Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  I stand up, stiff and aching, and walk back to the bottom of the hole. “Ms. Stuart? We’re all right. We’ll come back as soon as we find him.”

  “We’ll be waiting, Ada. Try to restrain Gabriel’s more foolish impulses, if that’s possible.” She’s bending over, her head and shoulders a ruby blotch against the fraying trees.

  “Who on earth is that girl?” Dr. Jacoway asks. His voice sounds dim and shaky. “She seemed to materialize out of purest nothingness, but somehow I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

  Chapter Twenty

  GABRIEL SWINGS the beam across my face. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do anything that dumb. We can throw the rope up to them once we’ve got him.”

  I nod at his ankle. Now that I’m standing here on aching legs, I’m not sure why I didn’t tell Ms. Stuart that he’d hurt himself, except that I knew he didn’t want me to. “It’s pretty dumb to mess yourself up before we even start searching.” I keep my voice just above a whisper. “It’s not broken, is it?”

  “Sprained. So walking on it will hurt.” Gabe shrugs. “I’ll deal.”

  “Oh, that’ll work great. Until we have to carry Rowan out of here. As long as we don’t have to run.” He heard that thing moaning as well as I did.

  He’s still standing right by the pool, and I keep waiting for him to freak out about those tadpole creatures. He seems awfully casual for just having seen something that disturbing—​unless, of course, he already knew all about them. I walk up to him and he doesn’t move, not even when I tug the flashlight out of his hand. The first thing I do is point the light toward the darkness beyond the pool, searching for where Rowan might have gone. Sure enough, there’s a rounded spot on the wall where the darkness sinks deeper than the beam can reach. Then I comb the light across all the corners, just to make extra sure he’s not here, though I don’t see body heat coming from anywhere but the two of us.

  It’s only then that I let myself shine the light down into the glassy stillness of that water, greenish black now that the blue isn’t there to illuminate it.

  It’s empty. I swing the beam back and forth across the pool, trying to be casual about it. There are a few jags of rock below the surface, but they aren’t nearly big enough to hide that crowd of writhing human-faced kimes. The green glass skin hovers over emptiness, algae, a single lost snail. I’m pretty sure those tadpole things couldn’t have slithered off on their own and found a new pool to live in; the one I picked up shrank desperately from the air. But who could have moved them?

  Even stranger: the level of the water is a lot lower now. A blackish stain rims the rocks ten inches above the surface, showing how high the pool was only an hour ago.

  “I was hoping that pool might be a way through to the sea,” Gabe says morosely. “Rowan can stay under for longer than you can imagine.”

  I can’t react, not with Gabriel watching me. I point toward the deepening black on the wall again. “That way, then. There’s nowhere else he could have gone.” Gabriel reaches for the flashlight, but I ignore him and walk forward with as much determination as I can manage. Gabriel’s stuck tagging after me, and for a moment I’m glad about that.

  At least, I’m glad until we hear that moaning howl again. It’s much louder down here, echoing off the walls until we’re caught in a barrage of repeating cries like a thousand broken voices all pelting in on us.

  Whatever it is making that sound, it’s straight ahead.

  The tunnel descends unevenly and also gets narrower. It’s rough going: a natural fissure, not something people made or smoothed out. The ceiling is too high to touch. What was Rowan thinking? It seems impossible that he just walked off this way deliberately. It’s hard enough not to bash against blades of cracked rock even with the flashlight, and he would have had to pass this way in utter dark. I keep searching the peaked stones for any sign of him: if something dragged him through here, wouldn’t there be scraps of his clothes that snagged and tore?

  Wouldn’t there be blood?

  Where is the blue now that I desperately need its help? It was down here with Rowan when I left. Wouldn’t it know what happened to him?

  The walls squeeze in and Gabriel pants behind me, suppressing tiny gasps of pain each time his right foot touches down. Our warmth casts a red quiver on the walls and sends ragged shadow shapes flapping ahead of us. The space is so tight now that I have to turn sideways and shimmy through a gap, but when I point the flashlight up, its beam lances endlessly into blackness, touching nothing but pinwheeling bats.

  As we twist around a corner, there’s a new sound: a deep, dreamy booming. The voice cries out again, and now it sounds so close that I jump and wave the flashlight ahead of me. The light skitters and tears on the ragged stones.

  And then reflects off a pair of eyes maybe two feet above the floor. They’re staring straight into mine. A rocky crest blocks the lower half of the face from view.

  Those eyes seem human, or they would if there were human beings with eyes ten inches across and even farther apart. Green-golden, the same color as mine, set in grayish skin with a damp shine to it. Their lashes are as heavy as black tusks. There’s no glow of warmth: that creature is cold through and through. Something thicker than hair spills back behind what I guess is a forehead the size of a dresser. I don’t have long to look, but I get the feeling that whatever it is there in the dark knows exactly who I am, and that it bitterly resents me—​and maybe it feels something else, too, though I can’t put my finger on what.

  There’s a shuddering groan, a splash, and then the creature is gone. I don’t have to walk over there to know that we’ve found a passage through to the sea. The truth is that I’d be way too scared to get any closer.

  Behind me, Gabriel hasn’t made a single sound, but it’s like I can feel his tension drawn all over my back in black marker. I turn to him with the flashlight aimed at his chest, though I’d rather shine it straight in his face.

  “That was she,” I say. “Wasn’t it? The she you started talking about before. So who is she?”

  Gabriel hesitates. “You’re the one who needs to start answering questions, Ada. It’s just plain stupid for you to try asking them. It’s a lot dumber than anything I’ve done. What are we supposed to think, when you’re so nosy?”

  I guess I should be worried. Gabriel could shove me into the gap that monster came out of, and nobody would ever know. But I’m shaking all over with something a lot colder and wilder than fear, and I don’t care what he does.

  “What did she do to Rowan?”

  He scowls. “You know too much already.”

  “I’ve seen her, Gabriel! How am I supposed to keep from knowing about things I’ve seen for myself? Do you not even care if that thing strangled your friend?”

  “Of course I care! But Soraya loves Rowan, okay? She would never hurt him. Unless—”

  He stops, brows drawn, and chews his lip. Violent slants of color collide all over his skin. And he’s glaring at me like, whatever happened to Rowan, it’s definitely my fault.

  I don’t want to understand why that creature—​Soraya?—​looked at me the way she did, but all at once I get it. I never tried to make Rowan like me. It didn’t even cross my mind until just now that he might.

  Rowan never actually said that those tadpole creatures were the first mostly animal kimes he’d seen, but I feel my heart contracting just a little with the realization of how totally he’s been deceiving me. I guess we’re even, but I still feel betrayed.

  Gabriel hasn’t taken his eyes off me once, but suddenly he’s three steps closer.

  “Ms. Stuart is convinced we need you. She thinks you could be the key to the whole thing, if you actually cared about being on our side. She thinks you could help us control the power that’s here, even if you’re pretending now you don’t know what I’m talking about. But I don’t think you’re ever going to be that useful. It’s like you have some kind of delusion that your parents
will want you back if you keep sticking up for the normals. It’s pathetic, Ada. You could be part of something new and amazing, something that could change the whole world, and instead you’re clinging to the past like all the other losers.”

  He’s getting in my face, and I start to back away—​but maybe ten paces behind me there’s the opening where Soraya was peering out at us. She might still be lurking just below the water’s surface, and for all I know, that surface is a long way down.

  “Gabriel, what are you doing?”

  “You should really start talking, Ada. You should do whatever it takes to make us care what happens to you. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all you have now.”

  The air around us shakes with the hollow boom of the sea. I can’t let Gabe keep herding me toward that hole in the floor, so I stop with my legs apart and braced. He’s a lot bigger than I am, but he’s also injured.

  “Are you seriously about to try and murder me?” I’m straining to sound contemptuous, but my voice jumps.

  “Soraya wouldn’t kill Rowan, I don’t think, not even if she is pissed off with him. But maybe she hid him somewhere. Maybe I can trade you to get him back. Since you’re the one she really hates. It won’t be me murdering you, though. Not technically.” He shoves me with a queasy grin plastered on his face, and I stumble three steps deeper into the cave. “Tell me everything you’ve seen since you came here. Tell me you’ll persuade your blue thing to help us—​to break through whatever the problem is that’s been holding back our project. It’ll know exactly what I mean. Then I might decide we need you after all.”

  There’s a good chance he’s bluffing. This might even be something he and Ms. Stuart planned together, to scare me into spilling my secrets. Though, now I think about it, I don’t know when they would have had a chance to come up with a plot like that. We all left right after I ran into the dining room yelling that Rowan was trapped.

  “Do you really think Rowan would forgive you for helping to kill me? You’ll lose your best friend.”

  Gabriel grins. All the wild ripping colors have drained from his skin. He’s icy white, cold and calm and determined, and seeing that floods me with shivers. My knees are starting to buckle under me, and when he slams me again, I totter back hard. My calves smack into a low wall of rock. I nearly tip backwards, and my arms fly out, wheeling at the emptiness for a terrible moment before I find my balance again. It must be the rock that half hid Soraya’s face.

  That means I’m on the brink. Dank air breathes up the back of my shirt, bringing a reek of iron and salt and clay. Even without looking behind me, I can feel how deep and cavernous that vacancy is. I can already sense what it will be like to fall: the stone throat swallowing me, the crash into cold waves. And then Soraya, whatever she is, and her hatred for me.

  “Rowan won’t have to know. I’ll say you had an accident. Talk, Ada. Now. Because I’m getting bored of waiting.”

  I have exactly one chance. If I mess up, he’ll probably fling me over the edge in a rage. He reaches up and grabs my shoulders, his fingers digging into the bruises on my back.

  If he sees me glance down, he’ll be ready for me. I keep my eyes fixed on his and silently lift my left foot, then kick his hurt ankle as hard as I can. He grunts and his right leg gives way beneath him. The flashlight drops and rolls away across the ground, flinging up mountains of shadow as it goes.

  I was planning to leap over him and go sprinting back up the tunnel, but he keeps his grip on my shoulders and I can’t twist free. Instead I go toppling down with him and land sprawled on his chest. I lash out at his bad ankle again, pounding viciously in the hope that the pain will make him let go, but he’s as determined as I am, and, locking one arm around my head, he throws me onto my side.

  Then something wet and gummy, and as thick as a human thigh, snakes around my left arm. There’s something horrible mixed into the sensation of the wetness, as if a hundred rasping mouths were chewing on me.

  For maybe half a second I find myself hanging in midair, looking down into Gabe’s shocked face, traced along one side by the flashlight’s beam. More snaking things are holding me now. It’s all happening so fast that I can’t make sense of any of it.

  “Where’s Rowan?” Gabe screams. “You can have Ada, I don’t care! Give back Rowan!”

  Soraya. What is she?

  Then I’m arching through the darkness. The ocean gulps me down.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’M TRAPPED in freezing, tearing, watery blackness. Flashes of my own red warmth shine between her coils, but I can’t see anything else. My chest gets tighter and tighter, yearning for air, but we must be in some flooded tunnel deep in solid stone. My whole body heaves with the urge to breathe. She’s going to drown me, and that’s it.

  A huge face looms into mine. A mouth bigger than a bucket opens and swallows my entire head; rubbery lips seal tight around my neck. I’m gagging from the stink of it, like fish and wet pennies, and from the sharp blast of humid air.

  Air. My lungs open, and I start panting and coughing inside Soraya’s vast mouth. She’s sharing her air with me on purpose, and it makes no sense. She was moments away from getting rid of me for good and having Rowan all to herself again. Her moaning thrums in my eardrums until my head sings with pain, but I’m still alive and rushing at a crazy speed through the water. I can’t tell how much time is passing; the moments rumble along for what might be minutes or hours.

  Blue stars shine in the blackness of her mouth. I’m reeling with an impossible dizziness, vomit rising and retreating in my throat. My legs burn with shocking pain, and after a few moments, I realize it’s the salt getting into all my scratches.

  Then she spits me out. I look out at a field of dusky waves, a final ribbon of sunset still caught at the sky’s back edge. I can see the lights of the Genesis Institute gleaming on the hill, but we’re a long way out. “Soraya,” I gasp. I’m sure Gabe is right. She hates me with a passion. So why am I alive? “Thank you.”

  Her tentacles twist me around, and I stare into a single giant eye. Those rasping mouths all over my body are her suckers. She’s so big that I can see only a few slices of her looming from the water, but I see enough to get an idea. Her head is bald and slick and maybe earless, a cascade of heavy tentacles spiraling back from her forehead.

  She’s a kime, of course. Part human, part giant squid?

  She pulls me back twenty feet and lifts her head out of the water down to her chin. She looks horribly sad, and long, groaning breaths squeeze through her lips. The sight of her whole face races through me.

  I’ve never seen anyone who looks so completely like me, not even my mom.

  All her features are enormous: eyes like molten olive glass, a nose as long as my forearm, gray-blue lips like ocean waves. But every detail is shaped exactly, precisely, the same as it is on me, just crazily inflated. The look in her eyes is heavy with a disturbing, lonely intelligence. I’m sure she can understand me.

  Apart from her grayish skin and her monstrous size and those tentacles, we could be identical twins.

  Maybe we are. A kind of twins, anyway. Maybe some of the algae that infected me when my mom was pregnant copied a chunk of my DNA and carried it into Soraya when she was just starting to form. And I get a chilly understanding of why she might resent me: not just because Rowan likes me, but because he maybe likes me for being a more human version of her.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m really not trying to take Rowan away from you. I mean, if that’s something you’re worried about? Can—​do you speak English?”

  Her voice rattles in response. Her mouth looks human, but maybe she doesn’t have all the right parts inside for speech.

  “Do you know where Rowan is?” She didn’t take him; I know that now. I don’t think Gabe understands her at all. She was never planning to kill me, either. The more I look at her, the more certain I feel that she really is my sister, and that she knew it way before I did.

  Her voice is
still wordless, but I can hear the anxiety bubbling through it. She pivots her eyes across the sea and howls. That’s what she’s been doing: she’s calling him, just like we were.

  “If you didn’t take him, what did? He knew we were coming for him. He wouldn’t want to scare us by disappearing like that.”

  Soraya gives a startled yelp and swings me around, facing me back toward the beach and shaking me. We’re far enough away that I can barely make it out: a reddish shape crawling out of the sea and onto the deserted beach. Then it stops, clinging to the sand in an exhausted-looking heap.

  “Rowan! Soraya, is that him?”

  She looks at me wide-eyed as if she’s about to cry, then her mouth engulfs my head again. We dive with a violent rippling motion that sends my stomach reeling.

  A minute or so later, I feel my body abruptly released and flying through the water so fast I have to fight an impulse to scream. My head splits the water’s surface, but foam flies at my face, so I keep my lids closed. There’s a clang, and my hands fly out and grip the wires of our chain link fence.

  I open my eyes and gape around. I’m on the inside of our penned-in piece of ocean, breathless and rocking with the waves. The sea is much rougher than usual, and salt slaps into my mouth. My hair is clumped with Soraya’s sticky, fishy saliva.

  But I’m pretty sure that shape sprawled on the beach is Rowan. He’s alive, and so am I, and, no matter how she feels about me, Soraya saved my life.

  From Gabriel. Will anyone believe me if I tell them what he did? Ophelia’s crazy about him, Rowan is his best friend, and Ms. Stuart thinks of him as her own kid. And who am I to any of them?

  The new girl. The one who’s a little too human. The one they’ve never really trusted.

  I clutch the fence, dreading the swim back. I wonder if Gabriel’s gone back up the tunnel already, tossing up the rope. I wonder if they’ve pulled him out and he’s walking home through the woods, telling some smug story of how I slipped and fell and there was nothing he could do.