looking for, she sweeps her arms across all of them, sending them shattering on the floor. Her hands are bloody and glittering with glass shards.
I reach out to her, but she pulls away and stands over her father. He releases the hand from his chest and reaches out to her face. Then he takes my hand in a bone-crushing grip. The blue of his eyes returns. His breath is a gust rattling inside: “Don’t let it burn.”
His mouth opens wide, releasing his last breath. The hold on my hand goes slack, and my heart seizes.
I’ve never seen a merman die this way. He’s looking at her. Convulsing. Shaking. Shivering. His skin melts away, leaving behind the powdery whiteness of coral and bone.
There’s someone else in the room with us.
Gwen takes a step back and grabs Kai’s arm to keep her in place. Kai’s whole body trembles as she cries. I hold my finger over my lips and flick my eyes down. Along with the hiccups Kai is trying to hold back, the whisper of her tears running down her face, I hear an extra heartbeat and a sob that shouldn’t be there.
Gwen hears it too, and I follow her cloudy gray eyes down. For the first time, I see the set of toes under the table. I unsheathe my dagger slowly. I reach under and grab hold of a handful of hair.
“Please!” His arms go right to his face as a shield. He’s whimpering. “Please. I couldn’t stop them.”
“Let him go, Tristan,” Kai’s voice is raw as gravel. “That’s Delios, my father’s apprentice.”
He looks about fourteen, arms like twigs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeats. “They came and I hid. Master said to hide so I did and then—oh goddess, the screams—they broke things and—”
“What were they?” I ask, though in my heart I already know.
He shakes in Kai’s arms, letting loose the hiccups he was holding back. He turns sadly to the coral bones on the table and he hugs himself. With his long fingers, he taps his forehead three times, the way Kurt does in his Morse-code way. “Merrows. I’ve never seen them so large before. One of them could talk.”
“Archer,” I say.
“What did they want, Del?” Kai asks, rubbing his hair back for comfort.
“The old map. Master wouldn’t cooperate. They tortured him. With the blade. You have to know just where to cut, you see, to not kill our kind so quickly. To make it last…”
“As if she knew we were coming,” I say.
The silence returns.
“Where is the map?” Gwen asks.
Del can’t take his eyes off Gwen. From the pearly scales covering her breasts to the damp mess of blond hair. He licks his lips nervously and brushes his hair back in a bad attempt at cleaning up. We follow his eyes to the wall behind us where an onyx circle tablet as wide as my spread arms is embedded into the wall. There’s a crack at the center of the tree. I touch the grooves that must be from Archer’s fist. Despite that, the tree on the tablet is grand with branches reaching up to the sky. Right at the roots, a tiny waterfall spills into a spring.
“If this is the map, then what does it mean? It’s just clouds and stars and stuff.”
“Actually,” Del holds his finger up to the deep silver crannies marking stars, “these are constellations. Cancer over here.” Del gets a geeky smile on his face. It turns my stomach into knots. Ryan used to get that look on his face when I’d ask him to help me with my biology homework. They even have the same naïve glimmer in their eyes. Hopeful—
“But where is it in the sea?” Gwen presses. “On this earth and not the heavens?”
Del rummages through the things on a shelf, looking back to smile at Gwen, and pulls out a roll of parchment. It’s an old map of the world.
“This is from eighty years ago,” I point out. “Alaska is America now. Also, the Soviet Union is dismantled or something.”
“In one way, yes. The surface of the earth is different than below it. There are more tunnels and caves down here than you humans would ever dream of. It’s a labyrinth, hiding everything the world has forgotten. Some are prisons. Some are palaces. I’ve been studying it for fourscore years, but even I still need to reference manuals. Human maps only show the surface of the world. We need dozens of maps to show our layers beneath