Page 59 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

A section of the ward beside us blew out just as we passed, so I didn’t see what happened. But I felt the wave pick Pinkie up and throw him down the tunnel. Although what it was carrying us through, I was no longer sure.

The water slide, or what had been one a second ago, now resembled a limp plastic bag floating in the sea. The only reason it had any shape was the water pouring in and filling in out. We couldn’t even reach the surface like this, being trapped by disintegrating wards like the remnants of a spider’s web, one that was hauling us down to our doom.

My power took that moment to return, but it was too late to help us this time, especially as I still couldn’t use it. Enid’s power had been like a sip of cool water in a desert—wonderful but useless to someone dying of thirst. I couldn’t shift us back to our rooms; I couldn’t make it to the surface; I doubted I could go three feet with how exhausted I—

Three feet.

Three feet.

Three goddamned feet. Damn it, Cassie, think! Why was that so important?

Because it was ringing through my head like a bell. But said head was also doing loop-de-loops down a disintegrating track while Pinkie’s screams echoed in my ears, Enid shook me and yelled something in my face, and fey spells lit up the darkness. And yet, all the while, even my heartbeat was thumping out three feet, three feet, three feet.

Or how about three inches, I thought, as that looked like all the width the remaining wards had left. Get to the other side, even if the strain of it knocked me out, and Enid could get us back to the surface. Or Pinkie could before we all drowned.

“Close up,” I told Pinkie and pulled Enid back into the stinky cavern.

“What are you doing?” she screeched, which seemed to be her preferred tone.

For once, I didn’t mind.

“Something called a Hail Mary back on Earth,” I said, watching the skin over our heads heal together as if there’d never been a rift there.

Demons.

You had to love them sometimes.

“What?” she was shaking me again.

“I’m going to try to get us to the open ocean,” I explained. “But it will take everything I have left. That means—”

“Open?” she screeched. “You can’t break through a Margygr spell! That’s why they were given this task—so there can be no cheating on the course!”

“Well, the course seems to be disintegrating pretty well on its own right now—”

“Because it’s not finished yet!”

“—and I’m not going to break through it; I’m going to avoid it.”

“What?”

“Just get us to the surface, all right? I won’t be able to help you after this.”

She just stared at me because, yeah. Kind of a lot to ask of a kitchen maid. But then she surprised me, set her jaw, and nodded.

Well, okay then.

You’re up, Cassie, I thought, grabbing for my power and hesitating because this was going to be bad. Bad enough that I could almost hear the Pythian power yelling at me, telling me not to try it, warning me without the words it didn’t have by a deep thrumming that echoed through my soul. But I wasn’t going out like this, without even attempting to save myself; I’d rather die the hard way than drown like a freaking fish in a net, and so I shifted.

For a moment, there was nothing, just a blinding light and an echoing silence, with every sense I had cutting out simultaneously.

If this was death, it wasn’t so bad, I thought.

Not like last time.

And then I didn’t think anything except, oh, God. Oh, God. Because the lost senses had returned, all at once, and—

“Oh, God!” I screamed.

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