The Secret Sea (2 page)

He realized that he had no idea where he was. Somewhere in lower Manhattan. On his way to Wellington Academy, he'd stayed underground in the subway station the whole time. Now he hadn't just lost his bearings; he'd never had them to begin with.

Pacing in a widening circle, he scanned the area for a cop, a firefighter, anyone with any kind of authority. No one else had run with him up the stairs. No one else had followed.

All that water … All of those people, drowning right now …

“Help!” Zak screamed to the pedestrians all around him. “The subway's flooding! Help!”

Most of the people on the sidewalk—even the ones not on their cell phones or plugged into earbuds—ignored him. Of the ones who didn't, most glanced in his direction, then kept walking.

But one guy—a big guy in jeans and a white T-shirt—stopped and cocked his head at Zak.

“What did you just say?”

“It's flooding down there!” Zak could hardly catch his breath. “A huge wave just came down the tunnel and—”

That was enough for the man, who pulled his cell phone from his pocket and ran to the subway entrance. He paused halfway down the stairs to turn back and point a threatening finger at Zak. “Do
not
come down here!” he ordered, then continued down the steps, barking into his phone the whole time.

Zak was trapped in a nightmare, one of the really bad ones where you're experiencing one thing but you're aware of something terrible and awful happening at the same time, not far away. Up here, in the open air, it seemed like just another too-hot summer day, with everyone going about their business as usual. Down below …

He tried not to picture the platform overrun with water. Tried not to imagine dead bodies floating up near the ceiling.

The sensation of being on a boat rushed him, and he swayed, grabbing the stairwell handrail for balance. He could feel water in his lungs.…

How long he stood there, clinging to the handrail, he did not know, but when he opened his eyes, the man who'd run into the station was coming up the stairs, glaring at Zak as though Zak had personally run his puppy through a shredder.

“How bad is it?” Zak choked out.

“Not bad at all,” the man said, fuming. To his phone, he said, “Yeah, never mind,” then slipped it into his pocket.

Never mind? What was wrong with this guy?

“Are you crazy?” Zak demanded. “People are dying! Aren't you, like, a cop or something?”

“No, I'm with Con Ed.” When Zak said nothing, the man said, “The power company. I saw nasty stuff a while back when Hurricane Sandy hit Manhattan. I thought we were seeing something like that again. Thanks for getting my heart rate up, kid.”

“What do you mean? Do something!”

“There's nothing
to
do, and you know it.” The man kept coming up the stairs until he towered over Zak. “This stuff isn't funny.”

Only he didn't say “stuff.”

Zak trembled. He didn't understand what the man was getting at. He'd
seen
the water with his own eyes. Heard it with his own ears. He'd …

“You know what? I'm gonna teach you a lesson,” the man said, and then clamped his fingers around Zak's wrist and dragged him down the stairs.

Zak thought of screaming but was too surprised to do so.

Down in the tunnel, where he'd expected to see a dirty aquarium of death, he saw instead the receding lights of the N train and some leftover straphangers loitering on the platform.

On the dry platform.

Well,
almost
dry. Where Zak had been standing was a shallow puddle, steadily fed from a smallish stream of water overhead.

“But—” he began.

“But nothing. This how you get your kicks when school's out for the summer? Joking about this?” The man pointed up.

Zak followed his gesture. Above them a pipe sagged slightly, broken at a weld seam. That was the source of the water.

A broken pipe.

A broken
pipe
?

“But I saw—”
And my guardian angel said …

“Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Do they even teach you stuff like that these days?” Again, he didn't really say “stuff.”

“What's your name?” the man demanded. “Where are your parents?”

In mere moments, Zak went from terror to relief and back to terror. At first he'd been afraid that the man would hurt him. But people who are going to hurt you don't usually want to call your parents. And then he realized that he was about to be in a huge amount of trouble.

The next thing he knew, the Con Ed man was dropping him off at home. And the next thing he knew after that, he was sitting in the living room of his apartment with his parents staring at him from the sofa.

It was weird seeing his parents in a room together. Each week they exchanged grim little smiles and terse words of advice as they swapped out of the apartment where Zak lived, but that was the sum total of their interactions these days. Until now, when Zak brought them together.

“What went through your head?” Dad asked. He was the more even-keeled one. The calmer one. Professor of history and African American studies. Mom had the temper. “A little thing like some water and you go screaming about a flood? Are we supposed to let you go to school on your own when you can't even keep your wits about you when a pipe breaks?”

I saw it!
Zak wanted to say, but didn't. Because, yeah, he'd seen the platform about to flood—had seen it with his own eyes.

But he'd also seen it utterly
not
flooded with those same eyes. As much as he wanted to believe that the station—and everyone in it—had been in danger, he couldn't deny the evidence.

“You can't go panicking like that,” Mom said. “Your heart can't handle that kind of stress.”

“I thought…” He stopped. He didn't know what to say. “I guess I thought I saw something. I made a mistake.”

“You thought. You saw. Something.” Mom. Biting into her words like undercooked pasta.

“You know those signs everywhere? ‘If you see something, say something?' I thought I saw something.”

“You thought you saw a
flood
, Zak. Not a package or a suitcase left on the platform.” Dad folded his arms over his chest.

“No one thinks they see a flood,” Mom said, not even looking at Dad. “You don't say, ‘Is that a flood over there? Oops, no.' What's really going on here?”

Zak struggled. He didn't know what to say. He'd never been a good liar—Moira had a much better imagination, and Khalid was more convincing—so he usually tried to stick to the truth. But the truth wasn't going to help him in this case. He'd already told them everything except for—

Run. Run now.

—the bit about his guardian angel's voice. And he didn't think that part would help him.

Besides, his guardian angel had been totally wrong this time.

Garbage and nonsense. Dad was right.

“I thought I saw a flood,” he said, his voice shrinking with every word. “I don't know what else to tell you. I thought the tunnel was flooded and it was coming toward us. Why else would I go running like that?”

Mom muttered something in Spanish, which she usually did only after being on the phone with La-La. The words were unfamiliar to Zak, whose Spanish was passable, so that meant they were probably swear words.

Dad shot a glare at Mom. He didn't speak much Spanish, but he knew the bad words pretty well.

“Am I punished?” Zak asked, even though he knew the answer already.

“Are you kidding me?” Dad asked. “I can't believe you even need to ask that question.”

“You are so punished,” Mom said, “that I don't even know what the punishment
is
yet. I am—” She broke off, sighed, then said, “
We are
so angry at you right now that we can't even begin to imagine an appropriate punishment.”

So maybe we just skip the punishment this time
, Zak thought, but was way too smart to say out loud. His parents wouldn't appreciate the humor. Not now.

“Go to your room,” Dad ordered. Zak nearly jumped out of his chair at the opportunity to get away from his angry parents. “Your mother and I will figure out a fitting punishment.”

“And then we'll
double it
!” Mom shouted as Zak disappeared into the hallway.

Zak flung himself onto his bed with all the outrage he could muster. He didn't
deserve
to be punished. He'd
seen
something. He'd
heard
something.

If there really was a flood, they'd be singing a different tune
, he thought.
I would probably be on TV as a hero for running and getting someone. And my parents would be all, “Oh my God, Zak, we thought we would lose you! You were so brave! We're so glad you got away!”

Yeah.

If there had been a flood.

But there hadn't.

There
had
been water, though. Right? The voice had told him to run
before
the pipe sprayed him. There was something going on, something strange, something he couldn't identify. Even if he'd imagined the flood, he hadn't imagined the pipe and the water.

What's happening to me?
Zak thought.

He rolled over onto his stomach. Even though it was still early, he was suddenly very tired, and the muted back-and-forth of his parents' voices through the wall lulled him to the edge of sleep.

And his guardian angel's voice—a sad, yearning, almost desperate whisper just as he drifted off:
I'm sorry.

Or maybe he just imagined that.

 

THREE

I'm sorry
was the most the guardian angel had ever said. It was actually a complete sentence. Usually, it was just a word or two, like
Run!
or
Run now!
Simple things. The voice couldn't—or wouldn't—say much. Sometimes Zak wasn't even sure it was a voice so much as a sense of the word, the underlying imperative of it.

But as he woke in the middle of the night, he heard words—more than one or two—jumbled together, as though fighting each other for primacy.

—free—

He blinked sleep out of his eyes.

—
God
—

God?

—
Zak!

He sat up straight and slapped at the light switch, turning on the lamp, a scream tucked right behind his lips, eager to explode forth.

His name. It had said
his name
.

And for the first time, the voice was familiar. Not merely as the voice of his guardian angel. He'd always known and trusted the voice. And now he knew why.

—the secrecy—

“Tommy?” he asked the empty room. And a chill raced up his spine before evaporating at the base of his skull.

Tommy
. Tommy, his imaginary friend. Tommy, who had gone away around the same time Moira's family moved to Brooklyn from Dublin. Zak had—if he was being honest—pretty much forgotten about his invisible buddy until this very moment, this moment of late-night/early-morning darkness and solitude. Being alone was nothing new to Zak. He hated it, hated the isolation and the sense that the world could have vanished outside his door and he wouldn't know. Maybe it came from being an only child.

But there was a special kind of aloneness that only filled the wee hours and that only happened to children, although Zak was too young to understand that. Children know true isolation in a way that adults have forgotten, forgotten like scraped knees and loose teeth and …

And imaginary friends.

He shook his head. It was crazy. Tommy had been a figment of his imagination, nothing more. This kind of thing happened to only children, he knew. It was no big deal. Tommy, like most imaginary friends, eventually went away once Zak had actual friends to play with. He'd known Khalid forever, but they'd only started school together when Moira's family arrived. And they'd become an inseparable trio and Tommy had gone away.

And now he was back.

—
God
—

Zak spun around in bed. The voice had been right behind—

—
free
—

He turned again. Nothing. No one there. He rolled out of bed and stood in the center of his room. He realized he was panting. He touched his chest by reflex; his heart pumped normally.

I'm losing my mind.

Nothing. No answer from the air.

“Tommy?” he whispered again. “Tommy, is that you?”

Zak!

—free—

Beware!—

—secrecy!

The chill was back, this time spreading down along his shoulder blades. Why was he so scared? Tommy had been his friend.

Yeah, and then you stopped talking to him. Maybe he's really, really pissed.

That thought pummeled his chest; his heart thudded. He suddenly pictured a ghostly imaginary friend, angry and plotting revenge, coming back after years in limbo with …

With what? With a ghost knife? What could a ghost do to him, anyway?

“I'm sorry,” he said, not realizing how similar to his guardian angel's voice his own sounded in that moment. “I'm sorry, Tommy.”

Was his guardian angel really an angel? Was it looking out for him, like when it warned him away from the man in the black coat? Or was it tricking him, like when it told him to run from the flood that wasn't there?

Was it even—he shuddered—making him
see
things? It was one thing to hear an occasional voice or experience a sense of something. But to see a wave of water where there was none …

Am I losing my mind? Am I going crazy?