Heart of the Storm by Michael Buckley

  “CLEANSE THE BAD CHILDREN,” they say, over and over and over.

  Chapter Eight

  THE HUNTING GROUNDS

  WEEKS PASSED, LONELY DESPERATE WEEKS WITH no one to talk to and no hope of escape. Husk kept his distance after our meeting on the island, but I could feel his presence skirting the edges of my mind. Sometimes, his emotions swam with mine so that I could not separate what he was feeling from my own experience.

  I spent my days doing as he demanded—​learning to fish. It was a frustrating suckfest, chasing the fish with the staff, throwing the staff, watching the fish swim away unharmed. If I was lucky to catch anything, it was a minor miracle, but to feed Minerva I needed to bring back four or five good-size fish, and she liked specific kinds—​the white and pink ones, the brown ones, the ones the color of steel. Every day I returned with my measly offering, only to have Husk put several more in my bag. I feared the day when I came up short and he wasn’t there to help me. I could still feel the prime’s raking fingers on my skin, even though the wounds were almost healed.

  One day he joined me on my hunt while my two Rusalka guards looked on. He didn’t speak to me, just sat down cross-legged with his spear in hand and closed his eyes. Silent and motionless, he was a statue on the ocean floor, and then when a fat fish flitted by, he shot the spear like lightning and impaled it. In one quick and fluid motion, he yanked it off the tip, buried it in the sand, and sat on it, only to return to his zenlike stance. I watched in stunned amazement. Later I realized he was teaching me without saying a word. I repeated everything I’d seen, even going so far as to bury the fish, which I eventually learned kept them safe from other predators while I was hunting. With practice, I was soon bringing back six, seven, sometimes even ten fish for Minerva. She never thanked me. Her eyes were consistently disgusted with me, but she kept me alive.

  One afternoon I watched a fish circling me. It was gray and fat, maybe twenty pounds, and one of Minerva’s favorites. It paid me little notice until I tensed in preparation to strike, and then as if it could read my mind, it darted away to one of the black cracks in the earth, the deep crevices so empty I was afraid to even look into one. Maybe it could hear the spike in my breathing or smell the eagerness on me? I tried to force my gills to hold themselves still. I didn’t want any noises to startle the skittish thing. Just a few more seconds, I thought, maybe another pass, and I could take my shot. I just needed to get the right angle so the spear would sink into the meat and not bounce off the hard, thick skin on its head and back. Closer . . . closer . . . I told myself I wouldn’t miss. I visualized the tip shooting through the water with perfect and deadly aim. Imagining it happening seemed to help for some reason, and when I was certain I couldn’t fail, I let the weapon fly. Wham! I got it with a perfect shot! I swam to pull it off my spear and bury it, just as Husk had taught me, but the damn thing was heavy and still stubbornly alive. Its tail caught my hand and sliced it open enough so that blood escaped. I pulled away, angrily and in pain, then stabbed the fish over and over in my rage, like some deranged aquatic serial killer. Finally, it stopped fighting me and died. I put my foot on its head to wrench the weapon free, then got down on my hands and knees, scooped sand away to make a hole, and buried the beast. It was a sloppy effort, but I did it. I was proud of myself. That fish was the biggest one I had managed to catch. I raised my hands in triumph to an audience of two Rusalka, one of whom still held a grudge from when I put a hole in him.

  “I am awesome!” I shouted to them.

  That was when I noticed the shadow. I looked up and gasped. A shark drifted over my head. It looked huge, as long as a taxicab, and fast. It was another great white, and it was hunting me, slowly circling, descending to my level.

  I turned to the guards, but they were gone. After attacking them, I had to guess that this was their revenge, and they left me with nothing to defend myself but a stupid spear. I nestled it under my armpit and pointed the tip in the beast’s direction. The shark immediately bolted to the right, abandoning its attack, but circled back and steered its nose right at me again. I was hoping it would see I planned to defend myself, but this one must have been hungry. It suddenly turned on the speed, rocketed at me, and cut the ocean in half. I barely got the spear up in time, though little good it did me. The shark chomped down on the end, yanking it from my hands, then turned it to splinters. There was one sizeable piece with a freshly jagged point near my feet, but trying to retrieve it would have left me vulnerable. Still, if I was going to have any chance of surviving, I had to have it. I dove and swam frantically while the great white circled again, picking up speed for a fresh assault. I snatched the broken spear, now no bigger than a dagger, and stood my ground. My only chance was to jam it into the shark’s eye and try to blind it. I’d seen that in movies. I’d also seen people fly and shoot webs out of their hands in movies, so I had no idea if it would work.

  Hey, Shadow, remember when you said I was going to get some kind of special ability? It would really be useful right now.

  The shark bore down on me and closed the gap between us quicker than seemed possible. I had only one chance, so just as it crashed into me, I stabbed at its eye. The shark’s nose hit me right in the rib cage. The impact felt like a subway train had slammed into my side. My only weapon floated downward, then swirled into one of the bottomless crevices and vanished. The impact screwed with my equilibrium, threw me off balance, and caused me to drift out of control. I couldn’t right myself. My legs were up, and my head was down. I bounced in every direction. I had made myself the easiest target in Shark Week history. What a stupid way to die.

  I tasted blood in the water, unsure if it belonged to me. It swirled in front of my face in leaky curlicues. Had the shark bitten me? I hadn’t felt its teeth when it crashed into my ribs. There was no pain other than the dull ache in my muscles. I wondered if that was death—​fast and furious, so shocking and efficient, I was saved the agony. When the shark sailed past again, I learned the origin of the blood. There was a jagged cut in its belly. Tiny fish that might normally tremble in the face of a predator that large raced from every direction to feast on its dying body. They were followed by a swarm of bigger fish, all digging into the shark’s vulnerable wound, pulling out strands of pink flesh. A pack of smaller sharks joined the buffet, feasting on their dying cousin. Before I knew it, there were thirty of them chomping down on the still-warm carcass. One swam close to me, its eyes glued to my body as if I was on the dessert cart. My fight to live wasn’t over yet. I started swimming toward the city, frantic to escape, but my sudden movements drew the smaller sharks’ attention. They abandoned their meal for something different.

  Husk appeared and grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me toward the surface and we exploded out of the water, sending a spray into the air that came down like rain. I scampered up onto the island just as a fin rose near my feet. The sharks swam along the shoreline of the black island, hoping we’d come back in, then sank below and disappeared. I stared at slapping waves until a nervous breakdown seized me, shook me hard, and let loose every tear in my body.

  “Foolish girl. You barrel through life with less sense than a guppy,” he bellowed. “Not only did you attract those creatures, you lost your catch.”

  “I almost died,” I shouted, then curled up in a ball, doing what I could to stop the involuntary shakes tearing me apart. Husk stood over me. I could see his neck muscles tighten as he prepared a torrent of insults, but something held him back. He took a long, deep breath, leaned down, and helped me to my feet. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

  “I sensed it. I cannot be present at all times to keep you safe. Minerva is ill. She requires my attention, and I must be at her side, but I am out here with you! I do not hold favor with her. She will kill me when she grows tired of your nonsense.”

  Husk swam with me back to the strange temple where I slept. He stopped at the archway and, without a word, swam off down the boulevard.

  I went through
the halls and up the tunnel, to the room with the strange markings on the walls, and somehow found a way to fall asleep. Maybe my body just couldn’t take any more of the terror I’d experienced that day and had decided to shut me down. It was a welcome escape, but it led nowhere. My brain wouldn’t let me slip away. My thoughts led me back to Husk.

  I could feel him and knew he could feel me. He was agitated by my presence. He felt I was intruding, or maybe it was just how I felt at first. Regardless, I didn’t want to trespass. I would have rather turned back, but when I tried, there was nowhere to go. I was stuck there, peering at his greatest fears and vulnerabilities. It suddenly dawned on me how ridiculous it was to care what he felt. He’d captured me. He’d turned me into a slave for a woman I despised. He wouldn’t let me leave. Did he deserve my respect?

  A step forward led me to a familiar site. I was back in the same room I’d been locked in for weeks, but it wasn’t the barren, lonely cell I knew. Instead it was a bustling space filled with Nix scientists. They buzzed around working on projects, unaware that I was walking among them, which at first was unsettling, until I remembered I was in one of Husk’s memories.

  Nix look very similar to me, thin bodies with tight skin, long, bony arms, heads like pumpkins and fleshy mouths. Underwater, their bodies were more serpentine, almost eel-like without the legs they grew when they came on land. Ghost was the first one I met, when he and a few other Alpha were forced into my school. Honestly, he was always a prickly jerk, but he was responsible for putting the glove on my hand. He probably saved my life the day the tidal wave came. He often bragged about his grandfather, who he claimed invented the gloves. Was Tarooh Ghost’s grandfather? It was impossible to know. Any one of those creatures could have been Ghost’s identical twin, but there was one who attracted my attention more than all the others. He was scratching an elaborate mathematical equation on the walls in a frantic hand, all the while muttering to himself feverishly. I was sure he was Tarooh. These were Husk’s memories, and what he knew I seemed to understand as well. Husk called him the High Thinker—​a scientist, and an important one.

  I guessed the other Nix were his assistants. Each labored on the same project, though they were busy on different aspects of it. I had no idea what they were building. All I knew for certain was they appeared to be worried about their boss. Tarooh was crazed, talking to shadows, and not sleeping. It had started shortly after he returned from an expedition to the Great Abyss. He told the others of the wisdom he acquired inside the crater. He told them he believed the Great Abyss spoke directly to him. The others feared him.

  Husk threw up walls, but they were easy to steer around. What’s the matter? Does it suck when someone else controls you? You can push back all you want but it won’t slow me down. All your secrets are laid out for me to rummage through.

  I was eager to learn more. Something terrible happened in that room, and Husk was desperate to keep it from me. I scanned every corner while his mind bellowed at me. At first there was nothing, but then I noticed a figure huddling in the shadows. It was too dark to see his face but I knew he was important. The closer I got to him, the less I could see his face. He was little more than an outline, empty and nondescript, until we were suddenly face to face. It was him! Husk was chained to a wall, exhausted and frightened, but he was not the intelligent creature who now held me prisoner, but rather a howling beast. The revelation came with another surprise. I understood the noises he made. They weren’t just grunts. They were a language, a crude one, but a language, nonetheless. The snapping teeth were his way of saying he was confused. The whines were calls for mercy. I knew Fathom could speak to Rusalka, but he’d told me that they were barely smarter than a dog. He was wrong. Rusalka were intelligent —​not rocket scientists, but not animals, either.

  The Nix ignored his cries. Nothing he said or did got their attention, because they didn’t think he was smart either. Husk, like all of his kind, was below all others in the Alpha hierarchy, at the very bottom of a list of life forms that mattered to the empire. He was beneath consideration. I suspect it was how the Nix avoided the guilt of making him their guinea pig. It was the same willful ignorance that allowed the rest to turn his kind into slaves.

  Get out of my head, human!

  I could feel his embarrassment with this version of himself. He was humiliated by who he was before the “blessing.” His shame was suffocating, or perhaps it was my own. I had gone too far. I pulled back, trying to find my way out of his memory, but there was nowhere to go. I was trapped. I turned back to the bustling lab, and more history unfolded. I suddenly understood that Tarooh had brought the Alpha to this place. He’d settled the empire in the shadow of the volcano after going into it and coming back changed. Alpha made pilgrimages here throughout their history, receiving visions from their god, but Tarooh claimed the Great Abyss wanted his children near. He convinced the others to make the holy site their home.

  Each time he entered the volcano, and each time he returned, he came back as if possessed by some mad spirit. He no longer slept. He carved symbols and numbers on everything, night and day, and he swore he had been given instructions for a machine that would change his people’s lives.

  I could see a glass container with a cork top. Inside the container was a viscous black liquid. It swirled and spun, flipped onto itself, and shot upward at the cork as if it were alive. Husk feared it right away. It was something beyond his understanding, and the hunger in the High Thinker’s eyes when he looked at it frightened him.

  The High Thinker’s actions hinted at madness, but he held the ear of the prime, so the others did as they were told. They worked tirelessly on his invention. When the pieces were complete, Tarooh assembled them himself. A small compartment in the palm flipped open and he poured his holy treasure inside. His assistants cried out when the machine glowed as blue as the moon. They knew they were people of science, and this was something they should not have been tampering with at all. They raced out of the room, leaving him alone with Husk.

  Tarooh slid his glove onto his long, stringy hand, and even though it was a perfect fit, the latch would not close around his wrist. Husk watched him try to force it on, but it would not stay.

  Enraged, the scientist turned over tables and smashed his equipment. The Great Abyss’s gift had rejected him, and he felt betrayed. He railed for hours, and there were many times it seemed he might take his own life, but then Tarooh was struck with an idea. He leaped to his feet, retrieved the glove, and forced it onto Husk’s hand.

  I felt dread crawl up my throat, sour and hot and full of hopelessness. Husk instinctively knew something was going to happen to him, and he was terrified. He pulled at his chains, but the truth was unavoidable: he was disposable. He trembled with both sorrow and fury, and when the glove clicked shut around his wrist, I felt his dread. I wished I could have consoled him. I wished I could have told him that he would be all right.

  The glove glowed blue once again, and the same rush of power that swept me away when my glove locked around my fingers came over him. There was a brightness inside as beautiful and yellow as the orb he watched ride the sky above the waves. Now he had an orb all his own, living in his chest, and it had a voice. It offered him favors. It told him he could have anything he wanted; all he had to do was ask.

  Tarooh couldn’t hear the voice. Husk knew, because if he could, Tarooh would have been afraid. Instead, his master’s eyes were wide with wonder. Even when the water broke the clamps around Husk’s feet, he clapped and cheered. He celebrated when Husk turned the power on the lab, sending metal and tools flying in every direction, some piercing the very walls and letting in the red light of the volcano. When he turned the glove on the High Thinker, Tarooh smiled. He told Husk that he was special, and that if they worked together, they could make all the Rusalka special. Husk lowered his hand and listened.

  The lab shimmered into nothing before my eyes, and I found myself somewhere new, a place I had never seen. Here, in this sandy
, dark valley beneath the raging volcano, a line of Alpha waited patiently while Tarooh and his assistants locked gloves onto their hands. The power rejected many, especially from the other races, but it embraced hundreds of Rusalka. I watched them glow, then build a kingdom out of nothing. Roads snaked through the sand, towers sprang up like weeds, great works of art were brought to the very edge of life. Husk stood in the street, working on a massive sculpture of the prime. It was the same one I watched Minerva destroy.

  Again, I was taken somewhere new. I found myself on the edge of the crater, looking down into the volcano. Tarooh was next to me, as were hundreds of Rusalka wearing their gloves. The prime was with us, his long blond hair swirling behind him as he peered into the unknown. Minerva stood by, though she kept a respectful distance. The prime was with another woman, a Triton with gorgeous features and eyes like hurricanes. I knew she was Fathom’s mother. She was pregnant and terrified, begging her husband to stay with her, pleading with the priestess dressed in sealskins to make him listen to reason. He didn’t seem to hear either of them; he was too hypnotized by the swirling horror below.

  Tarooh leaped into the volcano and the Rusalka followed. Despite his wife’s pleading, the prime went as well. Minerva followed without hesitation. Husk swam along the side, too frightened to follow. Two Selkies snatched him by the arms and tossed him in against his will.

  He was sure his end waited for him, but there was no death inside the Great Abyss. There was something else, something that frightened him more than anything in his miserable life. What it was I couldn’t know. Husk found a way to push me out of his mind and slammed the door shut.

  Chapter Nine