Ocean: The Sea Warriors (6 page)

Chapter 9

“Good morning, Gwyneth.”

The door to her room had just squeaked open, and even though the girl did not look, she knew it was Dr. Halberton from his soft tone and precise, Queen’s English. With her back to him, she stood staring glumly out her barred window, in the direction of the sea. A thick fog lay over the English village, preventing her from seeing the water, but she knew where it was nonetheless All her life, no matter where she was, she always knew the direction of the ocean from her, and always wanted to be as close to it as possible.

“Have you ever heard of the Sea Warriors?” he asked. “A radical ocean-rights organization?”

The question startled her, and she turned her head slowly to stare at him blankly.

“Well, have you?” His dark features were intense, but not severe. Usually he looked exceedingly kind to her, but sometimes she worried that he only used that demeanor to draw information out of her—precious secrets from her innermost, autistic world.

He held up a small computer, which looked familiar; she had seen her father with one like it. The black, overweight doctor walked over to her, and let her see the screen. It showed a website entitled SEA WARRIORS, with a list of names, two or three hundred, it looked like. But as she focused more on it, the letters grew blurred. Her arcane inner world had been disrupted, and she’d been brought out of it too quickly, like a diver surfacing too fast.

Scrolling down the list, he pointed to a name. “Do you recognize that one?” he asked.

For hours today, the teenager had been staring toward the sea without interruption—and though she could not actually see it, in her imagination she’d been envisioning herself out there swimming in the water, being soothed and comforted by it. The doctor’s interruption was not welcome.

As moments passed the letters and names began to clear, and she realized she was staring at her own name, right above his pointing forefinger. Even so, she said nothing.

But she felt herself emerging from her displeasure, and from her vision. Her thoughts scurried to organize themselves and transmit messages to her brain.

Sea Warriors?
she thought.
What on earth is that?
And ocean rights? She liked the term, liked the name of the organization, too.

Glancing at Dr. Halberton briefly, she reached out, touched the screen and scrolled it back to an explanation of what the Sea Warriors were all about. She liked what she was reading. She liked it very much—and they had mounted a recruiting program for new members—a program in which only an elite group of humans were being invited, yet all of the invitees might not make the grade and be accepted.

She managed to speak, but haltingly. “How … how did my name get … on this list?”

The doctor shrugged. “They also sent you this letter,” he said, handing a small white envelope to her. It had been opened, which she considered a serious violation of her privacy. Yet she said nothing of this, and examined the one-page communication. Her thoughts were spinning as she again tried to focus, and she had trouble reading the words. She set the letter aside for the moment, on the window sill.

He nodded toward the doorway, and she was surprised to see her parents in the corridor, both dressed in heavy coats that were open at the front.

“I’ll leave you and your family alone,” the doctor said. Then, as he went out into the corridor he handed the small computer to her father. So it
was
his after all.

Jim McDevitt was a tall man in his late forties, his face ruddy from spending so much time outdoors. An advertising executive, he had a passion for backpacking through the nearby forests. He used to take Gwyneth, her brother, and two sisters with him on those trips, and those times had been better for her than most. Her father knew a lot about the flora and fauna of the woods, and he also spoke of archaeology and history and all sorts of interesting subjects. He was something of an environmentalist regarding trees, but when she asked him one day what he knew about the ocean, he just looked at her vacantly, as if he didn’t realize that life on the land depended on the sea. He often looked at her that way when she spoke to him. With her he had a certain coldness about him, an aloof demeanor he didn’t use with her siblings, or with her mother. It always made her feel odd, even stupid.

The teenager’s already-tenuous relationship with her parents and siblings had gone even more downhill after she went in the water by Portsmouth, and tried to swim out to sea, attempting to immerse herself in the ocean water and learn more about it and the creatures who lived in it, to help the aquatic ecosystem in some way. But she’d been unable to explain her reasoning, had totally failed when she tried to unravel her complex thoughts and emotions to justify her actions, and she’d ended up here, in this dreaded facility. This
prison
.

Gwyneth harbored a great deal of resentment over that, and over the fact that she had not seen or heard from her parents for the better part of a year.

Her mother was stout and severe, looking dour today, her thick black eyebrows forming scowls over her eyes. Katie McDevitt had never been as interested in the outdoors as Gwyneth’s father, and had always scolded him for spoiling the children. Not as much of a scholar as her husband, she was always complaining about people she knew—neighbors, shopkeepers, anyone, it seemed that she happened to encounter outside the house.

Too angry to look at her parents any longer, she turned away and tried to reconnect her thoughts with the sea, which was making a welcome appearance as the fog dispersed. She saw sections of water now, dark blue and mysterious through the gray mists.

“We don’t know what these Sea Warriors are all about or how your name got on a list,” her mother said, her presence and words intruding, just as the doctor had done earlier. “But joining them is completely impossible.”

Abruptly, Gwyneth spoke slowly but clearly, as she could on occasion. “Then why did you come here?”

“To tell you about the existence of the list, and the letter, and to try to explain to you why it is all out of the question.”

“I wish you’d never told me about it, then,” she said. “Now get out and don’t come back!”

In the depths of her mind, Gwyneth heard a terrible sound, and she sensed that it was a large gathering of sea creatures just offshore, numerous species crying out to her for help. She had never heard such horrendous, spine-jolting screeches before, but knew instantly—and for a certainty—what they were.

I can do nothing to help you
, she thought.

For several awful minutes the sounds grew louder in her consciousness, hurting her head, and finally they faded away—giving her physical, but not emotional, relief.

Peripherally, Gwyneth saw her mother backing up, and heard her whispering to the girl’s father. Then she said to Gwyneth, “Very well, dear, we’ll leave you here to get better.”

As if in a strange dream, a disconnected reality, her parents came toward her and kissed her on the forehead, her father first and her mother last. But he said nothing, just looked at her in an odd way, reflecting on his lack of understanding of her, and his lack of compassion.

They took the letter from the windowsill, even though Gwyneth had not read it yet. She heard them walking toward the open doorway, going through and shutting the door behind them. It made the familiar locking noises, ominous metal clicks that Gwyneth did not like.

She could envision herself growing old and decrepit in here, never meeting the qualifications for release. The complex feelings associated with that realization swam in her mind, like piranhas eating away at any positive thoughts that tried to surface, making her feel dismal.

And she sensed something else out at sea, special people who wanted to see her. The Sea Warriors.

Gwyneth remembered the unfocused one-page letter she had looked at so briefly. Now, startlingly, it became suddenly clear in her memory, and in a vision she read it consciously for the first time. The Sea Warriors were arriving to pick her up later today, and would wait for her at the main village pier—but only until 11:00 a.m.

Feeling desperate to get to the pier, she looked at a clock on the wall. She had only an hour and a half to make good her escape.

Just offshore, Alicia arrived in a long, sleek jetfish pod that surfaced and opened on top to release her from its oxygen-rich enclosure. She climbed out onto the red, softly-glowing skin of the amalgamated creature, then plunged into the cold water.

She and Kimo had been aboard the unusual craft for eighteen days, having sped across five oceans just beneath the surface of the water, making stops along the way to pick up volunteers for the newly-formed Sea Warriors. To keep everything organized onboard, they had brought along his cousin Danny Ho, the caterer who had donated sealed packages of food. They also had Shauna McDill with them, a professional storyteller who was good at arranging games for the passengers to play during the journey—amusing intellectual competitions that did not require cards, boards, or game pieces. Neither Danny nor Shauna were on the list of volunteers, but were donating their time.

There were many people from the recruitment list aboard the jetfish pod now, sitting shoulder to shoulder on long benches that had been formed by the sea creatures to accommodate human forms. A number of passengers were eating Danny’s packaged food—healthy snacks, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners from a variety of recipes that included selections of red meat, white meat, and fish for the main courses, and nutritious side dishes. The food was going over well with everyone.

Kimo and Alicia only had a few more stops to make before returning to Hawaii, on a route that would take them across the Atlantic to the Panama Canal and through to the Pacific, getting them back to the islands in a day and a half. There, in waters off Loa’kai, the new recruits would be introduced to the deep-ocean locker of Moanna. With her special powers of discernment, she would either accept the volunteers and transform them into hybrids, or reject them….

Alicia shivered in the cold water as she swam alongside the hull of the linked animals, which glowed with a soft red translucence as they waited for her to go into shore, and then return. Jetfish had the ability to change colors like chameleons, and could make themselves invisible in any environment by blending in with it. They could look like the ocean itself if necessary, or like the bottom of the sea. The day before, they had changed into a beautiful spectrum of colors on the interior of the passenger compartment while Alicia, Kimo, and volunteers were inside, causing many exclamations of wonder.

“There is much more these creatures can do,” Kimo had said when they made that display. “There are billions and billions of secrets in the sea.”

When a man asked what more the jetfish could do, Kimo had just smiled and said, “If they want to show you, they will. Jetfish are very intelligent creatures, you know.”

Alicia had liked Kimo’s answer, and she’d exchanged gentle smiles with him….

The village of Apperton was not far away from her now, only around half a mile. Almost an hour ahead of schedule, she swam slowly toward the shore, but the water was so cold that she decided to generate a gentle wave that lifted her a little higher in the water. This enabled her to stop swimming and float toward shore on her stomach, with her back warmed by sunlight that was breaking through wisps of fog. It was a new technique she had discovered on this trip, swimming or floating on the upper portions of the sea as if she had fantastic buoyancy, instead of standing on top of the wave. It was much more comfortable for her now, and would be less obvious to anyone watching from shore.

On this initial recruitment trip she had discovered other new things as well. For the first recruits they picked up, Kimo used a small, improvised jetfish boat that transported people from the shore to the pod—a shuttle system. But, practicing with her own abilities, Alicia had discovered a way to allow others to ride atop waves that she generated—a technique she began using to bring people to the pod. In this manner she had been able to carry as many as four additional passengers with her on each wave, having picked up that many volunteers at a time from some of the port cities. It pleased her that she had enlarged on the manner in which she had transported Kimo from Wanaao to Honolulu, and that she was also making larger waves than she had demonstrated for Jimmy Waimea and his student-camera crew at Waikiki Beach. She would continue to work with her wave-generating skills, trying to improve them.

In recent days Alicia had noticed an interesting commonality among the volunteers, an intensity and focus that was quickly apparent when each of them boarded at their various pickup points. Now she sensed the collective psychic energy of the passengers she’d left behind in the pod with Kimo, as if every one of them knew innately that they belonged together, that they were an important team.

Of the two-hundred fifty-three verified names on the list, people that she and Kimo had hoped to pick up around the world, forty-one had notified Jimmy Waimea that they could not take the time to be involved with the Sea Warriors, or were not interested—and he had told Kimo before departure to remove those names from the list. A handful of others had simply not shown up to meet them at the announced pickup points, for unknown reasons. Kimo and Alicia didn’t speculate much about that, and focused on rounding up as many volunteers as possible, as quickly as possible.