Creatures moved about in it, seeing but unseen. Ling could feel them. She was in the Abyss, about two leagues from the prison camp, where her father had told her the puzzle ball might have drifted.
She held a fat moon jelly in her hand. It was her only source of light. She couldn’t cast the most basic illuminata. She couldn’t cast anything. The sea wasp’s venom had sickened her so badly, she’d lost most of her magic. Even her omnivoxa powers were weak. She could speak only a handful of simple languages. Ling shone the moon jelly’s glow over the Abyss’s jagged south side, looking for Sycorax’s ancient talisman. She moved back and forth along a section of wall and, finding nothing, descended farther.
As she did, a sharp pain stabbed at her brain.
Depth sickness, she thought. It’s starting.
She wasn’t surprised. She’d been searching for ten hours straight. She knew the symptoms—headache and nausea, followed by disorientation. Then things got really bad. Victims struggled for oxygen. They coughed blood and became uncoordinated. A brain bleed usually finished them off. Either that or suffocation.
After Ling and the manta ray had parted company, she had crawled into a cave and stayed there for two days—sick and shivering—waiting for the swelling in her tail to go down. On the third day, hunger had driven her out to forage. She’d found fish eggs and some bitter seaweed that she’d choked down. The food gave her energy and strength. On the fourth day, she set off in pursuit of the puzzle ball.
Ling knew she was lucky to be alive. She didn’t feel lucky, though. She had no idea how long it would take her to regain her magical powers. What if they never came back? That thought was so terrifying, she couldn’t bear to dwell on it.
She kept moving down the south wall of the Abyss now, sweeping her tail fins over clusters of tube worms to see if the puzzle ball had landed in their midst, peering into small caves and niches.
A wave of dizziness washed over her. She closed her eyes until it passed, then started laughing. She was searching for a ball, no bigger than the palm of her hand…in the Great Abyss!
“I’ve lost my mind,” she said out loud.
The puzzle ball could have landed on any one of a million ledges that lined both sides of the Abyss. It could be buried in thick silt or wedged into a crack. Or it could be leagues below her, and still falling. Legend had it that the Abyss was bottomless.
“This is totally insane,” she said out loud, still laughing. “It’s impossible!”
She laughed so hard she started to struggle for breath—which made her realize that her depth sickness was getting worse.
“You’re becoming hysterical,” she told herself. “Knock it off. Right now.”
Ling was strong; she knew she was. And strong mer didn’t lose it. They didn’t come apart. They got the job done. She descended again. A small hollow lay in a rock below her. Holding the jelly in one hand, she grasped the edge of the cavity with the other and peered into it.
She didn’t even have time to scream as a bony face with gaping jaws lunged at her. The giant fangtooth’s sharp teeth missed her face by a hairsbreadth. Panicking, Ling raised both hands to protect herself from the fish and dropped the moon jelly. The current carried it away. The fangtooth shot toward it.
“No!” Ling cried.
But it was too late. The fish snapped its jaws shut on the tasty jelly and swallowed it whole.
Ling didn’t know what the fangtooth did next, or where it went, because she couldn’t see anything. The water around her was still and silent, the darkness overwhelming. It felt to Ling as if it was swallowing her whole, the way the fangtooth had devoured the jelly.
All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, rapid and shallow. Dizziness gripped her again. It was so bad this time that she became violently ill. When the racking spasms finally subsided, she realized she had no choice but to ascend. Her breathing was too ragged; it had to normalize. She had to find another source of light.
She swam upward, but after taking a few strokes, she realized the water was getting colder, not warmer. Was she swimming down instead of up?
Dizziness struck again. Ling swam in the direction of the wall, hands outstretched. If she could find it, she could steady herself against it and hopefully beat back the spinning in her head. But the wall was nowhere to be found. Ling was flailing in the black depths now, completely disoriented.
And then she saw a light.
“Oh, thank gods!” she said, swimming toward it. “Hey!” she shouted. “Wait! I’m over here.”
The light glowed more brightly. It came toward her. Ling put on a burst of speed, rushing to meet it.
And then she stopped short, unable to believe what she was seeing.
A man was carrying the light. A human. He had blond hair and empty eyes. He wore a black pearl at his throat.
“Hello again, Ling,” he said.
“No!” Ling cried.
It was a face from her nightmares. The face of a monster.
Orfeo.
“NO,” LING WHISPERED. “It can’t be.”