Dark Life: Rip Tide (15 page)

“I wouldn’t try cutting past that beast in a speedboat, forget trying to sail by when there’s no wind in here.”

“It can climb up here anytime it wants, can’t it?” She surveyed the floating dock. “Don’t answer that.”

“Look for a harpoon or a speargun,” I said, backing toward the far corner.

When I turned, my legs were knocked out from under me. My head cracked onto the dock as I sprawled. Thinking the crocodile had somehow flown across the distance, I pushed up with a choked yell, only to see a man standing
over me, his rusty trident at my throat. Hadal, who looked more monster than human with his scabbed, hairless skin and horns.

“I have no choice,” he ground out as he lifted his arm to impale me.

“It’s anchored, isn’t it?” I sputtered, putting the pieces together in a flash. “That’s why ‘Drift’ is painted on the wall.”

He froze, weapon still raised but not smashing into my chest.

“Someone chained the hatches, disabled the engines, and sank her deep.” I was guessing, but it felt right. “And you don’t know where.”

“Yes,” he said, so softly it might have been a released breath. “With all of them trapped inside,” he added, running a hand over his scaly head as if to erase a thought, “Even my daughter.”

“Who?” I asked, without trying to get away. “Who is scuttling townships?”

Hadal lowered his trident. “Fife.”

No big surprise there. My dip in the crocodile pool had altered my vision. Now I saw Fife’s good-natured act for what it was—an act. “He ordered you to kill me?”

With a nod, Hadal stepped back, allowing me to rise. “At Rip Tide. But I came here instead, thinking that maybe the Seaguard could find Drift in time….” His
words rolled off as he regarded the crocodile floating in the entryway, its eyes and snout visible.

Quietly, Gemma joined us.

“Where are my parents?” I asked.

Turning from me, Hadal moved to the dock’s edge. “Fife planned to leave them at the surfs’ garden tonight. That way, we’d be blamed.”

His words sliced me open. “They’re dead?”

Still and silent, Hadal watched the crocodile slip under the water without a trace. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

I forced myself not to react—no panic, no grief, nothing—to think above my mind’s noise. I had to get to the surfs’ garden fast—how? Call back the
Specter
?

Hadal faced us, looking so haunted, my thoughts stuttered into silence. “Killing you won’t save Drift.” His voice sounded raw, as if he were in a stranglehold. “Fife will never free Drift. They’re a warning to the rest—while I’m the living reminder.”

When he lifted his trident again, I pulled Gemma behind me, cursing myself for dropping my guard.

He rolled the weapon in his hands. “It’s Fife I should kill….” He spat, tightening his grip on the shaft. Then his eyes found me. “But maybe it’s not too late for you. Maybe you can still save your family, but only if you sail now.” He flipped the trident tines down. “Get there before high tide.”

At that moment, the crocodile exploded out of the water.

Spinning, Hadal slammed the trident down on the creature’s skull, but the razor-sharp prongs bounced off as if they’d hit rock. In a flash of movement, the crocodile closed its jaws on Hadal’s leg and yanked him off the dock. All that remained a heartbeat later was a swirl of blood in the churning water.

I staggered back and heard Gemma’s choked cry, felt her arms circle me. I turned to cling to her.

“The boat’s light enough to lift over the wall,” I said as we sailed toward the break in the barbed wire. Hadal’s words urged me on—
Get there before high tide.
Which meant within the half hour. Maybe less. My nerves were taut as a winch line and yet, for the first time in two days, I had real hope.

Gemma had not taken her eyes off the dark water around us since we’d sailed out of the docking area. She swept the flashlight beam across the lagoon in a repeating arc. I understood completely. The thought of encountering another crocodile was unbearable. Luckily, by the time we reached the break in the fence, we hadn’t seen so much as a ripple.

She scrambled onto the rubble, taking the paddles while I rolled up the sail.

“Ty,” she said, pointing into the darkness. “Something is cruising over the waves out there. A boat?”

It was too far away for me to see with sonar. But something Kale had said on the
Specter
came to mind. “It’s moving like a skimmer. Can I have the flashlight?”

I knew the beam wouldn’t help us see that far out on the ocean, but with luck it would
be
seen. I flicked the light on and off—three short, three long, three short. SOS in Morse code.

Within minutes, the skimmer pulled up alongside the rubble wall. Both front and back pods had tinted viewports, making it impossible to see who was inside. Then the viewport on the first pod slid back to reveal a trooper, staring at us with disbelief.

“We need to get to the surfs’ community garden as fast as possible.” I dropped the rolled sail, ready to abandon the surfs’ boat.

“You’re glowing,” the trooper said.

“Yeah, I know.” His comment didn’t prick me at all. In fact, I couldn’t imagine ever caring about such a minor thing again. “My parents might be hurt. Please give us a ride.”

“Hop in.” He waved us into the front pod with him, even though it was designed to hold two people, while the back pod had seats for three. “You’re the Townson kid?”

“Yes,” I said, squeezing in next to Gemma.

He punched a button on the control panel and the viewport slid closed. As the skimmer took off at top speed, hopping the waves, he said, “Captain Revas will be glad to hear we found you.”

“Found us?” Gemma asked.

“We’re here on her orders.”

At Gemma’s confused look, he explained, “There are two more skimmers on the other side. We can’t cross into the Ruins without a warrant. But Captain Revas told us to circle the area all night in case you showed up.”

“How did she know we’d be here?” I knew now that Fife wouldn’t have told her.

“Some boxer got hold of her. Said he told you about the Ruins, but then he started worrying about your safety.”

“Gabion,” Gemma said.

I realized it wasn’t Captain Revas that Gabion had been afraid of the previous night, but Fife. “The captain understood him?”

“We all know sign language.” The trooper sounded offended. “It’s part of our training.”

As he radioed the captain and told her where we were headed, Gemma and I stayed pressed together. Not talking.

I didn’t have words for what we’d seen that night. Or a reaction, it seemed. I froze up every time Hadal came to mind, which was just as well. I needed to stay calm at least until I knew that my parents were okay. Then I could think about him. And Drift … Suddenly the memory of Nomad’s chained hatches swept through my mind on an icy current.

No. I couldn’t think about what the people on Drift
were going through, either. Not now. Not if I wanted to be able to function.

Two skimmers arrived at the surfs’ garden from the south, just as we reached the entrance. One pulled up alongside us, and the front viewport slid open to reveal Captain Revas.

When the trooper retracted our viewport, she beckoned to me. “Jump in,” she said, though it didn’t sound like an order. Gemma must have decided not to squeeze Captain Revas because she opted to stay with the trooper.

Once we were inside the garden, Revas told the troopers in the other skimmers to split off to either side, while we headed down the narrow center canal with our viewport open.

Like Hardluck Ruins, the surfs’ garden was a flooded city, though much smaller. And unlike the skeletal wreckage of the black market, these ancient buildings had purpose. In the bright moonlight, I could make out vegetable-bearing vines winding up the exposed girders and hydroponically grown fruit dangling from balconies. Even though I was impressed by the surfs’ inventiveness, I paid no more attention to the flora around us. All my focus went into finding Ma and Pa.

“Hadal told you that Fife’s men left your parents here?” Revas asked.

I nodded, knowing that the trooper had given her the report over the transmitter on our way here. I guess she was checking to see if I’d left something out … which I had.

“Hadal is dead,” I told her. “One of Fife’s crocs got him.”

Revas stiffened but didn’t reply.

“He contacted you right after the kidnapping, didn’t he?” I asked as I continued to search the surroundings for some sign of my parents. “Told you how he’d been forced to do it.”

After a moment’s consideration, Revas nodded. “I went to Rip Tide to meet him face-to-face. It was the only way he would talk.”

“That’s why you told me to go home yesterday,” I guessed. “Because Hadal was there.”

“Yes, and by the time you finally left Rip Tide,
hours later
,” she said pointedly, “he’d already gone into hiding at the Ruins. Then Gabion tells me that’s where you’ve headed.” Her expression turned grim. “I was afraid that Hadal might decide that killing you was his last shot at getting Fife to release Drift.”

Hadal had thought that and almost acted on it. He’d also considered taking vengeance on Fife. But in the end, he’d done something very different. He’d chosen to help me—a settler. “He made sure that I could get here in time to save my parents—before high tide.”

She glanced at me. “High tide was over an hour ago.”

“It might not have reached its peak,” I said, while refusing to look too closely at the crumbling concrete and exposed girders as we glided past them. No barnacles or limpets clung to the wreckage above the waterline. If I saw sea life growing just under the waves, then I’d have to face the truth—that the tide had risen to its highest point.

We continued in silence for a while. As much as I wanted to block out everything but the search, my conscience kept poking me.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said finally, and turned on the seat to face her. “I let Shade out of jail so he could take me to Hardluck Ruins.” I’d been so desperate to save my parents, I’d willingly broken the law. But now I wondered if I could have accomplished the same thing without Shade’s help. I sure didn’t try very hard to find another way.

Captain Revas studied me. After a moment she asked, “Did you see the shark?”

“What? Yeah. A bull shark. It ate right through the grille.”

“Is that why you unlocked the cell door?”

“I would have unlocked it anyway,” I admitted. “But yeah, the shark was ten seconds from breaking through.”

“Then you did the right thing,” she said. “No one deserves to be eaten alive by a shark. Not even an outlaw.
I shouldn’t have left a prisoner in that poor excuse for a jail. As I see it, your actions were due to exigent circumstances.” She gave me a stern look. “But it can never happen again.”

“It won’t,” I assured her.

Suddenly an eerie tinkling noise filled the night. I glanced up to see hundreds of old glass bottles swinging overhead. Green vines sprouted from the bottles and wound over crisscrossing cables. As the wind picked up, they tinged like wind chimes, which may have sounded pretty to some, but seemed ominous to me.

“Ahead,” Revas said sharply.

I followed her gaze to where two ropes were tied side by side on a horizontal girder. The ends disappeared beneath the water’s surface.

Revas maneuvered the skimmer closer, clearly intending to pull up alongside the dangling ropes, but I didn’t wait. I dove off the seat, shooting sonar the moment I hit the water. What came back to me shouldn’t have made my stomach curl up inside of me. I wasn’t seeing my worst fear—my parents’ bodies hanging from those ropes. Nothing dangled before me other than the ropes themselves. But it was the ends that freaked me out. They were frayed as if cut with a serrated knife. Or serrated teeth.

That meant nothing, I told myself. Someone had tied a pair of fish traps here and simply cut them loose once the traps were full.

I couldn’t hold my breath much longer, yet still I swam closer to the ropes. Catching the ends in my hand, I kicked for the surface.

The skimmer bobbed nearby. “What did you find?” Revas called from where she stood in the pod.

When I held up the ropes’ frayed ends, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. However, my heart beat faster than ever now that I knew the ropes were made of braided whale tendon. A surf had crafted these, putting in time and skill. Too valuable to leave behind after fishing. If I’d learned anything in the past two days, it was that surfs were the least wasteful people on earth, whether it meant eating every part of a seal or finding new uses for the ancient bottles that littered the ocean floor. Someone else had left these ropes here.

What had Hadal said? That Fife planned to leave my parents at the garden, so that the blame would fall on the surfs. These ropes had been part of that frame-up, I was certain of it. But if Ma and Pa had been tied here—where were they now?

Dropping the ropes, I inhaled Liquigen and dove. I kicked my way down to the submerged cityscape that someone had tried to turn into a kelp field. The water wasn’t cold or deep enough for kelp, so what should have been lush thirty-foot stalks were barely ten feet and had a mangy look. With my sonar all I saw were fish, darting under the drifting fronds.

I sank until I could see the kelp’s holdfasts clinging to the rocks and in the sand. I sent out a series of clicks, not knowing what I was looking for until I saw it: A dive belt lay among the sea stars and anemones that covered the ground. I snatched it up, pushed off from the seafloor, and kicked my way to the surface.

“Ty, stop doing that!” Revas shouted the moment I broke the waves. “Get back in the skimmer now.”

I treaded water and lifted the dive belt to see it with my eyes in the moonlight.

“What’s that?” Captain Revas demanded.

My mother’s dive belt, that’s what. Unmistakably hers. My throat closed off as I studied the loops and holsters, which weren’t crammed with weapons like other settlers’ belts. Hers were filled with aquaculture tools, including a special clipper designed for her by my father. The front buckle was still fastened. The belt had been sliced open on the side—again by something with a serrated edge.