The Secret Sea (37 page)

There was a curved black chunk of something plasticky jutting out of the wall next to the door. Khalid rubbed at his burning eyes and hoped his breath would hold out. He inspected what turned out to be a sort of hard plastic sleeve into which he could insert his hand and arm almost up to the elbow. He did so and felt something smooth, glassy, and spherical at the end. He grabbed it, squeezed it, tried rolling it between his fingers. Nothing. Some kind of identification system. Something that used alchemy or astrology or voodoo or Wicca combined with a computer, probably, to identify people.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
for the digital age.

He dropped back down to his belly. Moira was coughing harder now.

“No way in,” he said.

“Always a way,” she said. “Back.”

Before he could respond, she shimmied backward, rolled onto her side, then turned around and headed back the way they'd come.

Khalid cleared his throat and spit up something that glowed a rotten brown in the red light that filtered through the dust and smoke in the air. Then, of course, he followed her.

 

SIXTY-SIX

Zak. Zak, get up.

Get up, Zak!

Two voices, but one voice, but two voices. He heard the same voice, saying different things, and it was his own voice.

Behind it all, alarms.

Zak groaned and rolled over. His body ached as though he'd been stuffed into a trash can and sent careening down a steep hill. Every movement caused him pain. He tasted blood, and his face was wet with what he assumed to be more of it.

Get up! There's still time!

Zak! Zak, are you okay? Can you hear me?

Can you hear
me?

He pushed himself up to his knees. The world tipped and swayed, just like on a boat, and for a moment he was back on the boat again, back where it all had started. An eighteenth-century ship from a different version of the eighteenth century. A scared boy from an island, making his way to America, caught in a storm, then plunged into another reality.

And then trapped underground. For so long. Alone. Alone and lost. Dreaming only of himself.

Help me!

Help yourself!

You can do both, Zak! You can save everyone! Trust me!

SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!
Zak bellowed in his mind, and was somewhat surprised to find that it worked. The voices fell silent, and he could think again.

All around him, the cabin of the superway was devastated. The control board had cracked across its area, with only a single flickering light remaining. Ironically, it flashed the word
SAFETY
over and over.

Through the broken windshield, he spied the wall of the tube, crushed and breached by the now-crumpled and dented nose of the superway. Lights flickered sporadically in the tube and in the distance, through the wall. Zak braced himself between the chair and the control panel and levered himself to a standing position. His head swam in a fog, and he held tight to his anchors to keep from falling down.

He tested his legs. Nothing broken, it seemed. His body ached, but the only sharp, insistent pains came from the multitude of cuts along his body. Flying glass. Glass on the floor. He'd been struck by it, had rolled in it. He was lucky not to be bleeding to death.

At least, he didn't
think
he was bleeding to death.

Get out of here. Got to get out of here.

His own voice, from his own mind; he was sure of it. And yet it recalled to him those easier, more innocent days, when he'd imagined a guardian angel watching over him. The good old days, when he'd worried only about his sanity, not about spirits and universes and life and death.

Life was so much simpler when I was just crazy.

He dragged himself over the control panel and—carefully avoiding the jagged edges—through the gaping windshield. Pushing debris out of the way, he slid down the nose of the superway and onto the floor of the building. He was in a hallway that was lit only by the rotating red blare of emergency lights. Staggering, he leaned against a wall to rest for a moment.

Zak …

Shut up. Whoever you are.

You can still—

Don't listen to him!

Shut. Up!

Using the wall for support, Zak inched down the hall. A chunk of ceiling fell right in front of him, and in the blink of an eye, he saw Tommy standing before him, but then the image vanished.

Close. So close to death just then.

Up ahead, a sign that had once been mounted to the wall lay on the floor. There were arrows pointing in different directions. One said
RECLAMATION
. Another said
RECHARGING
. He didn't know which way the arrows were supposed to guide him, because he didn't know which wall the sign had fallen from.

Did it really matter, though? He just had to keep moving. Find help. Figure out the rest of it later.

This way
, said the voice, and he blinked sweat out of his eyes, and a light appeared in the air, faint and glimmering for a moment before petering out.

Yes
, said the voices.

They were in agreement. For the first time.

Zak followed the path of the light into the darkness.

He stumbled down the hall, stepping around fallen beams and collapsed chunks of ceiling. Through doors and holes in the walls around him, he saw other areas, some of them devastated from the impact of the superway, some of them burning. But he walked straight ahead to a large pocket door that had partly crumpled. It had no hinges, so he pushed it to one side, straining and grunting until he'd shoved it far enough into the wall that he could pass.

Beyond was a large chamber, two stories high. Balconies ran in a ring around the second story, some of them collapsed, some of them dangling overhead from their support structures. At the bottom, where he stood, he spied several desks clustered together, obviously workstations for the evacuated personnel. But the desks didn't interest him. He cared only for the large tanks and drums arranged around the room. The big tanks were bolted to the floor and had wide, thick hoses running in and out of them. The drums were mostly stacked in corners, though many of them had fallen over and rolled hither and yon. A series of Wonder Glass–looking computer terminals were wired together in the center of the room, most of them cracked or sparking with electricity.

One of the drums had split and spilled. A familiar, viscous ooze glowed there. Electroleum.

This is the place, Zak
, Tommy or Godfrey said.
You can still use the electroleum to save us.

Don't do it
, said Godfrey or Tommy.
Rescue workers will come here first, to lock it down. Just sit down and wait. You'll be safe soon.

Zak lurched over to the broken drum of electroleum. He spied another one just past it that had cracked as well; a glowing trickle spilled down one side.

This would do it, he realized. He could still salvage something from this debacle. He could dunk himself in a tank of the raw stuff and let it work its magic. Would that suffice? Is that all he had to do to bring Tommy back? Could it be that easy? No need to plow a train through the place and blow it up. Just … take a little dip in the electroleum pool.

Or maybe that would do nothing.

I don't know what to do.

He dropped to his knees before the puddle of electroleum. What should he do?

The two Tommys manifested then, one of them wavering and weaker than the other.

It's time
, said the more stable one.
I'm so sorry it has to be this way, but it does. If there were another way, I'd tell you. I swear.

Zak was exhausted. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but if he did that, he feared he would wake up and the opportunity would be gone. He would be in whatever passed for juvenile detention in this world, and he would spend the rest of his life haunted not just by his twin but also by the knowledge of what he hadn't done.

Don't do it
, said the weaker one, fuzzing in and out of view as he spoke.
Just keep yourself safe.

That's Godfrey speaking
, said the strong one.
He knows there's a chance I'll be the only one to come through. Because of our twin connection. And that terrifies him. He's stalling until he can sever our connection.

Zak laughed. Okay, fine. So neither of them made any sense. Whatever.

Zak
, the weak one said,
it's simple: You know I'm your brother because I don't want you to die.

 

SIXTY-SEVEN

Moira knew it was only a matter of time before they either succumbed to the junk in the air or wound up crushed under a collapsing section of ceiling or stumbled upon by a rescue crew. They had to move quickly.

She suspected something had gone wrong with Zak's plan. The explosion that had rocked the building hadn't seemed like a combustible explosion. It was more the impact of something fast and solid—say, a superway train—colliding with something strong and solid—say, a building. The electroleum hadn't been detonated. Godfrey hadn't gotten his way yet.

Which meant there was a chance Zak was still alive.

Which further meant that he might be hurt somewhere in the facility. Or—possibly worse—not hurt and trying to blow the whole place up in some different way.

She didn't know anything about the chemical, physical, alchemical, and magical properties of electroleum, but she knew that the Dutchmen had seemed very confident that they could turn the stuff into an explosive. If it was easy enough for those dunderheads to do, then she figured Godfrey would have a pretty good shot at it, too.

They had to find Zak. Now.

Back in the corridor, she kept her eyes peeled for the wall that had crumbled—and a beam came falling through it. She jumped back, berating herself for her stupidity. That was the most significant damage they'd seen, so didn't it make sense that the point of impact was nearby?

She wiped dust from her glasses and could see well enough in the gloom to perceive the hole in the wall. The fire burning in there made it more obvious. She hauled herself to her feet. The cloud of dust—and now smoke—was filling more and more of the hallway. She tugged the neckline of her shirt up over her nose as a makeshift breathing mask. It was better than nothing. Barely.

Khalid stood up, too, and after a second's hesitation covered his face as she had done.

“In there?” he asked, pointing. “
Toward
the fire? Really?”

“Three Basketeers,” she said, hoping he could tell by her eyes that she was smiling.

“I hate myself for coming up with that,” he groaned, but followed her as she scaled a pile of wallboard and fallen ceiling joist into the next room.

 

SIXTY-EIGHT

Zak roared from the pit of his stomach as he pushed himself away from the electroleum and back on his feet. The stronger Tommy was shifting before his eyes, his colors bleeding and blending together, smearing into blue and red and gold.

And then, as the weaker Tommy faded from view entirely, Zak beheld only Godfrey.

This time, there was no crushing pain to distract him; he saw Godfrey clearly. He had long sandy-brown hair that was tied back in a ponytail, and he wore ragged blue pants, brown boots, a red kerchief tied around his forehead, and a loose, threadbare white shirt with a single brassy button among several dull brown ones.

And he was young. So young. Probably younger than Zak, something he'd never expected.

Just a kid. Still a kid. After all these centuries.

Do. It. Now
, Godfrey said, and his eyes burned. They literally burned—tongues of flame licked out from them, and Zak took a step back for fear of being singed.

One of the control panels is still functional
, Godfrey said.
You can overload the recharging mechanism and detonate the electroleum in the tanks. You'll finally get your wish, Zak: You won't be alone anymore. You'll be with Tommy. In the land of the dead. Where you both belong.

Zak shook his head. “No,” he said aloud. “Show me Tommy again. Let me see my brother.”

Your brother is dead, Zak. He's been dead since his kidneys gave out at age two. I just found his spirit, lingering because of his connection to you. Good fortune on my part. Other spirits, they just vanish, depart, float away above the Secret Sea. But not Tommy. No. Pathetically clinging to the one thing he knew so well in the world: You. Trying to communicate. He would have moved on eventually, would have left the Secret Sea entirely, and all the physical universes. But I reinforced his connection. Kept him tethered to you. All so I could contact you. No one would help a random spirit lost in the world, but a twin … Oh, a twin would do
anything
to help his brother, wouldn't he?

So, really, you owe me, Zak. Because of me, you had your brother's voice in your ear for years. Now's the time to pay me back. Bring me back to life, Zak.

“But it might not work! And Khalid said it could end up killing people back in my world.”

Do you think I care?
Godfrey raged.
Your world killed
me
! We could have saved the boat over here, but when we crossed over, we ran aground and I died! Do you have any idea what I've been through? What I've suffered? Imagine being trapped. In the dark. Forever.

You were a ghost. You could have just come up from underground.

I didn't know which way was up! Picture yourself underground, suspended in the utter dark. And gravity doesn't work on you because you have no mass. Any movement could be the wrong one. You could think you were going up but actually be going sideways. Or down. And you could end up drifting forever in the darkness, headed to the center of the earth.