Raging Sea

by Michael Buckley

  He reaches out to take my hand, but I swat it away like it’s the mouth of a rabid dog. “There won’t be any repercussions, but what happened with the little girl has made him apoplectic. We don’t have any more Oracles.”

  “Stop calling them that!” I snap. “It’s not some fancy gadget you buy at the Apple store.”

  “I’ve offered a solution that he’s going to consider. I hope it makes everyone happy. In the meantime, you’re making your life harder every time you open your mouth. Stick with what you’re supposed to do, and keep your opinions to yourself. Get smart, Lyric.”

  He turns to leave, but then stops.

  “Tomorrow you’re starting your combat training,” he adds.

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “Spangler is going to drop you into a pack of Rusalka and heaven knows what else. You’re going to need to know how to fight and defend yourself.”

  “I’m from Coney Island. I know about fighting.”

  “Your first class is after you train the kids. If you don’t show up, I’ll have you dragged there,” he threatens.

  The next day, Calvin arrives to take me to the park. He’s nervous and keeps reaching for his gun. His nose is still swollen.

  “Hey, old friend,” I say, enjoying the panic I create in him.

  “Don’t talk to me. Just keep moving,” he orders.

  In the park, the children gather around me, but they don’t have the same excitement as yesterday. Riley’s nosebleed shook them up, and now they have trepidation about me as a teacher. This is not good news, Doyle tells me.

  “Where’s Samuel?” I ask, scanning the room for his wheelchair.

  “He’s with the doctors,” Spangler explains when he enters the room. He’s busy tapping on his tablet and doesn’t even look up. “Well, get started.”

  “Yesterday Riley had a nosebleed. Did it scare anyone?”

  Chloe and little Geno raise their hands, and even Dallas admits her fear, but when Riley raises his, everyone explodes with laughter.

  “There’s no need to be afraid. The nosebleeds are normal,” I say.

  “They did some tests on me, and I’m superhealthy,” Riley says. “In fact, they told me my brain is actually working better than it did before I put the Oracle on my hand. Apparently, it’s making everything work better. By the end of the day, I’m going to be a genius.”

  The kids laugh again.

  “If the bleeding was hurting you, then we’d stop what we’re doing. Your health is my only priority,” Spangler says robotically. He’s still busy with his tapping.

  “Keep in mind that the gloves weren’t built with people like us in mind. They were designed for full-blooded Alphas—like Rusalka. We’re only half Sirena, so maybe it’s interfering with our bodies, but I haven’t had any problems other than the bleeding. A lot of times I don’t even know it’s happening. Still, it can’t hurt to be careful. If you get a nosebleed, then you should take a break. Deal?”

  I feel like a liar. I don’t know anything about the nosebleeds. For all I know, the glove could be giving me cancer or cooking my brains, but what I’ve said seems to calm their fears. It’s a powerful reminder to me that I’m not dealing with adults. As gung ho as they are to fight the Rusalka, they are still children. Even the oldest ones are sheltered and naive.

  We return to our work with the water. There is very little success. Dallas, Priscilla, Tess, and Emma can’t make anything happen at all. Ryan tries again and again, and grows more and more frustrated with each attempt. A seven-year-old named Leo and his nine-year-old brother, William, are quickly bored with trying and drift off to play on the swing set. A redhead named Suzi, Breanne, and even Harrison and Finn, lose their tempers and tell me all of this is stupid. Only little Geno, who is about the same age as Chloe, manages to cause a wave in the pool. It elicits a victorious cheer from all the children, and those who wandered off come running back, begging the little boy to do his trick over and over again. Geno is so proud of himself, basking in the jealousy that even the older boys can’t hide. It spurs them all to try even harder, and by the end of our class, half the children have nosebleeds. Frustrated, I have them change into their swimsuits and practice breathing underwater.

  At the end of class, the kids say their goodbyes and file out of the park.

  “What am I doing wrong?” Riley asks, unsatisfied with the waterspout he created earlier.

  “Riley, you’re the best in the class.”

  “I’m average,” he says. “Donovan says we’re running out of time. A bunch of cities had to be evacuated yesterday. We have to get out there and fight, Lyric.”

  I’m tempted to tell him the truth, that he’s being used and he’s probably going to die. I look over my shoulder. The scientists are packing up their cameras, and Spangler stands in the shadows with only his frustrated eyes illuminated. He taps on his tablet. Still, it’s too risky.

  “Could you show me again?” he begs.

  “Follow me,” I say, and I lead him to the edge of the pool. He stares down at the water with his glove alight and his face set and determined.

  “What I’m trying to teach you is almost innate,” I say. “It’s like trying to tell someone how to paint or how to write a story. It’s something that you automatically know how to do or, in your case, something we might have to trick you into understanding.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  I sit down on the edge of the pool and let my legs slide into the water. This is a question I haven’t really asked myself, and it takes me a while to sort through all the possibilities until I find what feels right.

  “I didn’t know what my mother was, what I am, until I was fourteen. Until that time, I felt like the queen of Coney Island. I was young, alive, and filled with attitude. Once I found out the truth about her, I had to go into hiding. Not literally, but mentally. All those things I loved about myself—my clothes, my big mouth—everything had to be stuffed down inside me and hidden from everyone. The only way my family could be safe was for me to be small.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “Meaning?”

  He laughs.

  “How do I put this and still make it sound like a compliment?” he asks as he sits down next to me. “The Lyric Walker I met was a hurricane who blew people away, and then one day she was a wet fart.”

  “That’s lovely, kid. So we’ve met before?”

  A frown flashes on his face but it quickly fades.

  “Sorry. What I’m saying is I met you and you were amazing, but every time I saw you after, it was like a different person was walking around in your body. It was obvious something was different.”

  “And how many times did you see me?”

  He turns pink and looks into the water. “You’re hard to miss.”

  “Anyway, that hurricane, as you say, was still inside me and it got so that I resented having to hide it. I suppose that’s the most powerful emotion of my life, this need to let it go, to be the person I was always meant to be. When I use the glove, I think about letting loose.”

  “How did you deal with that feeling before you got your Oracle?”

  “Yoga,” I say, suddenly realizing that it’s true. I don’t think I gave it much thought until just this moment, but yoga was the calming effect on my life. It helped quell the headaches and center me. I used it to channel all the bad mojo into something I could manage. Suddenly I know how to help Riley and all the others.

  For the next thirty minutes, I teach Riley a few poses. We work on downward dog and sun solstice and mountain, and even resting warrior. He finds it embarrassing at first. A lot of guys do, but then he starts to understand that it’s hard and he’s not as strong as he struts around thinking he is. When it’s over, I can see he’s found some respect for it and a little Om.

  “Now let’s try again. You’ve gotten all the clutter out of your head, so focus on that moment you used yesterday.”

  “My happy thought,” he says.


  “Good, so focus on the happy, Riley.”

  He closes his eyes, and there’s that grin. I have to admit he’s cute—naive, sheltered, dumb—but very cute. Bex would dig him. He’s a fixer-upper, and maybe someday when Shadow’s death is not looming over her, she might want to give him a chance.

  The pool starts to churn into a bubbling soup. It’s unruly at first, much like the things I made when Arcade started coaching me, but then it takes form. I’m expecting some kind of weapon. That’s what I usually create, but this is something entirely different, and it takes me a while to realize it’s a soda bottle. It spins and spins in place, finally slowing so that the end is aimed right at me; then the water falls back into the pool with a splash.

  “Big moment,” he says, getting to his feet.

  I look up into his face and he’s giving me that grin, and it’s charming, cocky, and confident. Now I remember him. I kissed him during a game of spin the bottle three years ago.

  “I better get going,” he says. He strolls off through the double doors without another word.

  Fathom enters and approaches, and suddenly my nice little surprise melts into anger.

  “I have been sent to train you to fight, Lyric Walker,” he says.

  “No!” I cry.

  “The one called Doyle insisted,” he says.

  Fathom takes off his jumpsuit, revealing a pair of tight swimming trunks.

  “We will train in the pool,” he says, leaping into the water with a splash. I look down at the clothes he left behind and scream. I’m not doing this. I refuse. I turn and walk, only to hear a whoosh! He soars over my head and lands in my path.

  “I cannot let you die,” he says.

  “You pretty much killed me already, and the kids, too. If you hadn’t given Spangler those gloves, he would never have been able to send us to face the Rusalka.”

  “You don’t understand,” he says.

  “Then explain it to me! Tell me why you’re helping him.”

  A couple of soldiers enter the park, walk toward us, and then stop to watch what we do.

  “I do not wish to speak of it with others around. I will meet you here every day and I will teach you to survive.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with you, Fathom. I don’t believe anything you do or say anymore. For all I know, you’re here to kill me or teach me something that will get me killed. Do you understand me? That’s how little I think of you now. We are not friends. Whatever we were or could be is dead. I don’t want to be your selfsame or your girlfriend. I don’t even want to be your friend. I want to be a stranger. I want to forget what we did so I can share that with someone who deserves it!”

  He takes a deep breath and drops his eyes.

  “I will respect any request you have, but I will not let you die. When I am confident you can fight, I will take myself out of your life,” he says, then leaps back into the pool. I watch him swimming below, seeing how the water bends and twists his image into something I don’t recognize.

  “Ms. Walker, this is part of the deal!” Spangler shouts from across the room. His tablet glows at his hand. He’s got a weapon too, and I know he’s not afraid to use it to kill everyone I love if I don’t give him what he wants.

  For the next two hours, Fathom silently teaches me to fight, and for two hours, I punch and kick him with every brokenhearted fiber of my being.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ODDLY ENOUGH, MY LIFE STARTS TO TAKE ON A ROUTINE. I spend half my days helping my mother take care of my father’s injuries and letting Bex bitterly complain about Fathom’s “dumb face.” In some ways it feels like we’re all back in our apartment in Coney Island.

  Everyone is slowly getting stronger. Bex and I put on weight, and our bruises fade. Her old self is returning as well. One day I come back to the room and find she’s cut up one of the jumpsuits into something that borders on scandalous. She even yanked the White Tower logo off the chest and threw it in the trash. I ask her if she can do the same to all of mine.

  My father is obsessed with getting back to his former self, and my mother and I take turns scolding him for overexerting himself with sit-ups, pushups, and jogging in place. He says he’s going stir-crazy and needs to do something. He wants to be ready in case there’s a chance to escape. He doesn’t want to be the one who holds everyone back. I worry he’s making his injuries worse.

  My mother frets about us all, sliding back into her role as Summer Walker, hot neighborhood mom, but I catch her doing exercises as well. She lifts the sofa over her head and does pushups for hours.

  The other half of my day is spent with the children, four hours of training with the gloves, then two hours of fight training with Fathom. Spangler hovers over it all. He pushes me to get closer to the kids, so I eat meals with them. I agree to lunch in their own fancy cafeteria, complete with a salad bar, an ice cream machine, and a taco buffet. A chef will make them coal-oven pizzas that look a lot like New York–style thin-crusts but for some reason aren’t as good. Huge television screens play prerecorded cartoons and MTV all day. The children sometimes gather around, asking questions about the Alpha like they are characters in comic books or Greek mythology. They have an endless desire to know more about their Alpha families.

  “What does a Selkie look like, Lyric?” Geno asks. He’s been in this camp for almost three years. He has no memories of Coney Island or the arrival of the Alpha.

  “They’re big. Even the teenagers are almost seven feet tall, and they have spikes on their shoulders.”

  “I saw a Ceto once,” Tess says.

  “They’re probably the most dangerous of the Alpha. They’re electrified, like an eel, and one touch can kill a person,” I explain.

  I realize I’m telling ghost stories around a campfire.

  “Donovan says there are hundreds of different kinds of Alpha. And there’s something that eats your brain,” Georgia says.

  “He told me the same thing,” William says.

  “He showed us a news story where thousands of them came out of the water,” Leo says. “If they come at me, I’m going to stomp them with my feet.”

  “Who is that boy who meets with you? Is he your boyfriend?” Priscilla asks.

  Suddenly, all eyes are on Riley, but he’s staring at his shoes.

  “He’s a Triton, and his name is Fathom. He’s a prince, and his father is the prime.”

  “He’s the king’s son?” Chloe asks. “Is he bad too?”

  I realize I don’t know the answer to that anymore.

  “He’s not like his father,” I say. It’s the kindest thing I can muster.

  “When I see the prime, I’m going to punch him in the face,” Leo says.

  Riley gives me a shy smile. He’s got it bad for me and if we weren’t locked up in this madhouse, I would probably enjoy it. He’s got the worst timing in the world. A crush is just stupid right now.

  But all these kids are stupid. They don’t have a clue. To combat their naiveté, I push harder in our training sessions, trying to teach them to think of themselves as giants or dragons or whatever fierce beast they can imagine, though I’ve found that if I meet with each one of them individually, I have better luck with yoga. Within a week, ten of the kids can command the water nearly as well as I can.

  Geno is my prize pupil by far. Despite his age, he’s capable of complicated creations, and for such a little boy, he’s not easily shaken or distracted. Doyle is pleased with him as well and tells me he will most likely lead the charge when we deploy. The very thought fills me with dread, and my instinct is to focus on the older kids, work on their abilities until they surpass his. I’m sure it hurts his feelings, but I’m doing it for his own good. None of these kids are meant for fighting, no matter what age, but I’m not going to help the littlest one lead the war.

  Riley is ever present, hovering and joking and flirting, always showing off his growing control. I don’t want to encourage him, but I do find myself smiling when he’s around. He’s tho
ughtful and kind with the little ones, and I suppose it’s nice to have someone in this world who still thinks I’m hot. Or maybe it’s nice to be around a boy who is allowed to like me, who doesn’t have some weird tradition that keeps us apart, who isn’t a liar. Riley and I are a lot alike, from the same neighborhood, with the same weird genetics, too, with the same secrets. But mostly, and I know this is selfish, what I like about him is that he’s so obvious. He’s into me, and he lets me know and I don’t have to have a degree in Triton facial expressions to decipher what he’s thinking. He reminds me of Shadow in a way—always there, dependable, fun.

  There are moments when I see him in the park or pass him in the hall and I get a little thrill when his whole face brightens. If we were a couple of kids hanging out on the beach, he would be a more-than-suitable rebound boyfriend, but now, in here, I feel shut down, like my heart is dead. Fathom ruined me for any future boys. I’m smooshed, and my feelings are unreliable. I can’t trust anything. It’s also hard to get excited about someone when you know his future is bleak.

  “He says you’re beautiful,” Chloe whispers to me. “He tells me at night when he reads me bedtime stories.”

  “He tells you that so you will repeat it to me,” I say.

  “You think so?” she asks, suddenly angry with his manipulation.

  “It’s a boy trick,” I say.

  I rub my head beneath my hat, feeling the patchy hair slowly growing, and feeling self-conscious. I don’t feel beautiful.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” I tell Chloe.

  “Yeah, I know,” she says, then bursts into giggles, and I smile. I’m making a mini-me.

  Chloe and I spend a lot of time together. I can’t help but care for her, stepping in to act as the mom when her real mom is probably floating in a tank not four floors above us. I find myself prodding her to eat more vegetables at lunch. She draws me pictures where the two of us are walking on rainbows. I hang them in my room. She sits with me in the grass, and we talk about home and how much she misses it. I rub her temples when her migraines attack. One thing I’ve noticed is how she changes the subject every time I ask about her parents. All she will say is that her daddy is a hero and her mother is fighting the war. She tells me it’s her turn to fight now, and she will, just as soon as she gets a glove.