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Screw it. Annoyed with myself and just about everyone and everything else in my life, I put every ounce of strength I had left behind my kick-off, then plunged through the opening of the cave and straight into the middle of the first room.
It wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. The last cave had been black, empty—filled with sharp rocks and barren rooms. This one was alive with color and life. Though it was dark, my natural phosphorescence partially lit up the world around me with a purple haze. Plus, there was an entire school of fish in this room, all glowing a beautiful orangey red.
Thanks to their light, I could see clusters of multicolored coral and sea anemones lining the floor, as well as gorgeous stalactites dripping down from the ceiling. They made a kind of maze for me, around long, sharp, rainbow-colored spears arranged with no rhyme or reason, that I had to navigate through and around to get to the back of this first cavity.
As I swam, the fish darted up to me. Some whirled back and forth in front of me, while others circled my arms or played peekaboo in my hair. I couldn’t help laughing, and tried to send them a sense of my amusement. If I’d had Kona’s talent, we actually would have been able to talk to each other, but since I didn’t, I settled for reaching out to pet them.
Most of the fish zipped away the second my hand came anywhere near them, but a few curious ones stuck around and let me stroke their sides or tails. They felt a little rough, scaly, but kind of silky too. I liked it.
Two huge stalactites loomed in front of me, the opening between them too narrow for me to squeeze through. I dived deep, got under them, but ended up brushing the tip of my tail against a fire coral.
Crap. It wasn’t the first time I’d been stung—while mermaid or human. But fire coral was obnoxious, its sting hurting more than a lot of the other kinds.
I swished my tail back and forth in an effort to shake off the last of the stinging cells, as Kona had taught me. The burn lessened a little, and I realized it was already healing. Huh. I’d been stung a lot in human form and it had never healed this quickly. Always nice to discover something else cool about being mermaid.
Feeling better already, I finished the obstacle course of the front room and ended up in a long, dark passageway. With the sting feeling better by the minute, I concentrated on exploring the cave, trying to figure out what it was about this place that called to me so completely. I had no sense of danger, no little niggle at the back of my neck telling me something was wrong.
In fact, I felt more right in this place than I had in a while. I certainly felt healthier and better than I had since getting attacked yesterday. It was like being here, in this cave, was feeding my energy, my power.
It sounds crazy, I know, but with every room I swam into, I seemed to get a little bit stronger.
Which was pretty much a guarantee that I wasn’t going to stop until I’d explored the whole cave—or as much as I had time for today. As I swam through a room that branched off the main passageway, I found another, narrower route. I followed the path—I couldn’t help it—and about halfway down found a hole in the floor that was barely big enough for me to swim through.
For long seconds, I contemplated it. Told myself it was a bad idea to go down there when I had no idea where it led and, unlike the rest of the cave, there seemed to be no other life forms in it.
And yet, somehow, I knew it was exactly where I was supposed to go. Sick and tired of the mysteriousness, of the unknown forces pushing at me when what I wanted most was to be normal—a normal human or a normal mermaid, at this point I didn’t care—all of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to turn around and leave. No matter how beautiful the cave was, I didn’t want to communicate with forces I didn’t understand. Any more than I wanted to be the subject of that stupid prophecy that had everyone treating me like I was different. Special.
Better to just do it, I told myself. Get down there, see what it is you’re supposed to see, and then get back to the city. Mahina was probably looking for me, and God only knew what Hailana would say about this latest disappearance of mine.
So that’s what I did. I arrowed myself straight down into the small hole in the cavern floor. My arms were out in front of me, helping me swim, and the second they came into contact with the hole, an electric current jolted through me, paralyzing me even as it knocked my teeth together in the closest thing to a seizure I had ever experienced.
I tried to pull back, but I couldn’t move. The electricity was zinging through my body, pulling me deeper and deeper into the hole without any effort on my part.
There was a whole section of my brain that was terrified, convinced I was going to die down here. But at the same time, it was kind of fascinating, this strange pull the current had on me. Even though it hurt, like getting zapped by a bunch of shocks at exactly the same time, another part of me understood that if I could just keep calm, just go with it, the pain would soon be over. Whatever oceanic force had grabbed on to me would relinquish its hold as soon as it brought me where I needed to go.
I floated down into the hole, through a passageway so narrow that I felt the rocks scrape at my shoulder blades and hips, then somehow moved into an even narrower tunnel. At one point, I had to hold my breath—just the in and out of my gills was too much for the tiny space. And then I was at the end, opening into a cavern so large that I couldn’t see the top or bottom of it.
The second I slid into the room, the electric force released me. I plummeted a few yards, straight through water so icy I knew it had never seen sunlight, before realizing my body was once again under my control.
Slowing my descent with a flick of my tail and a few strokes of my limp arms, I took a second to assess my physical condition. I was weak, tired, my skin a million times more sensitive than it had ever been before. My breathing was harsh, my gills sucking water in like they were afraid it was about to run out. And my head—it hurt almost as much as it had yesterday, after I’d lost all that blood. I couldn’t help wondering how many brain cells I’d killed in the last twenty-four hours, between the blood loss, Sabyn’s attack, and now this. With my luck, enough to cause some serious damage. This whole underwater thing was working out so much better than I’d planned.
But self-pity wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Of course, neither was sitting around in the dark. Though I was still glowing, it was nowhere near enough to actually help me out. This part of the cave was so huge that I didn’t illuminate much of it. Closing my eyes, I concentrated as hard as I could, praying I had enough power left to do what I needed to.
My palms grew warm, tingled, and I wondered if there was a way to use what Sabyn unwittingly taught me to help me down here. In the training circles, I’d used my energy and light to create a spear. Down here I only wanted something to help me see.
Rubbing my hands together as I focused, I pulled them apart slightly when they started to burn. Opening my eyes, I could see the small spark of light resting in the center of my left palm, and I pulled my right one back a little, rolling them around so that I could mold the light into a ball. Then I used my mind to send the light straight out in front of me. It stopped about fifteen feet away and cast an eerie glow on the wall in front of it.
I grinned, startled but also pretty impressed by my first attempt at making light.
Focusing, I did the same thing again, but this time I sent the light straight down twenty feet or so, until it hovered a few inches above the rocky bottom of the cave.
