Child of a Hidden Sea (7 page)

“Thanks,” she said. And then, just to change the subject: “Where were you taking Lais?”

“It was a speculative venture, Kir—we're a salvage ship. He hired us to help recover some stolen goods.”

“Transporting me's messed that up?”

“It's not just you. His goods are sunk, and I loaned my diver to Stele.”

“Sunk at what depth?”

“Forty, fifty feet down.”

She paused, toying with the map that made no sense and looking at a shell someone had nailed to the wall of the pilot house. It had the reptilian pattern and texture of tortoise shell, and the shape of a clam.

What the hell. I can't go yet, not if—
“Forty feet … a person could free-dive that, if she knew what she were doing.”

“We're to take you straight to the Fleet,” Dracy said.

“The dive site's not even remotely on the way?”

“Perhaps a day or two out of it.” Her eye fell on something in Sophie's camera bag—the courier pouch. “Could you override our orders, Kir?”

“Why not? I didn't mean to screw up your plans.”

Dracy brightened. “We'll discuss it with Lais over dinner.”

“Dinner?”

So much for playing it cool: The captain looked as though a flashbulb had gone off in her face. “Oh, Kir Sophie. I should have thought.”

She went on another rummage through the cupboards, this time coming up with an oilcloth packet that smelled faintly of bacon.

Sophie's stomach growled audibly as Dracy handed it over. Inside was a pressed cake that looked like it was made of unidentifiable fish, seeds, and bread—a salted ball of oil, protein and crunchy flour.

“Slowly,” Dracy said. “I'll have the cook get onto a meal right away. Milk, soup.”

Sophie nodded, forcing herself to chew. The seeds tasted like sesame; after days with little but broth, the flavors seemed amplified, so intense they all but burned her mouth.

“Come,” Dracy said. “We'll dine early and the Tiladene can tell you his troubles.”

CHAPTER
5

The story on Lais—besides his apparently being some kind of bisexual Lothario—was that he worked for a cooperative of horse breeders whose prize stallion had recently retired from an inter-island racing circuit.

“We mean to put him out to stud, of course. I'd set up his first pairing with a very exalted mare. But he's suddenly grown…” His eye wandered to Captain Dracy. “Docile.”

“Like a gelding?”

“Like a lamb.”

“I don't suppose maybe he's having trouble adjusting to retirement?”

“We got a ransom note two weeks ago,” Lais said. “Silesian has been scripped infertile.”

“Scripped. Someone learned the horse's name, then wrote up a magical … intention, was it?”

“Intention, yes,” Lais said.

“And now Silesian can't get it up?”

“Better him than me,” Lais said.

Dracy clattered a salt shaker and cleared her throat. The message was clear:
No flirting
.

They were finishing off the remains of a cod and mussel stew and a dish of roasted, buttery fava beans, wiping up their plates with the remains of a hearty rye bread. Every bite had lifted Sophie's spirits. She felt like her best self again: calm, optimistic, able to deal with whatever came her way. “The bad guys are holed up in this Zunbrit Passage?”

“No, they're long gone. We paid the ransom and they gave me the scrip's location. It's sunk near one of the Zunbrit sea mounts.”

“You paid, just like that?”

“Silesian's appointment with Balletic is soon.”

“Balletic's the mare?”

He nodded. “We didn't want to lose face by breaking contract, so paying the ransom seemed expedient. The more so because I wanted the issue resolved quickly. Horses are the family business, but I have a side project.”

“Problem is, I loaned my diver to Stele,” Dracy said.

“Dracy says you can countermand the diversion,” Lais said. “And if you can, as you say, free-dive…”

“I do have to go home,” Sophie said, trying to deploy her nonexistent poker face. “My brother'll notice I'm gone eventually. But…”

“Yes?” Lais slid a tray of what looked like cream puffs across the table at her.

“Not to be rude, but you're rich, right?”

They both seemed taken aback, but she pressed on. “You paid this ransom, you've commissioned Dracy, and you're in a hurry. This is kind of a big deal for you.”

“True.”

“If I get this scrip back for your horse,” Sophie said, “could you buy some food for those islanders, once I've gone home? I'm not asking you to beggar yourself, just to do whatever you can. The storm … Someone was after my aunt; their harvest is lost and it's our fault.”

Whatever breach of etiquette she'd committed, the request seemed to amend it: Both Lais and Dracy relaxed.

“My word on it, Kir,” he said. “Whether you succeed or not.”

“I'll pull it off.” She accepted the cream puff at last, raising it in a mock toast. “Let's divert the ship.”

That night, she lay in the confines of her small cabin, swinging in the hammock—which was vastly more comfortable than the pallet she'd borrowed on Stele Island—and trying to will her camera battery back to life. She'd used the last of her juice shooting a dusky gray-purple seabird, and a spidery crab the crew had hauled up from the depths. Now she'd been reduced to taking bad pictures with Gale's phone, queuing them up to send to her e-mail account at home. She was still firing off the occasional text to Bram, too, just to jolly herself up:

Bad news, Bro: UR gonna have to maybe rethink some physics.

Message will be sent when we return to service area,
the phone replied.

OTOH, Good news: I'm not as crazy as initially reported.

Bram might disagree with that one. He had had enough therapy over the years to come away with the idea that everyone was fundamentally neurotic.

Her brother was a bona fide kid genius. He'd finished high school when he was twelve and had been working on his second undergraduate degree, two years later, when he came out to their parents. Dad had decided a teen whiz kid who was also gay was someone with too much to cope with, and packed him off to a doctor to talk it all through.

If she could only have one week on Stormwrack, Sophie wished Bram could have been around to share it. The magic would offend his sense of an ordered universe—at heart, her brother was an engineer. But he might have some idea why Stormwrack's moon was the same, so indisputably, Earthily familiar, when its land masses were jumbled beyond recognition.

I'll get back. Gale's already promised she'll get to know me. We'll talk her into letting us have a proper look around, him and me. So little land mass, and it sounds like it's mostly one country to an island …
She dozed off contemplating the map, falling into thick, dreamless and restful sleep.

A tap at the cabin's hatch woke her. “Zunbrit Passage, Kir.”

She made her way up to the main deck and found that
Estrel
had dropped anchor. To the stern, the water was pewter and foam, the waves breaking over a series of jagged rocks that extended eastward in a winding, dangerous-looking line. Most of the rocks were scoured bare by the water. One was just big enough to host a few dozen petrels.

Her pulse raced as she looked at the birds. They resembled Leach's storm petrel, a species she'd filmed in New Zealand. There was another bird, almost identical to the Leach's, that had recently become extinct.

Which species was this? Any number of organisms that had died out at home might survive here, wherever here was. The thought was so exciting it very nearly hurt.

One of the birds dropped off the sea mount and started dabbling in a stretch of shallow water at its base, almost dancing on the water's surface as it fished.

“Sophie?”

She shook herself back on task. “Just thinking.”

The crags and islets were the tip of a great mountain range. They were mostly too small to sustain larger animals; they wouldn't be good for much besides wrecking ships. Sophie thought:
I can see why they used it as a ransom drop. Lots of cracks and crannies.

“Captain, do you have a dive locker? Equipment?”

“After a fashion.” Dracy led Sophie amidships and down. The room was all but empty. “I left the best of our salvage equipment on Stele with Boris, my diver,” she explained, apologizing.

“You must have something—a snorkel?”

“Don't usually need 'em,” Captain Dracy said. “Boris is a merman.”

“He breathes water? Are you serious?”

Dracy nodded.

“Wouldn't that have been something to catch on video?”

“I don't know video, Kir.”

Hell with whether Gale wants me, I will get back here,
Sophie thought.

She quashed the urge to ask five thousand questions about mermen and magic, instead looking over what was left in the locker. Tanks and a regulator would have been too much to ask, but there was a decent mask—it appeared to be made of a dried sea jelly—and a pair of flippers that might have been carved from the cartilage of some massive creature. Plus plenty of rope, floats, and flags.

The fins were short—not quite right for a free dive, but they'd do. She scooped them up and headed topside.

“My heroine,” Lais said, as she emerged. “Savior of my honor.”

“Your horse's honor, anyway,” she said, leaning against the rail so she could put the flippers on.

“The studs of Tiladene will neigh your praises for five generations.”

She laughed. “I haven't succeeded yet.”

“Remember,” Dracy murmured. “Promiscuous.”

“I promise not to get my heart broken,” Sophie whispered back. “Have you found the sea mount, Lais?”

“They marked it.” He pointed out a mossy hump of land, barely bigger than an SUV, pocked and covered in puddles, and covered in seabird droppings. A post had been driven into its peak, an old ship's mast from the looks of it. A strip of red cloth fluttered from its tip.

“The scrip is supposedly sunk and weighted about forty feet from that mount's northern point,” Lais said.

“What do you know about the currents around here?”

“They can be treacherous during high tide, but that's not for…” Dracy checked. “Six hours.”

“Great! I'm not drowning for a horse, so if anything looks off—”

“No, of course!” Lais nudged Dracy. “Captain?”

With obvious reluctance, Dracy produced what looked like a miniature birdcage, covered in thick black leather. “This will help.”

“What is it?” Sophie removed its cover, finding a shuttered, waterproof lantern inside. Something glowed within, bright enough to illuminate it, even through the shutters. A shape, inside—

“That's—” Sophie said. “That's a skull.”

“It's my father,” Dracy said. “He had his teeth scripped to shine as the sun. The intention survived his death.”

“Was it literally sunshine?” Sophie's mind spun through implications. A constant flood of solar radiation in the mouth—hadn't it burned? Could he give others sunburn, then? Did he die of cancer? Couldn't they have just made a magic lantern? Had Dracy kept it for sentimental reasons?

Dracy replied with a gesture that was less than a shrug, more than a twitch. Sophie was coming to realize it came standard issue among these people: It meant “Don't know, don't care.”

She added magical solar radiation and
Can a whole people be fundamentally incurious?
to the continually growing list of things she had to find out, and then eased herself overboard. It was cool but not cold. She'd borrowed a light tunic to swim in; it stuck to her body but didn't constrain her movements.

It was good to be back in the sea; she dipped her head underwater, letting salt water run through her hair. The ocean felt like silk on her skin. Dipping the gelatinous mask in the water to moisten it, she laid it over her face. It had the texture of silicone, sort of. She thought briefly of breast implants and giggled.

There was no strap, but once she had it laid over her skin, the mask clung, flesh to flesh, leaving small pockets of air in front of her eyes. The visibility was sharp; unlike a plastic mask, it seemed to have no blind spots.

She experimented with it, adjusting the fit around her nose, figuring out how to equalize the pressure.

“Careful with this.” Lais handed down the lantern. “It's precious to Dracy—I had to pay extra.”

It's her dad's
head.
Of course she charged extra
.

Tying the lantern to the float, she swam out to the sea mount. The land rose to meet her: She ended up wading more than half the way. After picking her way up the slicks of seaweed on its rocks, she stood atop its peak, leaning on the improvised flagpole and peering down. The downward slope of rock was furred in normal reef vegetation—polyps, anemones, a sea star or two.

Glancing at her watch to confirm the time, she drew several deep breaths, purging as much carbon dioxide from her bloodstream as she could. Then she swam downward, picking her way along the descending slope of the underwater mountain. She was twenty feet below the surface in fifteen seconds. There was no sign of anything manmade in the water.

A long stroke took her to thirty feet. It was dimmer now, the water murkier; she unshipped the lantern. In the dark, she could just see the seams of its shutters glowing. She opened one a crack and a searing shaft speared through the gloom.

A swirl of crabs shifted as the light hit them, then went back to worrying at a carcass on the floor.
Dead shark,
Sophie thought,
looks like a mako.
An orange tentacle that had extended across the reef pulled back under a low rock shelf; from underneath it, a single octopus eye regarded her with peculiar intensity.