I don’t argue, but I stand and stare dumbly. “Solomon,” he says, looking me in the eyes. “This is war. People die. Find the shofar and get back to the FOB. That’s your mission. Now go!”
He turns away from us, slapping in a new magazine, and opens fire on the hunters advancing into the water. “Go!” He shouts one more time, spurring me into action.
I wade back. When I’m waist deep, the warrior shouts, “No!” He raises his ax, and for a moment, I think he’s going to throw it at us, but then he screams, swings down and severs his own leg. Purple blood sprays from the severed limb, but it quickly starts to grow back. Free of the stone binding him in place, he charges forward, into the water, limping on his half formed leg bones.
I wrap my arms and Whipsnap around Em, Kainda and Kat. “Hold on,” I tell them, “And to her.”
Em and Kainda hold on to my weapon with one hand each, and grip Kat with their other hands. We push back into deeper water, sinking below the surface. The warrior clone’s angry shout chases us beneath the water. His face plunges into the water, staring at us as we sink out of sight.
As we descend, my thoughts turn to Wright’s fate above. He’s dead, I know, perhaps dying right this moment—the recipient of the giant’s rage.
It’s my fault,
I think.
It’s all my fault.
15
I’m so lost in my despair for Wright that I forget where I am, who I’m with and the fact that all of us need to breathe. Like a Nephilim, we’ll drown in the water. A sharp elbow in the side reminds me.
I close my eyes and focus. The first and only time I tried this I only had to transport myself thirty feet. This time, there are four of us and the opposite side, which could also be completely flooded, is miles away. I address the most immediate concern first, drawing air from the stone walls of the flooded High River tunnel. A bubble forms around our upper bodies, providing air to breath. Pulling the air toward us is tiring, but keeping it in place is far easier.
Em and Kainda are momentarily stunned by what’s happening. Neither knew I could do such a thing.
That makes three of us
, I think.
“What should we do?” Em asks after catching her breath. I can tell that she’s uncomfortable about leaving Wright behind. As am I. And it takes all of my will power not to race back up to save him. What keeps me in place is that, one, he’s likely already dead, and two, his dying wish was that I complete the mission. He understood better than all of us that this fight, this war, isn’t about any one person, but about all people. If one of us dies, so be it. If all of us have to die to save the world, then that’s the cost.
Wright was a good man. I could have learned a lot from him. So I’m not going to ignore his last lesson. “We need to finish the mission.” It’s what Wright wanted, but I can’t help feel like I’m the one condemning him.
“But how?” Em asks. “We can’t just stay here. And we can’t go back up.”
“We move forward,” Kainda says.
Blood drips from a wound on her lip. I want to wipe it away, but my hands are locked in place, holding Whipsnap so the others can cling to it like a rollercoaster-ride safety bar.
Kainda looks at me, oblivious to the blood on her face. “You can do it.”
Her confidence in the wake of our defeat is kind, but I’m not feeling it. She must sense this because she quickly changes tactics. “Push forward, Sol. You owe it to Wright. To Em. To me.” She nods to Kat. “To
her
.”
Guilt is a strong motivator for some people, but it kind of just sucks my strength. The sphere of air closes in around us as I lose focus.
“Solomon,” Kainda says, her voice growing harsh. “Look at me.”
I look all around her before finally settling on her eyes, burning with something I can’t quite place. The strangeness of the look keeps my attention on her. “You have become someone I thought you would never be, and you have made me someone I believed was impossible, but I cannot love a man who refuses to finish a fight. Win or lose this war, you will take this to the end, or you
will
lose me.”
She’s just spoken forty-nine words, but all I heard was something like, “blah blah love blah blah.” The rest of it slowly sinks in, leaving me confused. Is she talking about the possibility of loving me? Is she saying she loves me now? This is not only a huge step for me—a girl, or woman as the case may be, has never professed love for me before. That it’s Kainda, who I figured would never use the word, makes it even more powerful.
It centers me.
Gives me strength.
“Hold on,” I say. “Tight.”
When I’m sure that everyone is secure, I expand the bubble a bit, rotate us so we’re facing downhill, and push deeper into the flooded river. I move slowly at first, using most of my energy to weave through the stalagmites and stalactites turning the tunnel into an obstacle course. Twenty minutes later, we leave the tunnel behind, entering the massive chamber containing the ruins of New Jericho.
The city is below us, but out of sight, concealed by the liquid gloom. My first time here, I was just a boy, and I was chased away by the Nephilim, Ull, who would later become my master. My first return was after Ull’s death at my hands, and I discovered a statue of the beast, erected in his honor. On my third visit, the chamber was flooded, and though I did not see the city again, I felt its dark presence below. But this visit is different. I’m not fleeing the underworld. I’m heading deeper. On a mission. And the ghosts of the past, including this dark place and the memories it holds, can’t distract me from it.
I accelerate slowly, cutting through the water like a hot needle through wax. The bubble is hard to maintain while moving, but the air around us reduces the friction of the water on our bodies, creating the perfect environment for cavitation, which allows us to move very fast—best guess, we’re at fifty-two knots, or roughly sixty miles per hour.
We travel in silence, each lost in our own personal train of thought. Em is thinking of Luca. I can’t read minds, but I’ve seen that worried look on her face before, and every time I’ve asked, her mind was on my younger clone. Kainda, on the other hand, is likely replaying our last battle in her head, over and over, imagining ways it could have turned out differently. Her clenched jaw says as much. Me? I’m not thinking about anything.
I’m focused.
And not on the mission. Or on avenging Wright. Or finding the shofar. My thoughts are narrow: keep the bubble open and keep moving. With each passing minute and mile, I push harder and harder, because the effort is taking a toll. I can’t do this forever. And if I stop, we’re all going to drown.
What a way to go that would be. Solomon Ull Vincent, the last hunter, the first and only natural human child born on Antarctica, bonded to the continent and gifted with extraordinary powers, capable of killing Nephilim and dinosaurs, and the only human to set foot in Tartarus and return...killed by drowning. Something about the idea feels like the taunting of past schoolmates, and it fuels my effort for another minute.
But exhaustion is catching up to me.
How far have we come? Five miles? More? It’s impossible to tell without knowing our true speed. The other side of the chamber could be several miles away or a hundred feet. I start to consider our options, when I feel one of my passengers shift.
Without looking, I know it’s Kat. She’s between Em and Kainda, but pulled up against my body. She shifts again with a moan. She’s waking up.
“This might not be good,” Em says as quietly as she can over the rush of water flowing around the air bubble.
I’m not sure what she’s talking about until Kat wakes up and says, “Where’s Wright?”
I feel her head turn back and forth. She can’t see a thing, I’m sure. Even by my standards, the abyss is dark.
“Where’s my husband?” she asks, growing angry.
“We—had to leave him,” I answer.
Honesty is supposed to be the best answer. Even liars say so. But in this case, trapped in a bubble, surrounded by endless water, I think a temporary lie might have been the best option.
“Go back!” she shouts.
“We can’t,” Kainda says, then with a more scolding tone adds, “Calm down.”
Kat reacts to the demand about as well as I’d expect Kainda to, which is to say, not well. She leans forward and then drives her head back into my gut, knocking the air out of my lungs. She has no idea what kind of danger she’s in, only that her husband has been left behind to die.
“Stop,” I say, but the words get lost as I gasp for air.
Kat twists, taking Em and Kainda’s grasp as restraint rather than support. “Let go of me!”
Rather than breathing, I focus on slowing down. I can’t maintain this speed without any air in my lungs, and the bubble around us is rapidly shrinking. I take a deep breath, hoping to explain when Kat manages to wrench herself free, plant a foot against my chest and shove. She slips out of the bubble and is sucked away into the water.
My surprise at this is so severe, that my concentration breaks. The bubble supplying our air bursts. Water envelops us. The pressure is intense. I can feel the weight of all this water pushing on my chest, urging my lungs to let go of that last breath, while my lungs are still urging me to gasp after being struck in the gut.
I reach out for the fleeing air bubbles, trying to draw them back. If I can just reform the bubble, I might be able to get moving again. I might be able to get back to Kat.
But it’s not going to happen. The bubbles bounce through the water, rising toward the surface somewhere above. My energy is gone. I have pushed my abilities to their limit several times over the past few days—stone manacles, flying, and now cavitating through water with three passengers—and while I can do more with each attempt, the end result is still the same. Mind numbing exhaustion.
I need more time
, I think, as my vision fades.
I need to practice, to build skill and endurance. I’m not ready to fight a war yet.
These despairing thoughts and a thousand others flash through my mind as the dark, wet world around me turns black and my consciousness slips away.
16
I awake from my dreamless slumber with a gasp. Last I knew, I was about to drown. But since I’m breathing, I’m pretty sure I’m not dead. Which is good, but confusing. The first question that needs answering is how I survived—a question that is directly tied to answering my second question,
where am I
?
The space is lit by a single glowing crystal embedded above me. It reveals the brown stone just inches from my face. I’m floating face up, on my back. My ears are partly in the water, so the echo of my breathing sounds funny. I remember floating like this when I was a kid. Not in pools. I had issues going to pools. The water was always too cold and my scrawny body embarrassed me. But I loved to float in my parents’ tub. It was the big kind. A Jacuzzi tub with heated jets. I would float there, daydreaming, until my fingers and toes looked like raisins, or until my parents feared I’d drowned and came to my rescue.
I rub my fingers together. Raisins.
The memory brings a smile to my face. Then a frown. Will that world ever exist again? My frown deepens with the knowledge that my childhood, despite the teasing and bullies, was a paradise compared to kids in other parts of the world. Compared to what Em and Kainda endured, it would have been something closer to Heaven.
Something bumps my foot and I flinch away. My hand goes instinctively to my waist and I find Whipsnap locked in place on my belt.
“Solomon?” It’s Em. “You’re awake?”
I lift my foot out of the water and push off the ceiling, bringing my body upright. Em is just a few feet away. Her head is tilted up so that her chin is just above the water line. She has a hand jammed into a crack in the ceiling so she doesn’t have to tread water, like I’m doing now.
I try to speak, but water flows into my mouth. I spit it out, kicking to rise out of the water, and I bump my head on the ceiling.
First things first
, I think, looking for a handhold. I find a knob of stone above me and grip it. I stop kicking and pull myself up, an easy task while my body is ninety-five percent submerged. With my body stabilized, I tilt my head out of the water, looking over my nose at Em. “I’m awake.”
I turn slowly, taking in our surroundings. We’re in an oblong divot in the ceiling. “We’re still in the New Jericho chamber?”
“Yeah,” Em says. “Right above where we stopped. We followed the bubbles up.”
I don’t reply. My eyes have landed on Kat. Her glare looks as angry and savage as any I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen the worst this world has to offer.
She blames me for Wright’s death
.
So do I.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “About everything.”
She just stares.
“Are you—”
Em puts her hand on my submerged arm and squeezes. The gesture silences me and says,
Now, is not the time
.
“I’m just sorry,” I finish.
I twist, looking for Kainda and when I don’t see her, I panic.
Em senses my next question and says, “She’s okay. There are bubbles of trapped air all across the ceiling. She went to find the way out in case we had to move you while you were unconscious.”
“How long was I out this time?” I ask.
“Not long,” she says. Hunters don’t usually keep time. It’s pointless in the underworld. But Em knows I prefer modern human time and has made attempts to learn minutes and hours. “Best guess, thirty minutes.”
That’s actually much faster than usual. The few times Tobias, Em’s father, pushed me to my limit, I would sometimes crash for six hours. I once slept for eight and couldn’t be woken. A half hour is a dramatic improvement. Of course, it would be even better if I didn’t topple over like a fainting goat every time I pushed myself. It’s a weakness. I need to overcome it, before it gets someone killed, which was almost the case this time.
“I’m going to look for her,” I say, slipping under water.
Em grabs me and pulls me back up. “You can’t leave. What if you go two separate directions?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, then slip beneath the surface again. I float down a few feet and close my eyes. I won’t be able to see her anyway. Nor will I hear her, or detect her using any other traditional sense.
I reach out with my thoughts, trying to connect with the water around me. While I don’t feel temperature changes physically, I
am
connected to the land. I should be able to know whether it is hot or cold.
And then, I do.
It’s not like a voice, a weather report or any other kind of tangible transfer of data. I just know.
It’s cold.
The others must be freezing
. I expand my reach, merging my sense of touch with the molecules of water surrounding me. I have been bonded to this continent since the day of my birth. In many ways, it’s an extension of my own body, or perhaps more accurately, I am the focus of its power. Either way, not only can I direct the natural world of the continent, I can also sense things through it. I can feel earthquakes like a muscle spasm or a bird landing on a branch two thousand miles away like an itch on the sole of my foot. I have to clear my mind and focus on exactly what and where I want to feel. The challenge is not to let it all in at once. Letting in an entire continent’s worth of sensory information would likely destroy my mind. I’ve never tried it, but I suspect the result would not be beneficial to my health.
I start my search twenty-five feet out and expand it. I feel the water’s currents, fueled by the High River’s flow. The sharp shapes of New Jericho’s ruins emerge in my mind’s eye. My reach expands quickly now, moving out through the featureless water with ease. I’m sensing nearly two miles out now, looking for anything moving. There are scores of small fish, but nothing the size of a human being.
How far could she have gone in thirty minutes
?
I stop when I reach the far wall and our exit. She’s not there. Did she leave? Maybe she drowned and sank to the bottom? I was searching for something moving. If she’s dead, I might never find her.
Distracted by thoughts of losing Kainda, my reach pulls back quickly, sifting through the water already explored. Two miles. One mile. Three hundred feet. Two. One. Twenty five. My eyes twitch, about to open.
That’s when I see her, just two feet away. Her face is carved into my mind by the strange sense, glowing luminous blue in the water. She must have been inside my twenty-five foot radius when I began my search. Was she watching me?
I imagine Kainda, the mighty warrior, watching me like a love-sick schoolgirl. The thought brings a smile to my face and I “see” her do the same without opening my eyes.
She slips through the water, and gently places her lips against my own.
My connection with Antarctica is severed like an amputated limb, though the sensation is far more pleasant.
When I open my eyes, she’s right there, lips pressed against mine. Her brown eyes look almost black in the gloom. I’m transfixed, frozen by the touch of her lips. She pulls away slowly, letting no other part of her body touch mine. Then she turns her head up, and swims.
I stay there, hovering in the void, still feeling her lips on mine. My stomach is in knots. My chest feels ready to burst.
Is this what love feels like?
I wonder, but then I realize that it’s actually what asphyxiation feels like. I need to breathe.
I kick to the surface, careful not to rush and smash my face on the ceiling. I slip out of the water’s grasp, find my handhold and turn to the others. “What did you find?” I ask Kainda—all business—knowing that any hint of a romantic gaze would be unwelcome, both by Kainda because she’s, well,
Kainda
, and by Kat, who just lost her husband.
“We can’t swim out,” she says. “I nearly didn’t make it back.”
“We don’t need to swim out,” I say. “The exit is just a few miles away. I can get us there.”
“You’re sure?” Em asks.
“I’ll be tired after,” I admit. “But you can help me if I need it. Even if I do pass out again, we don’t have much of a choice. We need to push forward. We’re deep underground now. We’re losing surface time.”
To my surprise, it’s Kat who replies. “He’s right. Let’s go.”
There is no emotion in her words, just cold calculation. She swims in front of me, glaring at me. I feel like a mouse staring into the eyes of a lion. Then she turns around and waits. I remove Whipsnap from my belt and bend the staff around her. She holds on with both hands. Em and Kainda duck beneath the water and rise inside the loop of my arms and Whipsnap. They hold on with both hands.
I focus on the air trapped against the ceiling, pulling it toward us from all the neighboring bubbles, which makes the effort easier. The swirling air whips our hair and quickly dries our bodies, pushing the water away. When I’ve gathered enough air around us, I push us down into the water. As the red glow fades above us, I turn toward the exit, accelerate and race through the depths.