The Exposed Read online

Tobias said. Then, after a moment of silence, he said,

 

  Too big for all my bravado. And I was going down into its very heart. Like a lunatic, I’d cheated in order to face it first. Now I was dragging poor Tobias right along with me.

  And I was supposed to like him.

  After more than an hour of flying, Jake landed on the swelling, heaving surface of the sea. We’d followed the rough directions of the Chee.

  I landed, too. Easy enough for the seagull brain, which had no particular concerns.

  The ocean was frigid, the wet cold held at bay by my fluffed, oily feathers.

  A dangerous place for a human. Worse for a hawk.

  Tobias landed beside me, bobbing like a white-and-black cork on the swells.

  Jake said.

  Within minutes, Cassie had morphed from seagull to human, then on to sleek, playful dolphin. This made me feel better. Having a helpful dolphin around is like having a couple dozen lifeguards on hand.

  she called, giddy from the dolphin brain. She dived and shot up through the air, then twisted and nosed down for a no-splash dive.

  One by one, we did the same. The passage through human morph was not fun. Seagulls ride the waves. Humans end up swallowing saltwater and imagining sharks rising up from the depths.

  I don’t think Ax enjoyed it any more than we did. He can swim, but it’s an awkward thing to see.

  Tobias landed on Cassie’s back, demorphed to hawk, then waited for me to catch up, riding Cassie’s back with his talons dug sharply into her rubbery gray flesh.

  Tobias said to me.

  “Yeah,” I yelled, treading water and spitting brine. “Let’s do it.”

  Marco teased.

  Okay, here goes nothing, I thought, as Cassie and Marco swam up alongside me and I summoned a mental picture of the whale.

  Saltwater splashed my face. Again and again. I swallowed it. Gagged.

  My bones stretched and grew heavy, my feathered arms flapped frantically until fingers sprouted and I could tread water.

  I was tired. Eyes burning, I glanced over at Tobias.

  His red-tailed hawk form was already shifting. He slipped from Cassie’s back into the water.

  I closed my eyes and visualized the sperm whale.

  And felt the changes begin.

  Big. Bigger. Enormous.

  I was expanding, stretching in every direction at once.

  Huge!

  Only I wasn’t a whale.

  I’ve mentioned that morphs get weird? That things don’t happen in some nice, neat, gradual way? Well, this morph was ridiculous.

  I was growing, growing, growing! My skin had turned leathery graphite gray. There was a blowhole in the back of my neck. My head was monstrous and out of proportion.

  But the rest of me was still Rachel. I had a head the size of Iowa. And about an acre of floating blond hair.

  Marco groaned.

  Cassie said.

  I glanced at Tobias. He seemed to be morphing normally. If any morph is ever normal. If a creature with feathers melting into flesh is normal.

  Jake complained.

  Ax said.

  I said, vaguely offended. But he was right: I was sinking.

  And if I didn’t finish morphing, I was going to drown. Probably sink to the bottom and float past the Pemalite ship. A big, drowned, female Gulliver.

  That got me back on track.

  My legs blended. My feet flattened.

  My head bulged into a huge rectangle. My eyes slid apart … apart till they were in separate zip codes. My neck thickened and a triangular dorsal hump grew out of my back along my spine.

  My skin shriveled.

  My arms slithered back into my body. Flippers sprouted.

  I bobbed to the surface. My blowhole inhaled. My lungs filled.

  I felt the water ripple as the dolphins surged and danced.

  I sensed their joy and felt a deep, thousand-generation-old kinship with my lithe, sleek brethren.

  My instincts were sure. Calm. Confident.

  I had no fear. No questions.

  I asked for nothing. I explained nothing.

  I drew a deep breath, expanding my lungs to their full capacity and dove, arching my dorsal hump and flipping my triangular fluke into the air.

  The ocean was no longer a cold and hostile place.

  It was home.

  I knew its temperatures and depths, its floors and crevices.

  I fired off a blast of pulsed clicks and received a “picture” of everything around me. Like a black-and-white sketch that traced across my mind and was erased like an Etch-A-Sketch.

  I was echolocating. I had natural sonar.

  I “saw” the dolphins and they “saw” me.

  And then another large creature was moving toward me.

  Tobias called.

  Oh. Right.

  The whale brain wasn’t hard to control.

  The thing was, I hadn’t even tried.

  I’d liked the calm confidence. The absence of fear.

  I said, rolling and powering my gigantic, muscled body up, up, up toward dim light like a runaway train.

  Another train rushed beside me. We raced to the barrier between sky and sea.

  Tobias shouted as we exploded the barrier and erupted into the sky. Our massive heads surged into the crisp air, water shimmering down around us.

  Jake said.

  Marco whined.

  Jake said.

  I said.

  I exhaled, spouting spray and drawing in enough air to last to maximum dive capacity. Passages in my massive head filled with water and, all automatically, the waxy deposits of spermaceti cooled the water and sent me plunging.

  Ten thousand feet. Maybe even twelve thousand feet.

  Into giant squid territory. I hoped.

  Where the atmospheric pressure could squeeze every last molecule of air from a human body.

  Tobias asked.

  I said, sighing and shivering deep in my soul. The whale might not be scared. I was.

  We arched our backs and sounded, slipping silently down into the living sea.

  We descended quickly, echolocating past shelves and hollows, our sonar drawing us sketchy, uncertain pictures.

  Murky shadows and then, total darkness.

  Total. Like being blind. Like having your eyes taped shut and being locked in an underground vault.

  Lightless.

  The whale’s senses quickened. The whale did not hear, but it did anticipate. We’d soon be entering the hunting grounds.

  Where my prey sometimes fought me and won.

  Tobias said helpfully.

  I said.

 

 

  From my memory I called up the brief bit I’d read about squid. They had sharp, parrotlike beaks and eight arms covered with grasping, needle-toothed suckers. And two long, powerful tentacles that worked to grab prey at a distance and draw it toward the arms and mouth.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know how whales killed squid.

  But I could more than imagine how squid killed w
hales.

  Still, we powered down into the darkness. Falling, falling forever through darkness.

  The whale did not fear what was going to happen.

  It hunted to eat every day. Someone would win the battle, someone would lose. The whale had accepted this fact since birth.

  I had not. Losing was not something I wanted to think about. This was not a situation where I could simply demorph if the whale was hurt.

  To demorph was to die.

  Tobias called, sounding, if possible, even jumpier than I felt.

  I blurted out the only new thing I could think of.

  WHAT? What made me say that?

  If I could’ve kicked myself, I would have.

  Tobias said sarcastically.

  I shot back, irked by his attitude.

  Tobias said.

  I snapped.

  Silence.

  I countered. I could play that game, too.

  he said.

  I said, firing off a burst of pulsed clicks and studying the “picture” I got back.

  he began.

  But I didn’t want to talk about T. T. anymore and I especially didn’t want to tell Tobias why I hadn’t accepted the date. This was so not the time.

  I said instead.

  Tobias admitted.

 

 

 

  Tobias complained.

  I said.

 

 

  CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK.

  I fired a round of clicks, maximum volume, directing the sound toward the sketchy tornado of squid. Suddenly a part of the swarm stopped moving.

  Tobias commented.

  I had noticed that, too.

  Tobias said.

  I said gloomily.

  The whale part of me wanted to surface. The human part of me had wanted to do that for a long time.

  I said.

 

  I said.

 

  We searched, echolocating for what felt like forever. Back and forth and always, always down. Once I picked up something that might have been a giant squid. But I lost him.

  It was madness! We were blundering around blindly. The sun’s rays had never reached this depth. Never. If the water had been rock and dirt, it could not have been any darker.

  We were buried alive!

  Buried alive in water.

  Tobias said at last, his thought-speak voice faint, his tone shaken.

  I agreed.

  We turned and headed up. And now the panic grew. You can walk through a graveyard at night and be afraid, but the terror doesn’t begin to get you till you start to run away. When you acknowledge fear, it grows. And although I tried to tell myself it wasn’t terror sending me to the surface, that it was just a need for air, I knew better.

  We raced. We barreled madly toward the surface. It took forever. Up and up and up.

  Air! Where was the air?

  We’d been down too long. We’d never reach the sky again. We were going to die in darkness, to sink and sink back to the cold, lightless, lifeless ocean floor.

  Buried alive in water.

  I kicked hard, every muscle in my massive body straining, desperate now. Desperate!

  Then …

  FWOOOOOSH!

  I exploded into the air, exploded out of the water, blew the stale air from my lungs, and crashed back into the sea.

  Ka-WHUMP!

  Tobias erupted a quarter mile away.

  I sucked air. I exhaled and inhaled and sucked air like I was never going to breathe again.

  The others in dolphin morph were nowhere around. I was actually surprised, though I should have known better. You can’t travel miles down through water and come popping back up in a straight line.

  Tobias wallowed in the waves beside me.

  he suggested.

  I demanded, angry at myself now.

  he asked like I was crazy.

  I admitted.

 

  I knew then what. So did Tobias. Jake would take us all back to the beach. This time he’d acquire and morph the whale, along with Cassie or Marco.

  So one of them would be back here. With even less time. With even less chance of success.

  Tobias said.

 

  he said tolerantly.

  Down again. Down and down and down. Into the water like ink.

  Ten minutes down we split up again. Tobias called after me.

  I probably should have listened to him.

  I swam hard. I fired off round after round of pulsed clicks. Picture after picture came back to me. Revealing nothing big enough to be the ship or the squid.

  And then, suddenly …

  A flash of light! A shimmering, rippling light!

  I almost laughed. Fish! Phosphorescent fish, their pale, chemical-reaction glow like a neon sign in the blackness.

  The fish were moving away from me, but at an angle. Like they were moving away from something else. From something behind me, to my left and —

  I fired clicks. The picture came back with startling clarity. The details were unmistakable.

  Coming toward me through the water like a dark, deadly torpedo was a hungry, angry, sixty-foot giant squid.

  So much for the question of whether squid are aggressive, I thought. Someday the six of us could write a serious update of zoology textbooks. If we lived that long.

  I shouted. I fired off a frenzy of machine-gunned clicks at the squid.

  It staggered, stumbled in its charge.

  I yelled again, as the whale’s instincts took over. It wanted to kill the squid. It wanted to hunt.

  Where was Tobias?

  Hunt, yes. Kill, no. We needed the squid alive. The whale didn’t care. This was core instinct. This was hunger and the urge to hunt. I fought the whale’s brai
n. It had been so docile I’d almost not noticed it. But that was only because I’d done what the whale wanted me to do.

  Now I could feel the power of that huge, intelligent brain as it fought to carry out the instructions encoded deep in its DNA.

  And while I was doing that, the squid recovered and came at me with murder in its blood.

  From far away, a faint voice. Tobias!

  Tobias called faintly.

 

  A whip in the darkness. I never saw it coming. It slapped against me, gripping, hugging, holding.

  Another!

  The two almost thirty-foot-long tentacles, iron-strong arms, tightened around my head.

  The squid used the tentacles to yank the rest of its body toward me. I felt the tug. I felt the water moving. I could picture the photograph I’d seen of a squid mouth, a bizarre hawk’s beak.

  Then an arm, thicker, stronger than the tentacle. And another!

  I thrashed wildly, tearing free one of the arms. The suckers ripped away chunks of my skin. I smelled my own blood in the water.

  My tail! I couldn’t move it. And the squid was on me. ON me! Too close for echolocation to see anything. I was wrestling blind. And unlike the squid, I had no arms.

  The squid was smaller, much lighter, basically weaker. But it had agility. And it had arms. I had a mouth.

  Imagine a fight between a gymnast, small but with full use of arms and legs, and a three-hundred-pound linebacker who can only use his mouth.

  The squid was locking me up. And now I was sinking.

  Down to where the atmospheric pressure would crush even me.

  Down to where my burning lungs would force me to exhale.

  Down to black death.

 

  I lunged and rolled. The squid hung on. I hammered it with pulsed clicks. Again and again! But my own body mass was helping to shield it.

  I echolocated again and again, but it was on me. Then, one burst of clicks caught a wall of denser water and bounced back. It drew me a fragmented, eerie picture.

  The squid was huge! Its arrow-shaped head, long as a small school bus, was pressed close to my head. Its sharp, snapping beak was only inches from my left eye. Eight twenty-foot arms and two longer tentacles clutched and tore at me. Sharp-edged suckers the size of saucers Super Glued the creature to me.