Echoes of the Tide (Deep Waters #3)

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

T here weren’t any obvious clues, and that was annoying her. This key was supposed to be easy to find. Jacob had made it seem like it would be right here in the doctor’s office. Considering what he said, she had a feeling other people might even want to find the key, or know where the key was. If this Doctor Faust was the one who had it, then surely he would have some record of having it.

Right?

But she’d torn his office apart. From the front to the back, every piece of paper that still existed in this room, she had read it. She’d torn up the pages that she’d already read, knowing there wasn’t much use for them anyway. It wasn’t like any other doctor was going to read this man’s boring notes on what it took to repair vein ruptures. No one in Gamma had those kinds of skills.

And then, of course, Maketes had to come and distract her. He didn’t understand how hard it was for her to focus when she knew his eyes were on her. Because she didn’t want to do this. He made her want to be a better person.

He made her want to go back to Jacob and tell him to go fuck himself. She had an undine on her side and he wouldn’t let anything terrible happen to her or her sister. Some part of her wanted to swim off with him into the sunset and just trust that he would take care of her.

In contrast, reality was a real slap in the face. There wasn’t a chance on the face of this earth that she could do any of that. Her reality was a hard one. Her sister wasn’t safe, she wasn’t safe, and she was surrounded by criminals. If they wanted to hurt her or her family, they would. Jacob likely had already. She knew he’d killed that one massive crowd of people, but he’d probably done it before as well.

People in Gamma didn’t talk about body counts, and not in the fun way. If she had asked, though, it wouldn’t have surprised her to hear that any of the people she dealt with on a day-to-day basis had killed more people than they had fingers and toes.

So she returned her focus to the task at hand. She ignored the feeling that she’d been lied to, that the key wasn’t here at all. Jacob clearly wanted the key. He wouldn’t have created this elaborate plan just to have a reason to kill her sister. He wasn’t that good.

Ripping the last drawer out of the desk, she tossed it onto the ground a little too hard. Tera rolled in circles at her feet, trying to get her attention, likely because the sound had been far too loud. Someone would come to investigate if she kept throwing drawers around, but at this point, her anger had gotten the best of her.

Because for fuck’s sake, this was a waste of time. Obviously, the key was gone. Someone had taken it with them when they were evacuated or, likely, Doctor Faust had been caught in the flooding when Gamma was first destroyed.

She could see the hints of it now, and she slumped in the desk chair as she looked around. “Tera?” she asked, letting her head rest against the back of the chair. “Did you notice there are barnacles growing above our head?”

Tera rolled in a circle again, cracking the beads together and then rolling in the opposite direction. It drew her attention to the back of the room, where she could see there were even hints of dead coral growing in the back. This whole room had likely been underwater for a very long time for all of those things to grow, which meant anything that was useful was gone.

No one as smart as a doctor would let an important key just... linger. Not without knowing exactly where it was going. At least, if it was as important as Jacob thought, that is.

Tera clacked again, trying to get her attention as she wallowed in self pity. Or maybe that was a tap on the window. She didn’t know. The undine might be trying to get her attention, too.

At least, until Tera cracked a little harder and then bumped against her shoe.

“What is it?” she asked, looking down at the little droid. “I know you think I should still search, but there’s nothing here. I was lucky the desk even managed to not be as waterlogged as the rest of it. This whole room was reclaimed by the sea. There’s nothing here.”

Again Tera made the noise, and this time rolled underneath the desk. Then the little beads all turned in the same direction, almost as though they were looking at the bottom of the waterlogged wood.

“Oh, you little genius.”

Standing so quickly the chair went careening out from under her, she crawled underneath the desk with her droid. As she flipped onto her back, staring up at the bottom of the drawer, she saw a tiny piece of metal imbedded there. It wasn’t part of the desk build, that much was certain.

“A clue?” she muttered, grabbing onto it and moving both herself and her droid out into the light. “Or... A hologram?”

There weren’t many of these left, as far as she knew. A lot more people used to use them before they went under the sea, and now it was mostly just primitive ways to keep in touch with others. At least, that was as far as she knew. But a hologram was something she’d heard about, and apparently something Tera knew what to do with. The little balls were jumping, leaping for her attention.

So she handed the disk over. Magnets connected to it and all five of Tera’s pieces were rolling away with the hologram in their grasp. Right into the center of the room where they set themselves up into a circle and blue light flickered from the piece that had been hidden under the desk.

A man appeared before her. Well, not really. A holographic man who was made of blue lights and the sprinkling of flickers from where the chip had likely been damaged when it was underwater. But he was right there. A man with enough details that she could read the name on his lab coat.

Faust.

He was a small man. She wasn’t sure why she’d built up the image in her mind of a tall, handsome doctor who had likely done some terrible things in his time. But this man was so far from her imagined person. He was small. Mousy, even. He had tiny spectacles on his nose and was balding only on the crown of his head. He had a thin, pointed nose that was constantly wrinkled as he stared at something in the distance.

“It’s on?” he said. “Are you sure?”

Ace backed away, blindly reaching with her hand for the chair so she could sit down on it and stare at the absolute magic in front of her. A real hologram. It was like she was standing in the room with him. Even if it was a recording, it was still impressive to see.

“If you’re looking through my office, I can only imagine you’re here for one reason. And Jessup, if it’s you, then you put this down and go back to your family. You’re wasting precious time.”

Doctor Faust slid his glasses back up his nose and the hologram glitched. She could see it roll up through the sparkling blue lights that made him up. One moment he was standing straight, and the next he was glitching in stages away from her. Walking through the room and then sitting down where there might have once been a chair on the opposite side of the desk for someone to sit in and visit with him.

It was odd, watching someone sit where there was no chair. But the look of hopelessness on his face made her breath catch in her throat.

“That’s why I can’t keep going,” he muttered. “This is wrong. It’s beyond wrong. What we’re doing to these people, and they don’t even know it? None of us should have done any of this.”

“Done what?” she found herself asking. But that was the part that had been skipped. Because the doctor just sighed and ran his hands through the meager hair on top of his head.

“I don’t know what to do. All I know is that the information you seek is in Tau.”

“Tau?” she repeated, watching the hologram suddenly freeze and then shudder. “There’s not a city named Tau.”

She didn’t think, at least. There were only three remaining cities that she knew of. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. There had been a fourth, but it wasn’t called Tau. And that city had long been lost to the sea. It was destroyed a long time ago. Now there was just Beta and Gamma.

There was another city? Was that what this key was meant to do? Open the doors to a city that she shouldn’t even know existed?

“Tera,” she said quietly. “Please replay what you can and fix whatever is damaged. I need to know more about Tau and about where the key is.”

Her droid made a soft cracking sound and then she could see it working. The doctor moved all throughout the room. His image was projected everywhere, from the door to the window to suddenly right in front of her like he had just stood. And then he started talking again, even if the sound was distorted, like it was underwater.

“The key to the vault is in my private quarters. That’s above the Painted Lady. But I caution you, whoever you are that found this message, to know that there are limitations to what you will find after you use the key. You don’t want to know the truth of all these cities under the sea, I can promise you that. And if you do find out the truth, then I pity you for what you will find.” Doctor Faust took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “And I hope you can find some pity for me when you find out all the things I have done.”

She watched the hologram start to shift and move again, glitching forward and back. “What did you do?” she asked quietly, watching this tortured man move throughout his office, talking to himself and recording messages that had been stolen by the sea. “What did you and whoever else was helping you do?”

There was the faintest click, and suddenly she was staring right at him. He had knelt in front of the office chair as though he knew someone would sit right where she was sitting. His beady eyes stared up at her, and she felt like he was looking into her soul.

“Do not trust anyone from Tau. Don’t believe them if they say their city has been destroyed. Tau is enduring. That is what it has always done and what it will always do. That city is full of villains and to underestimate them is to invite a massacre to your world. Do not trust them. Not a single person from that city.”

And then the hologram dissipated. There was nothing left of him, and nothing left of the hologram either, it seemed. A little fizzle, a strange hissing noise, and then Tera dropped the small chip that was now smoking. The little coil of black made her realize that she was the only person who would ever know what was said on that hologram. No one else had found it. And somehow, she wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

He had told her very little, other than where the key was. Her stomach still twisted in knots, though. She was so terrified what kind of key she was getting for Jacob. A vault could have anything in it, but the warnings about Tau were clearly meant for people to heed. This was a dangerous new city, if it even existed.

“Tera?” she asked as the droid rolled up to her feet. “What do you think?”

She’d never wished she’d given her droid a voice more than she did in this moment. It clicked, rolled, clacked, did all the things it could to communicate, but she still had no idea what it was saying.

All she wanted was for someone to tell her that she was doing the right thing. That yes, this was hard. It was never meant to be easy, but she was moving in the right direction. Of all the things she’d done in her life, she had made a good choice to be here.

Get the key. Save her sister. Go back to living in Gamma where no one cared if she was alive or dead, but at least her sister was still thriving.

Yet this whole adventure had wriggled its way into her mind. Maybe she didn’t want to just exist. Maybe she deserved more than living in that clocktower, working on her droids and being covered in grease.

She touched her hair. Her fluffy hair that had been shorn so ragged at her shoulders, and she remembered that her hair had once been pretty. At the very least, she’d brushed it regularly, and it had streaks like she’d just seen the sun. She liked her hair. And she’d taken that away from herself because it was easier to forget that she was a person at all, rather than risk being seen by someone she didn’t want to see her.

Tears gathering in her eyes, she sighed and placed Tera in her pocket. “It’s going to be fine, Tera. We stick to the plan, right? That’s the only thing we can do.”

She was so caught up in her own thoughts that she didn’t even think about listening to her surroundings. Ace was usually so aware of everything around her. She’d had to be. Gamma was a prison, after all, and in these moments she forgot that.

A boot hit the ground hard. The almost stomp broke through her thoughts and suddenly she looked up to see a group of people standing in the doorway to the office. The woman in front had a scar down the side of her face, right through her eye that was sunken into her skull. A faint yellow ooze seemed to smear underneath, as though she’d lost the eye recently and infection had set in.

Then she smelled the rot, and Ace knew she was in so much trouble.

“Now who do we have here?” the scarred woman said. “I don’t think you belong here.”

“I recently moved into the area,” she said, trying to scramble to make it seem like she was exactly where she was supposed to be. “Sorry I haven’t been able to introduce myself before I tried to find a bed.”

“A bed?” The woman stepped into the room and nudged the broken hologram with her foot. “Seems like you are here for a different purpose than a bed.”

Shit.

She reached into her pocket and palmed the scalpel in her pocket. She really had hoped she wouldn’t have to use this, but her luck had been real bad lately.

“I guess you know more than I do,” she ground through her teeth.

“Oh, I do. We’re going to rip you apart, piece by piece, until you tell us how you got in here, where you came from, and what you were going to do.” The scarred woman tilted her head to the side in a very raptor-like motion. “You’re cute. It’s a shame I’m going to carve stripes off of you before you talk.”

“What makes you think I’m that good at withstanding torture?” Her hand was shaking in her pocket.

“Because I don’t want to hear a word until I’m done carving. Then I’ll allow you to speak.”

Oh, she was so fucked.