The Secret Sea Page 8

  They could also kill him.

  * * *

  As the train rushed under Manhattan, Zak closed his eyes and tried to conjure Tommy’s voice, his presence. It was strange—he had no true memory of his twin, yet he felt as though he could imagine Tommy’s presence with ease. It was like leaning on your arm until it went numb … and then feeling it slowly come back to life. Tommy was pins and needles throughout his whole being, awakening him from a clotted numbness he hadn’t even discerned, because it had gone on so long that it had become normal.

  But now … now he could feel again.

  He and Tommy were like the old twin towers that had once stood at the end of this subway line—so alike on the outside, different on the inside. One with a bad heart, the other with kidneys that wouldn’t work. One had died and one had lived, and maybe that was the way it was supposed to be. But maybe—just maybe—there was a way to fix that.

  At the Spring Street stop—two away from the World Trade Center—a cop got on their car. Zak had scarcely registered her presence, when Khalid hauled him to his feet and pulled him off the subway just as the doors closed. Moira barely made it out with them.

  “What the hell?” she demanded, rubbing her shoulder where the door had clipped her.

  “Five-oh,” Khalid said, as if that explained everything.

  “Police?” Zak asked. He tried to follow along, but they were closer to the World Trade Center now, and his ears were beginning to buzz. Just a bit. Just enough to be distracting. He thought he could hear the scream of a gull, but it might have been the subway train pulling out of the station.

  “Look,” Khalid said, hustling them toward the exit stairs, “you think it’s a coincidence the cops showed up here?”

  “They randomly check subways—” Moira began.

  “Random, my butt,” Khalid interrupted as the three of them went up the stairs. Any static in Zak’s ears vanished. “Look, Zak sleepwalked to Ground Zero before, right?”

  Moira groaned, getting it. “His parents called the cops when we left the hospital, and they’re going to be waiting for us.”

  “Right. And they’re probably staking out the subways nearby.”

  To Zak, it all sounded remarkably paranoid and, at the same time, highly logical. “So what do we do, then?”

  Khalid shrugged. “Go home and play video games?”

  Zak ignored his buddy’s attempt at humor. He could think only of Tommy’s anguished voice, crying out for help. What if his brother was being tortured somehow? Who knew what happened to people after they died? Maybe Tommy was in torment—had been in torment for years—and only Zak could save him.

  “We’ll walk down to the World Trade Center,” Zak said. This part of the city was unfamiliar to them all, but getting to the Freedom Tower wouldn’t be difficult. It was the tallest building in the city—in the country—and its trapezoidal angles dominated the skyline. They couldn’t miss it. “We’ll stick to the smaller streets, avoid any cops we see.”

  “What do we do when we get there?” Moira asked.

  It was a good question. Zak pretended to think about it, calling out in his thoughts for Tommy.

  There was no answer.

  “We’ll think of something,” he said with a confidence he did not feel. And they turned to the tower and began walking.

  * * *

  “There’s a lot of cops here,” Moira said nervously.

  “There’s always a lot of cops here,” Khalid shot back.

  They were on Fulton Street, near the Freedom Tower. Sure enough, the place was crawling with cops. Zak had last been here a few nights before, when he’d awoken from his sleepwalking adventure. He strained to hear the gull, the lap of waves. Something tickled at him, but it could have been the evening breeze coming down Fulton.

  His parents were definitely onto him. Khalid was right—there was always a big police presence in this part of town—but there was a flavor in the air, something almost physical. A wariness. An awareness.

  The cops were waiting for something.

  For him.

  “I think—” he started to say, and then the street vanished, the tower vanished. He was on the ship again. This time he forced himself not to panic, not to gape like an idiot. Instead, he stayed as calm as he could, quelling the lurching spasms of his heart.

  But wait—his heart wasn’t lurching. At all. It felt perfectly fine. Reliable. Not like his heart.

  Shouts and screams all around him. Orders barked. He looked up. Rain spattered and spit. He looked around. The squeak of pulleys and the creak of wood. He ignored it all and—for the first time in a vision—looked down.

  At his hands.

  They were pale. And definitely white.

  I’m not me in the vision! I’m someone else!

  With that realization, things changed—he felt as though something slender and scalding hot had slipped into his gut and then split in two, moving up and down at the same time, cutting him in half. He gritted his teeth against the pain, and then the pain was gone and he could perceive both the rocking, storm-tossed deck of the sailing vessel and the crowded, humid sidewalk along Fulton Street. Moira and Khalid stared at him.

  “He’s zoning out again,” Khalid said, worried, as if Zak weren’t there at all.

  “I’m okay,” Zak said. His voice echoed weirdly in one ear but not in the other, as though he’d plugged one with cotton. He felt the rope from the ship slip through his hands, as it had once before. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Moira leaned in. “You look pale. You’re sweating again.”

  Khalid came closer, too, and started talking. Zak wished they would both shut up—it wasn’t easy, maintaining this connection. On what he thought of as the “ship side,” a burly man, naked to the waist and bleeding from a gash along his shoulder, grabbed Zak by the elbow and shouted horrible curses at him, ending with “… and get yer keister up there now, God blast ye!”

  Zak felt that half of himself stumbling along, then climbing a rope ladder. He went dizzy as that half looked up—the rope ladder swayed sickeningly, occasionally slapping against a mast that rose to scrape the bottoms of the thick gray clouds overhead. As Zak climbed higher on the ship side, he found it more and more difficult to maintain a connection, especially with Khalid’s and Moira’s chatter on the street side. He broke the coupling, staggering on the street side for a moment as if physically shoved.

  Khalid and Moira caught him before he could stumble off the curb and into traffic.

  Zak, Tommy said, his voice clear. This is it. You won’t get another chance.

  Too many police, he told Tommy, eying the entrance to the subway. There were four cops loitering by the entrance and who knew how many more inside?

  It’s now or never. I need you, Zak. I can’t come to you—you have to come to me.

  “We have to go into the subway,” Zak said.

  Khalid and Moira glanced nervously at the entrance. They could see what he saw, obviously.

  “Right…,” Khalid said with a smidgen of doubt in his voice. “And this is a good idea because…?”

  “I have to do it,” Zak said. “You don’t have to come with me.”

  Moira cleared her throat. “And that’s exactly why we will.”

  Zak’s own throat needed some clearing. He clenched his jaw, willing the tears clustering at the corners of his eyes to go away, and succeeded for the most part. “Thanks,” he whispered.

  “Let’s go,” said Khalid.

  They sauntered to the subway entrance as casually as they could, hoping that they were wrong, that these cops were there just because it was part of a normal patrol, not because they were on the lookout for three kids on the run. And they closed in quite a ways before one of the cops tilted his head and nudged his partner, the two of them scrutinizing the trio as they got even closer.

  You can do this, Tommy said, and his encouragement actually emboldened Zak and made him wish he could share it with Moira and Khalid.

/>   A moment later, he realized he could—he took their hands in his own and squeezed reassuringly. His heart skipped a beat, then another, then settled back into a normal rhythm. For now.

  The first cop nodded curtly and opened his mouth.

  The ship side returned then, suddenly, wind howling and rain blowing.

  “Run,” Zak said, and released his friends’ hands and charged straight ahead as fast as he could.

  FIFTEEN

  It was like running through a museum with only two paintings, copies of which were hung next to each other in an endless gallery of repetition. With each step, Zak moved from street side to ship side and then back again. Hot August night and concrete underfoot became chilly, storm-ravaged afternoon with rickety boards beneath. And over and over again.

  He pressed through it, ignored it, focused on charging straight ahead, darting between the cops before they could react. Moira and Khalid were right with him, but he didn’t let himself think of them. He could only think of straight ahead, of the subway.

  You’re doing it! Tommy yelled. Keep going!

  Zak needed no encouragement—the shouts of the cops behind him were enough to propel him forward at top speed. His heart thrummed in his ears, and he tried not to think of what was happening in his chest as he raced ahead. He scrambled down the stairs, leaping from the third-to-last step to the floor below. Clusters of annoyed commuters shouted in aggravation; Zak flailed wildly, knocking people away, shoving aside the ones who didn’t recoil from his pinwheeling arms. Grumbles about “crazy kids” and barks of recrimination filled the air, but he didn’t care.

  The station was crowded, but Zak was small and wiry and able to slip between people. As he gained the turnstile, he spared an instant to check over his shoulder—the cops were far behind him, larger and having trouble getting through the crowd.

  He ducked under the turnstile and felt a trill of exhilaration and guilt at the same time. Jumping the turnstile was wrong. But fun. Oh, man, Dad’s gonna kick my butt for this.

  Ha! He had bigger problems. No time for that. They could fine him later, ground him for eternity. If he survived. He scooted along and emerged on the other side of the gate.

  The platform! Tommy urged. Hurry! The police are getting closer!

  He checked in both directions, saw the sign for the platform, the uptown E train. He charged in that direction, once again scattering passengers in his wake.

  He caught a flicker from the ship side; there, he’d swung down from the rope ladder as the ship listed dangerously to port. (He didn’t know how he knew port was the left side of the ship, but somehow he did.) On the street side, he stumbled to his left with the sway of the ship, then caught his balance and blasted down a flight of stairs two at a time. Rain started falling on the ship side; it was cold and needlelike on his skin, pelting him like tiny hailstones. He left wet footprints on the street side even though it was dry there.

  Finally he emerged on the platform. Maybe a dozen people lingered, waiting for the next E to come along. Zak leaned against a column, catching his breath, his heart dashing along like a rabbit running from a Doberman. A man in a suit lifted an eyebrow and made a point of pulling his briefcase a little closer.

  I don’t want your briefcase, you tool. Tommy! Tommy!

  Footsteps clattered behind him, and he dared a look over his shoulder, ready to take off again despite the dangerously rapid pounding in his chest. He would not let the cops catch him.

  But it was Moira and Khalid, similarly out of breath, racing toward him. They almost collided with him but stopped just in time.

  “Well?” Khalid demanded, heaving and wheezing. “Is this the place?”

  “Is it?” Moira asked, also short of breath.

  Zak didn’t know what to tell them. He didn’t want to disappoint them, but there was nothing here to indicate that he was in the right place. Whatever the right place might mean. He could still glimpse the ship side, where the pale boy whose eyes he saw through was now tugging at a hatch built into the deck of the ship. But that was all.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. And the crowd clustered along the stairs shouted in outrage.

  “Cops are coming,” Khalid said. “We gotta do something.” He looked down the length of the platform. There was another exit at that end.

  “They’ll be blocking that side,” Moira advised.

  Tommy! Tommy!

  You have the power, Zak. Not me.

  What?

  It has to be you. I’ve brought you this far. You have to come the rest of the way on your own.

  Zak pondered for a moment. He’d always been waiting, passively receiving the visions and the voice. But was it true? Could he force it to happen? Could he push forward instead of merely standing his ground?

  He imagined for a moment that he heard something else, something new—a far-off cry of anguish. No. It was a gull from ship-side, maybe. That’s all.

  I can do this. I can do it.

  The cops were almost down the stairs, shoving out of the way those people who didn’t move at their shouts. Zak grabbed Moira’s and Khalid’s hands.

  “I need you guys.” He didn’t know how he knew it or why it was true. Only that it was true.

  “We’re here,” Moira said, and squeezed his hand.

  “Hurry,” Khalid muttered, gazing back at the stairs and the cops.

  Zak didn’t know if he could hurry. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was trying to do in the first place, so he had no idea if it could be hurried. Maybe it was like baking a pie—you couldn’t just turn up the heat to make it bake faster. You’d end up with a burned shell surrounding raw fruit paste.

  But maybe … maybe it was like a fire hose, and you could open the nozzle wider and let the water fly.

  He closed his eyes and envisioned ship-side. The sky was gone now; the version of Zak on that side had gone belowdecks. A barrel screeched as it strained its moorings, then snapped loose from the wall and rolled toward him. Zak dived out of the way; the barrel smashed against a column in the middle of the compartment. Zak had trouble making out the size of the compartment because the only light came from a flickering torch—

  A torch that now dropped to the wooden floor. It rolled, guttering.

  The ship had juddered, the entire thing shaking and grinding to a sudden halt, as though it had run aground in the middle of the water.

  “Zak! They’re surrounding us!” It was Khalid, heard as though through a bad cell connection. Somewhere, ghostly fingers tightened on his own.

  The rolling torch fetched up against a pallet tied to the deck. A lick of flame lashed its length. Zak drew in a deep breath at the sudden eruption of light and heat in the enclosed space.

  Zak knew what he had to do; he had to somehow marry ship side to street side. He could see into both of them, but he could be in only one. If he could make them intersect, then maybe—just maybe—he could cross over.…

  He opened his eyes and staggered. Ahead of him was the trough beside the subway platform, along the bottom of which ran the tracks for the trains. But overlaying it was the belowdecks compartment on the ship, now ablaze with fire. Zak’s heart double-timed, or maybe it was the sensation of his own heart beating alongside the ship-side person’s.

  Down in the tunnel, the clatter and clang of a train echoed.

  “Step away from the platform!” a voice shouted. At the same time, someone yelled, “Man overboard! Man overboard!”

  Zak’s vision doubled as he stared at the overlap of the ship and the subway station. The train grew louder and louder, merging with the creak of the ship and the crackle of the flame until they became a single, pervasive chatter and rattle.

  And—

  There.

  Zak’s breath whooshed out of him, and he doubled over as though to vomit, but nothing came out. Khalid and Moira held him steady.

  The train was gone. The ship was gone.

  A massive wave of water was coming down the subway tunnel. Just like t
he one he’d seen the other day.

  Hurry! Hurry, Zak! I can’t wait much longer!

  The last time he’d seen this, Tommy had told him to run.

  Hurry!

  Zak tossed looks over both shoulders. A cop crept closer, one hand on his nightstick, the other reaching out cautiously. Khalid and Moira, within reach, shrank back toward Zak. Nowhere to go. They were caught between the cops and the edge of the platform.

  The water rushed at him, a liquid bullet throwing off wavelets, lapping at and overrunning the border of the platform.

  Zak! Now!

  Moira shrieked as a hand clamped on her. Khalid shouted.

  Zaaaaaaak!

  Zak took a deep breath and leaped into the water.

  SIXTEEN

  The water vanished. Zak’s legs pumped in empty air above the subway track.

  The train reappeared, bearing down on him.

  SEVENTEEN

  The water returned, bubbling and fizzing around him as he collided with it in midair.

  Somehow, somewhere in there, the train hurtled along the track as if nothing was wrong, its headlight wavering and glowing under the water, like an angry, fluorescing lamprey. Zak opened his mouth to scream and swallowed salt water. The train hurtled toward him.

  EIGHTEEN

  The water was gone again. Zak fell toward the tracks, praying he wouldn’t hit the electrified third rail.

  NINETEEN

  And the water came back. Zak, still choking on seawater, struggled against the flood, thrashing.

  There was fire somewhere. Somewhere above. The ship. Part of it had caught fire.

  He had to stop thinking of the ship. Of the train. He had to think between them. He had to focus.…

  TWENTY

  The world went silent. Zak hung suspended in something that was neither water nor air.

  Between. Think between the ship and the train.

  Something cracked open ahead of him, as though a hole had been torn through his line of sight. He could perceive the edges of it; they crackled and popped with strange energies.