Echoes of the Tide (Deep Waters #3)

Chapter 39

CHAPTER 39

A ce didn’t know how long they traveled through the ocean, only that they eventually shook the soldiers of Tau. The lights disappeared in the distance, just like the shattered feeling of her heart. Eventually, she became just as numb as her body. The cold of the sea settled in her chest, sinking through her very flesh and bone until she felt like she didn’t care about anything anymore.

It was nice to exist in that place for a little while. It didn’t feel like she was doing anything wrong, and she wasn’t hurting anyone but herself. Because she knew it wasn’t healthy.

Logically, she could look at what she’d done as the right choice. She needed to let Tera do the job that they had always wanted. Her droid only had one function, and that was to be of use. The fact that it could save not just her, but so many other people? Of course it was going to take that role happily.

But then her mind would scatter into the darker thoughts. Tera was just going to be alone down there. In the icy cold, knowing that time was passing, but that it was on its own. Worst-case scenario, Tau found her droid. And if they did, they would tear her droid apart for whatever it hadn’t wiped from its own memory yet.

Because she knew that’s what Tera would do. It wouldn’t give any information up about her, and that meant it had to start destroying itself on the way down.

Maketes’s arm tightened around her, and she could feel the ache in him as well. He wanted to fix what was broken, but he didn’t know how.

Neither did she.

After all they had been through together, this was the most broken that she’d ever felt. Her droid. Her best friend. All of it had been traded to save a sister who she wasn’t even sure wanted to be saved. What if Laura was happy down there? What if she had wanted to stay in Beta?

“Kefi?” Maketes asked, his voice pitched low and gentle.

She nodded against his neck, then buried her face in his gills. The thought of facing anyone or anything right now stung.

“We’re here.”

“Where is here?” she breathed against his skin.

Hopefully, somewhere she could pretend the world didn’t exist for a little while. If she could take some time to herself, she could piece all of these shattered bits back together. All she needed was a few minutes to herself and then she would crawl out of this dark hole.

“This is where Fortis had his son bring your sister,” Maketes said. “I thought, perhaps, you would like to see her now.”

One half of her soul screamed “Yes!” and the other half wasn’t so sure. What if Laura was disappointed to see her? The ‘what ifs’ could swallow her whole if she let them.

He had taught her to be brave, though. Maketes had always believed she was braver than she’d ever been, and she wanted to prove him right.

So she peeled her face off his side and looked around them. They were in a much calmer sea now. The water above their head was so close she could almost touch it. The sun shone brightly with a blue sky that was so vivid it turned the water around them into a sapphire pool.

Another pod was in front of them. Or what remained of one. This one looked mobile. It had clearly once been intended to send out into the depths of the water, perhaps to anchor itself somewhere as a home. But it had gotten stuck on this shoal. Half of the pod was out of the water, half of it in the water. Tipped onto its side like this, she could only imagine half of it was even useable.

But somewhere in that wreckage was her sister. Somewhere, Laura waited for her.

Squeezing his shoulders, she asked, “Can you come with me?”

“Your sister has not reacted well to my kind, apparently.” Maketes held her out away from him, the breathing tentacle loose between them. “I think it would be best to not scare her any more than she already has been. And there’s... other surprises, as well.”

“Other surprises?”

He shrugged. “Fortis and his son work in mysterious ways. The depthstriders see more than any of us.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

The soft smile on his face was the only response she would get, apparently. “It’s not a bad surprise, Ace. Just go inside and see your sister. You’ll feel better.”

She wasn’t so sure about that, but if her only option was to go inside and face the music, then... well, she supposed she had to do just that.

Sighing, she detached from the breathing tentacle and nodded. She could do this. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if her sister didn’t want to see her. She had faced a shark, rode a whale, weathered storms above the sea, and even fought against Tau. She’d survived cannibals! She could survive her own sister’s disdain, if that’s what it came to.

There was a small opening in the bottom of the pod, likely what had once been a moon pool. She slipped through that opening and pulled herself into the pod.

The interior was eerily similar to the one Mira and Anya lived in. Even with the podium in the back, now at a severe angle, where a bed had once been. Now the mattress had slid off the frame and a broken pot with dirt smeared across the floor was beside it.

The first thing she noticed, however, was the sound of voices. Not just one voice. Not just her sister talking to herself, but a man’s voice. Listening intently, she realized there were at least two men and then... another woman? Not her sister.

“Hello?” she called out. “Anyone home?”

The voices stopped, and then a man stuck his head through the opening to the next room. He had tousled brown hair, a mousy face, and freckles dusted across his nose. Glasses perched in front of his eyes, very similar to her own, although his magnified his eyes considerably.

“Hello?” he replied, although it sounded more like a question. “Who are you?”

“Ace.”

“We weren’t expecting any... humans.”

“Well, the undine thought maybe you’d been terrified enough for one day.” Standing on the slanted floor, she shook herself free from water and reached out a hand. “Nice to meet you. I’ll be honest, I thought I was only going to see my sister in here.”

“Your sister?” His mouth dropped open before he took a step back from her. “Are you... Are you Laura’s sister?”

Oh shit. “Yes.”

“The criminal?”

There it was. Sighing, she rolled her gaze up to the ceiling before sighing. “Yes, the criminal.”

The sound he made was a cross between a squeak and a gasp before he darted out of sight. So that’s how this was going to go. Somehow, Fortis and his son had brought a whole gaggle of humans to this place, and that was going to make all of this harder for her. The bastards.

She froze at the sound of running. Was she going to have to jump back into the water? Were they going to attack her?

But all she saw was the faint blur of a familiar form and an amazon running toward her. Without hesitation, Laura flung herself into Ace’s arms. They both staggered backward until Ace’s back hit the wall and still, her sister hugged her so hard she couldn’t breathe. Ace had a moment of stunned shock. Was her sister really hugging her? Was this actually Laura?

Then the smell hit her. Basil and herbs, the scent of loam that always clung to Laura no matter where she was. Green things and pottery. All the scents that had always made her think of her sister, even after the years it had been since they’d seen each other.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she finally hugged her sister back. Years of sacrifice. Years of pain. Years of torment and fear and sleepless nights. They all flowed away as her sister held her and she held her sister back.

“It’s you,” Laura whispered. “I never gave up hope. I knew you’d come back.”

Tears burned in her eyes and then fell. But this time, they weren’t sad tears. They weren’t tears that were born of frustration and anger. They were happy tears.

Finally, everything that she had done mattered.

Squeezing Laura even harder, she then leaned back so she could look at her sister for the first time in years.

“Look at you,” Ace whispered, running her fingers underneath Laura’s eyes. “You have wrinkles now.”

“You should talk. You look even more like a criminal than the first day you left.”

“I can tell you aren’t sleeping enough. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

Laura laughed. “So do you.”

She wasn’t taking care of herself, but Ace was here now. Ace would take care of her, just like she always had.

“Come here,” she whispered, tugging her back into her arms.

All was right in the world. All of it.

“I’m not as brave as you,” Laura murmured. “The undine are terrifying. They brought us here, and I was certain it was because of everything we’d been doing. But I remembered that you always were different. So no matter what the others said, I held out hope.”

“The undine are the reason we are together.” Ace made eye contact with the second man and woman that also joined them. The two looked like brother and sister, with dark hair and dark eyes that had seen too much. “They are the ones who listened. They are the ones who fought for us. And now, I will do everything I can to fight for them as well.”

The other humans looked at each other in doubt, but Laura pulled back and grinned. “Look at you, always breaking the mold.”

Ace shook her head, trying to clear it of all the questions that were there. “What do you mean you thought the undine were taking you because of what you were doing? You’re a gardener?”

Laura’s expression turned sheepish. Her sister held out her hand and then drew Ace into the other room. There were countless droids that had come with them, apparently. Ones that fit in pockets, ones that were similar to Byte. Even a few gliders that were currently out of the water and being worked on. The room smelled musky and metallic, just as her old workroom had. For a moment, Ace was right back there.

Working in the droid depot with her shitty boss, but her fantastic coworkers. The two siblings she almost recognized. They must have worked there as well when she was in the depot, just not in her department. And the other man...

“You used to program droids,” she muttered, then shook her head. “Laura what?—”

“You were right,” Laura interrupted. “Beta was corrupt from the top down. There were too many rich people and not enough shared wealth. After they locked you up, there were a lot of folks who felt just like I did. We all got together and realized this was far too important to ignore. We had to keep going. We had to keep doing what you were doing. Steal from those who wouldn’t even notice the loss of money, and then redistribute that wealth where it needed to go.”

Ace could hardly keep up with what her sister was saying. “You were always too afraid to leave the garden because the plants might die.”

“They did.” Laura’s expression hardened. “And everyone who killed them suffered.”

Where had her baby sister gone? In her place was a woman who had seen the problems in her own city and she had taken every step to fix them. Whereas Ace had just wanted to see if she could do it, Laura had done so much more than that.

Stunned, she looked between all the people before her and coughed out a little laugh. “Well, aren’t you all the bravest people I’ve ever met?”

Laura shook her head and then gestured for Ace to sit down at a table next to the glass. “Tell me everything. I want to know what happened in Gamma. Why are the undine working with you? How did you start working with the undine at all?”

She sat and blurted everything out. All the hardship, all the terrors. She kept her relationship with Maketes at a minimum, but it was rather hard to do because halfway through her storytelling, he appeared behind her. The glass was the only thing that separated them, and though she could see her sister and her friends get nervous, they relaxed once they realized he wasn’t going to bust through the glass.

She ended the story by putting her hand against the glass where Maketes was. “The undine are a beautiful people. They are more similar to us than I ever gave them credit for.”

Laura grinned. “I know. We saw your message.”

“What message?”

The man with glasses shoved them up the bridge of his nose and said, “The one you sent to all the cities. It was broadcasted in here as well.”

“I know that was you,” Laura added, her eyes glittering with pride. “No one else would be so ballsy as to take on a city like Tau through a droid.”

“How do you know I used a droid to do it?” she asked.

The woman behind Laura turned a screen for her to look at. And there, still hovering on the screen, was the last image of the video she’d put together. But it wasn’t the gory picture of a dead undine who looked far too similar to a human. No, it was a picture of her.

No one would know that it was Ace. It was a photograph of her standing in front of the circular window of her clock tower in Gamma, her back to Tera as she was silhouetted by the neon lights in the sea. And then there were the words that broke her heart in two.

Human compassion is the greatest power you can wield.

Use it.

“Tera,” she whispered, pressing her hand against her mouth as tears welled in her eyes again. “That droid was one of the best.”

“And you made that droid,” Laura said, sinking on her knees in front of her. She held their hands together, squeezing Ace’s fingers tightly in her own. “Now we’re here to ask you to build a lot more with us. Droids that can watch all the people who said they were going to do the right things, and then didn’t. We’re here to help, Ace. Just tell us what to do.”

She looked over her shoulder at Maketes, a plan already forming in her mind. “Are you willing to do anything?”

“Yes.”

The other three echoed the word.

So Ace grinned at Maketes and said, “Do we have room for them?”

Maketes rolled his eyes, but then nodded and tapped his ear.

“Right,” she turned to the others. “How would you like a new home? And a translation upgrade, so you can understand the undines?”