Ling wasn’t far behind her friend. She swam out of the barracks and joined the surge of prisoners. They all wore the same uniforms—a baggy gray tunic and an iron collar. They worked in them and slept in them.
She saw the Selects being herded toward the Edge. Some were dull-eyed and resigned. Others called out desperately to friends, asking them to tell a husband, a wife, a parent or child, that they loved them. Others resisted and were beaten.
Ling’s heart would have broken if it were not already in pieces from witnessing the same scene morning after morning.
She tore her eyes away and hurried to the munitions warehouse. She wasn’t Select material, not with her damaged wrist, but she could count out arrows and spears with her good hand and load them into crates. That was the job she’d been given. The crates were shipped out daily. Ling didn’t know where they went, or why, but she was sure their purpose wasn’t good. She’d overheard two guards saying that the elder, Qin’s ruler, was too busy dealing with the plastic the goggs had dumped into his waters—and the suffering it was causing the ocean creatures—to notice the movements of some wooden crates through his realm.
Tung-Mei worked in the infirmary. She’d seen the Selects who made it back. Sometimes they could still talk. A few had told her what had been done to them, and she’d told Ling.
They were taken to the edge of the Abyss. Each Select’s collar was fastened to an iron chain attached to an individual lava globe. Also attached to the globe was a flexible metal filament line. The lines were very long and were wound on giant spools. Once a Select was leashed in this way, he or she was ordered to swim down into the Abyss, to the very end of the filament’s length, and then give three sharp tugs on the iron chain. To discourage a Select from simply gathering the filament in her hands and swimming only a short distance into the Abyss, electric eels were twined around the filament back at the top. They sent a current down the line, shocking anyone who touched it. The glass lava globe acted both as a source of light and a current breaker, preventing the mermaid or merman attached to it from being electrocuted.
At the end of twelve hours, the electric eels were removed and the soldiers stationed at the edge of the Abyss wound the filament back onto the spools. The prisoners came up with it.
Half were usually dead from depth sickness by then, and the rest wished they were. Survivors came up disoriented and trembling, with excruciating headaches. Their faces and hands were blue, and they were usually coughing up blood. The extreme depth—with its higher pressure and lower levels of oxygen—destroyed lungs and caused brain swelling. The living were hauled off to the infirmary, where they lasted for an hour or two.
Tung-Mei had asked one survivor why they’d been sent down into the Abyss. He’d said they were to look for a white ball.
“So much suffering, so many deaths…for a white ball?” she’d said.
But Ling knew it was no ordinary white ball. It was Sycorax’s talisman—the puzzle ball. Orfeo had told her about it. He wanted it found and didn’t care how many were sacrificed for his mad quest.
Ling knew that she would be sacrificed soon, too. She would die here. Her body would be thrown into the cart that came into the camp every evening to collect the dead. Then it would be dumped into a mass grave.
Ling was strong and not afraid to die. She knew that a death from depth sickness was not an easy one, but she would face it bravely. What tortured her, though, was the thought of dying before she could tell Sera what she’d learned aboard Rafe Mfeme’s ship.
Ling was an omnivoxa, a mermaid who could speak all creatures’ tongues. For her, the most awful part of her imprisonment—worse than the beatings and the hunger and the fear—was being unable to communicate. Her friends had no idea who they were dealing with, no idea of the danger they were in.
When she’d first arrived at the camp, Ling had hoped she’d be able to escape, but it was surrounded by a living fence of sea wasps—giant, bioluminescent jellyfish with long, lethal tentacles. They opened only enough to allow in cages containing new prisoners, food and munitions deliveries, and the death cart.
Ling saw a merman try to escape on her second day in the camp. He’d just been selected. Desperate, he tried to swim between two of the venomous sea wasps. In the blink of an eye, one of the wasps wound a thick, fleshy tentacle around his body. He was dead within seconds.
When she realized that she couldn’t escape, Ling looked everywhere for a courier—a small fish, a tiny octopus, or even a young hawksbill turtle—that she could send to Serafina with a message. But the sea wasps kept sea creatures out as effectively as they kept prisoners in.
As Ling approached the munitions warehouse now, a mermaid ahead of her faltered in the water and fell to the mud. The guard prodded the emaciated woman with his spear. She winced, tried to push herself up with her arms, and collapsed again.
Ling felt a hand on her back. It shoved her forward.