The Dark Water (18 page)

“We're too late,” he says, his mind reeling.

“Hey Amber,” Odessa calls up the stairs, tossing a bottle toward the barricade. “Make sure everyone drinks a little of this water.” She turns and heads back the way they came, motioning for Jimmy to follow her. “We save who we can. They're all that's left.”

THE WATER'S COLD, A STARK CONTRAST TO THE
HEALING
type. It presses against me and reminds me of swimming under ice. I undulate my body like I would in a race, trying to stay beneath as long as possible. When I finally break the surface and start to swim—freestyle—I immediately feel an ache twist through me. I know what it feels like to get tired. I know what it feels like to push myself so hard that the edge of my vision goes black. I know what it takes when I'm close to the finish mark, when I have to skip the breath and keep my head underwater to gain those extra milliseconds of speed. I can remember nearly passing out a half dozen times after a race, holding weakly on to the plastic blue lane dividers, letting chlorinated water fill my mouth and spitting it slowly out. But the tired I feel so suddenly, it's different. The pool's small, maybe thirty yards, the kind of distance I should laugh at. My arms are sluggish, my bones squeak in my body. I can feel my eyes dim. And when I turn my head to breathe, my lungs can't get enough, can barely get any air, so I go back under breathless, and it takes my entire will to keep the rhythm and not pull up to paddle like a dog.

The coldness spreads and I can't feel my feet. My heart races, part fear, part desperation, pushing against my chest, but suddenly there's something else pushing on me, holding me down, and it takes me a moment to realize that it's water gushing onto my arms, then my head, then my back, the waterfall shoving me under and trying to drown me. I switch to breaststroke, frantically aiming for the surface. For a moment I can only see the churning haze of foam over my head. But then I break the surface and gulp air, the sound of the water pouring right past my head so loud I'm deaf.

It's dark behind the falls, almost black, but I can see something up ahead, a hole in the wall and some sort of light coming from beyond it. There are marble steps up from the pool and a thin tunnel before me. I was right. I knew I was right. But as I move toward the steps, those final easy strokes are like agony, and I see my arms for the first time since I've jumped in. They're tiny, shriveled, the muscles hanging small and loose from my arms, the skin like a plastic bag. I grit my teeth and push forward, slogging through the water to get to the stairs.

I shouldn't have gritted my teeth, because a tooth shatters like porcelain, cutting up my mouth. But I don't have time to gag, to do anything but keep on. I might have been right about going through the waterfall, but Brayden was right about the water and my body's quickly disintegrating. I climb the steps shakily, my feet flat and callused and wrinkled beyond belief. I can hear Brayden calling my name, a small sound sifting through the waterfall, but I don't have the energy to call back. I feel my skin shift, as if no longer fully attached to my body. My hair turns brittle and grows quickly down my shoulders, as gray as anything.

I'm out of the water but the aging's not stopping. Just like it didn't stop with Brayden, and he only dipped into the water for a second. I try to hurry forward but my legs are like jelly and I fall to my knees, blinded by pain. I think I shattered my kneecap. My hip. I don't know but I can't stand up. If I stay here I'll die, I know this, so I moan, and put my hands onto the stone and drag myself forward, pulling my splintered bones farther apart inside me.

Five, ten feet of agony. Ahead, at the end of the tunnel, the light grows stronger. For a moment I can't help but think of it as the end. But that's stupid. Here, the light means something more.

“The source,” I whisper, and out of nowhere a drop of water hits me in my face, sending shockwaves through my body. For a moment I convulse, like I'm having a seizure, and I lose all control of myself, my limbs flailing about, my knee screaming in agony. I clench my eyes shut and will the pain away and then, as soon as it's begun, the shaking stops and I'm calm, breathing deep, feeling better.

My eyes clear, so much so that I had no idea how bad they were, like I had glaucoma, like I was ninety. I'm out of the cave and in a vast glowing field of flowers. Thousands of them. Different and the same as those I've seen before. Like magical wildflowers off the interstate. They come right up to my feet but stop at the edge of the tunnel leading toward the waterfall. There's something strange about the field. It ripples and sways and grows, as if the field were breathing.

Another drop hits me, this time on my arm, and the skin immediately firms up and heals.

The drops fall languidly, and when one lands on the ground, it sprouts a flower like in a time-lapse video we've seen in biology, an enhanced-speed version of a plant's life. It grows to my knees and bursts a flash of glowflower light along its petals and suddenly I realize what's going on: water is landing all around me and creating new flowers instantaneously. Another drop hits me, and then another, coming from above, and my body continues to heal. Not like Odessa and Jimmy, who were given water and then remained stuck in the bodies of thirty-year-olds. Instead, this water's reversing the effect. I can feel my tooth sliding back into place. My knee knitting together under the skin. I raise my face to the sky, unable to contain a giddy laugh as more drops hit. And then I see it. How could I not have?

There, some fifty yard away and cascading
upward
from the ground and into the endless black of the ceiling above is the fountain. My breath hitches. The water swirls and twists like a lazy, beautiful tornado, drifting back and forth above my head, but anchored to one spot on the ground. The tornado's spotlit by the thousands of glowflowers in the field. The water is mesmerizing, shadowed and glittering like it's made of diamonds and every few seconds a drop of water hits a glowflower at just the right angle to flash a rainbow of color. An ache burns through me. I wish Dad could see this. Right now, right here, I know that I'm witnessing the greatest thing I'll ever see. It's strange to recognize that at the moment it's happening. To recognize the beauty and to be all alone.

Maybe it's supposed to be this way.

There's no path, just endlessly growing flowers, so I run with my knees high through the field toward the vortex of water. The flowers rub against me like cotton candy. As I get closer to the fountain the water gets louder. The earth vibrates beneath my feet and this close there's a mist, no longer just drops. The water sinks into me and I feel a sense of euphoria. I can see why no one's allowed here; I'm having a hard time focusing. If not for the memory of Brayden calling me through the waterfall, I'd want to lie down here forever. I bet I could, here, with the water dropping on me. Live forever.

The cyclone of water is big, maybe twenty feet in diameter, and now that I'm close enough I realize I can't tell where it's coming from. The wall of water making up the cyclone is so thick that it's hard to see beyond it. There could be a hole, or a pool, or it could be spinning directly up from the ground. I have no idea. It's hard to understand the strange logistics. I look around to get my bearings and realize that I don't understand where this place is in relation to the city and the wall and the mountain and everything. Back on Randt's tower, we could see the mountain, and I just assumed the source was there, at the top. But I haven't climbed at all, so I must be in the center of the mountain. Yet still, this looks like open space, with the same darkness above me as in Capian—it's as if I'm not inside a mountain at all. I might as well be standing on the edge of a vast prairie, and behind me is a cliff face, jutting straight up from the earth, keeping this place from the Keepers. Inside that cliff is the waterfall, a trap to protect the source.

The water goes up into the black as far as I can see. Where does it go, I wonder, staring up at the tornado. The drops that land don't seem to gather and drain anywhere, they just sprout new flowers. But the mini-aqueduct of water back in Capian—the one my dad's currently lying in—seems to tap directly into the mountain, as if draining a fruit. Maybe, somehow, enough of the water drains below me and into some underground water system. But this place, the source, what am I even supposed to do here?

I circle the edge of the cyclone, looking for some clue, but there's nothing beyond but an endless field. I've gone around twice before I notice it, a lump in the flowers, right back near the tunnel that led me to the field. I must have missed it when I crawled in half blind. I hurry over and tear off the greenery, my hands ripping at strong and sticky vines and moss and flowers that have overgrown a stone structure, what I think is an altar. But after I clear it off, I know different. I'm breathing hard, hands aching, but that heals up after a couple drops and I'm staring at a flat rock, smooth and painted. There are ten cups slotted in a circle into the rock, each a different color, carved of a different stone. One slot has a cup, but it's glass and plain and entirely different than the others. I can't find one that's onyx or obsidian or some other form of black mineral. Maybe Feileen's cup just faded away. The other nine are probably for the remaining Keepers who have had the source. Maybe this is how and why Arcos and Randt so fervently believe the seven Keepers that went Topside are still alive. Maybe the cup fades if you die. And theirs never did.

The cups encircle a drawing of what looks like the earth, a spherical ball of blue and green, though the green doesn't match up to North America or Africa or any other landmass we'd see on any globe. From the top and bottom of the sphere, like the axis of a globe, is a blue-and-white spiral. I look up at the tornado, see it disappearing into the black nothingness above and am sure that's what the spiral is. The axis of the earth. But what does it mean?

I don't have time to rack my brains. There are cups and this is the source so I grab the glass one, surprisingly heavy, and start back through the fields. I try not to think about Feileen using this; I have no idea how to get my own, or how blasphemous touching someone else's cup is. But I'm not struck by lightning and the cup's heft feels good in my hand so I go for it.

This source, this font, gushes straight up, and I find myself remembering the strange physics of this place, and how I swam through the well in the Cave to get here, down down down until I surfaced
up
on a lake. As I get close, the wall of water is so thick and impenetrable that the cup in my hand seems ridiculous. I could hold it up in the air and hope to gather drops, but that would take forever. The mist comes off in waves, shimmering around me, and I slowly reach out the cup and bring it to the water, but as soon as the cup touches the water, the force of the spray shoots it out of my hand and up, way up, so high and far I can't see it. I let out a loose laugh. I'm somehow absolutely certain the same thing would happen if I tried again. I spin once in a circle, searching for some sign, something to show me how to actually take the source.

Okay, think, Mia. What did Dad say?
I can't remember. The Keeper with the spear, the circle, a hand. I don't know. I'm at the edge of all of this, the entire reason for being here, the entire reason my dad is dead and I can't do a thing. I can't even gather the water.

What do you want with me?
I imagine myself shouting to the cyclone, my voice ragged and useless, but for some reason I just whisper. As if in response, a drop hits my face and, blinking away the water, I swear I see something. A space in the cyclone. I squint, but it's gone.
What was that?
I look around me and then bend down and pluck a flower from the ground. Its bright, glowing petals are covered in dew and I wipe them against my eyelids. They feel cool and as soon as I open my eyes I can see the water in front of me shimmer. I realize that the cyclone isn't a firm wall of water, but rather it bends and twists like tall sheets of laundry in the wind, sheets that sway and shift and open small gaps between and beyond themselves. I blink, the shimmer fading, but not before I see something shine in a gap in the water.

I think
wormhole
or
aliens
or maybe both. The Keepers are probably human descendants, right? It's clear from the painting of the globe that the Topside is way more connected to this place than I realized. Even the way Randt and Arcos use the source proves it.

But I shake away my thoughts. I have to get water back to Brayden, to Dad. Maybe that's what the water does—it brings you back. The water here rejuvenated me, it didn't just halt the virus's progress like in the Cave. Maybe it really can bring Dad back too. Maybe he'll wake up in that aqueduct and know that everything he's spent his life on was worth it.

“Shit,” I mutter. I can't see the gaps anymore, or the light inside the cyclone. I could soak myself to carry the liquid.
You can't really be thinking this.
But I am, and my hand is already moving again to try it.

I hold my breath and touch the water, imagining my hand being shot into the air like a fire hose going off in my palm. But unlike with the cup that doesn't happen. The water separates and flows around my hands, dripping gently
upward
through and around my fingers, floating around them like I'm in outer space, with no gravity. The light within the whirling cyclone shines again and I step forward. My leg splits the curtain of water and then my body and I'm soaked and hot and I feel a pressure at the base of my shoes that wants to eject me to the sky, but that isn't what happens.

What happens is that the curtain closes around me and it goes so dark I'm afraid I've disappeared. And then I hear my father calling my name.

HIS VOICE IS FAR AWAY, MUTED AND ECHOING.

“Dad?” I yell. Jo or Rob must have healed him somehow back at the battle and he's followed me here. “I'm here, in the source. I'm
in
the cyclone.” But my voice sounds odd. Smaller, nasally.

I realize, suddenly, that I'm not in complete darkness. Above me, larger than a star but smaller than the moon, is a circle of light. It's blindingly bright but illuminates nothing. And I've seen it before. My stomach curls. I'll never forget that light. What's it doing here? I try to look down but my head slams into a hunk of rock, hurting so bad I want to throw up. A drop of warm liquid drips down my face, not water now, but blood from a gash on my forehead. I'm dizzy but when I try to sit down I realize I can't move, can't lift my arms or anything. I'm stuck, rock surrounding my body, like I'm in a tube of concrete. I shiver, suddenly cold. I know what this is. It's impossible, but still, I know. What isn't possible down here? How can I disbelieve something that I
remember
? This is it, my first memory. I remember the well.

I take a few deep breaths.
Calm down, Mia.
I bend my head forward again, slower this time, until my forehead comes in contact with the cold stone a few inches away. Below me, I can tell that I'm wearing a green dress, one with white flowers. It used to be my favorite.

There's a sound above me, a clatter, and some dust scatters onto my face. I blink away the grit and see something solid coming my way. I try to duck but can't. I can't do anything. I close my eyes and take another breath; I know from swimming that if you breathe too much, too deep, you can pass out. Hyperventilation. But I can't help it. This is my nightmare.

The object above me drops down, then stops, dangling above my head. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but I already know it's a Pink Power Ranger lunch box.
My
Pink Power Ranger lunch box. I want to scream, because there's no more doubt.

I'm in the well. My well. I am me,
Baby Mia, who fell down the well.

The newspapers all wrote about the lunch box. But no one reported on how my hands were restricted, and how I couldn't eat the food. No one knew I didn't eat the food. They lowered the lunch box down by rope and pulled it up again, full. Then tried another time, with a string attached to open the box. They thought this had worked, because the lunch box was empty when they pulled it up. Instead, I had stayed down there for hours with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich lodged behind my head like a thin pillow. When they managed to break through to me via a parallel tunnel, the sandwich disappeared into the dirt, eaten by the earth.

I watch the lunch box get raised and take a moment to get myself together. Why am I here? I'm in my own body, my childhood body. The only difference is that I know what's about to happen. Does that matter? I wonder. Or am I fated to watch my past with no faculty for action, like Ebenezer Scrooge?

Right on cue, the next lunch box is lowered. I'm reliving the moment, but maybe I can actually do something. My dad yells down to me but I can't understand him. I lean my head back and this time when the lunch box opens, the sandwich falls and hits my forehead. It's about to slide down behind me into nothingness but I snatch at it with my teeth and catch it. It's wrapped in plastic and the sandwich gives between my jaws but I don't care. Elation surges through me. I
can
move. I can make a difference here. It takes a few painful minutes, but I manage to shove the sandwich against my shoulder and pull the plastic off. I can't believe I caught it! It smells like our kitchen and the longing I felt when my mother used to put me on the bus.

My mother. She's alive right now. She's alive here.

“Mom!” I scream, but my voice is still shrill and tiny and I can almost imagine it bouncing right back at me.

I stop to listen for a moment and hear the grumble of equipment, still distant. I remember that feeling, the terror of the wall caving in, of the noise of the digger which had already been so loud becoming suddenly ear-shattering. I peed down my legs. The news didn't report that either. I'm not sure I even remembered that until right now. Even when I saw that my rescuer was Wilkins, the Santa Claus–looking man from the aqueduct, I screamed
no
at him, didn't want him to move me, to feel the hot urine that had soaked my dress and legs. Now, stuck here, I feel the cuts and bruises of the fall, of the rock scraping into my legs as I tumbled. I feel the warm blood oozing from my wounds. The fractures splayed along my bones and in my nose. The water isn't shielding me anymore. The pain is becoming unbearable.

“Let me out of here,” I yell up the hole, and my bruised ribs explode in protest. No one can hear me. They didn't then and they won't now. Not Dad, not Mom. “Please,” I try again, speaking through the pain into the darkness, straight to whatever sent me here. “Let me go and I won't take any. I didn't know you'd bring me here. I won't touch the source. Please.”

There's nothing. Just the growl of the digger and the light above me.

The lunch box begins to rise, jerked up bit by bit as my father—or someone—tugs at the rope, hand over hand. I watch it lift, blocking the light, spinning in circles, bouncing against the well's edge. Something falls out of the box and I flinch, but then it swirls lazily in the air and slowly down, a sheet of paper folded in half. My mom used to do that: send me to school with my lunch and a note folded in half. The notes were usually pink and consisted of a heart or a smiley face drawn at the top. I loved them.

The paper lands on my shoulder, halfway unfolded. I push down an end of the paper with my chin and stare at the sheet, squinting, trying to read it, trying to suppress the jumble of emotions—joy, fear, excitement—the pain amplifying it all. But I can't make anything out in the darkness. The reporters used to ask me what I remembered, and I never used to say my mother. Ever since she died, she's been slowly disappearing from my memory. Like forgotten treasures stored in the attic, I owned my memories of her but didn't use them. She sent me a note and I never knew.

Suddenly I can see her, standing with my father on our porch watching the diggers at the well. Her head on his shoulder, his dirt-covered arms around her waist. She sits on my bed, listening to the
clank
of shovels. She walks out in the middle of the night, when the generator is blaring and floodlights blinding and she puts her hand on the controls of the drill and everyone stops while she walks to the hole and gets on her knees and wishes me good night. My mother packs my lunch for me, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and writes a note and lowers it into the well. Did she really add a note, or is that just here, in the source, in this nightmare? Why give it to me if I can't read it? Why torture me so?

I begin to cry, which is a mistake. My body heaves and scrapes and the pain makes me cry out louder.

Then, suddenly, there's a bright light. I blink, blinded for a moment, and stare up the hole. Usually I could see the sky above the well, a bright blue, but now the sun's actually hitting my face, which I don't remember ever happening. Some part of me knows that it must be noon. I look down, tilting my head to the left, pressing as hard as I can against the rock. I squint uncomfortably at the paper. There's enough light now to read the words. It's her handwriting, it's really hers.

Mia,

I know you can't read this, but it makes me feel better writing, so I'm going to do it anyway. It's been over twenty-four hours now and I'm losing my mind with you down there. I'm lying in your bed right now, writing this. How silly is that? I want you to know that your daddy has been out there trying to get you the whole time. He hasn't slept. He hasn't eaten. He's too worried about his baby Mia. Just like me. I wish I was down there instead of you. I wish it were me. And I hope that you see this letter, even if you can't read it, and know that I wrote it, know that your mommy is thinking of you. See those stains? Those are tears—Mommy's crying, but that's okay. These are magic tears that will help you come home. They will help you forever. Come home, Mia. We're waiting.

Love, Mom

My heaves subside but the tears keep coming, pouring down my cheeks. It's uncontrollable, the pain of missing her sears my face, my stomach, my chest. Not even when she died and I watched her casket lower into the ground did I feel like this.

But something pierces my grief. As a four-year-old kid, I wouldn't have been able to read the words. This note was for her, then. But it's also for me, now. The source didn't just send me here for fun, and the one thing out of place in my memory of the well is the note.
Mom, I read the letter. I read it anyway.
The sun's path continues on its arc overhead and the darkness returns to the hole, but I'm not scared anymore.
Magic tears,
she said. I close my eyes and feel my eyelashes stick together. I let my tongue taste the cold air, then run it across my lips, drinking in the salt from my tears, the pain of my body and of her death.

This is the source. More than water. Something entirely my own.

I blink and am back in the eye of the cyclone. My arms and legs are free. There's no sound, as if I'm in a vacuum. Beneath me is a thin layer of water, and below that, maybe stone—it feels like stone. It's hard to tell through the dark water. I'm out of the well, but still inside the source. The cyclone spins around me, a shimmering blue cylinder shifting back and forth like a charmed snake. It is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and the mist instantly revives me and melts away the pain of the well.

I breathe in the air and feel a tingling, like an electric current. My mother wrote me a note thirteen years ago and brought me back. She gave me life. Far above me the eye of the cyclone is as blue as a clear day, the same thing I remember in the well, the first thing I remember at all. I don't know if I would have been stuck in the well if I hadn't read that note, if that was some kind of test, or if tasting those tears somehow counted as “drinking” the source. But a part of me knows that just as I'm now in the source, the source is now in me.