The Secret Sea (41 page)

WORLD TRADE CENTER

& 9/11 MEMORIAL

With an arrow pointing toward the stairs. And a familiar capital
E
in a blue circle. For the E subway line.

“What the—”

“Come on, man.” The guy who'd helped him out of the water hoisted him to his feet and shoved him forward. “Water's still rising. Gotta get out of here. Now!”

Khalid coughed up some salty water. Moira was being led away toward the stairs by a woman. Other people were crushing their way up and out.

He turned. The subway platform was flooding rapidly as the water filling the tunnel rose higher. Just like Zak's vision way back—

“Come on!” the man yelled, pushing him again. “Move it, kid!”

Khalid broke away from him and ran toward the track. “Zak!” he screamed. “Zak! Where are you?”

The water roared and spumed a sick greenish white, like grassy foam on a dog's lips. Darkness whirled in its depths, but nothing that looked human.

“Zak!” he cried again. “Zak!”

It couldn't be. They couldn't be here,
home
, without him. Not after everything they'd gone through. It wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to work like that. Moira could have said it better, but even Khalid knew: In a story, when the good guys win, they get to go home. All of them.

If I hadn't let go … I shouldn't have let him go. I should have held his hand tighter.

“Zak!” Khalid's throat burned; he coughed up more salt water, and then the man who'd hauled him from the water grabbed him bodily from behind, lifting him off his feet. “Come on, kid! We can't mess around!”

“No! No!” Khalid kicked and struggled against the man's too-strong arms. “No! My friend is in there!”

“No one's in there, kid!” Moving toward the stairs.

“We have to save him! He's in there! He's in there somewhere!”

Implacably, resolutely, the man slogged through the rising water to the stairs.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Khalid started sobbing. He beat his fists against his rescuer's back, but the man was solidly built and did not stagger or slow. “Let me go! You don't understand!”

“I understand we're both gonna drown if I don't get us out of here!”

“But I let go of him!” He had to make the man understand. “I was holding his hand and I let go! I have to find him! Please let me find him!”

But the man bore him relentlessly to the stairs as Khalid screamed “Zak!” over and over until his throat felt as if it had ripped in two.

 

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Outside, Moira blinked against the harsh sunlight. She smelled car exhaust for the first time in two days, realizing only now that she'd missed the familiar stench while in the other New York.

Above her, the Freedom Tower soared, a needle against the sky.

She broke away from her rescuer, who rushed over to a man—husband? boyfriend? brother?—and hugged him tightly. All around her a mob was milling about, people rushing into the street to get away from the subway, cabs honking their horns. All the delirious, delicious chaos of home.

And not a
frau
to be seen.

Moira climbed onto the hood of a parked car, her body exhausted, her mind whirling. Something in the electroleum … There had been a chance it would rip a hole between realities, and now it had. Their best efforts to the contrary, they'd torn through one of the walls separating worlds. On one side, the World Trade Center subway stop in lower Manhattan. On the other side …

The Houston Conflux and untold millions of gallons of water, now pouring in.

Who knew how long it would last? Was the rip permanent? The electroleum
could
have caused something so much worse. Why did …

But she knew. Deep down, she knew.

Psychoreactive. The electroleum picked up on their emotions.

And it took them home.

Them
. It was no good to come home if her friends drowned. She cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, “Khalid! Zak!”

She peered around, shading her eyes. Nothing. Cupped her hands again. Shouted for them again.

Still nothing.

Then she saw a man emerge from the subway, carrying a very still, soaked form that looked familiar. She leaped off the hood of the car, scattering fleeing commuters, and bulled her way through the crowd. The man took a few more steps and then, exhausted, set his burden down on a low concrete parapet.

Before Moira could speak, before she could even think, Khalid charged up the steps, right behind the man. “Is he okay?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

Zak lay on the parapet, frighteningly still.

“Damnedest thing ever,” the man said, catching his breath. He gestured to Khalid. “This one just kept fighting me. And thank God, because if he hadn't made me go back, this one…” He looked down at Zak and shook his head. “Never would have seen him on my own.”

Sirens wailed. Police and fire vehicles and ambulances clotted the street as the crowd, still in a panic, thinned, spilling away from the tower and up along Fulton and Church Streets. Khalid and Moira took each other's hands and stood over Zak.

Who groaned.

And turned.

And vomited a truly epic amount of seawater.

“Gross,” said the man who'd rescued Khalid and Zak.

“That,” Khalid said with authority, “is the most awesome, best puke I've ever seen.”

Moira couldn't help but agree.

 

EIGHTY-EIGHT

The Shamoons, the O'Gradys, and Zak's parents found them at a hastily erected aid station two blocks from the Freedom Tower, with at least a hundred other refugees of the subway station.

Zak's mother threw her arms around him and sobbed right in his ear. His dad crouched down next to them and grasped one of Zak's hands in both of his, squeezing too hard. Zak didn't have the energy to tell him to let go, especially when he saw the tears in his father's eyes. He didn't think he'd ever seen Dad cry before. But of course, Dad had.

Everyone cried.

Dad had probably cried when Tommy died.

And the thought of it made Zak break down, and he convulsed with sobs against his mother, like a baby, and for a little while, at least, he was just a kid again, just their child, and he was glad to be home.

 

EIGHTY-NINE

Eventually the water stopped, but not before completely flooding the World Trade Center subway station and more than a mile of track and tunnel in multiple directions. According to the news, the MTA believed some kind of leak was responsible for the sudden onrush of water. It would take weeks to pump out the area, and then the search for the rupture would begin.

Zak knew they would never find the leak. Because it wasn't there.

At least, it wasn't rooted in concrete or steel or earth. Moira and Khalid had cobbled together a theory, based on what Dr. Bookman had said: The leak was in the fabric of reality, where they had used the power of the electroleum to tear through from one world to another, at the spot Godfrey had weakened. And now, thankfully, it had closed, the universe healing itself.

“Universes aren't supposed to interact like that,” Moira said. “It's finding its balance, repairing itself.”

“We got lucky,” said Khalid.

“I don't think so,” Moira replied, and Zak agreed. If he hadn't chosen to forgive Godfrey, if he'd combined his anger at Godfrey with Godfrey's fear and rage … who knew how the electroleum might have reacted?

But it was over now. No need to speculate. The MTA and the Army Corps of Engineers could look and look and look for their “leak” all they wanted, but without a guide like Tommy, they would never find it, for the water came from the Houston Conflux. Or maybe from the Secret Sea itself.

One more mystery in the City That Never Sleeps.

Maybe it never slept because it was afraid of nightmares.

Zak wondered what kind of bad dreams cities would have. He imagined they would involve being uprooted, tenuous and off-kilter.

Like being on a ship at sea, in a storm, with no solid ground for miles in every direction.

 

PART FOUR

ZAK

 

NINETY

Zak's parents—like Khalid's and Moira's—were so overjoyed to see their child back safe and sound after having been missing for two days that it took a good week before they asked any serious questions. By then, the Basketeers had already agreed to a short, simple lie. Easier to remember, harder to disprove.

“Tell them we were running from the police, trying to hide in the subway,” Khalid coached them. His fibbing skills were still top-notch, unaffected by their experience. “They already know that part, and there's witnesses. And then tell them we jumped down and followed the tracks into the tunnels to get away. But we got lost in there. Which is totally believable because it's hella dark in there, and the tunnels twist all over the place. So we wandered until the water came out of nowhere and washed us right into the station.”

Incredible and impossible, but the truth was more incredible and more impossible, so they stuck with the lie. Their obvious lack of food and the need for medical attention upon their return gave credence to their lie. And their parents' gratitude—tempered by the grounding—did the rest of the work for them. In the end, all the moms and dads wanted was their children back. How and why didn't matter.

Zak's grounding lasted into the beginning of the school year. He thought it unfair that his parents could lie to him his whole life and yet
he
would end up being punished, but he figured he'd gotten to see Tommy one last time. They never had.

Maybe they were even.

“
Don't be too hard on them
,” Tommy had said. Zak was trying.

He wanted to forgive his parents. It would happen slowly. Right now he felt like he could be angry at them forever for what they'd done, for the lies they'd told. But a part of him knew that nothing—not even ghosts—could last forever.

He wanted to tell his mother what Tommy had said—that he would miss Zak “like that dish you forgot, the one that would be perfect for guests right now.” Wanted to tell her because that meant Tommy had been watching, had been with them even though dead. That their family had been, in some way, complete. Most of what Zak had heard and seen during his adventure, he realized, had originated with Godfrey, not Tommy. But that sentence, that emotion: It proved for certain that Tommy had been watching them.

He thought maybe he understood his parents' grief. That he could share it. And they could, in time, share his.

He couldn't forgive, them, though. Not yet. Because somehow he knew that forgiving them would mean explaining what had happened, what he'd seen. And he couldn't explain. Not because he feared that they'd think he'd lost his mind.

But because it was
his
. Right now, his time with Tommy—their merged moments, their too-brief good-bye—was a sacred, solitary trust. A gift from one twin to another, like blood in the womb. His parents couldn't understand because he didn't yet understand.

Someday he would tell them.

Someday.

*   *   *

His punishment ended in late September, right around the time Moira's and Khalid's did as well. They agreed that their parents had probably coordinated this, for mysterious, ineffable adult reasons.

On his first day of freedom, Zak went—alone—to the subway stop near his home. He rode into Manhattan, switched trains, and went as close to the tip of Manhattan as the subway system would take him. Then he walked the rest of the way, past the Korean War Veterans Memorial, past Castle Clinton, until there was nothing between him and the water but a railing at the edge of Battery Park.

His heart skipped a beat. It did that occasionally now. An emergency room doctor had treated him for salt water inhalation on the day he'd returned to this universe, and had told his parents to get him back on his verapamil. Zak had pretended to take it for a while, but now …

Dr. White-eagle had said that the treatment was a temporary measure, and now Zak was slipping back into his old life, his heart reminding him it was still there and still fragile.

But he thought that maybe—just maybe—some of its strength would linger. A gift.

Zak placed a hand on his chest and the other tight against his ear. He listened to his heart.

He cast his thoughts out past the confluence where the Hudson River met the East River, out into the Upper Bay, to the horizon, to that invisible line where the sky kisses the ocean. Sunset now reminded him of the electroleum-lit buildings of the other New York, the soft glow along their lines and arcs.

Tommy?
he thought, without urgency.
Tommy, are you out there?
he asked, knowing the answer.

He refused to believe—despite Tommy's disappearance—that his brother was gone. Everyone else had thought that, and they'd been wrong. Until he had proof, he would continue to hope that his twin still lived.

And if he didn't? If he was truly lost beyond the fathomless depths of the infinite Secret Sea?

Well, then that would be sad. But Zak would survive. He had come through this much, thinking he was only part of a greater whole, but he realized now that it wasn't a question of fractions. He was doing the wrong math. (He thought of Moira and he smiled.)

It was a question of remainders, not fractions. He was what was left of Thomas and Zakari, the Killian twins. What that meant for him and for the future, he could not know, but he would not forgo the chance to find out.

He knew, in that sun-dappled moment, only one thing, but he knew it for certain. He knew it the way mothers knew they loved their children, the way the shores knew the tides.