The 45th Parallel, page 23
“What do you want?” I asked her, knowing what my heart desired, but I was too scared to follow it. I still felt crushed and never wanted to feel pain like that again.
Sera leaned into me and hugged me fiercely. “I love you, but I love him too.”
Sera threw herself at Matteo, who caught her, lifted her into his arms, and carried her off to the bedroom.
“And you?” Gio asked, lowering his arms, realizing I wasn’t going to respond the same way.
I looked out the window. My head was spinning. I had come here by accident. Planned to leave. Told him my deepest secrets. Then learned my mother was responsible for his father’s death. I felt guilt and shame and desire. But what do I want? I closed my eyes and tried to focus.
I felt the couch sink behind me and his arms slink around my waist. Unconsciously, I relaxed and let go of the fear holding me back. My head dropped onto his chest, and he bent down to kiss me. “Ti amo,” he whispered in my hair. “I love you, Caitlin.”
Rolling over onto my stomach, I searched his eyes.
“Do you mean that?”
“I do. I will make you the promise my parents made to each other. No matter what happens, I will always put you first, and I will never lie to you.”
My mouth found his, and the world ceased to exist. Sounds, sights, and smells faded away, as there were only the two of us. I felt him scoop me up like a child and carry me to his room.
Gio pushed the door closed with his hip and carried me to the bed. But instead of placing me on it, he sat upright against the pillows, with me still laid across his legs. My head rested on the concavity of his chest and neck, and we sat in silence as he cradled me against him, like I was valuable.
“I am so sorry for calling you a freak,” he whispered into my hair. “Mum had a book when I was a child, and it used that word to describe something that is unique, one of a kind. I didn’t think.”
“You didn’t know.” I sighed, trying to get closer, to crawl inside him. “But my entire childhood, I was taunted by children calling me that word, like it was nasty, something evil. I learned to fight back, but not once did it stop the pain. Every time that word was thrown at me, I could hear Sanjiv’s voice as he held me under the water, ragingly angry. I couldn’t work out why he was angry with me as he kicked me and stomped on me. At one point, I wondered if I truly was a freak and I deserved to die.”
“You were a child.” Gio stroked my hair soothingly. “I can’t believe anyone would hurt a child.”
“I know how lucky I was. Three of my sisters were murdered for the same reason. I wasn’t supposed to know, but Sera and I used to love sneaking around and listening to the grownups talk at night. We heard them discussing it after they thought we had gone to bed. They were scared, knowing that there were people out there trying to hunt us, but not knowing who. They had cut up all of my mother’s photos, calling her a witch. I don’t think I have ever heard her scared, but she was then.”
“Any parent would be scared if someone were murdering their children. Are you all hers?”
“All except three. Those three were from my aunt, my mother’s sister. But one of them was among the three murdered. The other two were only six, like me.”
“Oh, Caitlin. He rocked me gently, stroking my hair.”
I lay in his arms, knowing I would miss the traveling window and not caring. Nothing mattered but this moment, this place. My mind whirred once more. One thought floated to the surface.
“If the lake is the place you lost your father,” I asked quietly, “why would you go there? With Matteo? Both today and the day you found us.”
“We both felt we needed to go there to resolve this. We needed to be close to our father, to get closure, I suppose. Last night, we spoke to him and Mum. It helped us resolve our anger, release our grief, and see the path forward. But last time, the day we found you, it was for Matteo. He was so close to ending it, and it was my last chance to pull him back. We went there partly to remind him of what we have lost. I can’t believe it has been only a month since we found you. That place has brought us nothing but pain. I wanted him to see what pain it would cause me if he were to go.”
“Only pain?” I whispered.
“Until you came through.”
“And now?” I ran my hand along his rippled chest, making him sigh with contentment.
“Now I can see that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked.”
Chapter 41
The room shaking woke me with a start. Gio sprang from the bed and was tensed, alert in the darkness.
“What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good. The last time I felt the pods shake like that was when the portals closed.” Gio threw my clothes at me. “Get dressed.”
I hurriedly pulled on my jeans and top, not bothering with a bra. The shaking had stopped, but even in the dark of night, it was ominously still. As we exited his room, I saw Sera doing up her jeans behind a topless Matteo as he opened the door opposite us. I grinned at her, rapidly revised as we heard an explosion followed by gunshots echoing through the hallway and yelling reverberating around the walls.
“Get in the cupboard, now!” Gio barked as he shoved Sera and me toward the kitchen. I had images of his mother doing this to him as a child, saving him from what they thought was the end of the world. No sooner than the cupboard doors closed, the door was kicked in, and shouting filled the apartment. I held my breath and hoped they didn’t search the apartment. They didn’t. The uproar was short and sharp, but I couldn’t make out the words. I heard what sounded like a heavy impact against skin. Thuds. Grunts. But no shooting. Surely that was good? The tiny view I had from the gap in the cupboard door wasn’t enough to show me anything. Fuck! The hottest guy I had ever met told me he loved me, and now he was being attacked? I tried to hold my breath before taking quiet inhalations. I hated hiding. I had siblings and could hold my own. But that had undoubtedly been gunfire. I had heard it enough times. Illy had trained us to use small arms after our experience in Australia. Plus, there were hunters on Lewis to keep the deer population under control. Many a time, I had heard a crack in the distance.
I waited an eternity before hissing, “Sera!”
“What?”
“Do you think it is safe?”
A long pause ensued. “I think so.”
I pushed the door open a crack to get a better view, but the apartment was empty. One of the kitchen chairs had been knocked over, and I fought the strangest urge to right it.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
“Where?”
“To rescue our guys, of course.”
Shoeless, Sera and I crept through the corridors toward the Soggiorno deck. It didn’t take us long to hear voices and locate them. All of them. The entire community had been forced together in the central pod, men in black shouting at them, hitting people with the butts of their guns for not moving fast enough. Mothers were hushing crying babies. Older children cradled in laps, sheltering them from the invaders. I spotted Gianni sitting beside his mother, not wearing his leg braces. I wondered why for a moment, then realized he had likely been hauled out of bed. Residents were being dragged out of all the accommodation pods and pushed into the center of the room. There are a lot of them, I thought, scanning the room. The residents were all in nightwear, barely dressed. Some in robes, many in pants or tops only. The invaders, dressed in black but with no face coverings, patrolled the perimeter and menaced the residents. As one passed nearby and we shrank back into the shadows against the articulated wall, I realized it was a woman. Are they from Yellowstone? Did they follow us here?
We listened as one of them began calling names from a list in a heavily accented voice. I hoped like hell no one had added us to the manifest but didn’t see why they would. We had only been here twenty-eight days. Less than a month and I was already madly in love with a man I might never see again.
Each of the intruders was carrying a weapon, a semi-automatic gun. Illy had made them illegal in most communities, saying that they weren’t required for hunting and could cause too much damage in the wrong hands. These people were most certainly the wrong hands. I watched them patrolling the perimeter of the group. They were waiting. But for what? I heard one bark an instruction at another in a language I didn’t understand. It wasn’t English or Italian. After all our years in Scotland and Ireland, I had a fair smattering of Gaelic, but this was guttural. A language I had never heard. One of them grabbed a woman randomly from the crowd, yanking her by the hair, and smacked her hard across the face. I heard the thwack from where we stood and saw her face knocked sideways. She screamed, panicked, and he did it again with a closed fist. This time she fell silent, and he pushed her back into the crowd. Do they understand the lesson? The silence in response indicated that they definitely did.
Staying as far back as we could, I scanned the group for Matteo and Giovanni. The people were so closely packed together, it was impossible to identify them. I saw people I knew, Joseph, Riccardo, Carmelo, but not them.
“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath, and Sera pulled me back down the hallway to confer. “Ideas?”
“It would help to know who they are and what they want.”
“Didn’t you say that there are only six underwater habitations?”
“I did, and Matt confirmed it. Here, Yellowstone. One in France, Canada, Japan, and the Caspian Sea near what was Kazakhstan.”
“Then it can’t be that hard to work out where they are from. That isn’t English, so I don’t think they are from Yellowstone, so that only leaves four others. I’m not positive, but I don’t think that is French or Japanese they are speaking. I think we can safely assume they are the Caspians.”
“We need to get to the technical pod with the surveillance stuff. Did anyone say there was access anywhere else?”
I wracked my brain, trying to remember. “I can’t recall.”
“There are only apartments in this one, so there is no point staying here. But don’t we have a bigger problem? How do we get from this pod to another without traveling through the main one? They are all in the central pod, so we can’t get through there unseen. All the small pods are linked via the main one.”
“Fuck. This is a mess.”
“Okay…” said Sera, thinking. “Except you and I can go outside.”
“You are right. Gio told me there was a moon pool in the bottom of each pod. Nominally for drainage, but that was how they released the bodies back to the earth. So it is big enough for us to fit through. Surely all we need to do is get out of this one and swim to the next. No one will think to look for us outside. And we are safer swimming than trying to swing between them on ropes. The pods are huge. But I felt them drop, this one at least. There is no way we could get across if they were skyward. I peered out the window, but it was so dark outside I couldn’t tell if it was night, or we were underwater.”
“That isn’t a bad idea,” Sera admitted. “But we need to know where we are going. The colors are inside, not outside.”
“Well, it is the third from here. Assuming they are all still in some semblance of order. All we can do is eliminate them one at a time.”
“That is a lot of swimming and trying to find access points.”
“Agreed, but it is safe to assume that the access points will be the same on each pod. There is no logical reason to place them in differing locations.”
“You are so Freyja’s daughter, Miss Logical.”
“Because your mother is so fluffy,” I hissed. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Although I had never been there, once we located the maintenance access door in the center of our pod, we slipped quietly down the stairs to the base. The last thing we wanted was to find more of the intruders lurking, and we were unarmed. Reaching the bottom of the pod, I was surprised to see the floor curved and unlined. It was fiberglass, I realized, running my fingers along the rough, uneven fibers along the inside. The escape vent was centrally located in the pod’s base within an airlock. Gio had referred to it as the moon pool. I wasn’t sure if this was an official term or something flowery for the ceremony.
“Have you been here before?” I asked Sera.
“No. I had meant to when we were working on the sensors, but I was dealing with a glitch in the system, so I never made it down here.”
“Do you know how to open it?”
“No, but how hard can it be?”
A small metal loop in the trapdoor glistened in the dim light. I manipulated it and worked out that once twisted ninety degrees, it allowed the door to be pushed outward on hinges.
“Okay, but the issue isn’t opening it from the inside, but opening it from the outside,” I pointed out. “And likely no one has ever done that before us.”
“Let’s hope they built it in such a way that we can,” Sera muttered. “Or we are stuck.”
I maneuvered myself to lie on the edge of the opening, tipping my head down underneath the pod so I could see the underside of the trapdoor.
“There is an external lock,” I told Sera excitedly when I pulled my wet head back through. “It looks like a small hole. Is there something we can use as a key?”
As I hung from the access hatch, trying to work out how it could be opened from the outside, Sera hunted around, finally locating a long metal bar hanging behind the door. One end was small and square. The other flattened like a chisel.
“We will need to take the key with us,” I pointed out. “We won’t have access to others if they are inside. But we should practice getting back into this one before we head to others.”
Sera sighed. She hated swimming.
“I’ll do it.”
Sera and I were both strong swimmers, taught by our mother, Freyja, after the incident on my seventh birthday. Every day she had made us swim laps of the loch near our home, no matter how bitterly cold it was. Never again would she allow me to be a victim. I had heard her tell my father that one day after he suggested that, when we were turning blue, it was too cold to make us swim.
I slipped through the floor and splashed into the water, the key in hand. The water was warm. Nothing like the frigid lochs of home. But we knew we were located over geothermal vents, their primary power source, so that made sense. Sera closed the hatch, and holding my breath, I maneuvered the key. It was dark, and I fought to see in the dark. Bloody hell, I could feel my lungs needing to expand. Memories of being held underwater bubbled to the surface, and I panicked. I banged my fist against the hatch and burst through, gasping for air.
“Glad we practiced?”
I nodded, panting, trying to get my anxiety under control. “Give me a sec. I’ll try again.”
On the fourth attempt, I worked out how the mechanism operated. The small end of the metal bar inserted in the square hole, and a 45-degree twist was required to unlock the mechanism. Spun too far, and the latch would rotate past the opening point. Then the larger flatter end of the metal key was inserted like a handle into the groove along the edge to pull the trapdoor down.
I opened the hatch and popped through, grinning as I gasped for air.
“Give me one more try, and then we are good to go.”
I locked the hatch from the outside before re-opening it a few seconds later with a grin.
Three moon pools later and we found ourselves soaking wet, but in the yellow high-tech facility, jampacked with servers, computers, and machines with flashing lights. Sera had spent most of her time here, but some of it was new to me. Despite my apprenticeship technically being to Callie, both Sera and I had spent months in Clava with Tadhg, learning all about the backup file shares, the satellite access, and the surveillance systems. Tadhg had been running tech for Illyria for over a decade since she had taken over as Chief. Much of it had been moved to Lewis and Newgrange, where we had gained access, both officially and recreationally. But this was astounding. I acknowledged Gio had only scratched the surface on our tour that day.
We tiptoed through the corridor toward the control room, fearful that they would have someone here. We were surprised to find it was empty, although they had clearly been here with the doors kicked in and screens smashed.
“Okay, what now?” I whispered. Sera was better than I was at technology and was already rapidly assessing the racks of flashing lights and cables.
“Cameras,” she muttered. “We access the cameras.”
“Do you know how?” I asked.
“No, but it can’t be that hard.” She smirked. “But I think not using the control room makes sense, in case they come back. There is a desktop computer you can use in there.” She gestured to the small office at the back. “I’ll track down one of the tech laptops to use.”
“I’ve found something.” I popped my head around the doorway to find Sera sitting on the floor, an unfamiliar laptop on her lap scanning madly. She had a cable leading to the data storage behind her.
“Me too. You go first.”
“The six unhab communities are Piedmont, Yellowstone, Caspian in the Caspian Sea, Hokkaido Japan, Nova Scotia in Canada, and the Pyrenees in France, all on the 45th parallel. Let me guess. You knew that already.”
Sera looked shamefaced. “I did.”
“And?”
“These guys are definitely from the Caspian one. The community there is built in the Caspian Sea, which, while inland and technically a lake, has a higher salinity content than freshwater.”
“So it is a sea?”
“Not exactly. It has about a third of the salt content of an ocean, but to drink it all the time, they need a desalination plant. That also ensures that the salt content doesn’t degrade the pipes and equipment. From what I can work out, the desalination plant has failed, and their crops are dying. People can’t drink the water undiluted, and the higher salt content is corroding their machinery.”
