Raging Sea (Undertow, #2)

“Maybe Tammy sent a message to me,” I say hopefully.

Bex watches eagerly as I scroll through everything. I’d so love to give her some good news right now, but almost all of these messages are from people wishing me dead. They hope I get hit by trucks and bleed out in the street. They promise to do terrible things to my corpse. Some of them are from people I knew in the neighborhood, people I might have once considered friends.

“Anything?” Bex asks.

There’s nothing. I check twice.

“I don’t think she knew my number, Bex. She never called me,” I remind her, which is true, but not at all helpful. “It doesn’t mean anything. She probably sent you hundreds of them, and all we have to do is find a way to get them. They have to be in the Cloud. They store everything in the Cloud, right?”

She shrugs and turns toward the window.

“We’ll get them,” I promise, but I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know how to access “the Cloud.” I don’t even really know what it is. “Bex, c’mon. I’ll help.”

“Just let it go,” she whispers.

Another text buzzes and I quietly ask God for just one more favor. Let it be Tammy. I pull it up only to find something a million times more surprising.



CHIHUAHUAN DESERT. MR. COFFEE.



I gasp and drop the phone.

“He’s still helping me,” I cry, reaching into the glove compartment for a map of Texas I spotted earlier. I pull it out and open it wide.

“Why do you speak in riddles?” Arcade says, suddenly interested in what is happening in the front seat.

“It’s Doyle! He just told me where to find Tempest,” I say, scanning the map for the Chihuahuan Desert. It’s in the far southwestern-most edge of the state, hundreds of miles from where we are right now. It’ll take days to get there, but at least we know where to go. “We’re going to find them!”

Arcade nods, then snarls. “Move this machine, Lyric Walker.”

“Well, let’s get going already,” Bex adds, without bothering to look at me.

“Bex?”

“Drive.”





Chapter Four


TEXAS IS MASSIVE AND CROSSED BY INTERTWINING highways that lead you to endless tiny copies of the town you just drove through. Still, every dot on its map has a quirky claim to fame. Duncanville, Texas, once housed four nuclear warheads designed to protect Fort Worth and Dallas from the Russians. Hutchins, Texas, has the state’s largest men’s penitentiary. Terrell, Texas, is the birthplace of Jamie Foxx. Lindale, Texas, is the blackberry capital of the world. Chandler, Texas, boasts the state’s biggest horseshoe-throwing competition. Corsicana, Texas, has an annual cotton-harvest festival. Canton, Texas, is the former home of notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. I speed past each one, wondering at the lives of the people who call them home. I wonder if they’re bored. I envy them. When this is all said and done, I’m going to move to one of these little towns and bask in the boredom.

Bex and Arcade have no interest in the scenery. They nap while the road ticks off the miles. To keep me company, I flip on the radio but keep it low so I don’t wake up the happy twins. I’ve never seen anything as ancient as the Ford’s stereo. It’s a collection of clunky buttons with two knobs and a little window. I push one of the buttons, and a red line slides across the glass and lands on the number 1430. Static turns into polka music—lively horns and accordions. I push another button and land on a station playing a marathon of someone named Conway Twitty. I listen to a few songs. He’s not bad—kind of a country-pop thing—but then he sings that he wants a lover with a slow hand, which completely grosses me out. I push the next button, and the music is replaced by a fiery tirade.

“So, America, more news from the frontlines, and the casualty list continues to grow. The Alphas continue their onslaught.”

“Not the Alphas, dummy. The Rusalka,” I grumble at him.

“As reported, the city of Norfolk, Virginia, the site of the world’s largest military base, is lost. After several tidal waves and relentless flooding, the president has declared the base and surrounding neighborhoods a disaster area. FEMA and the Red Cross are on the scene, but there doesn’t appear to be anything to do. Folks, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Norfolk was a terrible blow not only to our country but to our military. We just lost trillions of dollars in weapons, ships, tanks, and supplies, and it’s the first American city to fall in this war.