by Tracy Korn
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Groups
1. Surfacing
2. Recovery
3. Signals
4. Bridging
5. Breathe
6. Paths
7. Seeing in the Dark
8. The Falls
9. Descending
10. Through the Wall
11. The Beginning
12. Center Hall
13. Reunion
14. The Circle
15. Vishan
16. Catching Up: Part One
17. Catching Up: Part Two
18. Origins
19. Layers
20. Coming Clean
21. Zephyrs
22. The Pier
23. The Path
24. The Test
25. Frequencies
26. Bonds
27. Perspective
28. One of Us
29. Fireproof
30. The Itch
31. Treatments
32. What I Feel
33. Waking Up
34. Do What You Can
35. Boundary Lines
36. Into the Storm
37. Threshold
38. The Rush
39. The Rainforest
40. After the Rain
41. Skeets
42. The Edge
43. The Bog
44. Burning Down
45. Tanglebush
46. Tunnel Shark
47. The Channel
48. The Freeze
49. The Cliffs
50. The Wind and the Chasm
51. Out of the Woods
52. The Bridge
53. Transcending
54. The Connection
Continue the Journey
Acknowledgments
About the Author
TERRA | Book Two
Copyright © 2016 by Tracy Korn. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
Cover Design Copyright © 2016 by James Korn
Photography by J.Korn Photographics
www.jkornphoto.com
www.TheElementsSeries.com
Edited by Ryan Bachtel and Rachel Carpenter
Summary: Getting out of Gaia Sur was almost as hard as getting in, but there's no going back now. Jazwyn Ripley and her friends have no choice but to venture into the caves and tunnels underneath the ocean floor as the messages they've been receiving from the earth's core get stronger. Tensions rise and loyalties are tested when another of their crew is captured along the way, and one critical choice means following unlikely allies down a path most would never dare—across the seven biomes of the "Rush"—which, if they survive, will either lead to freedom or imprison them forever.
In the center, the only way out is through.
For my mom, who always encouraged me to make my own path.
"I shall either find a way or make one."
~ Hannibal
CHAPTER 1
Surfacing
I hear the splash of my footfalls, but I can't see where they're landing as I force damp, heavy air into my lungs, then taste the tang of seawater on my lips. Wayward grains of sand scrape the inside of my cheek, and my chest tightens as the narrow stone walls of the tunnel seem to close in on me.
Stop tweaking…you have to stop tweaking, I tell myself, then crush the sand between my teeth as if this will prove that I can still control at least one thing between the flashes of what has happened over the last few hours.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the images, but they play too quickly backward to the beginning—to Pitt stepping into the zipper-like mouths of the undulating black creature that surfaced in the air bell…the lesions from the poisonous spores appearing on his neck after Tieg had to sever two of Pitt's fingers to free him from the Leviathan's docking gate just before that…just before the Leviathan self-destructed and launched us end over end toward the seafloor entry vent in the first place. Everything before then seems like a virtuo-cine—a role-play experience to escape everyday life—and maybe that's all the dream of getting into Gaia and making a future for ourselves ever really was.
I nearly fall as my boot slips on the slick tunnel floor, but Arco's arm tightens around my shoulder and steadies me. "We need to get to higher ground!" he shouts to Avis, who is at the front of our group. "Can you get a scan?"
"There's a system above this air bell!" Avis calls back to us. "We'll need to squeeze through up ahead where it's more stable, but then we're clear."
His voice seems far away, muffled somehow, and I wonder if this is what shock must feel like. The Leviathan actually imploded, which means Ms. Rheen and Mr. Styx had to figure out we were trying to escape from Gaia. Maybe even Dr. Denison and Mr. Tark too—maybe all the teachers just let us walk right into the trap like Liddick said. They knew we'd try to leave, but did they know why? Do they know we survived? I think, but when Liddick doesn't answer, I wonder if our telepathy still works out here.
The walls in this tunnel don't glow blue like the ones in the air bell. Instead, they're slippery like the ground and shiny in the light of our shoulder lamps, but this isn't because they're wet.
"These drips are alive!" Myra cries out a few feet in front of me as she sees the rivulets shifting directions and pulling away from the wall like they're reaching for us, each of them as if drawn by a magnet.
"Don't touch them! Just keep moving!" Ellis shouts back as he disappears through the opening ahead, and I can't bring myself to look at the slippery ground.
"Are you hurt?" Arco asks, pulling me away from the thousands of clear, gel-like worms trying to latch onto us. "You fell hard when Liddick shoved you through that crevice back there," he adds.
I try to focus on what's happening right now, but crite, an hour ago Arco was unconscious, and we were pulling him from the wreckage of the imploded Leviathan.
"I'm OK, are you? Are your nanites finished working?" I ask.
"Almost," he says with a cough, and my heart seizes.
"Arco...why did you cough? Pitt was coughing before the spores started to…" I trail off and grip the side of his dive suit as the panic swells in my chest, which only catapults when he winces in a whole body jerk and sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth. "Wh—? Is that your ribs?" I ask, my voice pitching. "Dez's scanner didn't pick up anything there when we brought you out of the Stingray…"
"It's OK," he tries to laugh as we get ready to duck through the opening that appears like a rip in the dark walls, which are now mercifully free of the water tube animals. "I've had worse from wrestling your gorilla brother," he says, gesturing to his side with a half smile. "Come on, we need to go in sideways. Keep your head level."
I take off my supply bag and push it through the fissure, then maneuver through the opening with Arco right behind me. On the other side, Avis stands to the right of a running stream in the dim, blue light of a glow rod someone has thrown to the ground while Ellis aims another blue light from his Nav system over the walls.
Avis angles the equipment on his arm toward the wall at his side, then waves us in. "There's a tunnel that winds up through that hole where the water is coming in, and one that winds down through where it's flowing out," he says, flipping the blue edged wing of black hair out of his eyes. "There must be a source pushing this current from above. We'll have to sync the sweep map with the terrain to see which route to take. With any luck, we won't have to go upstream."
"Here," Arco says, handing Avis the rectangular silver panel, which is embedded with the sweep map Pitt was able to save. Avis inserts it into his Nav system. "We'll stop for a while and rest, then start out fresh in the morning. Is everyone all right?" Arco cracks another glow rod against his leg, and the added blue light illuminates the rest of our group against a curved dark wall that bows out to our right. The cave seems to be the same striated rock as the other side of the opening we've all just come through, and every surface is smooth like beach stones.
"That water must have run all the way through here at one point," I say, retracting my glove and reaching for the stone, but I stop abruptly when Ellis shouts.
"Jazz! Don't touch that!" he warns as he reads something on his Nav screen. I jerk my hand away, startled, and wait for the explanation that he takes his time delivering. "All right, it's clean. Sorry, I had to make sure there weren't any spor—" he stops himself and darts a look at Dez and Tieg, "...that there weren't any toxins in here," he adds, pressing his thin lips into a line, and my stomach sinks with the realization that he's rewording because he doesn't want to add any reference of what happened to Pitt in front of them.
"Looks like we're heading down," Avis says with a sigh of relief. "We have about 18 miles to hike to get to the source of the messages. It's a tight squeeze for about 25 yards, but then it opens into a wider channel. We caught a break…for now," he adds before shutting down his Nav system and finding a spot to curl into against the wall near Ellis and the others.
Ellis crosses his long arms under his head and lies on his back a few feet away, but as tired and rattled as we all are, there is too much unsaid and unsettled for anyone to drift off. Dez sits next to Tieg in the blue light of the glow rods, tears streaming down her pale cheeks as she turns into her brother. He puts his arm around her, closing his eyes under a furrowed brow, and the sight of them in so much pain reaches into my chest and squeezes.
I look away from them only to see Myra standing just a dozen feet away, still hopefully watching the fissure for Pitt until Joss puts his hands on her shoulders and starts talking to her, his light eyebrows raised and his expression gentle. She starts shaking her head slowly after a second, then adamantly as he draws her against his chest, despite her pushing at him in denial of what he's evidently just told her: Pitt isn't coming back.
I start to go to her, but stop myself when Jax crosses behind Arco and me and takes a seat against the wall. He props his elbows on his knees, then clasps his hands behind his neck as he looks at the ground, and my stomach sinks.
"Jax..." I say, the weight of everyone's combined grief getting progressively heavier as we all start gathering in the same small space. I have to say something to alleviate it. "You did everything you could," I add, kneeling next to him and threading my arm through his.
"It should have been me," he says under his breath. "I should have gone back for the sweep map instead of him."
"That wouldn't have stopped him from getting his hand caught in the hydraulics," I whisper, careful not to let Dez or Tieg hear the details of their brother's accident recounted. "No one could have known when they would lock out during the self-destruct." I close my eyes against the memory of Pitt's scream over our helmet comms and the vision of him struggling to free his hand in the mouth of the Stingray gate as ribbons of blood wrapped all around him and Tieg, who finally ran out of options as the Leviathan's self-destruct counted down.
Arco moves behind me to clap a hand on Jax's shoulder. I feel his other hand slide over my back as Myra takes a step toward us with Joss, then sits down with him, her Empath projection abilities saturating everything with a suffocating grief. Liddick must feel it wash over too because he immediately tries to offset it.
"Myra…I'm so sorry," he nearly whispers, his expression wrenched as he takes a seat next to her against the charcoal colored stone wall, and for the briefest of seconds, I feel a flutter of relief.
"He said he was fine. He said he would be right behind us," Myra says, flashes of a still hopeful smile interrupting the quivering of her lips.
"He wanted to make sure you'd be safe," Joss says, angling his chin down to catch her wide blue eyes. When she looks up at him, he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close before leaning his head against the wall behind them. She's so small and fragile looking sitting with him like this, especially when her tears begin spilling over her cheeks, and her nearly invisible brows draw in just before she tries to speak again.
"That's why he wouldn't kiss me—why he wouldn't even let me get close to him just before he sent us on?" she asks, almost to herself. Joss takes a deep breath and nods, pushing one hand through his nearly white blond hair, which seems to glow against the dark rock in the dim, blue light.
"He didn't want there to be any chance that you could get infected too," he says, looking down over her and wiping her tears away. She curls into him as both hers and Dez's sobs break free, and the already heavy air in the little cave begins reverberating in my teeth. I glance at Liddick, his eyebrows drawing together and the muscles in his jaw tightening against the thrum, as he said Ms. Reynolt called it—this static of everyone's emotions mixing all at once.
Liddick…I think as he scrubs his hands over his face, then meets my eyes. His are stormy and desperate as he presses his lips together into a hard line and swallows, then pulls in a deep breath like he's going to dive into the stream and swim as far away from here as he can.
In this minute, despite whatever I've decided about being more than friends with him, the relief that he can still hear my thoughts is so strong that it holds back the anxiety rushing at me from everywhere else. It makes me want to go to him because he's the only other person who can feel the chaos like I can, and I want to hold onto him through the storm of it just like when he kissed me after his port-carnate debacle—when it felt like we'd jumped off a cliff without fearing the fall because there's a comfort in knowing that however scary something is, at least there's always this connection…this one solid thing that reminds us we're not alone.
Instinctively feeling all this when things spin out is also infuriating, though, because I've already made the decision about being with him. It's not fair to Arco, it's not fair to anyone who cares about me, and crite it would be great if everything inside me would jack in with that.
I squeeze my eyes shut again and press my palms against them like I'm trying to hold this perspective in place long enough for it to stick, but I look up again when Jax stands abruptly. He walks to the little stream across from us to put a gloved hand in the water to refill his suit's desalinator. Arco's arm moves around my shoulders and pulls me toward him as Dez starts talking.
"He tried to flush Pitt's wounds when we first surfaced...when I was prepping the disinfectant," she says in an absent voice that cracks at the edges while she watches Jax. "He must have used all his water." Her head falls to Tieg's shoulder, and he closes his eyes in a long blink, then swallows hard.
"I should have looked for another way…found a tool or something to force his hand loose," Tieg says after a minute. "I'm so sorry, Dezzie."
She looks up at him and shakes her head as she opens, then closes her mouth, seemingly unable to gather the right words to let him know that she doesn't blame him for their brother's death.
"It was already too late by then," she manages, and I feel her frustration with herself rising in desperation to say something to help ease his guilt. Liddick must sense this too because he steadies himself and starts to lean in toward them.
"It was the only choice you had, Spaulding. He knew there was no other way out. But you gave him a chance to say goodbye. He wouldn't have had that without you," Liddick says. Tieg lowers his head at this, and a wave of grief pushes up through me like a geyser, then stops hard as my throat constricts and seals off the pressure like a hose suddenly bent in half. In the same second everything inside me shifts, and Tieg explodes onto his feet.
"We never should have helped you in the first p
lace!" he growls, taking quick, purposeful strides toward Liddick, who doesn't have enough time to get completely to his feet before Tieg shoves him back into the stone wall. "None of this is our problem! We shouldn't even be here!" he shouts, taking advantage of his leverage and squeezing Liddick's throat with one hand, the other gripping the front of his dive suit and pinning him in place. Liddick struggles to push him off, but between the angle of the hold and Tieg's Skyboard select gene pool making him even more densely muscled than Jax and Joss, while Liddick, like Arco, is lean like a swimmer, he can't free himself.
"No!" I yell, but don't even realize it until I'm on my feet and rushing toward them.
"Tieg, stop!" Dez screams from somewhere in the distance, which is how everything sounds until my air is forced out of my lungs when an arm hooks around my stomach and pulls me off my feet, then puts me back on the ground. Arco flies in front of me with Jax quickly following, and together they pry Tieg away from Liddick. Tieg is so upset it takes both of them to hold him in place as Liddick coughs and gasps to regulate his airflow.
"Pitt's dead because of you!" Tieg shouts again, lunging against Jax and Arco, who have his arms pinned behind his back. "Because of all of you!"
"Tieg! It's not their fault! It's no one's fault. He wanted to help them find their family and their friends—our friends!—and so do I," Dez says, now at Liddick's side examining his throat. "Are you OK?" she asks, her voice cracking as she moves her long fingers over his face and neck. Liddick nods, leaning over to brace against his knees as he coughs again.
"It's all right. I'm all right," he whispers, straightening. Ellis and Avis have moved to help Arco and Jax, but Tieg doesn't stop struggling until Jax puts both his huge hands on Tieg's shoulders, locking him down on the wall.
"Listen to me! This isn't helping anything! Remember when you told me that after Fraya disappeared in the cave with Vox? I know how you feel, but this isn't helping. Blaming people just makes it worse," Jax says, looking him in the eyes as Tieg breathes through his teeth. "What happened to Pitt is no one's fault, do you hear me? No one's fault, all right?" Tieg clenches his jaw and looks away, but Jax shakes him and angles his head to line up their eyes again. "All right?"
