by Starla Night
And the date said several months had passed since she’d descended to Atlantis, putting home in midwinter.
Time dilation, Balim had called it.
Had Starr made much progress? She hoped everyone was okay. The journey through the undersea world had taken longer than she’d realized.
“Operate the satellite internet,” the general ordered.
She eased Balim into one of the cushy seats and perused the mysterious instrument panels. “Which one controls that?”
“You are the human.”
“I can read. But I can’t understand most of these labels. I’ve never sailed on a boat.”
“Do not defy me!” He lifted his trident to Balim’s throat.
Balim closed his eyes and stiffened.
Bella felt so helpless. Balim was sick. She was imprisoned aboard an abandoned boat and held hostage by an unpredictable, violent, drugged general who didn’t seem entirely sane. He was, hands down, the worst client she’d ever worked for.
Although he had yet to kidnap her child. So he was only second-worst.
What was wrong with her? Why was she able to cut off her emotions and have these ironic thoughts when Balim’s life was on the line?
Her chest blazed. Because that was her strength. She could focus even when her loved ones were in a life-and-death fight. She could feel happiness and sadness and myriad other emotions. I’m okay.
“Operate it,” the general ordered through clenched teeth.
“I told you, I can’t.” She lifted her chin. “You drove in a car. Did you learn how to drive?”
“The metal car drove itself.”
“So, no. Don’t be unreasonable. Sailing a giant metal boat isn’t an intuitive life skill. I don’t even know which button to push to turn it on.”
The general lowered his trident. “How do I communicate I have upheld my vow?”
“Let me see…” She finished inspecting the deck and rummaged around in the pockets of the jackets the crew had left hanging over chairs next to opened cans of soda and half-eaten sandwiches. A square metal cell phone was her reward. She pulled it out. “Hold your breath.”
General Giru eyed her suspiciously. “Why? Is it poisoned?”
“If I can guess the password, we can call anyone.”
“How does holding breath assist with your guess?”
“It’s just a figure of speech.” She pressed the power button to wake it. “Here we…”
The phone showed a music player screen with the message, Trusted device nearby. Safety lock disabled.
Huh. Secret government contractors who’d set their phones to stay unlocked when trusted devices were nearby? Starr would love that.
She closed the music player and dialed, waited for it to connect, and prayed.
“I can release my air?” General Giru asked faintly, still trying to hold his breath and talk.
“Yes. Sorry. It’s fine.”
He breathed out.
How trusting.
The dial tone stopped.
Shoot.
“MerMatch,” a clear female voice said confidently over the bridge loudspeaker, making them jump. “Hazel speaking.”
“Hazel, it’s Bella.” Her heart thumped hard.
“Bella! Oh my god, I was just leaving the office, I almost didn’t pick up the phone! Where are you?”
“A ship in the Indian Ocean,” Bella said. “And right now, I’m afraid it’s a plague ship.”
“Stop this conversation.” General Giru lifted his trident once more to threaten a half-conscious Balim. “Contact Hercules.”
“Who’s that?”
Bella looked at the general.
He straightened his spine. His pupils had returned to normal size, and he was showing the strain of whatever injury had caused him to demand medicine from Great Healer Dalus.
“I am General Giru, Second General of the All-Council armies. You will obey my orders, or I will eviscerate your friends, starting with the false healer Balim.”
“E-eviscerate?” Hazel’s tone edged into panic. “What? Bella? Are you okay?”
“For the moment.” She kept a smooth, soothing lilt in her voice. “We just need to contact the Sons of Hercules.”
“But how? We don’t know—”
“I’m sure we do know.” Bella smiled tightly at the general and then gazed at the intercom as she held the phone to her ear. “We didn’t know how to call off this boat and now I’m talking to you, so it’s a similar manner of working through the problem. Contact our contacts.”
“Oh. Um. Oh. God. Okay. Here’s, uh, here’s Dannika.”
The phone clattered, making them jump again, and Dannika’s concerned voice took over the line.
“Bella, we’re so glad to hear from you. You’ll be pleased to know that Faier was found unharmed. He’s even found his own bride. She’s a—”
“Don’t tell me too much. We’re on a party line.”
“Yes, of course. I’m making conversation while Hazel contacts someone who can help with your problem. General Giru, you said? I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”
The chiseled general did not answer. Dark shadows around his eyes and hollow cheeks sickened his expression. He straightened by sheer force and looked as though he preferred to hunch over as Balim did.
“You do know him a little,” Bella said, also trying to keep the conversation easy. “He’s the one who entered the mer hospital and infected everyone.”
“How very brave,” Dannika murmured. “He didn’t worry about infecting himself?”
Oh.
Ohhhh.
“I think he did infect himself,” Bella murmured.
He fixed on Bella for a long, hard moment. “I am a general of the All-Council. I do not collapse from weakness. The warriors of Oannes Field fought to death during their sickness. I will do no less.”
“Bella, Hazel has almost connected you to your Starr,” Dannika said, accidentally revealing her half sister’s name. “Just hold on one—”
Clink.
Another voice intercepted the call and boomed through the loudspeaker. Not quite male, not quite female, and masked with computer distortion.
“What idiot forgot to abandon ship? Report to the bridge to be mocked by your superior.”
General Giru straightened. “Hercules.”
“Yes? Who’s forgetting passwords and locking themselves out of their workstations instead of jumping overboard and paddling away like a little pup?”
“And what do we need to flee, Herc?”
A surprised pause ensued, and then strange admiration. “Why, Bella Taylor. Imagine you showing up on my condemned secret lab ship. You are more resourceful than I gave you credit for.”
Her stomach soured, and fury filled her. “So are you. I assume this is the government lab you used to study the Life Tree blossom.”
General Giru frowned. “Life Tree blossom?”
“Government?” He guffawed. “Private sector! The government pays so much more for the same biological weapon if it’s developed by a company with black folders to contain its communiques.”
“Packaging is everything,” she agreed.
“Of course you understand. It really has been wonderful working with you, Bella Taylor. If only you had been more competent at your assigned task.”
“You’re the one who got impatient. You blew that poison vial, didn’t you? I could have gotten you that blossom.”
“I gave you weeks. You were betraying us. Don’t deny it.”
“The Life Tree doesn’t blossom like a cherry tree. The last one was heavily guarded. And if you were thinking of synthesizing it into a cure, your premise was a mistake. Blue Ring is incurable precisely because it can’t be cured by the Life Tree.”
“That’s what makes it so good,” Herc corrected, sounding excited like a greedy collector. “Mermen can’t fight it. But I digress. You have little time now. It’s a shame we’ll never meet.”
“Yes, about that�
�”
“Hercules,” General Giru interrupted. “As negotiated, I have brought you another test subject. Rebel Balim was infected with a fresh strain of the disease. We ascended directly. You may now test the progress on a living merman.”
“Thanks, General Giru. As you can see, we’re suffering from an unforeseen staffing shortage.”
“I do not understand.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Tell you what. Leave his body in the dissection lab. Someone will return to dissect his corpse.”
“What about his female? She will not remain here.”
“Lock her in the bridge.”
“How?”
“The ship operates on electronic locks. Close the door and press the middle button on the keypad.”
This was bad. She appealed to General Giru. “It’s a trap.”
The general dragged Balim through the door and closed the heavy metal, sealing it.
“He’s lying!” She jiggled the locked handle and banged on the small strip of glass. “Don’t do this. These people are your enemy. They want to kill you.”
“Nonsense.” Herc chuckled. “We want to kill you. And working together in a harmonious partnership, we will. Same goals.”
“General.” She tried to make him hold her gaze. “Your race is dying. I’m a bride. I could be pregnant with a young fry.”
“You will be safe on your human ship. Hercules will release you after he returns.” General Giru gathered up Balim and exited.
“He’s not returning!” She smacked the glass. “You can’t do this! This is crazy! The Sons of Hercules are our enemy! We’re on the same side!”
“Bella Taylor.” Herc tsked in that weird computer-muffled voice. “Don’t you know better than to reason with an innocently childlike, easily manipulated monster?”
She let her hand drop and searched the bridge for an exit.
The seats were bolted to the floor. Heavy metal objects were bolted to the wall. There was a fire extinguisher. She yanked it out of its clip and banged it against one window.
It bounced off, leaving the metal extinguisher dented.
How thick were the windows? Feet?
“I could still get you a Life Tree blossom,” she negotiated, stalking around the bridge and testing another window. Thud-bounce. “I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
“We’re abandoning the project. Only a few hundred are infected, and it’s not worth the money to develop a cure.”
“You released a plague in New York City and it’s not worth developing a cure?!”
“The CDC will handle it.”
“That’s so irresponsible.”
“It’s all your fault.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You threatened to smear the reputations of my heroic sons. I had to act. We’re heroes, Bella Taylor. We vanquish the monsters that spread their horrifying fish diseases across our pristine shoreline.”
“It wasn’t enough to focus on the mer ‘stealing’ women who would never become your girlfriend.”
“Women are whores.”
“That bullet point must delight the Ladies’ Society.”
“They don’t even notice because they know, Bella Taylor. They fear the ‘other.’ The other skin color, the other country of origin, the other neighborhood, the other class. Hatred is a great unifier. It brings together very different people who have so much fear and so much hatred of each other and concentrates it on the ultimate other: the subhuman merman.”
“There are greater unifiers than hatred.”
“Yes, certainly. But as a marketer, you well know that adding in fear is effective. My messages of fear and hatred have even convinced a monster to do my bidding.”
She crouched on her hands and knees and searched beneath the consoles for tools while Herc congratulated himself.
“Preying upon doubts and catering to our worst impulses led my little experiment from a weekend hobby to sparking a movement across college campuses and now the world. Political figures consult me on the sly. Companies have lined up to throw money into my pockets, and they don’t care if my work never passes an audit. Truly, it has been a success beyond my wildest dreams.”
“And then you kidnapped my son.”
His tone flattened. “I give him better care than a middle-class income such as yours could ever provide.”
Her heart thudded. Jonah was still alive.
“And besides, any expanding company experiences setbacks. Less successful products fizzle while more exciting products come on the line.”
“So the plague is a ‘less successful product’?”
He grew more animated again. “Do you know an exciting illness? Ebola. Three days of brain hemorrhages and bleeding from your eyeballs. Nobody forgets that. Do you know an unexciting illness? Heart disease. Over half a million Americans die of it every year. One in four deaths. And yet do people exercise and eat right? No. Two Americans died in the last Ebola outbreak. Who fears Ebola? Everyone.”
“Too bad for you Blue Ring doesn’t make people bleed from their eyeballs.”
“It takes far too long to kill them,” he agreed. “And then one researcher tests positive for the disease when it’s not clear how he got infected and the whole project has to abandon ship. He probably handled the dagger with a paper cut. They’re supposed to be honing the ultimate weapon to fight back against a race that regrows limbs and survives bullets to the heart. I expect a man of science to show more grit.”
“You know, you could have spent those resources figuring out how to regrow limbs for humans and let everyone survive bullets to the heart.”
“Mmm. Benefit from the mermen? Not ‘on message,’ Bella Taylor. You can’t unite the groups I have with positive thinking and miracles. We’re talking Ku Klux Klan working side by side with ISIS.”
“What a humanitarian.”
“I’m a great unifier. You’ll see when I’m accepting my Nobel Prize for annihilating mermen and safeguarding the sanctity of human life.”
“Conveniently ignoring the biological weapon unleashed in a major US city and, apparently, on this ship.”
“It will be dealt with. When your mortgage is underwater, there’s only one thing to do, you know.”
“Talk to the bank?”
“Burn the mansion and collect the insurance.”
Nothing in this bridge would break her out. Bella pushed to her feet again. “That’s dark.”
“I’m a realist. And now, I’m signing off. I prefer to remember you like this, thinking you’re so clever as you’re debating, rather than screaming as you fruitlessly try to evade the fighter jets.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry. When the bombs hit, you shouldn’t feel a thing.”
“What about my son?” she demanded.
“He shouldn’t feel a thing either.”
“But where is he, Herc?”
“Closer than you might imagine.” Click.
A screen embedded in the wall by the speakers lit.
It showed a blank part of the ship. Then, images rotated. Her in the bridge staring at the screen. An empty hallway. Her son, still alive, sleeping on a bunk in a locked room.
Jonah was here! On an infected ship about to be bombed by fighter pilots! She had to rescue him, find Balim—
The screen flashed again to show Balim stumbling back from General Giru. The general held a bloody dagger.
Balim clutched his belly. He’d been stabbed. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Balim stumbled back and collapsed on the hard metal floor.
He barely felt his body. It seemed so far away. Even the new pain in his gut where General Giru had stabbed him fell away.
He was back in Undine, a trainee, gravely injured. His prince clasped his shoulders. Blood soaked the water, and dark pain circled his eyes. “You will survive this attack, little healer. Undine cannot go on without you. Your father will heal you swiftly. I wil
l ensure he heals you first.”
“No…”
His moan snapped him back to the present. He was lying half on his side on a human boat. General Giru stood over him.
Balim had been stabbed. He was bleeding.
He clenched the wound. Blood spilled over his fingers.
But somehow, he barely felt it. His infected chest pained him much more.
“Balim.” His father’s grateful, worried expression was the first thing Balim observed upon waking. Every thread of dark wood and heartblood red in his irises focused on Balim with sharp relief. His features, his steady soul light, his patterns of tattoos were bright and clear. Balim’s wounds pained him, but they were neatly sewn and bandaged, and he tried hard to be brave in front of his father. “I will never let you out of our safe castle again.”
“Nghgh…”
General Giru advanced, orienting him once more in the present. Sympathy softened his harsh expression.
The memories pushed against his mind, forcing him to reenter them, pressuring him like a suppressed sneeze.
But Balim held them off. He couldn’t get distracted. Not now. “You…stabbed…me…”
“I will again.” He knelt beside Balim and wiped the blade on an abandoned human fabric. Cleaning it before dirtying it again with Balim’s blood. “It is better to die swiftly than live with the pain of Blue Ring.”
A commotion at the edge of the Life Tree dais drew his father’s gaze away from Balim. The king’s cry echoed. “My son!”
Balim moaned.
“Yes, I have suffered with this illness for many human months. It forces me to relive the same moments over and over.” General Giru settled beside Balim. “Great Healer Dalus warned me that I would commit suicide. No! I was not so weak. But this memory torture is more excruciating than any physical pain. Only his draughts give me relief.”
“Where is the healer? Why has he let my son, the city’s prince, slip away?”
Balim’s life leaked out between his fingers. “Bella…”
Her beautiful face turned to him in memory. Light shone from her chest. Her red hair floated like a cloud, and her green eyes glimmered with happiness.
