into oblivion,” said Jake. “There’s nowhere else.”

“Maybe we can still go to heaven?” said Brynn.

“That ship has sailed,” said Cedar.

They were silent a moment, then Brynn giggled. “We
were
on that ship—”

The sub lurched and dropped out from underneath them, pitched to the left. Brynn landed hard on Jake’s lap and stared wide-eyed around the dark cockpit. “What was that?”

“Something’s pulling us down,” said Naomi, sitting forward.

The sub clanged sideways into the bottom of the airlock and sprawled them into a dogpile, and the gurgle of rushing water sounded through its hull. At the top of the acrylic dome, the seawater parted, and its surface slurped down around them and drained off the sides.

The movement cut off abruptly.

Brynn quivered in stunned silence. They were no longer underwater.

Jake opened the hatch, and musty air swirled into the cockpit, enveloping her like silk and quenching her parched lungs.

The four of them climbed out of the sub and stumbled to the front of the dripping airlock—which they could now see towered the size of an airplane hangar—and stepped onto the Triton.

They found Sky shivering outside the airlock in a pool of vomit, knees clutched to her chin, deep bruises oozing red. Above her, on the end of a six foot lever, her handprint still dripped blood.

Brynn’s gaze flicked from Sky to the strange writing carved into the wood above the lever . . .

Sky staggered to her feet and collapsed into Cedar’s arms.

She had done it.

The Triton Project

“If this is
a spaceship,” said Jake, leading the way toward the Triton’s core down a dark, musty corridor. “We need to find its propulsion system and shut it down. We need to cripple this thing until we figure out a way to send its cargo back to earth. Any theories, Naomi?”