Of Sea and Stone (Secrets of Itlantis) (20 page)

Finally, a shout went up from the front of the ship.

“Primus,” someone cried out. “We have arrived!”

Heads lifted. Tired eyes blinked. No one said anything after the initial shout of celebration. Just that small action seemed to take the last bit of energy we’d all reserved. Now we sat, stone-faced and unspeaking, while the ship connected to the city.

The ship shuddered as it docked. I stared at nothing. My plans were in ruins along with Celestrus. Nol was dead. There was nothing but fog now, a fog of pain and darkness.

Merelus emerged from the cockpit.

“Word has already reached Primus of what has happened,” he said. “Other survivors have been arriving in ships for the last few hours. The senate has sent a message to all incoming ships that clothing, food, and rooms will be provided. There is a hall being set aside for all refugees, so you may seek your family or friends once we are settled. They will decide how to proceed once everyone is accounted for and we have a list of...” He paused. “Of the dead.”

The hatch was opened, and one by one we lined up to disembark.

Numbly, I took in the city before me. Primus made Celestrus seem like a mere village in comparison. The ceilings were as far away and blue as a sky, capping vast chambers that echoed and gleamed with light and space. Vertical strips of glass let in a view of a sun-soaked sea as a pod of whales drifted past, sunlight flickering around their massive bodies and outlining them in gold. Pod-shaped vehicles moved along rails set in the walls and along the ceilings, carrying people. Silver designs were inlaid in the floors.

Banners hung from the rafters of the docking station, one for each city, set with the colors and symbol. We disembarked beneath a huge violet banner that rippled and shivered in the circulating air high in the recesses of the domed ceilings. Someone had covered the banner with a great sail of black silk, and cylinders of shimmering glass cast light across the floor where they were stacked in a wall of light.

“Primus mourns with us,” Lyssia whispered to me in explanation. “They honor us.”

I swallowed, but the painful tightness of my throat wouldn’t ease. My chest was empty, my lungs a ragged tatter, my heart a hole.

I was a pit of shadows, an ocean of unshed tears.

Grief pushed at the corners of my eyes, making them burn. I did not cry. I felt wrung out, utterly dry. I followed Lyssia off the ship.

A half-circle of people, most of them in robes of pale blue for Primus, waited for us as we disembarked from the ship. They faced us soberly, their hands clasped and their heads slightly bowed. The woman in the middle of the group, who wore violet robes, stepped forward and reached out both hands to Merelus.

“Welcome,” she said, her voice low and musical in the heavy silence. “Primus greets its brothers and sisters and extends her sorrow. I am Alia, representative for Celestrus in the senate. I will show you to the rooms that have been prepared so you can rest, and then we will listen to your stories and grieve with you.”

She led us through another vast corridor, this one split down the middle by a string of bronze columns interspaced with statues of men and women, presumably people of state. Everything was excessively large, undeniably grand, and I ached for the splashing fountains and intimate plazas of Celestrus.

Pain shot through me when I realized I would never see those fountains and plazas again. They were broken and charred on the bottom of the sea.

When we reached our rooms, Alia turned to face us.

“Please,” she said, her forehead knitting with concern, “make yourselves as comfortable as possible. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything, no matter how small.”

The rooms set aside for the Celestrusean refugees churned with people. Some sat on the floor, wrapped in blankets. Others milled about, occasionally stopping and hugging another survivor or crying out as they spotted someone they had thought lost. Lyssia spotted Cal and ran into his arms, weeping. Relief filled me at the sight of him.

I looked for Mella, for Nol. If Cal was alive, maybe they had made it too.

They weren’t there.

Grief crushed me all over again.

Tob’s hand found mine, and he squeezed my fingers hard. We found a place against the wall and sat on the floor. Neither of us had words to say, which relieved me, because I didn’t know what I could say that would make sense of the vast emptiness inside. I felt emptied of every feeling except blankness. My heart was a scar.

I lowered my head to Tob’s shoulder, and he winced.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting up again.

“My arm. Merelus thinks the bone is bruised.” He paused. “A wall collapsed on me when we were escaping.”

Simple words for a horrific memory that he didn’t seem to want to explain in any more detail. I nodded. “We should find you a doctor.”

“I just want to sit here for a little longer.” He leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

I think the bone is bruised
, he’d said.

The word bounced in my mind. Bone.

Bones.

I straightened as the memory that had been eluding me rushed back. A shiver ran across my skin, leaving prickles in its wake.

“You can still lean against me,” Tob said, but I was already scrambling up. I stepped over the people lying on the floor, tripping on legs as I made my way to the doorway.

“Merelus,” I hissed, catching his attention from where he stood speaking to an aide at the door to the chambers. He turned to face me. My expression must have worried him, for his gaze intensified and his shoulders straightened.

“What’s the matter?”

“One of the ships.” I sucked in a breath and slowed my words, trying to be clear. “I was in the Verdus garden sphere with Nol when they opened fire. One of the ships was hit, and it fell to the ocean floor. It hit the sphere and cracked it, and I got a glimpse before it fell away. It had a skull and bones painted on the hull.”

Merelus shook his head, not understanding.

“According to the pryor, the skull and bones symbol is often mistaken for a Dron symbol, and though that has been disproven as a falsehood, the idea persists in popular understanding.” I seized his sleeve. “They weren’t Dron ships.”

“What are you saying?”

“You just said yourself that all the libraries were destroyed. All the information you needed to convince the senate to negotiate peace. In fact, the libraries were directly destroyed.”

He stared at me.

I was breathing hard. My blood rushed through my veins and thudded at my pulse points. My mouth was dry.

“Who doesn’t want peace, Merelus?”

He didn’t immediately answer. His brow furrowed, and he sighed. “Arctus.”

I nodded.

“Are you sure of what you saw? The ship with the forged Dron symbol?”

“I’m as sure as I am of my own name.”

“We’ll need proof,” he said. “You must know that. If someone else engineered this, if one of our own engineered this slaughter, we can’t simply have your word. It won’t be enough.”

Righteous fury was a fire in my blood. I wanted nothing else but to avenge Nol’s death, Mella’s death, Celestrus’s death. “One of the ships was shot down,” I said. “If we can get to it and get inside, do you think we could find the proof we need?”

His mouth hardened into a line. He turned back to the aide.

“Ready a ship for us.”

THE RUINS OF Celestrus lay dull and gray in the sunlight that had found its way to the ocean floor. Wreckage sprawled across the sand, scattered for miles. Bits of the city still stood planted in the sand as they had fallen, looking like tombstones.

Merelus guided our ship through the graveyard of debris grimly, his eyes narrowed to a squint and his fingers tight over the controls.

A chill skittered over my skin as I gazed at the gray, ghostly scene before us. “Shouldn’t we look for survivors?”

“There are no survivors left,” he said. “No one could have survived this long.”

I was silent. A flutter of seaweed made my heart jump; it looked like a hand waving for help. The wreckage was white as bone in the glare of our ship’s searchlights.

“Where did you see the ship crash?”

“It collided with the Verdus garden sphere and sank straight down. It can’t have crashed too far from there.”

Merelus dipped the controls, and we dove lower. The water around us darkened as the ship approached the ocean floor. The lights lit on a sunken vessel wedged between two rocks.

“There it is,” I said.

As we studied the crash, a long shadow blocked the light above us—a whale?

“It’s another ship,” Merelus murmured.

“A Manta. Military class.” I recognized it from the pryor’s data. “Do you think Arctus sent it?”

“Anyone could be piloting it,” Merelus said. “We don’t want them to see us.”

He let the lightship come to rest on the ocean floor between two charred pieces of debris. He cut off all illumination from the ship and then we waited, staring up through the glass at the shadow we’d seen overhead.

The ship drifted past, and a searchlight roved the darkness. It vanished over a rock, and we waited in silence for it to reappear.

It didn’t.

“Are they searching for the sunken ship, the same as we are?” Horror filled me. “What if they destroy the evidence?”

Merelus squinted through the glass. “We won’t let that happen. Come on.”

He led me out of the control room and through the main quarters to a round room with slatted metal floors. “Here, put this on.” He shoved a bulbous metal helmet into my hands.

“What is this?”

“It’s for diving,” he said, and removed a slick black suit from a hook on the wall. “Put this on too.”

Diving.

I struggled into the suit, pulling it over the skin-like suit Nol had given me. Merelus placed the helmet on my head and connected it to the tubes that would provide me with air to breathe. When I was suited, he pulled on his own and hit the button that would close the door behind us and allow us to dive.

Our eyes met through the fogged glass, and his were dark and glittering with fear. I reached out and squeezed his hand. This wasn’t the first time I’d been deep in this dark water.

The room closed around me as I readied myself for the dive. My pulse pounded in my veins and neck and ears, a song of fear and exhilaration. The walls darkened as the floor opened beneath me and dark water rushed in. My stomach clutched, my lungs tightened, and I stepped into a hole of dark water and sank

Down

Down

Down

Into blackness.

My breath rasped loud in my ears in the confines of the helmet. Air still flowed down my throat as the water closed over my head and wrapped around my limbs with cold pressure.

It took me a second to orient myself.

Merelus sank into the water beside me in a vortex of bubbles. Glowing seams lit the edges of his suit and mine, casting flecks of light through the dark blue of the water. He motioned at our destination and then swam toward it with powerful kicks of his legs, a line trailing behind him.

I followed.

The sunken ship was below me, a charred disk of metal and shadows wedged between a pair of rocks. It looked like a sea monster waiting to close its jaws around us as we ventured to the edge of the splintered hole that gaped darkness.

The lights from our suits played across the walls as we swam inside. The ship groaned around us. Darkness swallowed us. A fish darted away from our approach, startling me. My arm grazed a wall, and I flinched.

Merelus secured the line at the entrance to the ship, and we continued on, the line pulling taut around corners as we swam through the dark corridors.

Debris floated at random in the flooded chambers. I caught a disk and held my wrist up to light the face of it. It was charred garbage. I let it drift away.

Ahead, Merelus was examining the wall. He waved me forward, and I kicked my feet to propel myself to his side.

He motioned me inside a doorway. A control room. Debris floated around us. I froze as I saw the bodies, lingering between the ceiling and floor, drowned. Their blind faces were like masks, stiff and pale.

One of the bodies had a bundle of water-sealed documents clenched in its fist. Merelus struggled to pull them free. The arm waved in the water, rigid in death, the fingers bloodless and white as bone in the light of our suit seams. Finally, he wrenched them free. The hand fell away empty. Merelus floated back, bumping against me.

The ship shuddered around us, the sound distorted and far away through the water and my helmet. I braced myself against a wall.

What was happening?

Another shudder rocked the ship. The walls and floor tipped sharply. Merelus grabbed my arm with one hand and the line with the other, turning back the way we came.

I shook my head. We needed to keep looking.

Merelus hooked his arm around my waist and kicked off the wall. The control room erupted behind us in an explosion of fire and smoke as he swam forward, clutching the life line. Bubbles shot around us, churning white. Through a hole in the wall above, I saw a shadow shoot past. A ship—the one we’d seen before?

They were shooting at the ship.

They were trying to destroy it.

I kicked my legs, and Merelus released me. Together we swam hard for the hole we’d entered through, following the line. I could see the sea, a lighter shade of blue against the black of the wreckage around us, the color of hope.

The ship screeched and tilted. The sides began to close around us. I thrashed, swimming for my life.

We broke into the blue of the open water just as the ship exploded behind us.

~ ~ ~

I turned the documents we’d salvaged over in my hands as Merelus piloted the ship back toward Primus. I sucked in my breath as I read the words:

Fire on the city until the gardens and main towers are destroyed. Allow approximately half of the survivors to escape
.

My stomach churned as I realized what I was looking at. It was the order for the attack. There was no name to identify who had given it, just an official-looking seal.