The last sensation isn’t so pronounced.
I don’t feel it right away.
But when I look to Dorian, I can feel it like a weight upon my chest, driving the air from my lungs, pressing inward upon me, crushing me, deafening me, blinding me. Everything feels like drowning. Or falling. Or freezing. All of it at once. There’s a terrible longing. I’m looking for something that I know should be there, but it’s not there. And when I realize it’s not there, that I’ll never be able to reach out and touch it again, everything settles into a deep black. It’s emptiness. As far as I can feel. And somehow that’s more terrifying than everything else.
I’m shaking.
It’s going to pull me under.
“That’s probably enough,” Lydia says, taking the needle from the record. The haunting music stops and the weird feeling disappears. I snap back to me, the strange sensation of everybody around me falling away all at once.
“What… the… hell?” Dex blurts bluntly.
“That was… I don’t know what that was,” Tori says, her eyes full of wonder.
Dorian is looking at me, unblinking. The tattoos on his neck writhe angrily.
“What happened?” I ask him. “I could feel… something.”
“I’m going to call it an early night,” Dorian announces, ignoring me. “Never really liked that song, anyway.” And with that he slips himself back into his wheelchair and rolls down the deck toward the float-tube.
“What’s his deal?” Dex asks Lydia.
“He prefers we not speak about it.” Lydia purses her lips and shrugs, slipping down onto the spot Dorian vacated.
“Dex?” Tori says, setting her hand on Dex’s knee. “I felt… well, what are you afraid of?”
Dex looks to me and I nod back. So he tells Tori and Lydia about his crappy parents, and the thought of having to go back to Tempus instead of staying with us. Lydia’s skin ripples with a dark, mellow purple, roiling like a thunderhead with sparks of red. She pivots off the couch, stepping up onto and over the table, moving directly toward Dex. She kneels down slightly, taking his head in her hands, raising his chin to look at her.
“You will find a home with us as long as you need it.” She touches her lips to Dex’s forehead, leaving a wet patch on his skin. Then she turns away, walking slowly to the float-tube.
Dex is blushing furiously now, touching tenderly at the spot on his forehead. Mixy chooses that moment to lift the barrier to his dome, stepping down onto the Carnegie’s deck, where Tori, Dex, and I are still sitting together.
“Earth-Son,” Mixy says, coming to examine Dex. “Are you well? Your heartbeat is erratic. You are experiencing some sort of cardiac episode. Shall I send you to Lydia for medical attention?”
“No!” Dex shouts too quickly. “No,” he repeats, more quietly. “I’m, uh, fine. I’m good.”
Tori laughs at that. The sound of it seems to just melt the tension. I’ve never thought about how much I love the sound of her laugh.
Chapter Nine
The Carnegie is back in the Atlantic, charting a slow course to who-knows-where while Mixy and Dex get to work on decoding the Synthesizer chatter. Mixy’s room is more so a laboratory with a weird-looking nest of blankets tucked into the corner. Dex gets a wall of displays to himself. Meanwhile, Mixy works on one of the Carnegie’s other walls, which shapes symbols and numbers in a series of raised bumps or depressed indentations. Almost like braille. Mixy’s four hands and agile fingers fly over these in a flurry of motion as they work.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m the dumbest of Tori, Dex, and me. Dex has always tried to help me study, and Tori has always tried to help Dex try to help me study. She’s good at interpreting his jargon, half the time. Passing classes for me is proof of what The Beatles always said about getting by with a little help. But even though Tori is smarter than me, we both know that Dex is light years ahead of us.
Watching Dex work with Mixy makes me feel like Dex has never had a conversation on his level before. They use words I don’t understand to describe concepts that are way over my head. Dex comes alive, and his words race just to keep up with the thoughts flitting through his mind. Mixy responds in kind, babbling, sometimes not even in complete sentences, but they seem to understand each other well enough.
They keep me around because, hey, somebody has to keep the coffee coming.
I try to make myself useful, but sometimes it’s just hours of watching those two mumbling like crazy people as they try their umpteenth permutation of whatever software they’re working on to crack the Synthesizers’ code. It gets boring.
Tori and I look at the fish sometimes. Lydia turns the Carnegie’s cargo hold entirely transparent for us. The walls tend to shimmer a bit, but otherwise it’s like looking straight out into the ocean. It’s incredible. Lydia loves the ocean too, and explains to us how her people evolved as amphibious bipeds due to their coastal habitats repeatedly flooding. Once in a while we’ll see a shark, curious about the Carnegie’s vibrations. Once, we see a pod of whales.
I talk to Mom once a day.
She tells me how they arrived at the Biblioteca Marciana looking for a book, but that the book had been rotated into storage about five years ago. They ended up paying an administrator €50,000 for access into the storage facility, only to find that the old stocks weren’t properly catalogued. That meant nights upon nights of digging through inventory, looking for the one box that might hold the one book that might have a secret message from Mr. Patel’s old friend who might still be alive.
We talk about other stuff, too. She tells me about the food. About the people. About the energy of Venice. She and Dad used to travel a lot, and I think she always missed it. She did her tours, too, but she doesn’t like to talk much about where she went or what she saw during those years. I tell her about my days aboard the Carnegie, not that there’s much to tell, and for the most part life just seems stalled.
For a week, I don’t even see Dorian. When I do, it’s by accident. Dex and Mixy send me to medical to find some sort of adrenal stimulant that they plan on adding to their coffee to give them an extra boost. I tell them that sounds like a good way to have a heart attack, and Mixy assures me that even if one of his hearts stop, he has two others that can pick up the slack. Dex seems a little less on-board by that point.
I walk into medical to find Lydia studying Dorian’s legs. He’s sitting on a bench wearing the ugliest pair of Hawaiian swim trunks I’ve ever seen, clashing terribly with the light red shade of his skin. His legs are scarred terribly, high ridges and deep valleys stretching from exposed knee down to bare toes. Lydia’s fingers are probing at the skin while Dorian winces with pain.
“What do you want?” he asks brusquely.
“Mixy sent me up to get something,” I say. “Sorry, I’ll come back.”
“Looks gnarly, right?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I nod, taking that as an invitation to stay a moment longer. “Pretty gruesome.”
“Check it out,” he says, and with a bit of movement, the skin on his scarred legs moves slightly, rearranging and smoothing out. Dark-lined tattoos take shape on the skin, matching those on his exposed torso, neck, and arms.
“You can control it that well?”
“Chameleon-man,” Dorian laughs, but I can see there’s no humor behind it. “And if you think that’s gruesome…”
I watch his skin shift again, this time over the face, neck, chest, and arms, too. The tattoos fade away and the smoothness turns to the same web of scars, some wide, some thin, some patchy and rough. He’s covered from head to toe.
“The Synthesizers did this to you?” I ask.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time, Caleb,” Lydia explains. “One time the Synthesizers hit me so hard that I had to be carried around in a bucket for six weeks.”
“Don’t feel bad for me,” Dorian points to my left hand, with its weird, forking scar stretching down to the tips of my fingers. “At least I can control how I
look. You’re stuck with that naked mole-rat of an arm from here on out.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say, tucking my hand into my pants pocket.
“Well, you’ve got nobody but yourself to blame for that one.” Dorian hops off the examination table onto his legs and Lydia helps support him. He wobbles for a moment before limping over to the doorway where I’m standing. He leans against the wall and looks at me, closely, intensely. “Mixy and Dex are doing their thing, kid. But we still have a lot of work to do.”
“Training?” I ask, expectantly.
“Training,” Dorian agrees, shouldering through the doorway. “Once we get there, of course.”
“Where are we going?”
He doesn’t answer me—just limps down the hallway to his quarters, whistling the chorus to Weezer’s “Island in the Sun.” He looks back at me before he disappears into his room, flashing a devilish smile. It doesn’t help that he looks pretty much like every picture-book demon, except for the Hawaiian shorts.
Weezer never scared me before this moment.
* * * * *
Mixy’s drumming turns into a snare-drum solo—precise, delicate, and intricate as he pilots the Carnegie through a series of rocky shallows. The dark blue of deep ocean is behind us, replaced now by the light blue of sun-soaked water. Tori, Dex, and I stand behind Mixy, looking out through the dome at the surface of the water above us. The sun beats down as a school of fish swirls about.
Eventually, Mixy brings the Carnegie up to a wall of rock that raises up out of the water. He traces the rock for several minutes as the water beneath us turns shallow, sand rising up from beneath the Carnegie. As the rock overhead juts out in a way that obscures the sun, Mixy slows the Carnegie with a hissing drum-roll. “We have arrived, Earth-Spawn,” he booms.
“Where have we arrived?” Dex asks.
“Training grounds for Caleb and Tori. A place where they can practice in isolation. A place where we can continue our work, free of Synthesizer interruption, for the moment.”
There’s a wash of bubbles from outside the dome as something drops into view outside the Carnegie. Lydia is there, pulsing brightly with a brilliant display of yellows, pinks, and greens as she smiles at us through the glass. She winks and blows a kiss at Dex, then plants her feet against the glass and kicks off. As she moves, her body elongates, thinning out as she propels herself faster than any Olympian through the water, toward the sandy shallows.
“Keep an eye on our Rez levels, Mixy,” Dorian says, startling me as he joins us on Mixy’s platform. “We don’t need the Synthesizers picking us up on a scan.”
“Monitoring,” Mixy confirms.
“Can we have a Resonator ordinance on the beach?”
“Aye.” Mixy stomps his bass-drum once. Something thumps inside the Carnegie and a moment later a torpedo-looking pod shoots by the dome, racing up toward the surface into the shallows.
“What was that?” I ask.
“Your Resonators,” Mixy says. “There are times when Composers do not have them readily accessible. The Carnegie possesses an adequate delivery system.”
“Your Resonator doesn’t like getting wet,” Dorian rolls his eyes. “Very persnickety, that way. Come on now.”
“Want to come?” I ask Dex.
“And do what? Work on my tan? No thanks. I’ve got math to do.” He says it like it’s some sort of a treat, like a kid with a new toy saying, And you can’t play with it! I shrug and follow Dorian and Tori to the float-tube. This time it sends us up another level, spitting us out right on top of the Carnegie.
Suddenly I’m breathing fresh air (I didn’t know I missed it so much!) and looking out over some sort of paradise cove. The rock overhang obscuring the Carnegie continues into a cliff face abutting the water and running up to a white-sand beach. Farther up the beach there’s a dense growth of tightly clustered, exotic-looking plants. Several hundred yards away, another high cropping of rocks forms the opposite side of the cove.
Something erupts from the water next to the Carnegie, flying upward in the air and spraying us all. With a shimmer of blue and yellow, Lydia lands atop the submarine. Her hair is entirely gone, but with a shake of her head it explodes outward in a wash of white. It stays puffed out like giant dandelion fuzz. “That humidity, though,” she sighs, satisfied.
“Sorry to cut the vacation short, but it’s time to kick the birds out of the nest.”
“Of course,” Lydia agrees.
“What’s that supposed to—” It’s all I get out before I feel Dorian’s foot planted firmly on my butt, pushing me forward. I yelp, tumbling forward and start to slide off of the Carnegie’s side. Then I’m down with a splash, sputtering as I break the surface, treading water in jeans and an old Transformers t-shirt.
“What the hell?!” I yell up at Dorian, but he and Lydia are preoccupied with Tori. She’s clinging to the lip of the float-tube exit with both hand, while Lydia and Dorian are tugging at her, one at each heel.
“No!” she screams at them. “Sharks! There could be sharks in there!”
“Oh grow up, there are hardly any sharks in there!” Lydia says.
I stop splashing so much. Lydia changes her tactics, going to Tori’s hands. Lydia’s hands go all liquid and she slips them around Tori’s. They come away together, Tori biting at Lydia’s arm, who laughs as Tori ends up with nothing other than a wet face. Then Lydia starts to spin. Tori squeals as her feet leave the ground, Dorian ducking as her feet threaten to knock him out. After a few quick rotations, Lydia lets Tori fly like some sort of weird human discus.
She gets impressive air before hitting the water with a loud smack.
I swim to her as Lydia and Dorian drop into the water behind me. Tori surfaces, letting loose with an inspired string of curse words that make Lydia and Dorian howl with laughter. “To the beach!” Lydia yells, paddling fast circles around us with newly webbed hands. “Before the sharks get you!”
Dorian churns past us, his legs trailing behind him while powerful arms propel him forward. Lydia powers past him toward the beach, leaving Tori and I to choke our way onto shore. It’s a lengthy swim, and I swallow a sickening amount of salt-water before I finally feel the sand beneath my feet.
Lydia and Dorian are already sitting on the beach, laughing together in the sun when Tori and I struggle up onto the sand. We’re both barefoot by then, having lost our shoes somewhere along the way. While I’m stuck with soggy jeans and a Transformers shirt, Tori has sweats and a faded Gargoyles shirt.
“I can fly and you make me swim!” Tori yells at them, furious.
“You’re afraid of heights, remember?” Dorian chides. “Besides, a little exercise is good now and then.”
“You guys were kidding about the sharks, right?” I ask nervously.
Lydia starts howling even louder with laughter, skin rippling in a rainbow of colors. Dorian starts laughing so hard he’s crying, pointing out to the water. I turn just in time to see a dark brown fin disappearing below the surface.
“You’re insane!” I scream.
“Give me my violin so I can kill you!” Tori screams from beside me.
Lydia scrambles to her feet, giggling as Tori goes chasing her around the beach. I fall onto the sand, exhausted. I can feel my heart racing. The sun overhead is warm on my face. The sound of Lydia’s laughter is bright, happy, like a bell.
Dorian’s shadow falls over me. “Those jeans can’t be all that comfortable. I put an extra pair of trunks in the ordinance, if you want?” He offers a hand to me.
“Sure,” I sigh, letting him help me up.
Tori has tired herself out by now, panting, with hands on her knees while Lydia spins cartwheels over the sand. I follow Dorian over to the torpedo-pod, which beached itself on the sand farther down-shore. It’s the same uniform white of the Carnegie’s interior. Dorian puts his hand to it and it opens with a hiss, sliding back to reveal everybody’s instruments and a regular-looking duffel.
“I picked them out
just for you.” Dorian riffles through the bag for a moment before pulling out a pair of trunks that he hands to me with a smug smile on his face. “You like ‘em?”
I unfold them, cringing as the trunks wave like the eternal banner of lameness that they are. They’re white trunks with kitten faces printed all over them, speech-bubbles coming from the various cat-mouths with phrases like, “Me-Wow!” and “Purrrfect Weather!”
“You enjoy tormenting people, don’t you?”
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bright spot in my life. Go get changed.”
“Where?” I ask.
“It’s a deserted island. Go behind a tree or something.”
Lydia comes dashing up to the pod to grab her own duffel before darting back toward Tori. “I have a suit for you too!” she yells happily. Tori trudges to meet Lydia with murder on her face.
I excuse myself to change out of my soggy jeans and into the swim trunks. I come back onto the beach a few minutes later to a round of applause from Dorian and whistles from Lydia.
Tori’s voice comes floating from somewhere in the brush a few minutes later. “What did you do with my clothes?!” she screams at Lydia.
“I fed them to the sharks while you were changing!” Lydia calls in return. “No backsies!”
“I hate you!”
“Come on out,” I assure her. “Your swimsuit can’t be any dumber than mine.”
Tori emerges, head and shoulders hung low in shame. I can’t help but laugh alongside Dorian.
“You win, Lydia,” he concedes.
Tori is dressed in a one-piece suit that’s light brown from the armpits down with a diamond pattern of darker brown lines crisscrossing the fabric. From the armpit up, the suit is dark green, with a neckline cut to look like a series of pointy leaves. The shoulders are giant, ruffled, and green. The overall effect is unmistakable.
Six Strings to Save the World Page 11
