Waybound (26 page)

Without warning, the tentacles released them. The Sea Bullet dropped and rebounded heavily. The three passengers sat in silence, bobbing in the flux, too terrified to move.

“Now what?” Micah huffed.

As if in response, there came a blistering screech of tearing metal. The roof of the boat was peeled aside like the lid of a can. The three of them crouched on the floor, shielding their heads.

One of Rhom's tentacles beckoned them to follow, like a giant finger bristling with spines.

Phoebe stood, but her legs felt newly formed. She didn't want to see whatever was attached to that tentacle, especially after Gabby's reaction. But this is why they had come. If Phoebe was to help the Ona and find the Occulyth, she had to face Rhom.

Micah rose and fished a wad of cable out of his pocket.

“Seriously, kid?” Gabby said, watching him tie the severed cord back together. He was about to lash her to the driver's seat when someone grabbed his elbow.

“Plumm,” he warned. “Don't even start. I swear, I gotta—”

But it wasn't Phoebe.

Rhom's tentacle drew Micah back by the elbow, then nudged Gabby out of the chair. It drifted to Phoebe, but she got the message—Rhom was herding them off the boat.

Phoebe stepped off the Sea Bullet and took a look around. Late afternoon suns bled through dispersing storm clouds, and light sliced through the Talons, casting prison-bar shadows on a wasteland of shipwrecks. Some were pulverized or capsized, others were husks protruding at severe angles—the crumbling remains of mehkan and Foundry vessels. A few looked new, others so profoundly ancient that they might blow apart in a strong breeze. It was as if all the ships in existence had been summoned here to crash and decay.

The tentacle beckoned.

Phoebe checked the turbulent black-and-blue sky for signs of rain, then undid her facemask and hood. So did the others.

Her vision swam.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Micah, steadying her.

“Your head,” Gabby remarked with concern.

Phoebe pulled off a glove and touched her forehead, wincing. Blood. Her fingers were covered in it.

The tentacle approached, as if drawn by the wound.

“That's quite a gash,” Gabby said. “Let me patch you up.”

“No time,” Phoebe said, wiping the blood on her coveralls.

“You sure you're…okay?” Micah asked.

Phoebe glared, and he looked down. He wasn't going to get off that easy. She wasn't ready to forgive him for his cruelty.

“Hands behind you,” he said to Gabby, holding the cable.

Gabby sighed and rolled her eyes, but she obeyed.

“You know we're marching to our deaths, right?” she said as Micah lashed her wrists together.

Rhom's tentacle beckoned more insistently.

“Yep,” he said. “Kinda gettin' used to it.”

They trailed after the tentacle. It retracted behind a ruined hull, and another one wriggled at them from up ahead. The debris-littered ground was craggy, like shattered pottery crudely glued back together. They proceeded carefully, feeling it shift beneath their feet. Phoebe led the way with Gabby right behind, her face grim. Micah brought up the rear, rifle at the ready.

Phoebe looked down at the gelatinous blackness beneath her feet, and a terrifying realization gripped her.

They weren't being led to Rhom—they were on top of her.

All this debris was just the surface layer, a weathered shipwreck skin. No wonder the ground was so unsteady.

The tentacles urged them on. Rhom's expanse extended for miles in every direction, filling the Talons. And that was just above the flux. Who knew how far down she went?

They arrived at a hill of inky, viscous flesh. Tentacles crusted with clinking debris surrounded them. A geyser of hot air burst up, and Phoebe yelped. Moist jets blasted out from gloppy, fluctuating sphincters, wheezes that came in rhythmic bursts.

“Uh-oh,” Micah mumbled.

Flux bubbled and frothed. Something breached the surface and rose thunderously before them. It was a massive dome with gaping, serrated gills, heaving out plumes of exhaust. As the liquid metal streamed off the thing, Phoebe saw that it was as transparent as a rubber balloon stretched too tight.

The surface was patched with ancient scars, but they could still see into its milky depths. Within was a nightmarish tangle of fluttering valves and nodules. Stringy ducts gathered in bundles, entwined like tangled metal jellyfish. Bloated sacs were linked to fleshy gears, with clouds of dark fluid pumping from one membranous chamber to the next. Giant fish-white hemispheres pulsed and vibrated.

They were Rhom's vital organs, a system so massive, so revoltingly complex, that it seemed like the innards of Mehk itself. And still it rose from the flux.

Sound hissing from the geyser holes coalesced into a word.

“Bow.”

The sinister command startled Phoebe. As they stared up at the towering colossus, all resistance wilted. Wordlessly, the three of them fell to their knees.

As Rhom continued to rise, dwarfing them, a shifting circular mass emerged. It was a gargantuan array of concentric metal irises, contracting and expanding—hundreds of them, like the growth rings of an amputated tree.

They trembled before the eye of Rhom. Wet breath gasped out of orifices scattered around them and across the transparent dome. The bubbling voice sounded breathless, inhaling and exhaling simultaneously as she spoke.

“Here you are, lost and alone, hunters and the hunted, so little, so afraid, and oh so very far from home,” Rhom gurgled, mirthless, but with a broken intonation that hinted at laughter.

“You know who we are?” Phoebe asked.

“I do,” Rhom rasped, “for I am ever eating, ever knowing.” Her giant, shifting eye drifted closer, the irises extending like a telescope. “I know they all seek you, wanted by the Covenant and wanted by the Foundry, but I alone, yes, only I have you.”

“You don't know nothin' about us!” Micah snapped.

He immediately regretted it.

The eye rotated and widened to take him in. A vesicle within Rhom's head sputtered out thick crimson ink that broke into oily globs as it dissipated.

“I eat then I know,” the flapping sphincters spat. “I know the bleeders hunt for your captive, the one they call Flores.” A tentacle pointed at Gabby, and she went white.

Phoebe recalled the meaning of Rhom's name—to gorge.

I eat then I know.

“You eat…knowledge?” Phoebe asked.

“Ahhhhh…” Rhom breathed.

The pinkish fluid in her head rushed away, leaving it clear.

“I am timeless as the sea, my wisdom infinite, my hunger bottomless.” There was another steamy snort as Rhom continued. “Living or no, I eat and I know.”

The mound beneath them shifted, and the tentacles parted as something else breached the flux—a lost relic, eaten by time and half-buried in a mass of Rhom's black flesh.

“This schooner saw Creighton Albright aboard its maiden voyage, yet I discovered it centuries after his passing, devoured it and, with it, knowledge of the man, his stern voice, his fearful crewmen.” The organs within Rhom's head pumped faster, as if she were growing more excited. “But bleeders are a passing trifle, for I have tasted the dawn of life, the birth of consciousness, I ate of the proto-mehkans, they worshipped me, I feasted on megalarchs, consumed nations, fed upon their every thought and memory, so many stories, all mine…Just as yours will be.”

Phoebe felt the ground beneath her give. Her legs sank into Rhom's black flesh. She threw her hands down to try and push herself up and found them caught in the jelly as well. She was held fast. Heaving and pulling, she turned to Micah and Gabby, but they were stuck too.

They were being eaten. Soon Rhom would know them, know their secrets and fears. Then their bodies would be nothing more than a bit of debris added to her collection.

Rhom sighed. “The curse of infinity is infinite boredom, so few surprises, so few mysteries remain, and yet still I must eat, for there is still so much to know.”

“The Mercanteer sent us!” Phoebe cried.

Glands in Rhom's head gushed out brown and gray ink, muddying the clear fluid and clouding the unsightly organs.

“You do not travel in his vessel, you do not bear his seal.”

“No,” Micah answered, his prepubescent voice cracking. “We had to split. Bhorquvaat got overrun by Foundry.”

“This I know,” Rhom stated, uninterested.

“He said you would help,” Phoebe pleaded. “That you would help us find what we need. Please! We need it to save Mehk!”

Gabby looked at her in shock. Rhom's eye shifted to Phoebe, and her swirling, murky dome became opaque.

“Mehk does not need you, because Mehk does not need, it merely
is
, nothing more,” Rhom said in her constant breathless wheeze. “Yet your delusion is curious, as are your emotions, and curiosity is a delicacy, so I would know what you seek.”

“Careful, Plumm,” Micah whispered.

Phoebe recalled the warning from the Agent of Tongues—that Rhom was a great deceiver. And it was a risk to reveal too much in front of Gabby, but their lives were on the line.

This was their only chance.

“We have to find the Ona's Bearing,” Phoebe said at last.

In a sudden inky detonation, Rhom's dome went red. The irises of her great eye narrowed. Hot flux steam erupted.

“Self-righteous mystic, dogmatic worm she is, slave of tradition!” Rhom sputtered. “I was worshipped as a god, they groveled before me, lavished me with sacrifices, and I feasted, ahhhh, how I feasted….” Spurts of golden ink burbled amid the crimson. “But Makina was displeased with the slaughter, so the Ona turned my flock from me, curse the mouthpiece prophet! My worshippers abandoned me, left me to starve in the deep.”

Another jet of exhaust burst from the geyser holes, a noxious smell of rot and putrefaction.

“But this I know, this thing you seek…” Her voice was laced with boredom. “The Mercanteer is a reliable servant, always beseeches me with abundant gifts, so I will bargain with his pets, offer you the same exchange I do him.”

Rhom's eye backed off, and slowly the blood-red fluid in her head drained away, leaving the horror of her mehkan organ system on full display.

“What exchange?” Phoebe asked suspiciously.

“One for one,” Rhom said flatly. “Knowledge for knowledge. I give you an answer, you give me a life.”

A
lthough Goodwin's earpiece had been silent since the announcement of his forced retirement, he was certain the Board was still eavesdropping on him. Surely they had more important things to attend to, like the crisis Saltern had unleashed at the Council of Nations. Obwilé had neglected to engage with the disgruntled President, so he deserved the blame for that fiasco.

A train was scheduled to take Goodwin back to Albright City in a few hours. He had been tying up loose ends, saving this moment for last—his final visit to the Dyad Research Facility.

A technician scanned his pass, and the door hissed open.

“Thank you, Wilkes,” said Goodwin kindly.

“It's been an honor, sir.”

Goodwin entered the sterile white room. For the first time since his CHAR accident, Kaspar was sitting up.

A good sign. He might be able to handle the news.

“Hello, my boy,” Goodwin said softly.

He strode past the Omnicam that was monitoring the room. Kaspar's disfigured body had been treated with experimental agents and covered in customized bandages, which were spotted with grease from his seeping lesions. Tubes trailed from glass needles in his veins. A single black eye was all that was exposed.

And it stared.

“I am relieved by your speedy recovery,” Goodwin whispered. “It is good to be able to speak to you without causing you pain.”

The eye blinked, slow and deliberate.

“May I sit?” he asked, settling onto a wooden stool. Goodwin eyed Kaspar's hands, which were restrained by thick straps secured with high-index ceramic buckles.

“I…well, I have something I need to tell you,” Goodwin said quietly. “I am retiring.”

The black eye went wide.

“It was my choice,” Goodwin lied in a soothing voice. “The Foundry no longer requires my services, so I am off for Olyrian Isle. My sole regret is that we can no longer work together.”

Kaspar's bandages bulged.

“But together, you and I achieved greatness. We touched upon something that science is only beginning to dream of.”

A new spot of black bled through his dressings.

“You are in good hands,” Goodwin said, his voice tight. “Wilkes and the others, they are going to fix you up.”

The eye narrowed.

“Please, do not worry about me,” Goodwin whispered with a smile as he glanced up at the Omnicam. He withdrew his Scrollbar. “They sent me some photos of my retirement villa. Would you like to see?”