The Secret Sea (40 page)

*   *   *

Moira doubled over, clenching Khalid's hand with both of hers now, as the wind built to what she knew would be a devastating crescendo. The gale mounted higher and stronger, and eventually it would rip her right away from Khalid. And he was worried about what she could
see
?

“My eyes are closed!” she yelled.

“Mine too!” came back.

“Well, open yours!”

“You first!”

Not a chance. No way.

Zak hadn't joined in with them. Either he couldn't hear them or—

No. He's doing something. I know he is. I can feel it.

 

SEVENTY-SIX

Below Zak, the electroleum on the floor, the torrents of the stuff spilling out of the tanks … It had all paled to a hot, intense white, a glow brighter than any Zak had ever seen. His body was still down there, still chained by touch to Khalid and Moira. He could hear them shouting to each other, like the sound of a train whistle far off down a tunnel. But he could not spare the attention to listen to them. He was too busy.

Too busy pummeling Godfrey.

He couldn't believe how good it felt! All the frustration and anger, all the loneliness and rage, the disappointment in his parents, the fear of this new world—it all funneled down into his/Tommy's fists as he/they struck Godfrey again and again and again.

Godfrey flung his arms up before his face, trying to ward off the blows. But Zak/Tommy was/were twice as fast, twice as precise, landing blow after blow after blow, forcing Godfrey farther and farther back.

On the floor, the glow of the electroleum began to rise, drifting up like a cool lake's steam on a sweltering early morning. Zak could see nothing now, nothing but Godfrey before him, his face twisted into sheer terror as the glow ascended and then—as Zak watched—wrapped tendrils of pure light around him.

“No!” Godfrey screamed. “No!”

And for the first time, Zak felt a swell of overwhelming pity for Godfrey.

Godfrey was scared. Godfrey had
always
been scared, Zak realized. Scared of the bigger, more powerful men who controlled his life on the ship. Scared of the storm. Of climbing the rope ladder. Of the sudden juddering halt of the ship. And, yes, scared of dying, so scared of death that he consigned himself to an infinitely worse fate, a liminal half-life that drove him to do anything—
anything
—to return to life.

You were willing to do the same
, Tommy whispered.
You were willing to kill yourself and maybe many, many others. For me.

“Help me!” Godfrey screeched, his voice gone high and tremulous. “Please! For the love of God! In the name of all that's holy!”

But I was doing it out of love
, Zak told his brother.
Not fear.

Does it really matter?

And in an instant, he decided: It didn't. Done for love or done for fear, what Godfrey planned and what Zak had almost done were the same. Their motivations didn't matter. Zak had almost become as bad as Godfrey, thinking the whole time that he was doing the right thing.

“I forgive you!” he shouted, and reached out to take Godfrey's hand. The unholy dread etched into his foe's expression and threaded through his voice was more than enough. Godfrey had contemplated something horrible, planned something monstrous, but the agony riddling him now … No one deserved that.

But the heat of the glow forced back his own ghostly hand before he could clutch Godfrey's and yank him free. And then, as Zak watched, the light peeled Godfrey like a half-molted snake, sloughing off sheets of him as though he were caught naked in a sandstorm.

Godfrey's mouth stretched wide, wider than a human mouth should be able to stretch, and Zak could not look away, staring in horrified fascination, steeling himself for the final scream.

A scream that never came.

The light swallowed what was left of Godfrey without a sound, and then everything went black.

*   *   *

Through the blackness, Zak discerned a wave of light coming toward him, flashing multicolored and kaleidoscopic. Tommy was suddenly before him, drifting and whole.

“We did it,” he said, and Zak wept at the sound of his twin's voice.

He extended his hand. “Come on. Come with me.”

Tommy shook his head. Zak's hand passed through him.

Which one of us is the ghost now?

“I can't,” Tommy said. “It doesn't work that way.”

“But why not?” Zak whined. “After everything we went through—”

“After everything we went through,” Tommy said, “I'm still dead. That's forever.”

“But it isn't. Dr. Bookman's cockroaches—”

“—prove nothing. Do you really think it's the same thing, animating a bug and reviving a person? I died, Zak. Years ago. And you don't get to turn that back. No one does. Not Godfrey. Not me. Not you.”

“After all this?” Zak's incredulity was a living thing, and it squirmed and wailed on its way out of him. “I go through all this and I can't have you back?”

“Tell Mom and Dad I love them,” Tommy said. “And don't be too hard on them. You forgave Godfrey; you can forgive them.”

“I don't want to.”

“I know. It's easier to be angry. Do the hard part, Zak. I was there, always. Against the ceiling, along the sky. On the ground. In the air you breathed. I saw them when you didn't, when you couldn't. They were trying their best for you.”

“But, Tommy—”

“The Secret Sea is the sum total of everything that lives. I don't belong there anymore. Good-bye, Zak. I love you, brother. And I'm glad I got to know you.”

“But—”

“I'm going to miss you,” Tommy said, tears clustering and dropping. “I'm going to miss you like that dish you forgot to go back for, the one that would be perfect for guests right now.”

Zak wept, his arms outstretched. “We don't have to let it happen! You can come to me! Come to me, Tommy! Come to me!”

And the light consumed Tommy from behind, first reducing him to shadow, then burning him away, burning him through a million pinpoint holes that merged into a single Tommy-shaped outline for an instant before vanishing into the eternal glow.

Zak screamed until he could hear himself no more, screamed until his voice bled itself to death. Even with his eyes shut, he could still see the light, pulsating through his eyelids in a red-white rhythm, a discolored chiaroscuro. The light crashed into him, and the light was water, a tidal wave of it, a tsunami, a monsoon, smashing against him like the fist of God.

 

SEVENTY-SEVEN

And Zak was in the water and then he soared above it, rising into a dead black sky. Below him was the ocean.

No, not the ocean. The sea. The Secret Sea.

He was above it. In what Tommy had called the no-space. The place near death.

The whole of creation spiraled and spun and thrashed below him. In an instant, Zak saw and comprehended the entirety of it, the crash and wave of the quantum foam, the mingling of realities, possibilities, potentialities. It was an infinite wellspring, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. It was that which preceded the alpha and succeeded the omega.

TOMMY!
he screamed into the nothingness.

He looked up—there was only darkness.

He looked down—the world and the worlds spun in eddies beneath him, here swallowed, there revealed by the roaring waves of the Secret Sea. It was vaster than anything he could imagine. The universe was a pinprick within it, tossed and lost on the foam.

He looked all around—the empty blank of the no-space, the limbo between the life of the Secret Sea and the release of death.

He had nothing left in him. No screams, no cries. He hung in the non-air, suspended, watching the play of universes.

This was the Secret Sea, a secret witnessed by Godfrey and maybe by Tommy. And now by Zak. He wondered if to espy this, to perceive the true nature of reality, was to die, like the others. His parents had never forced religion on him, but La-La had told him stories from the Bible, and he thought now of Adam and Eve, of how their sin had been to eat from the tree of knowledge. Their sin had been to
know
, and now Zak knew something no one else knew.

He knew the shape of God. He knew the curve of the unending universe, its warp and its weft.

He cried, his saltwater tears running down his cheeks and then dropping off his jaw to plummet an infinity below into the brine of creation.

And then he dropped downxs

                                               down

                                                                down

 

SEVENTY-EIGHT

down

            down

                 down

                              down

 

SEVENTY-NINE

ever down

                     until

 

EIGHTY

IMPACT

 

EIGHTY-ONE

The shock of water erupted from nowhere and forced Moira's eyes open. She still clung to Khalid's hand with both of her own. Where had all this water come from?

Walls breached in the facility. Zak did something or Godfrey did something or something else caught fire and blew up and now we're drowning.

The water was dirty, briny, and she could barely make out Khalid, reaching for her with his other hand.

His free hand.

The one that had been holding Zak.

 

EIGHTY-TWO

Khalid didn't know where the water had come from. And, truthfully, he was damn sick and tired of being dunked without warning.

He knew only that he was still connected to Moira.

He knew only that Zak's hand had vanished from his own with the impact of the water.

And that he would drown soon. He knew that, too.

 

EIGHTY-THREE

Moira thrashed against the current. The water raged all around her, knocking her away from Khalid as she released him. She needed both hands to swim.

But which direction to swim? The murky water made any sort of reckoning almost impossible. She'd been knocked off-balance, and the fluid buoyancy made it difficult to tell which way was up.

Then she felt a current pass her and a hand brush against her. Khalid. He was swimming past her, headed toward something. She didn't know what, but she was almost out of air.

Her glasses had been blasted off her face by the force of the water. She could barely make out his shape through the murk.

It was difficult to move in her waterlogged coverall, but—kicking her feet—she followed him.

 

EIGHTY-FOUR

Khalid was a middling swimmer. It was probably fair to say he excelled at not drowning, more than to say he was a good swimmer. But right now,
not drowning
sounded pretty good.

Zak was gone. One minute, he'd been there, the next …

The water shoved at Khalid, commanding his attention. He thought it seemed lighter off to one side. He karate-chopped the water furiously and kicked his feet, propelling himself in that direction.

 

EIGHTY-FIVE

Moira touched concrete just as Khalid caught up to her. She was faster in the water, and he'd fallen behind. She pressed her palms against the wall and shoved herself in the direction she now knew to be straight up. Khalid followed right behind, breaking the surface of the water an instant after her.

The first thing Moira noticed—other than Khalid's enormous inhaled breath at her side—was the screaming. Lit by flickering lights, people were yelling and crying out. Then came the sound of feet pounding on pavement.

It took her a few seconds to become acclimated to what she was seeing. She was floating in a filthy body of water just off of a concrete platform. The platform was in a tunnel, and people on it ran toward a flight of stairs. Disoriented, Moira blinked grungy water out of her eyes, trying to clear her vision. Without her glasses, everything blurred and smeared and collided into a chaos of indistinct shapes and shadows.

And then someone—a woman—shouted, “Wait! There are kids in there!”

Moira grabbed onto the platform as the current buffeted her. Khalid missed it, slipped past her, then grabbed hold on the other side. Trying to hoist herself out of the water, which rose rapidly to spill onto the platform, Moira suddenly realized that hands were on her, arms straining to pull her out. To her left, Khalid was being helped, too.

After being hauled onto the platform, Moira allowed herself a moment to catch her breath as the water lapped around her.

“You have to get up and run, honey!” the woman shouted, pulling at her.

Moira allowed herself to be tugged onto her feet. On the way up, she couldn't help looking at the woman's legs. They were close enough to snap into focus.

Moira laughed what must have seemed an insane laugh.

The woman was wearing
shorts
.

 

EIGHTY-SIX

Khalid heard Moira's laugh and shook his head fiercely, throwing off droplets. “Zak,” he rasped. “Zak!”

Nothing. The sound of panicked feet. Cries of alarm.

Water, rushing.

“Zak!”

Down on all fours on the concrete, Khalid looked right and left. Where was Zak? What had happened to him? Khalid had managed to hold on to Moira, but he'd lost Zak. Somehow, he'd lost Zak.

As his vision cleared, he could read a sign above him:

EXIT TO