by Ben Farthing
Riley didn’t believe for a second that Dad was preparing himself for the Deviser to return or whatever nonsense Wendy claimed. The man she knew loved each moment of life, in the moment that it happened. He wasn’t obsessed over the future. Now that she knew Dad knew about the other world, it only made sense that his passion for life was fueled by knowing he’d avoided getting grabbed away into that unnatural world.
She didn’t understand why he’d kept the watch, but she understood why he’d kept it from Nathaniel. She imagined he’d wound the watch, been taken to the other side but managed to escape, and then realized Nathaniel wouldn’t believe him without testing it for himself. And Dad wouldn’t have wanted Nathaniel to risk that. So Nathaniel thought Dad had lost his faith, when really Dad was keeping Nathaniel from acting on his own faith to kill himself. Or to bring about a catastrophe.
“You went quiet there,” Wendy said.
Riley blinked. She’d lost herself in thought, trying to figure out Dad.
“You were telling me why you accepted my invitation.”
“Right,” Riley said. “I thought the watch had something to do with what my Dad called ‘reaching over.’”
“And what have you learned so far?” Wendy asked.
“The watch has everything to do with reaching over.”
Wendy nodded. “That’s what Nathaniel tells me.”
“You haven’t seen for yourself?”
“No, but I will soon. This ship is a gift from the Deviser. We’re here to discover and spread that gift.”
Chris’s theory was right. Nathaniel wanted to help along the purpose of the Aria. And now that Riley knew that purpose was terraforming enough of this world to allow the Deviser’s creation to cross over, she was ready to do anything to stop it. “I’d like to help,” she told Wendy.
“I know,” Wendy said. “Let’s go back and tell your uncle.”
Riley hoped the fake smile on her face would convince Nathaniel as well as it worked on Wendy. She had no firm plan yet, only a vague idea of freeing Chris so he could sink the ship under their feet.
She tried not to think of all the ways this could go wrong.
38
Riley walked side-by-side with her aunt back inside, leaving the salty humid air behind them. The ship’s air conditioning felt freezing for the first few moments.
Riley wondered if Wendy said a prayer of thanks to the Deviser over that luxury.
She shook her head. It was all crazy, and the sooner she could get Chris free so he could do his thing, the better.
“Your uncle may need some convincing that you’re returning to your father’s original path,” Wendy said. “But you leave that to me. Just smile and compliment him. Say that bit about how you would never have stolen the watch if you’d realized he wanted it for the same reason.”
Riley nodded. “You know him better than me.”
“You’ll get to know him, though. Once he comes around, he’ll be so happy that his family is back on the path.”
They walked downstairs.
With all the guests still hunkering down in their cabins, the lobbies and stairwells were eerily quiet.
Riley wondered what was happening on the bridge. Chris had suggested that the crew would quickly retake it. And if not, the Coast Guard would send a boarding party soon. There were probably already helicopters on the way.
Riley would need to help free Chris quickly, so she could distance herself from the cult. Probably not a good idea to be mingling with the group that the military would be aiming automatic weapons at soon.
Hoping to project confidence and throw Nathaniel off-balance, Riley stepped ahead of Wendy to be first down the stairs back to the landing on Deck Two.
The landing was empty.
The door to the Deck Two hallways was still closed, and its lower quarter was still ripped out.
Orange fog drifted through the gap to cover the art deco carpet up to Riley’s ankles. It sunk down the stairs out of sight.
Riley walked to the door. The landing floor sank under her feet, like the floor close to the center of Deck Two. “It’s spreading,” Riley said aloud. They were running out of time.
“What’s spreading?” Wendy asked. “Where did they go?” She fished through her purse for a two-way radio which she spoke into. “Nathaniel? Where are you?”
A sharp clap echoed up the stairs from below.
Wendy gasped. “Was that a gun?”
Before the casino last night, Riley would have been asking that same question. But now, she recognized the firing of a pistol. “Did the crew already hit back?” she wondered out loud. Or had Chris overpowered the old man to take his gun?
“Oh god, Nathaniel!” Wendy ran for the stairs.
Riley followed, then stopped herself. She didn’t need to win Nathaniel’s trust if Chris had already escaped. Her number one goal here was to help Chris blow up the dough pile that was welcoming over the Deviser’s creation. That meant she needed the explosives from Chris’s cabin. She didn’t even know where that was.
So she did need to find Chris.
Problem was, she had no idea what was going on downstairs.
Was Chris already free? He had to be. Either he’d snatched away a gun, or he’d ran and the gunshots were aimed at him, or the crew attacked, which meant that Chris would have been able to escape.
Wendy screamed.
Riley cautiously crept down the stairs, craning her neck to peer around the corners.
On the Deck One landing, Wendy pressed her back against the wall, head turned, and eyes squeezed shut. At her feet lay the body of the Asian woman from the cult. Three blood splotches dotted her yellow blouse.
Riley walked downstairs. She ignored her aunt’s weeping to step over the corpse.
Through the door, the dripping silver threads had disappeared. They’d finished their job, and now Deck One was terraformed, the first crack in the opening doorway to the other side.
39
Riley stepped through the door. Another gunshot clapped from somewhere ahead.
Riley had to find Chris so they could get his explosives, and she didn’t even know if Chris was playing cat-and-mouse with the cult or if the crew had hit the armory and then came hunting for the cult. But those concerns got pushed aside by the room in front of her.
Orange mist drifted up to knee height. A brittle metal floor creaked under Riley’s weight. Spots empty of mist revealed themselves to be holes in the floor where the mist sank out of sight.
Flotsam and jetsam littered the deck. A propeller bigger than a house lay crooked on the floor. Riley looked up and realized she couldn’t tell if there was a ceiling above. Only an orange blur.
She frantically turned back around, convinced the wall and door would be gone. But she still had an escape route. A rectangle view of the stairwell lit by fluorescent light. Wendy was hunched over her dead friend, giving chest compressions.
Riley walked deeper into Deck One, avoiding the spots empty of mist and giving the junk a wide berth. She passed wide around an ornately decorated wooden staircase that was whole but on its side. Smaller debris dotted the floor, too, like scattered narrow mattresses and rusty stoves and cookware.
It was like someone had built the imposter Aria out of prefabricated pieces and then tossed the extras here. Or this space had been created from the junkyard of the imposter Aria’s construction.
Riley couldn’t tell how far the room went on. The wall behind her was the only one visible.
Deck One felt less like the bottom level of a cruise ship and more like a cavern she’d stumbled into.
Except if she stood still and paid attention, the floor still rose and fell ever so slightly. She was still at sea.
Something skittered along the toppled staircase. A chorus of taps as feet struck the wood. Riley crouched to stay out of sight and get a better look.
Her heart pounded in her ears. The movement didn’t sound like the monstrous starfish. Too staccato. Too light.
Riley held her breath. She had no way to defend herself against the jagged pincer blades.
The lanky fiddler crab explored the stairs, lowering itself to snip through the hardwood several times.
Another gunshot snapped through Deck One without an echo.
Riley focused on its source: behind a loose pile of steel framing studs.
The fiddler crab continued its exploration of the stairs. It had been unfazed by the gunshots.
A male voice shouted unintelligible instructions from the same direction as the gunshot. The voice was deeper than Chris’s, so it was either the cult hunting Chris or the crew hunting the cult who were hunting Chris. Riley wanted to go in that direction.
The fiddler crab had turned its jaws toward the voice.
It wasn’t deaf.
It lowered itself between its many legs, looking like a daddy longlegs, or the monster starfish reaching down to pick up Marjorie’s corpse. Then it stayed like that.
Riley counted to thirty. The crab didn’t move.
Maybe it wasn’t a predator. Maybe it heard the voice as a threat and was preparing itself to flee.
Riley couldn’t wait any longer. Still hunched down, she walked toward the propeller to circle wide around the fiddler crab.
With a dull click, the crab straightened its legs to launch itself at Riley. It reversed its legs midair, so she saw eight pointy bones surrounding quivering pincer jaws, all hurtling through the air at her face. The feet would dig deep into the sides of her skull while the jaws carved their way to her brain through her nasal cavities.
Riley dropped to her stomach. The fiddler crab rocketed over her. One foot hooked her hair enough to pluck out a small patch and send the crab spinning.
Riley winced at the sudden pain.
The damned thing was definitely a predator. She ran for the pile of steel studs.
A glance behind showed the fiddler crab climbing the giant propeller. It leaped again.
Riley prepared to dodge, but it sailed over her. It landed with its pincers facing her, between Riley and her goal.
The thing was smart enough to cut her off. For all she knew, this was the dominant species in this world. Hell, this could be the Deviser itself.
The thought of kicking the Deviser and sending it flying sent her into a fit of giggles. This was some kind of shock. She was in a warped cruise ship deck, fleeing a predator fiddler crab, and her mind was ready to crack.
Riley pulled herself together. She wasn’t going to die like this.
The crab lowered itself again.
Riley sprinted to the side. Its jaws grazed her back, and then it was sliding along the floor, scraping, trying to right itself.
She wouldn’t be able to outrun this thing. If she could find someone with a gun, the crab looked solid enough—poking enough holes in it should kill it like anything else. But Riley wasn’t willing to gamble that she could find somebody on her side faster than the fiddler crab could catch her.
An open space beyond a yellow lifeboat had less orange mist than everywhere else. Riley ran for it.
As she got closer, she saw enough gaps in the mist where it sank into holes in the floor that it was like running across a giant game of Chinese checkers.
She heard the fiddler crab skittering behind her. Riley ran straight towards a hole. There was a sharp click, and the skittering stopped.
Riley breathed deeply and then dropped again.
The crab sailed over her head and right down through a hole in the floor.
Riley leaned over jagged metal edges to look down into the hole.
It was a lower deck of the Aria. Some kind of basement below Deck One. Untouched by the changes that had infected Deck One. Just pipes and big metal boxes doing who-knows-what to keep the ship running.
The fiddler crab lay on its side on a corrugated steel walkway. Its freakishly long legs curled up underneath it. They dried out as Riley watched. The pincers crumbled next, followed by the tougher shell. Within seconds, the predator crab was a pile of ash.
It couldn’t survive in the regular world. The monstrous starfish must have been an exception. Or maybe specially designed.
But otherwise, what survived over there couldn’t come over here. Or vice versa, with where Riley was standing right now.
So blowing up the doughy mound on Deck Two might actually stop this disaster.
Riley got back on her feet and ran towards the pile of steel studs.
She slowed as she approached so as not to startle anyone with their finger on a trigger.
She circled the rusty metal.
The barrel of an automatic rifle pointed at her nose, inches away. Riley felt the blood drain out of her face. Surviving two run-ins with monsters didn’t supply any lasting bravery when facing down gunpowder and lead.
Wielding the gun was a sweaty, terrified porter named Bobby.
40
Ever so carefully, Riley raised her empty hands.
The rifle shook in Bobby’s hands. His sculpted muscles couldn’t compensate for the shock he’d faced. Riley noticed that he was resting the rifle’s barrel on the back of his wrist. His left hand hung limp, skin red and blistered.
Cold determination in Bobby’s eyes was slowly replaced with recognition. “You’re not one of them. You’re that guest who was talking about monsters on the hull.” He kept the rifle aimed at her nose.
“Do you believe me now?” Riley wanted to check around her for more fiddler crabs, but she didn’t dare move and set off Bobby’s panicky trigger finger.
Bobby grunted. “I believe your terrorist friends killed Bengsston.”
A gunshot went off behind him, far away. Bobby snapped around to look, then jerked back, remembering Riley.
“I’m not with the terrorists,” Riley said. She tried to see where the other gunshot had come from. Farther into Deck One, the debris was closer together. Lifeboats, lounge chairs, dining tables—all the pieces of a cruise ship—along with the construction materials themselves like steel studs, piping, and marble tile.
It appeared the crew had armed themselves, just like Chris said they would, and chased Nathaniel’s cult into this junkyard maze.
“If you’re not a terrorist, and you’re not one of them,” Bobby said as he poked Riley with the barrel, “then what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean by ‘them?’” Riley asked.
“The shadowy people.”
The ones she’d seen after winding the watch on Deck Two. “What are they doing?”
Bobby waved his limp, burned hand. Riley thought of Chris’s missing finger that he attributed to them.
“If you’re not with the terrorists,” Bobby said, “then leave.”
“I need to find my friend. They had him as a hostage.” She figured she shouldn’t mention the explosives.
“Let the security team handle it.”
“You’re a porter.”
“I’m auxiliary security.”
“You don’t have a clue what’s going on.” Riley motioned around them.
Bobby, who had been letting the rifle droop, raised it again.
Riley showed her palms. “You’re in over your head. There’s something insane going on right now. My friend knows about it and is trying to stop it.”
Bobby looked doubtful, but he obviously liked the idea of someone else being responsible for dealing with this madness. “Is he with the terrorists?”
“No. They’re in favor of all this.”
He shook his head and slowly blinked. “It’s not a dream. I thought for sure it was when I came through that door. Then I got separated, and those shadowy people threw a chunk of plywood at me, and it burned so bad.”
“I didn’t let them get close enough. But all this junk in here is like salt and ice on your skin.”
Riley inspected the pile of steel studs. “Like a chemical burn?”
“An instant one, yeah.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Riley asked him. “Let the shadowy people deal with the terrorists.”
“It’s my job,” Bobby said.
“Your auxiliary job.”
“They killed Bengsston.”
“You’re willing to die just to be the one who delivers revenge?”
“You’re willing to die to find your hostage buddy?”
Riley didn’t want to die. She hated her jobs, she missed her dad, she had no clear path out of her dead-end life, but she desperately wanted to return to that life. Even still, she’d seen the Deviser’s world. She’d sensed what was approaching and the horror it would bring. She couldn’t let that happen. “I’m gonna try to find him without dying,” Riley said.
“Do you think he’s still a hostage?”
“I doubt it,” Riley looked around.
Three shadowy figures were slinking towards Riley and Bobby. Their features drifted in and out of focus—one moment, they were blurry silhouettes, and the next, they were dusty and scarred people, two men and a child. Tattered clothes hung on emaciated bodies. Wide eyes and sunken cheeks conveyed urgent desperation. They needly something badly from the newcomers.
Two more of them had approached the pile of steel studs. They heaved against the side, trying to topple it onto Riley and Bobby.
Metal creaked.
Riley backed away. “Move back,” she warned.
Bobby saw the fear on her face. He whirled around and squeezed the trigger. The approaching shadows shuddered with the impact of the rifle rounds, but kept coming.
The close rifle shots deafened Riley.
