“Who will talk about how honorably we fought if there is no one left alive?” he shouts at them. “Today we are eels.”
Then it’s my turn. Ghost, Luna, Thrill, and Arcade gather before dusk. They’re going to teach me how to use my weapon.
“So where are the rest of us?” I ask.
“There are only five,” Thrill says.
“And how many Rusalka are there?” Bex asks.
“Thousands,” he says.
“Thousands! There are thousands of these Rusalka on their way and they all have these gauntlets?” I cry.
“They don’t all have the gauntlets. I would say roughly half do. The others are killers and just as dangerous,” Ghost says.
“Are you afraid to fight, human?” Arcade says. She’s giving me the “You disgust me” look again.
“I’m afraid of not having a chance,” I admit.
“These gauntlets give us a chance, Lyric,” Luna says. “They allow you to move the water around you. You can turn it into different shapes, increase or lower its speed, affect the tides, create waves that can destroy one of your human cities. The water is what you imagine it to be. It will do as you say.”
“I have no idea how to do that,” I cry.
“Lyric, you need to calm down,” my mother says. “They’re trying to help.”
“You did it twice already without any training,” Ghost says, and he walks me to the shore.
I take a deep breath. “So I just imagine a shape and the water will do the rest?”
Thrill nods. “It helped me to close my eyes when I was learning.”
I close my eyes and then I open them, wondering why I need to close them at all. Then I close them again. But how am I going to fight something if I can’t see? So they open, and seeing Ghost’s irritated face is all I need to stop doing it.
“What should I imagine?”
The others groan.
“Make a hammer,” Arcade snaps.
“Relax. I’m new at this,” I say, but as I say it, I hear a splash of water. I can’t help it—my eyes pop open. There, hovering in the air, the water swirls and sloshes and then morphs into a hammer nearly five feet tall made entirely of murky gray Coney Island seawater. I can see a fish in the handle. It hovers there like an eager dog waiting for me to reward it with a treat for rolling over.
“How does it stay up there?”
“It’s a reaction between the electrical charges in your brain and the salt in the water,” Ghost says proudly. “The glove amplifies your natural energy. My grandfather discovered the principle.”
“Turn it into something else,” Luna says.
I think of a sword and watch it transform into a sword, then a pistol, then a trident. Anything I can visualize becomes real. I turn it into a snowman and a taxicab and then, almost against my will, a memory of Fathom and me kissing, and there it is, in all its three-dimensional watery embarrassment. I look to my mother’s disturbed face, and suddenly the water falls on me and I’m soaked.
Arcade turns pale and, without a word, walks away.
“That was not cool, Walker,” Bex says.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” I say.
“Your mind is already capable of making the shapes. What you need to work on is control and command,” Luna says. “You need to be able to sustain what you make, keep it until you don’t want it any longer.”
“And it would do you well to think of something a lot more deadly. These hammers and pretty pictures are not going to kill a Rusalka,” Thrill chastises.
“I can’t kill anyone,” I say.
Ghost steps up to me. “The Rusalka used this gauntlet to create a spear that impaled my mother. Then they tore her apart and ate her. The same thing happened to Fathom’s mother and Luna’s brother and Arcade’s sister. They swarmed around the dead in a feeding frenzy until they had picked the meat off the bones and there was nothing left. It happened to millions of our people, and we were forced to watch.”
I turn to my mother. She looks pale and horrified.
“They will do the same to your people unless you learn to kill,” he continues.
The day is long and without rest. I spend every hour learning to use the gauntlet. I can create small things—weapons about as big as a man—but the bigger things, like pushing back the tides, seem impossible. Whenever I think about the vastness of the ocean, the sheer weight of the water, my brain shuts down and I stand there waving the stupid glove around like I’m some kind of insane puppeteer. Luna tries to be patient with me—the others, not so much. But to be fair, Ghost always looks pissed off, so it’s hard to tell when I’m really making him angry.
“You can’t think about the weight. The weight doesn’t matter,” Luna tries to explain. “You’re making it more difficult than it has to be.”
“Um, I’ve never tried to pick up the ocean before, so you’re going to have to cut me a break,” I snap. I’m exhausted and worried about my father, worried about Fathom, worried about the world. Heck, I’m even worried about Tammy.
“Try again,” Luna begs.