The Blue Tower (The Five Towers Book 1), page 9
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Don’t know much,” Hank says, “but Abram told us it’s another race. Small teams. You two are together, of course.”
I glance to Emma. She eyes the water and feels a hint of terror. The wind blows hard, rippling the indigo surface into thousands of white caps as far as we can see.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’ve never been on a boat.”
“We’ll be fine,” I say, as if I know what’s about to happen. “Come on, let’s find ours.”
She follows close as we walk the pier. Pairs line up beside the boats. Helena ignores us as we pass. Her servant, Jack, is doing all the work of readying their boat. Shelley works together with her same servant, Adele. It seems odd to be in the same class as Shelley now, since she’s been here much longer and learned much more.
The next to last boat is empty. It looks like the others, if a little worn. The hull is maybe twenty feet long. The front half is covered, with a single window in the weathered wood. A mast with two sails rises in the middle. The sails flap uselessly in the wind.
“Listen,” a voice booms out over the wind, “this is not a race of speed.” Back along the pier, Abram stands at the far end. “It is one of distance,” he says. “The towers may be close at the center, but do not underestimate the size of their lands. The ocean, of course, surrounds them all, as the Genius surrounds the mind. But back to the contest at hand. Whoever brings back proof that they’ve gone the farthest is the winner. You may leave at any time. Bon voyage!”
A few groups move fast, despite what Abram said. They’re climbing into their boats and untying. Ropes are pulled, sails drawn tight. The first boat catches the wind and begins to glide over the roiling ocean. It looks like they’ve sailed before.
I step into our boat, getting a feel for it.
“Cipher, a little help?” Emma stands on the dock, waiting.
“Right.” I’d forgotten.
She grabs my hand, squeezing tight and looking uneasy, as she boards the rocking hull. She immediately sits on the bench along the boat’s side.
How do I do this? I know how this works, mechanically, but the only experience I can actually remember was the last race. And then we’d had oars to help control the boat.
I study the mast, the ropes, the sails. I find the rope connected to the main sail and follow it through a pulley at the bottom of the mast to a knot, which I begin to untie. The rope is coarse in my hands and my slightest pull on it brings tension. So I pull the rope tight, the sail goes tight, and the boat jerks forward. I sit at the back of the boat beside a large wooden handle. It must be the tiller that controls the rudder.
Rope in one hand, tiller in the other, I pull harder. The sail draws tight and I can feel the energy coursing through me.
But we don’t move.
I catch Emma’s eyes. She laughs.
“What’s so funny?” I’d be mad if she weren’t so cute about it.
She stands slowly and turns to the pier. Her hands take hold of a rope that is tied to a wooden beam on the pier.
Oops. As she unties it, I start to laugh, too.
She finishes undoing the knot and sits back at the side of the boat. We both look ahead, across the ocean. Now we’re sailing.
27
THE OTHER BOATS ARE all ahead of us. Abram said it wasn’t a speed race, and it’s not like I know how to speed up anyway. Unless I want to move the air myself. But it’s probably better to save my energy and focus on controlling the boat. I let the wind do its work as I study the mechanics, trying to get a feel for it.
I pull a rope that draws the front sail tighter. It adds a little speed, a little control. The rudder needs only a nudge to shift us left or right. The hard part is knowing where to go.
Ahead is ocean as far as I can see. Rocky cliffs spread further and further apart on either side of us as we sail out of Blue’s vast harbor. There’s no sign of a dock, a beach, or any safe place to stop. I’ve avoided looking back, and a glance confirms this was a good idea. We’re already far beyond swimming to the tower. Still it stands enormously tall and slender, like a pencil jutting up from the surface of the earth. Except apparently this is not earth.
“Look.” Emma climbs out of the sheltered part of the boat with two flat pieces of bread, their faded yellowish color dull in comparison to her hair. “Want one?”
“Sure, how many do we have?”
“Plenty. You should check it out. I’ll take the rudder.”
I eye her questioningly. “You said you’ve never been on a boat.”
“And you don’t remember how to sail,” she says, “but you are now. I’ve been watching you. Looks pretty easy. Sit there, make sure the ropes stay tied, and hold the rudder to keep going straight, right?”
It does seem easy enough for now. I let her take over steering. She guides the boat as I duck through the door. My head almost touches the ceiling inside. It’s like a tiny home. Two small cots line the sides and there are a few shelves of food. Bottles of fresh water, flat bread, and dried fish. It looks like we’re stocked to last a week.
As I sit on the bed, the significance of all this food hits me. We’re supposed to sleep here? How long are we supposed to be gone? A day on the boat might be nice, but a night, much less many nights, starts to feel like a stupid game. My eyes are almost level with the sea through the porthole window. The sky is the same gray-blue as always.
I rise and walk out of the enclosed space. The Blue Tower is even further away, even smaller. The tips of the other towers are just visible beyond it. The five towers aren’t that far apart, with each one bordering the Scouring. Yellow is beside Blue, going clockwise, so maybe we can sail to it. It beats going the other way, to Black, or straight out into the ocean that looks like it never stops. I’d rather keep land in sight, even if it’s inaccessible cliffs.
When I explain this to Emma, her eyes light up. “I’d love that!”
“It’ll be just a visit,” I say. “And that’s assuming we can even get there. But why not try? The wizard said whoever goes the farthest gets the prize. If we could go and bring back some kind of proof that we made it to the Yellow Tower, maybe that would win.”
“Bring back what?”
This could be hard. The link reveals that she suddenly feels homesick. She might not want to leave if we reach Yellow. But she’ll have to obey me now if it comes to it. “Does the land around the Yellow Tower border the ocean?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Yellow’s fields spread out far beyond it, as vast as Blue’s ocean. I started in those fields. They stretch for miles, and at the end there’s a wall. It’ll be a long journey. Even if we find our way there, I don’t think we could get past the wall.”
“What’s between the wall and the ocean?”
She shrugs. “I never went outside the wall.”
We decide to give it a try anyway. We sail in quiet for a while. The wind rises, whipping even harder, driving us up and down the huge waves. Emma has to hang her head over the side to empty her stomach. So much for the flat bread.
I keep my hand on the tiller and my eyes on the black cliffs to our right. The Blue Tower is no longer in sight. There isn’t a single place where we could stop. Only one of the other boats can still be seen, and it’s just a dot on the horizon, much farther out. Something about the open ocean is unnerving, so I stay close to the coast, but not too close. Waves thunder steadily against the rock cliffs. Blasts of white foam spray into the air.
It’s much later, as I’m eating my dinner of dried fish, when I first notice the sky growing dark.
28
“WE SHOULD TURN BACK.” Emma’s face is pale, maybe slightly green, as she lifts her head away from the side of the boat. She hasn’t eaten, moved, or spoken in a long time.
I study the waves crashing on the black cliffs to our right. “We won’t make it back before night, and there’s nowhere to dock between here and there.”
“We can’t keep going in the dark.”
She’s right, of course. This dark isn’t like the night that I can vaguely remember, filled with soft silvery light from a moon and a sky full of stars. This night will be pitch black nothingness. Not exactly good for sailing.
Another wave thunders against the cliffs. “I could try to maintain this distance from the rocks, using the sound.”
She stares at me.
“You know, hearing the waves, we can tell how far away we are...roughly.”
She’s still glaring. Her sea sickness has her feeling salty. “Can you tell where a rock juts out? What if the wind changes?”
I don’t have answers. We’re stuck on a small sailboat in a foreign ocean with no place to land and the gaping mouth of complete darkness is about to swallow us. I look around the boat, thinking.
My eyes pass over a rope, and I remember: an anchor.
“Take the rudder,” I say, and Emma does.
I scurry forward and pick up the anchor. It has two sharp points, and it’s connected to the boat by a long rope. Seems straightforward enough. I toss the anchor overboard, the rope whistling down into the midnight blue water. Down, down, down. This has to work.
The rope catches.
I lift the anchor and it rises like a feather. No way to tell if it hit bottom or not. But probably not, if it pulled the connecting rope out its entire length.
I move back to Emma at the rudder. “We have to steer closer to shore.”
She looks past me, to the cliff and the black rocks and the crashing waves. The sound thunders, the wind’s blowing harder. We can’t get much closer, but we have to try. The sky is still darkening.
I take the rudder and turn hard towards the cliff. The anchor is still down, drifting. Catch, catch, please catch. We just need to get to shallower water, but the cliff wall drops so sharply. Maybe there is no shallower water.
The crashing waves are closer now. The thundering is louder. We can feel the ocean spray misting our skin.
“You have to turn back,” Emma says, her voice weak. “Please.”
I shake my head. “Just a little farther. It’s our best chance.”
My hand is on the tiller, ready to turn fast. We can’t get much closer without risking a crash. I start to count. Five, four, three—
The boat crests a wave, wind still heavy in the sail, and we glide down. At the bottom we feel it: a jerk.
The anchor rope pulls taut. The cliff wall is about thirty feet away.
I dash around the boat, quickly untying the ropes for the sails. They flap viciously in the wind, and Emma rushes to help. We draw the sails down like curtains. We tie off the loose ropes.
Another big wave lifts the boat and my breath freezes. Just at the wave’s crest I feel the jerk again, the rope connecting us to the anchor and the sea floor pulling tight, keeping us away from the rock wall, keeping us as safe as we can be.
I’m suddenly laughing and Emma grabs my hands. We’re both laughing, or maybe crying, as the waves crash just beyond us and night falls.
29
THE SUN DOESN’T APPEAR—THAT makes eight straight days since I arrived at the Blue Tower without a glimpse of the familiar red-orange ball—but the gray light of dawn comes and so it’s morning all the same. The water is shockingly calm. All night Emma and I rocked up and down, over and over, sleeping across from each other in the little cots inside the hull. Now the deep blue water is still. No crashing waves, hardly a ripple.
It’s nice for a moment, a place of peace and quiet. Then I realize the problem. We need the wind to sail. In the motionless air we are stuck.
I’m sitting by the rudder, thinking, when Emma first steps out of the hull. She figures out the problem faster than I did. “What do we do now?”
“Wait for the wind.”
“What about your power?”
Of course she’s right, but who knows how long I could keep it up, or whether this Genius thing will let me do it. Harnessing the wind is not like riding a bike. Like riding a bike. I know I’ve ridden a bike. It’s a vehicle with two wheels and pedals and brakes to squeeze at the handle bars. I remember one thing clearly: little green guards over my handle bars. I try to remember when I rode a bike, how I got it, how I learned to ride it. But the only memory is those little green guards. I loved those things.
“Okay.” I force myself to focus. I move into action, pulling the anchor, lifting the sails. “You got the rudder?” I ask Emma.
She nods and sits by it. “Let’s go.”
The air around us is motionless. This makes it harder to move the air, inertia doing its work, but a few streams begin to flow. Then I reach wider with my mind to gather more of it, visualizing the streams like little currents of water joining into a main, rushing river. The air begins to surge and blow into the main sail. In moments I have it blowing full on, and the boat takes off.
Any time my thoughts begin to drift to something different—a memory, anything—the wind weakens. Emma starts to talk, and as I listen to her words, I lose control of the air, like a slimy fish slipping through my hands.
“Sorry, I need quiet.”
I use all of my energy to focus on the air. I try to tie off the thoughts, to keep the wind blowing without having to constantly focus, but I can’t. Only my active concentration works, but it works well when it’s going. We’re faster than yesterday. The water is like glass in front of us, and a V-shaped wedge of rippled waves spreads out behind us.
After maybe an hour of this I feel tired, really tired. I’m sweating and leaning back on the bench along the side of the boat. I let go, take a break.
My eyes close. There’s a gentle breeze along my skin but I’m hardly thinking about it or about anything. I’m bone tired.
“Hey. Cipher. Cipher!”
Someone shakes me awake. I feel like I’ve slept an entire night. Emma is beside me, one hand on the rudder, her blond hair blowing in the wind. We’re gliding up and down big swells of waves. Waves crash in the distance. Billowing clouds stand like gray giants upon the ocean. They seem to be coming towards us. Lightning flashes in the distance.
“How long was I asleep?” I ask.
“A couple hours, but you did well. The breeze was picking up when you dozed off. I figured I’d let you sleep.”
“Thanks. It was exhausting.”
She nods. “Healing is the same way. The bigger the hurt, the more energy it saps.”
I look back at the clouds. “How fast are they coming?”
“Fast,” she says. “We don’t have long before the storm hits.”
“That could be bad, really bad.” I imagine lightning hitting the mast, or a wave crashing us into the cliff. I study her face and find calm in her blue eyes. “You’re not worried.”
“I am...a little.” She smiles. “But look.”
She points ahead. There, for first time since we’ve left the Blue Tower, I see a small sandy cove within the cliff—a safe place to land the boat.
“The problem,” Emma says, pulling my gaze back to her, “is that I don’t think we’ll beat the storm. I’ve been studying our pace, and we’ll be just past half way there when the clouds reach us.”
As if on cue, a cool gust of wind rushes by. It catches the sail hard, yanking us forward, and then it’s gone. I look left and see the clouds closing on us, looking darker.
“Here.” Emma’s holding out a piece of bread. “You must be starving. Eat this, then you need to make us go as fast you can.”
Dread grows in me as I scarf down the food. Then I begin to channel the wind. I feel like a used-up battery, unable to draw as much power as before, but it’s easier, too, because the wind is blowing. Now I just have to direct it the way I want it to go.
The sail is tight as it can be, lifting the boat higher in the water and racing forward. We’re skimming over the waves, rushing across the breakers.
Thunder rumbles to our left. A flock of white birds soars away from the clouds and over our heads.
The wind is gusting and whipping past us now. The air is getting hard to control, blowing in different directions, faster then slower, then faster still. The waves are hammering the cliff to our right, but we’re getting close to the cove. Maybe two more minutes and we’ll round the bend of the cliff and the waves can wash us ashore on the soft sand. It looks like a golden nest surrounded by dark ocean, black cliffs, and a slate sky.
“Oh no, no.” I feel Emma’s terror as she speaks. She shouts, “Turn left!”
I turn and see a monster wave coming at us. It’s more than twice as tall as any we’ve seen. It’s taller than our mast.
Emma pushes the rudder hard right, trying to steer into it. “Left!” she shouts again.
I try to grab at the wind with my mind, like trying to control a charging bear with my bare arms. I manage to add to Emma’s steering and we’re suddenly climbing, up, up, up, the side of the wave.
The boat feels like it would flip backwards if not for the wind I’m blasting into the sail. Then all at once we tilt down and reach a moment of perfect leveled balance on the crest of the wave. In that instant the world explodes in white.
Blazing, burning white.
I’m flat on the deck. My ears are ringing. I can’t hear anything.
Emma’s face is beside mine. Her expression frantic. Her lips move but I can’t hear anything.
I follow her eyes as they move up. Just in time I see something huge falling down at us, the mast, and I roll over to try to cover Emma’s body and the huge wooden beam slams into my back.
The whiteness is gone. All is black.
30
WAVES LAP GENTLY. A fire crackles.
A light breeze brings smells of brine and smoke.
My eyes blink open slowly. I have a splitting headache, a sore neck. My vision is blurry as I try to stand and focus on the fire. It’s a neat pile of burning wood with one exception. A huge beam, thicker than my leg, hangs over the fire, half burnt through, with the other half extending to the shallow water nearby.
