The magic burns, raw fire in his veins. It’ll hurt Marcus worse. But the other wizard don’t scream. A small, choked sound escapes him as he pulls the magic into him. Tage feels it being swallowed. He gasps, pain sparking white behind his eyes.
Startled, he realizes he’s seeing what Marcus sees.
The whole ship, outside and in. It don’t change, but its appearance does. Its skin ripples, shifts from metal and glass to shell and flesh. The outer lights dim, become luminescent. Eyes appear where the bridge is, and instead of Whale Fall, an adolescent nautilus stares back at the giant before it.
The questing tentacles pause.
Tage feels his body stretched, expanded beyond proportion. Against his skin, the weight of the sea presses, cold and solid, the world’s bones. It will turn him into nothingness and he’ll welcome it—
Inside the shell, heartbeats flutter. His. Marcus’?
The ship-nautilus meekly pulls in its tentacles, waits before the sea god. Humble. Harmless. May I pass?
Tage can’t find his body. Panic touches cold inside the shell, in him. The illusion wobbles, pulled at the edges. The giant nautilus reaches again.
Hands grab his shoulder, his chin. Does he have a body still? The sea takes no notice of tiny motes, fragile bones crushed to nothing.
“Hold fast,” Marcus is saying, forever away. He’s pulling Tage apart; inside there is a vast expanse, never filled. The other wizard feels hollow, not-real. A shell washed clean on a beach. He’ll pull everything from Tage, unmake him.
Stop, Tage wants to say. He has will, somewhere. Knows he does. He ain’t…weak. Promised Kane he’d never be weak again, that he’d always protect them both. He can’t lose himself. He won’t.
Tage grasps at the things he knows are real. His coat, the scars, the memory of Kane and Bonnie and the Clan and food that ain’t stolen and soot in the air and cities and ghosts and pain and another’s warm, solid body against his. Not alone.
His vision blurs, shows him the ship and the not-nautilus and Marcus’ face right in front of him. He clamps down on the magic, on himself. Realizes Marcus is holding him up by coat front and chin.
And he’s himself. He ain’t a ship or part of the sea. He ain’t a helpless kid no more. He won’t be broken, no matter how it feels inside.
He takes a breath, jerks away from Marcus. The man lets him go. Tage lands on hands and knees. The glass is blurry, or maybe it’s his eyes. Outside, the giant nautilus drifts by, an endless expanse of shell and light.
Tage feels the illusion burning his skin, his senses. Marcus holds it steady, body rigid and eyes blank. Tage can’t hear nothin’ but his weak heartbeat. Unsteady. Then stronger. He pushes himself to his knees, sways, blinks until his eyes clear. His bones ache, feels like he burned the marrow from ’em all.
“How long until we clear the trench, Mr. Savatori?” Norris’s voice comes at a distance.
“One league, ma’am.”
“Damage report, Mr. Grey?”
“We’re fine, Captain.” Marcus sounds like he swallowed razors. “We’re in the clear.”
Tage coughs. His chest aches, muscles strained, lungs aflame. Pain reminds him he’s alive, whole. Still himself.
Shaky laughter, relieved swearing. The crew calms. Except Norris. The captain stands, looks down at Tage.
Tage tries to brace himself. He’ll still fight, somehow. Ain’t gonna be put down easily. He’s survived because he don’t give in.
Marcus kneels, claps a hand on his shoulder, steadies him. “We’re in the clear now.”
Tage don’t blink or look away, realizes he’s already got a knife in hand.
Norris nods once. “Mr. VanDrake.”
“Captain,” Tage says, hoarse.
Marcus helps him to his feet, offers him an arm. Tage limps on his own until he’s in the narrow hallway. Wobbly, he leans against Marcus until his breath steadies.
“Thank you,” Marcus says.
Tage ain’t used to being thanked. He straightens a little, thinks the scraping ache from so much lost magic don’t hurt as much anymore. “Didn’t know it’d work.”
Marcus chuckles. “I’ve had worse done to me. I like how you think, though.”
Tage looks away. Too much is churning in his head. He stumbles, feet heavy. Marcus keeps Tage from falling.
“Get some rest,” Marcus says.
Tage stares at his bunk. His vision blurs at the edges.
“You’ll be safe,” Marcus adds, backing away. “You have my word on that.”
Tage shuts his eyes before he admits that means more than Marcus could ever realize. Safe. He believes it, too, just this once. It lets him sleep.
* * *
He’s still thinking on Marcus’ words—“What will you do now?”—when Whale Fall reaches Aldare.
A new country, a new city. He’ll be alone again, this time with no backing from the Clan, no support, nowhere to return.
“You could stay,” Marcus said, the words running over and over through Tage’s head. He can’t ignore ’em.
Stay. Maybe not for long, but it’d hurt less not to be alone. He can’t forget Kane, forgive himself for failing. It can’t be so wrong to want to find a little peace, though, somewhere. Or maybe it is. He’s wanted worse.
The rest of the crew has disembarked. Marcus says he’s staying behind to prep Whale Fall and keep her ready while the crew takes a day’s leave and Norris sees to business. Tage stands on the low, flat deck of the submersible, staring at the rise of forest and mountains distant.
He notices Marcus beside him. The other man offers him a cigarette. Tage accepts. The wind tugs his hair, slides under his coat. One step down, into the skiff, and he won’t set foot on the submersible again.
“You still looking for a crew hand?” Tage asks at last.
Marcus grins. “I like men with previous sailing experience.”
A bit of strain eases inside Tage. They finish their smokes and climb below.
Marcus leans against the wall, his hat tipped back. “Not going ashore?”
Tage shrugs. He looks Marcus in the eyes. He knows what he wants. “Earlier, we got interrupted.” He kisses Marcus hard.
Heat and magic-sense tingles Tage’s mouth, spreads through his belly and legs. Marcus tangles his fingers in Tage’s hair, hooks an arm around Tage’s waist. Tage is pleased. Gentleness scares him, makes him think he’ll break the one he’s with.
“You all right with this?” Tage asks.
“Fuck yes,” Marcus says, and kisses him again.
Impatient with clothes, Marcus drags him towards his cabin, pulls Tage down on the bunk. Tage unbuckles Marcus’ belt.
He ain’t alone tonight.
RIVER OF STARS
David Farland
Aracai rose to the surface as the fishing boat sped away, motors whining softly. The surface of the Atlantic was dimpled with waves that lapped softly, as if the sea were slightly perturbed. The stars shone so brightly they throbbed, and the moon was in its dark phase, but light from the Arab colonies there created a bright band that slashed across the moon’s equator like a gathering of rogue stars.
He dove beneath the water and followed the backpack dropped by Escalas’ contact twenty meters to the ocean floor. The sea here was alive with sounds—the crackling of snapping shrimp, the eerie bellow of a grouper, the chiming sounds of baitfish. Though the sea was dark, Aracai’s night vision was excellent. He’d been engineered to see in infrared, so many creatures seemed to emit a soft glow.
He followed the backpack down to a place where rocks were covered in splotches of anemones and starfish, all gray shapes in the night, and began circling it, swimming on his side, watching it as if it were some strange creature that he dare not approach.
He made a soft whistle, “Here,” and in moments two more mer swam up, hugging the sand. Like Aracai, they were both nude. Dulce, his young wife, had hair of amber. His mentor, an old mer named Escalas—whose streaming white hair was held b
ack by the silver circlet of the mindlink around his head—swam near and circled the backpack. But he did not watch the pack. Instead, he swam on his side, deep-set eyes watching Aracai.
He knows what is in the pack, Aracai thought. That’s why he brought us here. And now he is waiting for me to pick it up …
Dulce circled behind them a few meters off.
Three months back, Aracai and Dulce had been living to the south, at the tip of Brasilia, where the cold waters of the Antarctic were among the cleanest in the world and the fisheries still thrived. That’s when he’d met Escalas.
He was a living legend. Not only was he very old and wise, he was the only mer to have a mindlink, so that if he wanted to know something, he could wonder about it and thus access Heavenly Host—the AIs linked in geosynchronous orbit—and learn what he wanted to know.
Upon meeting, Escalas had eyed Aracai a moment and then said, “Swim with me.” Among the mer, it was an invitation to swim for a ways, to talk, or perhaps to swim for a lifetime.
Now, Aracai realized that the old man had been bringing him to this point for months. “What is in the backpack?” Aracai sang, his voice a low thrumming that ended in a higher squeal.
Escalas hesitated, as if he hoped Aracai would guess, then answered, “A bomb.”
Many questions crowded Aracai’s mind. What kind of bomb? Who will Escalas kill? But one burst to the forefront: “How did you get it?”
Escalas’s answer was leisurely, a rumble. “I bought it…from the neogods.”
The news took Aracai’s breath. It did not surprise him that Escalas had bought the weapon. No, he felt surprised at mention of the neogods. They had been human until their genetic and mechanical upgrades had boosted their intelligence so much that they no longer wished to associate with mankind any more than Aracai would want to associate with amoebas. The neogods had left Earth decades ago, learned to bend space and time, so that now they explored the edges of the universe…
“Those creatures do not talk to men—or bargain with them,” Aracai said, worried that Escalas was teasing him.
“Ah, Spirit Warrior, they bargained with me,” Escalas affirmed. “Perhaps I made the right offer, or asked for the right weapon?” He jutted his chin toward the backpack. “Pick it up.”
Spirit Warrior? He thinks I am a warrior? Aracai had never thought of himself as a warrior at all.
But he had begun to believe over the past weeks that the world needed one. There was poison coming from Rio Negro—heavy metals and acids from mining, human waste, pesticides and industrial chemicals. In some places, over the past four decades, the poisons had turned the sea floor into a wasteland that even crabs could not survive. The mer were dying. The three of them were among the last.
Old Escalas had petitioned numerous national leaders, sought to get the humans to stop the “genocidal poisoning of our people.” But the governments in South America did not enforce their own laws. Those who had been charged with protecting the environment merely took bribes and turned a blind eye.
Escalas swam past Aracai, studying him. “It is time to go to war,” he said. “But the notion of violence sickens you.”
“Yes,” Aracai said. His whole frame was shaking.
“As it should,” Escalas said, swimming close. “Feral humans do not need a reason to go to war. Violence is in their nature. But when they made us mer, they took our bloodlust away. So the idea sickens you, though it is long past time for us to act.” He jutted a chin toward the backpack. “The problem with us mer is that we circle our problems endlessly, when we should merely grasp at the solutions.”
A bomb? War is a solution? Aracai studied Escalas. The old mer held a trace of a smile, as if he were amused. That was the problem with the old man. In the past months, Aracai had learned a lot, but Escalas always seemed to be three steps ahead.
“Do not do this thing,” Aracai warned, “whatever you have planned.”
“Oh, I am not going to do it,” Escalas said softly. “You are!”
Aracai could not imagine himself harming another. “But—”
Escalas raised a hand. “The feral humans who are poisoning our seas hurt themselves almost as much as they do us. Their society is toxic, and what do humans do when they perceive another society to be toxic? They go to war. History is full of toxic societies that are no more.”
Aracai could hardly believe what he heard. He wanted to argue, but did not know where to start.
The old mer swam lazily. “This is the answer. Pick it up.”
Numb, Aracai pulled at the backpack and dumped out the bomb—a strange device, all metal, a heavy black disk. Soft, white lights displayed the time and the bomb’s GPS coordinates on top.
He lifted it. The bomb was heavier than anything so small should be. Heavier than lead. Heavier even than gold. Uranium?
Aracai trilled a warning to the others, “Stay back!” He suspected it was a nuclear device, but it was too small to have much in the way of shielding. Being this close could expose them all to radiation.
He threw it back to the ocean floor, raising a cloud of filth, but Dulce swam near and wrenched it from the mud. There was sadness in her dark eyes. “Let me carry it,” she demanded. “She was my daughter, too…”
An image flashed in Aracai’s mind—their infant daughter, cold and rigid, eyes and fingers gone equally white in death. The poisons had contained some sort of mutagen, so that she was born with only a small part of her brain.
“Too many mer children have died,” she said.
“We can try for another,” Aracai promised.
But the gill slits along Dulce’s neck flared in anger. “No, no we can’t,” she said. They had been trying for five years. “You know that. I want to carry my vengeance in my own hands.”
With a flick of her tail, she lunged forward, upstream through the brackish water.
Old Escalas said, “It is not vengeance I seek, but change.”
* * *
In the night they swam, pushing through heavy headwaters, and Escalas sang to them of the dangers of the Amazon, a chant that formed dreams in Aracai’s mind. There were huge black eels ahead that could emit a killing, electric jolt of blue light, and piranhas with bright-red bellies that hung like rubies in the slow waters until they smelled blood, when they would lunge and tear chunks of flesh from bones. He sang of coral-colored dolphins, anacondas, and other dangers. The fresh water itself was poison to the mer, for in time their kidneys would fail in the reduced salinity.
So Aracai feared the river.
It became quieter as they swam. The crackle of snapping shrimp died away and only the sloshing of waves could be heard.
Aracai saw evidence of toxins. There were no snails or freshwater clams on the muddy river floor. They passed no schools of fish—only a pair of huge bull sharks swimming upstream to spawn. The sharks eyed the mer hungrily.
The waters at the mouth of the Amazon were deserted. Flecks of dark moss and white decomposing bits of dead insects and fish drifted about. The water was oxygen rich, but smelled of decay, and the toxins in it made his gills itch.
So Aracai pleaded for reason as they swam in the darkness. “We cannot bomb the humans. Innocent children will be hurt.”
“I do not want to hurt innocent children,” Escalas agreed. “But the humans must change their ways. I have done all that I know how in order to convince them. Now, we must go to war.” The old man seemed to change subjects. “The poison that killed your daughter is called C54.”
The news sent Dulce into a wail of pain. Her tail thrashed, so that she surged ahead and became invisible in the cloudy water.
Aracai had never heard of C54 and felt relieved that Escalas had put a name to the toxin.
“In Venezuela, it is used as a chemical warfare agent. That is where we are going—to set the bomb off at the factory. The poison is colorless, tasteless. It was not meant to kill anyone, though it has unforeseen effects on the mer. It was designed as a mind-control weapon. T
he drug causes the victim’s brain to release the hormone dopamine, making victims carefree and happy, but over time the victim’s prefrontal lobes shrink, limiting their ability to plan ahead. This makes the Venezuelan’s enemies stupid.”
The waters were dark, and Aracai’s gills itched. He swam briefly to the surface and flashed his gills, shaking his head, to try to rid them of grit.
Aracai wondered long about the C54, horrified that such a weapon would be unleashed on others, crippling the minds of children.
He thought of his daughter, her tiny fingers as rubbery as the tentacles of a dead octopus, her blind eyes, the malformed brain that would not work well enough to let her breathe.
“The Venezuelans create this drug, and the other nations, they do not fight back?” Aracai wondered.
“Oh, they fight back,” Escalas sang. “Humans have never discovered a stick that could not be turned into a club. Venezuela’s enemies wage economic war, making their country the poorest of the world’s poor, and they bribe AIs to withhold information from them. Each of Venezuela’s enemies have iconic celebrities who mock the Venezuelans, weakening their spirits. They use viruses and nanobots…”
“And if we go to war,” Aracai asked, “are we any better than them?” The possibility that they weren’t frustrated Aracai. He did not know much about humans. He had seen the hulls of their boats above water, but had never wanted to meet one.
Truth be told, he despised them. The humans had made him poorly. His eyes did not face forward like those of a fish, which made it dangerous to swim too far, too fast, lest he crack his skull on something. He had no need for hair, and would have preferred to simply have flesh alone, or perhaps scales, instead of flowing locks that were always picking up bits of seaweed and becoming home to tiny crabs. His shoulders were too large, not sleek enough to slice through the water.
It is the right of any creature to dislike his creators, he felt. The humans created us according to some nightmarish aesthetic instead of constructing something more elegant.
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