I climbed the gangway. It didn’t collapse. Thank Fate for small favors.
A school of fish, pulsing with green, darted below me through the water, narrowly avoiding a jellyfish as big as a tire shimmering lemon-yellow and sparkling with magenta. Yep, definitely not a normal ocean. The ship was a magical nexus of some sort.
I climbed to the deck and almost collided with a heavy-set man carrying a big club.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here to see Aaron.”
“The fuck you are!”
He swung the club. I swept his legs out from under him and shoved him left. He made a lovely splash.
Ahead a wooden double door stood open. It seemed out of place on the ship. They must’ve retrofitted it. I went through it, into a short, arched hallway, and came out into a large space.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. It looked like the inside of a mall. Exactly like the inside of a mall. A long passageway stretched to both sides, with a curved storefront with golden letters spelling out GUEST SERVICES directly in front of me. Shops and cafés lined the walls. A Starbucks, a karaoke bar, some kind of Italian restaurant. Most of it had been abandoned and stripped down to the bone. The air smelled of salt and bacon.
On the right the passage was dark. On the left, feylanterns illuminated what looked like a plaza. Left it is.
I strolled along the storefronts. The plaza lay ahead, a well-lit round space with ten tables, a restaurant manned by a woman who was cooking bacon, and a bathroom at the opposite end. Six of the tables were occupied. Fourteen people total, some eating, some playing cards, wearing normal street clothes. It was close to midnight. The acolytes of Aaron were night owls.
One of the benefits of being married to a shapeshifter and having a shapeshifter son was that I’d learned to move very quietly. I was right on top of the nearest occupied table before a young woman sitting at it looked up and jerked back.
Everyone looked at me. None of them seemed to be packing a lot of magic power. Most of them didn’t look well fed, and there was a lot of apprehension in their eyes. Small fry followers. Followers were good at taking orders.
“One of you is supposed to take me to Aaron,” I told them.
“Umm,” an older man said. “Why?”
I gave him a hard stare. “Who are you that you’re asking me about my private business?”
“Nobody,” the woman next to him said. “He’s a nobody. I’ll take you.”
She got up. “This way.”
We left the plaza, walked along the mall hallway some more, and then took stairs down. One deck, two, three…We had to be below sea level or close to it.
“So is it true that Aaron is a god?” I asked.
“He isn’t a god,” the older woman said quietly. “But he has god powers.”
“How did he get them?”
The older woman didn’t respond.
There were only three ways to get god powers. You were born with them, which made you an avatar or some variation thereof, you were granted them as a reward, or you bargained for them. Technically, you could merge with them or devour them, but that almost never happened. Almost.
An avatar wouldn’t have to rely on gangs to steal people for him. He would be powerful enough to take what he wanted. The reward was equally unlikely. There were no signs of any gods around us. A god who was rewarding a follower would want their name glorified and their symbols displayed. That left only the third possibility. A bargain had been struck. Probably under duress of some sort.
Another formerly luxurious hallway. Doors stood open on both sides. They looked like luxury dining rooms or maybe casino rooms converted into kitchens or possibly laboratories. Long metal tables everywhere.
A hint of magic pulled on me. I went through the doorway on the right, following it.
A large tank sat against the wall, glowing bright enough to light up the whole room and emanating faint magic. An assortment of feylantern glass lay on the tables next to it: globes, tubes, and bunches of small spheres. Some sort of bioluminescent algae, but magically charged. I was wondering why the feylanterns here were so bright. Normally they were glass vessels filled with magically charged air, but here they were filled with water and that algae.
“How long do they last?” I asked.
The woman had stopped in the doorway of the lab. “About a year.”
“You sell these?”
She nodded. “Garvey does.”
“Who is Garvey?”
“The CFO.”
Interesting cult they had.
I moved to the next table. A big plastic bin filled with pearls of all sizes and colors. Golden, white, pink, purple, black…They came in a variety of shapes. Some were oval, some were round, others had ridges. A few were teardrops. A small fortune.
I glanced at her.
“The kids get these,” she said. “When Garvey can convince Aaron to let a couple of them forage on the ocean floor. Aaron hates it, but Garvey says we need the money.”
She didn’t sound happy about it. Her eyes were haunted, too.
I moved to the next table. Slow cookers. Four of them. Wrapped in chains, padlocked, and secured to metal rings bolted to the floor. And warded. Good wards, too. Hmm.
“What’s in these?”
The woman’s face jerked.
“Who set these wards?”
“Aaron,” she said barely above a whisper.
Aaron clearly knew what he was doing.
I walked over to the large trashcan with a sealed lid, unlocked the latch, and looked inside. Chunks of a glass sponge, bright yellow when it was in the water, and now dull.
Oh.
“Who has Huntington’s?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “My daughter. She’s only 16.”
Back when Curran and I had run the Mercenary Guild in Atlanta, one of the mercs, a veteran, had a son who had developed the symptoms of Huntington’s disease. Certain types of glass sponges contained magically potent bacteria that slowed the progression of disease and sometimes stopped it completely. The extraction process was complex and incredibly expensive. These sponges only grew in cold, deep water. We had gotten ours from Canada.
The slow cookers were bacteria vats, fed and protected by the wards.
“Is this why you’re here?”
She started crying. I let her sob. There was nothing to be said. She was here for her daughter, she knew it was wrong, it ripped her apart, but still she stayed because she couldn’t let her daughter die. She was desperate and trapped. That didn’t excuse anything she had done.
“And the others?” I asked.
“It’s just four families,” she managed. “Us, the Allens, the Lipnicks, and the Rios. Rodney Allens’ wife has MS, Denis Lipnick has Huntington’s, and…”
“I get it,” I told her.
“They give us medicine every month. Just enough.”
Cults exploited people, and those who got sucked in, especially on the bottom layer of the hierarchy, weren’t usually bad people. They were looking for something better, a little bit of hope, or a way to deal with overwhelming things in their life. Instead, they ended up as free labor, brainwashed and used, their vulnerabilities and fears molded into a leash that held them in place.
There was no better leash than saving the life of someone you loved. It made people do terrible things.
“Let’s go,” I told her.
We crossed the length of the hallway and came to a metal bulkhead door that looked newer than the walls around it. The woman cranked the wheel, strained, and swung the door open. In front of us a narrow metal bridge spanned a flooded space four feet above the sea. The water glowed with blues and yellows, lit up by a school of tiny jellyfish. Under the jellyfish, about six or seven feet down, something slithered. It was long and sinuous, thicker than me and butter-yellow. I couldn’t tell if it was a mass of tentacles, some prehistoric marine worm, or a knot of giant underwater snakes. It had no eyes or mouth. Just length.