Triton (17 page)

A chill fluttered up Sky’s spine, and she fought back a shiver. “Whatever it is, it’s intelligent,” she said. “
Really
intelligent.”

“What’s our location?” said Naomi.

“What’s our speed and heading?”

“Limping along at eighteen knots due west. That’s as fast as she’ll go.”

Using a ruler and a protractor, Sky sketched a line from their last known location up and to the right at a 74.2 degree angle, east by north—their former heading. The line missed Bermuda by twenty miles.

“Cruising speed of twenty-two point six knots,” she murmured, “for twenty-seven hours . . .” She entered the numbers in Naomi’s phone, and—with a feeling of satisfaction—sketched a dark X on the chart, no man’s land in the middle of the Atlantic.

The island.

Their new heading branched west at eighteen knots . . . She calculated their current position. “You know, we’re only a few hundred miles from Bermuda. If we change course, we could get there by morning.”

“Our calculations are way too rough,” said Naomi. “It’d be like finding a needle in a haystack. Let’s stick with the mainland; even if we’re off by thirty degrees, we’ll at least hit the continent.”

Sky did a final calculation. “In exactly two days, we’ll arrive in South Carolina.”

Jake stepped onto the bridge and leaned over Naomi’s shoulder. “How’s she doing?”

“Holding steady at eighteen knots. We’re not tracking straight, though. I keep having to correct starboard to maintain our west heading.”

“Thrusters are probably out of alignment,” he said. “Just keep your eye on that compass; keep north on our right and we’ll be fine.” He turned to Sky. “How’s my navigator?”

“I calculated our position. Am I done yet?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You have someplace else to be?”

“Cedar and I kind of have a project.”

“Yeah. Fine. Go.”

On her way out, Sky saw the two of them exchange a smirk and an eye roll. She hardly noticed, though, given the sudden, nervous throbs of her sternum.

Cedar.

She had told him about her stepdad. Now was the moment of truth; now she would see how he reacted, what it did or didn’t mean to him . . . if, like everyone else, he would now treat her like some essential part of her was missing.

Please don’t, Cedar
.

With the binoculars
, Jake scanned the area Naomi had indicated, but he didn’t see anything. Just empty ocean stretching to the horizon. “What did it look like?” he said.

“Just a flash,” said Naomi.

“You sure?”

“About the flash, yes. Whether it’s anything, I don’t know.”

“Something metal?”

“Yeah. The sun glinting off metal.”

“Or glinting off a wave.”

“Maybe a wave,” she said. “But the sun’s in front of us. I saw it off starboard.”

Jake swung the binoculars farther to the right and peered directly off the starboard side of the ship, where a column of water vapor jutted out of the sea . . . the only cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky.

Where the meteor had landed.

It had hardly moved since they left the island, which meant it was farther away than they initially thought. He imagined the superheated asteroid sitting at the bottom of the ocean. The rock had to be huge; judging from the size of that plume, it was vaporizing half the ocean.

“See anything?” she said.

“You think it was a boat?”

“I don’t know what it was.”

Jake licked his lips and lowered the binoculars. “It was probably just the sun reflecting off a wave.”

“Maybe,” she said.

He nodded to himself, satisfied. No need to waste hours chasing a phantom flash, it was just the sun reflecting off a wave—

Then he saw the flash.

Right at the edge of the horizon. The glare lingered for a second, then faded, like a metal surface slowly angling away from them. No wave did that.

Jake whipped the binoculars back to his face, but he’d already lost it. He scanned the distant wave crests, squeezed the binoculars to his eyes.

Then he spotted the anomaly.

Among a cluster of whitecaps, the edge of a glinting, dish-shaped object surfaced out of a trough before drowning again in the waves.

“Turn the ship,” he said. “There’s something in the water over there.”

Cedar watched her
storm through the medical facility like a tornado, raiding cabinets, emptying drawers, and seizing random supplies—which she slammed on a lab table: a glass beaker, a bottle of nutrient agar, three petri dishes, and culture swabs.

The swabs—long Q-tip like things—spilled out of their bag and littered the floor.

“I hope those weren’t sterile swabs,” said Cedar.

“It doesn’t matter.” Sky dragged them into a handful and slapping them back on the table.

He raised an eyebrow. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“We did this lab two weeks ago in my summer biology class.”

Though thoroughly entertained, Cedar doubted this experiment would amount to much. As he watched her, his mind raced with what she’d told him earlier. About her stepdad.

For some reason, it made him think of Brynn; this girl represented every evil thing he feared for his own sister. He didn’t know how to take it, or what, exactly, it made her into—if anything. He didn’t know what it meant.

Just proof, maybe.

Proof that everyone had a heap of dog shit piled into their lives that they had to dig themselves out of. She was no different.

Just then Cedar felt the deck sway gently underfoot, and he had to shift to maintain his balance. The
Cypress
was turning . . .

“Fill this with water,” Sky said, tossing him the beaker, which he fumbled with for a second before it smashed on the floor.

“Um—”

“There’s another one in the cabinet,” she said, unscrewing the jar of nutrient agar.

“Distilled water or from the tap?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Unconvinced, he retrieved a jug of distilled water anyway and filled the beaker halfway. Sky sloppily measured in a scoop of nutrient agar and set the beaker on a hot plate.

“Should I be wearing gloves?” he said, eyeing his dirty hands; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed them.

“Probably,” she said.

Cedar slipped on the latex gloves, donned a lab coat, goggles, and a face mask for good measure, and sidled up next to her. “Doctor Vilkinson,” he said in a gruff Russian accent, “you have made sexy potion, yes? It vill make penis firm?”

She giggled and pushed him away.

He kept at it. “Very firm, yes?”

She rolled her eyes and did her own impression, smirking. “You vill be able to pleasure many sheeps and livestock, yes.”

Cedar grinned and tugged off the mask and goggles. “Touché. What’s next?”

On the hot plate, the broth-like soup started to boil, the agar now dissolved—
bacteria food
. Sky swirled the beaker a few times and took it off the heat. Using a rag to hold the hot beaker, she carefully poised the pour spout over the first petri dish. Intrigued, Cedar leaned in close, casting her into shadow.

“Don’t crowd me,” she said, flashing him a glare. He backed off, and she swept her hair over her shoulder and refocused.

Eyebrows knotted with concentration, Sky painstakingly tipped the fluid into each of the three petri dishes. Cedar gazed mesmerized at her face, her doll-like lips, slightly pursed—and only realized after she’d finished that she had somehow managed to spill most of it.

“There,” she said, proudly admiring the three half-filled petri dishes floating in a pool of bubbling nutrient juice.

Poor girl. With her supermodel looks, no one had ever had the heart to tell her how much she sucked at this lab.

She swept her hair back, blasting Cedar with the dreamy scent of her shampoo, and caught him staring at her. She raised an eyebrow.

He raised one right back.

Once the liquid in the petri dishes cooled to a gelatinous pudding, Sky tore open the package of swabs with her teeth—though it was already opened on the other end—and handed three to Cedar.

He eyed the long Q-tips and then her injured leg. “So . . . you want
me
to do it?”

“Squeamish?” she said, her golden-green eyes full of daring. She propped her foot on a chair so her thigh was horizontal, and the scab gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

“Squeamish, my ass,” he said, stooping over her leg. “I pulled the glass out, remember?”

“Yeah. You did.”

He held the first swab like a pencil and poised it over the wound, steadying himself with a hand on her knee and the base of his palm on her upper thigh—doing his best to ignore the up-close heat of her bare skin, smooth and perfect under his fingertips . . . the slender shape of her long legs . . . the ensuing head rush.

“You know we’re going to get some nasty bugs from this, right?” he said. “All kinds of germs, viruses, molds . . .”

“That’s your theory,” she said.

He went on. “. . . fungi, dust mites, Ebola, flesh eating bacteria and all that—”

“Okay, my skin’s not
that
dirty.”

“Just saying . . . we might want to grow this culture in a quarantine.” The comment earned him a shove in the face.

Cedar rubbed the swab around her cut and dipped into it, making sure not to press hard on the skin in case he reopened the scab.

Once satisfied he had thoroughly infected the swab, he painted the utensil across the agar jelly in the first dish.

Then he knelt and swabbed the underside of her thigh—struggling not to peer up her cutoff shorts—and rubbed the second petri dish.

They left the third dish clean as a control. Sky let down her leg and straightened up right in front of him. “You should be a doctor,” she said.

“Lifeguard training. Now what?”

“Now we wait, let the cultures incubate for a couple days.”

“See what grows?”

“See if anything grows.”

He didn’t answer. They just stood there, closer than they normally would have, neither budging. Now that their project was done, he felt a pang of disappointment—he no longer had an excuse to hang out with her alone.

Sky didn’t flinch away from his stare the way most people did; she dished it right back, defiance burning in her eyes. Caught in her stare, Cedar felt heat flash across his skin.

This girl
 . . .

“It would be so screwed up if we kissed right now,” she said, her eyes flicking to his lips.

“I agree,” he said.

Taking that as all the permission she needed, Sky unhurriedly gathered the lapels of his lab coat in her fists, pulled him forward—and kissed him.

With tongue.

She lingered on his lower lip, sucked on it, the inside of her mouth caressing his skin like a whisper and setting fire to the sensitive-as-hell tissue at the same time. Too early, she pulled away and proudly admired her handiwork—kind of like how she admired the finished lab experiment.

“Nuh-uh.” He shook his head and tapped his lips again. “Now one for saving your life out on the balcony.”

“That was your fault,” she said, but she kissed him again, anyway. “That’s for not killing anybody.”

Her comment lingered in the air like a taunt, and coming from her, it stung. “Come on,” he said stiffly, breaking away from her and depositing the petri dishes in an incubator at the back of the lab. “Let’s get out of this creepy lab.”

Sky stood next
to Cedar on the elevator in wounded silence wondering what she’d done wrong . . . why she
always
did something wrong. The kiss had been perfect. Until she ruined it like she ruined everything.

That’s for not killing anybody
.

She had meant the comment as a joke. Because he hadn’t let Jake plummet to his death the night before. Instead, she’d hurt him.

At the thought, guilt welled up in her like acid. What would she have felt like if someone reminded her of all she had tried to forget? If someone had forced her to remember
him
—her stepdad—and all those terrifying years of numbness from what he’d done to her? How would
she
have reacted?

“Who told you?” Cedar snapped, startling her out of her thoughts. “Was it Brynn? Naomi?”

“I don’t care what you did,” she said. “That’s not who you are.”

“Whatever. Just . . . just let me be alone for a minute.” He jabbed the floor buttons, stopping the elevator at deck ten—a level they hadn’t been on yet.

With a lump in her throat, Sky watched the doors slide back and Cedar walk into the deserted lobby—and she immediately knew something was wrong.

An odor wafted into the elevator. Her nose wrinkled out of reflex—the stench of melted plastic, burnt rubber. Her skin prickled.

Halfway out, Cedar froze. His muscles flexed under his T-shirt.

“Uh-oh,” he muttered.

“What is it?”

“That.” He stepped out of the way and pointed at the lobby floor, giving her a clear view of the source of the smell. The sight jolted her body.

All across the floor, with mechanical precision, thick black marks had been burned into the fibers of the carpet, as if branded with an iron. The marks formed symbols, letters, words . . . but in no language she had ever seen.

One glimpse sent prickles all the way down her spine.

נפילים להיזהר

“We haven’t been on this level,” said Cedar. “Not since the vanishing. Someone must have done this before it happened. As a prank.”

“It smells fresh,” she said.

“It’s a synthetic fiber. Burning it releases chemicals.”

She stared at the singe marks. “That language. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“It’s not a language,” he said, cutting her off before she could voice her fears. “It’s just a prank. They did this before—”

Their radios crackled, making them both jump. “Cedar and Sky,” came Jake’s hissing voice over the speakers, “Get down to the submarine launch bay. Now. We’ve just fished something out of the water. You’re going to want to see this.”

On the floor
of the submarine bay, the cone-shaped metal capsule stood just under three feet. Had the pointed end not been sharply dented in, it would have stood four. Seawater still trickled out from under bent side panels, inside which Cedar glimpsed a muddy sludge of bashed in electronic circuits. But it was the symbols on the side that drew his gaze.