Echoes of the Tide (Deep Waters #3)

Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26

T he toy tower was the last place she wanted to go. So many rumors tainted this place as a madhouse, and she didn’t want to find out why everyone said that. After all, everywhere in Gamma wasn’t “normal”. For so many people to fear this area of the city? There had to be a good reason.

Holding onto Maketes’s shoulder, she bit her lip as they approached the building. They couldn’t stay in the water for very long now that her suit was gone. And though they’d tried to find another one in the control tower, apparently those were hard to come by these days. They had to move fast and get her into another building, even if it was the toy tower.

Lights flickered around it. A rainbow of colors that lured any and all toward what was meant to be a fun and childlike area to be in. She knew this building used to be a store for children until it had flooded after the undine attack. Then it was just... taken over by gang members. Supposedly, the most insane ones were the only people who lived here.

The closer they got, the more her stomach twisted. All the windows were covered up. Every single one of them.

Whoever lived inside had plastered flyers and posters onto the windows, making it almost impossible to see inside. There was the faintest hint of shadows moving beyond, so the lights were still on, but that was all she could see.

“I don’t like this,” Maketes muttered, even as he looked for entrance.

“Neither do I.”

“We should find somewhere else to go.”

“There isn’t anywhere else to go. Everything I could find leads us here, and if this is where I find the key, then this is the only place we can go.” She rubbed her hand on his chest, trying to soothe the fears from him, even though she knew that there was no way for her to fully do that. “I have to do this, Maketes. You know that.”

She knew he did, but it broke her heart to realize that she was going to make him even more afraid. Everything she’d done so far made him worried, and that didn’t settle right with her. She wanted him to believe in her. To trust her. All the things that she’d always wanted from other people. But she didn’t want to put him in a position like this.

“There,” he said, and then they were darting through the water. Past all the plastered up windows. Beyond the looming shadows that looked like people holding knives with severely blighted bodies.

He swam with her past all those horrors and then tilted her head to his shoulder. He made her look away from the nightmarish shadows. At least until they got to their destination. There was a small crack at the base of the tower. Not much of one, but enough that she could slip through on her own.

Ace reached out and grabbed onto the shards of metal that were bent back into the ocean, pausing only when Maketes’s hands grabbed onto her waist. Gently, he turned her to face him. And then he framed her face with his webbed hands, making her look at him.

“Be careful,” he said, his deep voice echoing through the sea. “If they lay a finger on you, I will rip their arms off their bodies. I will tear them apart, kefi, and I will feel no mercy.”

She’d seen him do that exact thing already. It should have terrified her that he was capable of it, but instead, now all she felt was the warmth of reassurance.

Touching her hand to the side of his neck, she trailed her fingers through the pretty gills there. “When are you going to tell me what kefi means?”

“Soon. If you come back to me.”

If.

A burst of fear flooded through her. His gills flared even wider, and she could see in his eyes that he knew what she was feeling.

“Ace,” he said, his words belaying that he was ready to call this off. Soon, he would gather her back up in his arms and dart through the ocean. He would take her so far away from here that she would forget about her sister or all the terrible things she’d done to keep Laura alive.

So she propelled herself backward, into the small opening where he could not follow her. She pressed a kiss to her fingertips and sent it out into the ocean for him, before she turned and yanked herself through the twisted metal.

There weren’t a lot of floating objects here. It made a warning bell flash in her mind. Because if there wasn’t anything floating here, then that meant someone had been looking for items in the water. This exit wasn’t a secret one. People had been here.

And if people had been here, then that meant wherever she was going to exit wasn’t all that secret either.

She still had her scalpel. It was in her pocket, and Tera was there too. If she had to get herself out of a situation, she could. Even if that meant finding a way out that wasn’t the same as the one she’d exited.

Unlike the other humans in this tower, she had someone in the sea who would help her if she had to flood the place.

A twisted spike of metal caught on her shirt. She turned to yank it free, only to get caught up by her icy fingers. She couldn’t open and close her hands all that easily, and that made her clumsy. The twisted metal freed her shirt with the tug, but it also sliced through her hand. Blood plumed in the water, tendrils of it reaching out in the stillness that was odd to swim in.

She’d gotten used to the rolling waves of the sea. The building stopped all those waves, though, and now it was just still.

Her lungs screamed for air, and she turned. Kicking against the metal, she swam toward the shimmering light at the surface. Every inch of her prayed that it was an empty room that she would swim up to.

She didn’t gasp as she crested the surface. Instead, she kept her head low and wiped her nose free before taking in a deep inhalation. At least that was quieter than the gasp that would have told everyone where she was.

The base of this tower was flooded, it seemed. The foundation had cracked long ago, leaving fissures like veins spreading throughout the base of this room. Some fissures were hidden underneath beams that had fallen from the ceiling and created small grottos she could hide in. And she’d need to.

Groups of men and women clustered around fires that were on the ground. But the people weren’t right. Just one glance and all she saw were scars and wounds and strange faces. It looked like they had purposefully scarred their faces. Everyone seemed to have some form of mark on their face, right down their eyes, all the way down their cheeks. Some had scars that made a permanent smile stretch beyond their lips.

As she watched the nearest group, a woman stood with a doll in her hands. A baby doll, wearing a bright blue dress. She reached behind it, cranked the small pull tab on the back, and giggled as the baby laughed. Then she tossed it into the fire and danced around it.

This was beyond odd. This was a dangerous, mad place with people burning toys to stay warm.

She reached for the beam above her head and used it to push herself back underwater. Swimming to the next beam and the next hiding place made it a little easier to survey them all. She didn’t even know what she was looking for, but she hoped the key itself would be rather obvious.

Until she noticed that the nearest group next to her was eating. Their boisterous laughter filled the room with a cacophony of sound. One of them gestured with a long bone that had gristle hanging off of it.

“You caught him first?”

“Yeah, he came over the bridge at the switch. Didn’t have any idea that I was still standing there.” The second man who spoke had a greasy lump of hair hanging off of his chin. Bald other than that greasy beard, he looked like a villain in a fairytale. “Too easy to pick off.”

“How’d you kill him?” asked the first man, ripping a huge bite of meat off the bone. “Gun?”

“Nah. I like to do things with my hands.”

The flash of silver caught her attention as the second man pulled out a hunting knife that was longer than her forearm. “I gutted him to make sure the meat stayed sweet.”

The meat?

Her eyes tilted to the side, even though she knew she didn’t want to see the truth of what they were saying. Next to the fire, she had thought it was a third man. His booted feet were set up like he was sitting with them. But as she moved just slightly in the water, she could see that he was missing an arm. Intestines hung out of his belly, and his head lolled forward.

Dead. So dead. And that arm was hanging over the fire beside the men.

The first man had been eating... By all the gods, that was an elbow in his hands. The gristly meat hanging off of it was the man’s biceps.

She pressed her hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t make any noise. The fish she’d eaten last night rose in the back of her throat, pressing against her tongue and begging to be released.

They were eating people here.

Oh, fuck.

Fuck, they were eating people, and she was in the middle of everything. Her heart thundered in her chest. Even though she was in icy water, she felt flushed and hot. This was wrong. It was so fucking wrong. She’d always heard they weren’t right in the toy tower, but she hadn’t realized...

Ace ducked under the water again, making sure any whimpers were little more than bubbles that could easily be misconstrued as something dropping from the ceiling into the water. Because she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t be surrounded by cannibals while she was looking for some stupid key that probably didn’t exist anymore.

She couldn’t.

She had to go back out to the ocean. Fuck Jacob. He could get the key on his own. She’d tell him where it was and everything she knew about it, but she would not stay when these people would eat her if they found her.

But then the thoughts fluttered through her mind again. She could hear her sister’s voice in her head. Laura had begged her to stay back then. And if she failed in this, wasn’t she failing her sister again?

So she turned under the water and told herself she was everything Maketes had said. She was brave. She was capable. She was a courageous woman who knew how to take care of herself and if that meant facing a group of cannibals?

Oh, she was going to puke in the water. They were eating that man.

Grinding her teeth, she forced herself to swim past all the people. She tried hard to not look at all the other bits of meat they were eating. Meat she was now certain didn’t come from rats, like her own people had been eating. But it was so hard to not look at the absolute madness unfurling around her.

No wonder people didn’t come here. No wonder everyone warned the others to stay as far away from this cursed place as possible.

The farther into the tower she got, the more insane things she saw. People here wore the children’s masks on their faces. But they were too small for adults, so they were just tiny masks with scarred faces spread out on either side of them. Every time she ducked behind a beam or underneath the water and watched them stagger by.

They were all so oblivious. They bumped into each other, laughing or drawing weapons afterward. There was no in between. Like their emotions were too intense for any of them to react predictably.

Until she saw one walking by, pouring a white powder onto their hand and then snorting it. So they were also the ones who had the most drugs at their disposal as well. She hadn’t realized there were drugs even left in this city, especially if these people were using them so rapidly.

Finally, she reached the end of this fissure of water that ran all the way into the heart of the tower. There were fewer people here, most of them seemed to gather together in the main room. It made getting around them easier. But her feet felt like they were going to fall off and her hands were so numb she couldn’t feel her fingers, so she had to get out of the water.

Placing her hands on the floor, she glanced around to make sure no one else was here before sliding out of the water. Shivers wracked her body.

Get warm first, then she could keep searching. But she needed to get out of these clothes and into something far more manageable if she was going to do quite literally anything here.

Shivering with her arms wrapped around herself, she opened the first door she could find. There were countless people in there, all of them ripping apart toys. Some of them were on their hands and knees, knives poised at the throats of stuffed animals and blades digging into the soft bellies.

The next room was empty of anything useful. There were no people, but it seemed to be a room filled with the remains of old rocking chairs. The eerie stillness sent her rushing away.

It was hard to find a room where she could be alone, but eventually she managed. There was a single door that almost felt like it was locked until she pushed her way into it. Someone had placed a wall of giant bean filled bags in front of it. But as she stumbled inside, she could see it was actually a bedroom.

A bed in the corner was cozy, and the windows didn’t have all the coverings like the rest of this place. Instead, it was cozy and warm, with a fire crackling in the center and light filtering into the shadows.

A blanket in the back caught her attention, along with what looked like a pile of used clothes. That was good enough for her. Ace descended upon the clothes, stripping out of the sopping wet fabric that clung to her and putting on a black shirt that had seen better days and pants that were nearly serviceable. Tossing the blanket over her shoulders, she took a deep breath and tried to get her bearings.

“Oh,” a voice said, interrupting her quiet solitude. “I didn’t think to see a young lady in here.”

She turned to see the same old man who had been in the security system hologram. Although now he was even older. The gray on his hair had turned snow white, the wrinkles on his face were even deeper. But the smile on his face was tender as he looked her over.

“Don’t worry,” he added. “You’re safe here with me.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“I wish I could convince you, but...” He opened his hands. “I am just an old man. And I have lived here before all this became... all this.”

Frowning, she looked him over before sitting down on one of the many bean filled chairs. “Prove it to me.”

“Are you really in the place to be saying that?”

She grabbed her wet pants and pulled out the scalpel, along with Tera. The droid zipped throughout the room, moving until it was behind the man. It tapped against his heels, and he involuntarily took a step toward Ace.

He chuckled, as though none of this was scary to him in the slightest. “All right, I take the hint. I’ll prove it to you.”