by Chris Howard
Kassandra swung under Zypheria, caught her hand, and twirled into the light to find Nicole. The three of them held on to each other, flying free through the ocean, passing Stormwind in a burst of swimming, diving straight down to run with deep sea squid.
An hour later, they caught up to a pod of dolphins rocketing through the water before the prow of Stormwind. Kassandra shot past them, running her hand along the belly of the large female in the group's center. Kassandra's wake hit them and they scattered, diving in different directions.
Nicole grabbed Kassandra's hand tight, Zypheria doing the same on the other side, and the three of them fired out of the water, just as the sailboat's prow passed, Kassandra dancing over the chrome rail with them. They landed square on the deck at the bow, Nicole holding one arm out to catch her balance, found she didn't have to. The water gripped her feet, kept her fixed to the deck.
Then it released them, and the three of them laughed, jumping down to the deck at the stern.
Zypheria looked over at Alex and Kaffia. "Either of you want a turn?"
Kaffia shook her head. "Looks a little too cold for me."
From behind hem Gregor said, "Just need to get used to it."
Alex exchanged a look with Kaffia, and then shook his head.
Moving away from the wheel, Jill jutted her chin off the starboard side, leaned in to Kassandra to whisper angrily, "Why did you come back? Can't you stay out of my life?"
Kassandra looked at her without pushing, just watched her eyes, a twitch at her mouth. She wanted to see how serious her sister was. She gave Jill a short bow. "Okay."
She grabbed Nicole's hand, gave her father a farewell nod of her head, and turning to Zypheria, said, "Stay here. See that Alex and Kaffia get back safely. We will return this evening."
Zypheria looked out at the horizon. "Please don't go far, milady, and don't stay out too late."
Kassandra nodded, smiled innocently. "I won't go far or do anything crazy." She went overboard, pulling Nicole with her.
"Hold on tighter, Nic. We're going to be moving."
The water rocketed past, and Nicole closed her eyes, trying to nod her head, hanging on to Kassandra with both arms, her fingers clutching at her shirt.
They hadn't gone very far before Kassandra's voice came in filtered, tinny sounding. "What is that shit in the water?"
Nicole gave her a muffled wad of noise, trying to get the words past the rush of currents. Kassandra seemed to understand her anyway.
"There's a container ship coming up, dumping something in my ocean. Hang on."
Nicole gave her another garbled question.
"We're going to give them something they'll never forget." Kassandra sped up, streaks of cold blowing by them. There was a booming noise in her wake, and a roar of violent water following them. They shot under the ship, swinging deep and then Kassandra arched her back and, pulling Nicole with her, jumped into the light, through the surface, straight up the dark painted hull of the ship, twenty meters out of the water.
Nicole screamed.
The deck crew scrambled toward shelter, alarms blaring. The captain managed to turn the ship into the wave—a giant violent wall of water. The deck was drenched; water rapped like fists across the control room windows. Seven containers crashed into the central aisle along the deck, bolts sheered, two eighty-ton steel boxes went through the fore hatch, cutting another container in half, crushing palleted boxes in the hold. The ship listed to starboard on the clear side of the wave, and the horns blared obnoxiously, the captain ordering reports.
The starboard side door of the control room banged open and Kassandra walked in, trident leaning over her shoulder, seawater running off her. She pointed at the captain, pinning him to the back wall.
"This is my ocean. You move on its surface by my leave. Every wave, every drop, every tide is mine."
She made a fist. All the windows in the room blew out.
"Dumping garbage and other shit in my ocean!" She brought up her hand, pushed the captain up the wall. He made wet nail-scraping sounds in his throat. "If I find you out here again and you've fucking spit in the sea, I'll...you don't want to know what I'll feed you to." She let him go, and he dropped inelegantly to the floor. She tore off his hat, winged it out the open door, past Nicole who dodged it. "Do you understand me?"
The man nodded slowly, and Kassandra strode across the room, grabbed Nicole's hand at the opposite door, and pulled her into a dive over the railings, another thirty meter drop into the roiling dark sea. When the captain made it to his feet, shoving a lieutenant aside to get to the rail, the two of them were gone. He looked down into the foam streaked cold blue, pockets of ink black shadow, he saw his captain's hat tossed up the face of a wave.
Chapter 24 - The End of the World
Nicole closed her eyes and held on tight, a whirring noise like a dentist's drill in her ears, a chill she hadn't felt since Lady Kallixene had given her the seaborn curse, not the water, but a slow ooze of an icy gel over her skin, slipping along her arms, her stomach, down her legs. Her toes stiffened reflexively.
They weren't exactly in the water anymore. They were between it.
She tried to lift her eyelids, caught a stab of light and shut them; the afterimage burned onto the inner screen in her mind, a steep angled view of Kassandra, her jaw line, the smooth arch of her throat, her eyes open but narrowed with purpose, one side of her mouth turned down, her lips pressed tight with the strain. And the thought, my sister's a goddess, repeating in Nicole's head, a mantra to keep her organs functioning, her heart beating, her lungs swelling. Her stomach lurched and she caught the acid before it reached her throat.
"You're doing well, Nic." Kassandra's voice came through faint and tinny, like hearing her through a mile of metal irrigation pipe. Then a sharp laugh. "Bachoris heaved his guts out after a minute of this."
Nicole did everything she could do to hang on, fingers going numb, holding on to Kassandra like she was the edge of a world, and falling off meant oblivion. Then a faint hope that the journey was near its end. A glow coming through her eyelids, wavering light, cold blue, warming to orange with a blast of air against her face, and the bobbing sensation of a calm sea's surface.
"Open your eyes." Kassandra peeled her sister's fingers off her arm, curling them back into place but without the dear-life grip.
Nicole emptied her lungs, blinked away more water, looking up at towers of glass, sleek mirror framework skyscrapers on her left, a long arching span of a bridge, black metal centered in her view against the sky, green hilly urban beauty on her right.
She sucked in a deep breath, shifting her heart and lungs back into normal rhythm after the journey between the water.
"Where are we?" Nicole's gaze sliding farther left, gasping when she saw the concentric white conic shapes of the Sydney Opera House. "Australia." She let the sound of her own voice sink in. "Holy shit, you've taken me to Australia."
"I come here all the time, mainly to think. Sit on the rocks under Fort Denison and ...look up at the city. And think."
"You don't need a passport. You can go anywhere."
"I do. Tokyo Bay is gorgeous, New York is one of my favorites, and Alcatraz Island with San Francisco right in front of you is right up there."
"Do they ever see you, surfacers I mean?"
Kassandra shrugged. "Sometimes."
"What do you do?"
"Nothing usually. They stare. I ignore them."
Nicole scowled at the smile pulling at her sister's lips. She shook her head. "You don't do the whole mermaid thing? Comb your hair? Sing songs on the rocks?"
The smile came right out in the open. Kassandra looked over at her, made her eyebrows jump. "Only for sailors."
Nicole laughed and climbed out of the surf, mild rolls of it against her legs. "What time is it?"
Kassandra looked over her shoulder, the sun coming in low. "Early in the morning, guessing seven or eight. Don't worry about the time. We're fine."
They sat on the rocks
, kicked their feet in the water, talking for an hour about their school days, old teachers, how everyone thought they were weird, how it didn't matter. A ferry passed apparently without any of the passengers noticing them.
Nicole sighed, elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, watching the bands of sunlight come up across the shiny office towers. "Beautiful."
Kassandra leaned forward, got to her feet, and held out her hand. "Let's go. I want to show you a couple more things before we head home."
Nicole swallowed. "How far?"
Kassandra reached down and pulled her to her feet. "Not as far as the last trip. You'll love this. Really just a quick stop to get ready for the main part of our journey."
"Ready for what?"
"You never know. Come on."
They were under the waves, releasing the air in their lungs, taking in the sea, feeding off its power, kicking smoothly into the dark center channel of the harbor. Kassandra swung in, grabbed Nicole, hooked her fingers under her arms, and they were gone, ripping through the ocean, between the currents, inside the smooth cold channel they had followed to the other side of the world.
Teeth rattling, Nicole clamped her mouth closed, trying not to bite her tongue, trying to shut her mind against the intrusions of sharp noise and the icy slippery fluid against her skin. They were slowing down, bright blue waves of light, and they fired out of the water. Blinding blue sky, water below them—everything below then—almost black. They flew fifty feet straight up over the churning sea, leaning back and coming down knee-bending hard on a steep, nearly vertical plane of pale blue ice.
Nicole opened her eyes, gargled out most of the water, and managed a choked scream.
Kassandra held her lips like she was whistling, and let the sea in her lungs stream out, laughing when she was done. "Sorry. I should have warned you. Do not let go of me, hold my hand. Just a quick safety stop." Kassandra unlocked the fingers of her left hand from Nicole's, tightening the grip on her right to make it clear that she wasn't going to let go.
"The ice?" Nicole gasped, her eyes wide in terror. "Why aren't we falling?"
"Ice is water. It wouldn't dare let me fall." Kassandra squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them, let out a deep breath, and slapped her free hand in the middle of Nicole's back. "Or my sister."
They both tipped forward, but kept their feet, and Kassandra's smooth yellow striped armor with the blue at the joints, slipped around Nicole's body, protecting her from the neck down. Kassandra scrunched up her lips thoughtfully. "If you need a helmet, I'll grab it. Otherwise, I think this is fine."
Nicole looked down, bending her knees, trying to get a feel for what the armor was doing—it was active, not like any kind of clothing she had ever worn. It was almost weightless, a smooth current always running through it, anticipating her motion and bending with her. It picked up her breathing, expanding with the swell of her lungs. "This is your armor?"
Kassandra nodded. "Made it myself, with a little help from Eupheron. I grew tired of the crab carapace suit, nice, but a little too showy—and spiky for my taste. Like wearing high heels. They just aren't me. So, I've left it for someone who'll make use of it."
Nicole's gaze drifted up her own legs encased in armor, then, distracted by the blue ice, lifted to the horizon. "Where are we now?"
"Antarctica. Give me your other hand." Kassandra jutted her chin to the left. "The Weddell Sea is that way."
She grabbed Nicole, gave her an amused smile, and stepped off the edge of the ice ridge into open air.
"Point your toes, Nic."
Nicole bit back a shriek, and found it hard to breathe, the wind whistling by her face, her braids standing straight up, and Kassandra laughing through it all, "Let's stop by the Nine-cities and see what my asshole granddad's up to, shall we?"
They hit the dark waves. Arctic water swallowed them whole, a rush of bubbles shattering, soft mirror fragments flipping past their faces, slowing, then flowering around them with blasts of light from above shooting into the sea.
Kassandra took both of Nicole's hands, spun them around, and they shot into the deeps, slipping along mountain ranges for hundreds of miles, slowing down across sandy flats toward a globe of cold blue white fire hanging in the dark, lighting the city and the surrounding ocean floor like a sun in the abyss.
"Helios' Twin," whispered Nicole. "It really is like our star...at the bottom of the sea."
The Nine-cities of the Thalassogeneis was nothing like Nicole had ever seen on the surface, in games, virtual worlds, anywhere, but it was like pieces out of all of them at once—along with some otherworld influences that raised the hair on her neck in their creepiness: fluid walls, spidery liquid webs, and other sense-jarring organic structures. There were familiar old world shapes. Huge walls with brooding corner towers and then there were floating cities—cities within the city bristling atop long slender wedges of rock the size of Manhattan turned on its end, all floating—mid water—above rows of dark globular structures that could have been houses, alongside ancient looking columned temples and ovoid glassine things with no obvious function. There were miles of farmlands, long even rows of short stalked plants, towering forests of kelp, colorful branching soft corals.
Kassandra pointed out a cluster of tiny darting black and white bullets in the water, orcas and riders, outsea guards on the lookout for unusual visitors.
"Like us."
There were more killer whales and teams of dolphins in the fields, pulling barges loaded with farm hands and baskets of whatever they had picked.
"Calm down." Kassandra felt Nicole tense up as they dipped to the floor, skimmed the sand, drawing nearer.
"Someone's going to see us."
"Like you and me can't handle that. Let me show you something." Kassandra tugged Nicole away from the city, swinging her underneath so that they both faced the ocean's floor. Several miles out from the massive front gates of the Nine-cities, Kassandra pointed out faint furrows in the sand, long snaking rows of them, like someone's tracks through snow, covered by a following storm.
"What is it?"
"That, dear Lady Nikoletta, is my army tunneling through the sand. Three-thousand of the dead, clawing out underground passageways." Her voice tightened. "I can feel them from here."
Nicole shuddered. "Good?"
Kassandra tugged her around to face her, caught her eyes and smiled, one side of her mouth twisting higher than the other. "Very good."
They headed back to the city, skirting the walls low, raising alarms at every corner tower. Nicole watched as soldiers on orcas bolted after them from shielded chutes in the outer wall. Kassandra just laughed, waving as they rocketed past the massive front gates of the city, picking up an entire team of riders in full armor, lances down in pursuit.
She cut another laugh short, looking over her shoulder at one soldier darting off in the opposite direction, presumably to catch them coming around the other side of the city—which would be miles. She shifted sideways and they angled up, spiraling the clear glistening dome of the King's Protection, the thick see-through shell over the entire city. She let go of Nicole's left hand as they came around the central spires of the royal fortress at the apex.
Kicking from his private quarters at the peak, King Tharsaleos, waved half his trusted Eight to their orcas to the nearest gate. The other four stayed with the king, taking up positions in a half circle around him.
Kassandra slowed to a smooth glide, catching Nicole's right foot on top of hers, swinging her sister to her side, legs braced apart, both of them facing in toward the king and his guards. She laughed, "I'm coming to get you."
Nicole gave the ruler of all the seaborn several vigorous jabs of the finger. Kassandra touched her tongue with one finger and let it slide along the hot charged surface of the King's Protection, trying to feel what it was made of.
She glanced right and swung Nicole around her back, picking up speed along the slow curve of the doming spell. "Nic, take the reins, hold on, head north
. I'll catch up in a sec."
Nicole turned her head. "What reins?"
A flash of teeth, pink gums, a huge glossy eye an inch from her own, twisting in the water, killer whale black and white, and she hit the saddle, rammed her tailbone against the base of the dorsal fin, and lost her grip on her sister.
She dug in, swinging the orca north, and over her shoulder spotted Kassandra flipping end over end, wrestling with the former orcaman. Above her, a charge of orcas and riders along the high glistening face of the King's Protection, lances out, coming for her. Nicole urged her mount faster, Andromache shouting commands in her head.
Nicole slid low along the orca's body, dozens of soft plinking sounds at her back, crossbows firing. At a command from Andromache, she reached down and yanked the reins right, the killer whale dropping out from under her. She nearly flew from the saddle, a burn up her forearm, her fist shaking. Her killer whale went into a spiral dive, and a flight of bolts ripped through the water over her head. One winged past her ear, another caught her center in the back, nothing more than a sharp knuckle rap against her spine through Kassandra's armor.
She twisted around, tugged a crossbow free. It was loaded. She steadied her arm, aimed and fired, caught someone's feet flipping into the gloom before she bent to reload. One more. No more than another shot before they'd be on her, closing from all sides. She wrenched the mechanism back, jammed in a bolt, aimed and fired. Took out another one.
She took her time, loaded the weapon. No time to fire. Two orcas dashed alongside, and Nicole jumped from her squatting position, spinning backward, using her momentum to swing the crossbow into the rider on her right, caught her with the butt in the face. Out of the race.
Another orca closed for the kill.
The archer on the left pulled the trigger point blank, a thump like a fist in the ribs shoved Nicole to the front of her saddle. It hurt, but didn't get through the armor. Nicole bent forward over the pain, slid the crossbow across her lap, gasped, "sorry," and put the bolt through the saddle on the orca, not enough kill it, but it would be too angry and uncomfortable to keep up.
