Triton (13 page)

A shockwave of pain shot up his front, and he surfaced, wincing and gasping for air.

Sky picked at
Cedar’s bloody T-shirt, still tightly wrapped around her thigh. The wound itched like hell. Still, she knew better than to scratch it. To distract herself, she turned her attention to the tiny dots of Cedar, Brynn, and Jake on one of the bridge’s closed circuit monitors—by the looks of it,
swimming
. “What are they doing? Why don’t they just take one of the lifeboats?”

A hundred and eighty degrees around the bridge, the glassy ocean reached to infinity, the waves no more than pond ripples from this height.

“Where are they?” Naomi followed Sky’s gaze to the monitor. “That’s close to the breach in the hull. Tell them to get the hell out of there. There’s still water flooding into the ship; they could get sucked under and into one of the watertight compartments.”

“Want me to go yell at them?”

“Announce it over the PA system,” said Naomi, turning back to her work unbolting the bright orange Voyage Data Recorder—also known as the black box. “Turn the volume all the way up. They’ll hear it.”

Sky limped through the sliding glass doors at the back of the bridge into the Safety Command Center and seated herself behind an array of ship status monitors.

She switched on the PA, turned the gains all the way up, and spoke into the microphone. She heard her own voice echo across the decks outside the bridge.

“Cedar, Brynn, and Jake—you are
seconds
away from being sucked into the watertight compartments, where you will die a horrible death. Get away from the hull of the ship . . .
Now!
”

She went back to the navigation bridge and checked the monitor again. The three of them were now swimming frantically away from the hull, toward what looked like an inflatable life raft.

“What’d you say to them?” asked Naomi, plugging a laptop—one of the few that had survived yesterday night’s collision—into a data port on the side of the VDR, which she had managed to get open.

“I just asked nicely.”

Naomi powered up the laptop. “Any luck finding out where we are?”

“Still working on it,” said Sky, sinking into the seat behind the monitor of the Electronic Navigation System, which currently displayed a chart of the water around Bermuda, nowhere near where they were now.

An error message flashed continuously on the screen.

No GPS signal detected. Proceed with chart navigation? [Y/N]

“It’s saying there’s no GPS signal.” She tapped the
Y
key, and the message went away. “Is that because we’re too far from the mainland?”

“No, GPS uses signals from satellites to calculate position. It’s supposed to work anywhere in the world. The crash must have damaged our receivers. I guess that means we’ll be doing good old fashioned compass navigation from here on out.”

“Satellites . . . like in space?” said Sky.

“Yeah, they’ve got like thirty satellites up there, so there’s always a few in the sky. What was our last heading?”

“Our what?”

“What direction were we sailing before we lost the signal?”

“Up and to the right,” said Sky, studying the line on the chart. “So . . . northeast I guess?”

“Can we get more specific than that?”

Sky jabbed the trackball mouse with her finger, and was relieved to see a cursor appear. She clicked on the line, which displayed an exact heading. “Seventy-four point two degrees east by north. We lost the signal about four hundred miles before Bermuda.

“Perfect,” said Naomi, typing a few keys on her own computer. “We can use our last know location and calculate where we are now.”

Sky nodded, staring at the navigational charts—and then an odd thing struck her. “Wait . . . you said the crash damaged the GPS.”

“That makes the most sense, right?”

“But we didn’t lose the signal last night, we lost it two nights ago . . . four hundred miles before Bermuda.”

Naomi stopped typing and glanced up, and her eyes narrowed. “Two nights ago,” she repeated, “at what time?”

Sky clicked on the end of the line, at the spot where the ship vanished off the charts—and stared in disbelief, her heart making hollow thumps against her rib cage, at the time readout. She swallowed and read the number out loud, a chill slinking up her spine. “Midnight.”

Fear flashed in Naomi’s eyes. “The same time everyone vanished.”

Sky nodded. “Which means that eight thousand people vanished at the exact same time thirty GPS satellites went dead in outer space.”

“This is the
MS
Cypress
calling all ships,” said Naomi into the radio headset. “We are in distress. We’ve run aground at an island approximately two-hundred and fifty nautical miles east by north of Bermuda. We are missing eight thousand of our crew and no longer have anyone capable of piloting the ship. If anyone can hear me, please help us.”

Naomi switched to another frequency and broadcast her message again. She couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of this before.

“This is the MS
Cypress
. We have a damaged ship and are in need of emergency assistance.” She quieted down and listened to the crackle of the radio. Just static.

“Anything?” said Sky behind her.

“Not yet.”

Naomi broadcast the SOS on every frequency, and waited. Each time, her message was greeted by a faint hiss of static, not even garbled voices. And each time, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach deepened.

No one was out there.

“This isn’t right,” said Naomi. “Something should be coming in. We can’t possibly be the only ones on the airwaves.”

She swiveled and watched Sky, who was in the middle of unwrapping Cedar’s bloody shirt from her thigh. “How’s it feel?” she asked.

“It feels weird,” said Sky.

“You’re really brave about it, you know,” said Naomi. “You got stabbed through the leg and you didn’t even flinch.”

She shrugged. “Things don’t really phase me anymore. After what my stepdad did to me, this is nothing.”

Naomi blinked, her jaw going slack for a moment.
After what my stepdad did to me
 . . . She didn’t know how to respond, though, and with her silence went her one chance to reach out. She felt a stab of guilt.

Sky peeled the last bloody scraps off her leg, and they both stared at the three-inch gash, the skin now sealed together with a smooth, black scab.

On a wound that should have required stitches and a trip to the ER, Cedar had worked a miracle. The two sides were healing together so smoothly, Naomi doubted she would even scar.

In fact, the surrounding skin looked so smooth and unaffected, the gash almost looked fake—as if made of Halloween scar makeup.

“Come on,” said Naomi, averting her eyes from Sky’s unnerving injury. “I think I’ve cracked the black box.”

A wave capsized
the life raft and dumped the three of them into the surf. Brynn came up for air, giggling, and slicked her hair to the side. In the baking sun, the cool water on her skin was bliss. She pranced up the shore.

Heat waves rippled off the black sand, which singed the soles of her feet.
Black sand
 . . . clearly, this was some kind of volcanic island.

Cedar stumbled out behind her, dragging the life raft and wheezing, and behind him emerged . . . Jake Carmelo.

He rose godlike out of the waves and strode onto the beach, dripping pearls of seawater, his chiseled upper body gleaming in the morning sunlight. In slow motion he wiped his face and dragged his fingers back through his curly hair, sending out a spray of mist.

As of that moment, Brynn was officially smitten by him. She also felt a pang of frustration; since yesterday, he had hardly looked at her.

Cedar coughed and keeled over, gasping for breath. What was his problem?
Jake
didn’t have any problem paddling them to shore.

Jake marched past her brother and thrust his paddle into the sand like a spear. “You can rest back on the boat, Cedar. We have work to do.”

As he approached her, Brynn posed in her bikini, returning the show: abs tight, chin held high, back arched, she reached up and tousled her hair, letting it fan out in the breeze. Through her stray blonde locks, she nailed him with her fiercest stare.

Guys liked fierce.

He eyed her for a single thrilling moment before averting his eyes, and her nervous rush fizzled out. That was
it?

But then his gaze darted back to her—then to Cedar, still wheezing into the sand—and he slowed.

It happened in a flash.

While her brother wasn’t looking, they fused together. He looped his arm around her waist and kissed her, his lips salty and wet. She ran her palm down his sun-kissed back, her mind disappearing into a heady fantasy.

He pulled away just as quickly. “Now we’re even,” he said.

“I didn’t know we were keeping score,” she said, feeling bubbly.

“That’s for the elevator kiss,” he said, and broke away from her without a glance back. Note to self: pose for Jake and you will get a kiss.

She glanced back at Cedar—and felt as if a weight had slammed her chest. Foamy saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, he glared at her across the beach, his blue eyes narrowed to hateful slits.

He saw the kiss.

She turned away from her brother, fear chilling her skin. She already knew what he was capable of—what he had done to her ex-boyfriend.

The memory of it all still stung. Cedar had caught them naked in her bedroom, as Simon was putting on the condom.

It was a broken nose, a grade three concussion, and a stab wound to the kidney before Cedar even heard her frantic pleas.

Simon had already lost one kidney to chronic kidney disease. His remaining one failed in the hospital.

If not for the organ donor, Cedar would have been a murderer. After Simon recovered, he spoke with a slur, and he couldn’t even look at her—his girlfriend—without going rigid with fear.

In the juvenile courts, Cedar smooth-talked his way down from eight months in a detention center to a weekend of community service with icy charisma, like he always did. According to him, it looked like the guy was raping his little sister.

The statutory rape laws supported his story. As a fifteen-year-old, Brynn was incapable of consenting to sex. It didn’t matter that she and Simon were in love.

In the end, Cedar hadn’t even done the community service. He had nearly killed Simon, destroyed his life—
definitely
destroyed hers—and gotten off completely scot free.

And now Jake was next.

As they hiked
off the beach and up the slope of barren rock, Cedar hung back, his insides writhing. Jake had just kissed her full on the lips right in front of him . . . Brynn . . .
his freaking sister
. Was the guy
trying
to get himself shanked?

After their fight yesterday, Jake had managed to keep his wandering pervert eyes off her; as a result, Cedar had been going easy on him.

He should have known better.

Scattered across the charred landscape, knotty, leafless tree stubs jutted out from the charcoal-black earth . . . like the gnarled hands of corpses reaching out of their graves. Cedar took in the windswept wasteland. They still had a ways to go to depart the underworld; if this wasn’t hell, he didn’t know what was.

Up ahead, Brynn’s hand brushed Jake’s.

“No touching,” Cedar barked, and she flinched away from him.

Brynn curled her lip. “Why’d you bring him along?” she muttered to her new boyfriend.

“Oh, he regrets it plenty,” said Cedar. “Trust me.”

Every ten feet or so, strange holes dropped into the soil, branching out underground in a network of tunnels, some of which had collapsed. No doubt the homes of burrowing vermin.

In fact, similar holes littered the mountain as far as Cedar could see, making the terrain appear choppy . . . recently dug up.

But something about the island didn’t feel right. Cedar scanned the slope ahead of them, the beach, and the rocky cliffs behind them, confirming his suspicion.

Nothing green, not even a blade of grass. They approached a dark mound up ahead, gleaming in the sun. Not a rock, though. Too round and sleek for that—

“Listen,” said Brynn, halting the three of them, a hint of fear in her eyes. She glanced around, breathing shallowly.

Cedar followed suit, but except for the wind whistling in his ears and the distant crash of surf, he heard nothing.

“Listen to what?” he said.

“Doesn’t it seem oddly quiet to you?” she said. “No birds? No insects?”

“It’s supposed to be quiet,” said Cedar. “It’s a desert island.”

“Not this quiet,” she said.

“If I didn’t know better,” said Cedar. “I’d say a volcano fried this place.”

“But you do know better?” said Jake, catching his eye.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” said Cedar, brushing past him and continuing up the slope toward the mound, which took on a suspicious shape as he approached . . . all at once, it snapped into focus—and his insides clenched.

The half-eaten carcass of a seal, its innards baked onto the rock, lay smeared before him. Out of reflex, Cedar wrinkled his nose, but there was no stink. Just the salty smell of charred blood.

“There’s no life on this island,” he said.

“That’s not true,” said Jake, pointing to one of the trees, a dry husk in the distance.

Cedar shook his head. “That’s firewood . . . that tree’s dead.”

Near the seal, an especially large hole drew Cedar’s gaze, and he peered down into it. The tunnels branched underground, their surfaces packed smooth.

Not burrowing vermin, he realized. Something else—and even in the stifling heat, the chill sank all the way to his bones.

“You know what these holes are, right?”

The laptop had
tons of specialized cruise ship software installed. After clicking on dozens of icons in vain, Naomi was finally able to access the VDR data using a retro-looking piece of software called
VoyageMaster
, which filled a window with graphs and green numbers. At the top, a slider let her scroll through the past forty-eight hours.