AER (The Elements Series Book 3)

by Tracy Korn

Finn shrugs. "You caught that sub to Gaia just in time, Wright. Though, I gotta say I'm glad to see you. Would be nice to get back to work putting things right around here again."

  "What about the old crew?"

  "Still here, but since Grisham was cut loose from his contacts, they've gone dark."

  I shake my head. "We'll put all this right. What did Grisham do anyway?"

  "Double dipped, man. He was working on a hack for The Seam, but then threaded his own port-network through it. They cut him off after that…something about him putting them at risk."

  "Well, yeah. Not like him to be so sloppy. What was he thinking?"

  "Power, man," Finn shrugs. "It got to him I guess."

  I blow out a breath. Nothing is how I left it here. "I need his help to find a friend. She had to wander out this way from…Skyboard."

  Finn shoots me a wide look. "You let a Cloudy out of your sight around here? And a girl Cloudy?"

  "Don't hotwire me, man, I know," I say, watching the dirt blow across what's left of the pavement in the distance. "That's why I need Grisham's grids, all right? I need to find her before morning."

  He narrows his eyes at me this time, but I shake my head so he doesn't ask me anything else.

  "Well, I don't know if he can help you. Tarriff took most of Grisham's gear and reprogrammed it. Nobody cares about spying on the sky anymore."

  "That's the one place they should be watching," I say under my breath as we pass more decrepit buildings, then shake my head to deflect any of Finn's questions. "So, where are we going?"

  The occasional patch of dark pavement has been replaced by puddles of water in the sand, so I slow down and start watching my step.

  "Yeah, man, you have to eyeball for swallows like that in the sand out here," Finn says, noticing me shift. "They're worse during high tide. So, like, right now," he adds, then cocks his smudge of an eyebrow at me and chuckles. "This is basically the worst time we could be going to the hole in the sky."

  I look up and see nothing but the gray haze that always covers the sky—always except for that night I climbed the dune with Jazz and saw the stars for the first time in I don't even know how long. I should have said something about them instead of telling her about my stupid scar…instead of that whole stupid situation with Liam. Maybe she wouldn't be in this mess if I had.

  I step in a puddle and feel the earth inside it wrap around my foot, then my ankle, trying to pull me into it. I jump before I think about it, seeing a tunnel shark gripping my leg in my mind instead of just wet sand being displaced.

  "Whoa! It ain't gonna eat you, Wright," Finn laughs, gripping my forearm to steady me as I kick my leg free. If you only knew, man. If you only knew, I think.

  "Yeah…I'm just pressed. I need to find my friend," I say, finally pulling free from the quicksand hole. We round the corner before Finn can say anything else.

  The alley is narrow, and there's nothing at the end of it except a shadow between the buildings, about halfway up. I squint, and realize it's actually a building, what? I stop walking.

  "The hole in the sky," Finn says, nodding at me. "The base is glass. At night it looks like a hole in the sky because the dark part of the build—"

  "I get it, I get it…" I say, waving off the rest of his obvious explanation. "Grisham is up there?"

  "That's about the only place he can go anymore. Eyes and ears everywhere else just waiting for him to breathe the wrong way."

  "How do we get up there?"

  "We don't. Someone will come in a minute—they're watching too."

  On cue, two men come out of the shadows and make their way to us, both of them with their hands wrapped around the same kind of white baton the guards in the Phase Two Gaia facility had. My adrenaline spikes with the memory, and the palms of my hands start to prickle and itch. No…no…no….I can't flame out up here. I ball my hands into fists and clear my throat.

  "Finn," one of the men says. I can't see more than his dirty face in the shadow of his dark hooded shirt. His hand is shoved inside the zipper over his chest, but he takes it out and lets it fall to his side. "Who's this?"

  "Man, Liddick Wright," Finn says.

  "The Cred-Fed?" the other man asks, pushing his hood down. His hair is dark and greasy, pulled away from his face in a pony tail like Finn's. I glare at him.

  "Just tell Grisham I'm here. I need his help," I say.

  "Thought you caught a golden sub and went off to be a demigod like your brothers," the first man says, pushing his hood back now too. He's older, maybe as old as Azeris, and significantly less greasy than his partner, though his huge nose looks like it's been broken a few times, and his teeth are chipped and brown…the ones that are left, anyway. But still, there's something about his eyes …he looks familiar. Then it hits me.

  "Grisham?" I ask, and the corner of the man's mouth pulls to a smirk.

  "Follow us," he says, putting his hood back up as he and his skinny sidekick lead us back into the shadows . We stop right in the middle of one of the buildings, about 20 feet from the glass tower holding up what looks like a single room. I look over at Finn for answers, and he nods at me.

  "It's all right. Just keep going," he says, then takes a few steps forward after the two men, who walk directly through the concrete blocks. Just like the walls of Phase Two…I think, wondering why I didn't feel the buzz of the energy field like I did there.

  On the other side of the wall is a set of stairs, then another. At the top is another solid concrete wall, which we also walk through. On the other side of this is a half destroyed room with several floating grid screens, some with scrolling blue text, and what looks like the beginnings of a few different kinds of transfer hubs with various parts strewn around. Lights hover in the air a few feet below the ceiling, and there are no windows.

  "Good to see you," the older man says, pushing his hood down again and then waving his hand over his face. The nose I saw a second ago shrinks and straightens, the mouth widens, and the destroyed teeth morph into a solid white bar just like Dez's.

  "Grisham! It is you. Why the charade down there?" I ask.

  "A lot has changed around here," Grisham says as the other man throws off his hood and falls into a wrecked couch behind the half built hubs just a few feet from us.

  "I told him about Tarriff…about the Extract," Finn says like a confession, but Grisham waves him off with a nod.

  "Of course, of course," Grisham says, walking behind one of the floating green grid screens and tapping something into it. "Last I heard, you were living the dream on the ocean floor," he adds, then looks up at me.

  "More like a nightmare. I need your help, Grisham—Azeris is here with me. He's on his way to his hab, but I have a Cloudy friend who is lost somewhere out here. I need to find her before the sun comes up."

  Grisham narrows his eyes and laughs out loud, shakes his head at me, then goes back to examining the screen. He taps a few more things, then moves to the screen next to it and reads the sudden deluge of scrolling text.

  "Now this makes sense," he says as the text starts rolling so fast I can't see the individual lines anymore. "About an hour…that's how long you've been topside?"

  "Yeah, how did you know that?"

  "Time stamps…clocked you and four others crawling out of the swallow field," he says, gesturing to text that comes and goes, then looks at me. "You crawled up through those from the ocean floor?"

  "Grisham, that's a long story that I'm happy to tell you, but I need your help finding one of the people who came up with me first—she's…from Skyboard," I say, catching the word Cloudy before it comes out of my mouth as I see Grisham's bar wedge of teeth scraping his bottom lip like he always does when he's thinking.

  "All right, all right. But if it's so urgent, why didn't you just go to Azeris's hab? Why come find me here in this…paradise?" Grisham laughs, pushing his graying curls out of his eyes. For a second I can imagine him in his prime, when he worked with Azeris in the virtuo-cine spec-check facility a
t Skyboard North—before they moved the whole operation to Admin City about 20 years ago. Now, though, he's a tech scavenger like the rest of the Tinkerers in the Badlands, those slick manners and genetically engineered teeth are all that's left of his high society days.

  "You're the only one who can help me, Grisham. I need to find her before daylight and get her back to Azeris's hab," I say, knowing Azeris and Jack need to figure out how to reverse our Vishan treatments, not to mention how to rig a port-carnate link to Admin City. Grisham levels his icy gray eyes at me and smiles.

  "And why is that?" he asks slowly, and I get the feeling he already knows the answer. "Matter of life and death, is it?"

  I shrug. "It usually is if I ask for your help, isn't it?" I say, but he just keeps staring at me with that stupid grin on his face—the kind that says he loves holding all the cards, no doubt because he hasn't held any since Tarriff took over the port-carnate game around here. "Come on, Grisham. She's from Skyboard—blonde with day-glow blue eyes, man. Here, in the Badlands," I say, hoping this will remind him that the world doesn't revolve around him. He takes a seat in a steel chair, then props his feet up on the pile of spare parts.

  "OK, Liddick Wright," he says. "For old time's sake, I'll help you find her…and then you'll help me," he adds. I glance at Finn, who seems as clueless as I am.

  "Help you do what?" I ask.

  "Tarriff has something that belongs to me. I want you and Azeris to get it back."

  CHAPTER 28

  Blackwater: Part Two

  Jazz

  I'm the first one to grab the rope, holding onto the knots I now notice. I can hear the splashing of the water below and have no idea if there is a platform or something I'm supposed to lower myself to, or if I'll find the water first. Why is there no light?

  "You can't expect us to help the captain with no light," I say, stopping on the rope. "We need to see what the problem is, don't we?"

  The dark-skinned man with the thick accent narrows his eyes at me and exhales through his nose. He raises his chin to one of the crew in the gathering crowd behind Fraya, then turns his unblinking stare back on me.

  After another minute, the crewman returns with a lantern that looks ancient with its thin iron handle and oil wick flame. He shoves it at Fraya, then pushes her shoulder in my direction.

  "Now you have light. Descend," the dark-skinned man says, his voice booming on the last word. I continue lowering myself down the rope as Fraya walks toward me and starts doing the same, hooking the lantern on her belt. The light falls over a square platform about 15 feet down above the water, and I sigh in relief.

  "There's a platform above the water! I don't see anything else, though," I say to Fraya, who is still about only halfway down the rope when I get to the end of it. The dark water all around us splashes and laps against the wooden walls of the boat, which makes the lashed boxes and oars and everything else that's tied to the walls float out, then crash back in with a series of random thuds. Fraya drops to my side from the rope just as a huge splash sounds from the other side of the room. She holds up the light after we both jerk our attention toward the sound.

  "Hello!" Fraya calls.

  "We're here to help you! Captain Royce?" I shout.

  "I don't see him," Fraya says, then looks back up through the hole in the ceiling. "Hey! There's no one down here!" she calls upward, then lets out a high-pitched scream.

  "What! What's wrong!?" I turn to her, then see the hand wrapped around her ankle. I grab Fraya's arm to keep her from being pulled into the water, but the hand isn't trying to do that—it's just holding on perfectly still.

  "I can't…push it…away!" she says, trying to wrench her foot out of the hand's grip, then starts to rear back her other foot to kick it.

  "No! Wait," I say, not knowing why kicking the hand seems like a bad idea, but it does—especially when all the fear seems to settle and I almost feel…comfortable? "It—he…won't hurt us," I add, straining my focus like I'm trying to hear something far away.

  "How do you know?" Fraya asks, her voice steady, but clipped.

  "I don't know; it's just a feeling," I answer just as a head starts to surface in the water…dark roots at the base of long, blond strands, which give way to dark eyebrows—the left one slashed by a white scar near the outer edge. My heart starts to hammer in my chest. It can't be…

  But it is. Liddick's blue eyes surface, then stare straight into me.

  "Liddick?" I whisper, but when he tries to respond, water just pours from his mouth.

  "What?" Fraya says, "Jazz…"

  "No more water…" Liddick finally says, and I immediately reach down to him. Fraya grabs my wrist.

  "Jazz!"

  "It's Liddick! Fraya, help me!"

  "That's not Liddick, Jazz!"

  Immediately, Liddick lets go of Fraya's ankle, then dives back into the water. I fall onto my knees and grip the edge of the platform.

  "Liddick! Come back!" I shout to the 20 feet of water spreading out before us. "I'm going after him," I add, then start to get to my feet so I can dive in.

  "Stop! You're seeing things—Jazz, that wasn't Liddick! That person was…I don't know, but it wasn't Liddick. Listen to me!" Fraya says, squaring my shoulders and forcing me to look at her.

  "I saw him, Fraya. I heard him. He said, 'no more water…'"

  "That's not what I saw or heard. I think whoever it was, Captain Royce, I guess…was dead, and from the look of the sores on his bloated body, he's been dead awhile."

  "What?" I say, shaking my head at her.

  "He floated to our platform, Jazz. Rammed into it with the shifting water…those sores were like what Pitt had from the spores before he died. You were looking right at the body."

  "No, you answered me when I said he wouldn't hurt us…when he grabbed your ankle…you asked me how I knew," I say.

  "Nothing grabbed my ankle. And I asked you that because those sores…that infection is highly contagious. I just tweaked before I remembered that this was only a virtuo-cine."

  "No. No, I saw him and heard him…we have to help him. That's Liddick, and he's alive, Fraya!"

  "If that's what you saw, that dead body must be the glyph. Isn't no more water what Liddick said to you back at Gaia after his port-carnate stunt? When you helped him reset his nanites? It's in your mind, Jazz. It's the code talking to you."

  I take a deep breath and press the heels of my hands into my eyes. Stop tweaking…stop tweaking… I tell myself. She's right. That had to be the glyph.

  "What's happening!? Are you all right?" Arco calls down to us.

  "We're fine!" Fraya answers. "But we need a plank and more rope, or a barrel."

  "A barrel?" Arco shouts back through the opening in the upper deck just as a splash of water soaks Fraya and me.

  "Wha—?" Fraya's eyes go wide as water drips from her face. "What was that…?"

  Another splash temporarily blinds us, but then I see a man's bare back surfacing with three flexing gills slamming closed before going back under the water.

  "There! You saw that! You saw Liddick's back!" I turn to Fraya, gripping her arms and nearly shaking her off the platform before I shout up through the first deck latch. "What did you do to him!?"

  "No! Jazz, listen to me. That was a shark! They put us down here with a shark!"

  "Pull them up!" I hear Arco screaming at someone above deck. "Now!"

  "Dey must treat de cap'n!"

  "He's already dead! Pull us up!" Fraya shouts, grabbing onto the rope, but it's ripped from her hands. "We can't help him!"

  "Bring them up!" Arco shouts, but his voice is lost in a sudden crash of other voices and the sounds of struggle. I look around the dark, flooded lower deck for another way out, but none of the stray ropes are long enough to reach the hatch above us.

  We need to get out of here…I think, then see the back of Liddick's head and shoulders pushing through the water toward us….his gills flexing—gasping in the air.

  Jazwyn, stay awa
y from him. It's not Liddick…it's not even the right glyph. Don't let it touch you, Lyden says in my head, which stops my frantic scanning and pulls my attention to the hatch in the ceiling.

  What? But it— I start to answer.

  Listen, I just got a breakthrough message in my channel from Calyx—just trust me for right now. She wouldn't risk doing that unless it was urgent, he adds just as a rope ladder tumbles down through the hatch. Climb up—now!

  "Fraya, come on!" I call, and she immediately starts climbing up the rope. I start to follow her, then hear another big splash behind me. Liddick is pushing himself up onto the platform after us, his wet, blond hair falling into his eyes. His teeth are clenched as he closes his hands into fists against the platform and lifts himself out of the water.

  "No more water…no more water…" he says through his teeth, the three gills that run the length of each of his sides flaring open, then snapping closed as his chest expands and collapses.

  "Liddick! Stop!" I shout down to him as Fraya and I continue scrambling up the rope ladder. He just looks up at me with his brows drawn together like he's in pain.

  "There will be no more water-based, nor core-depth risk of suffocation to mankind with this breakthrough," I hear a monotone voice say, but I don't know where it's coming from. Then Liddick's expression twists, like he hears it too. He clenches his teeth again and grabs the ladder rope, shaking it as hard as he can. I lose my grip and feel myself falling, but then am jerked abruptly to a halt.

  "Jazz!" Fraya calls down to me. "Hold still, I'm coming! Don't move!" she says, and I notice I'm hanging by my left leg, which is tangled in the rope ladder. I try to sit up as fast as I can, reaching for the ladder, but the pain in my head is suddenly so intense it freezes me in place.

  It hurts! I think, shutting my eyes. Lyden, what's happening!?

  Calyx must be trying to block your neural channel so the code can't track you—stay calm, they're working on it!

  Liddick's voice gets louder and louder in my ears, and a pressure starts to build behind my eyes. I squint, and the image of Liddick flickers, then blurs.