The Secret Sea (21 page)

“Yeah? To me, it sounds like it's just starting.”

“Hey!” Jan yelled, thrusting himself toward her. “Back off,
frau
! I'm not gonna stand here and listen to you sass-talk!”

Moira went rigid with intermingled terror and rage. Jan was close enough that she could reach a hand through the bars and gouge furrows in his face with her nails. But she was behind a locked door, with nowhere to run, no room to maneuver. He and Sentius had the upper hand. She gripped the bars tighter and waited for the anger to pass.

“No need for such language,” Sentius said smoothly, gesturing for Jan to step back. “I hardly blame
her
. At this age, they are often in the grip of hormones and chemical imbalances. It is the tragedy of the fair sex: As children, so intelligent and so capable, almost the equal of the male. But upon the transition…” He
tsk
ed and sighed with resignation.

“Adios, ladies,” he said, and then he and Jan were gone, leaving Moira to stare at the door through the bars of her cage.

*   *   *

To Moira's astonishment, her fellow prisoners seemed relaxed and at ease. One of them—a stunning Asian with a single braid past her shoulders—even took out a nail file from a pocket in her skirt and began touching up her nails.

“What. Are you. Doing?” Moira asked in disbelief.

“Just fixing up,” the woman responded. Her voice had the tiniest hint of a Southern accent to it. “I know we'll have time at the estate, but might as well start now, right?”

They just accepted it. They all just accepted what was happening to them, what was
going
to happen to them.

Moira licked her lips. That file … It was flimsy, sure, but it could be sharpened to a fine point by rubbing it repeatedly against the concrete floor. She'd done it once before, back home, with a Popsicle stick at Prospect Park. A long time ago. She and Zak and Khalid had decided to build a fort for their LEGO figures, but it kept falling down. Until she'd come up with the idea of staking the Popsicle sticks in the dirt by sharpening them to points first.

That nail file was a weapon waiting to happen.

“So, they just let you keep that?” she asked casually.

The woman boggled at her. “Why wouldn't they?”

“You could use it.”

The other woman smiled indulgently. “I
am
using it.”

“I mean
against
them.”

Silence. The murmured conversations in the room halted, and everyone looked at Moira. Not—as she'd hoped—with interest and cunning, but with confusion and suspicion.

“Why would I do that?” the filer asked.

“Seems a nice enough chap,” someone else commented.

“One of the good ones,” another agreed.

Are you people insane?
she wanted to ask. But didn't.

Because the truth was … they weren't. They were caught in a system that, according to Sentius, had existed for centuries. Moira's mind raced. The dates Sentius had given her spun in her mind. She couldn't connect them to any specific dates in the history of the United States back home, but they predated the signing of the Constitution. He'd also referred to “the Federal States.” If this country was the Federal States of America, not the United States of America, then maybe that explained the legal distinctions. Somewhere in the earliest days of the founding of the nation, something had gone very right and slavery had been outlawed, eradicated before its grip grew into the tenebrous cancer she knew from history books.

But at the same time, something else had gone very, very wrong. Women had made no gains in their rights since the beginning of the country, and the despicable notions of the past had calcified into the accepted truths of the present.

In some ways—technology, as best she could tell—this world had advanced far beyond her own. But socially, its development had been retarded at some point. She couldn't quite reconcile the two. After all, without women contributing, how could a society advance?

Maybe Marie Curie discovered radiation here, too, but had her work co-opted by men. Or maybe she worked in secret. Or maybe she'd never been born at all. The discovery of radiation was probably inevitable—if Curie hadn't found it, someone else would have, eventually.

She shook her head. No time for this now. It was an interesting theoretical issue, but she had actual steel bars to get through.

The women who shared her cell did not seem frightened. Or angry. Most of them seemed happy. Some bored. One of them—the one who'd given Moira her glasses—seemed resigned to her fate, not upset enough to do anything about it.

Moira would not allow herself to be bored. Or complacent. Or resigned. She was not about to give up the freedom she'd been born into in Ireland and then granted again as an American citizen.

In the fantasy novels she read and loved so dearly, the solution would be obvious, she thought, sitting with her back to the bars. A woman locked in a cell with other mistreated women would find a way to rally them. Together they would overpower their jailers, break free, wreak havoc … probably end up out in the forest somewhere, forming a clan of woman-only warriors or something like that.

But
these
women … These women weren't warriors-in-waiting. They couldn't even conceive of a world in which they defied men, much less were equal to them. They were so nonthreatening that their jailers hadn't even taken potential weapons away from them. That's how little men feared women in this world.

She ran her hands through her pockets, wondering what they'd left
her
with. But all she had was her useless dead phone and a stick of lip balm. Her house key and MetroCard—shoved into her pocket on the way to visit Zak in the hospital—must have washed out and away during one of her two dunkings.

Great. Maybe the nail-filing lady would let her have the file. Maybe she could …

“What's it mean?”

The ponytailed blond with the bad skin had approached her again, settling down next to her.

“What does what mean?” Moira asked.

“This.” She tapped Moira's upper right chest. “‘I like you ironically.' I don't get it.”

Moira looked down.

At her buttons.

Just like looking at a test in school, where the answers glowed and shouted for her attention, Moira suddenly saw the path to her freedom. Or if not her freedom, then at least a noble effort none of the Dutchmen would ever forget.

She cleared her throat and offered her best, friendliest smile at the blond woman. “
Love
your hair,” she said.

 

THIRTY-SEVEN

Zak braced himself against a wall with one hand and tried to push himself up to his feet. His knees and palms burned from crawling along the sidewalk. He blinked sweat away and gave up, slumping instead against the wall, breathing hard.

Where was Moira? Where was Khalid? What had happened to them?

He remembered the gondola, remembered Khalid yelling for them to jump.

And then water. Water, again. Always water. The boat, rocking, tossing him to and fro—

No. That wasn't me. That was …

Godfrey.

The memory of Godfrey assaulted him like an electroshock, and he gasped for breath. He'd been reliving Godfrey's last days. In combining their powers to contact Zak, Tommy and Godfrey had been sending not just words but also dreams, images.

Godfrey and then Tommy and
then
the gondola and—

The water.

Vague memories of Moira and Khalid dragging him … somewhere.

And then … an alleyway? Was that right?

An alleyway, and he remembered speaking to Moira, telling her …

“All I want is to see my brother.”

Yes.

“It's like they erased him. I just want to see him one more time.”

Zak snuffled back tears and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. He'd said that, and then he'd seen Tommy, talked to him.

He looked to his right. There, down the street, a flash of blue and red and gold glimmered for just an instant.

Tommy
.

Zak's heart throbbed in protest, but he managed to hoist himself to his feet. With one hand braced against the wall for support, he staggered in the direction of the light.

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

“Young man, if this is a joke, it is most definitely
not
a funny one.”

Khalid ran a hand through his hair and paced another circuit of the alleyway. He was
positive
that this was where he'd left Moira and Zak. The buildings out on the street were familiar, and the alley looked exactly the same.

But Moira and Zak were nowhere to be found.

“Right here,” Khalid said, forcing his voice not to tremble. It wasn't easy; he wanted to whimper like a baby, the terror and the disbelief clogging his throat. “They were right here. I swear.”

Dr. Bookman, standing at the mouth of the alley with his arms folded over his chest, sighed and shook his head. “Is this an initiation of some sort? Are your gang brethren going to assault me once I step into the alley?”

“I swear to God, Dr. Bookman. They were here.” Khalid kicked at a loose chunk of concrete; it skittered along the ground until it hit a plank.

“Have you considered that your friends might be playing a prank on you?”

“Zak was
dying.
He's in no condition to play a prank.”

“If the situation is that dire, you should just call his parents and be done with it.”

Call Zak's parents. Ha! Khalid wished he could do exactly that. If he could call Dr. and Mrs. Killian, then that would mean he wasn't stuck in another universe, away from everything he knew.

And it collided with him then, the enormity of it all, the impossible but undeniable power of it. He wasn't lost. He wasn't in a place where a kind stranger or a cop or the right phone call could fix everything. He was in an entirely different universe, and his best friend was dying, and no one could help. He'd known it before, but there was a difference between knowing something and understanding it. He knew that gravity kept his feet on the ground, but he didn't understand exactly how.

Now, though, he both knew and understood: He wasn't lost; he was trapped. With no way out.

“Oh God,” he muttered, and sank to his knees. “Oh my God. This isn't happening. This can't be happening.”

Dr. Bookman made a show of examining a bracelet. Maybe there was a watch embedded in it or something like that. “If that is all, I really should return to my office.”

“Please don't go.” Khalid had meant to shout the words, but they came out as a whisper.

“I've spent enough time on this particular jape, far more time than one should spend on a joke one doesn't get. I'm sorry, young man.”

“Wait!” Khalid jumped up, remembering something. “Wait!” He dashed over to Dr. Bookman and grabbed the man by the lapels. “That glass you had me touch. In your office. And then you came here with me. That was a lie detector, wasn't it?”

With a cautious but confident move, Bookman plucked Khalid's hands from his jacket, then smoothed out the creases. “No. Nothing so specific or so crude. It merely ascertains whether or not you mean me harm.”

Merely.

“Then you know I'm not trying to hurt you.”

“I know you don't intend to hurt me. But someone else could.”

“Please. I'm begging you, okay?” Khalid actually dropped to his knees again, grasping the tail of Bookman's jacket. “Please. You have to help me.”

Bookman sighed again and rechecked his bracelet. It was slender and segmented, polished silver, and Khalid was convinced it had some kind of watch built into it.

“Very well. Five more minutes.”

Khalid jumped up and hooted with joy. He dashed back into the alley and stood off to one side, pointing. “This is where we were. Right here. I remember that standpipe because it's painted blue, which is weird.”

“Weird how? Most standpipes are blue.”

Not in my world, man.
“Anyway, this is where we were. We had Zak propped up a little and sheltered a little.”

Dr. Bookman sauntered into the alley and glanced around. He came over to Khalid, studied the ground, and gazed up and down the nearest wall. When he turned around, his foot hit the concrete chunk Khalid had kicked earlier. It rolled against the plank and turned the board over.

“Oh, my,” Dr. Bookman said, and took a step back.

Khalid peered around to see what had caused Dr. Bookman's reaction.

On the end of the plank was something brownish, dry, and flaking. It looked like paint at first, but Khalid realized what it was in the instant before Dr. Bookman said, “Blood.”

*   *   *

Moira didn't have to wait long, which was good. She was impatient, but more than that, she was worried about losing her nerve. It was one thing to plan an escape and let the adrenaline of it consume you. It was another thing to lose that adrenaline rush and wonder,
Is this really going to work?

The other women in the cell were either napping or—she couldn't believe this—sharing tips on what Moira could only describe as “auction etiquette.” The best way to talk to the buyers. The cues and hints that indicated “a good one.” She couldn't believe she was hearing it, and the outrage she felt fueled her conviction.

She had hoped that at least one of the women in the cell with her would offer help, that at least one of them would be more like the women back home. But what were the odds that, in a world of sexist repression, she would happen to be locked up with this world's Xena, Warrior Princess?

Pretty dismal odds.

Some of her cellmates were playing with or cooing over the pins she'd given them. She'd traded a couple of them to the blond woman for what she needed, and then given away all but two.