by Eric Nylund
Eliot stepped in front of her and Robert and whispered, “I got this one.”
Fight or run-there wasn’t much of a choice.
The MiG would close in seconds, not enough time to cross the courtyard.
And there wasn’t just him and Fiona and Robert to protect; there were all those people in the church in the line of fire. Eliot was partially responsible for them, too. Not just because he wanted to save innocent people, but because he was connected to this: Uncle Henry had said the League engineered this war-Robert’s “party tip” to drive down today-and Fiona (what was she doing here?). It was too much of a coincidence. . like the League had pulled a fistful of tangled strings to trick them into coming. Why? So he and Fiona could pass another of their cruel tests?
It was like Area 51 all over again. People getting killed because of them; only this time, he’d do something to save them.
Eliot heard the roar of the jet. Felt the rumble in his bones.
Its dive leveled and it angled on a straight shot through the open street of Costa Esmeralda’s cityscape canyon.
Eliot gripped Lady Dawn, his hands sweating, and he played.
There was no time to warm up with nursery rhymes. He needed raw force-fast-enough to destroy.
He flicked out a bassy power chord, throwing the strength of his arm into it. The notes resonated from Lady Dawn’s body and shook the dust off the cobblestones and blew away smoke and ash.
The jet wobbled on its trajectory, but kept coming-and shot. Twin cannon spit fire and death at them.
Bullets sparked in the air between him and it, bouncing off a wall of sound, peppering buildings, tracers making spirals.
Nothing got through.
But as the jet streaked toward him, Eliot’s barrier shuddered and contracted-force meeting force.
Eliot needed more power.
He double-pumped the strings and danced his fingers up the scale, back and forth; wavering mirage air and water vapor flashed outward.
The MiG spun, righted, and ceased the machine gun fire.
It launched two missiles.
Lady Dawn jumped under his hands-and his fingers stepped up the register-a lightning-fast bridge, found, and held, a high C.
Out of the corner of his eyes, Eliot saw the shadows in the alleys lengthen and sharpen into slices of darkness that cut through the noontime light. . and sway as if they danced to his music.
The missiles streaked at them, hit the wall of noise, and blossomed in sparkling rosettes, shattering glass and blasting apart the steel frames of nearby office buildings.
The jet was almost on them. It shuddered, a blur, and its metal skin peeled-wingtips fluttered to pieces. The fuel tanks breached and ignited.
The pilot ejected, a plume of white smoke that arced from the craft.
But the flaming, out-of-control MiG fighter aircraft was still on course, plummeting straight at Eliot.
He let go of the single note and flicked the strings-power chord upon power chord, building upon their resonant echoes, increasing in pitch and intensity, sucked in the air from the courtyard, blasted out feedback-laden notes, waves of pressure, and lines of force that seemed to emanate through and from his body as much as Lady Dawn’s.
It was as if they were one, rocking back and forth, playing together.
Glass ruptured off every building for six blocks. Asphalt bucked and crumbled. Water mains burst and showered into the air.
The MiG-15 exploded: fire and spinning metal and burning fuel still on an impact course.
Eliot pounded on Lady Dawn as hard as he dared. . and then as hard as he could. Her strings cut into his fingertips.
Before the jet crashed into him, Eliot found the strength for one last downward power stoke.
Buildings on either side of the street shook and cracked, and two toppled over.
The tumbling wreckage of the MiG-15 detonated again-driven back as if someone had blown out a lit match.
Confetti bits of metal and trails of oily smoke drizzled down. . harmless.
Eliot exhaled. He shook out his numbed hand and arm.
“Very cool,” Robert murmured.
Fiona shook her head as if just now seeing them. “What are”-She looked back and forth between them-“you two doing here?” Her brow scrunched and her expression was a mix of confusion. . and, as she concentrated on Eliot, annoyance.
She doubled over in pain.
Robert caught her and his hand came away bloody. He scrutinized the seeping, bubbling wound on her side. “She needs help.”
Fiona went limp.
Eliot took a step forward, feeling helpless to do anything, forgetting everything he’d ever read in Marcellus Master’s Practical First Aid and Surgical Guide.
“Shock,” he said. “Her pulse is strong, though. That’s a good sign, but we’ve got to get her to a doctor.”
A crowd emerged from the church and stared at them.
Eliot called out, pleading, “Is one of you a doctor? Hay un médico?”
The people gaped, pointed, and they ran away.
How could they not help them after he’d just saved all their lives?
Eliot felt, then heard, subsonic quaking and thunderous crashes behind him. He wheeled and watched every office building for three blocks collapse into dust and rubble-a swath of destruction he had caused.
Those people in the church might have been grateful, they might have helped. . if they hadn’t been scared out of their minds.[57]
Eliot touched Lady Dawn, ran his bloody fingertips over her fiery wood grain. He smiled. He liked this new incarnation of the violin. She no longer fought him. How much power could they together summon?
He had also enjoyed the destruction and havoc they’d wreaked.
The smile on his face vanished. Fiona was in shock and bleeding to death-what was he thinking?
“Get her into the sidecar,” he told Robert. “I’ll ride on the back. Just go slow until we get on the highway.”
Robert lifted Fiona into his arms. She yelped, but clung to him and let him carry her toward his bike.
The power when Eliot had played was seductive. He had felt glee as he blew the jet apart, rapture at seeing buildings fall at his whim. . and was horrified that he wanted to do it all again.
“Put her down,” someone behind Eliot commanded.
Mr. Ma dropped off the last rung of a fire escape, followed by six upperclassmen Paxington boys. Dante Scalagari was there, and he looked grim, made a move toward Fiona-but Mr. Ma checked his motion with a hand on his shoulder.
“I shall take Miss Post,” Mr. Ma told them. He pointed toward the roof of the building he’d climbed down. A jet helicopter sat there, blades spinning up to full speed.
Robert glared at Mr. Ma and held Fiona tight.
Mr. Ma continued toward him. “You cannot jostle her on a motor bike with a punctured lung,” he said, glancing down at her, “and likely other internal injuries.”
Robert’s glare faded and the color drained from his face.
Mr. Ma stopped before Robert and held out his arms. “We have medical supplies on board. I can stabilize her.”
Robert looked to Eliot.
Eliot wasn’t sure. How much did he trust any Paxington teacher? Especially one who tried to kill them every few weeks? Enough to literally place his sister’s life in his hands?
But Mr. Ma was right: On the bike they might hurt Fiona more. And if the unthinkable happened. . the League would kill Robert for trying and failing to save her life.
“You won’t hurt her?” Eliot asked.
Mr. Ma blinked. “No.”
Eliot listened with great care. There were no weird echoes or any backward whispers that he detected from the lips of liars.
Eliot nodded to Robert. Robert passed Fiona to Mr. Ma.
Mr. Ma held her as if she weighed no more than a feather.
“I’m going with her,” Eliot told Mr. Ma. “We’re stronger together.” His tone left no room for discussion on the m
atter.
Mr. Ma looked at him a moment, then nodded.
The Paxington helicopter lifted off the roof, turned, and lit in the courtyard.
As they walked toward the craft, Eliot glanced back at Robert. Worry and helplessness etched his friend’s face, and Eliot understood that pain. He’d felt the same thing for Jezebel. . and he knew at that moment that Robert loved Fiona.
Near the helicopter, Mr. Ma ducked, and held his unconscious sister closer.
Eliot barely made out his whispered words over the noise of the blades. “School rules give me no choice in the matter.” Mr. Ma told her. “You get an F for today’s lesson.”
But then for the first time, Mr. Ma’s craggy features softened, and tiny laugh lines crinkled the corners of his eyes. “And even though I must hate you, young lady, for we appear to be on opposites sides of fate. . for dueling an armored tank to save people that meant nothing to you, you deserve an A-plus.”
63 WOLF UNDER THE WAVES
Henry Mimes tried on the captain’s hat and regarded himself in the mirror bolted to the wall of the guest quarters. The pilfered cap was a tad too big, and the golden fringe and black canvas didn’t look right with his silver hair. Not his colors, alas.
It was just another reminder that he was a mere passenger on this submarine.
He twirled the hat on his finger. It was hard to let go of the rudder, even among friends, when one was used being the Captain.
A fluted speaker whistled to life. “Mr. Mimes?” said a tinny voice. “They’re ready for you, sir.”
“Tell them I’m on my way,” Henry replied.
He left his cramped quarters and entered an equally cramped corridor. Two uniformed ladies bumped into him.
Henry smiled, did his best to bow, and greeted them both.
They returned his salutations. . and his promising smile.
“Would you lieutenants be good enough to take this to the bridge?” He handed the hat to the athletic brunette.
They said they would. There were more smiles and flirtatious glances, and then they went on their way, squeezing past.
Henry watched them go.
Or perhaps such close accommodations did have some advantages, after all.
And yet the Coelacanth was definitely not a craft he could spend more than a day bottled up in. Wolves did not do well beneath the waves. He preferred the open sea and fresh air. No matter how much opulence one cocooned oneself in, all submersibles were susceptible to a loss of buoyancy and gravity, and could become more coffin than vessel.
He ran a hand over the brass pipes that curved along the walls. Every square millimeter was polished and etched with tiny porpoises and sardines and scallops. Still, it was a lovely sinking tin can. Gilbert ran a tight ship.
It was technology millennia ahead of anything else when it had been forged. There was nothing like it in all the seas. In thirty years, however, American or NATO or Russian naval engineers would have the technology to detect her subtle, silent movements through the waters.
Men glimpsing legends.
Which was one of the reasons Henry knew change was coming. “A matter of time” as Cornelius might have said, although he and the other Council members seem determined to ignore that fact as long as they could.
Henry moved through three pressure doors, down a spiral stairs and entered the launch bay. The walls of the cavernous chamber were ribbed for strength, and from the ceiling a variety of small submersibles hung like mechanized insects caught in a web.
The Tinker, however, was the one Gilbert had selected for their journey today.
Unlike the other modern titanium-and-polycarbonate-composite mini-subs here, this diving bell had been part of this vessel’s original complement, crafted by the same master of the seas who had forged the Coelacanth.
The Tinker was a treasured relic-a gleaming geodesic bubble of foamed gold alloy encrusted with half-meter circles of diamond windows coaxed from the earth and polished to perfection-constructed to withstand pressures that would crush her modern counterparts like Styrofoam coffee cups. The mermaids along her curves still gleamed and beckoned as if they had been carved yesterday.
The diving bell was lowered into the moon pool, and a soft blue light glowed to life as she touched the ocean.
Gilbert and Aaron waited for Henry, and from the crossed arms and look on Aaron’s face, he could tell they had been waiting some time.
“Am I late?”
“Is that a question?” Gilbert muttered, and straightened the cuffs of his black captain’s uniform. “By the way, have you seen my hat?”
“Not recently. .,” Henry replied.
Henry could see why Gilbert, with beard trimmed in precise stylish angles, and the Coelacanth had inspired Mr. Wells to write an entire novel about them.
Aaron donned a leather bomber jacket and offered one to Henry.
“No thank you,” Henry said. “I shall be quite comfortable.”
Gilbert boarded the craft. Henry crossed the gangplank and ducked through the tiny doorway. Aaron was right behind him (cowboys boots clonking over the metal), and once aboard, he irised the outer hatch, and then wheeled tight the inner hatch.
Portals offered views all the way around, as well as up and down. Control panels, levers, and valves made a ring of controls along the outer surface of the Tinker-which Aaron and Gilbert busied themselves pulling and prodding and checking. One panel was dotted with empty vacuum tube receptacles, and a laptop computer had been soldered upon it.
Henry gravitated to the center of the craft, where shrimp cocktails lounged on a bed of chipped ice, along with caviar and fresh sushi. A dozen thermoses of heated sake were labeled: KAKUNKO JUNMAI DAI GINJYO.
Dire circumstances and the possible end of the world notwithstanding, Cousin Gilbert could always be counted on to be an impeccable host.
“Care to lend a hand?” Aaron growled.
“Not really,” Henry replied as he munched on a shrimp.
Gilbert spoke into a tiny gramophone-like device: “Ready to launch, Mr. Harper. Steady as she goes.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” a voice from the gramophone replied.
“Mark gyrocompasses,” Gilbert told Aaron.
Aaron flipped switches. “Online and checked.”
The Tinker eased below the waterline. Her glow lines intensified to a brilliant blue as they descended into the darkness.
Gilbert then spoke to gramophone again: “Sever connections, Mr. Harper. Coelacanth to station keeping.”
“Station keeping, aye, sir. Tinker away.”
There was a clack, and then the diving bell floated free. . and proceeded to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The exterior lights were bright enough that Henry saw the seafloor beneath his feet. It grew as they approached a crack in the earth a hundred meters wide. This particular abyss had remained undiscovered by man, and Henry hoped it would remain that way for a long, long time.
They entered the chasm, and Henry spied the columns and stairs that zigzagged at angles that should not (in any strict Euclidian sense) exist. He averted his eyes and tried not to look at the tentacled idols and cavernous temples that clung to the walls like ancient crustaceans. The shadows of shadows moved within those places. These were the remains of a civilization that predated the Titans: the Old Ones who had vanished from this world. . or as some feared, were still dreaming in a nonstate in the In-Between Places.
Henry just hoped that, as League experts predicted, this trench would in a century subduct under the mantle. Only then would he be able to safely forget about it.
Until then, everyone avoided the place. . which was precisely why they were here. Eyes and ears had followed them everywhere else.
“Ablate the portals,” Gilbert ordered.
Aaron twisted a dial and the windows darkened.
“Counter aetherics,” Gilbert said.
Aaron tapped on the laptop computer. “Circuits warming; channels alpha through gamma all in the green.�
��
“Initiate sound cancellation.”
Aaron nodded.
“That’s it, then,” Gilbert said, and both men exhaled and seemed to finally relax.
Aaron grabbed one the silver bottles of sake, popped the lid, inhaled its steaming contents, and downed the thing in a single draft.
“We sulk about like children hiding from their elders,” Aaron muttered with great sarcasm. He opened another sake. Although from this bottle, he took only a sip, and then set it aside because he knew-despite his bristling-these drastic precautions were indeed warranted.
“Tell us about Costa Esmeralda, Henry,” Gilbert said.
His coconspirators leaned forward and listened.
So Henry told them what had occurred yesterday in Central America-everything that he and his spies had observed: Fiona’s reaction during her Force of Arms class, and Eliot’s and Robert’s charge to her rescue.
Aaron’s fists clenched harder as Henry related how Fiona had stood up to a Soviet T55 main battle tank, cut it down, and survived the resulting explosion.
Both men shared worried glances as Henry related the raw destructive force that Eliot had unleashed with his guitar.
Aaron let out a long whistle. “They’ve progressed further and faster than I would’ve predicted,” he said, and tugged on his long mustache.
“Than anyone,” Henry agreed.
“But how do they feel?” Gilbert asked. “Is the League’s plan to make them sympathetic to their cause working?”
“Eliot doubts the League and their intentions,” Henry told him. “A wise thing for any teenage boy to question authority. So, unless I have completely misread the situation, he is where we want him.”
“I have a concern,” Gilbert whispered. “There had been a hundred witnesses…”
“In fact, an entire church full of them,” Henry replied.
“And you took care of it?” Aaron asked. His eyes narrowed.
“Oh, relax.” Henry patted his hands together. “Even I would not do such a thing to protect our secrets.”
Aaron looked unconvinced.
“Besides, there was no need,” Henry said.
Gilbert quirked an eyebrow. “A hundred ‘God-fearing’ people saw our nephew destroy several city blocks-and there’s no need?”
