So I kept swimming, floating, and calling out, growing less hopeful the farther into the system I went. At one point I spotted one of the iron ladders drilled into the side of the sloping tunnel and stopped myself so the swollen water rushed past me. The waves were chest deep even in the largest pipes, and the current kept jerking my feet from beneath me as I tried to link them around the rungs. So when the mewling sound came, I barely heard it.
Until it reverberated in my chest.
“Jas!” I called out again, screaming this time, suddenly certain she was trying to reach out to me. Hadn’t she said on the rooftop of her house that she’d felt me drawing nearer? So why would it be any different now? The thought gave me an idea, and I inhaled deeply and submerged myself in the icy flood. I held, one-handed, to the ladder, listening…and heard it again.
It was coming from deeper in the pipeline, a different entrance, but closer to the core and Midheaven, as the Tulpa had said. I bobbed for air, inhaling a mouthful before giving in to the current and allowing myself to be sucked under again. Jasmine continued calling, the sound growing increasingly stronger. I was becoming used to the tumult of the waters, almost finding a rhythm to its twisting violence, and was so surprised by the sudden slamming of my body into a wall that I actually sucked in a mouthful of the gritty deluge. Flailing as the water continued to press me against the unyielding concrete, I fought to the surface, which proved even higher than I thought. However, once I managed it, I was rewarded.
“Jasmine,” I sputtered, and almost managed a smile.
“It hurts,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.
At first I thought she was talking about her restraints. The Tulpa had secured her with ropes that stretched the width of the tunnel, fastening on opposite ladder rungs. It didn’t look painful, however, and the rising water kept her body weight from pulling on the ties, so that couldn’t be it. Of course, when she cringed again, eyes squeezed shut, short dark hair plastered to her skull as she ducked her head, I realized she was reacting to something I couldn’t hear. Dolphin language, perhaps.
I looked up.
But her proximity to Midheaven was a more likely bet.
I willed my glyph to life, gaining my bearings in the meager light. I’d hit the rounded wall that marked the vertical entrance, and the ledge to Midheaven above. Perhaps mortals couldn’t stand to be this close to the entrance. I suspected the only reason Jasmine could manage it now was because of the power she shared with me.
“Okay, Jas. I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, going to work on one of the restraints. I latched one foot in a lower rung, as water continued to rage at the wall, rising swiftly. I had no idea where to take her once I did free her. To a broken world where the sky had caved in? Back to a family that might have been crushed under its weight? Certainly not to Midheaven. The passage alone would kill her, even if the way wasn’t locked.
As if on cue, a piercing wail sounded, almost directly through the walls.
So the sky was falling, the water rising-neck height now-Skamar was dying, Jasmine drowning…and I couldn’t get this damned knot untied!
So swim away, you idiot! I glanced up. Because I could. I could decamp to Midheaven again, disappear into another world, saving myself, escaping it all.
Catching my look, Jasmine smiled, bittersweet. “I wondered how long it would take you to think of it.”
I shook my head and went back to work. She winced in response to some sound I couldn’t hear, and I felt the shudder slide into me, as if our bodies had melded where they touched. “Don’t worry. I’m not-”
She cut me off. “I would.”
Surprised, I jolted and my foot slipped, sending me far enough underwater that I got another mouthful of the briny stuff. It was metallic and gritty, trace amounts of gasoline making pretty liquid rainbows off the heaving surface. I spit as I regained my feet and tried to lift Jasmine up. There was enough slack to have her half hidden in the hole leading to Midheaven-and put her always above yourself might mean literally, right?-but the higher we got, the worse it was for her. She screamed and the water rolling down her face was from tears, not the flood. But if I left her alone, she’d drown. I didn’t know which was the lesser of the evils. So I held her to me.
“I would,” she repeated against my chest.
“Shh.” I stroked her head, as something in the sky lost its riveting. The tunnels shook.
Jasmine gave up, relaxing against my chest. Water lapped at her lips. Her skin was clammy and cold, like she was already dead. Despite my best efforts to hold her up, the water was winning. She lifted her head in the air so she was staring straight up at me.
“You’re not going to get me undone in time. It’s okay. And…and I’m happy for Li. If I die, it’ll be better for her.” She bobbed, gurgled a bit, and I lifted her higher. Too high. She screamed in pain.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” I clasped her close again and suddenly tears were rolling down my face as well. I didn’t know what to do!
Jasmine coughed, spit out more water. “You should…go.”
“No. I won’t leave you.”
“Okay.” She shut her eyes. “Then stay with me for as long as possible, okay?”
“Yes,” I whispered, watching the water climb past her lips.
“It’s okay…” She bobbed, gurgled. “You said the first time sucked anyway.”
The reference to her virginity had me laying my cheek across her forehead. “Jasmine.”
She had fought becoming a woman because it meant letting go of the power afforded changelings, but I knew she’d longed for it too. All girls did, at once excited at the prospect and ambivalent at the unknown. That had been a long time ago for me. Before attacks and a metamorphosis, before superheroes and tulpas and tunnels leading to other worlds. I felt tears sliding down my cheeks, almost burning my skin in contrast to the water infiltrating every pore in icy jabs. I lifted Jas a bit higher. Not too high. Not so the proximity to Midheaven would cause her any more pain. She’d had enough of that.
Her head was pointed straight up now. Her ears were submerged.
“Stay with me…” she said again. Water again lapped at her lips.
“I’ll go under with you,” I whispered, because little girls shouldn’t have to die alone. Because when I was not much older than her, I’d been left to do just that. I smiled, then bent, and kissed her like I knew her mother would if she were there.
If the feeling that passed between us was visible, it would have been a hot spark, a welder’s fire, a burst like a comet shooting from my mouth into hers. Shocked, I pulled back, and she gasped, sucking in a lungful of the floodwaters.
Put her, always, above yourself.
And in the moment, when I really believed it was the last for both Jasmine and me-for Skamar and Las Vegas, and for Warren’s beloved troop-I had the strangest thought. I thought of Suzanne and her blabber about goddesses…and how she’d told me I wasn’t gray, but full of color. The life of the world. A fucking rainbow.
I thought of my mother, and how she’d once given her aura over to me, color blooming behind my closed eyes as she fed her soul into mine, her energy bleeding through and then beneath my skin. Of everything in this world, which oscillated with vibrational energy, lives were the most potent. A death, or birth-a sacrifice of one’s own soul-was a detonation that could change the world.
Put her always above yourself.
As my mother had done with me. She’d harnessed her personal energy and then drove it relentlessly into me. I smiled at the memory of power flowing from her mouth to mine.
There was a way to fix Jasmine’s shattered chi without killing her. A single choice that would give Skamar the power she needed to beat the Tulpa, to force the manuals of Light to be written again so that my allies had havens outside the sanctuary once more. To save this world. I laughed because it was suddenly all so clear and simple.