CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Lysi
Plan in Flames
“Found one.”
Spio returned with the end of a fishing net. It trailed so far into the distance that I lost track of it. He’d cut off most of the buoys so it bobbed below the surface.
We helped him reel it in. I tried not to let Meela catch me stealing glances at her. She acted as though she wasn’t in pain, but I knew from experience how debilitating an iron burn was.
Meela growled. “Who do people think they are, leaving litter like this?”
“It was technically still in use,” said Spio.
I cast my senses into the distance, searching for the other end. “Were they trying to catch every fish in the Pacific?”
“Possibly. I had to rescue a dolphin from it.”
Meela pursed her lips.
Catching a flare of red in her eyes, I grabbed an end and started swimming. “You can wage war on fishing nets later. Come on.”
We dragged it along. It weighed more than I’d anticipated.
My rescue in the Ice Channel had inspired us. Maybe there was nothing big enough to snag the serpent, but a trap of this size would at least slow her down.
“How do we make sure the serpent goes towards it?” I said, still unsure of the details of Spio’s plan.
“Remember that time you acted as bait to lure the sharks away from the frenzy?”
I looked at him sharply. “What, you want me to be the bait that lures the serpent away from Adaro?”
“Bait?” said Meela, voice rising in pitch.
Spio gave her a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry, buddy. She’s done worse.”
“Has she?”
“Well, no. But covering yourself in blood while you’re beside a bunch of sharks in the middle of a feeding frenzy counts for something.”
“Sure, but—”
I raised a hand, deciding Spio had a point. “I’d like to mention I’ve also avoided being eaten by the serpent twice.”
Meela groaned. “So you think this is a good idea?”
A good idea? No. But it was an idea.
Before I could come up with a reassuring response, Spio said, “It’s something we’ve had practice with.”
Meela eyed him.
“So,” said Spio, turning back to me, “while you keep after the snake monster to make sure we don’t lose it, Meela and I set up the net. When it’s go time, you get its attention, I help steer it into the Ropey Trap of Terror, and Meela slips away to where Adaro’s hiding.”
He mimed shooting a crossbow.
Meela looked desperately between us. “Does anyone need to be bait, though?”
“You need the serpent out of your way,” I said. “This will do it.”
My courage was mostly feigned, fed by Spio’s confidence in his plan, but Meela didn’t need to know that.
She considered for a long moment. “Have you two always been this insane?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Never,” said Spio.
We continued in the serpent’s wake, waiting for Adaro to veer towards land. He kept the serpent at the bottom. For easy breaching while dragging the heavy net, we stayed close to the surface. The pace was quick. We dropped further behind, the net making it hard to keep up.
I hadn’t said it aloud, but I was terrified Adaro wouldn’t transition. Maybe I’d counted the days wrong and had missed our chance, or king tide wouldn’t happen for another tidecycle. Maybe he was already on land and had sent the serpent swimming by herself as a false trail. Too many things could go wrong.
As Utopia drew nearer, Meela kept touching her crossbow and remaining bolt, like she was afraid they would disappear. Twice, something dark eclipsed the daylight, and we looked up to see a helicopter zoom by.
The question that kept popping up was how we were going to find Evagore. I’d been so close to knowing where she was; if only I’d tried harder.
“I should have made Thetis and Nestor tell me where the high security prison is,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” said Meela. “You were in no place to pry for information.”
But the knowledge was right there, I thought. My insides roiled with frustration.
“The Reinas are in Utopia,” she said. “Maybe they already figured out where she is. Maybe they already have her.”
“I doubt it. The way they were talking, the high-security prison is an entirely different direction from Utopia.”
“Which direction?”
I closed my eyes, trying to remember Thetis and Nestor’s conversation. “They said it was on a different current.”
Another dark shape passed overhead, low in the sky. We looked at each other, none of us voicing our fear. The floor had begun to grow shallow. Could they see the serpent from up there?
The rising floor also meant we were close to Utopia. What if we couldn’t find Evagore before Adaro got there, or before the humans did something drastic?
Meela’s aura was so taut I could have snapped it.
“Lysi, are you sure it’s king tide?”
Swallowing back the fear that my senses and intuition were all wrong, I said, “Positive.”
“This current’s going the wrong way,” said Spio. “If he was going to Utopia, he would have hopped streams back there.”
He was right. A flutter of anticipation went down my spine. If Adaro wasn’t going straight to Utopia, then he was going somewhere else, first—and what could be more pressing than what was happening in Utopia?
My ribcage seemed to compress. Whatever happened, we were about to confront Adaro for the last time.
Meela met my gaze. I could see in her eyes she wanted to say a thousand things but couldn’t.
The helicopter passed overhead again, a mechanical thrum beyond the surface. For the amount of times it kept passing, I was sure—
A sudden pain ripped through my head, pressing from every direction. I cried out. My hands shot to my ears. Every cell in my body was vibrating. What was happening?
I couldn’t see. My brain seemed to swell, pressing against my skull. My eardrums were going to burst.
My ears. The pain was coming from sound. A barge of sound, impossibly loud, was pulsing towards us. I couldn’t tell which direction it came from. I couldn’t think.
Meela and Spio were covering their ears, too, agony twisting their faces. The net floated away.
Spio caught my eye and jerked his elbow skywards. Moving in a fog, I followed him to the surface.
At once, the pain stopped. We bobbed in the waves, gasping for breath and staring at each other in stunned silence. The sound was still in the waves, buzzing over my skin like toxic jellyfish.
“What is it?” said Meela. My ears were still ringing. A moment passed before I understood what she’d said.
I shook my head. Spio, too, was uncharacteristically silent. I’d heard plenty of strange noises in my life—the distant rumble of earthquakes, shifting ice, huge creatures from the deep sea—but never had I experienced anything like this.
We turned in the direction we had last sensed the serpent. I could no longer feel her. The sound interfered too much.
By sight, she was invisible, hidden beneath the waves. But something else had broken the flat horizon, coming towards us.
“A ship,” whispered Meela. “That’s what’s doing it.”
“You think?” I said.
Was the noise intentional? Was this another attack by the humans?
I looked around. We were alone except for the ship and the helicopter.
The ship coasted towards us, hazy through the mist. It was enormous and blocky, like a tanker. For a long moment, we stared at it. I didn’t know what to do. We could continue swimming with our heads above water—but then what?
No sooner had these thoughts crossed my mind when a black giant rose from the water and towered over the ship. I watched it happen as though in a dream. The serpent’s massive jaws parted.
She had not yet struck when the ship crumbled from below. It was like the hull had popped, tipping the ship sideways. It shuddered. Then her upper head curved to meet the deck. Her body writhed, her jaws biting everything she could reach without restraint.
Meela cried out. “The crew!”
The painful vibrations against my skin stopped abruptly. Whatever had been making that sound, the serpent had destroyed it.
My relief was overshadowed when Meela dove. I shot after her.
“Mee, wait!”
A pungent smell hit me as I submerged, poisonous and chemical.
Spio was close behind. “Right. I guess we’re moving towards the toxic pool of death, then.”
From the ship, a thick, black cloud flooded towards us like lava. Meela stopped some distance away, looking on in horror.
Over and over, the serpent’s fangs pierced the hull, tearing the frame. Oil and chemicals spilled from every hole. It flowed around the serpent, clouding the water and obscuring her black scales.
“We need to get out of here,” said Spio. “Don’t let that crap get on you.”
The helicopter circled. It tried to hover over the sinking ship, but one of the serpent’s heads followed it, and it was forced to keep moving to stay out of striking range.
It had found its target—but it couldn’t drop anything now. Not over their own ship, with the crew still aboard.
“For someone who hates humans so much, he sure understands a lot about them,” said Spio.
It was true. Adaro must have known the helicopter would stop pursuing him if he put the crew in danger.
Through all of this, it occurred to me Adaro could have been anywhere.
“We need to get around this,” I said. “We’re losing—”
A blast of heat hit my face. The chemicals had ignited.
Fire engulfed the ship. Shouts filled my ears from the deck.
The chemicals swelled towards us, reaching, billowing. I tasted poison on the water.
We had no option but to flee. Flames and toxins blocked every forward direction.
“If we go back far enough we can go around,” said Spio.
I cast desperately for any sign of Adaro. We couldn’t lose him now.
“What about the crew?” said Meela.
A cloud of smoke swelled into the sky. One of the enormous black heads rose through it, snapping at the helicopter. The people inside fired at it, bullets clanking off her scales.
“The helicopter will help them,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
To try helping would be a waste of time, not to mention dangerous. Besides, though I wouldn’t admit it to Meela, I hardly cared about the wellbeing of those humans at the moment.
Globules formed in the oil, drifting in every direction. On the surface, the slick spread and bobbed on the water like a raft. The flames were ravenous.
Meela conceded, letting out a moan of despair.
We surfaced far from the disaster. The breath caught in my throat as I looked back at the black cloud in the distance. The enormous ship, half submerged, looked like a toy next to the spreading smoke. It billowed into the atmosphere, blacker than iron, so high my head spun to watch it.
Meela looked at us fiercely. “We need to find Evagore before it’s too late.”
I knotted my fingers in my hair. “I know! I’m trying to think of where the prison could be.”
“What did Thetis and Nestor say, exactly?”
I screwed up my face, thinking hard. “I don’t remember! The acoustic channel was east and the luna bin was west—or that was east and the king was going west—”
“Luna bin?” said Meela sharply.
“Yeah. Some witless nickname they came up with for the Moonless … What?”
Meela’s mouth had fallen open.
“When Thetis and Nestor were waiting for Adaro to come, they said the humans dropped something over a prison. They said luna bin.”
“They did?!”
“They were talking about the queen, then, weren’t they?”
“Yes!”
Spio cleared his throat. “Not that I’m trying to discount your detective work, but that still doesn’t tell us where the prison is.”
“Hang on,” said Meela. “They said where it was. Something Peaks.”
Multicoloured flames licked the sky, trying to spread as far and wide as possible.
The serpent backed away, disappearing behind the wall of debris and smoke.
Not only had we lost Adaro, but we were also about to lose the serpent. We had to get around this mess and keep following.
The helicopter wove around the column of smoke, presumably finding a clear spot to rescue the crew.
“It was something like …” said Meela. “Ugh, I remember reading the word in one of Tanuu’s textbooks, but I can’t remember the details. It’s from Ancient Greece.”
“Again,” said Spio, “nothing against your sleuthing skills, but basically everything this side of the waves is named for Greek history.”
“Peaks …” I said, recalling something from when I was a kid. “There’s a range east of Utopia. We passed through when we moved to Utopia from Eriana Kwai so I could start training.”
“Are you talking about the Nereids?” said Spio.
“That’s it!” shouted Meela so abruptly that I clutched my heart. “The Nereid Peaks!”
“That’s the place they mentioned?” I said.
Meela nodded. “That’s where our queen is.”
We stared at each other, the beat of silence alive with adrenaline.
“You need to go there,” said Meela.
“Now?” said Spio and I together.
Meela looked desperately towards the retreating serpent. “After you’ve made the decoy. Go as fast as you can and get Evagore.”
“What about you?” I said.
“Once I have the serpent, I’ll find the nearest ship and tell the Americans to meet us at Eriana Kwai.”
“Once you—? Mee, you can’t do that by yourself!”
I tried to process what she was saying. How was I supposed to let her throw herself into danger like that, swimming up to a ship full of humans?
“I’ll have the serpent with me for protection,” said Meela.
I cast her a look of horror.
Spio glanced between us, then said evasively, “In the way of bodyguards, the serpent’s a pretty good one to have.”
“It might be invincible, but Meela isn’t.”
“You have to trust her, buddy. From what I’ve seen, Meela can fend for herself as well as you can.”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came.
“Lysi, please,” said Meela. “We’re out of time. Trust that I can do this.”
I wanted to trust her. I knew how much this meant to her. But I was so afraid of losing her.
Meela pointed eastwards. “I think that’s it. I think that’s where he’s going.”
I tuned my senses beyond the wreckage. Past the serpent, undulating away from us at high speed, the floor rose.
There was a bump on the horizon, like a wart.
A wild mix of terror and elation and shock rose inside me. Had we found the place Adaro went to transition?
It pained me to know Meela was right. Every moment we waited before making a peace treaty, the more danger we were all in. We had to split up.
“Lysi, if you’re going to be our bait, now’s the time,” said Spio, squinting in that direction.
Meela grabbed my hand. “Once you’ve diverted the serpent, keep going. I’ll meet you at Eriana Kwai, okay? Tomorrow night.”
I glanced to the sun, descending to the horizon. We could do this. By the time king tide receded, Adaro would be dead. Our new queen would be ready to take the throne, and peace would be restored to the Pacific.
I nodded. Then we were kissing, Meela’s face between my hands, her fingers knotted in my hair. For a few, blissful seconds, I forgot the fear pressing in on us. I knew only the feel of her body.
Too soon, we broke apart. Neither of us said anything. I couldn’t get the words out if I’d tried.
I wanted to refuse to leave her.
Instead, I swam after the serpent as fast as I could.