Beyond the Rising Tide (38 page)

At the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but through a jagged archway, and when I come out on the other side, I find myself in an enormous cavern with an arched opening that faces a small cove. The tide is low, the sand exposed. Moonlight pierces through holes in the cavern, spotlighting little pools in the sand.

Treading to the middle of the cavern, I sink to my knees and hug my stomach, trying to squeeze the ache out. I always knew that love could hurt, but never knew it could hurt
this
much. Never knew that losing someone could carve a place inside of me so deep. I’m as hollow as this cavern, waiting for the tide to return and fill it back up.

But what if the tide never returns? What I’m never filled again?

As I sit there, still and silent, feeling the breeze play with my hair and tickle my cheek, listening to the surf echo off the cavern walls, it occurs to me that the cavern is not as hollow as I perceive it to be. It may not be full of water, but there is air—it fills my lungs as I breathe it in, keeping me alive. There is sound—beautiful and rich, saturating my ears. I may not be able to see these things like I can see the water, but the cavern is still full.

There may be a hollow inside of me left by Kai’s absence, but there are other things to fill it. There’s my family. My friends. This life and all the things I can learn and do here, even if Kai isn’t with me.

And then I think how just because Kai isn’t with me now, it doesn’t mean I’ll never be with him again. “When I leave,” he said on the cliff that day, “I won’t really be gone. I’ll be just over the horizon.” Until I meet him beyond that horizon, all I can do is live my life the way he taught me to.

Slowly, I rise to my feet and step through the sand to the water’s edge. The cove is circled by towering rocks, and although I can hear waves crashing into the rocks on the outside, the water in the cove is calm. I wade in and sway my foot back and forth. The water is cool as it glides over my ankle and between my toes. I move deeper, feeling it on my calves. The rhythm of the sea calms me. It hums with life, a lullaby that sooths me into tranquility. My body relaxes, sinks deeper to my hips, then my waist. The sea engulfs my shoulders, circles my neck like a strand of pearls. I lie in the water as though it’s a bed, and the moon and stars are my blanket.

The dark water stirs the adventurer in me awake. I draw in a few deep breaths, then dive under, swimming down a good ten feet. To keep myself from rising, I grab hold of the edge of a rock that juts out of the reef. Gravity has no power over me down here. Even my cares seem to rise from my shoulders and drift away into the nocturnal underwater world. Colors are muted into shadow and light. Shafts of moonlight cut through the surface, slicing up the darkness. The light reflects off the white sand, painting the liquid ceiling into a rippling silver sky.

Being underwater like this, a piece of myself is restored. I am strong and courageous and fearless again. I am the girl who can free-dive to thirty feet and hold her breath for four minutes. A familiar thrill courses through me, a rush of adrenaline I haven’t felt in so long. My skin tingles the way it does when I repel down the face of a mountain or slide across the perfect wave. Or when the boy I love brushes his fingers over my skin.

My chest burns, but not because I’m running out of air. It’s the joy of finding myself again. It’s gratitude for Kai, for all he did for me. And the aching desire to return the favor somehow. To make restitution. To tie that leash around his wrist the way I failed to before.

My lungs are begging for air, so I let go of the rock and push upward. But I only make it a few inches before I feel a sharp tug on the back of my head and then jerk to a stop.

My hair is caught. Tangled in something. I reach back to untangle it and feel the skeletal fingers of the reef entwined in my hair.

I yank hard, trying to free myself, but there’s too much hair caught. My heart is pounding, burning up oxygen.
Calm down
, I tell myself.
There’s a way out of this
. And then it comes to me. The pocketknife. My hand grapples it out of my pocket, and it takes me a few tries to unfold the knife. I swipe the blade behind my head and feel a lock of hair come free. I take another swipe. But this time my hand slams into the reef and the knife slips from my fingers. I fumble for it, twisting and sweeping my hand through the water as I watch it sink down, down, but it hits the sand before I can catch it.

It’s only five feet below me. But my arm won’t reach that far.

Calm down. I’ve been under longer than this. I think. Just relax.
But I can’t calm down when all I can hear is my heart throbbing in my ears. My lungs are screaming for air. My body gives a jerk, and then a shudder.
Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.

My feet. I can grab the knife with my toes. I grab hold of the reef and bring myself vertical. But just as my toes touch the knife, I feel my hair come free and my body begin to drift upward.

I abandon the knife, turning and kicking toward the surface. As I get closer, it brightens as if the night has suddenly turned to day. When I break the surface and take a gulp of air, it
is
day.

And I’m no longer in the cove.

eneath the crystal trees of Demoror, I sit beside my mother, listening to her soft voice. Starlight sifts through the crystals, scattering little specks of colored light all over her face. We’ve been having a lot of these long conversations since she came out of the Briar—about her new assignments, or my ongoing journeys into the Briar, or about my sisters. And with each conversation, she looks less like a withered grapevine long-deprived of water, and more like one after a few good rain showers. The longer she spends away from the dark, the more light she drinks up, and the more she stands tall and strong, stretching her branches toward the sun.

She’s telling me now about a little girl she was able to heal. Her eyes are bright with enthusiasm, her hands resting peacefully in her lap, her healing wristband glinting under the sparkling sky. In her voice, I hear something I’ve never heard before. Something I’ve ached to hear ever since I was a kid. Happiness. Genuine happiness. It makes something rise from my chest and catch in my throat.

And then as she continues, a different sound breaks through. A different voice. One that sends a jolt through my chest like a shot of adrenaline. My hand falls on my mom’s, and she trails off, looking at me curiously. “What is it?” she asks.

“Did you say my name?”

The crease between her brows deepens. “No. Why?”

I sit still a moment, listening for the sound again. “I … I could have sworn someone just said my name. It sounded like …” I scan the trees around us, searching for Avery. But of course she’s not here. “Never mind. Whatever it was, I must have imagined it.”

Maybe I want to hear Avery’s voice so badly that my mind conjured the sound of it. I gaze through the trees at the silver lake, wishing I could see her through it like I used to. Over two months of Earth time have passed since I left her in Isadora’s cottage, and it’s torture to not know how she’s doing. I take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s better this way. Because if I could see her, I would watch her every hour of every day, and anytime she wasn’t happy or had a problem, I’d want to fix it. No—it’s definitely better that she live her life without me hovering.

“Is everything all right?” my mom asks, drawing my gaze back to her.

“Yeah. It’s just—” Before I can finish my answer, I hear it again.

“Kai.” Avery’s voice.

I rise to my feet. “There it is again. Did you hear it?”

“What?”

“Avery’s voice. Calling me.” I turn in a frantic circle, scanning the area for her or whatever is producing the sound of her voice. But I see nothing except the tree branches. “Something’s wrong. I need to talk to Charles.” I hold out my hand to her. “Come with me?”

She nods and takes my hand. I picture Charles in my mind, and then we quicken to him, finding him on a bench near the cliffs of Elysium.

He must see the worry in my face, because he stands. “What’s wrong?”

“I keep hearing Avery’s voice.”

His lips part in surprise for a moment, and then he presses them together and braces his hands on my shoulder like he’s about to deliver grave news. It makes my hands turn cold.

“I told you,” he says, “that you would know when she came.”

“What?” The word makes no sound, because all the air has been knocked out of me. I close my eyes and shut everything out, trying to sense her presence to see if what he’s saying is true. It takes a minute, and then a riot breaks loose inside of me, shattering order and reason, obliterating the bit of peace I’ve scraped together over the last few weeks. Because there, in the center of my chest, I feel it. Feel her presence in Demoror like a new sun in the sky, bigger and brighter than any other, shifting my center of gravity so that suddenly I’m falling toward her. Without another word, I leave Charles and my mom and surrender to Avery’s pull, quickening in an instant to where she is.

On the still shore of the silver lake, I find her. She doesn’t see me because she’s turned toward the water, gazing at something. Her hair spills down her back like a silk cape, shimmering gold under the sparkling sky. Her dress is like a white and iridescent moonflower, twisting at her waist and flaring at her calves. It reminds me of the one I pictured her in the day I sang to her on the cliff. Everything about her is
soft
. She is satin and snow, a lullaby and a whisper.

She’s close enough to touch, but my hand is a dead weight at my side. The warmth of her nearness burns in my chest, but my skin is as cold as the Briar. Because she shouldn’t be here. Not yet.

I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn to see that Charles and my mom have followed me here. Charles squeezes my shoulder and gives me a look that says,
Calm down
. But I can’t. “No,” I breathe, turning back to Avery as my vision blurs.

At the sound of my voice, Avery whips around. Before I can blink the tears from my eyes to see her face, she throws herself into my arms and cries out my name.

Her embrace softens the shock, and for a moment all the panic and questions take a backseat to the joy that’s humming in my chest like an amplified guitar riff. I let my arms do what they’ve ached to do for weeks now, and I gather her close, breathing in her presence, feeling her warmth spread through me, completing me like missing lyrics of an unfinished song. I bury my lips in her hair.
This
. This is what I’ve been waiting for. To be made whole by the certainty and permanence of her love, never to be lost. It just came sooner than I thought. Too soon.

As much as I want to keep holding her, my need for answers nags me like the whistle of a departing train. Reluctantly, I pull back and cradle her face in my hands. Her blue eyes glisten with tears, and she is even more beautiful than I remember. I breathe a sad sigh and brush the tears from her cheek with my thumb.

“What are you doing here?” I ask in a broken voice.

“I …” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I was swimming, and then …” She seems confused and disoriented. I remember feeling the same way when I first came here. Even after Charles finally came to greet me, it took me a while to piece together the details of my death.

She swallows and blinks a few times. Then instead of finishing her sentence, she looks at the water near our feet. The glassy surface shows an image of her body. In the ocean, limp and entirely submerged.

“No,” I whisper, only because I feel too weak to shout. I shake my head, unable to accept her fate. I have the impulse to jump into the lake to return to Earth to help her. But there’s only one way for me to return to Earth now. And even if I went through the swamp in the Briar, I wouldn’t have the substance or the power to save her.

I turn to my mom, almost asking her to go back to Earth to save Avery’s life. That’s her job now, after all. But I stop myself. She hasn’t been assigned, and I can’t get her into trouble.

I cast a desperate look at Charles. “Why isn’t anyone assigned to help her?”

“I’ve called to Jerick, and he’s on his way. Maybe he can give us some answers.”