Page 66 of Echoes of the Tide

She’d gotten used to the rolling waves of the sea. The building stopped all those waves, though, and now it was just still.

Her lungs screamed for air, and she turned. Kicking against the metal, she swam toward the shimmering light at the surface. Every inch of her prayed that it was an empty room that she would swim up to.

She didn’t gasp as she crested the surface. Instead, she kept her head low and wiped her nose free before taking in a deep inhalation. At least that was quieter than the gasp that would have told everyone where she was.

The base of this tower was flooded, it seemed. The foundation had cracked long ago, leaving fissures like veins spreading throughout the base of this room. Some fissures were hidden underneath beams that had fallen from the ceiling and created small grottos she could hide in. And she’d need to.

Groups of men and women clustered around fires that were on the ground. But the people weren’t right. Just one glance and all she saw were scars and wounds and strange faces. It looked like they had purposefully scarred their faces. Everyone seemed to have some form of mark on their face, right down their eyes, all the way down their cheeks. Some had scars that made a permanent smile stretch beyond their lips.

As she watched the nearest group, a woman stood with a doll in her hands. A baby doll, wearing a bright blue dress. Shereached behind it, cranked the small pull tab on the back, and giggled as the baby laughed. Then she tossed it into the fire and danced around it.

This was beyond odd. This was a dangerous, mad place with people burning toys to stay warm.

She reached for the beam above her head and used it to push herself back underwater. Swimming to the next beam and the next hiding place made it a little easier to survey them all. She didn’t even know what she was looking for, but she hoped the key itself would be rather obvious.

Until she noticed that the nearest group next to her was eating. Their boisterous laughter filled the room with a cacophony of sound. One of them gestured with a long bone that had gristle hanging off of it.

“You caught him first?”

“Yeah, he came over the bridge at the switch. Didn’t have any idea that I was still standing there.” The second man who spoke had a greasy lump of hair hanging off of his chin. Bald other than that greasy beard, he looked like a villain in a fairytale. “Too easy to pick off.”

“How’d you kill him?” asked the first man, ripping a huge bite of meat off the bone. “Gun?”

“Nah. I like to do things with my hands.”

The flash of silver caught her attention as the second man pulled out a hunting knife that was longer than her forearm. “I gutted him to make sure the meat stayed sweet.”

The meat?

Her eyes tilted to the side, even though she knew she didn’t want to see the truth of what they were saying. Next to the fire, she had thought it was a third man. His booted feet were set up like he was sitting with them. But as she moved just slightly in the water, she could see that he was missing an arm. Intestines hung out of his belly, and his head lolled forward.

Dead. So dead. And that arm was hanging over the fire beside the men.

The first man had been eating... By all the gods, that was an elbow in his hands. The gristly meat hanging off of it was the man’s biceps.

She pressed her hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t make any noise. The fish she’d eaten last night rose in the back of her throat, pressing against her tongue and begging to be released.

They were eating people here.

Oh, fuck.

Fuck, they were eating people, and she was in the middle of everything. Her heart thundered in her chest. Even though she was in icy water, she felt flushed and hot. This was wrong. It was so fucking wrong. She’d always heard they weren’t right in the toy tower, but she hadn’t realized...

Ace ducked under the water again, making sure any whimpers were little more than bubbles that could easily be misconstrued as something dropping from the ceiling into the water. Because she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t be surrounded by cannibals while she was looking for some stupid key that probably didn’t exist anymore.

She couldn’t.

She had to go back out to the ocean. Fuck Jacob. He could get the key on his own. She’d tell him where it was and everything she knew about it, but she would not stay when these people would eat her if they found her.

But then the thoughts fluttered through her mind again. She could hear her sister’s voice in her head. Laura had begged her to stay back then. And if she failed in this, wasn’t she failing her sister again?

So she turned under the water and told herself she was everything Maketes had said. She was brave. She was capable.She was a courageous woman who knew how to take care of herself and if that meant facing a group of cannibals?

Oh, she was going to puke in the water. They were eating that man.

Grinding her teeth, she forced herself to swim past all the people. She tried hard to not look at all the other bits of meat they were eating. Meat she was now certain didn’t come from rats, like her own people had been eating. But it was so hard to not look at the absolute madness unfurling around her.

No wonder people didn’t come here. No wonder everyone warned the others to stay as far away from this cursed place as possible.

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