Virginia Kantra - Forgotten Sea

A tiny victory. She would make the most of it.

She approached the bunk. Even spel bound and unconscious, Justin looked messy and attractive and vibrantly, painful y alive. She knelt beside his bed like a girl at prayer, hands in front, resting on the rough wool of his blanket.

Awareness traced down her spine like a bead of perspiration. She looked over her shoulder. Simon stood in the center of the room, his eyes gleaming silver in the mage fire.

“Do you mind?” she asked pointedly.

His jaw set. “Not at al,” he said politely and turned his back.

Taking a deep breath, she leaned over Justin’s pil ow and pressed her lips to his. Her hands fumbled in her skirt.

Her heart drummed wildly in her chest, in her ears. She held the kiss as long as she dared, wil ing her breath into him.

Her right hand slid from her pocket and thrust under his mattress. He never moved.

She sighed. “Al right. I’m ready.”

She pushed to her feet. Simon was waiting. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she walked past him, leaving her smal defiance behind.

Along with Justin’s dive knife, a lump under his mattress.

H e wa s s h a k en. C h a n g e d. S h e h a d c h a n g e d him. Lara’s kiss— soft lips, warm breath, her life, her strength, in him —had ripped through him with the force of a tornado, churning him to the depths. He floundered in a sea of memory and desire, at the mercy of his dreams, a plaything of the waves, a prisoner of his own mind.

He wanted.

He needed.

His world was ended, everything lost, drowned, submerged beneath the waves. He had to find.

“Find what?” A man’s voice, deep and penetrating, dragged him back to his body, to his splitting head and the flat, hard cot. “What are you looking for?”

He disliked the voice instinctively. An impression surfaced, too fleeting to be cal ed a memory, of a large hard man wearing black and a sneer. No name.

“Who are you?” the voice asked.

The question pried at his brain like an oyster knife, slipping through his weakened defenses, threatening to rip him open, to plunder the soft gray flesh inside. Pain speared his head. His throat burned. He recoiled in self-defense, retreating deeper, down, down, through levels of pain.

But the voice pursued him. “Where are you from?”

The sea.

Al his memories began with the sea, warm and sunlit, gray and storm cast, the clear cold salt dark.

A sense of loss swept over him, leaving him parched and alone with his pain. Too much pain. He couldn’t find his way through it, he could not think, he could not remember .

Why couldn’t he remember?

God, he was thirsty.

“Would you like some water?” A woman.

For a moment his heart leaped, buoyed by her memory.

Her arm around his shoulders. Her breath, mingling with his. Her mouth, warm, moist, sweet.

But she wasn’t the one. He knew it before she touched him, before he surfaced to see the dark, worried face bending over him. She smel ed wrong, like rubbing alcohol instead of like dawn, fresh and ful of possibilities.

“I’ll be back, ” she had promised.

But she did not come again.

“Where. ” he croaked.

Is she?

“Ssh. Drink this.” A straw poked his lips.

He closed his mouth grateful y on the plastic, holding the water careful y in his mouth before letting it trickle down to soothe his throat. Only as the flat taste lingered on his tongue did he realize it was drugged.

Time stretched, passed, hours — days? — measured by F o r g o t t e n s e a 69

the rasp of his breathing and the sound of footsteps and the coming and going of the silver light.

And the questions, always the questions, pursuing him into the dark.

“Who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“Where do you come from?”

He closed his mind, closed his mouth stubbornly on the answers, but in the dark between times, visions leaked and flooded his brain. A tumbled shore of sand and shale.

Green hil s cradling the water like a cup. A broken castle on the cliffs, its ancient towers glazed with light.

Danger.

His heart hammered. His head pounded with impending doom. The wave was coming. He had to save them. He had to save.

“Who?”

A man with eyes like rain, a girl with hair like straw, a dog.

.

Their images spun away, snatched by the rising and fal ing sea. He couldn’t save them. He could no longer save himself. His strength was gone, everything was gone, smashed, drowned, vanished beneath the waves.

He did not answer.

“Of course he doesn’t answer. I’d be surprised if he can even hear you.”

That voice. He recognized that voice. Fucking Axton.

His lips drew back in a snarl, but he did not speak. Didn’t open his eyes. Let them think he was asleep or drugged or dead.

“It’s his shields.”

“It’s the drugs.”

“—danger with concussion,” the woman was saying.

The doctor, he remembered. Marian? Miriam.

“Appropriate dosage for a human.”

“Wel, he’s not human, is he?” snapped the first speaker.

He was listening now, but the words had no more meaning than the tol ing of a buoy.

Not human .

Not human ?

“Tel me something I don’t know.”

“Wel,” the doctor said slowly, “his toes are webbed.”

For an instant, he couldn’t breathe. Something flashed in his brain, stronger than recognition, more elusive than memory.

And then the footsteps faded. The light behind his closed lids ebbed away.

He lay with the sound of the sea’s long retreat echoing in his head, his thoughts raucous and meaningless as the cries of seabirds over something that has died.

He wasn’t dead yet.

But he might as wel be. He felt like a diver plunged unexpectedly into the water, unable to distinguish up from down, past from present, dreams from reality.

He needed answers. Help. A weapon. They’d taken his knife.

Something hard — a loose slat, a broken coil — poked his shoulder blades.

If they were going to lock him up, he thought with a sudden flash of clarity, they might at least have provided a comfortable mattress.

The lump at his back gave him a focus. He could fashion a tool from wood or wire. A shank. It took several tries, but eventual y he managed to rol onto his side. Panting, F o r g o t t e n s e a 7 1

he jammed his hand between the frame and the mattress and touched.

Not a slat. A knife. His knife, shaped to his palm.

Lara. He felt her presence as keenly as the blade. Her touch, lingering on the handle. Her energy, vibrating through his fingertips. Her breath, in him. He saw her, her eyes large and gray beneath dark winged brows.

He clung to her image like hope, like the spar, fighting to keep his head above water. He had his weapon. Now al he needed was answers.

And a way out.

The whispers of her disgrace were up before she was.

Lara heard the stutter of conversation when she entered the vaulted dining hal the next morning, a sudden drop in noise level fol owed by a rustle like wind through corn. She stood with her breakfast tray at the end of the serving line while the younger students craned to get a look at her and the other proctors careful y avoided her eyes.

Her stomach sank.

The teachers took the first two meals of the day in the faculty dining room, leaving the proctors to monitor the students. A few proctors patrol ed the tables or ate with favorites from their floors, but most grabbed this chance to sit together. Lara carried her tray to join them at the round tables at the end of the hal. One or two people col ected their trays and left without a word.