Suiteonem Prime, Malali, Dumakule, 213919

  Ragay twisted as he was buffeted by a thumping pulse that turned the water into a swirling nightmare of wriggling red things.

  He acted on instinct. The hard earned muscle memory from Miss Karagatan’s grueling training came alive.

  A bubble willed to life.

  Cold brine drained out, dropping the parasites to the bubble’s floor.

  Their bodies couldn’t survive long without the water supporting them.

  Screams filled his ears as he quickly opened and closed the bottom of his bubble to flush out the dead parasites.

  “Bubble yourself, Gossamare! Forget the boy!”

  Keisho’s voice.

  Followed by an agonized refusal from Gossamare.

  “They’ll infest you!”

  Hard water blades churned the water into a crimson soup

  Circular blades with dozens of teeth spun around Keisho and through the dense bait ball of parasites, revealing Gossamare struggling to keep her will surrounding the Malalian boy in her hard water bubble.

  Ragay gasped as he saw the parasites latched to her limbs.

  Translucent blue flesh darkened beneath the surface as her blood was exposed by frenzied burrowing.

  “Someone help her!” Keisho roared.

  Abygale cursed, but she dropped the bubble keeping her safe to swim over and begin slicing parasites off Gossamare.

  “Into the waterlock! It’s clear!” Ragay could see through the red cloud now.

  He dropped his bubble in favor of a fine mesh net to scoop the parasites out of the way.

  Keisho swam quickly behind his whirling blades, clearing the rest of the path for Ragay to swim through and pull the other three into the waterlock.

  “They’re getting in me!” Gossamare’s large black eyes were wider than he had ever seen them. She pulsed bioluminescence frantically, bringing light to the dark water.

  “Shit in the lagoon! I can see tendrils reaching!” Abygale cut with a hard water blade.

  “Kill them!” Keisho snapped as he helped Abygale slice the parasites attached to Gossamare’s limbs.

  “It’s not doing anything! They’re still reaching for her brain!”

  “Cut them off!” Gossamare screamed.

  “Wha—”

  “Just cut them off!”

  Abygale didn’t hesitate.

  She willed a larger blade and slashed Gossamare’s four limbs off above where the thin tendrils were about to reach.

  Ragay caught a leg.

  Tendrils wriggled, reaching for her face as he put it in a bubble.

  Keisho did the same for Gossamare’s left limbs on the other side.

  Abygale took care of the last one.

  “Quick! We have to seal them before she bleeds out!”

  Gossamare’s flashing lights weakened in intensity and frequency as her crimson blood bloomed out of her four stumps.

  “Ragay, catch!” Abygale flicked Gossamare’s infested arm over before digging into her bag of holding to take care of Gossamare’s horrific wounds.

  Throughout it all, the deep trench oceanborn kept her bubble around the Malalian boy.

  Outside the waterlock and the open door, Justavi and Tagge fought in the middle of a swirling bait ball of infested Malalians.

  Ragay struggled to catch glimpses of the pair through the roiling red.

  “They’ll be okay,” Keisho said. “Their armor is too tough to be easily penetrated.”

  “Yes, but how will they break away long enough to join us. And what about Sings? Last I saw him—”

  A leviathan rose from the depths of the habitation sphere.

  Hard water in the form of a deep singer, the kind with a blunt square of a head like a rock-breaker hammer, sang straight into the massive red ball.

  Behind it came Sings Too Loud in his landsuit smeared with the remains of infested.

  The construct smashed through the infested while Justavi and Tagge used the propellers in their suits for a burst of speed to get out of the way.

  Keisho’s mouth dropped.

  “Did you know he could do that?”

  Ragay had not.

  Miss Karagatan had taught that the potentials’ growth in wielding the power of Sinaya’s Heart came like the rising tide. Slow, steady, predictable. Most of the time.

  On rare occasions, when desperation laced fingers with fortune, growth could rise like a sudden rogue wave thrice the height of all the ones that came before it and those that would come after.

  The swimming battle had carried the armored group to just under a hundred meters away from the door.

  “Close the door!” Sings Too Loud’s high-pitched voice pierced into Ragay’s ears. “They’re coming!” He gestured down.

  Keisho swam to the lip and looked.

  He cursed, flinching back as if he had accidentally swam into a sulfur vent.

  “There’s too many!” Sings Too Loud continued. “We can’t beat them to you! Close it. We’ll find another way.”

  Justavi growled, while Tagge shot them a feral grin.

  “Their suits will keep them safe. The infested can’t penetrate, right? You’ve seen it?”

  Ragay could only nod as Keisho hurried to the controls and closed the door.

  The last sight he had of the trio on the other side was them swimming away with a dark red cloud in their wake.

  …

  Gossamare floated in the waterlock.

  Abygale had covered her stumps with a gel that solidified into hard caps. It stopped the bleeding while numbing the pain without affecting her mental state.

  Which had to be terrible judging by her unblinking eyes staring at the door. And, yet, she still maintained her concentration on the hard water bubble around the boy.

  “What do we do about… well… you know?” Keisho whispered, eyeing Gossamare’s limbs in his and Ragay’s bubbles.

  Parasites continued to wriggle into the translucent blue flesh, their tendrils stretching out of the clean cuts toward the two potentials.

  “One of us can carry them. Miss Karagatan will know what to do.”

  “That will take one of us out of the battles that are surely ahead of us,” Keisho said.

  “Yes, but we don’t know that with certainty. I don’t want to ruin any chance for Gossamare to have them reattached.”

  “Agreed, but we do have to get outside to Miss Karagatan for her to even have that chance. One to carry these. One to carry Gossamare and the boy. Which only leaves one to do the fighting. I don’t like our chances in that scenario.”

  “Destroy them.” Gossamare’s voice was a weak whisper. “They will grow back… in time…”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, then looked away.

  “There should be a drain…”

  …

  The tunnel had been drained by Gossamare.

  It was filled with red blobs laying splayed out all over the wet floor.

  “You do it,” Abygale said. “What? I’m the better fighter between the two of us. So, I need to conserve my energy for the actual fighting.”

  Ragay bristled and wanted to object, but knew that she was being factual.

  He willed a wedge-shaped plow of hard water into existence to clear a path through the infested corpses.

  Keisho followed carrying Gossamare and the boy inside a bubble of water that the pair needed to survive lest they turn into flattened blobs like the others.

  Abygale stayed close as the rearguard, keeping her eyes on the bodies for any parasite tricks.

  The level tunnel and the blobs of red that Ragay tried not to think were people gave way to a steep incline. Rungs were set on each surface for when it was filled with water.

  This wasn’t the way he remembered coming in.

  But, Gossamare had set the path, so he would follow.

  Ragay climbed, keeping one hand on his hooked staff to will a wedge-shaped shield of hard water ahead just in case.

  Partway up he glanced back.

  Keisho struggled to keep pace owing to the fact that he only had one hand and he had to hold his hooked staff to keep Gossamare and the boy in the bubble. A bladed prosthetic didn’t make for a good climbing aid.

  “I told you that the axe hand was better than the sword.”

  Keisho only had enough energy to spare him a mirthless smile.

  “Shut it and hurry up!” Abygale snapped. “I can hear water starting to fill the tunnel behind me and, I swear to Sinaya, Ragay, if I get infested…”

  He reached the halfway mark when the above door began to open, spilling cold brine on his shield.

  The trickle turned into a deluge before he could think to try something and it took all his superstrength to hold on to the rung and all his concentration to keep his hard water shield from breaking.

  “Guys! Shit!” Abygale shrieked.

  He glanced down.

  Rising dark water filled the tunnel below them.

  Red shapes swam beneath, circling so fast as to almost appear like the sucking mouth of a scylla.

  “Ragay!”

  Keisho’s warning saved him and possibly all of them.

  A door to Ragay’s left and just a little above opened, spilling more dark water and infested Malalians.

  He acted on instinct, reflexively moving his shield just in time to block the flow and send the infested smashing into the side of the tunnel.

  “Behind!”

  This time Keisho’s warning was too late.

  Cold water hit Ragay in the back.

  Hands grasped at him, ripping at his hair and digging into his mouth and nostril slits.

  He spun, sandwiching the infested between his back and the hard surface.

  Soft flesh squelched and fell away, washed by the torrential waterfall.

  “They’re on your back!”

  He hooked his clawed toes into the rungs and desperately reached back to rip the parasites off.

  One clamped on his knuckles, but they were scaled and it didn’t do more than scratch him before he smashed it against the wall.

  “Am I free of them!”

  It was hard to hear over the roaring water and the thumping in his chest, but mercifully, Keisho said he was clear of parasites.

  He could only hope that they hadn’t injected eggs or something worse.

  “Keep climbing!” Abygale roared while she fired hard water spears into the rising whirlpool.

  Ragay did, but the waterfall made it difficult even for one with the physical strength required to swim in the deep.

  It was doubly taxing to keep his hard water shield from breaking under the force.

  “Stop.” Gossamare’s voice was weak, but he heard her through the gem in his ear. “They’re waiting for us.”

  He peered up, but struggled to see anything through all the water.

  “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “The opening two up and on your right. A different current we can take. But, we have to hide our true intention under our shells or they’ll attack.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “If you don’t hurry none of that will matter!” Abygale’s will began to fray.

  As the rearguard she was first on the infested menu.

  “I understand. I’ll push ahead past the tunnel and I’ll block them as long as I can so the rest of you can go.”

  It went without saying that he’d follow. Or at least he’d try.

  He passed the opening, which was streaming water down, but not enough to make it impossible to enter.

  “It looks clear, Gossamare.”

  She didn’t reply.

  Undoubtedly conserving her energy.

  The thought that she fought despite losing her limbs lent him strength and he surged faster underneath the downpour.

  Toward the waiting tendrils of the parasite eel-things.

  He focused his will on his hard water shield, increasing the density, but not the dimensions so as to keep up the charade that he was climbing straight into their trap like a dumb drylander thinking a night swim in ripper fish territory was a good idea.

  Sinaya’s Oath echoed in his mind.

  It had become second nature to him so much that he could go months before noticing its comforting refrain in the back of his mind.

  “Keep going until Abygale is in line to dive into the tunnel,” Gossamare whispered. “Then please throw us in, Keisho. Followed by yourself and Ragay at the last. Be prepared to block the opening, Ragay, until the door can be closed.”

  He glanced down again, counting the rungs and making a quick mental calculation. Then he marked the rung he needed to reach and the moment the infested would find out that their trap had been sprung much too early for their liking.

  Ragay climbed.

  “Going!” Abygale sounded eager to get out of being the rearguard when the infested were within less than a meter of her bare feet.

  They moved quickly.

  Abygale dived like a desperate fish through a forest of snapping teeth.

  Keisho shoved Gossamare and the boy into the tunnel, dismissing his bubble since it didn’t fit.

  The dark-skinned landborn dived in after, leaving Ragay to deal with the infested denied their prey.

  Small, glowing fish with teeth like whirring saws swam down the waterfall.

  The spell or Skill ate away at his hard water shield with frightening quickness.

  It wasn’t fair, in his estimation, for the parasites to have access to their poor victims’ abilities.

  Down below, red tentacles boiled up out of the froth, reaching for him as he dropped.

  Both himself and his shield.

  The latter in order to will a slide to shoot him right into the tunnel.

  “Block it!” Keisho said.

  Ragay grit his teeth, turning the slide back into a shield over the wall as Keisho entered the code Gossamare whispered into the control console.

  It felt like an eternity for the door’s eye to shut as he held back the angry infested ripping away at his shield.

  Each strike and bite reverberated up the link to the Heart of Sinaya dangling from his staff and into him, turning the imagined pains into physical ones like needles jabbed into his head.

  He fell back into cold brine that had filled up most of the small tunnel.

  He breathed deeply, filling his lungs once again.

  Constant training had removed the unpleasantness and time it took him to make the transition from breathing air to water.

  “Abygale is now the vanguard. Ragay, you have the rearguard,” Gossamare said.

  The tunnel was too small to shift their positions easily.

  Too small for Keisho to keep Gossamare and the boy inside a bubble.

  He had to tether them with a harness and line of hard water.

  Even then it took some shifting to orient Gossamare in the right position to keep her hooked staff strapped on her back from catching on the tunnel walls.

  “Gossamare. I don’t mind, but you’re going to have to tell me where to go. I don’t remember this part from the maps,” Abygale said.

  “Of course.”

  …

  Ragay swam in the dark water with only Gossamare’s and the boy’s bioluminescence to keep him from swimming into the sides of the tunnel.

  He kept his head on a swivel for potential pursuit.

  The murky darkness behind him seemed to be ever reaching for his finned legs with its black tendrils. No matter how much he moved forward it was always just behind him in the minute changes in the water.

  Gossamare had gone silent since the tunnel only had one direction to go so far and Abygale no longer needed directions.

  It lacked connections to other tunnels according to Gossamare, but Ragay still flinched whenever he saw anything that might’ve been an opening.

  The parasites had already shown the ability and propensity to use the water filtration and circulation system.

  The vents might have been sealed shut by Gossamare’s earlier efforts, but he didn’t trust them to stay that way.

  The seconds ticked away in rhythm with the thunder in his chest pushing the rushing river in his ears.

  “Are you feeling well, Ragay?” Gossamare whispered. “Remember what we spoke of.”

  The stinging pain across the skin of his back and left arm was a good reminder.

  His mouth moved silently.

  “I don’t feel any different. I’m still myself. Don’t worry.”

  So he said when his insides writhed with a thousand angry eels.

  Metaphorically.

  He tried not to think that there were actually things writhing around inside of him.

  If only he had a landsuit to scan.

  Another thing he tried not to think about.

  What if he had seen the last of Sings Too Loud, Tagge and Justavi? What if he hadn’t?

  Death was preferable to infestation.

  He said a prayer to Sinaya to grant all of them that mercy if it came down to it.

  “Does anyone hear?” Gossamare said.

  The boy whimpered.

  That wasn’t a good sign.

  “I hear nothing,” Keisho said. “Abygale? Ragay?”

  “Quiet. They might hear our vibrations. And I’m trying to listen for theirs,” Abygale said.

  “Is it because you’re like them, Gossamare?” Ragay had an idea. “They seemed to be moving as if they were many fingers on a hand. They could function as something of a hive mind.”

  “That seems probable, but Gossamare and the child aren’t infested. I’d say that the parasites are necessary to communicating through metaphysical means,” Keisho said. “What do you hear?”

  Gossamare stayed silent for felt like an eternity.

  “Just whispers.” She reached out to the boy then realized she no longer had a hand to comfort. “You hear more, don’t you? Can you please tell me what you’re hearing?”

  Another seeming eternity of silence as they swam ever into the darkness.

  “My mommies and daddies want me to go home.”

  The boy’s whisper was so soft that Ragay thought for a moment that he had heard what the two had been hearing.

  “How did you end up alone in the control chamber?”

  The boy flinched away from Keisho’s grim face.

  Ragay read his body language and he would’ve swam behind Gossamare if not for Keisho’s hard water tether keeping him close to the dark-skinned landborn.

  “Easy. Let Gossamare talk to him. I doubt that he’s seen a lot of landborn down here.”

  Keisho nodded and turned away from the boy.

  “You can speak just to me, child. I’m from a deep trench oceans away from here, but my home is very similar to yours,” Gossamare said. “May I have your name?”

  The boy whimpered and curled up even tighter, burying his head in his knees and wrapping his arms tightly.

  Gossamare tried, but the boy shut down once again.

  …

  The swim through the tunnel simultaneously took forever and ended quicker than he had expected from his, admittedly, average grasp of Malali’s layout.

  It was difficult for one that lived primarily on dry land to grasp what life in a deep city was like.

  Swimming paths went in all three dimensions.

  Living spaces were placed in walls and ceilings from his usual perspective.

  Up and down were equal to left and right as far as valid directions.

  They reached the end of the tunnel.

  “What’s the code?” Abygale said.

  Gossamare had Keisho move her so she could look over Abygale’s shoulder.

  “Follow my instructions.”

  The swirling eddies brushed Ragay’s skin and scales.

  He shivered, not from the cold, but from the dread lurking in the black murk at the edge of his vision.

  An intake filtration unit loomed a little behind him.

  He willed a hard water a wall to block off the filter and the rest of the tunnel.

  “Good idea.” Keisho kept his voice low. “Have you tried to contact the others?”

  “No. I didn’t want to risk distraction or revealing them if they tried to escape. Did you?”

  “Briefly, until I realized the same as you. I received no answers.”

  “The landsuits appear to be proof against these infested. At least from what I saw.”

  “Agreed, but the concern doesn’t go away. Perhaps, I should have opted to wear one too. But pride has caused regret.”

  “Pride?”

  “Yes. As a half-drylander it felt good to not need one.”

  Ragay nodded.

  He didn’t understand the need, but it wasn’t the time or place to be curious.

  “Uh oh,” Abygale said. “You saw that! I didn’t—”

  “Yes,” Gossamare said.

  “What—”

  The door began to open.

  Ragay gasped with horror.

  There was no waterlock to buy them a little bit of space.

  The water in the tunnel didn’t suddenly gush out, dragging them along like a powerful current, as it should have if Gossamare had drained the other side according to plan.

  Indeed, he saw dark water on the other side.

  “Ragay!” Keisho squeezed to one side of the tunnel with the boy on his tether.

  “I know!” Ragay swam past the pair and pulled Gossamare back behind him.

  Beyond the opening eye of the door sat a forest of kelp strands as tall as trees swaying like trancers in the gentle current.

  But that wasn’t what he had eyes on.

  No.

  All he could see were the red flashes of bioluminescent light in and around the kelp wherever he looked.

  “Close it!”

  Abygale hissed as she stabbed her fingers into the controls.

  “I’m. Trying.”

  …

  “Move!”

  Abygale burst ahead shooting hard water spears in every direction.

  Ragay kicked his legs, unfurling his fins.

  He stayed in the center of Abygale’s wake where the turbulence was least.

  “We’re right behind you!” Keisho said.

  “Aim for the base of the kelp forest,” Gossamare said. “Cut the kelp and use them to block and confuse the infested. Weave a net to keep them away from us.”

  Red light flashed from every direction.

  Ragay imagined it was like being in the sky in the middle of fireworks during one of his home island’s celebrations.

  A glint out of the corner of his eye drew his attention.

  Miss Karagatan’s hard training had his body react before his conscious thoughts.

  Hard water blocked a barrage of spines.

  “They can use weapons!”

  A school of infested floated in the dark water aiming spine shooters… well… perhaps not quite aiming. Their huge, black eyes stared off in random directions.

  There was a hint in how the parasite eel things controlled the unfortunate Malalians, but it wasn’t the time to ponder as a second barrage hit his wall.

  Abygale cursed.

  He glanced down.

  Red lights flashed at the base of the kelp forest.

  They flashed through the thick green stalks everywhere he looked.

  A soundless roar split her mouth as she filled the water with a storm of hard water.

  Jagged spears filled the infested Malalians swimming up to intercept her with their blank-eyed stares.

  The parasites embedded in their translucent red flesh wriggled like desperate grubs on a fishing hook.

  Some detached and swam on, but Abygale swept them all out of her way with a wedge-shaped wall of hard water as she dived through the spreading red and into the swaying green.

  “Ragay, take the rear,” Gossamare said. “Keisho, slice the kelp with your arm-blade. Abygale— Abygale!” she wheezed.

  “What!” Abygale snapped.

  “Slice the kelp.”

  “They’re above us!”

  “That is why you must listen to me and clog their approaches.”

  Abygale grunted.

  Ragay slipped out of her water tunnel to let Keisho, Gossamare and the boy pass him.

  All the while he maintained a moving wall to block the spine shooters.

  He allowed the distance between him and the others to grow in the hope that the infested would focus on him.

  It worked!

  It worked?

  Skills or spells flashed around him, turning the cold brine into a boiling soup.

  It wasn’t fair that the parasites could use their victims’ abilities on top of the whole parasiting thing.

  Hard water encased him in a bubble filled with boiling water, which was better because the temperature began to drop immediately compared to outside where it continued to rise.

  Will carried him downward through the froth.

  He burst free and slammed into the floor’s rough, coral-like surface.

  The bubble burst as he kicked his legs and willed Sinaya’s Heart to pull him toward the kelp.

  Skin stung in the sudden cold, but relief followed quickly.

  Infested shot spines through his leg fins.

  A glowing tentacle appeared just behind him, lashing out an arm’s length behind his feet.

  The floor ahead shot up into a tangled net of spiky coral.

  He crashed through everything and reached the kelp.

  Red light flashed from above as he swam, ripping through the thick, green blades that slapped him in the face. Air-filled bladders as big as his head burst on impact, sending bubbles rising.

  He lashed out blindly with hard water blades to give the infested bad visibility and a tangled current.

  “Ragay, where are you?” Gossamare said.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Follow my light.”

  He swam with infested seemingly always just on the brink of catching him, searching desperately for flashing blue light in the thick, tangled green.

  There!

  To his right!

  “I see you!”

  “Hurry.”

  He shot in their direction, catching up quickly.

  “I’m here, Gossamare!”

  “Good. Keisho, cut the kelp. Ragay, use them.”

  He willed the hard water into the shape of the tongs used to flip meat on the grill, except many times larger, to gather the loose kelp and shove them into the infested.

  The natural dense tangle of the kelp forest aided their efforts to stifle pursuit.

  The forest cleared around the edges.

  The way looked clear, but Ragay knew not to trust his eyes based on how things on Malali had gone so far.

  He let out a metaphorical breath when Gossamare said the way ahead was clear as she directed Abygale to a circular door near the curved ceiling.

  Open water hadn’t caused dread for Ragay before.

  Now?

  Now it looked like a trap.

  “Cut at the base, above the holdfasts,” Gossamare directed.

  Abygale obeyed with a blade of hard water while Keisho used his blade arm.

  “Ragay, topple them on our pursuers.”

  He swam past the enormous kelp the size of land trees, pushing them behind with hard water walls before they could drift in the wrong directions.

  “Abygale. Go faster. I’ll give you the code. We cannot wait long for the door to open,” Gossamare said.

  Ragay glanced back.

  Pursuit had been snarled in the tangled kelp, but that wouldn’t last long.

  “Opened!” Abygale snapped before she shot through.

  Red lights flashed from the surrounding dark water. Blinking lights left streams of turbulent water in their wake. Growing larger by the second.

  Keisho towed Gossamare and the boy through next.

  Ragay shot through and slapped a hard water wall on the other side as Abygale punched in the code to close the door.

  “I’m getting tired of swimming for my life from one dark tunnel to another!” she growled. “How close are we to the exit, Gossamare?”

  “It is a short swim to one more large sphere followed by a lengthy swim—”

  “Through more pitch black tunnels!” Abygale sighed. “Okay. Fine. But, I’m getting tired. I think I have half another battle like the last one in me.”

  Ragay felt like he had at least a full battle left in him, but judging by Abygale’s face he didn’t need to share that fact.

  Keisho raised his blade-arm.

  “Switch?”

  Abygale grimaced.

  “I’m not as good at small, flexible things.” She gestured toward the hard water tethers and harnesses the dark-skinned half-drylander had around Gossamare and the Malalian boy. “But, sure, I’ll trade.”

  “Good. Keisho is now the vanguard. Ragay will continue to be rearguard,” Gossamare said. “Let us continue forward.”