Triton (20 page)

“That’s because something is wrong, Naomi,” said Jake. “Something went wrong three nights ago when eight thousand people vanished from this ship in the blink of an eye. That’s when things went wrong.”

Naomi leaned over and checked the compass on her screen. She studied it for a moment, eyebrows scrunched, before she finally straightened up. “All I’m saying is something doesn’t feel right.”

The next morning
, Brynn took Jake down to deck three to investigate the mysterious light she had seen. Like the rest of the interior cabins, stateroom 834 was now dark.

Still, prickles scampered across her arms. Only a hint of morning light penetrated the maze of hallways this deep.

“You sure this is it?” said Jake, leveling the flashlight’s beam at the door’s room number.

“Positive.” Brynn had meant to investigate the room yesterday, but with Jake’s new never-by-yourself rule, she hadn’t been able to scrounge up a partner until now.

With the hairs on the back of her neck bristling, she unlocked the door and pulled it open. The dark cabin swallowed the beam of the flashlight.

A room without windows.

One of only a handful of interior staterooms on the
Cypress
. Jake stepped into the room and swung the flashlight. The beam illuminated a floor strewn with luggage and two made twin beds.

Brynn crept in behind him, clutched his arm, and peeked around him. He swept the light deeper into the room, and the beam caught movement.

A dark, hulking silhouette shifted against the back wall. She flinched, and her heart shot up with adrenaline . . . before she realized it was only their reflections in a mirror, their conjoined bodies appearing as one.

“Nothing here,” said Jake.

She sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”

“What smell?”

“Like . . .
smoke
.”

“Whatever you saw in this room, it’s gone now. Let’s get back to the bridge. It’s creepy as hell down here.” Jake lowered the flashlight, but its bright cone glinted on something small and black on the bed.

“Wait—” Brynn grabbed his hand and steadied the flashlight. The cone glimmered on black leather—a book, lying on the pillow.

She pushed past Jake and peered closer.

A Bible.

“Leave it, Brynn.”

“It could be useful.” She plucked it off the pillow and, having no sizeable pockets of her own, slid it into the Velcro pocket of Jake’s boardshorts.

Brynn didn’t let go of the book, though. Something about it jogged her memory.
A Bible
 . . .

She realized in a flash—the translation.
Beware of the giants
 . . . that last word.

She knew where she’d seen it.

“Anything?” said Naomi.

Next to her, Cedar—her new navigator—swept the binoculars across the horizon. “Don’t see jack.”

“Sky could have been wrong.”

“She wasn’t,” he said. “She made the best estimate she could with incomplete information; there’s a margin of error. If we haven’t sighted land in an hour—by four thirty—that’s when we worry.”

In front of the ship, the expanse of unbroken sea reached to infinity. If Naomi didn’t know better, she would have said they were still in the middle of the Atlantic, not minutes away from the Eastern Seaboard.

But according to their charts, in the last forty-eight hours they had sailed a thousand miles west. So why didn’t the ocean feel any different?

She suppressed a chill and tapped the compass on her screen. “Either way, we’re heading west straight as an arrow. Eventually, we
will
hit land.”

“Unless the land’s gone too.” Cedar swiveled the binoculars off starboard, to a whisper of a cloud just visible above the haze.

A knock on the blast door announced Brynn and Jake’s return.

Naomi let them in. “Find anything?”

“Just this,” said Brynn, tossing a Bible onto their nautical charts. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that Hebrew message . . . I think there’s another translation for that last word.”

“Not giants?” said Naomi.

“It’s something biblical. I remember it from my class. Is there anywhere on this ship I might be able to find a Hebrew dictionary?”

“I have no idea.”

“There was a bookshelf in the suite, could I find one there?”

“You could try, but . . .” she trailed off. A bookshelf? She knew where Brynn could find a whole room of bookshelves. “On deck eleven, toward the stern. We passed it on our way into the Aquarium Bar—there’s a whole
library
.”

“Perfect. Come on, Jake.” Brynn grabbed his hand tugged him back into the hallway.

“This is bullshit,”
said Cedar, whipping the binoculars off his face and flinging them onto the desk. He jabbed a finger at the sun, sinking inexorably off port. “It’s
sunset
already . . . where the hell is South Carolina?”

“You in a rush?” said Naomi.

“There’s this great lobster shack on the waterfront in Charleston. I wanted fresh lobster for dinner.” He slumped behind the navigation desk and gripped the pencil.

For the fifth time, he went over Sky’s calculations. Flawless, every one of them . . . utterly flawless.

Just like her.

Once again, he plotted their possible courses. He factored in currents, wind speed, uncertainty about their starting location, the deviation of magnetic north from true north, and even doubled the margin of error for good measure. Then he drew a large circle on the chart encompassing all their possible locations.

He showed it to Naomi. “This is where we’re supposed to be.”

She glanced at the circle he’d drawn, and laughed. “Calculate it again. You made a mistake.”

“I don’t make mistakes.”

“Well, we’re not there.”

“No shit, Sherlock. I can see that for myself. Obviously, we are not in Knoxville, Georgia, two hundred miles inland . . . we are in the buttfucking middle of the Atlantic ocean.”

Brynn flipped through
the ship’s
Hebrew-English Dictionary, doing her best to sound out the Hebrew word. “Nef-eel’ . . . n’filim.”

A warm, studious glow lit the stained oak shelves of the library, and for a moment she forgot they were aboard a cruise ship.

Then she found the entry.

“Found anything?” Jake’s voice startled her, and she flinched as he planted his palms on the table opposite her and peered down at the dictionary—apparently impatient with their lack of progress.

Brynn scooted her chair around, so he could read the dictionary over her shoulder, and she read the entry. Her skin prickled.

נפיל
m.,
pl
.
נפילים
giants
.
Fallen ones
; name of
a demon
.
Nephilim
.

“That’s the word I remember,” she whispered. “
Nephilim
.”

“Nephilim,” he repeated. “What, like fallen angels?”

“Something like that.”

He stood up. “Beware of the nephilim . . . why
the nephilim?
”

“We learned that word in our religion and mythology unit,” she said, feeling a flutter of pride that she’d managed to track it down. “I told you it was biblical. We might find something about nephilim in the Bible . . . that one we found in the room.”

Jake nodded and dragged his hand across his jaw, his eyes darting around the dim library. “And I think it’s time we dealt with the fact that there might be one of them on this ship.”

Red-orange sunlight
glanced off the wave crests and cast long shadows into the troughs. On the bridge, airborne lint caught the glare like red sparks.

Once again, Cedar peered through the binoculars at the distant plume of vapor off starboard, more visible now that it was sunset. “That can’t still be the meteor,” he said. “We passed that ages ago.”

“I don’t know,” said Naomi. “We didn’t have good visibility yesterday, and I haven’t been looking that way. I’ve been looking straight ahead.”

Cedar swung the binoculars across the skyline. Through the binoculars, the severe angle of the sun, shining from behind him, painted the peaks of the waves a dull brown and everything else a bluish black—which was how he noticed a faint glimmer ahead and to starboard, the sun’s metallic reflection off a distant floating object.

Its dish-shape looked familiar.

“Steer us to the right,” he said. “There’s something in the water over there. It looks like another NASA space capsule.”

“Triton Two?” Naomi said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe their whole fleet fell down from space.”

In the distance, a swell thrust the capsule skyward, and through the binoculars, Cedar glimpsed the whole thing—and a wave of chills soaked his spine.
No, it can’t be
 . . . 

“Is it Triton Two?” she asked.

“It’s not Triton Two . . . those later ones were way bigger.” He lowered the binoculars, his hands trembling. “And don’t bother altering course.”

She glanced over, alarmed. “What is it?”

He swallowed, his throat dry and unresponsive. “It’s Triton One . . . again.”

Magnetic North

Sky woke up
in blackness, a migraine pounding her temple. She tried to swallow, but her throat merely clenched around a feeding tube.

No. Not again.
Please not again . . .

Her gag reflex triggered, and her stomach clenched and tried to expel the tube, but it was fixed in place. A nauseating hot flash burned her cheeks. Frantic, she scratched at her face mask, tore it loose just in time, and coughed the slippery hose onto her chest, ruining another T-shirt.

Taken
. Again.

The last thing she remembered, she had been searching a stateroom on the
Cypress
, feeling calm. Then pop.

But that had been days ago, right? Cedar flashed into her mind, and it was like a hole opened in her chest. What if she never saw him again? She hadn’t even said goodbye.

Now she was back to being blind and disoriented, trapped half-naked in a musty, pitch black—

No, come to think of it, she was wearing more than just her underwear. She was wearing shorts. Naomi’s shorts.

Naomi’s shorts, which still had Naomi’s cell phone in the pockets.

A cell phone.

Heart echoing in her chest, Sky dipped her hand into the shorts and slid out the phone. She inhaled slowly and clicked it on.

The screen lit up, almost blinding her. Yes! It still had power. She navigated to the flashlight app, and the white LED flooded her world with light.

Swiveling her wrist, she swept it around her surroundings—and claustrophobia immediately clamped down on her sternum. The slimy ceiling slumped inches above her nose. She was in a coffin-sized pod the width of her shoulders, barely a foot high.

She squeezed her eyes shut, heart slamming. “Take me back,” she whispered. “Please, take me back to the ship.
Please
take me back . . .”

Nothing happened.

She was stuck here. Forever.

Where?
The feeding tube . . . she was meant to stay asleep. She could be in an alien spaceship on a thousand-year voyage across the galaxy, and she was supposed to stay asleep. No duh. Instead, the freak she was, she’d woken up.

Panic skittered over her skin.

Like an idiot, she had pulled out the feeding tube; now she couldn’t put it back in. Now she couldn’t get back into deep sleep. She would be up the entire trip. Wide awake. Trapped in a tiny coffin for a thousand years of agonizing boredom.

Why the fuck hadn’t she just stayed asleep like a normal person? They could have experimented on her all they wanted, and she wouldn’t have remembered any of it—

Suddenly, a terrifying thought constricted her lungs: she was trapped in here with only her creepy little mind for company, trapped with nothing but her own nauseating memories . . . her memories of
him
.

Her stepdad.

The monster who had raped her when she was thirteen, stabbed her within an inch of her life, and murdered her mom.

According to psychologists, the trauma had forced her brain to repress the memory. From the moment he flung her to the ground to the moment she woke up in a sack at the bottom of the Chicago River, it was like she hadn’t even been in her own body.

The doctors didn’t believe her survival was even possible. He had meant to murder
both
of them, after all.

Trapped in here, with nothing else to reflect on, she would be forced to relive it. Right when she was doing so well, too, when she had already tried so hard to heal; a month in here would undo it all.

She needed to escape.

Sky tugged at the net securing her to the slab. Weakened by centuries of dampness, the twine ripped apart easily, and her elbows banged the walls. Head and shoulders now free, she scooted her body downward—and her feet hung off an edge. She tore the rest of the net and wiggled out into a narrow crevice, where she probed for footholds.

Her toes found a ledge directly below her own pod—right between someone else’s clammy feet.
Yuck
. On either side, her flashlight illuminated more stacked pods. More pale feet, some with shoes. All the way up until the beam faded into blackness.

Dank air drifted past her from the left. Left it would be. She abandoned her pod and squeezed her body along the crevice, heading toward its source—terrified of what she would find.

“Obviously, we’ve been
going in circles,” Jake announced, in response to the unsettling news about the NASA space capsule. “We dumped Triton One almost nine hundred miles back.”

“But that’s impossible.” Naomi stared at her instruments, mouth agape. “We’ve been going in a straight line. We’ve been going west.”

“You’re sure?”

“That’s what the compass says.”

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” said Brynn, “but if we’re going west, shouldn’t the sunset be in front of us . . . not way over there.” She pointed to the sinking blood-red sun, directly off port.

They all went silent.

“She’s right,” Cedar said finally. “We’re not going west.”