Waterfire Saga, Book Three: Dark Tide: A Deep Blue Novel (22 page)

“A
TTEN
TION
!” A HARSH voice bellowed.

Ling was out of her bunk before her eyes were even open. She’d only been at the camp for a week, but already she knew to move fast at Selection. Anyone who didn’t was docked an
entire day’s rations.

She took her place with the other prisoners who lived in Barracks Five. Thin and sickly, they all floated in a single line in front of their bunks—hands at their sides, eyes straight
ahead. Ling was near the far end.

Two death riders flanked the open barracks door. Their commanding officer—Sergeant Feng—came through it now, a crop in his hand. Tall and brisk, with hard eyes, he swam down the line
of prisoners, looking them over as if he were inspecting sea cows.

He prodded one merman with his crop. Lifted the chin of another. “You,” he said to a third.

Fear filled the eyes of each prisoner as Feng approached. It turned to relief if he passed them by, horror if he didn’t. All were quiet as he moved down the line. Except for one mermaid
who dared speak after she was selected.

“Please, sir…I have a child here. Her father’s dead. There’s no one—”

The sergeant swung his crop so quickly the mermaid never saw the blow coming. The pain silenced her. Tears in her eyes, a crimson welt rising across her cheek, she took her place with the other
Selects outside the barracks.

Three more mermaids were chosen. Five mermen. The sergeant had almost finished the Selection when he stopped in front of Ling. He eyed her grubby cast, then moved on.

Ling’s wrist had been broken when she was captured in a net lowered by one of Rafe Mfeme’s trawlers. The cast was the only thing keeping her alive. Without it, she would already have
been selected.

The sergeant picked two more mermen, then turned and addressed the remaining prisoners. “The rest of you, work hard, and you, too, may soon be selected!” he said. Then he and his
soldiers swam through the doorway and disappeared.

Ling heard mer exhaling all around her. A few were crying, upset at the loss of a friend or bunkmate. The death riders said it was an honor to be among the Selects, that only the strongest and
bravest qualified. But Ling—and everyone else in the barracks—knew differently.

“Guess we live to see another day at Happy Hills,” whispered Ling’s bunkmate, Tung-Mei. She’d arrived at the camp three days ago.

Ling smiled sourly at the nickname the prisoners had given the labor camp located in a shallow valley near the Great Abyss.

“I’ll see you later, Ling…if neither of us gets beaten to death today. Gotta go, before they dock my breakfast,” Tung-Mei said.

She darted through the doorway and disappeared into the crowd of prisoners hurrying to their jobs. The waters weren’t even light yet, but prisoners were made to work for two hours before
rations were handed out. No one wanted to be late. They got little enough food as it was, and being deprived of breakfast meant gnawing hunger until noon.

Ling wasn’t far behind her friend. She swam out of the barracks and joined the surge of prisoners. They all wore the same uniforms—a baggy gray tunic and an iron collar. They worked
in them and slept in them.

She saw the Selects being herded toward the Edge. Some were dull-eyed and resigned. Others called out desperately to friends, asking them to tell a husband, a wife, a parent or child, that they
loved them. Others resisted and were beaten.

Ling’s heart would have broken if it were not already in pieces from witnessing the same scene morning after morning.

She tore her eyes away and hurried to the munitions warehouse. She wasn’t Select material, not with her damaged wrist, but she could count out arrows and spears with her good hand and load
them into crates. That was the job she’d been given. The crates were shipped out daily. Ling didn’t know where they went, or why, but she was sure their purpose wasn’t good.
She’d overheard two guards saying that the elder, Qin’s ruler, was too busy dealing with the plastic the goggs had dumped into his waters—and the suffering it was causing the
ocean creatures—to notice the movements of some wooden crates through his realm.

Tung-Mei worked in the infirmary. She’d seen the Selects who made it back. Sometimes they could still talk. A few had told her what had been done to them, and she’d told Ling.

They were taken to the edge of the Abyss. Each Select’s collar was fastened to an iron chain attached to an individual lava globe. Also attached to the globe was a flexible metal filament
line. The lines were very long and were wound on giant spools. Once a Select was leashed in this way, he or she was ordered to swim down into the Abyss, to the very end of the filament’s
length, and then give three sharp tugs on the iron chain. To discourage a Select from simply gathering the filament in her hands and swimming only a short distance into the Abyss, electric eels
were twined around the filament back at the top. They sent a current down the line, shocking anyone who touched it. The glass lava globe acted both as a source of light and a current breaker,
preventing the mermaid or merman attached to it from being electrocuted.

At the end of twelve hours, the electric eels were removed and the soldiers stationed at the edge of the Abyss wound the filament back onto the spools. The prisoners came up with it.

Half were usually dead from depth sickness by then, and the rest wished they were. Survivors came up disoriented and trembling, with excruciating headaches. Their faces and hands were blue, and
they were usually coughing up blood. The extreme depth—with its higher pressure and lower levels of oxygen—destroyed lungs and caused brain swelling. The living were hauled off to the
infirmary, where they lasted for an hour or two.

Tung-Mei had asked one survivor why they’d been sent down into the Abyss. He’d said they were to look for a white ball.

“So much suffering, so many deaths…for a
white ball
?” she’d said.

But Ling knew it was no ordinary white ball. It was Sycorax’s talisman—the puzzle ball. Orfeo had told her about it. He wanted it found and didn’t care how many were sacrificed
for his mad quest.

Ling knew that she would be sacrificed soon, too. She would die here. Her body would be thrown into the cart that came into the camp every evening to collect the dead. Then it would be dumped
into a mass grave.

Ling was strong and not afraid to die. She knew that a death from depth sickness was not an easy one, but she would face it bravely. What tortured her, though, was the thought of dying before
she could tell Sera what she’d learned aboard Rafe Mfeme’s ship.

Ling was an omnivoxa, a mermaid who could speak all creatures’ tongues. For her, the most awful part of her imprisonment—worse than the beatings and the hunger and the fear—was
being unable to communicate. Her friends had no idea who they were dealing with, no idea of the danger they were in.

When she’d first arrived at the camp, Ling had hoped she’d be able to escape, but it was surrounded by a living fence of sea wasps—giant, bioluminescent jellyfish with long,
lethal tentacles. They opened only enough to allow in cages containing new prisoners, food and munitions deliveries, and the death cart.

Ling saw a merman try to escape on her second day in the camp. He’d just been selected. Desperate, he tried to swim between two of the venomous sea wasps. In the blink of an eye, one of
the wasps wound a thick, fleshy tentacle around his body. He was dead within seconds.

When she realized that she couldn’t escape, Ling looked everywhere for a courier—a small fish, a tiny octopus, or even a young hawksbill turtle—that she could send to Serafina
with a message. But the sea wasps kept sea creatures out as effectively as they kept prisoners in.

As Ling approached the munitions warehouse now, a mermaid ahead of her faltered in the water and fell to the mud. The guard prodded the emaciated woman with his spear. She winced, tried to push
herself up with her arms, and collapsed again.

Ling felt a hand on her back. It shoved her forward.

“You!” a death rider behind her barked. “Take her to the infirmary!”

Ling bent down to help the fallen mermaid. “Can you swim?” she whispered.

The woman shook her head.

“You’ve
got
to. I’ll help you.

“Leave me. Let me die. I don’t have any strength left.”

“No,” Ling said firmly. “Put your arm around my neck. I’ve got enough strength for both of us.”

The mermaid did so and Ling lifted her.

“There we go….That’s it, one stroke at a time….It’s not much farther,” Ling coaxed.

The infirmary was only about thirty yards away. If she could just get the mermaid there and hand her off to one of the workers, she might still be able to make it to the munitions warehouse in
time for her morning rations. She was so hungry, it hurt.

Flimsy and spare, the infirmary was run by prisoners who had been doctors and nurses before they were taken. Medical knowledge was valuable. Prisoners who had it were sometimes permanently
exempted from Selection. Ling hoped Tung-Mei would be. She’d been studying medicine at the University of Qin and was stolen from her village while on break visiting her parents. Through the
infirmary’s open double doors Ling spotted her bunkmate rushing from patient to patient.

The survivors from the night shift had just arrived. Ling saw mermaids and mermen bleeding and thrashing as they struggled to pull oxygen into their lungs. She knew they didn’t have long.
All Tung-Mei could do was ease their suffering, not stop it.

“What happened?” she asked, as Ling approached her with the sickly mermaid.

“She collapsed.”

“Anything broken or bleeding?” Tung-Mei asked briskly.

Ling shook her head.

“Take her to the back. Find her a cot. This area’s for critical patients only,” Tung-Mei ordered.

Ling nodded and swam to where her friend had pointed. The mermaid’s head was lolling now. She was only half-conscious. There were no empty cots.

A merman was bent over another patient, taking her pulse. Ling waited until he was finished, then said, “This mermaid’s sick and I can’t find a cot. Where should I put
her?”

“You’ll have to lay her on the floor,” the merman said.

He rose and turned to her, and as he did, Ling gasped. For a few seconds she felt as if she might collapse herself.

She was looking at a face she knew so well, but never expected to see again. The face of a dead man. A ghost.

The face of Shan Lu Chi.

Her father.

T
HE MERMAN WENT pale. His eyes widened.
“Ling?”
he whispered.

Speechless, Ling nodded.

Her father enveloped her in a fierce embrace. And for a moment, in his arms, Ling was no longer in the hellish labor camp, she was in a place of love and light. She was home.

All too soon, however, he released her. And the love that had lit up his face was immediately replaced by other emotions: fear and sorrow. Ling understood. She was so happy to see him, so amazed
that he was alive, but she was devastated, too, to know he was in this horrible place.

“How long have you been here?” he asked. “Your brothers…your mother…are they—”

Ling shook her head. “They’re not here. I wasn’t taken from our village. I was picked up in the waters of East Matali. On my way home. Three weeks ago.”

“
East Matali?
What were you doing
there
?”

“It’s a long story, Dad. What are you doing
here
?” asked Ling. “We thought you were dead!”

“You two!” a voice shouted. “Why are you talking instead of working?” He narrowed his eyes. “And you”—he pointed at Ling—“you don’t
belong here.”

It was a guard. He’d just swum into the infirmary. Ling and her father immediately stood at attention, eyes straight ahead, as they were required to when being addressed by a death
rider.

“She brought a patient in, sir,” Shan said. “I asked her to stay and help me. We’re overwhelmed. Several prisoners have died from purple fever. The bodies remain
contagious after death. We need to get them into the death cart and out of the camp as quickly as possible.”

The guard recoiled at the word
contagious.
He put a hand over his nose and mouth. “Be quick about it!” he ordered, backing away. Then he hurried out of the infirmary.

Ling looked at her father fearfully. He had aged greatly since she’d last seen him. His black hair was shot through with gray now, and his strong shoulders were stooped. Had he been
exposed to the deadly disease? Had she?

“There’s no such thing as purple fever. I made it up,” he said quietly. “The death riders are as stupid as they are brutal.”

“Why are you working in the infirmary?” Ling asked. He was an archaeologist, not a medical doctor. He studied ancient mer civilizations.

“When the death riders took me, they went through my things. They saw my ID, with the title of doctor on it, and assumed I was a physician. That misunderstanding keeps me alive.” He
cast a worried glance in the direction of the infirmary’s door. “Can you cope with dead bodies? Not contagious—victims of depth sickness. I’ve got at least ten to deal with.
Probably more before the morning’s out. We can talk as we load.”