The first stream of electricity I shot at her was short and fast. She gasped when it hit her, her eyes flying open, but nothing else happened. So the second time I sent a little longer pulse, and she called my name. Tempest? What are you doing?
The only thing I can think of to help you. Is it working?
I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt as badly.
Figuring that could either be good or bad, I tried for optimism. Taking a deep breath, I hit her with one more shot of electricity. She screamed and then so did I, terrified I’d electrocuted my best friend.
But when she quieted, she was sitting up, her eyes wide and her gills back in semiworking order. She was still swollen, but nothing compared to what she had been. I nearly collapsed in relief.
Don’t ever do that to me again! I screamed at her, crying now that the crisis had passed. You disappeared on me, and when I found you, I put the kelp on you and it did nothing.
She giggled. That’s because I’m supposed to eat it, silly.
That would have been good information to have, I said with a roll of my eyes. I thrust a huge ball of kelp her way. Well, here, then. Go to town.
She grabbed it, started to munch.
How are you feeling?
Like hell. My whole body hurts, especially my gills. But at least I’m breathing.
At least you’re breathing.
She went back to eating the kelp and then I grabbed some, figuring it couldn’t hurt, since I’d been stung nearly a dozen times myself. After a few minutes, Mahina said, I feel better, but I don’t think I can swim yet, Tempest. You’re going to have to leave me here.
I’m not leaving you.
I’m just going to slow you down.
Well then, you’ll slow me down. You were nearly dead ten minutes ago. I’m not just going to run off and leave you here.
You have to!
No. I don’t.
What about Mark?
I was trying hard not to think about him—or Kona. We’ve been making great time. We’re almost there and we’re probably ahead of them. We’ll rest here for a few hours, see how you’re doing, and then we’ll start swimming.
What if—
Don’t “what if” me. I’m not changing my mind.
Mahina must have decided I was serious because she quieted down. Maybe even got too quiet, because after a few minutes passed I started to freak out again. Mahina? Are you okay?
I’m fine, Tempest. Just tired. I want to sleep a little bit.
I floated there for a long time, my brain racing as I tried to figure out where Kona and Mark were in relation to us. I thought we were still ahead of them, but I didn’t know for how much longer that would be the case. I also went over everything I knew about the Leviathan and Tiamat and Sabyn. Kona thought he was being so clever, arranging things so that he saved the day and got rid of Mark at the same time, but the fact of the matter was he was heading straight into a trap. Maybe he thought he was smart enough to circumvent it or maybe he just wasn’t thinking clearly. Either way, he was going up against the things nightmares were made of and he was doing it without anywhere near enough backup.
Eventually, exhaustion and jellyfish venom overtook my racing brain and I fell asleep—I’m not sure for how long. But when I woke up, the fish swimming by me were very different from the ones I fell asleep to. The night predators were out and awake, which meant it was time for Mahina and me to get moving.
Chapter 26
We reached the outskirts of Kona’s territory around eleven the next morning. Neither of us was in top shape or we could have made it a few hours earlier. But I was hoping, time-wise, we were still ahead of the others.In the distance I could see a fence very similar to the one Hailana had built in Coral Straits, and I wondered if Kona had fallen to the same madness that Hailana had or if we had the Leviathan to thank for it. I hated to think of Kona as succumbing to that kind of useless paranoia. He was way too smart for that—or at least he should be.
This is going to be hard, Mahina told me. It isn’t like the pirate ship, Tempest. We can’t exactly sneak up on them. There’s nowhere to hide out here.
Yeah, I was just thinking that.
So, what do you want to do?
You’re almost fully recovered. Isn’t it your job to figure this out?
She snorted. Since when? When it comes to strategy, you’re usually ten steps ahead of me.
I looked at the fence and the wide-open ocean between us and it. Not this time.
All right, then I think we should go check out the surface. Make sure there’s no yacht up there. We did sleep nearly an entire day away.
She hadn’t even finished speaking before I was heading for the surface. I was certain Mark and Kona hadn’t arrived yet, but I agreed it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides, it was a lot easier to escape detection if we swam on the surface for a while. Maybe that would be my new plan.
As I swam up, I glanced behind me at the wall, tried to figure out about how far away it was, so I knew how long we needed to swim to be able to drop back in on them. Even that might not be enough. If we were right and they had laid a trap, every inch of that fence was going to be covered. There would be no way to sneak up on them at all.
I surfaced, freezing as the sun hit me with blinding intensity. My gills froze up and I had to concentrate, to make myself breathe through my lungs. Harder than growing a tail, harder than living without sunlight, switching from lungs to gills and back again was my absolute least favorite part about going from human to mermaid.
“Do you see anything?” Mahina asked after she got her own breath back.
“Nothing like Kenji’s yacht. What about you?”
“There’s something over there, but it looks more like a cruise ship than a yacht.” She was facing in the other direction and I turned to look where she was pointing. There was a huge boat about a mile away from us.
“That’s a cargo ship, and it’s under power. I definitely don’t think that’s Kona.”
“Well, thank God. Hey, what do cargo ships run on?”
“I don’t know. Gas, I assume. Why?”
“I thought I read that in the human world boats run under nuclear power?”
I looked at her, vaguely horrified, as I tried to figure out what she was going for. “American military ships. They just don’t hand the secret to nuclear fission over to anyone. Why are you asking?”
She shrugged. “I just figured that was one way to take care of Tiamat and her posse.”
“Along with half the Pacific Ocean—not to mention everyone on that ship. What’s wrong with a well-placed grenade or two?”
She patted her bag. “Absolutely nothing. In fact—” She broke off, a horrified look on her face.
I whirled around, expecting Tiamat herself to be behind me. Instead, I watched as the ship started to quickly sink beneath the water.
“What the hell was that?” Mahina demanded.
“I don’t know. But maybe we should get out of here.”
“Good ide—” She broke off with a scream, then disappeared, her whole body pulled under the surface in one smooth move.
It was so similar to what had happened to the ship—and to my dad and me—that I pulled my legs up to my chest in reflex. There was no way I was going through that whole chained from down below thing again.
Mahina! I screamed even as I dived under the water to see what was happening. Sure enough, there was a clamp around each of her ankles. And when I moved behind her, trying to stay in motion so that whoever was fishing down below couldn’t get a lock on me, I watched in horror as the ship continued sinking. It too had chains attached to it, and it was being pulled so quickly that no one even had a chance to escape.