Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

There was a hiss, and I was worried the ocean had finally won its long war against the Maraschino, but it was the sound of pressurized air inflating the life raft instead.

“I’ll get you into it up here, and then I’ll get it over the edge, and then we’ll get away,” Asher explained, as if saying the words would make doing it easier.

The raft inflated quickly, and Asher hoisted it over the side. It took him longer to get me into it—I tried to help, honestly, but I hurt so badly, all I could do was curl up into a ball while he hefted me up and rolled me in. I landed inside it and it bottomed out, meant to support people in water, not above it, and I worried we’d catch on some puncturing piece of metal that the more solid lifeboat had scratched off the hull on its way down.

I was trying to arch my back enough to prevent this, and Asher was outside, hauling us down to the waterline, when our progress was interrupted by the sound of a wet thump and a voice that couldn’t be denied.

“Monster of men, I command you to answer me!”

The dragging sensation outside stopped.

“Monster of men!”

“I have a name,” Asher told someone.

“Get down here! Now!”

Even I felt the urge to answer her—and I knew who we were speaking to. I lifted my head weakly out of the raft. Claire was there, beached on the diminishing remnants of the Maraschino ’s hull like a Renaissance painting come to life. She was as long as a twelve-person dinner table, most of her tail, and looked nothing like the frail elderly woman Hal had loved. Her hair was the color of kelp, from dark brown to translucent yellow, and her tail was covered in variegated scales, ending in an extravagant fin—but the top part of her was human-ish. Her fingers ended in talon-like claws, all the better to spear fish with I assumed, and something about the color and shape of her skin made me feel it would be rubbery to touch.

“Make this work,” she said, her monstrous voice an imperious command. She had far too many teeth.

Asher took in whatever she’d shared with him—I couldn’t see what it was. “This ship is already lost.”

“It’s not for this ship. It’s for that one,” she explained, and then her voice changed again in pitch, becoming one of command. “Make it work. Now.”

“Stop that,” Asher said, kneeling down. “I’ll do it if you can fix her.”

I saw Claire’s head wave back and forth. “I can’t. It’s not just your child living inside her now.”

Asher stopped whatever he was doing. I saw his shoulders go still. “Heal her,” he begged.

“Would that it were that easy,” she said snappishly. Then perhaps remembering her years as a human, “It is beyond me. I’m sorry.”

I concentrated on pulling myself up so I could see what Asher was working on. Claire had brought him something that looked like putty that I recognized. The packages of C-4 we’d left downstairs, the ones that Hal had stopped from exploding. Claire must have swum below to retrieve them, presumably in through the gaping hole that the ones that had exploded had left.

I hadn’t known that Asher had had a demolitions expert inside him, but I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“I have no idea how you’re going to light all this,” Asher said as he worked.

“I overturned lifeboats until one of them gave a flare gun to me.”

Asher paused at this, possibly, like me, imagining those lifeboats carrying people she spilled into the water, then shook his head and kept working.

“Emily?” I asked quietly, knowing she would hear.

“She’s none of your business now,” Claire said. Her dark eyes were sad, looking at me. “She’s safe,” she amended, more kindly.

Asher continued to work as the sound of the water came closer. “You only brought me five minutes of fuse. Once you light this—” he warned her.

“I’m built to swim,” she cut in.

“And you know where to use it?”

She laughed bitterly, an awful sound. “Hal was a torpedoman.”

Asher nodded and gave his finished work to Claire. She took it in one taloned hand and held it to her breast like a child as she used her free arm and tail to propel herself back into the sea. I let myself relax back into the raft as Asher appeared overhead.

“Ready?”

“Yeah.” I had my two fists punching in over my stomach, unsuccessfully trying to keep it from knots. Another wave hit, hurt so bad I could puke, and then left me. I could see the fear on Asher’s face looking down. Claire had told us both the truth. They were worms. I was going to die.

The pill I’d palmed had already melted in my pocket.

“Where’s she going?” I whispered when I could. Anything to stop him from looking down at me like that.

“I think we’ll see.”

He disappeared again, and I felt us sliding until we hit the water with a slap. Then the edge buckled as Asher jumped in beside me ungracefully, letting cold water in.

It wasn’t until I could feel us rocking in the waves like we were in a cradle that I realized we’d escaped the Maraschino at last.

The Maraschino died as it had lived, slowly and stately. It sank beneath the waves as though it were merely going on another trip, only this time to the bottom of the sea. There was no sucking woosh or danger of us being pulled in after it. Burbles of air escaped, like an ancient volcano burped below, and then it was gone, along with everyone else who hadn’t survived, all their deaths red on the hands of a madman.

In between waves of cramps, my curiosity outweighed my pain. I used my elbows to prop my head up on the raft’s edge so I could look around outside its canopy. The surrounding waters were full of random debris, clothing, pieces of furniture, and madly swimming worms. Now free of their human hosts they twisted around one another, copulating in the growing dawn, releasing streamers of luminescent eggs into the ocean like scattered stars. Those were what I’d seen frothing in the sink, and out of the weird woman’s mouth. Worm eggs.

Like what was growing inside me. I sank back into the raft bleakly.

It wasn’t any warmer here than it had been on the Maraschino . Jorge, Marius, and Rory had gotten into a lifeboat, but this was only an inflated half-a-foot of air and rubber between us and the sea, and a canvas canopy to protect us from the sun. We didn’t even have a paddle. Asher leaned over me and out the raft’s door, swirling his hand.

“Edie, look,” he said, and I leaned up again to see.

We were pointed at the rescue ship that I felt sure Claire was swimming toward.

I didn’t know what we were waiting for—all the explosions I’d ever seen in my life had been televised. But Asher’s hand kept us steady, and I was warm where he lay beside me and his skin touched mine.

We were too far away to hear it, but we saw it, half a second before we were sprayed with salt mist.

The bow of Nathaniel’s ship hopped up as though it had hit a speed bump beneath the waves. I got the feeling that keeping the explosion underwater made it worse—there was nowhere for all that energy to go but up. It shuddered, and where it had jumped, it broke in two.

“She keel-whipped it,” Asher said to himself, sounding like he approved. Maybe Asher had touched a torpedoman in his former life.

“Whoa,” I said, trying to bite off the end of the word so it didn’t roll into a groan.

The explosion Claire had caused created a chain reaction of combustibles within the ship. Sailors and soldiers flowed overboard like mythical lemmings, jumping into the water to escape the flames. I wondered how many more deaths would feed the Leviathan today because of her.