Keystones: Tau Prime (23 page)

“Then what happens?” Deklan asked.

“Theoretically it will crash against the end of the cylinder and flood down to the ground.” She looked at their group with wild eyes. “We’re going to be swamped in less than two minutes.”

“Great,” said Deklan. “We have the distraction we need.”

“What?” replied Jamie.

“We’re no longer priority number one. Arkady, can we get back to Jonny now?”

“Yes, we can.”

“To which end of the habitat do we need to head?”

Arkady made a face and pointed to where the water would be flowing from.

“How fast is the water going to be moving?” asked Deklan.

“Not fast. The 180-degree change in direction from the ocean will lessen its speed. Most of what momentum is left will come from its fall.”

“Does that mean it’s safe to head that way?”

“Maybe.”

It wasn’t the answer Deklan wanted, but it was all he had. “Good enough.”

Arkady’s eyes returned to the ocean above them. “This will be chaotic,” she said quietly. Deklan wasn’t sure whether she had meant for him to hear her comment.

The waves crashed against the far wall in a silent explosion of water that sent spray sparkling into the air. Seconds later the impact’s thunderclap came to his ears. Water ran down the cylindrical end of the habitat in an ever-expanding froth of white. An undersea station erupted from the surface and was carried down the side of the wall. It was hard to see, but Deklan could tell that its domes were shattered. “Was that. . . ?”

“No, that wasn’t Sanctuary.”

Another station burst to the surface, its domes also broken and half of the main body snapped off.

“How many stations are there?”

“Ten, with five kilometers between them,” Arkady answered without looking at him. If Daniil hadn’t warned people in time, she might see everyone she ever knew die.

“How many people lived between them?” asked Deklan.

“Less than five hundred.”

If five hundred people had been evacuated from ten different locations, the surface of Tau Prime teeming with so many more people must have been terrifying for Arkady. “Are you okay in this crowd?” he inquired.

“I’m not thinking about it.”

Deklan gripped Arkady’s shoulder and made her meet his eyes. “We’ll find your father and the others, but we have to move.”

Arkady nodded, and Deklan could see that she was pulling herself back together. “Stay with me,” she said, squaring her shoulders and walking in the direction from which the water would surge. While hordes of Tau Primans fled in the other direction, Arkady soon was running toward the oncoming current. “Stay with me, but stay behind me,” she called over her shoulder before picking up the pace.

The street was lined with tall buildings that would funnel the water into more dangerous waves. It was the last place that he wanted to face the tsunami, even if it were reduced in power. “Shouldn’t we get a flitter?” Deklan yelled at Arkady’s back.

“No.” Her voice was almost lost amid the increasing roar.

More than twenty blocks away a wall of water was visible. People ran ahead of it, and an unlucky few who were too far behind were either tossed aside or vanished in the surf. Abandoned vehicles absorbed the brunt of the tidal wave and disappeared beneath it.

Deklan didn’t want to admit fear, but he was anxious about what lay ahead of them. “Jamie,” he said, “do you know what Arkady has in mind?”

“Yes.” Her voice was quiet and intense.

Deklan glanced at her. The red hair was gone, and her features had vanished behind a mask of pallid skin. “You look ready for action,” he remarked.

Jamie ran her fingers over the smooth expanse of her face. “I didn’t do this on purpose,” she replied softly.

Arkady ran ahead of them, a small body arrowing toward an advancing wall of whitecaps. All other sounds were drowned out by the rumble of rushing water, and Arkady crashed against the churning maelstrom. When she disappeared, Deklan feared the worst.

A crocodile exploded through the water’s surface. She was enormous but smaller than before. It hadn’t been obvious in the gloom of Tau Prime’s ocean, but now Deklan could see that her scales alternated between black and the brightest emerald. Water surged around Arkady, but with a shoulder height of twenty meters her feet were planted on the ground.

Deklan realized what was about to happen. “Oh, no. That’s not the. . . .”

Jamie teleported him onto Arkady’s back. “Hold on!” she yelled. A second later she was back with an arm wrapped around Calm.

The three of them lodged themselves in a half-meter space between scales on the forward portion of Arkady’s crocodilian back. When Arkady shifted position, however, Deklan fell to his knees. Her scales had little give. The impact felt like slamming into a steel plate. As water rushed up her sides, he grabbed the edge of a scale for a secure grip with his right hand while his left darted to his pocket for the beacon.

They ploughed ahead with Arkady’s elongated face breaking through the water like an icebreaker ship through the Arctic. Each plodding step reverberated through Deklan’s body, especially when she crushed something underfoot such as a submerged car. Icy water lapped at Deklan’s knees and soaked into his clothes. “Are you okay?” he called out to Jamie.

“We’ll get there soon,” she yelled back.

An unexpected swell washed over Arkady and submerged the trio. If Deklan had thought it was bad before, his entire body was now almost numb. He worried that he was going to drop the beacon. The only saving grace was that the fresh water didn’t sting his eyes or foul his mouth the way saltwater would have.

As the swell receded, Deklan, feeling like a bedraggled rat, called to Jamie, “Now are you okay?”

“Calm’s pale and shivering, but we’ll make it.” She too sounded less energetic than before the drenching.

Arkady’s feet then left the ground, cutting off further conversation and immersing her passengers in the lapping waves. Her enormous tail thrashed the water’s surface and propelled them forward. Cold air became a knife-like wind that compounded Deklan’s misery. They moved with enough force to create a bow wake, passing tall buildings that lined the submerged streets. Stranded and gesticulating people were visible in the skyscrapers’ windows.

“I hate this plan,” said Deklan between chattering teeth.

“It’s not my favorite either,” allowed a blue-lipped Calm.

A rumble shook Arkady’s body and vibrated through Deklan’s. As the water’s surface tension around them broke, Arkady sped up and created a churning counter-current. The wall of plummeting water that previously had been so far away grew closer and closer. Deklan’s aching muscles demanded that he abandon the struggle. “Jamie,” he shouted, “what are we going to do when we get to the wall? Arkady can’t open a hatch.”

“I’m going to teleport,” she replied.

Arkady drew to within ten meters of the cascading water. Here the noise was so loud as to obliterate all other sounds. Jamie was pointing, and her mouth opened and closed on her blank face, but Deklan had no idea what she was saying. In some ways the scenario was like a silent movie. Arkady’s massive crocodilian head swung back for the first time in their journey. Miniature waterfalls ran from her temples, and one large orb locked onto Deklan before looking back in the direction where they were headed.

A sense of foreboding came over Deklan as Arkady sped up in a vector aimed straight at the water ahead of them. Deklan crushed his body against her scales, seeking the best grip possible and filling his lungs with air.

Then came the water.

It slammed into him with bone-shaking force. His one-handed grip on Arkady’s back came loose as he was thrown to her left, another hand still wrapped around the beacon. He had the presence of mind to take a deep breath before he went underwater.

Only meters away from him Arkady set her feet down on the ground next to an access port like the one that Eric had used to bring them to the surface of Tau Prime. When one of Arkady’s hind legs collapsed, a broken section of an undersea station careened down on a collision course with Deklan. He tried to swim out of the way, but the current drew him further into its path.

Total darkness ensued. Deklan couldn’t see or hear anything. He was enveloped in freezing cold and velvety blackness. Water swirled around him. He didn’t know what had just happened. Fragments of the undersea station swept past him, but he remained untouched. No explanation made sense.

Suddenly Jamie was next to him, having teleported to Arkady’s back. Then Arkady’s crocodilian mass dwindled away to nothing, leaving her momentarily a beautiful and pale and naked woman before currents swept her away from them.

Deklan’s lungs burned. He was on his first breath, most of which he’d lost when he’d fallen, and the surface was still far above him. Jamie had one hand on him, another on Calm, and looked at both of them and then at Arkady.

Arkady was struggling against the current, trying to reach the habitat wall.

With firm fingers Deklan encircled Jamie’s wrist and squeezed. He pointed at her and then at the door, imploring her to take action. She was the only one who could open the door, the only one who could enable them to escape.

With a sudden implosion of water, Jamie was gone.

Fire burned in Deklan’s lungs. His vision was tinged by green and blue. He didn’t know where he was, but he couldn’t breathe. All he wanted was air. It wouldn’t come, and he gasped at the fire in his chest. Ice was everywhere else, but he couldn’t feel anything except in his lungs. His field of vision narrowed to a black-rimmed tunnel. He thought about Jamie and his parents, whom he was never going to see again.

Slam.

Deklan convulsed as his mouth opened wide.

Slam.

Water shot in a fountain from his mouth.

Slam.

He coughed and choked before pure air kissed his lungs.

Deklan let his head sag back and took deep breath after deep breath before opening his eyes. He was in a flooded hallway and held against a wall. Jamie, once more an attractive blonde, had a hand braced against one of his shoulders and was punching his chest in an aggressive version of CPR. Her free hand hovered in the air, ready to unleash another blow should it prove necessary. Water came up past her waist.

Deklan held up his hands and was alarmed by how much effort the action cost him. “I’m okay,” he said. The soreness of his throat indicated how far from the truth his words were.

“You are not okay, Deklan,” replied Jamie, but her voice was awash with relief.

Arkady stood nearby with her arms crossed over her chest in an attempt to hide her nakedness. Deklan plucked at the fabric over his chest. “Need this?” he asked with a weak grin.

She nodded her head.

“Do you want to let me down now?” he asked Jamie.

When her hand withdrew, he dropped from the wall.

“When I told you not to get shot,” said Calm, “I didn’t mean for you to drown yourself instead.” His voice sounded weak.

Deklan appreciated the attempt at humor, poor though it was, and peeled off his tunic but kept his pants and boots.

Arkady snatched the garment from his hands and pulled it over her head. When her face emerged from the top, she looked a good deal more comfortable, even though all she was wearing was a soaked thigh-length shirt.

“Where are we?” asked Deklan. “How’d we get in here?”

“We’re in an access shaft to the shipyards,” Arkady answered, pushing her wet blond hair back from her face.

“How’d we get here?”

Jamie pointed straight up. “We couldn’t have done it without him.”

A shadow dropped from the ceiling and boiled into the water. Darkness coalesced into a tapered cylindrical blob that morphed into a crude human outline before becoming a man. The young man in a torn coat of black leather was shorter than Deklan, but that made him no less intimidating. His skin was pallid, with a web of black veins under the surface. The dark touch was everywhere but strongest near his left eye, where a tangle of dark and broken spirals etched the skin. His eyes were familiar puddles of black, making it impossible to tell where he was looking. His hair, never still, moved like an oil slick, or shadows dancing in a fire.

Deklan’s immediate impulse was to try to escape.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” murmured Stalker.

“You dragged me into the darkness earlier,” protested a skeptical Deklan.

Stalker nodded, his eyes alight with dark pleasure. “Yes, three times.” His smile showed the darkness of his tongue playing over bright teeth. “And saved you twice.”

“Saved me?” Deklan hadn’t expected that.

“Mutuari was going to kill you.” Stalker held a hand out and snapped it shut, illustrating the extinguishing of Deklan’s life. “Part of the agreement was that I had to find you and save you.”

Goosebumps ran over Deklan’s skin. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. Deklan didn’t know what Stalker was talking about. “What agreement?”

Stalked tapped the side of his head, and a smile creased his face. “The man who caged the Void.” He rolled his head on his shoulders, an expression of pure pleasure on his face. “It’s still there, demanding death and murder.” His smile grew wider. “But I don’t have to listen anymore. It can’t hurt my brother, and it can’t hurt my family.” A fierce expression replaced the smile. “It lied.”

The psychotic madman, inferred Deklan, had a voice in his head telling him to kill people. “Who freed you?” Deklan asked, already knowing the answer.

“Cheshire.”

Again Deklan sagged against the wall. Every step of the way Cheshire had come into his life and intervened. “Why did he free you?”

“To keep you alive. Mutuari”—a chuckle shook Stalker’s shoulders—“was going to kill you. Cheshire didn’t want that to happen. Then you were going to die here. He told me to ride in the ball and feast when you let me out.” The dark tongue crept over his lips. “Feast.”

“And now?” asked a shuddering Deklan.

“Now I keep you alive.”

“He did, Deklan.” Jamie’s fingers were a comforting presence on his arm. “He went through the blocked door and overrode the emergency lockdown. With all of the water’s pressure, the door couldn’t open. We would have drowned.”