Horizon (16 page)

Zorro clutched Hoku’s ear. Hoku glanced over and saw Great White zoom toward the hidden net of fish.
Barnacles
, that shark was fast! Hoku returned to the glowfield and sawed tendrils with frantic purpose.

“Zorro, is Great White still eating the fish?”

The water around him glowed red.
No.
He swallowed thickly.
Next time, hide the fish deeper in the rocks
, he told himself.

“Zorro, is Great White headed this way?”

Green.

Hoku spun slowly, trying not to kick his feet or move his arms more than necessary. If Great White hadn’t seen him yet, then —

Oh, Great White had seen him. Great White was, in fact, swimming right for him.

Hoku looked down at the spear in his hand. Kampii hunters used weapons just like it to kill sharks. It felt heavy and useless, and not nearly big enough. If only he had —

A bigger weapon.

Of course! That’s exactly what he needed, and he knew just where to get it.

“Zorro, trust me,” he whispered. The raccoon’s eyes glowed green. Hoku knew he was programmed to say yes to things like that, but it made him feel better all the same.

Great White cut through the water, fast as a bird diving through the sky.

“Not yet,” Hoku muttered.

He stared at the meat hanging from Great White’s teeth. He stared at its widening maw. And when the shark rolled to its side to better snap him in half with its hideously powerful jaws, Hoku dodged.

Great White might have been fast and sleek, but it was also heavy. The shark started to change its angle to follow him, but its body carried it forward. Not far, because Great White was an agile monstrosity, but far enough.

Enough to carry it into the glowfield of paralyzing jellies.

The shark jerked, and for a horrible flash, Hoku thought Great White might be immune to the jellies’ power. He bolted backward, windmilling his arms and kicking his legs, and hitting himself in the shin with the spear still stupidly clutched in his hand.

Great White thrashed its tail and bashed its head against the jellies, trying to break free. The jellies only stung it again, over and over. Eventually, the shark’s struggling slowed and stopped, until the massive beast hung still.

Sharks never stopped moving. Never, ever. And here was the biggest shark Hoku had ever seen practically frozen in place. He could only imagine how surprised Great White itself must be.

For a moment, Hoku thought about killing it. The shark could be stuck there for weeks or months before the jellies managed to absorb enough of its flesh to end its life. Great White would starve to death first, and that was certainly not a pleasant way to go.

But the shark was Karl Strand’s creature. Strand might not know if it was stuck in the glowfield, but he probably had some way of knowing when it died, so he could send another. Letting the shark live might give Hoku more time inside Seahorse Alpha.

And besides, he had no idea how to actually kill the shark and not paralyze himself in the process. Imagine how stupid he’d feel if he defeated the creature and then killed himself by accident afterward.

“Come on, let’s go to the other side,” he said, eager to leave Great White’s quivering bulk behind him. “Zorro, warn me if you see more sharks.” They’d only faced one the last time they were here, but they hadn’t stayed long enough to see if there were more. He didn’t want any surprises.

Hoku found a weaker section of the glowfield where the jellies had grown slightly apart from one another, and he set to work. After an hour, his arms burning and his stomach begging for food, he’d carved a hole big enough to swim through.

After all these months, he’d finally made it to Seahorse Alpha.

If Zorro hadn’t figured out the air-lock mechanism, Hoku might still be treading water in the tiny entrance room he’d discovered. The little guy had found an access panel and plugged in his tail. Within seconds, the room started draining and the pressure dropped slowly to Above World levels.

“Good thing I still have legs,” Hoku said. “I don’t think this place was built for tails.”

When the last of the ocean had churned through the floor, a buzzer sounded and the light over the door turned from red to green. Hoku threw all his weight on the door’s handle and it swung open with a long sigh.

Chunky desks ringed the circular room, each with a battered video screen mounted to the curved wall above it. Pictures, faded and wrinkled, clung to most surfaces like barnacles, too stubborn to let go. A drinking vessel sat on one desk, a bright-red spot amid the stark white of the floor and ceiling and chairs.

Hoku walked slowly around the room’s circumference. His fingertips traced the edge of a decaying wooden frame holding the picture of a young woman with sun-bright hair. The inside of the red drinking vessel was stained brown with the memory of some dark liquid. Hoku picked it up and sniffed, but smelled only the same stale air that permeated the rest of the room. He threaded his fingers through the handle and lifted it to his mouth, as if he were taking a sip.

People had lived and worked here. Not phantoms, not faceless ancients, but real people just like him.

He righted a fallen chair and sat at a desk by the room’s lone window. Had Sarah Jennings sat here? Or her assistant, the one she’d trusted with the water safe? Grandma Nani said he’d been Hoku’s ancestor. Hoku wiped the dust and dirt from the desk’s surface. It smeared across his palm and forearm in dark streaks. Had his ancestor done the same thing hundreds of years ago before he sat down and got to work?

Work.
He was here to do that, too. His ancestor had helped build the first Kampii colony. Now, across the centuries, Hoku needed to save it.

“Zorro, look for an interface,” he said. The raccoon’s eyes glowed green. He hopped onto a desk and began to sniff for a place to plug in his tail.

Hoku stood and searched the room for anything that looked like it might be connected to the main computer system. When he found buttons, he pressed them. When he found switches, he flipped them back and forth until their lights blinked. He found the power switch under one large monitor, but when the screens lit up, he was surprised: instead of one big image, there were dozens and dozens of tiny ones. They each had a label displayed in blurry type, and he instantly recognized several of them:

He even saw screens for Silverfin and Nautilus, two distant Kampii colonies he’d only heard of once before. Most of the screens were dark, but a few flickered with life: the inside of the communications room at Coiled Deep, and the back of an Equian’s head in Mirage.

And then, on the monitor labeled EQUIAN SETTLEMENT #6, a familiar face zoomed in so close that Hoku could count its shaggy nose hairs.

“Took you long enough,” Rollin said with a grunt. “Now, what are we working on today?”

A
LUNA SWAM TOWARD
Daphine’s surface colony, but when she neared the shallows of the reef, she stopped. Sharks filled the water. Before, they’d been milling around, lazily looking for easy meals. Now the ocean roiled with fins and sleek gray bodies and the flash of jagged teeth.

A feeding frenzy.

Not all the sharks were big, but many were vicious, trying to get a piece of whatever had died — and willing to kill in the process. To them, Aluna’s beautiful Kampii tail looked like food.

She circled around the frenzy, keeping her short, sturdy spear tight against her body to minimize its drag in the water. The knife strapped to her waist had been freshly sharpened, and a harpoon — liberated from the training dome in the City of Shifting Tides — dangled from a bandolier across her back, along with a canister of bolts and hooks.

“This is Aluna,” she called. “Can anyone hear me?”

Her brother Anadar’s voice answered immediately. “Aluna! Get out of the water! We’re trying to kill the most vicious ones, but it’s only drawing more into the mix.”

She surfaced to get a better view. Most of the Kampii lay clustered together on the reef like a pile of terrified seals. Unfortunately, the water covering the reef was still half a meter deep, giving most of the sharks plenty of room to navigate. Even Great White could leap onto the reef to grab a Kampii morsel, then wiggle its way back into the depths.

Anadar had arranged the colony’s few warriors — and anyone strong enough to wield a weapon — in a circle around the rest of the Kampii. They seemed to be doing a good job keeping the sharks away, but blood stained the water around them and the current wasn’t carrying it away. The sharks would keep coming, long after Anadar’s warriors grew tired.

She couldn’t see her brother well from this distance, but she recognized the way he held his weapons and the way he moved. He’d trained her, after all. Her own style owed as much to him as it did to High Senator Electra and the cappo’ra fighters in Coiled Deep.

The warriors couldn’t hold out forever, so the sharks needed to stop attacking. They needed another target. Something to distract them long enough for the Kampii to escape. Aluna dove underwater. The sharks on the outskirts of the action were slower, older, weaker, or just opportunists waiting for leftovers. Well, she could capitalize on an opportunity when she saw one, too.

A lazy dark-gray shark drifted by her tail. It wasn’t a big animal, not much of a threat to her, which made it a perfect choice. She spun, just like in the dolphin form she used to practice with Anadar, and stabbed it in the gills with her spear. She pulled the weapon out quickly, before the animal could jerk and rip it out of her hands.

Blood puffed up from the wound. Almost instantly, the other sharks smelled it. When they arrived, Aluna was ready. She got another one in the gills, then missed her mark on the third and watched her spear tip slide across the shark’s flank, digging a shallow groove. The shark came for her. She unsheathed her knife with her left hand and punched at the animal’s face. Her blade caught it in the nose. The shark twisted away in surprise.

Oh, she had their attention now. More and more sharks came, called by the blood. The first few sharks she had wounded were now fighting for their lives or trying to escape.

While she was aiming for another, a shark rammed into her from behind and scraped its tough body along her side. She sheathed her knife with fumbling hands and grabbed her ribs. The sudden pain made her nauseous.

But her sealskin shirt had stopped the shark from reaching her skin. She still wasn’t bleeding, and that’s all that mattered.

Aluna straightened her tail, turning her body into an arrow, and sank down through the water, quiet as a crab. Above her, blood billowed in the waves. More sharks came, leaving the surface colony for fresher, easier-to-catch prey.

She swam slowly in a wide arc around the new frenzy. She touched her side and winced. Kampii healed fast, but broken ribs still took time.
Please don’t be broken.

When she got close to the reef colony, she called out. Anadar and Daphine came to help her the rest of the way. She let them take her arms and tried to smile.

“You are so foolish,” Anadar said. “What were you thinking?” His brown eyes seemed so familiar, and so strange, as if a lifetime had passed since the last time Aluna had seen him.

“She was trying to save our fins,” Daphine said. “And she succeeded, at least for a little while.”

Aluna relaxed and let them pull her through the water.

“Where’d you learn to fight like that?” Anadar asked. “Must have had a good teacher.”

Aluna grinned. “Wish he’d spent more time teaching me how to actually fight things than making me do silly forms and exercises over and over again.”

Anadar’s face grew serious. She should have known not to insult his lessons. But when his words came, they were soft and kind. “Anyone who sees you fight will think I’m the best teacher in the world.”

Aluna closed her eyes and leaned into Anadar. She felt tears forming, but she didn’t know why. Her ribs hurt, true, but this pain felt deeper, confusing, unexplainable.

“We haven’t got long before the sharks find us again,” Daphine said. “I’m going to take everyone to the beach. We’ll be easy prey for the land animals, but we’re not faring much better out here. And the sooner our people learn to drag themselves on land, the better.”

“No,” Aluna said, opening her eyes. “I’ve got another idea. The people at the surface colony aren’t the only ones that need help.” She paused. “So do the Deepfell.”

Aluna swam beside Daphine just under the water’s surface, her ribs wrapped tightly in seal-hide strips. Behind them, the Kampii without breathing shells swam as best they could, surfacing like dolphins every few minutes for more air.

Hopefully the Deepfell would agree to an alliance, and Aluna wasn’t leading them all to their deaths. If Prince Eekikee was alive, she’d have a chance. The Deepfell’s hidden, air-filled cave would be the perfect place for the Kampii from the surface colony to stay until they found a more permanent home. It’d be cramped with all the Deepfell wounded, but safe.