Triton (21 page)

“But the compass . . .”

“A compass needle points to
magnetic
north, not true north,” he said. “All it does is align itself with the strongest magnetic field, whatever that might be. Usually it’s earth’s. Not always.”

“What do you mean,
usually?
” said Jake. “What’s stronger than the earth’s magnetic field?”

“It’s not just size that matters. It’s proximity, too. You can screw up a compass with a kitchen magnet if you hold it close enough. Our compass must have gotten thrown off by something nearby, something highly magnetic.”

“So if our compass isn’t pointing to magnetic north, then what
is
it pointing to?”

“It’s pointing off starboard,” said Naomi. “It’s been pointing off starboard for the last two days, because I was trying to keep north to our right.”

Cedar raised his finger to point. “I believe that’s your culprit.”

In unison, the three of them swiveled their heads, following the line of his finger, and peered off starboard—at the plume of vapor still rising from a point on the horizon, now tinted sunset pink.

The meteor.

Which they had never left.

It had been pulling their compass needle this whole time, swinging them around it in a giant circle.

Jake swallowed. “What’s our fuel situation, Naomi?”

“Well, considering we’ve been burning fuel nonstop for the last ninety-six hours and we just made a
thousand
mile detour, I don’t think it’s very good, Jake. Two days ago, we had enough fuel to reach the mainland—but I’m pretty sure we just wasted it all playing Ring Around the Rosie with a goddamn magnetic rock.”

“So we can’t get to the East Coast?”

“We can’t get anywhere.”

“Islands of Bermuda?” he offered.

“Not a chance,” she said. “We have no idea where we are, where our starting position is. I mean, who knows, we could be closer to Nova Scotia right now.”

“Then we have no choice,” said Cedar. “Alter course, Naomi.”

“
Where?
” she said. “Did you not just hear me? We have no fuel.”

“We have enough to get to the meteor.”

She stared at him. “The
meteor
?”

“There’s always been something strange about that meteor,” he said. “Considering what it’s doing to our compass, it may be the only thing we
can
navigate to.”

“The meteor.” Jake nodded. “It’s worth a shot. At least we might get some answers.” He looked around. “Any objections?”

“No . . . never.” Naomi threw up her hands in defeat. “We’re all going to die anyways, right? Might as well make it a quick death.”

“Brynn?” he said.

“I agree with Cedar,” she whispered. “I think it’s time we found out what in God’s name hit us.”

Cedar watched the
bow of the
Cypress
sluggishly align itself with the column of vapor made by the meteor. Behind them, the sun sank below the horizon. The vapor plume, evidently rising to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, still glowed a dim bronze.

Lost.

For two days, they had sailed in circles, lost. It disturbed him how easily it had happened. They had been deceived by a bad compass, a wrong assumption . . . their own blind overconfidence.

How else were they being deceived?

Now, burning through the last of their fuel, they were bringing their crippled ship to ground zero.

To face whatever had fallen from the heavens and now lay at the bottom of the ocean.

To get Sky back.

It was pitch
black outside by the time Brynn shared her and Jake’s findings about the nephilim.

With the ship safely on course for the meteor, the four of them gathered around the table and cracked open the leather Bible.

“You’re not going to find it,” said Naomi, flipping through the first few pages of the preface to the Holy Bible: New International Version. “There’s almost a million words in the Bible . . . and I’ve never heard of
nephilim
before.”

“It’s Old Testament,” said Brynn.

“Start with Genesis,” said Jake. “We’ll go by chapters.”

Naomi opened the book to page one of Genesis. The well-worn binding permitted it to lay flat without flipping shut, and they scanned the first page.

“Nothing.” Naomi flipped the sheet, revealing pages two and three, each with two columns packed with near microscopic text.

“Perfect,” said Jake. “Four columns, four of us. Each take a column, we’ll get through four times as fast. Naomi, you take the first column. Brynn, the second. I’ll take the third. And Cedar—”

“Found it,” said Cedar, jabbing page three with his index finger. “There’s your stinkin’
nephilim
. Bottom of the fourth column. The story of the Flood.”

“The flood?”

“You actually found it?” said Naomi in disbelief.

Cedar’s eyes raced across the page, reading the rest silently—and suddenly, his skin paled. Visibly, he swallowed.

“What is it?” said Brynn, straining to read the fear in her brother’s eyes.

“This is crap,” he muttered, and he flipped the Bible off the table and stomped away. His pale figure vanished into the wings of the bridge, swallowed by shadow.

Brynn and Naomi both dived for the book, but Brynn got it first. She jerked it open, whipped to page three, and searched the fourth column.

She spotted the word.

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days . . .” she began aloud, but like Cedar, her eyes immediately gravitated to the next paragraph, drawn by something else. She kept reading.

“The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’”

Inch by inch
, Sky wedged herself sideways through the narrow space between the stacked human pods, praying this was the way out and struggling not to step on the exposed feet of other captives.

The beam from the smart phone, gripped between her teeth, swung wildly—illuminating repulsive, organ-like machinery recessed in the gaps between pods: quivering globs of flesh, slimy balloon-like membranes of gas, and translucent tubes that pulsed like intestines. For all she know, they
were
intestines, harvested from humans . . . now feeding them.

How much longer would it have been before they cut open her stomach and took hers out?

She scrunched past a wider opening in the walls. Her eyes probed the black hole, but saw nothing. Yet she sensed something cowering in the darkness. She tilted her head to shine the flashlight inside.

Big mistake.

The sight made her stomach clench, and she fought back her gag reflex. Inside, locked in a bony cage, a veiny lump the size of a basketball shrank back under her light. It was beating . . . once every few seconds. The thumps echoed in her own chest.

A beating heart.

Disgusted, she scrambled past the cavity and finally reached the end of the crevice, which opened into a larger canyon. She shined the flashlight up. The beam dissolved into the humidity fifty feet above her. She angled the beam down.

A walkway hovered in the mist only twenty feet below her. She climbed down, using the pods as footholds, and leapt the last ten feet.

She landed hard, and her legs gave out underneath her. She splatted on her face, and humid air tinged with rot slithered up her nostrils. The moment she touched the walkway, light warmed her back.

Motion-activated.

Now they knew she was awake. She stood up and found herself at the bottom of a canyon stretching into the mist. The orange glow came from above her, from an unseen source beyond the fog.

In the better light, she understood the source of the musty smell. The walkway, the pods, the structures towering on either side of her—all the parts she could see—were made of wood. Not steel, not gleaming crystal, not super strong alien metal . . .
wood
.

She took a step, and the planks depressed under her bare feet; the wood’s slippery grain reminded her of walking barefoot on a pier. Old and familiar.

In fact, the place felt ancient. If not for its gargantuan scale and biological technology surpassing anything she had seen on earth, she would have said it had been built thousands of years ago.

And maybe it had.

After all, it would take about that long to journey from another galaxy. She jogged down the corridor, the hot air whistling in her ear, and reached a ledge. She teetered to a halt just in time.

An even bigger chasm dropped off beneath her. Except here, driven by a deep, rumbling vent, dry air blasted up her shirt, whipped her hair, swept the mist skyward—and cleared an unobstructed view to a hideous structure opposite her.

It took her a moment to understand the horror she was seeing. Then, with a gut-wrenching jolt, she did—and her insides crystallized to ice.

Crib-sized sacks clung like fish eggs to wooden trusses, each a thousand feet high. Inside the sacks, at every stage of development from embryos to near newborns, wriggled human fetuses. Millions of them. Their wrinkled, peach-colored skin gleamed under the sterile, bleached glare radiating from the ceiling.

Fear pooled in her stomach, and needles of panic pricked her skin. She sank down to her knees, her lungs unable to drag in oxygen.

They even took the unborn
.

The Triton

No one spoke
after reading the verse in the Bible, and silence descended on the dark bridge of the
Cypress
. Armageddon. They were facing Armageddon.

“Why not us?” said Naomi. “Why weren’t we taken?”

“Because we’re different,” Jake said, his face set in grim determination.

Above Naomi, the air conditioner clicked on. The gust of cold air snapped her back to alertness, and she realized she had almost dozed off.

“Temperature’s rising outside,” she said. “Eighty-five degrees . . . and humid.” Already condensation had begun to fog up the windows.

“I don’t like it that we’re losing visibility,” he said.

“Here.” She flicked on the wipers, which swished across the bridge windows in unison, clearing the coating of droplets. The repetitive motion lulled her eyelids back down again.

A wisp of fog floated out of the darkness and whipped past them, followed by more wisps. Soon, the outside transformed into an impenetrable gray. The bow faded in the mist.

“Why’s it so foggy?” said Brynn from where she sat half asleep in a cocoon of blankets and pillows.

“The meteor was really hot,” said Jake. “It’s heating the water, basically making it steam like a giant bathtub.”

“Is it going to hurt the ship?” she said.

Jake glanced at Naomi for the answer.

Naomi shook her head. “It’s just warm. Not boiling.”

Jake nodded and glanced at the clock. “Fifteen more minutes,” he announced. “Naomi, slow us down; I don’t want to hit this thing.”

She throttled back.

“Has it occurred to you guys,” said Cedar, “that this
thing
might be underwater?” He stood at the window, arms crossed. He hadn’t spoken in so long Naomi had figured he was asleep on his feet.

“It made a tsunami,” said Jake. “It was big.”

“This is the ocean. It’s deep.”

“Guess we’ll find out, then, won’t we?”

Outside, the fog thickened, leaving them blind. More gray swirls whisked past the bridge. All at once, the ship’s bow, the helipad—
everything
—was swallowed in the haze.

“Visibility under a hundred feet,” said Naomi.

Jake tensed his jaw, his expression grim. “How’s your understanding of radar?”

She pointed to a black screen marked with concentric green circles. “If anything’s out there, we’ll see it.”

Cedar chuckled. “You won’t. How long was it up in space before anyone saw it?”

“Just keep watching the radar,” Jake said.

“I’d watch sonar, if I were you,” said Cedar.

Just then, a shrill beeping sounded from the console. The noise jarred her wide awake, and she sat forward, her veins buzzing with adrenaline. An alarm. No, it wasn’t possible . . .

“What’s that?” said Jake.

“The depth sounder,” she said. “It’s saying we’re in shallow water.”

“That’s because there’s something underneath us,” said Cedar, turning away from the window. “Something big.”

Naomi yanked the
throttles all the way back, putting the ship into full reverse.

The four of them crowded around the sonar screen, which showed nothing underneath them. Yet the depth sounder continued to beep, increasing in frequency, ticking off eighty feet, then seventy-five, then seventy.

Seventy feet?
In the middle of the Atlantic? “You guys see anything out there?”

“Just that goddamn fog,” said Jake.

“Someone get out there and man the searchlights,” she said. “We need to light up the water.”

“I’m on it.” Jake sprinted down the port wing.

The cruise ship plowed through the dense haze, carried forward by inertia, blind and sluggish. No way they could stop in time.

“How deep is it?” said Brynn.

“Sixty-five feet.”

“How deep is our boat?”

Naomi strained to recall the
Cypress’s
draft—how far her hull extended below the waterline. “Thirty-one feet.”

The depth continued to decrease. Sixty feet . . . fifty-five feet . . . fifty feet. They waited in tense silence as the ship drifted forward, slowing only slightly.

On the sonar screen, the ocean lurked beneath them, black and empty.

“There’s nothing down there,” she said.

“Then what’s the depth finder picking up?” said Cedar.

A realization clicked, and Naomi jerked forward. The depth finder and sonar were part of an integrated system; they both used sound waves to probe the ocean floor. Anything the depth finder saw, the sonar should see too.

“Hang on,” she said, and she clicked buttons randomly on the screen until she navigated to a settings menu. She cranked up the gain and sensitivity to the max.