In Dawn and Darkness Page 9

  “Disturb nothing,” he ordered.

  “What now?” Nol asked, impatient.

  At the end of the room lay another door. Myo crossed to it, and it opened beneath his hand. More darkness.

  The next room had more tables, but these were interspersed with square pools of water set in the floor and edged with metal bars. Some kind of diving room?

  Garren peered between them.

  “What the—?”

  The water churned, and a tentacle snaked out and slapped the bars. He leaped back with a grunt of surprise, slamming into Nol as he yanked a knife from his belt and held it in front of him. The beast in the water snorted and submerged again. Valus laughed, a nervous sound that carried through the room.

  “I think it likes you,” he said.

  “These are creatures like the ones that attacked us.” I stepped close enough to one of the enclosures to see in without being within range of a tentacle. A fin cut the dark water of the pool below, and beneath the dark ripples, I glimpsed a flash of a long gray body streaked with glowing lights. In another pool, a long-necked beast with three rows of sharp teeth hissed at us before submerging.

  “Come on,” Myo said. “This isn’t what we’re looking for.”

  We slipped between the cages, and I was unable to tear my eyes from the creatures in the water. One of the pits was massive, its waters silent and dark, but as I watched, a ripple of light slid through them in a swirl of fins. Something large lurked beneath that surface. As I stared, a few bubbles floated to the top of the water, and beneath them, the darkness blinked.

  It was watching us.

  I shivered.

  “Look,” Nol said. “Aemi, look.”

  Beyond the pits of water were smaller cages, these with metal bottoms, and in them I saw creatures that did not belong to the sea. Monkeys. Birds. Snakes.

  The chieftain on Sprocket had claimed Azure came ashore to take animals. She’d been right, it seemed.

  I stepped closer to the cages that held the monkeys. They gazed back at me, eyes bright and curious, mouths moving as they chirped.

  Distracted, I barely had time to react when something lunged from behind the last cage and slammed into my chest.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I HIT THE floor, and my vision exploded with flecks of light as my breath left my chest. Sound faded and then rushed back all at once as I lifted my hand and saw blood on my hand.

  A snarl filled the air, and time slowed as I raised my eyes.

  A dog-creature stood over my chest, so close I could feel the heat of its breath. Its body was lean and powerful, thick with muscle and sleek like a shark. Its tail lashed. As I watched, stunned, it threw back its head and emitted a string of clicking sounds like a dolphin, its throat convulsing.

  “Don’t move,” Kit said, his voice high and strained. “Aemi, don’t move—”

  The dog-thing dove for my throat, jaws snapping. Ignoring Kit’s words, I grabbed a sharp tool from the table nearby and slammed it into the creature’s side. Hands yanked me back, and the beast jerked again and dropped to the floor. I lifted my head to see Nol and Kit with truskets raised. Valus helped me to my feet. His hands trembled.

  Nol rushed to me and grabbed me in a hug. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, my mouth pressed into his shoulder.

  He drew back and ran his hands down my face and arms. “No blood,” he murmured. His eyes swept over me and he hesitated as if he wanted to embrace me again, but instead, he released me.

  “What is it?” I managed, looking down at the dead animal. “It sounded like... like a dolphin.”

  “Some kind of hybrid?” Myo suggested.

  “How is such a thing possible?” Garren asked.

  No one answered. I think he spoke for all of us. We stared in silence at the beast-thing on the ground.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Myo said. Straightening, he cast one last glance at the cages around us before moving toward the door at the end of the room.

  I was still shaking. Valus stood beside me, and Nol stepped to my other side and took my arm.

  “Come on,” he said.

  ~ ~ ~

  We found the room of records, a narrow and cluttered space lined with shelves. The air was colder here, and the dryness made my skin itch. Myo seemed to know where to look this time. Kit stood guard at the door while he pulled a stack of books from a shelf and sifted through them, setting aside each one after a short examination. The rest of us lingered in the aisles between them.

  Garren touched one of the shelves, and a puff of dust rose as he tapped his finger against a book and then tipped his head to the side to read the spine. “The Winter Parables,” he read aloud. “What is winter?”

  “On the surface, it is when the season changes and the air grows cold,” Nol said.

  “These are surface stories? I thought these Azure people were Itlanteans.” Garren looked at Myo as if he’d caught him in a lie.

  “Azure keeps its own secrets,” Myo said. “They have always remained apart. Little is known about them, and whatever they have said about themselves cannot be trusted.”

  “Like the Mist, I hear,” I said.

  “Aemi,” Myo said, ignoring my barb. He held up a paper that had been folded many times. He smoothed the creases and handed it to me. “Tell me what you make of this.”

  I gazed down at the paper, scrawled with unintelligible letters and numbers. A rough sketch of something—a circle with spokes protruding from the center—filled the left corner of the document. He held another paper in his hand, this one water-stained, scribbled with music.

  I shook my head. “I don’t...”

  Under his breath, Myo hummed a few notes.

  I paused. A memory flitted at the edges of my mind. “I’ve seen this before.”

  How I’d seen it, and why, I didn’t know. The reason slipped away from me when I tried to remember, like a fragment of wood just out of reach on a wave.

  “Can you decipher it?” he asked, patient and intense as he focused on my face, as if he could coax the words from me.

  “I...” I took another look. Again, the memory drifted from my reach. “I can’t.”

  “Try,” he said. He hummed again under his breath.

  Angry voices lifted in argument. Crouching beneath a desk, listening, the metal of the floor cold against my fingers.

  I blinked. The memory came fast and strong, jarring me with its intensity.

  My gaze returned to the paper. I found myself looking at the sketch instead of the symbols. That was familiar too.

  “Where is Valus?” Nol demanded suddenly.

  We looked around. He was gone.

  “Valus?” I called.

  Garren strode to the corridor as Valus came hurrying through the door. They slammed into each other, and Valus fell back.

  “Where have you been?” Garren reached down and grabbed the front of Valus’s bodysuit, hauling him up.

  “I had to take a piss,” Valus snapped.

  A ringing sound split the silence, and I stiffened, my hand outstretched to take the paper. Myo snapped into action, gathering the books and shoving them back into their places.

  “Go,” he whispered harshly. “Hurry! They know they’ve been breached. That’s the alarm.”

  “Back the way we came,” Nol said, and then we were running between the cages while the wail of the alarm echoed behind us. The animals screamed and fluttered in their cells, stirred to agitation by the noise. Valus slipped on the wet ground, and I was the one to catch his arm. He grabbed my hand and didn’t let go as we headed through the second room, the one with the instruments and scribbles on the wall. The words meant something to me now, something they hadn’t before I’d been in the room of records. I skidded to a halt and pulled free, staring at them, devouring the information they held.

  “Aemi!” Nol turned and saw that I wasn’t following. “What are you doing?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait, I understand this
... I remember...”

  The alarm was still ringing. Nol repeated my name.

  A man, his hair wild with perspiration and too much tugging on the ends, writing with excitement on the wall. The sound of the words being written, a crisp squeak of charcoal against the paint. My legs dangling off the edge of a table, my hands folded in my lap so tightly my fingers were white. A woman saying my name, asking me if I was cold.

  “It’s brilliant,” someone said.

  “It won’t hurt,” someone else said.

  Then Nol was pulling me along, and I let him, let my legs carry me from that room of memories and into the darkness of the corridor. Numbly, I pulled the mask over my mouth and eyes and leaped into the water with Kit and Valus right behind me, and I swam.

  It won’t hurt.

  And I was too cold even through the thick layer of my bodysuit as my dolphin swam to meet me, and my fingers closed around his fin.

  ~ ~ ~

  I curled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, trying to keep warm after I’d hauled myself from the water and onto my ship. I couldn’t stop shivering. Kit, the next up into the ship after me, took one concerned look before disappearing up the ladder to the common area. He reappeared with a blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  “You’re cold,” he said, putting an arm around me and settling beside me. “Just sit here for a bit.”

  I felt warmer with his solid presence against me. I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “That was bizarre,” Kit muttered. “That dog monster?”

  I sighed. The memory stained my mind like a nightmare. “Did you ever see anything like that creature when you were with Nautilus?”

  “Never,” he said.

  Valus emerged from the water and threw off his equipment. He swiped at the wet hair on his forehead with his wrist. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get the image of that beast out of my head,” he said to me, noting my shivering. His face softened into something approaching concern.

  As soon as Nol set foot back on the Riptide, he yanked off his mask and grabbed Valus by the throat.

  “What did you do back there?” he demanded.

  Valus pushed him away. “I told you.”

  “You set off that alarm.”

  “I didn’t!” Valus stepped back, his shoulders bumping into Garren, who shoved him back toward Nol.

  “Both of you,” Myo said. “Leave it. It’s over now.”

  “We can’t trust this one,” Garren growled. “We should dump him in the ocean for the sharks to eat.”

  Valus paled.

  “Stop,” I said from my place on the floor. “We already covered that. No one is getting fed to the sharks, so leave him alone.”

  Nol turned to me, his mouth turning down into a scowl. “He risked our lives, Aemi.”

  “You just want someone to blame because your mission failed,” Valus said. He peeled off the thick outer diving suit and threw it at the equipment locker.

  “It didn’t fail,” Myo said, removing his mask as he stepped onto the deck. He punched the button to close the doors to the sea below. “We got what we needed.”

  Surprise rushed through me.

  “We did?” I said to him in a lowered tone, speaking for his ears alone. “But I don’t know where Perilous is.”

  “Ah,” Myo said. “But you do.”

  With that enigmatic comment, he turned and strode from the room.

  Nol and Valus glared at each other before Valus followed Myo.

  Nol stepped to my side. “Why are you defending him?”

  I shook my head, annoyed. “Why are you snarling every time he looks at you sideways? We’re supposed to be working together. Fighting constantly isn’t going to make that any easier.”

  Nol blinked at me, and then rubbed his hands across his face. “Don’t pretend to be so naive, Aemi.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Now it was his turn to shake his head. “Can’t you see it? He likes you.”

  Valus?

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, but I didn’t believe my own words.

  ~ ~ ~

  I slept for much of the next day, my body exhausted and my mind drained. Dreams haunted me. I saw Celestrus in her old, pristine glory, and Nol was with me as we both stood in a room filling with seawater. A garden sphere, I always realized with a crawling sense of doom, just before I raised my eyes to see ships in the darkness of the sea beyond, poised to fire on us as the Dron beat on the glass outside, bubbles streaming from their mouths as they shouted through the water, their hair and clothes streaming around their faces. “They’re drowning,” I gasped out, but when I looked again, there was nothing but the sea and the ships, and then the silence before the explosions in the city.

  Just as in the attack, Nol shielded me from a wave of water that poured in through the cracked glass, and together we swam out and up for the surface. But when I ran out of air, instead of breathing life into my lungs, Nol grabbed my head and shoved me down toward the wreckage of Celestrus. I kicked and thrashed, bubbles escaping from my lips as I fought the vise-like grip of his hands, and then the Dron rose from the depths, Garren and Valli among them, and they caught my ankles with their icy hands and stroked my arms as they pulled me down into the ruins, where dog-dolphins waited to tear me to pieces.

  I woke tangled in blankets, my forehead damp with sweat and Nol crouched beside the bed, his eyes trained on me and his hand on mine.

  “It’s just a dream,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  I curled into the curve of him and let myself cry from exhaustion and uncertainty, and he wrapped both of his arms around my shoulders and murmured unintelligible words of comfort into my ear. I let him hold me, and part of me wondered when I had begun to break, but the bigger part of me was only glad that he was there with me to let me shatter in safety.

  After a while, exhaustion claimed me and I slept again.

  After my third nightmare, I rose quietly. Nol was sleeping now, his head against the wall beside my bed, his chest rising and falling with even breaths. I didn’t wake him. I padded into the common room alone. The lights were turned low, and the hum of the ship was like a gentle shushing.

  Myo sat cross-legged on one of the padded benches, a game of Hooks beside him, but he was the only one playing. I watched from the doorway as he moved a piece and then reached across the board to move the other color. He was playing himself.

  “Were you planning to join me anytime soon?” he asked after a moment.

  I stirred. “I don’t want to disturb your battle,” I said, crossing to the board and studying it.

  He lifted his head to look at me. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “I have many dreams,” I said simply.

  Myo nodded. “I understand that is part of your memories returning. Tallyn said they would be intense.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Tallyn, because doing so filled me with sadness even now. I hesitated, other questions filling me. This was the first time I’d had the opportunity to question Myo alone. I intended to make use of it. “When we were at the facility, you found those papers. You said we’d gotten what we needed, even though I couldn’t decipher the code. You said I knew where Perilous is.”

  “You do,” Myo said. “But we still have to access the rest of the memories. I just need the rest of the song.”

  “The song?”

  He hummed a few bars, and a strange, wild feeling skittered through me, like the taste of a dream I’d had so long ago that I remembered only the feeling it had given me.

  “I found a sheet scribbled with musical notes in the facility,” he said. “And I remembered a rumor I’d heard, how Azure was experimenting with memory and music.” He paused to study the game before him, and then he moved another piece. “I believe you can retrieve your memories with a song, perhaps the one we found in the facility.”

  “What are we waiting for, then?” I said. “Hum it for me. I’ll remember rig
ht now.”

  “It isn’t quite so easy,” he responded, capturing a piece on the board and setting it aside. He didn’t meet my eyes. “You have to hear the music as you face specific challenges. And the song was incomplete.”

  “Where can you find it? Is there another facility we can raid?” Frustration simmered along my veins and bubbled in my blood. Perilous. It was like my memories, so close and yet always out of reach. And here Myo sat, playing a game instead of trying to solve this puzzle while a war waged around us.

  “Hmm,” Myo said. “Perhaps.”

  “You’re remarkably calm, considering we’re failing at our mission,” I snapped.

  “Aemiana,” he said. “We are closer than ever before. In fact, I believe we will find another piece of our puzzle in a few hours.”

  I opened my mouth to demand why. He hummed the song again, and memories tugged at me, close but out of my reach.

  “Myo—”

  Footsteps interrupted me. Keli stuck her head into the common room. “As you requested, we’re stopping to refuel in a few hours at Brinewater instead of the closer southern colony. Don’t know why you want to go out of our way, but so be it.”

  Brinewater. The oil colony where a thief stole from Lyssia and Tallyn unceremoniously dumped two thugs on the ground when they threatened us. Another bastion of the beaten down and oppressed.

  “Dock when we reach it,” Myo said to Keli.

  I lifted an eyebrow questioningly.

  “I’ll be going into the colony,” he said.

  What was he planning?

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IN SOME WAYS, Brinewater was just as I remembered it—dirty, cramped, rusted, and cobbled together from spare parts. Condensation dripped from the walls, and the air smelled like rotting fish. The same tired, scrawny workers parted before us as we strode through the marketplace where the rows of shops selling knives, tools, and curiosities lined the edges of the tunnels. But something was different.