Dark Life: Rip Tide (4 page)

She blinked at me and then scrambled to lean over the side and vomit. I held her hair back, wishing I could do more. When the heaving finally stopped, she rinsed out her mouth with seawater over and over, then sat up and pushed me back with a shaky hand.

“I am never going in the ocean again,” she said between gasps.

“It was as bad as last time?”

Without answering, she crawled away to sit in a corner with her arms around her knees.

“Gemma, I don’t think you’re crazy. I don’t.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I won’t see you anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll be living at the Trade Station forever.”

“Even if that’s true, I’ll visit you there.”

She looked at me, desperately unhappy, and finally said, “Sure. It’s a plan.”

Why did I get the sense that she was patronizing me? Like I was too stupid to see that this was impossible. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you today.”

“It’s not your fault.” She straightened her legs, suddenly all business. “How do we get out of here?”

“Our diveskins have radio beacons.”

She nodded and seemed to relax.

I didn’t want to panic her with the whole truth just yet: that no one would know to look for the beacon. Once Zoe reached the Trade Station and told people about the kidnapping, their concern would be for my parents. A chunk of time would have to pass—hours at least—before someone would think to search for us in the open ocean.

Ten minutes after our dip in the ocean, Gemma had recovered her poise as the raft rocked with the waves and we roasted in the sun.

“Can’t you call a couple of dolphins to come give us a ride?” she asked. “Like you did when the lower station sank?”

“I don’t have any control over dolphins,” I explained. “I can send out a distress signal like theirs, and if they’re in the area, they’ll usually come check it out. But I can’t give them directions on how to tow us back to the Trade Station.”

“It can’t hurt to try,” she said. “You’re the one who says that dolphins are really smart.”

With a shrug, I slipped over the side and into the ocean. She was right: It couldn’t hurt to try. Once I’d submerged, I imitated the agitated clicks of a dolphin in distress.

No reply. No pod of dolphins had heard. I tried several more times. Still nothing. Before climbing back into the raft, I threw out clicks that would travel far and fast
to see what was in the area. And when the echo bounced back and formed a picture in my mind, I inhaled seawater.
Oh, no no no.
I scrambled back into the raft. I should have known better. Should have known that yes, it
could
hurt to try.

“What’s wrong?” Gemma asked, seeing my expression.

“A pod of orcas is headed this way.”

“Great. Can you get them to tow us back to the Trade Station?”

“Know why orcas are called killer whales?” I asked, while unholstering my speargun. “Because they eat their own species—as in, anything in the dolphin family. Especially a wounded dolphin, which is why they’re hurrying this way. My distress call … that was their dinner bell.”

“Okay, the distress call, bad idea,” Gemma said, clearly trying to remain calm. “But you told me that orcas don’t eat people.”

“Right.” I scanned the water around us. “But I never said that they don’t
kill
people. The only sure thing about orcas is that they’re unpredictable. Every group is different. Like humans. Some pods are playful. Others ruthless.”

“Let’s hope we get one of those playful pods.”

“There.” I pointed to where a six-foot dorsal fin broke the waves.

“Oh! That’s big,” she gasped.

I’d seen three with my biosonar. The typical number for a transient pod. A good hunting number. And orcas were, without a doubt, the smartest hunters in the ocean. They knew how to gang up on a whale four times their size and force its mouth open so that one of them could dart inside and rip out the whale’s tongue—an orca delicacy.

Now two of them made a wide circle of the raft. I kept the speargun across my knees in case either had experience with a harpoon. I didn’t want to trigger any bad memories. But where was the third orca?

I got my answer when the ocean exploded next to us and the black-and-white orca propelled itself out of the water. I froze, transfixed by its ascending body. For a timeless moment, the massive animal seemed to hang in the air, and then, as if snapped back to normal speed, it dropped broadside down. Amidst a curtain of spray, the orca sank beneath the waves, leaving us soaked.

I released the breath I’d been holding. “He was taking a look at us. To see if it was worth tipping the raft over.”

Gemma pushed her sopping bangs out of her eyes. “And what did he decide?”

I saw no sign of any of the orcas now. “They submerged.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”

After a minute, Gemma said, “Actually, if we’re both going to die”—she lay back in the raft—“I’d rather not
watch.” Her expression turned puzzled. “Do orcas thrum?”

“What?”

“Hear that? Definitely a thrum.”

I froze, listening, but heard only the lap of waves.

“Like a sub.”

“You’re hearing something under the water?” I lay down with my ear pressed to the bottom of the raft.

“I’m not totally hearing it,” she admitted. “It’s more like a vibration.”

I have exceptional hearing, according to the doctors who tested me when my Dark Gift first emerged. Better hearing than is considered normal for a human, and yet I didn’t hear or feel any vibration.

I sat up, deciding to slip into the ocean to take a quick look around. If there was a sub nearby, I’d see it with my sonar. But just as I was about to climb out, a flexiglass dome broke the waves, not twenty feet away from us.

Water sluiced from the sub’s dome, and I caught sight of blond curls as the driver gave a hearty wave. Zoe. She must have tried to follow the green sub anyway, even though the Slicky could never keep up. It had taken her this long to get this far.

Moments later, as I hauled myself into the Slicky behind Gemma, Zoe grinned from the pilot seat. She didn’t even wait for me to catch my breath before asking, “Aren’t you glad I never listen to you?”

As I powered the Slicky over the waves, closing in on the Trade Station, I sensed something was wrong. But I put it down to my churning thoughts about what the surfs might have done to my parents.

“It’s too quiet,” Gemma said, sounding spooked.

Right. That’s what was missing—the noise. It was a weekday, yet only the gulls screeched overhead. Where were the market sounds? For that matter, where was the market? The Surface Deck was barren. No colorful stalls circling the promenade. No fish vendors hollering, no buyers haggling. And only a scattering of boats bobbed along the outer docking-ring. A chill swept over me.

“Go around,” Zoe said, leaning over the pilot bench between us. “Maybe everyone is on the other side.”

As I started to circle the Surface Deck, three skimmers shot out of the waves ahead of us. With their two pods linked by a slender joint, they looked like wasps.

“What are those?” Zoe cried.

“Seaguard skimmers,” I told her.

“Probably here for Nomad,” Gemma guessed.

As the skimmers rounded the curve of the docking-ring, the larger pods in back of all three tipped on their sides.

“Glacial,” Zoe said.

I knew that not only could a skimmer submerge entirely, but also when cruising atop the waves the back
pod could flip over to let the strapped-in trooper scan the ocean below. Yet I didn’t share that information. I was too sick and shaken about my parents to care about fast vehicles.

I followed the skimmers around to the opposite side of the Surface Deck and nearly plowed into a long line of hitched Seaguard vessels. But that wasn’t as alarming as what the uniformed troopers were doing. Like a bucket brigade, they were carrying corpses out of the derelict township.

The Seaguard captain stepped over the bodies laid out along the promenade as if looking for something, though what, I couldn’t guess because—thankfully—tarps covered the dead. When I’d come aboard, I’d told Captain Revas about Drift taking my parents. Now as I waited for her to say that the Seaguard was on the case, I stayed down by the corpses’ feet, some of which poked out—bare, callused, and crusted with salt.

The line of dead circled the whole Surface Deck and was more than a little tough to look at. Gemma had done me the favor of taking Zoe below, promising to get her a scoop of whale-milk ice cream in the dining hall. After letting me out at the docking-ring, they took the Slicky down to the lower station, to enter at the access level. If they’d docked up here, they would have had to waltz past the dead surfs to reach the elevator shaft.
Zoe was a fierce little girl, but she was only nine. Why put an image like this into her brain? I knew it would haunt me forever.

Squatting by a body, Captain Revas pulled the tarp back and frowned. Clearly not the person she was looking for. She flipped the tarp back into place and stood. Like her troopers, she wore a trim jumpsuit of windproof material with mesh strips running down the sides for ventilation. Finally, she faced me. Her eyes were barely visible under the brim of her patrol cap. “What were your parents doing anywhere near Drift?”

I stiffened at the question. “We were selling them seaweed and kelp.”

Revas was probably in her late twenties—younger than I’d expected a Seaguard captain to be, but it didn’t make her any less intimidating, with her hard expression and her dark hair lashed back tight.

“We weren’t doing anything illegal,” I added, trying not to fidget under her stare. “The ’wealth said we can sell our crops.”

“To townships?” Her tone was both incredulous and insulting. As if my parents were idiots.

“To anyone we want,” I snapped.

Stepping over corpses, Captain Revas strode to me. “And your parents thought it was a good idea to do business with desperate people who
hate
subsea pioneers?”

“What are you talking about? They don’t hate us.”

“Really?” she scoffed. “You know that ordinance that keeps townships from crossing into Benthic Territory …?”

“What about it?”

“The surfs are holding on to some resentment about it. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

I bristled at the judgment in her voice. “Those townships would drag their nets through our farms, scooping up our livestock and plowing through our plankton fields.”

Revas squatted by another corpse and lifted the tarp to study the man’s face.
Was she even listening to me?

“We had to do something about it,” I added. “The ’wealth backed us up.”

“Yes, I know.” Looking dissatisfied, she replaced the tarp and rose. “You passed an ordinance that covers most of the eastern continental shelf, which happened to be the townships’ primary fishing grounds since they launched eighty years ago.”

“They have the rest of the Atlantic to fish in.”

“Kid, you know better than most that there are more fish on the shelf than off. And finding and catching them is a heck of a lot easier there.”

That brought me up short. The fish on the abyssal plain were few and far between and not particularly good eating. Mostly there was mud and a smattering of sea cucumbers.

“See why it might rub the surfs the wrong way to buy seaweed from settlers?” she asked.

I shook my head. How had I missed that? How had everyone missed that? A disquieting thought struck me. Maybe the settlers hadn’t missed it. Maybe they just hadn’t cared.

No. That couldn’t be it. The settlers were the good guys. Well, except for the time a group of my neighbors tried to lynch Shade. That hadn’t been a pretty moment. But Ma and Pa had known nothing about it. Came running to stop it when they heard.

“My parents must not have realized the consequences of the ordinance,” I said aloud.

“Of course not.” Her expression said the opposite. Looking across the promenade, Revas studied her troopers—all in ocean blue jumpsuits with low-slung gun belts. Her gaze stopped on a woman carrying a child-sized bundle. “Hatorah,” she called out.

“Even if they did have some idea,” I went on in my parents’ defense, “I can guarantee they didn’t know that the surfs hate us.”

“Possible.” Revas glanced at me. “You settlers do keep to yourselves.”

My parents had been kidnapped and this captain acted as if it was their own fault. “We’re not keeping to ourselves; we’re putting in long days on our farms
because the ‘wealth doesn’t give
us
monthly handouts. Not like the townships get. We have to work hard for what we have.”

“Want me to pass that on to the surfs who took your parents?” she asked evenly. “Or would you like me to try to resolve this in a way that won’t incite violence?”

I shut my mouth. She had a point. If the surfs did hate the settlers, then my parents were in even more danger than I’d realized—a notion as cold and buffeting as a current surging toward the abyss.

“First, Nomad’s sachem is not among the dead,” Captain Revas told the trooper named Hatorah. “Get someone to find out if he’s been spotted alive since Nomad disappeared—maybe at Rip Tide or the black market. After you’ve assigned that, get his story.” She gestured to me. “Significant details, everything. Then take out three skimmers to comb the area for Drift. Pull up pictures and its dimensions so you don’t investigate every sonar blip.”

“That’s it?” I demanded. “Three skimmers?”

The trooper’s brows shot up at my disrespectful tone.

As if I cared. “That’s all you’re sending out to look for my parents?”

“Even if I had vehicles to spare, which I don’t”—Revas’s voice held a warning—“the situation calls for diplomacy, not a show of might. The surfs on Drift took your parents for a reason.”

“They had
no
reason. We were selling them crops.”

“Go home, kid, or you’ll just make things worse. I will do what I can to find your parents and negotiate their release. But they’re not the reason I’m here.” She pointed
at the line of corpses. “They are. Three townships have disappeared in the past nine months. That’s over a thousand people who got shuffled to the bottom of too many priority lists. But not mine.”

Missing townships? That was news to me. Not that anyone in the ’wealth ever heard much about the surfs except whenever a township attacked some poor floater family, stole their supplies, and set fire to their houseboat. “Disappeared how?”

“Now that’s the question, isn’t it? Nomad is the first one to turn up. And when you tell me you found it anchored in the trash gyre, it makes me think the others didn’t sink in a storm.”

“Which one o’ you is Captain Revas?” A stocky man climbed up the ladder from the docking-ring. He was overdressed for the heat in a shirt with a cascading collar and a purple frock coat. He stopped short upon seeing the corpses, then flipped up the lenses on his sun-goggles to squint at Revas’s cap badge. “Guess it’s you. Mayor Fife sent me to see if it’s true—someone found Nomad?”

“Who are you?” Captain Revas asked.

“Ratter,” he said simply, and then tacked on “ma’am,” along with a smile that revealed his green teeth and a wad of chewing-weed crammed inside his cheek.

“Well, Ratter, you can tell your boss there are no survivors.”

“That’s a terrible shame.”

“Did one of Fife’s prizefighters live on Nomad?” Revas asked pointedly. “Is that why he’s so interested?”

“No, ma’am. Mayor Fife cares about them surfs. Been worried sick since Nomad went missing.” Ratter spit the chunk of seaweed onto the deck, where it glistened like a lump of algae between two tarp-covered bodies.

“Wipe it up,” Captain Revas ordered.

I straightened at the intensity underlying her words. Had it been me, I would have scrambled to comply. But Ratter gave her a peevish look.

“I ain’t going to touch chewed chew.”

With icy calm, Revas unholstered her harpistol and aimed between Ratter’s eyes. “Wipe. It. Up.”

I eased back a step, not trusting Ratter to be smart enough to realize that, though she might not shoot to kill, Captain Revas
would
pull the trigger if he didn’t obey.

Scowling, he bent and scooped up the wet hunk of chew.

The exchange tripped a wire in me, setting off my anger. Captain Revas cared more about someone disrespecting a dead surf than my parents’ abduction. Maybe surfs weren’t the only ones who hated the pioneers. Though if Revas was biased, I’d bet on the glaciers refreezing before her admission of it.

With the wad of wet seaweed clenched in his fist,
Ratter said, “Fife also wants you to know that if everybody aboard is dead, he gets to decide what to do with the township, being as he’s the Commonwealth’s surfeit agent.”

Captain Revas holstered her pistol. “Inform the mayor that Nomad is part of an investigation and that the Seaguard will be holding on to it indefinitely.”

“But after that?” Ratter pressed.

“It’s my salvage,” I cut in. “I found it. There are no survivors. So when the Seaguard is done checking it out, Nomad belongs to me.”

Ratter glared at me.

I didn’t care if I sounded like a jerk, interrupting their conversation. Or callous because of the bodies at our feet. It felt good to show up Captain Revas. I knew the salvage laws as well as any ocean dweller.

Jaw clenched, Revas peeled her eyes from me like I was a bucket of fish guts and turned to her trooper. “Get this backwater brat out of my sight.”

My neighbors, Shurl and Lars Peavey, came as soon as I called them and agreed to take Zoe while I searched for my parents. Zoe had to be forced, kicking and screaming, into their sub.

“What if she shocks one of them?” Gemma asked worriedly.

“She won’t,” I said, as their sub disappeared under the waves. “She’s too scared to shock people she hates. She sure isn’t going to shoot electricity at someone she loves.”

“So what do we do now?” Gemma asked.

After everything she’d been through that day, the fact that she could still say “we” amazed me. “I can’t rely on three skimmers to find my parents. I’m going to Rip Tide,” I told her.

“Where the boxing match is?”

“Yeah. It’s about half a day’s sail south of here. The townships pick up their rations there. I know the chance of Drift showing up is slim, but I want to talk to the surfeit agent. Maybe he’s heard something—knows what Drift’s sachem wants with my parents. Or what it will take to get them back. And if he doesn’t, maybe he can tell me the coordinates of Drift’s fishing grounds. At least that would give me somewhere to start looking.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Thanks. But I’ve put you in enough danger for one day.”

“I don’t care about that. I care about getting your parents back.” Her attention jumped to someone behind me. “Hey, that’s my stuff!”

I turned to see a Seaguard trooper emerging from the lounge with a duffel bag in his arms.

“Good. You can take it with you.” He dropped the
duffel at Gemma’s feet. “I think I got everything. But take a final look-see.”

“Final look?”

“You have to clear out. Captain’s orders.”

“But—” Gemma stopped herself. “Who’s your captain?”

“Don’t waste your breath,” I told her.

Ignoring me, she looked expectantly at the trooper.

“The kid’s right. No way Captain Revas is going to let a teenage girl hang around a Seaguard fort.”

“Since when is our Trade Station a fort?” I demanded.

“Since the Assembly said so,” he replied evenly. “It’s a good central location.”

“For what?” I asked.

“To bring stability and justice to the ocean frontier,” he said, clearly quoting someone. A superior probably. Or an Assembly representative.

Just what the settlers needed—a garrison right in the middle of the territory so the ’wealth could keep tabs on us and meddle in our business. Already the Trade Station felt different. Like all the life had been sucked out of it.

Looking close to tears, Gemma picked up her duffel bag and hugged it to her body. “So,” she said, clearing her throat. “Do you want to ask Jibby for his tickets to the boxing match or should I?”

“Of course they took your storage closet,” I told Gemma. “The ’wealth doesn’t care about people’s families or homes. And the Seaguard is nothing but the government’s fist.”

Shoving the Slicky’s joystick forward, I laid on the speed even though the boxing match didn’t start for hours. Jibby had handed over his tickets willingly once he’d heard why I wanted to go to Rip Tide.

Next to me on the pilot bench, Gemma remained silent. She’d changed out of her diveskin before we’d left the Trade Station. No surprise there. But I was taken aback when she’d returned to the docking-ring in a sheer turquoise sari. I’d seen her in Topsider dresses before, but never anything so fancy. Maybe it was an everyday outfit by stack-city standards, but out on the ocean, only rich tourists wore such frippery. The sort of people who dropped by the Trade Station to gawk at the crazy pioneers who’d settled on the ocean floor. And when those tourists spotted me, out came the cameras, accompanied by stares and exclamations over my skin. Or worse, they’d comment on what reckless parents I must have to raise me in the subsea wilderness.

Pretty much all my experiences with Topsiders had left me feeling wary and embarrassed, which had to be why unease slid through me when Gemma had stepped from the lounge in a fluttery piece of nothing. Or maybe
it was because wrapped in a sari she seemed older. More sophisticated. And that unsettling combination made me want to dive into the ocean and get lost in a school of silversides. Instead, I’d busied myself unhitching the Slicky while hoping that she didn’t expect a compliment. Anything out of my mouth would’ve sounded insincere since really I wanted her back in a diveskin or at least a nondescript dress from her boarding-home days.

I glanced at her, sitting so close to me on the pilot bench, yet seeming so far away. She stared out the viewport with a faint pucker between her brows.

“You’re not homeless,” I said, guessing at her thoughts. “You can always live with us.”

She shot me a pained look. “Stay inside your house all day while you and your family work outside? I can’t.”

“Why not? None of us mind.”

“Because I’d feel useless and trapped.”

“What are your other options, though? It’s not like you can move in with Shade.”

Her lips tightened and she went back to looking at the passing ocean.

“You’re not seriously considering it?” But she was. I could tell she was.

“He’s going to be at Rip Tide while we’re there. I may as well talk to him,” she said as if it was no big deal.

“If you think Shade has changed his mind about letting
you live with outlaws, you
are
crazy.” When her brother had told her no last time, he’d been firm to the point of cruelty. And I sincerely hoped he’d stick to his guns.

She threw up a hand in frustration. “Fine. I’ll move to a township.”

How could she even joke about it, knowing that a bunch of crust-skinned savages had just kidnapped my parents? “You’d become a surf?”

“I already am. Surfeit population. May as well admit it.”

“No, you’re not. Not to us.”
Not to me.
“You’d be better off moving back to the mainland.”

“And live where? Stack-cities are restricted communities. Even the really awful ones—so dirty and old, you’d never want to visit—even they will only let you in if you have an access pass.” She folded her arms across her body as if trying to stay warm. “Before, I dreamed about finding a home. Now I’ll be lucky to find a place to live.”

“I don’t see how living on the
Specter
would be any different than living with us. You—”

“Can we concentrate on rescuing your parents? That’s going to be hard enough. We can worry about me later,” she said firmly. “After we’ve put your family back together.”

Being a pioneer, I knew
stubborn
could be a useful trait. Most of the settlers in the territory were stubborn to the point of being intractable. But Gemma dove into
stubborn
the way I slipped into the deep, as a way to escape tension and noise. At least my way came with a view.

I knew we were nearing Rip Tide when we passed under a township that had dropped anchor off the rocky coast.

“Townships aren’t allowed to come this close to the mainland anywhere but by Rip Tide,” I told Gemma.

“Why not?”

“They’re big and don’t maneuver well. The coastal states passed laws to keep them away from the marinas and smaller vehicles.”

We spotted more townships bobbing above us. I’d never seen so many gathered in one place. I scanned the bunch, looking for Drift. But judging from their undersides, none resembled an enormous Portuguese man-of-war.

“Let’s surface,” Gemma said. “I want to see what they look like.” The moment we broke through the waves, her interest evaporated. “They’re just mountains of metal and flexiglass.”

“The older ones, yeah. It took awhile for the government to realize that the surfs would be better off if they had some way to support themselves. That’s when they started designing townships for specific trades. Like Nomad, which was built to be a salt farm.”

“Look, an airship.” Gemma pointed at a brightly striped dirigible hovering far off in the sky. “It’s
tethered,” she said with some surprise, “like they are on top of stack-cities.”

“It’s probably hitched to Rip Tide. We’re getting close.”

I took the Slicky subsea, where we could speed along much faster, until the town’s steel legs popped onto the sonar screen. I got us as close to the hulking structure as I dared and headed for the surface to crash through ten-foot swells.

The ancient offshore drilling platform towered over us—seven stories tall. Before the Rising, the oil rig would have hovered above the water with room for boats to cruise underneath. Now the waves lapped at the town’s underside, which probably meant that come high tide the first level would flood completely.

These derelict platforms off the Commonwealth’s coasts had been converted into lots of things, like prisons. And wind and tide turbine islands, all with thick cables on the seafloor for sending the produced energy back to the mainland. But most became ramshackle towns, offering shelter to thousands of displaced people. Frankly, I would have preferred living on a converted drilling platform to being shut up in a stack-city. At least the platform was surrounded by sea and sky, not hemmed in by other concrete towers.

Cruising the Slicky alongside Rip Tide, I looked for a place to hitch her but couldn’t find a single boat cleat or
even an entryway. The rusting metal walls bore only a thick crust of barnacles, mussels, limpets, and snails. Rip Tide might have been an impressive drilling platform in its day, with its seven decks and enormous center tower, but it sure didn’t make for a very welcoming town. Giving up, I rounded a corner and steered for the rocky coast.

“There,” Gemma said, pointing up. “That’s how we get on.”

Thick cables swung overhead, stretched between Rip Tide and the cliff, with two steel towers in between. The cliff was quite a ways off. But then a cable car came into view, and I realized it covered the distance fast. Packed with people, the car zipped over us and banged through an opening on a middle deck.