Call Forth the Waves (23 page)

“I give! I give! Unconditional surrender!”

“Accepted.” I kissed him on the cheek and send the water back to where it had begun.

He cracked one eye open to see if anything else was coming, then did a pratfall faint.

“That was pathetic,” I said.

“Dead with relief,” he mumbled through one side of his mouth. “Can’t talk while dead.”

“Oh dear. Dead sounds serious. I’ll see if Klok can use his palm spark for a defibrillator.”

He caught my ankle with his hand when I tried to walk away.

“No time. Need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“Only if I get to smother you first!”

I yanked a pillow off the nearest couch and pounced on him, with my knees on either side of his stomach and the pillow over his face.

Jermay wrapped his arms around me and sat up, leaving me in his lap. He knocked the pillow aside so I was staring into his eyes. Electric-blue and live-wire sparking.

“This is why I love you. You know that, right?” he said.

“I love you, too,” I said.

He’d kissed me before, but this was different. We weren’t about to be killed or captured. There was no threat that if we didn’t do it now, we’d never get the chance. This was a choice, and we made it together.
Penelope and Jermay
, the way I’d always imagined.

This was real. Not a dream. Definitely not a nightmare.

I twitched my hand toward the door and blew it shut. Anybody ruining this moment was going to end up a
fried
clucking chicken.

CHAPTER 21

The clock flashed 2:19 in the morning.

2:20.

2:27.

The numbers were so bright and so blue I couldn’t miss them, even from across the room. I closed my eyes, but I knew they were still there, stealing my sleep one perfectly calibrated minute at a time.

I peeked out the window; it was pitch-black outside. One in twenty buildings had lights on, including the Harts and Palms. Most others had fallen prey to the curfew.

Everyone in the penthouse was asleep except for me, the golems patrolling the upper floor, and the mini–creeper lights rolling through the rafters in an apparent game of chase. When they had no one to entertain, they entertained themselves, and I had the strangest feeling that we weren’t going to get them to come back down. They liked it there.

Even Klok had conked out on the sofa downstairs, bathed in the light of the nearest TV, with a quiz-show theme song for a lullaby. I was the only one who hadn’t been relieved of her insomnia.

I was afraid of what might happen if I slept. Too many what-if scenarios involving night terrors and the potential demolition of a multistory hotel because I couldn’t keep the monsters where they belonged. I needed to
safely
burn off some steam and unwind. Maybe then I could convince myself we really were safe this time.

The master bathroom was the logical choice. I could lock the door, and marble didn’t burn. Better yet, I could practice water control and not have to worry about making a mess.

The bathroom was bigger than the bedroom. More gold—even the faucets and the toilet, which felt like overkill to me. The tub was bigger than most wading pools. Klok could have lain out flat in the bottom, and there would’ve still been room past his head and feet. It was over two feet deep and situated on a pedestal in the exact center of the room.

I sat in the tub in my pajamas, legs crossed lotus-style and eyes closed, attempting to balance all of my weight on my tailbone. The water level rose slowly, and I went with it. Water and air worked together to create buoyancy that allowed me to float.

Stardust, drifting through the endless void of space—maybe the word wouldn’t bother me so much if I owned it. Like the Mile, I became a trail of glittering gold left behind by a comet no one even remembered the name for. Cast-off ice, precious metals fused into frozen glass.

When I opened my eyes, I was several feet off the ground. All the water from the tub was still below me, but out of the boundaries of the tub itself. The faucet poured
up
, deepening and widening the pool I held together by force of will alone.

I laughed. This was fun! My touch had
never
been fun.

Expanding my repertoire had always been a matter of self-defense or protecting the people around me. I learned in the moment, when sink or swim were my only options. I’d never had the chance to play with it before.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a sight you’ve never dreamed of. Behold the dancing waters of the Harts and Palms hotel!

Maybe they’d give me my own brochure and a fancy new name. After all, I loved performing, and I had references. Fugitive references, but they’d give me glowing recommendations.

I lowered my feet into the water collected below me, amazed that it felt no different to my skin than air. I raised my hands, creating currents set to the soundtrack of The Show in my head. A tinny carnival sound that used to soak into our atmosphere so that people walked out humming it.

My sailfish made an appearance, breaking the surface with its dorsal fin to swim in time to the music. It bobbed up and down in a carousel rhythm, an observation the water decided to run with. The pool became a disk. Water bubbled up and burst, producing horses and sea creatures, marvels and beasts. They settled into tracks along the grooves with me as the floating fulcrum of a merry-go-round unlike any other, and no one else was awake to see it.

The figures twirled faster and tighter, closing in on me. A prancing horse slammed its hooves into my chest, throwing me into a sea serpent that trampled me under, submerging my head below the beating hooves of kirin and unicorns.

“Stop!” I tried to say, but inhaled stinging, burning water.

The carousel kept spinning, and the music in my head turned hectic. Too fast, too pitched. Out of control.

A lion charged toward me, jaws gaping and ready to snap.

“Stop!”

The carousel was now a stampede of furious feet and paws running in an endless circle and battering the air from my lungs. It knocked me end over end, refusing to allow me time to catch my breath. I pulled my arms and legs in tight to guard myself against the beating, and the creatures changed again. Their legs spiraled out into clinging tentacles dragging me down, down, down into water that deepened as I sank. The spinning disk became a column with me drowning at its center.

I opened my eyes and saw myself in the mirror, being strangled by a swarming bloom of jellyfish.

“Nim!” I screamed into the water. Bubbles bursting without sound. “Nim!”

Short for Nimue, not nemesis, despite my telling her otherwise. She was the sour sister. The one who took delight in causing trouble. A turbulent sea nymph trapped on land, but she was also a fierce defender of those she loved. If I could connect to Anise through the constant of the earth, then Nim should have been there in the water.

“NIM!” The last of my air escaped as the last word I would ever speak. My body twitched, demanding that I breathe in whether there was air or not. My lungs were empty and they hated the feeling. My blood screamed for oxygen.

I heard a laugh. Biting and choppy as the ocean in a storm, the way Nim sounded when she’d pulled a prank.

“Water is life,” said a voice I would have sworn was hers. “It’s not death.”

The currents calmed, and the tentacles unraveled, but I was still trapped in the middle.

“Water is life,” she said again.

A hallucination before dying?

Where was the replay of my life? All the moments I’d forgotten to remember, brought back so I could say good-bye?

“You’re all wet!” A familiar taunt from my sister, and a warning that she was about to drench someone with a wave they couldn’t escape. “You’re all wet from
H
to
O
!”

O.

Oxygen.
There was oxygen in water. Was Nim trying to help me from whatever hole she’d been thrown into?

I put my arms straight out into a
T
with my feet pointed down to lock my position in the column, gave myself a three count, and breathed in at the point I was ready to black out.

Water filled my mouth, cold and rushing into the void. It vaporized against my tongue. Oxygen flowed down. Hydrogen drifted up and out through my nose. I was breathing underwater!

My heartbeat slowed. I kept my eyes on myself in the mirror, marveling as I saw myself gulp water and breathe out bubbles.

The column flattened out. Without warning, it sloshed down and took me with it. I landed on my back in the tub with a splash. Water flooded over the sides, but I was free.

I scrambled out, reached for one of the hotel robes on the hook, and hastily bade the water lift off the floor and return to the tub and shower and sinks—anything with a drain.

Unwinding was the opposite of the result I got after the weirdest trip to the bathroom in history. I didn’t think anything could have struck me as weird anymore, but
breathing underwater
? Seriously? I wasn’t even sure Nim could do that; her act had always been on dry land.

I needed something to distract me from the feeling of drowning I couldn’t shake. Something serious. Fun was hazardous to my health.

I returned to the suite’s office and retrieved my father’s computer, along with my memory chip, and carried them both upstairs to where Xerxes and Bijou were the only ones around to ask me what I was doing.

“I don’t suppose you know the password?” I asked Xerxes. More than one of the people I’d encountered since I lost my father had spoken to his masterpiece like it was his proxy, including Warden Nye and my father’s own sister. Maybe they knew something I didn’t.

He padded over and climbed onto the table. He considered the computer, then me, then leaned over and nipped my ear.

“What was that for?” I grabbed my ear and held out my hand so he could see the blood on my fingers.

He made one of his many dismissive noises and jumped down.

“Crazy golem,” I grumbled. Tugging my ear used to be a prompt from my father to center myself before going into the arena. It was a gentle reminder that he was watching from the sidelines, never hard enough to make me bleed.

I had red on my hand and on my robe. It was probably dripping onto the chair, which was evidence of our presence in the room that we didn’t want to leave behind. Thankfully, ridiculously posh hotel suites came stocked with tissues, same as the regular kind. I pinched one around my earlobe until the bleeding stopped.

“See what you did?” I shook the tissue at Xerxes. “Mortally wounded. Your fault.
Bad
gryphon!”

He rattled his wings at me.

He already had my attention, so what—

“Is this a clue?” I asked.

Xerxes sat down.

This would have been so much easier if my father had given him a voice screen like Klok’s. What good was a machine capable of higher reasoning if he couldn’t tell me what he knew?

And what kind of a clue was blood?

“Thirty-three spaces and blood,” I said. “Thirty-three spaces . . . not enough for chromosomes.”

There were forty-six chromosomes in human blood, and they didn’t have names. They had numbers.

But if the clue was
my
blood, then maybe the answer was staring me in the face. Every time I entered a password, the screen flashed bloodred and filled with
X
s. My sisters and I were all girls, so did it mean X chromosomes? Was the answer in the riddle itself? That definitely sounded like something my father would do.

I pressed the X key until all of the spaces were filled, and hit “Enter.”

The screen flashed red, and I lost another number off the counter. I was down to my last chance.

“What?” I demanded. “What else could blood mean if not me or my sisters?”

Wait . . .

Maybe I was overthinking this.

Nieva, Nimue, Anise.
I counted off the letters in their names.
Vesper, Penn.

Too short. I deleted Penn and retyped it as
Penelope
.

Still four letters off. I took a deep breath and added the name no one was supposed to speak, much less know:
Nico.

A vertical line split the screen down the middle, opening like a set of doors.
I was in!

I slid my memory chip into the slot with a promise to melt the stupid thing sight unseen if it was password locked, too.

The chip’s drive opened, revealing a single video file.

I hit “Play,” and my father appeared in extreme close-up, washed out in the light of his camera as he turned on the device. He took a seat in what had been his office on the train, folded his hands, crossed his legs, and began to speak.

“Hello, Penn . . . Penelope. I swore never to burden you with this if I was able to conceal it, so it’s a given that I’m not there with you as you watch this.”

The same words he’d written in the birthday card he left for me at the Hollow. My reaction to hearing them spoken was the same as it had been to reading them—I started to cry, but made myself stop.

“Don’t mourn The Show, Penn. It was always an illusion on the verge of collapse; only the people were real. And if any of those people are with you now, I must ask them a favor:
Leave me alone with my daughter.
I suspect that having an audience hear what I have to share may be too much to bear after the trials which no doubt predicated taking refuge here,” my father said.

He had truly expected us to be safe at the Hollow. All of us. He paused, giving anyone who might have been in the room with me a chance to go. I wished there was someone near enough to wake up and watch the rest. If he was that concerned with secrecy, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone.

My father leaned in close and began again.

“I guess I didn’t need to give you the speech I prepared, did I? If you’re watching this, then you’ve already read the words I just spoke, so let me go off-script and start this with one of the several apologies I owe you—I’m sorry that it’s from a screen and speakers you’ve first heard me use your given name in conversation, my darling girl. I owed you better than that.

“I’ve robbed you of your rightful self, and I should have acknowledged that, if only to you. I hoped he’d lose interest, or find another, easier pursuit . . . in short, I was a fool. He might have let your sisters be, but never you.”

This was a version of my father I’d never seen and didn’t like. He was nervous and unsure. Haggard, he wrung his hands and constantly checked the space around and behind him to see if anyone was listening.