Child of a Hidden Sea (35 page)

Places Parrish has visited?
she wondered.

She looked at the chest of drawers, a potential treasure box if ever there was one. She was momentarily tempted to snoop.

Instead, she turned her attention to her own things, which were piled neatly on the floor beside the bunk.

She opened her trunk, setting aside the sack of polystyrene packing peas her solar charger had come in. The princess dress was next. Had anyone worked out what she was up to? It was inside out, but her little collection of samples remained hidden in its petticoats.

Relieved, she turned it right side out and repacked it before fishing out her diving equipment: swimsuit, wetsuit, mask, air tanks, rebreather, flippers. She tried to tell herself she wouldn't need the camera, but she couldn't do it; it would have been like leaving her leg behind.

She clamped it into its waterproof housing, checked the seals, and clipped it to the LED flashlight for good measure before she changed into her gear.

By the time she was back on deck, the rowboat was ready and Tonio was inside, waiting. She set her kit inside, one piece at a time, double-checking that nothing had been missed.

“You've hardly left room for anyone to row,” Tonio objected.

“I'll help,” she said, clambering into the boat. The octopus was nowhere to be seen. “Where's Lassie?”

“It will resurface if you blow the flute again,” Parrish said.

“Okay.”

“We're right here if you need us.”

“Look, I'll follow it, you follow me. It's not gonna be a problem.” She fervently hoped it was true.

“No,” Tonio said, unshipping the oars. “This is all meant to be, don't you think?”

“I'll give you people a lot, but not predestination, not without serious evidence.”

He looked away: “Let us hope you never find any, Kir Sophie. Knowing your future might be a terrible thing.”

“Chasing my past hasn't exactly been an endless rain of lemon drops.” She raised the flute to her mouth, and blew again. The octopus surfaced almost immediately, about fifty feet away, on a bearing north-northwest. Sophie wrangled the second set of oars into their locks and fell into a rhythm with Tonio.

They did that for about half a mile … the octopus surfacing to spit and wave, Sophie and Tonio following,
Nightjar
inching along behind. Then something seemed to bump them and the little boat picked up speed, racing after the octopus. Sophie peered over the side. There was something big and shadowy beneath the boat.

“Friend of yours?” Tonio inquired.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I'm guessing he knows John Coine.”

“Teeth! That can't be good.”

The octopus kept pace beside them now as the rowboat raced along. Wind ruffled her hair.

She let a hand drop into the water, enjoying the caress of the sea and simultaneously assessing the temperature. The air and water both had a bite to them that reminded her of spring in the Atlantic. Still, the wetsuit would keep the chill off.

“Land!” Tonio pointed.

A hump of an island rose on the horizon, but their course took them east and south of it. Sophie trained her camera on it and zoomed in. It was volcanic: a pitted rock beach facing south. The rocks seemed to be moving; after a second, she realized they weren't rocks but iguana, black and leathery, indistinguishable at this distance from the infamous swimming variety associated with the Galapagos Islands.

“Kinda far from your home latitude, aren't we, guys?” she murmured.

When they were due east of the volcanic beach, the rowboat began to slow. The shadow below them vanished; the octopus surfaced, spat water all over her, and rolled the tips of its tentacles onto an oarlock, pulling itself up to peer at them.

“Good girl, Lassie,” Sophie said for lack of a better idea. “If I had a fish, it'd be yours.”

It dunked, resurfaced, dunked again.

She turned on the light, shining it under the boat, looking. No sign of the thing that had been towing them, no sign of the bottom.

Diving alone, in unknown waters. Stupid, stupid. Dive alone, die alone. And there was something down there. She looked at Tonio speculatively. But no—this was no time to be training anyone, and anyway she had only the one rig.

“You know,” Tonio said. “The flailers would do what they could to make Bram welcome and comfortable.”

“For his whole life.” She laughed weakly. “Maybe we could jailbreak him from Issle Morta.”

“They'd scrip him to death,” Tonio said. “Their national honor—and their ability to protect future hostages—depends on their never letting anyone go.”

So much for that.
“Down I go, then.”

“I'm sure Bram would prefer to—”

“Live out his life on an intellectually barren rock? He'd lose his mind from boredom.” As she said it, she felt certainty descend. Cly might have the looks and charm of a TV dad, he might be a swashbuckling fighter judge from some exotic land. But that was all dream and vapor. Bram was her kid brother: That was real.

She made herself take her time. She checked every bit of equipment twice: rebreather, dive computer, mask, the light and camera and the tethers clipping them to her arms.

Half a click away,
Nightjar
was lowering its anchor.

There was something directly ahead of them, on the surface. She brought up the camera.

It was a sheet of wooden debris. A ship's deck? Yes, part of one, from the look of it—out on its edge, the boards fanned out, undulating in time with the waves, and as she took it in she saw joins—nails—and a scrap of sail.

Much of the raft's surface was obscured by growths of a trefoil plant not unlike the ivy that choked trees in the Pacific Northwest. Here, it had obvious adaptations to a marine environment; its leaves had a cupped shape, allowing them to catch rainwater, and where the vines met the ocean they were slicked with translucent slime.

“Algae probably,” Sophie said. “I'm guessing it's a separate species in symbiosis with the ivy, protecting it from the salinity of the water.”

“I couldn't tell you, Kir,” Tonio said.

The raft had all the bustle of a spring meadow. Caterpillars gnawed at the leaves here and there, and were eaten in their turn by keen-eyed shorebirds whose shape and markings reminded her of curlews. The birds ate the caterpillars and then snapped the half-eaten leaves off at the stem, tossing them away. Near the middle of the raft, whose surface area could have held a small playground or a huge house, the surface was bowed down by weight of a dozen or so Bonaparte's gulls who were peaceably eating … what? Something plentiful, Sophie thought; had to be or they'd be fighting over it.

Fanning out from the edges of the raft were random bits of driftwood and other stuff, tangled in the ivy and a bit of fishing net. The entangled bits and pieces had attracted mussels, at least four species she could see, and barnacles. The density of the structure was too consistent to have been random accumulation.

They rowed to within ten feet of the raft's leading edge.

A triple not-quite-splash and three brown mammalian faces, hairy and heavily whiskered, surfaced aft of her. Otters. Their fur was blacker than any species Sophie was familiar with, and one had white patches on its throat. They regarded her with solemn curiosity as she found a spar, checked that it was really attached to the raft, and then tied up the rowboat. One of them tugged the rope, experimentally. Tonio splashed a little water at it.

“They'll make off with whatever they can get,” he said.

She took video footage of the trio and then took a careful standing stance within the rowboat, raising herself up so she could examine and film the surface of the raft. The gulls in the middle had themselves a pond of sorts—a break in the floor of the raft where they were fishing up small invertebrates. They had a midden well clear of the water, a pile of lime and discarded carapaces that inhibited the growth of the vines around it. Insects whirled and crawled on their dungheap. They looked, from a distance, to be some species of cockroach.

A drag on her leg—the octopus had reached over the side and given her a tug.

“Just getting the lay of the land,” she said to it, and it vanished, descending. To Tonio, she added: “Where'd all this come from?”

“The otters. We call 'em wreck farmers,” he said. “They find a nice piece of floating garbage and build it out until—well, you see. In time it gets too big and breaks up, or there's a storm.”

“In the meantime it's a temporary floating meadow,” she said. “In three dimensions.”

“If we left the rowboat here overnight, they'd tangle it up good.”

“This is an amazing phenomenon,” she said. “I could spend my whole life filming something like this. The relationships between the plants and the various resident species…”

“Your friend seems to think you're needed below,” he said, frowning at the octopus.

“Right. Back to business.” She checked the housing on her camera and all her diving equipment. “Any idea how deep it is here?”

“Bottomless, I should think, or good as.”

Time to make what passed for a dive plan. “I've got three hours of air on this rebreather, Tonio, but I'm only going down for one,” she said.

“An hour, Kir?” He looked doubtful. “You'd have to be a mermaid.”

“I'll be okay,” she said, as much to reassure herself as him. “If Lassie takes off for the bottom or beelines for anything hazardous, I'm coming back up to make a new plan. But for now it's down, forty-five minutes under, up. Keep it simple, right?”

“Simple,” he repeated, in a tone that indicated neither agreement or disagreement.

“Depending on how deep I go and how long I'm under, I may have to ease my way up to the surface. So if you see me sitting at depth doing nothing, don't try to rescue me.”

“And if it's been an hour, and I don't see you?”

“I dunno. Worry?” There was no backup out here: If she didn't come up, there wasn't much he could do.

He nodded assent and then, with a glance back at
Nightjar
, offered her a dagger, black in color and about half the length of her forearm.

“I'm not sure I want that.”

“Can it hurt to have it, Kir?”

“I guess not.” On impulse, she hugged him. “Don't let them steal our ride home.”

She checked her stance again and then went over the edge. The otters vanished, one rolling up to slap its tail, beaverlike, on the surface. Treading, she adjusted her mask, took a few breaths, looked at her dive computer and set it to mark time.

Then she went under, just three feet, looked up at Tonio and adjusted her buoyancy vest. She took the time to breathe, to show him she wouldn't drown. It wouldn't help anything if he came swimming after her in a panic.

After about thirty seconds he raised his hand:
Okay.

She made a sign—”I'm going down,” it meant—and dropped to ten feet, then fifteen. There was no sign of whatever had been towing the rowboat.

They were out in what should have been a sterile stretch of sea: clear water, bright light, decent visibility. The raft, though, was throwing off a lot of murk. If its surface had been a meadow, what had developed beneath it was something in the way of a city. Long streamers of seaweed stretched down from the surface, like the tentacles of a jellyfish, all alive with activity. The underside of the raft was encrusted with anemones; small fish hid within them, guarding clutches of eggs. Palm fronds dangled here and there; they, too, were encrusted with eggs. Three of the otters were worrying a loop of vine loose from the raft, working in tandem to shove another scavenged hunk of driftwood into its outer edge.

The seaweed growing from the floor of the raft had had less spread than she would have expected—much of it was braided into itself, so that it tapered, exerting downward force on the center of the raft.

Must be something heavy down there,
Sophie thought. The weight would serve as a keel, balancing the whole structure. She wondered how long a raft like this would last in good weather. The pieces would break apart in a storm, sending the fish and flotsam everywhere. Then, presumably, the otters would regroup.

She shone her light into the particulate stream. The octopus was returning from the depths.

She took her time descending. She had no diving partner, unless you counted Lassie. All she could do was be careful.

One of the otters paddled close, investigating. It put out a covetous paw to one of the cords clipped to her dive belt.

Suddenly the octopus was there, mantle spread in a clear threat, flashing red at it. The message was clear enough:
Get back, get back
!

Sophie saw one of its tentacles was truncated, a stump.

The otter retreated.

She imagined it responding in a squeaky cartoon voice:
Hey, relax, I was just having a look!

Lassie led her farther down, closer to the braid of seaweed that hung like a curtain from the raft. Here and there fish had gotten entangled in the braid and been unable to work themselves free; they hung, staring dead-eyed, from the vegetation. She moved slowly, shining the light before her, watching for bits of net. As its beam took in the dark cord of vegetable matter she thought of the
Estrel
, and the lantern made of Captain Dracy's father's skull.

Sixty feet down, she found what was weighting down the braid of seaweed: a dense strand of matter she was tempted to call a root ball, dead and tangled. Invertebrates writhed within.

A heavy object, wrapped in sacking and six feet in length, was wound into the ball and affixed by the vines. Sea worms roiled in and out of it.

A shroud,
Sophie thought,
some sailor's body
. She made herself breathe slowly and film it. Of course the otters would bind in any source of nutrients they could find.