Call Forth the Waves

by L. J. Hatton

  An intercom crackled overhead, grainy from the interference of the water.

  “We have assets out of containment,” announced Warden Dodge. “Remain calm. We have assets out of containment. Recapture protocols are in place.”

  The law of averages should have guaranteed that at least one warden was a capable leader, but Dodge was no better suited for her rank than Arsenic. She wasn’t just unobservant; she was an idiot. How did she expect to catch multiple hydrokinetics in open water while her facility filled up around her?

  “As a precaution, we are requesting that all personnel report to their preassigned evacuation points. Thank you.”

  She had all the urgency of someone reading morning announcements at an elementary school.

  Following the energy within the walls and floors, I was led down a sloping hall, but this section was no secret. The door displayed its penitentiary function proudly. The water was too heavy to pull against now; I had to melt the hinges and let the rising current swirl the door inside and out of the way.

  The first room was for the person guarding the prisoners. It was empty but equipped for a crew of eight, with emergency air tanks and skin suits lined neatly along the wall.

  Another door down and I was in the actual holding area, and able to hear the voices of people screaming for help.

  “I’m here!” I shouted. “Squint! I’m here!”

  “Penn? Is that you?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Third door!”

  I peeked in through the barred window. The tide had already lifted him off his feet and left him treading water.

  “What are you doing here, girl?”

  “Saving you, I think.”

  “Excuse me, but could we do twenty questions and the happy reunion scenes after you open the doors?”

  “Nagendra!”

  “Yes, and it’s lovely to see you, Penn, but if you don’t mind . . .” He had his face in the window of another cell, with his long, skinny fingers helping him pull up on the door.

  Unknown voices came from other cells, but I had no reason to believe they were any guiltier of real crimes than Nagendra or Squint. I couldn’t leave them to drown, either.

  I felt out the tumblers in the first cell and forced the lock. The door swung in, pried open by the water, and the occupant was churned out. He tried to run and swim at the same time, but managed to make it to the outer room. The remaining cells held both men and women, none of whom stuck around long enough for thanks or introductions.

  Nagendra bent down to let Squint climb onto his back. The water was shoulder high on me and up to his chest. Squint would have been in over his head.

  “I feel like I should ask about the jacket, but I’m afraid I won’t like the answer,” Nagendra said.

  “Made a deal with someone devilish. Needed something flame retardant for insurance,” I said. Details of Warden Nye’s involvement in their rescue would have to keep until later.

  “Good enough. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait, have any of you seen a child in here? A boy a little older than Birdie?”

  If the resurrection boy was here, I needed to get him away from the Commission, too.

  “There was a boy,” Squint said. “But I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  “Who is he?” Nagendra asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” I promised. “Jermay and the others aren’t going to believe I found you!”

  “Jermay?” Nagendra asked as we trudged toward the exit. It was getting easier to swim than to try to keep contact on my toes.

  “He survived the fall from the balloon; Winnie and Birdie, too. And Klok. We all made it.”

  “But Penn, we saw—” Nagendra started, but I cut him off, raising my hand in a backstage signal for silence.

  I felt the water change, a violent shift in its configuration that I didn’t understand until I heard breaking glass. The command deck was collapsing, its great window shattered, and with nothing to hold back the water, the ocean flooded in on top of us.

  “Hold on to something!” I shouted just before my head went under.

  Nagendra’s ridiculously long legs wrapped around the room’s support column. He held on to me and Squint until the surge ended. The chaos actually calmed me down. When things ran smoothly, I felt like I had to be prepared for the next disaster to come and knock me off my feet. Once everything had gone wrong, circumstances could only improve. Our situation couldn’t possibly get worse.

  We were lucky. Some of the fleeing prisoners had taken the guards’ air tanks, but there were three left. One for each of us. Each small enough to hold in one hand, with a strap to tie the mask tight around our heads.

  We swam up and out of the detention level through flooded halls lit by greenish emergency beacons. Equipment floated past, still in its packing boxes. A stash of ghostly lab coats fluttered down below, and my stomach dropped at the sight of pink streaks in the water. They looked suspiciously like the pink sand that had filled the Medusae tanks in Nye’s Center before it had turned to plasma gel when water was added. There was no time to deal with it; that particular genie was already out of its bottle.

  I guided Nagendra back to the lagoon so we could begin our ascent to the surface. I knew the transport would be gone; there was no reason for it to wait for me when the door couldn’t be opened underwater. But I hadn’t expected it to leave without one of the prospects it had delivered to the Center in the first place.

  Lawrence was drifting in a lazy circle with his face turned toward the ocean floor.

  I ripped the air tank off my head and wrapped it around his. Nagendra tried to wave me off, insisting that I needed the oxygen myself, but I didn’t. I could breathe without it.

  The problem was, Lawrence couldn’t breathe at all, and I couldn’t do CPR in the water. This wasn’t fair! There was supposed to be balance in the world! Death didn’t get to spit something like Arcineaux back and keep taking the good ones! I couldn’t save Evie, but I’d save Lawrence if it killed me. And honestly, given the idea that popped into my head, it might.

  Trying to shock someone in the water was insane, but without the possibility of chest compressions, a jolt was the only thing I could do. I signaled Squint and Nagendra to move back and tried to isolate a sphere of water tightly contained to the space around Lawrence’s body, pushing in a barrier of air so that the shock wouldn’t travel. I layered my hands over his chest and used the last fizzling generator from the Center to force a pulse through him.

  If the Commission could restart someone, then so could I.

  I gave Lawrence another shock and shook him. I jostled the mask over his face.

  When he didn’t come around, I told myself I’d give it one more try, and when that didn’t work, I gave it two. He breathed in. He had to take the mask off to spit the water from his lungs, but once they were clear, he was okay. He was disoriented, but he was alive and he was swimming.

  Lawrence put his hand to my face, over my mouth, like he was asking where my mask was. I pointed at the lagoon to tell him other things were more pressing.

  We had to go down, then up, around the edge of the Center, a near impossible distance for anyone without hydrokinesis or a dive suit. The cold had claws and fingers to scratch at skin and poke at eyes. The only light was from the Center itself, growing dimmer as its final generator died in the water. The flash of each explosion opened a brief window to see where we were going.

  Flash. Watch for rocks.

  Flash. We’re at the runway with its colored flags.

  Flash. Strange things lurking in the coral beds.

  “Go up,” I told them, gesturing toward the surface each time. We had to go up.

  Something was wrong. We had to swim slowly to avoid the bends on our ascent, but I was slowing down too much. My arms and legs were too heavy to move through the water. Up and down got mixed around.

  I breathed in, and it didn’t become oxygen. I choked on the scalding sting of liquid going i
nto my lungs.

  A twinge. A pinch. My body burned for lack of air.

  I was glowing again, incinerating from the inside out, luminous enough to cast my light into the depths and allow me to see something, someone, swimming my way. Fire in the water.

  “Evie?”

  The word wouldn’t come out, and my eyes were playing tricks. They went dark as everything else lightened.

  I was dying, and Evie was already dead. Maybe she got impatient waiting and came to help me along.

  “Hang on, Chey-chey,” her voice said. “Hang on.”

  I floated away.

  CHAPTER 30

  I woke gasping, with my arms thrashing in the air because I thought I was still under water.

  “Hey! She’s awake!”

  Winnie’s announcement drew a crowd to my bedside in a room I didn’t recognize, but I was fairly certain it was another hotel. An exceptionally nice hotel. Someone had convinced her to work her magic again. Klok was seated beside my bed, functioning as my medical monitor. When I tried to sit up, he shoved me back so he could check my vital signs.

  “Can you talk?” Jermay asked. He hooked my pinkie finger.

  Klok slapped our hands to separate them; we were messing up his numbers.

  “I saw Evie,” I said, weak and shaky. “And a mermaid. Wait . . . did I just say I saw a mermaid?”

  “Oxygen deprivation. You saw Nim and her dolphins, so it’s not too far off. She’s still out, by the way. Between the collars and the underwater demolition, all of the hydros crashed hard.”

  Hang on, Chey-chey. I’d forgotten how much my sisters sounded alike.

  “My touch cut out again. I didn’t have enough air to get to the surface.”

  “We kind of figured that part out.”

  “I am so sorry,” Winnie said. “We were all in the transport, and the driver wanted to leave without you, but Lawrence and Peter and Callie and I, we told him that he needed to wait as long as we could keep the door open without water getting in. But the guy freaked out and he was going to leave, so Lawrence went outside, thinking the driver wouldn’t leave while he was standing there, but he shut the door and took off and there wasn’t anything we could do. I tried to tell him to turn around, but the intercom was one-way. The driver’s compartment was completely isolated and he couldn’t hear me.”

  She hugged me so hard that she pulled me up off the bed.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes, it was. I got away and someone else got left behind. Just like with Birch.”

  “That wasn’t your fault, either,” Birch said. It was a touchy subject that neither one of them liked discussing; I hadn’t realized how guilty she felt for escaping Arcineaux’s Center. That was a lot of weight to drag around.

  Klok beeped at us, but there was nothing on his voice screen. He pointed at his wrist, to a watch that wasn’t there.

  “He’s instituted a strict four-second hug policy until you’re recovered,” Jermay explained. “He’s also started threatening me in strange and frightening ways on a daily basis. Any idea what that’s about?”

  I shrugged and tried very hard not to laugh at Klok’s attempts to be more brother-like without actually telling anyone that he was my brother. I wasn’t sure how long he wanted to keep the others in the dark, but I was sure he had his reasons for not telling. Anonymity had been his security blanket for a long time; things like that were hard to give up.

  “Is Lawrence okay?” I asked.

  “He was in the hospital yesterday, but he’s back home now,” Winnie said.

  Right. Because that’s where the normal people went when bad things happened. They went to their houses and their parents and their fluffy dogs. They didn’t have to scam their way into hotels or grow their own medicine because hospitals were too public, too exposed, and too dangerous. They didn’t have to pretend to be high-school students or live inside the identity of their maybe-not-so-dead twin or wonder if the brassy gryphon watching over them was really their father in a form he chose because it could protect them better. Those of us who were less mundane were the only ones who had to deal with gripey cyborg brothers beeping in our ear.

  “No one’s hugging anyone, Klok, so knock it off,” I said. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  He kept beeping.

  “That is not a hugging beep,” Klok explained. “That is a Squint-is-hungry beep. He has a remote, so I can be aware in any room. Also you should know that you are healthier than you look because you look like you nearly drowned and then slept for two days. Ha ha. Ha ha.”

  Teaching Klok to tell a joke. That was my next feat of derring-do. I wanted to hear him say it out loud with a voice box and not a keyboard. If I was truly my father’s daughter, then I could figure it out. One lousy knock-knock joke was all that I asked.

  The beep came again, and Klok left to answer Squint’s summons. My vitals must have been stable enough that he could afford to focus on the only real father he’d ever known.

  “Squint’s been eating since you broke him out,” Birch said. “I’ve never seen someone put away so much food.”

  There’d been no mention of Smolly, but if she’d been killed or captured, Klok would have given it away. He was too happy to be mourning his surrogate mother.

  Someone knocked on my doorframe and stood there hidden by a huge vase of pink and purple carnations. “Flowers for the lovely lady,” Nagendra said. If his stage-ready voice hadn’t given him away, his stork-stilt legs would have.

  “Seriously?” Jermay said to Birch. “I’m right here.”

  “Forget you,” Winnie said. “I’m right here.”

  “I am not responsible for those,” Birch said. He wisely held back from adding that any flowers he created would have been twice as big and three times as fancy.

  “Should we believe him?” Jermay asked Winnie slyly.

  “I say we beat it out of him.” She snatched the pillow from a chair.

  Birch jumped up and ran, while the other two chased him down in the next room.

  “These came to the door.” Nagendra set the flowers on the table beside the bed. “Should I be worried that someone knows you by name and knows where you are?”

  He plucked the card from the holder, displaying “Penelope” on the envelope. “1004” was written neatly in the bottom corner; I assumed that was our room number.

  “You opened it,” I said. The flap had been torn.

  “I wanted to see if it was signed. What I found was worse.”

  I pulled the card out, and a shower of gold glitter came with it.

  “Stardust,” I murmured.

  “I know what that word meant to your father, Penn. What does it mean to you?” Nagendra sat on the edge of my bed, a nightmare of a man to most people, but he couldn’t intimidate me even when he tried. “Why, the first time I saw you after the train, were you wearing Commission silvers? And why are you getting flowers with one of these?” He plucked the card from my hands and held it up between his fingers, turning it slowly from the front to the back. It was another of Warden Nye’s black business cards. The ankh on one side, and on the other a name: Errol Bakke.

  “Who is he?” Nagendra asked.

  I’d never heard the name before, but I knew he was the warden who had Vesper. I’d kept my word and destroyed the Sea Center; now Nye was keeping his and giving me the next bread crumb. This way, I’d be close in case he needed another favor.

  But I wasn’t telling Nagendra that. I’d been out on my own for over a month, and I wasn’t about to start jumping at orders again.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on my time with the Commission if you fill me in on yours.”

  He scowled, pulling the chains on his face tight with a clinking sound as they moved through their loops.

  “Didn’t think so,” I said. “I did what I had to do to survive. That’s the only explanation you get for now.”

  “Fine, we’ll change the su
bject. Winnie and Klok explained what happened to you after the train was sacked,” Nagendra said. “I’m familiar with the warden who tracked you down.”

  “Because you were assigned to Brick Street with him?” I countered.

  Nye had never named Nagendra as the partner who had been beside him when the riots broke out, but it was the only way the pieces of Nagendra’s history fit. He’d been Commission, he’d been on Brick Street, and he’d run as fast and as far from that life as possible once the dust cleared. Nye’s reminders were of blinding pain; Nagendra’s were the memories that continued to haunt him.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “I’ve seen your file,” I told him. “Warden Nye kept tabs on you the same way he did me and my sisters, but he didn’t tell me anything. I found out on my own.”

  A wall of mistrust had gone up between me and Nagendra, and I wanted it gone. He had never been a father figure in the traditional sense, but he was a mentor and a protector, and he was someone that I could have literally told anything to without fear of judgment. He had way too many skeletons clogging his closet to blame anyone else for their mistakes, and he’d always been brutally—some might say inappropriately—honest, without a filter in place to protect feelings. When he first sat down, I’d been so certain that all I had to do was ask and listen while he unraveled the tangled threads of my family’s legacy. He’d know all the things my father hid from me. He’d know about Klok, and my mother, and what side of the line Nye actually fell on. He’d know about Sister Mary Alban and Cyril Bledsoe and the people who helped them save touched children from the Commission.

  Nagendra had some of the subtlest movements of any man I’d ever seen. His expressions could be broken down into individual muscle twitches, each with its own meaning, and what the muscles around his eyes had to say wasn’t good. I saw grief for the loss of his beloved snakes and fear for what would happen to him now that The Show and its protection were gone. I could also tell that he was holding something back, and that scared me most of all.