Embers in the Sea Read online

  I rubbed my eyes. “It burns.”

  He grabbed the sides of my face. “Your scleras are all bloodshot. Close your eyes really tight.”

  He held my wrist and led me across the floor—or ceiling, I guess. The low hum of the liquid walls effervesced from my left, followed by the soft slosh of someone manipulating the wall. I opened my eyes a crack to see a sheet of shiny black paper hop from David’s hand and attached to my face. I pawed at the edges, struggling.

  “No!” David said. “It’s only a breathing mask. Just like the last time on the green planet. Let the fabric fit itself to your face.”

  Easy for him to say, but a second or two later the air started to flow.

  He slipped his hands beside my cheeks. “Better?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I wiped the tears gathered beneath my mask. Dang, I was such a wuss.

  “I have it set to give you pure oxygen. Hopefully that will help any damage.”

  “Damage?”

  “You just inhaled poison, Jess.”

  Stuck at the bottom of the sea, breathing poison. What next? Couldn’t David and I ever have a normal date?

  He plucked another sheet from the cabinet and affixed it to his face. He didn’t even flinch when it took hold.

  The ground rumbled.

  My breath hitched until it stopped. “Earthquake?”

  “Sure felt like it.” He jumped up and grasped the back of his chair. The liquid metal came to life once more, circling his ankles before he let go and hung from the base of the chair, reaching down for me. “Let me help you.”

  I stretched up and he lifted me like I weighed no more than a gallon of milk. As he hefted me to the other chair, it seized my waist. Spinning me into a sitting position and securing me upside down.

  “What the heck?” I asked. “Why didn’t it do that when we fell the first time?”

  David laughed. “I wasn’t connected to the ship. You don’t expect it to act on its own, do you?”

  Umm, maybe. The blood rushed into my skull. “Is there a reason we’re upside down?”

  “Technically, the ship is upside down.” The floor rumbled again. David fiddled with the controls. “Definite seismic activity.”

  Great. Just great.

  I tried to right myself, holding my chin to my chest. My brain stopped throbbing, but my neck started to burn. David worked away at the console, seeming oblivious to our upside-down-ness.

  The ship jolted to the right. No rumble. Just a smash.

  “Was that seismic activity?”

  “I have no idea what that was.” He waved his hand over the console, and three more spotlights lit up the sea outside the windows.

  I gaped.

  Long, white, finger-like tubes swayed around the base of what looked like miniature, smoking, black volcanoes. A red, feather-like plume jutted out from the tip of one, then another. Then an entire field of swaying ruby-red danced in the currents. Unbelievable.

  And me with no camera. How freaking unfair was that?

  David laughed.

  “What?”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Why am I funny?”

  “We’re stranded at the bottom of the ocean, and all you can think about is your camera.”

  “You were supposed to stop reading my mind.”

  “I didn’t. Sometimes I can read your face.” He took my wrist and directed me over the console. A hazy, white octagon appeared on the glass before us. “Think of that shape like a lens. Maneuver it where you want, and think still frame.”

  Seriously? I giggled like a kid with a new toy. But still frame? That’s an annoying way to say click.

  A still picture of the plumes zoomed on the screen and disappeared. So cool! “Did I do that?”

  “Yes. Do it again.”

  Awesome. Click. Click. Click. Picture after picture graced the screen. One even micro-zoomed, showing the fine fibers of the tiny red hands.

  “Oh! I gotta get me one of these!” The ship joggled again, jolting us. “That was not an earthquake.”

  “Something’s moving beneath us.”

  “What kind of something?”

  My chair pulsated as a gargantuan, white elephant trunk-thing filled the screen on my side of the windows. It bent toward David, and a fluffy red plume the size of a Volkswagen shot out and bashed against his window.

  “Oh my God!”

  David sunk his arms into the controls and mumbled something in Erescopian. His gaze flew back to the screen as plantus-giganticus reared back again. “Hold on.”

  My seat immobilized my head, but my ears still rung from the shake as the thing outside smashed against our hull. The ship shifted back.

  “Is it pushing us?”

  “We probably landed on top of its nest or something. It’s only trying to defend itself.”

  Swoosh. My backpack slid toward the rear of the ship. It didn’t really matter whether or not this thing was only defending itself. It was beating us to a pulp. How much more could we take?

  Bam.

  The plumes filled the window again, and then another jolt came from the side, sloshing us to the left. Was there more than one?

  The ship rose off the ground and spun through the water, righting itself. The plumes swayed around us as we drifted back toward the ground.

  I grabbed my chair to steady myself, but my stomach and brain kept rolling. “Did you turn us over?” I asked.

  “No. Those things did. Probably by accident.” David peered into the console. “Oh, no.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The sensors say we haven’t hit the bottom yet. We’re only on a ledge of some sort.”

  We sunk back toward the sea floor. Our rear settled on something while our front continued to descend, tilting us downward. Our headlights pointed into another vast hole.

  Ledge my right butt cheek. That looked more like the edge of the Grand Canyon!

  Something hit us from behind. We skidded. Darkness sprawled below us. We jimmied. Slid.

  “Oh, Shi—” A scream wrenched from my gut as we went over the edge for a second time.

  10

  We spiraled into eternity. David sat back in his chair. His features slackened, defeated. His lips edged into a straight line.

  Oh, no you don’t. “There has to be something we can do!”

  He scrunched his lashes closed and pushed harder against the headrest.

  So that was it? He was giving up? To Hell with that. I was not ready to be buried at sea. Not now. Not ever.

  Release. I pushed the thought with all my might, and the chair loosened from my waist up.

  “What are you doing?” David asked.

  “Someone has to save our rear ends.”

  I stretched across him and shoved my hands into the dashboard. Warm, juicy goo rolled between my fingers. Blech.

  Okay, ship. Slow us down … Do something … Anything … Make us stop.

  The searchlights continued to whirl through the darkness.

  Umm, please? Pretty please?

  The lights picked up something other than sea. An outline.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  David’s eyes widened. “The bottom!”

  His arm darted out, shoving me back to my seat. The chair seized and immobilized me with one movement. My heart ricocheted off my ribcage. This was it. The end.

  The ship jolted and stopped with a heart-wrenching crunch. The chair gyrated around me, shaking my brain to a pulp.

  The outside illumination had disappeared, leaving us with nothing but the soft glow surrounding the panels.

  My temples throbbed. The deep, echoing sound of my breathing reverberated through the cabin.

  “Is this the bottom?”

  “Yes. Thirty-six thousand feet down. But … ”

  He looked out the window, squinting beneath his mask. Our interior illumination cast a blue haze over a solid rock wall.

/>   “But what?”

  He turned back toward the panel. “We’re straddling some kind of fissure. I don’t think this is the real bottom.”

  “It has to be. If we’re thirty-six thousand feet down, that’s the bottom.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so. I mean, I wrote a paper on it in school. I got an A, so I must have gotten the facts straight.” The ship juddered. “Please tell me that’s not another ticked-off plant.”

  “More seismic activity.” He tapped the edge of the console. “Jess, there’s still a lot of ocean below us.”

  The ground gyrated and a rock dislodged from the wall to the right and sunk right past the window. The trembling deepened as the ocean floor moaned and roared.

  “What’s going on?”

  I braced myself against the dashboard and the seat. The cabin blurred as I gave up trying to focus. The shaking chattered my teeth.

  “This is not happening,” David whispered. “This is not happening!”

  I screamed as we tilted forward into the widening fissure and slipped, rumbling deeper into the crevice and jolting to a stop, wedged between two giant rock walls with a vast void of sea beneath us.

  With the front of our ship pointed straight down, I hung from my restraints, panting in the odd silence.

  The pitch black looming in the depths below filled the window below me and threatened to soak through, penetrate, and consume us. The illumination within the ship brightened the cabin, but not the outside, as if light wasn’t even possible at these depths.

  “How far down are we now?” I asked.

  “Thirty-six thousand eight hundred and sixty-two feet.”

  And the darkness promised so much more.

  “This is a one way trip, isn’t it? We’re not getting out of here.”

  David’s bindings released. “We will. I promise. I just need time to think.”

  He slipped down onto the console, straddling the liquid controls. Reaching up, he dragged his fingers along my cheek, bunching up the fabric in my mask. My hair fell from the sides of my face as if reaching for him.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “I know, but I think we’ll be okay.”

  He held my shoulders as my chair released me. I slipped from my seat down into his arms, my sneakers setting on the window below us.

  “Can the glass hold my weight?”

  He nodded. “It’s not glass like you know it. It’s made to withstand a lot more than your little frame.”

  I looked up, past our chairs to the far back of the ship. I suddenly felt small, like looking up at the ceiling of Notre Dame Cathedral. Why did the ship look so much larger up on its end than it did when it was horizontal?

  David snickered.

  “What?”

  He bit back his grin. “I’m sorry. You just have the oddest thoughts sometimes.”

  I folded my arms. “You said you were going to stop … ”

  A bright red beacon flashed in the depths below us, drifting in the darkness.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He crouched down and shoved his hands back into the console beside our feet. “The instruments aren’t picking up anything.”

  “Is it another one of those giant mouths with fins?”

  “I don’t think so. That thing registered a lot of mass and solid bone. I’m not detecting anything out there at all.”

  The flash returned, glowing longer before fading out. A bluish flicker glinted from the right, larger than the first.

  I crouched closer to the glass. “Could it be submarines? Could they have sent someone to help us?”

  David shook his head. “Like I said, there’s no mass. Whatever it is, it’s like it’s not even there.”

  Another blue shimmer joined the blinking. They seemed larger with every flash. My hands trembled. So quiet. Like noise was as useless as the lights from our ship. I wanted to reach for a knob and turn up the volume, because there had to be some kind of sound. Anything. The silence, it was too much.

  David’s hand covered mine, but he didn’t turn his gaze from the glowing spectacle before us. He whispered something in Erescopian, and released my hand. He made a wide, stroking movement over the console, and a loud boom echoed around the ship.

  I covered my ears. “What are you doing?”

  “Chances are these are the beings Silver was so worried about. Our best chance to get out of this is to make friends.”

  “With a loud obnoxious noise?”

  David tapped the panel. “I’m hoping they’ll realize we’re trying to communicate.”

  Either that or you’ll piss them off.

  The lights continued to multiply. Oranges and pinks added their radiance to the display. They circled, twitched, and began to form patterns before drifting apart. Sometimes moving closer, other times backing away.

  “Still no readings on the instruments. Have you ever seen anything like this?” David asked.

  “No. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  The reds and the oranges began to twirl in pairs. They brightened and drifted as one, like embers burning in the sea. My stomach fluttered and tears formed in my eyes. It seemed wrong that something so wonderful remained hidden far below the sea, where no one could appreciate it.

  The embers winked out, leaving us in the soft bask of the remaining blue twinkles until they, too, faded into oblivion. I found myself reaching toward the glass, wishing I could bring them back, before my hand lowered back to my lap. Whatever that was could have been miles away, for all I knew.

  The glowing beams from the ship searched the barren waters, lone beacons in the endless night. I shivered. It might not even be nighttime. We were too deep for daylight to penetrate. It could be noon up there for all I knew.

  What could possibly be out there in a place that never saw the sun?

  The ship jolted. David shoved me back into my chair as an ear-shattering grinding noise echoed within the cabin.

  Jesus, couldn’t we have just a few seconds where we weren’t in imminent peril?

  We shook and rumbled, forced further through the fissure by something I couldn’t see.

  My chair tightened, and David released his grip. Bubbles shot out around us, covering the windows, before my stomach bottomed out.

  The grinding stopped. Free of the fissure, I closed my eyes, trying to keep from throwing up as we seemed to fall, spiraling faster than should be possible in water, propelled by God knows what.

  The ship lurched forward, and I jolted as we stopped. A yellow glow filled the sea around us, like looking into the sun. My chair loosened as David reached over and grabbed my hand. His wide gaze heightened the fear already sizzling across our tether. Whatever had pushed us down here, we were at its mercy, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.

  A flood of red light erupted in the space above our heads. David cried out and my chair liquefied, dropping me hard onto the window. Crimson encompassed the entire ship … as if it became the ship. I fumbled to my right and found David’s hand in the fuzzy redness. His voice echoed like it was in the distance and his hand twisted from my grip as if yanked away.

  “David!” I tried to reach out to him, but air pressed against me on all sides, pinning me to the window.

  A deep ripping sound resonated through the thick crimson blur. “David, where are you?”

  The pressure released, and I jumped to my feet. The glass vibrated beneath my sneakers as the ripping sound escalated to a roar—the same roar that had riddled me at the base of Niagara Falls as a kid. And just like in my nightmares after that trip, water lapped around my feet. But this time it was real, flowing across and covering the window.

  I stared, transfixed as the sea soaked my ankles. A white frothy torrent streamed into the compartment from somewhere in the rear of the ship. I gulped back the simmering panic rising in my gut. If I didn’t find a way to plug that hole, we
were dead.

  I turned to my left and to my right, combing my hands through the foggy, red cloud still obscuring my vision; unsure of what I looked for, but certain I hadn’t found it.

  The color deepened. I moved, but my sneakers splashed wherever I went. “David!” I pawed through the red veil around me, searching for something. Anything. “Edgar!”

  The tepid sea met my hips. This was it. I was alone, and the sea had come to claim me. Had Edgar and David abandoned me? Left me to die?

  Jess! David’s voice raked through my mind, more a desperate plea than calling my name.

  “David, where are you?” I turned toward where I though his seat had been, but my hands hit a solid, but soft wall of red that seemed to push me back as if it knew I was trying to get to him.

  I panted in jagged gasps. My mask tightened around my cheeks. My next inhalation suctioned the plastic against my lips. Air. I needed air!

  Slow, steady breaths, David had said.

  The water rose above my head. I gasped and kicked my feet, treading. When David and I had crash-landed on the green planet, my mask had given out after I panicked and ran. I couldn’t let myself collapse in a wheezing heap this time. The air purifiers weren’t made for freaking-out college students. They were made for composed, rational Erescopians. I needed to stay calm. I had to control my breathing, but where was everyone?

  A giant swell grabbed my helpless form, dunking me and forcing me back down toward the piloting station. I cried out and spluttered as the mask constricted. I thrashed until I came up into the air and panted as the rolling sea rose toward the back of the ship. The mask clung to my face, covering me like a plastic bag. Where was the air?

  The material eased away from my nose, filling with oxygen. I took a deep breath, and another. My scalp hit the rear wall above, forcing me back into the murky, red depths. My mask sucked to my face again, useless.

  It didn’t work when it got wet!

  I swam back up and inhaled when my mask filled. My brow grazed the rear wall again, leaving only a small space between the water and the highest point in the ship. I was running out of air! My heart thumped, wrung, and rattled, clawing out of my chest. I kicked and waved my arms, keeping my face aloft as the sea splashed around me. I needed to focus, to keep my cool. David was somewhere in here, and he needed air, too!