Chapter 532 | Wake the Water

Chapter 532: 532 | Wake the Water

The air around her went hot enough that the lobby’s plastic ficus curled a leaf. Belle took a photo of the ficus. Misato told everyone to get on the shuttle before the building caught fire, and Jordan said he’d prefer the fire because at least it wouldn’t be wet.

The shuttle ride took eleven minutes along a coast road hugging the cliffs, and by the end of it Javier had shown Blair three separate diagrams of Scenario Nineteen and Blair had corrected two of them. He didn’t argue. He fixed them in pen and thanked her, and she looked at him like nobody had ever thanked her for anything, and then she looked out the window and pretended it hadn’t happened.

The gate hung over a cove near Point Lobos, fifteen meters out from the rocks where the tide pools gave way to open water.

It floated about a meter above the surface, a vertical tear the height of a two-story house with edges glowing a sick shade of sea green. The water beneath it churned in slow circles, and a thin mist rolled off the edges and settled across the cove in a layer so low that the surf vanished into it. FGRA had strung a floating walkway from the rocks to the gate’s base, a line of rubber pontoons clamped together with steel, and a second handler waited at the far end in a yellow drysuit.

Deluca read the brief off his clipboard without looking at it. "Tier Two, aquatic-adjacent. Projected entity count sixty to seventy-five, amphibian class with some cephalopod traits. Alpha probable but unconfirmed. Clearance window matches the local tide, so you’ve got roughly ninety minutes of stable shelf once you cross."

"Eighty," Javier said.

Deluca looked up for the first time. "The tables say ninety-two."

"The tables are wrong by nine to twelve minutes for this stretch of coast. I pulled the buoy data from the last four years and adjusted for the moon phase." Javier held up his notebook like a legal document. "Eighty minutes, sir, and I’d plan for seventy-five."

Deluca studied him, then wrote something down, and I watched a government employee change his mind because an earnest idiot did homework. The graft purred against my sternum. I made a note to buy Javier something expensive when we got out.

"Recovery team responds in forty minutes if you trigger the beacon," Deluca said. "Don’t trigger it unless someone is dying. Good luck, Midnight Foxes."

"He said our name," Jordan whispered. "That’s how you know we’re doomed."

Misato ran the final check on the pontoons, one name at a time.

"Fox and Tanaka, detection."

"Here and scanning, Captain," Belle said.

"Present and ready," Hikaru said, and her voice came out low and clipped, the Ice Prince back in full service.

"Wayne, waterline control."

"Present, depressed, and legally obligated," Jordan said.

"Love, high ground and artillery."

"Ready when you are, Captain," Naomi said, and her staff flared blue-white at the tip.

"Davenport, support flank."

Blair’s jaw worked for a long second. "Support flank confirmed, and I want it noted that I hate it."

"Noted and ignored. Mendoza, mobile response."

"Ready, and I have forty-three scenarios if anyone needs one," Javier said.

"Nobody needs forty-three of anything, Mendoza. Monroe, field lead."

"Here, and still the best-looking one on this pontoon."

"That’s debatable, and you’ll run laps for it." Her lime eyes held mine. "Eight in, eight out. Move."

We crossed the walkway single file, the rubber rocking under our boots, and the mist swallowed our ankles and then our knees. The gate’s edge pulsed as we came close, and the air near it tasted like salt water left in a copper pan. Belle stepped through first. Hikaru went second, silent as a paper cut. The rest followed, and then it was Naomi and me at the edge of the tear, and she squeezed my hand once before letting go.

Transit through an aquatic gate felt like getting dunked in cold seawater that only existed in your nervous system. My lungs panicked for a heartbeat. My ears popped hard enough to make me see white, and then my boots hit wet rock and the world rebuilt itself around me in shades of green and gold.

The shelf was a slab of black basalt the size of a basketball court, rising a meter above a sea that went on forever under a sky the color of weak tea. Water lapped at the edges, slow and heavy. Kelp rose out of that water on all sides in towering stalks thick as telephone poles, their fronds spreading overhead into a broken canopy that filtered the light down in shifting gold columns. The stalks swayed without any wind I could feel. Somewhere deep in that forest, something big exhaled, and the surface of the water shivered in a ring that spread outward and slapped against the shelf.

"That’s great," Jordan said. "That’s a normal sound for the ocean to make."

"Formation," Misato said. "Now."

We moved into the grinder without anyone thinking about it, because Javier and Belle had drilled it into us twice before breakfast. Naomi climbed a spire of rock at the shelf’s center and planted herself three meters up, staff angled at the water. Jordan dropped to one knee at the leading edge and let his shadows spill out over the waterline in a black film that floated on the surface. Belle and Hikaru took the flanks, backs to the spire. Blair set up at the left support position and blue-white fire crawled over her knuckles and hissed where the spray touched it, and I felt her hate every second of standing still.

I took the center rear with my spear and Javier at my shoulder, daggers out.

Javier started a timer on his wrist. "Eighty minutes, and I’m calling every ten."

"Contact," Belle said, and her amber-brown eyes had gone hazy at the edges. "Thirty meters, dead ahead, and there’s a lot of it. I count fourteen, then twenty, and more are stacking behind them in the kelp."

"Movement matches," Hikaru said. "They’re coming up in a column, fast and shallow."

"Everyone hold," I said. "Let them come to the grinder. Naomi, wake the water."

Naomi swung her staff down in a long arc. A spiral of blue-white energy tore out of the crystal tip and slammed into the sea twenty meters out, and the water exploded upward in a column taller than the kelp. Spray rained down across the shelf. The forest went still for one breath, and then the surface boiled as every hidden thing in that kelp decided we were the most interesting meal in the ocean.

The first ones broke the waterline in a rush of grey skin and gaping mouths.

They were built like seals someone had crossbred with bullfrogs and a bad dream, slick and heavy and the size of large dogs, with webbed forelimbs ending in hooked claws and a ring of short tentacles around jaws that split all the way back to where ears should be. Their eyes were milky, and their bellies glowed a faint phosphor green. They hauled themselves onto the shelf in a wave of wet slaps, and the smell hit me a half-second later, low tide and rot and something sweet underneath.

Jordan’s shadows snapped shut across the waterline and pinned the front six flat against the rock.

"Burn them, Davenport," I said.

"Finally," she snarled.