Triton (29 page)

She ignored him and took deep breaths herself. She sat cross-legged on his lap and rested her palms on her knees, meditation style.

“Is it working?” said Brynn.

“Shush. I’m relaxing.”

“You don’t look that relaxed.”

“You actually think this’ll work?” said Jake.

“Everyone
quiet
. Yes, it will work. Cedar, he . . .” she felt heat rush to her face, thinking back to their underwater kiss. “He showed me how.”

“Want a massage?” said Cedar.

“That would
not
help.”

“Want me to kiss you again?”

She jabbed her arm backward, elbowing him in the face. At last, they fell silent.

“I have to pee,” said Brynn.

Sky sighed in exasperation and flung open her eyes. “I can’t do this under pressure,” she said. “Not with you guys gawking at me like this. I need to be calm and relaxed.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I need to pee.”

“Brynn, there’s a bucket in the back,” said Cedar.

“Ew,
no
,” said Brynn. “Can we go back up to the surface? We’re running out of air anyway.”

“I need everyone to turn away and look out the window,” Sky ordered, “or pretend to be asleep . . . just
shut up.
”

“Okay, but I should let you know we have a limited air supply,” said Naomi. “Judging by how long it took to get down here, we should conserve an hour’s worth to get back to the surface—unless we want this to be a one way trip. If you take too long, we’ll pass the point of no return and we won’t have enough oxygen to make it back up to the surface.”

“When is that?” said Sky.

“Five minutes ago.”

“
What?
” Her heart lurched and beat double-time. “But . . . but . . .”

“But if you can get yourself off this sub,” said Naomi, “we’ll only have to split the air four ways. It’ll buy us fifteen minutes.”

“That’s if you disappear now,” said Jake. “And that’s fifteen minutes you’ll have to find the air lock and open it before we have to resurface.”

“I should also point out that we have no way of refilling the sub’s oxygen tanks,” said Naomi. “The air compressor is in the launch bay onboard the
Cypress
, five thousand feet underwater. We got one shot at this . . . and you’re it.”

Sky sucked down another deep breath, prickles of panic racing across her skin. “You guys sure know how to make someone relax.”

“Just the facts,” said Naomi.

“Everyone needs to shut up now and let her concentrate,” said Cedar.

Thank you, Cedar.

The four of them averted their eyes and pretended to be asleep. Sky checked that no one was peeking and let her eyes close again.

The moment she did, terror streaked through her mind. What the hell was she doing? Even if she could somehow relax enough to be taken onto the Triton, never in a million years would she find the airlock. She’d get lost in a maze of creepy wooden corridors, stumble through aisles of fetuses and harvested organs, and freak out and end up right back on the sub.

But if she didn’t even try, their chance of survival peaked at a whopping zero. She could at least try.

In the silence, her breathing slowed. She imagined the earth’s surface above them, seven continents of dried out wasteland, parched of life. Not one blade of grass, not one butterfly . . . not one bacterium. Just wind whipping across barren plains, going nowhere.

Earth, rewound four billion years to the epoch before life . . . blissfully innocent. Restored to nothingness, erased, cleansed and reset to cosmological perfection. Though the thought gave her goose bumps, she felt a blissful sense of surrender—of euphoria, even.

If it was right by the universe, if it was right by whatever greater powers resided out there beyond her comprehension, then it was right by her. Her calm aroused a deep sigh.

It was right.

Cedar felt it
happen.

The warmth of Sky’s body vanished, replaced by cold. A puff of air brushed his cheeks. Blood rushed to his thighs, now free of her weight.

He opened his eyes. The others, still pretending to be asleep, hadn’t even noticed.

“She’s gone,” he announced, a lump forming in his throat. They had sent her into the Triton; they may well have sent her to her grave.

“Why can she do that?” said Brynn, staring wide-eyed at the empty spot on his lap.

“Because she’s somewhere in between,” said Cedar, stretching out to fill the space she’d left. “She’s half like us, half like everyone else.”

“What do you mean
like us?
”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“They take her when she’s calm,” Jake observed, his eyebrows nudging upward. “What’s so special about calm?”

“I don’t know,” said Cedar. “She just forgets everything, and then poof, she’s gone.”

“She just . . .
forgets,
” Brynn repeated thoughtfully.

“Or relaxes, whatever,” said Cedar.

“Could
we
forget?” said Jake.

“Forget what, though?” said Naomi.

“Maybe it’s not what she forgets,” said Brynn, “but what she remembers that brings her back?”

“Like a memory?” Naomi offered.

“Like a memory.” Brynn nodded.

“Seriously, what’s this memory crap you guys are blathering on about?” said Cedar. “No one said anything about a memory.”

Suddenly, Brynn’s eyes shot wide open. “Yes, Naomi,
exactly
like a memory.” She ignored Cedar’s comment and peered around at them. “Have you guys considered maybe there’s something that connects us, the five of us who weren’t taken—and Zé Carlos—some kind of common theme?”

“Some kind of memory?” said Naomi.

“
What
memory?” Cedar spat.

His sister held his gaze, her blue eyes vivid with a realization, a secret. She spoke directly to him. “A memory you’ve forgotten, brother.”

The Outer Hull

The pressure of
the feeding tube down her throat meant Sky had done it. She yanked it out, her lower abs clenching from her gag reflex, and wiggled out of the net—still eerily calm from her moment of surrender on the minisub.

From memory, she slipped into the crevice between stacked pods and blindly inched her way toward open air. She reached the edge and, heart pounding, leapt into pitch black space.

Her feet struck the ground and she faceplanted painfully into the wood, and
then
the lights flashed on. Useless.

She stood up, limbs throbbing and bruised, and peered up the steaming walkway in both directions. The vapor swallowed her vision.

She’d escaped the pod in about three minutes. Which left twelve to find the airlock—which was
where?
—and flood it with air.

Twelve minutes. And counting.

She sprinted toward the sound of rushing air and burst into the vertical air duct. She kept her eyes off the sacks of fetuses opposite her and peered skyward, trying to grasp her location inside the spacecraft.

Above and below her, a thousand levels of suspended walkways crisscrossed the chasm, vanishing into human-sized tunnels. From here, the lowest ones appeared the size of pinholes.

A three-dimensional maze of dizzying proportions—and she was lost in the middle. Somehow, she needed to orient herself.

Her eyes flashed to the vulnerable egg-like sacks of humans in utero, and a realization struck her. She was staring at the single most vulnerable form of human life, the form that required the most assistance and protection—
embryos
.

And what was the most protected area of the Triton?

The core.

This shaft had to run through the core of the Triton. Since her pod hadn’t been far away, she guessed newborns, children, and teenagers were in ever wider circles around the core, followed then by adults, animals, and finally—against the perimeter—plants.

She peered through one of the cracks at the nearest stack of pods. Inside an incubator slept a day-old newborn, confirming her theory.

That meant she could figure out the distance to the center based on the types of animals nearby. But which direction should she go toward the rim? And up or down?

She peered back the way she’d come, a narrow walkway fading into mist. One spoke among millions that led to the vessel’s hull.

And not a chance in hell it would deposit her at the airlock. She glanced forward again.

Stairs had been carved around the shaft-like core, climbing in a spiral until they vanished out of sight.

To her right, the stairs went up. To her left, they went down. She had to go up; from the top, she could get a sense of direction.

Without another thought, she bolted up the stairs to her right. As she climbed, the Triton’s core twisted steadily downward like a corkscrew. One revolution around the shaft took her up a hundred feet, past a walkway identical to the one from which she’d emerged—and set her legs and lungs on fire.

The Empire State building was fifteen hundred feet. A hundred and two stories. She had raced up it once in seventeen minutes—and vomited at the top.

Now she had ten minutes.

And if she had more than fifteen hundred feet to climb, it was over.

Inside the minisub
, Brynn explained her theory, her heart racing. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but remember what Zé Carlos said during the show? He said he lost his memory for a year—”

“Yeah, sure,” said Cedar, “and when he woke up, he had magical powers. That was part of the act, Brynn. He made it up.”

“What if he didn’t?”

“So? What’s it got to do with us?”

Brynn stared at her brother, certain she was on the right track. “You don’t remember the car accident, do you?”

Cedar’s eyes went livid. “We don’t talk about it, Brynn.”

“Remember how they said you saved our lives?”

“Brynn, I am so serious right now, shut your face,” he said, his voice a deadly whisper.

Still, she persisted. “You don’t remember what you did, do you?”

“I killed Mom,” he whispered.

“You saved us,” she said.

“I didn’t save us,” he spat. “I was nine; I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Yes you did,” she said. “You just
forgot
. We thought it was a concussion, but guess what? The same thing happened to Jake too—he doesn’t remember saving his mom.”

“That’s a coincidence, it doesn’t make us the same.”

“It happened to me too,” Brynn said quietly. “How do you think I got my scar?”

“What scar?” His he said, eyes narrowed.

“This.” She lifted the hem of her T-shirt and twisted away from him, revealing the scar cutting across the side of her waist.

“You fell off a diving board.”

“I lied.”

“No, you fell off a diving board. That weekend you stole Dad’s car.”

“I
lied
,” she said, “because if I told you the truth you would have murdered him.”

“Who?”

“Simon.”

“Oh, so
he
did that to you?”

“It’s the scar from donating my kidney,” she said. “I gave it to Simon . . . to save his life. You know my blood type is O negative; I’m a universal donor.”

“You’re a minor,” Cedar sneered. “You can’t consent to being a living kidney donor. Dad never would have let you.”

“I went to Mexico.”

“Bullshit you did.”

“That’s why I ‘borrowed’ Dad’s car that weekend.”

“Oh please, you don’t even have a license.”

“Well that’s the thing, Cedar. I don’t know how I got to Mexico, I don’t know who operated on me, I don’t know how I got back. I don’t remember any of it. All I know is that on Monday morning, I woke up in bed with a scar on my waist—the same day Simon got the anonymous kidney donation that saved his life.”

“And you don’t remember
any
of it?” Cedar asked, clearly still in disbelief.

“Just like Zé Carlos. Just like Jake. Just like you,” she said.

“And me too,” Naomi whispered from the corner of the sub, where Brynn had almost forgotten about her. “It happened to me too. After I quit using uppers . . . there’s three weeks I don’t remember.” She glanced up at Cedar. “What about Sky?

At first he just stared at them, not a hint of understanding. But then his eyes widened. His face tightened in anguish, and he nodded grimly. “Her stepdad . . .” His voice trembled. “She said she didn’t remember any of it, like she wasn’t even in her own body.”

“Yeah, that’s what it felt like,” said Jake.

Brynn nodded. “As if right after we made a brave decision, something else stepped in to help us . . . to act through us.”

Sky tripped and
sprawled out on the steps, gasping for breath. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go on. She’d climbed at least a thousand feet, and the ceiling was nowhere in sight.

To her right, yet another corridor branched off the core and vanished between aisles of stacked pods, déjà vu all over again. How much freaking space did seven billion people need anyway?

She stared absently down the corridor, to where it sank behind mist—

Something was there.

From her side, she made out a black spider-like silhouette lurking motionless beyond the mist. Fear swelled up in her throat.

The nephilim
.

But it wasn’t moving . . . it didn’t pose a threat. Maybe it was asleep. Heart pounding, she dragged herself to her feet and made a detour down the corridor to investigate, hardly caring anymore. Her legs wobbled with fatigue and nausea tightened around her abs.

Ten feet away, the creature’s identity became clear. Eight spindly legs, each made of titanium and hydraulic pistons, branched off a shoebox-sized hull—stamped with a biohazard symbol—to which was fixed an array of instruments and cameras.

A robot.

Its battery long since exhausted.

And there, painted side by side along its titanium shell in proud red white and blue, were the logos of NASA and the Triton Project.

Too fatigued to react, she limped back to the core and took off running up the stairs again, feeling like she was about to implode. So NASA’s spacecraft
had
reached the Triton.