Pillars of the Deep

by Harper Alexander

  “But he–why?” I demanded sickly, unable to get the image of his murder out of my head.

  “Key ingredient in any affective love potion,” Brax explained. Calculatingly. “The essence of a soul who really does love you. That is the love that gets transferred to the consumer of the potion.”

  Her concoction…was a love potion?

  Inking Abyss.

  I reprocessed everything I’d seen in the visions with the new information I’d just gleaned.

  “It was always your plan? To enspell Codexious into choosing you?”

  “He certainly wasn’t getting anywhere on his own, was he? The ocean needs a queen.”

  Her ruthless ambition shocked me. Then I shook my head. “What do you mean you haven’t done anything yet?”

  Her eyes narrowed, the violet webbing all but sealing her gaze. “I don’t know what you saw, but clearly it was part of the nice little surprise party I had planned for after I returned you to the Surface.”

  The jellyfish had shown me something from the future?

  As if reading my mind, Abraxia eyed the creature that was now floating aimlessly on the sidelines and said, “A jelly’s fathomless wisdom is not limited by inconveniences such as time.”

  Why was she bothering to explain everything to me? Possibly because she wasn’t, in fact, completely heartless, and thought an explanation might make it easier, somehow. Possibly to distract me so she could strike when I least expected it.

  “Brax, I…I just want to go home.” Distress for the victims she planned to murder and deceive raged through me, but I had to convince her my main motive was preserving my own neck.

  “Please. Don’t try to pretend you don’t care for him enough to try something stupid. We’ve all seen the way you interact, and I’ve helped you myself with some very gutsy schemes indeed. I know what kind of stuff you’re made of, Sayler. You were harmless to me as long as you were ignorant. No longer so.”

  “Then, what? You’re just going to kill me out here in the open water, and leave me to drift into the Deep, and no one will ever know?”

  “Fear not. You are mer enough that the Deep will embrace your spirit.”

  I was cold all over, my limbs tingling. “Brax…” I murmured ruefully, pleadingly. Don’t do this.

  “I am sorry. But this is for something bigger.”

  It was my last warning.

  With an indistinguishable flick of her tail she shot through the water like a viper, closing the space between us too quickly for me to react in time. I lurched backward as she reared in my face, but it was just a flailing of limbs that failed to gain purchase. Her knife plunged toward my chest, water swirling silver past her fist like some magical fireball aura. I was just quick enough to latch my fingers around her wrist before she could plunge the knife hilt-deep, but a sharp pain flared in the meaty void under my collarbone, the tip piercing my flesh.

  Red spooled into my face, clouding my vision. Abraxia pressed into me, the strength of her fin far out-muscling my feeble grasp on the water, and we pin-wheeled backward, the knife forced deeper into me.

  I let out a watery scream, my other hand clutching alongside the first to counteract Brax’s leverage.

  Whatever order there was in the world gave way to a dizzy whirlwind that rent up front down, folded east over west and muted everything behind a numb ringing in my ears. It was slow motion and yet it was a flurry of confusion.

  I was ravaged because of my handicap, but the handy thing about legs was their versatility. In an upside-down window of insight, I managed to curl my legs up between us, forcing us a small margin apart first with my knees against her chest and then with one foot planted flat against her breastbone and the other rammed against her throat.

  We broke apart, the blade slicing out of my flesh. My arm on that side went limp, the screaming pain rendering it useless. But just then I was reminded I was still in possession of the blade Coda had given me, belted at my waist. It wasn’t much against her aptitude, still, but it was something.

  I swept it out before she could come at me again, brandishing it like I knew in the slightest what to do with it. It felt slippery in my underwater grasp, the ultimate sweaty-palm effect. Seeing I was prepared to defend myself, Abraxia curved to the side, sinuous and sly, and began circling me.

  Shark-like indeed.

  I rotated to track her, but she was doing everything right to make me feel like a fly caught in her web.

  Once again she coiled and launched, darting in for the kill. I feinted left in a swirl of limbs and hair and slashed with my blade. Both of us drew blood. Tail twisting, she snapped back around and fluidly threaded in between my slashes, knife jabbing at me from the side.

  Somehow, I managed to elbow it out of the way, only catching a receding slice across my forearm. I swept my weapon up the only way I could, hoping it would catch her somewhere, and was rewarded with a slew of ruby scales streaming upward past my face.

  She hissed, showing her fangs. Her irises had become many-faceted–almost like they, too, were scaled. Her free hand surged forward and latched onto my throat, locking me in a choke-hold. It was instinct to send my fingers up to pry against hers–inadvertently releasing my weapon in the process. Too late, I realized my mistake.

  My knife spiraled out of reach, sinking down, down, down through the water beneath us, until the glimmering abalone blade disappeared in the murk.

  Brax pushed harder against my throat, forcing me upside-down again. We grappled like stags with their horns locked, pure adrenaline rendering me a force to be reckoned with. My cold limbs had turned hot, my body on fire with a terror-honed ferocity. I clawed at her with my feet, dug my nails into her wrist, strained for all I was worth to win my release. Her arm came up to stab at me again, but as we pinwheeled backwards we grazed too close to a fanning of jellyfish tentacles, and, seeing the danger just before she ran face-first into it, Brax abruptly relinquished her hold and slithered away.

  I righted myself just in time as well, but was more concerned with keeping my eyes on Brax.

  Brax regrouped in one swift motion, adjusting her hold on the knife and pinning me in her sights with such focus that I knew the next moments would be my last.

  She surged at me so fast it was like she warped time and space, the water distorting and webbing almost plastic-like around her. I saw the End–a crisp, sharp reflection gleaming like a silver lightning bolt all down the edge of her jagged blade raised for the kill.

  She wouldn’t hold anything back this time.

  Arcing upward to come down on me with all her glorious, animal force, the fangs came out and one of the last things that I saw was her beautiful, savage face coming at me ready to rip my throat out with her teeth if the knife didn’t do the trick. And then there was a flash and curl of light, and a surge of pain that both tightened around and lanced through my whole body, far beyond anything the blade had inflicted. My body seized up, ramrod-straight, and Brax recoiled as if lashed in the face.

  Then everything went still, and peaceful, and Brax drifted back and treaded water at a distance looking at me as if gauging my lucidity. I peered at her through the haze of my lashes, all thought going dormant. Something bright and tendril-like wavered at the corner of my vision, but I couldn’t turn to look.

  A vegetative state settled over me, nothing but the cold of the indigo depths registering through my daze.

  Then even that went numb, Brax fading from sight and the Deep embracing my spirit just like she’d said it would.

  * * *

  I dreamed that I rode the giant jellyfish like a hot-air balloon on a grand tour of the ocean. We glided impossibly fast with little feeling of motion or resistance through worlds of indigo splendor and brooding, ethereal grace, my legs trailing out behind me in the water and my fingers laced into the jelly’s frilly tentacles on either side of my body, like clutching the ropes of a swing. I felt light and airy, laughing silently at the wonders that abounded, flying on a magical current that n
ever seemed to disturb any of the wildlife we encountered.

  And then we slowed and the passing wonders thinned and we came to a halt in a dark, obscure region of the ocean. Soon the wildlife vanished outright into the water behind us, and the jelly turned a slow, searching circle.

  Surely it couldn’t be lost? Its feelers drifted idly out around us, lolling and curling and leaving faint little patterns of electric light in the water. It was then that a strange impression came over me–that perhaps we hadn’t been moving through the ocean at all, but the ocean and its inhabitants had been rushing past us. I looked up into the main balloon of the creature, where the constellation of glowing matter seemed to spark in a more fizzling manner than usual–almost as if shorting out.

  I curled my fingers tighter into the frills for comfort, willing the jelly not to go dark and leave me here, stranded in the lurking abyss.

  When I pulled my gaze back down, a timid swirl of motion caught my eye in the obscurity beyond my cage of tentacles.

  Please don’t be a shark.

  It came again, something distinctly un-shark-like, and then faded into a faint apparition.

  The silhouette of a woman–a mermaid–materialized, a flourishing head-full of long, roping dreadlocks writhing around her skull in the water, eyes glinting emerald through the darkness. She cocked her head, peering at me with an almost alien curiosity. A necklace of what looked like little fish skeletons faded into sight around her neck as she drifted ever so slightly closer to get a good look at me.

  I stared back in a numb sort of wonder, my consciousness still lost in some foggy dimension. Who was this woman? I should have been scared, perhaps–unnerved at the very least at the idea of these dark, tribal, glowing-eyed mermaids lurking in the water around me, but as she treaded water before me, a strange calm infused my body. The urge to reach out and feel the texture of one of her billowing dreadlocks overcame me, but raising my arm reversed itself unbidden, a dimming of my senses suggesting the calm I felt was really just me losing consciousness again.

  Wait, I pleaded distantly, to no one in particular. But the mysterious dreadlocked woman faded from view as quickly as she had appeared, and the flickering galaxy-lantern above me fizzled out for good, leaving me in a darkness more absolute than that pitch-black void of the Deep.

  Chapter 32

  My next trickle of consciousness came with the distinct sound of dripping. That was a sound I had not heard in a very long time. On the bottom of the ocean, nothing dripped.

  Something rasped in my chest.

  Was I breathing?

  My eyelids felt like they were stuck shut with tar, but I pried them open a slit. I was in a cavern–vast, the stone peppered with hieroglyphs, the air dim and dank and dusty. Ancient pillars propped up the rough, domed ceiling where smack in the center a painted mural of a pharaoh stared down at me, all gold and blue with eyes that seemed to bore into my soul.

  Was I in Egypt?

  I blinked, and it felt like cobwebs unstuck themselves from my lashes. I tried to move, but I was so dang heavy. Too long I’d been floating around under the sea, where gravity was hardly a thing.

  What I did manage was turning my head to the side, where I found two familiar, shocked faces staring back at me.

  “Do you think it’s really her?” Tara whispered to Axel.

  Axel shifted his jaw to the side, considering.

  “I mean, what if it’s the person whose blood we used–”

  “Sayler?” Axel tried, his amber eyes as wide as a hare’s. Tara swallowed nervously and shifted closer to him.

  “Axel?” I croaked. “Tara?”

  Tara clapped her hands over her mouth and let out some sort of squeal-shriek behind her muffling fingers. Then they both just stood there and continued to stare.

  I turned my head further, my cheek pressing against a smooth slab all crisscrossed with a maze of neat fissures. Something wet trickled through the channels, cold against my skin.

  “Where am I?”

  Tara’s mouth came open, but no words escaped. Seriously, what was going on? Was it really that hard to explain? She managed to get a hold of herself, clamping her mouth shut and starting again. “Um, you’re…safe, for starters.” But then she grimaced, giving me a once-over. “I think.”

  Axel shushed her. “Don’t weird her out, Tar. Of course she’s safe. Sayler. Welcome back. You…old rascal.”

  Why were they being so weird? I attempted to sit up, but a wave of light-headedness came over me, and I fell back against the slab.

  Axel rushed forward, then. “Don’t try that, not so fast. You’ve been through quite a…well, a thing.” He put a hand against my shoulder, gently keeping me from trying again. I couldn’t miss the way his eyes cheated down to my torso.

  Inking Abyss, could he see my gills? They would just look like gnarly scars to him, of course, but I’d done so well hiding them until now.

  The curse from under the sea reminded me of where I had been before waking up here. How did I go from deep underwater one instant to back here in Egypt the next?

  More hesitantly, Tara followed in Axel’s wake, peering over his shoulder to take stock of me.

  “What happened?” I tried again.

  Tara shook her head. “It was the craziest thing, Sayler. You’ll never believe it.”

  But I’d been to Atlantis and back and lived with mermaids, so they had no idea what I’d probably believe. “Try me.”

  “There was a killer dust storm–we had to evacuate the dig, head for the coast. Axel’s asthma was acting up, so I took him to the hospital in this little village, and do you know who we saw there? You. We found you. They said you had washed up on the beach, and you had this…this thing fried into your skin.” She gestured toward my torso, suggesting maybe Axel had been fixating on something other than my gill-scars. “Jellyfish tentacles, totally wrapped around and welted into your body, like nothing they’d ever seen before.” It all came out of her in a rush, but suddenly she faltered, becoming elusive. “But there was something else, too. They were keeping you in isolation, very hush-hush about the extent of your condition. They wouldn’t let us see you. But then some fancy-shmancy SUV showed up at the hospital, government official types in and out of your room. It didn’t sit well, so we snuck in…”

  Edging closer to the slab, she took my hand, looking nervous but concerned. “Sayler…don’t be alarmed, but something happened to you out there. You’ve developed… For some reason…”

  “You have gills,” Axel helped her out, since she seemed unable to quite get there.

  I blinked, and then a hot surge of alarm dispersed through my veins. “What?”

  “Don’t panic,” Tara coaxed, squeezing my hand. “We’re a jolly bunch of scientists, and there’s no reason not to believe, like always, there’s some explanation. It’s just…some mutation, that’s all. We’ll get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, it’s quite remarkable, really.”

  “Are you just…trying to ease her into it gently, or…” Axel prompted, and I frowned suspiciously, wondering what they weren’t telling me.

  But ink it, why could they see my gills?

  Clearly I’d been unconscious through all of this… In my compromised state, had my ability to camouflage failed, along with the rest of my body?

  “I’m already getting ahead of myself, Axel; just slow down,” Tara rebuked, regrouping with a deep breath. She focused back on me. “It was clear something crazy was going on with you. And then…you flatlined, and they couldn’t bring you back…” Tears glistened in her eyes. She cleared her throat. “And we were totally devastated, and in a fit of irrational denial, I suppose, we got to thinking–was it really coincidence that the dust storms herded us to the coast, right where we could discover you washed up, dying… And this, right after…” She balked again, and I could have screamed, if I’d had the strength.

  “We found it, Sayler,” Axel interjected again.

  “Found what?”

  “O
ne of the resurrection crypts rumored to be in the area. It’s what we’ve been uncovering ever since you left!”

  Disbelief fluttered through me, the shutters to my retired archaeological leanings flapping open. They’d really found one? “I missed it?” I heard myself lament, disappointment ravaging my old dreams. Of all times for me to break off and go in search of watery secrets…

  They both blinked at me, though. “Sayler…” Axel began, floundering for the proper way to put something. “You’re in it. You may not have been here for the uncovering, but I dare say you got the full experience more than anyone else ever will.”

  Now what was he going on about? “Could one of you please start making sense and stop with the cryptic riddles?”

  Axel ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry. It’s just…crazy, like Tara said. Hard to wrap our own heads around. But given your…state, at the hospital, it was evident something–well, supernatural, for lack of a better word–had a hold of you. And given Tara’s theory about the sand storm leading us to you, and how we’d just uncovered this legendary resurrection crypt right beforehand and were led to you just in time to watch you die, and how that couldn’t be a coincidence… Like Tara said chock it up to irrational grief and denial if you want, but we hatched the hare-brained scheme to, ah, kidnap you–your body–and bring it back here. Where we…tried out the function of the place.”

  It was my turn to stare, suddenly understanding why they’d struggled to impart the details. Feeling abruptly strange and squeamish, I squirmed experimentally. Surely they couldn’t mean what it sounded like they meant.

  “You…” It was all I could get out. Now none of us could form a whole sentence.

  “Resurrected you,” Axel confirmed.

  “You were dead,” Tara offered as if they had to explain themselves.