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Magic swirled around, a mix of thick, potent currents, flowing from the hallway ahead. The ward had blocked them, but now they splashed all around me, volatile, chaotic, twisting into eddies and whirlpools.
This was a nexus, a hole in the fabric of the world that bled magic. Atlanta had one too, a lot larger than this one. They called it Unicorn Lane, a place where metal rubble sprouted fangs, corrosive moss grew on power lines, and everything tried to eat you.
This explained the abnormal concentration of marine life.
I stepped through the arch and turned around. Yep, Elder Futhark runes, embedded in the arch. He’d used Horses instead of Cattle, but my frozen wagon still worked. The runes themselves had been etched into the bone and stained with metal. Not silver—the hue was wrong, and it wasn’t smooth, it was geometric and soldered on there. An osmium alloy of some sort. Very expensive. Very rare.
Damn it.
Well, it changed nothing.
Thomas should’ve gone to the Order with his petition. If I survived this little adventure, the next time we met, I’d tell Claudia all about it.
I turned and marched down the hallway toward the light.
I went through another red arch—unwarded this time—and paused in its shadow, just before the doorway. The hallway opened into a large room, lit up with clusters of feylanterns arranged into eight-rayed, layered snowflakes on the ceiling. The light was so bright, it looked like the middle of the day, and I stayed just on the edge of it.
This must’ve been a nightclub or some sort of concert venue with a dance floor and a raised stage at the far end of the room. The dance floor was now in front of me, the floor itself made of plastic or glass tiles, transparent and shimmering with embedded glitter. The ocean had flooded the section of the ship below this room. I could see the salt water under my feet.
On the left, a stairway led to a balcony that curved along the room, filled with tables and padded chairs. On the right, a massive, ragged hole gaped in the hull, big enough to drive a semi through sideways. It had carved off a chunk of the ship all the way to the bottom. The sea was just below the floor, and whatever lay on the other side of that hole wasn’t the Figure Eight beach. In fact, it wasn’t even America’s Atlantic coast.
Huge crags jutted from the waters in the distance. The same rocky boulders continued under water, stretching to the ship in stone reefs. Jewel-colored anemones sheathed the stone, glowing with yellow-green, orange, electric blue, and neon pink among patches of dark mussels. Mollusks, sea slugs in every color of the rainbow, and ringed jellyfish flashing with bright lights swam and hovered among the reefs. A huge brown skate glided by, slipped under the glass tiles, backlit by the reef, and floated right under my feet. The magic was so thick, you could cut it with a knife and spread it on bread.
Most of North Carolina’s coastal bottom was sand. There were artificial reefs and oyster sanctuaries, built pre-Shift, but none of them were here, in this spot. And those cliffs in the distance looked like something from Oregon or Washington…Except there were no trees. The Pacific Northwest was heavily wooded along the coast, and I couldn’t see a single tree.
Thomas’ source was right. The Emerald Wave did have a hole that could only be seen from the inside.
This was a tear in the fabric of reality, and I had no idea where it led. A pocket realm, built by some cosmically powerful being? A portal leading somewhere else? None of the options were good.
More importantly, maintaining this hole would require a ton of magic. Usually you saw these junctions in place of wild, very concentrated magic, because their creators used the environmental magic to power them. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like there was a definite focal point, some kind of magic generator right off the ship, that kept this portal going.
I leaned a bit to the right, trying to get a better view of the room.
Nine people sat on the floor by the far end of the hole, huddled together, each of them chained by their ankle. Three adults: a skinny woman in her thirties with scars on her pale arms and defiant eyes; a man about Thomas’ age, gaunt and beaten down, his hair a dark curtain over his bronze face; and a young woman, barely in her twenties, with bright red gills that stood out against the dark brown skin of her throat. The rest were children, all sizes and ages. The youngest looked about ten.
The chains stretched into the hole and vanished into the water.
Okay. Haven’t seen that before.
As I watched, the gaunt man leaned forward, and I saw the boy behind him. Darin. Alive. Wet and looking desperate, but alive.
