CHAPTER TWELVE

The Ocean Room

Most of Nhagaspir seemed to be made up of hallways that were different from the first hallway I had seen. They were completely underground and no one had bothered to try to hide that fact. The walls and ceilings looked exactly like the tunnel I had used to enter the village—bare rock.

Axel and I walked through a hallway that led to the Ocean Room. The passageway opened and I had the feeling that I was emerging from a cave as we stepped into the expanse that made up the room.

In front of us was a raised ceiling, the rock was carved to look like angry storm clouds over our heads. Our feet sank into white sand and the sizable room was filled with aqua-colored water that was lit up in the same way as a hot tub, with lights shining under the surface of the water. The water itself was cold as it splashed against my bare feet.

In the midst of the circle of water was a small building, like an ancient submarine that had been beached in the shallow water. It was spherical and built heavy with large bolts protruding at the seams in the iron. A round door was on the front of it like an old-fashioned scuba diving mask. It was even made of glass, like someone enormous underwater was using the room as a helmet.

“Ever seen anything like this before?” Axel asked, gloating at the sight before us.

“No. Something like this would be in a museum. How old is it?”

“Who even knows? Keeping track of time is annoying. What does it matter what year it is, what day it is? Why would that matter here?”

“How do we get across?” I asked.

He smirked. “However you like.”

So, the method was going to be left up to me? “Is the water shallow all the way over?” I persisted.

“It might be,” he answered vaguely.

I was the one who said I wanted to see the Ocean Room and try ordering tectonic plates around. I didn’t know if I would be able to stop a tsunami, but I wanted to see how Pricina did her work in the village.

How should I get across? It was obvious to me that Axel wanted me to walk on water in order to prove my divinity, but I’d have to make the water vibrate in order to make it warm enough to touch comfortably. I wasn’t much in the mood and the simplest solution was not what Axel wanted, but I didn’t need to put on a show for him. I merely stepped up into the air like I was climbing an invisible staircase. I could order my calcium to position itself in the air as I chose and the air was much warmer than the water. I began walking in a straight line toward the center of the Ocean Room.

“I can’t do that,” he said, watching me.

I turned around and stood in the air. “How do you get across?”

“I use one of these.” He pointed to the wall behind us and showed me what looked like black slate surfboards.

So he ordered the slate to carry him across the water. It was like what I had done with Rhuk, asking it to be my elevator. That meant that he hadn’t yet allowed himself to free fall the way Rhuk had encouraged me to fall in the tunnel down to the village. How old was Axel? How long had he been stunted?

“You have a lot of gaps in your knowledge, huh? You know how to manipulate tectonic plates, but not how to order yourself around?”

“I can learn a lot by watching you,” he said, taking his first step into the air. I could see at once that he was not commanding the calcium in his body, but instead the material in the shoes he was wearing.

He looked very proud of himself until he noticed that I was not wearing shoes. Then his shoulders slumped. “What are you doing?”

“I’m commanding the matter in my own body,” I replied.

“Aren’t those parts of your body busy?”

“My bones are not busy. Everything stays with the bones.”

We walked side by side without talking until we arrived at the heart of the Ocean Room. Axel bent to open the door with his hand but abruptly stopped himself before waving it open with a slight motion of his hand.

I glanced at him. The urge to revert back to doing things in a human way was obviously a fight that never ended.

Turning my attention back to the heart of the Ocean Room, I bent my head to look inward. It looked like the inside had been wallpapered in black snake scales. The room was empty, except for an archaic dentist chair.

“I sit here?” I asked curiously.

“You don’t have to. We do it for convenience, but you could lie on the floor or... float in the middle of the room,” he suggested cautiously.

I said that the chair would be fine.

Pricina told me that I was the first immortal since Brandon. Knowing that made me more tolerant of Axel’s adoring glances. He led me around like I was a princess, holding the very tips of my fingers. Axel settled me in the seat like I was an infant getting buckled in for a long ride in a car.

“Are you married?” I asked him suddenly.

“Yes.”

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“Where is she?”

“She’s wandering around here somewhere. I check on her periodically and every time I expect to find her dead. She’s been ill for eighty-one years. She probably doesn’t have much time left,” he said sadly. “She doesn’t seem to be improving.”

“Is there anything that can save her?” I asked with tight lips.

“I don’t know. Sometimes Brandon will work with one of them for a while to try to get them to realign their body in a way that makes sense, but after he’s finished, they always make a mess of their Red Forest again. Sometimes, they mess themselves up worse than before. It would take a god with a perfect healing ability to save them. Christian used to have that level. These people only got sick since he broke down and left,” Axel said, an accent of something that wasn’t English surfaced in his inflection. “We’ve tried things, but there may not be a way. My wife didn’t break trying to control the poles. She was doing this.” He bit his tongue, immediately regretting what he said. He looked at me, gauging my reaction. “You don’t look bothered. You’re not worried it will break you too?”

“We’re all buried anyway,” I said, dusting the place with dark humor.

He laughed. “Far from it. Even though we are underground, there are many things happening to give us hope. You became one of us and you’re already a master at the second level. This job will not hurt you the way it hurt Yvette. If Christian comes back and returns to being a fourth level, you and he should be able to flip the poles and save us from that trouble, which once corrected will stay corrected for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s lucky it will need no further monitoring.”

I nodded.

“It’s also good to have people who have lived on the surface recently. If an opportunity presents itself, I would like to return to the surface to find a new wife.”

“Aren’t you going to wait until she’s dead?” I asked.

Axel shrugged. “Our lives are different from human lives. I don’t care about food, air, water, or the sun, but I can’t be alone in my head for much longer. She severed our connection with her last moment of sense. She’s still my wife, but not in the way you are Christian’s wife. She’s my wife by vow, but not by flesh or bone. I shall take another.”

“How many have you had?” I asked.

“She was the fourth.”

“Is it that easy to replace a woman?”

“If it was, Christian would have found his first woman much sooner. He was on the surface for a hundred years before he gave you his heart. It is not easy. I’ll tell you one thing though, I’ll never do a tooth again. She tore that from her mouth like our bond was nothing. I’ll do what Christian did and give her something she can’t rip out. If our connection had stayed intact, maybe I would have been able to save her.”

Suddenly, I knew he was wrong. He said he could have saved her. I had a sword protruding from my chest. I saw it all the time, a reminder that it might not be possible to save the one I love even if I was willing to give him everything.

“Do you want to be strapped in?” Axel asked.

I looked at the seat and thought of all the comatose lying around I had done when I was back in the castle. “You guys should get a better chair down here. This thing is like something in a dental office from a century ago.”

“When you’re working with the elements, the position of your body matters little,” he replied, retrieving a strap like a seatbelt and clipping it around my middle. There were more straps, but he didn’t bother with them and left me alone in the room, slapping the door shut with his mind instead of his muscles.

After he closed the door behind him, my eyes adjusted to the low light filtering in from the door behind me and I saw that the individual surfaces in front of me were not scales but black stones in that shape. They were laid out in perfect order.

One jiggled.

I spoke to it.

It told me that it represented a tectonic plate and that plate was getting pushed around by another tectonic plate.

“That one is touching me!”

“I’m always touching you,” another one replied. “I can’t help it!”

“No, he’s really squishing up against me.”

I stared. This couldn’t possibly be what it meant to control the earth’s tectonic plates. I didn’t answer either one of the squabbling stones. I reached into their molecular makeup and followed the particle streams that led to the real plates under the ocean floor. I saw what they were complaining about. Both of the stones on the wall were attached to larger tectonic plates under the Pacific Ocean by a line of particles that were accustomed to relaying information. The molten iron of the world’s center was hurling itself against the crushing weight of the ocean, and their forces against each other were moving the plates.

Back to the two plates that were fighting. The offensive one wasn’t the only one putting pressure on it. There were many layers putting pressure on it. It was bending. It was worried it would break, but I saw at once that there was no immediate fear that it would bend far enough for that to happen. It moved too slowly for anything to happen immediately. It was moving the way hair grew. You couldn’t tell the exact day your bangs got long enough to poke you in the eye. These things needed to be watched carefully, but not incessantly.

The problem was that there wasn’t a single tectonic plate that didn’t have an enormous amount of pressure placed on it. Once one of them got the green light that it was okay to complain, all of them started whining together, making a miserable murmur come from the wall.

“Stones,” I said, already tired of listening to them bicker. “Maybe Pricina likes listening to all of you at once, but I’m going to have to ask all of you to be silent while communicating with me. Jiggle a little and that will get my attention. Otherwise, please be quiet.”

After that, there was blessed silence. I could hear the rocks jiggle and clack against each other when something happened. I oversaw it with a mere glance. Everything was fine. Nothing cataclysmic was happening.

When Pricina came to get me, she looked refreshed, like she’d just come out of a bath. We stood on the shore and she gave my hand a quick pump of a handshake before pulling away. “How were they? Did they behave for you?”

“They’re not allowed to talk anymore,” I replied, waving in their direction. “They’re only allowed to tremble in their seats if something is wrong. If you prefer for them to talk, you can give them permission again, but I strongly discourage choosing that.”

She looked at me in awe with her huge black eyes. “You can hear their words?”

I nodded, trying not to make a fuss of it.

“I can’t do that. Not exactly. Sometimes I think they’re talking and then I think I’ve been down here too long and I’m going crazy.”

“In that case, you might want to talk to them.” I turned my head toward them and gave them the order to speak again.

“That is a high-level skill. It must have been painful to learn so much so suddenly,” she said, looking at me with pity.

I remembered the pain I felt delivering the sword. She was not wrong. The pain was gone now, but the memory of it filled me with fear-like trauma. I forced myself not to cry. I was a goddess and I could swallow a bullet, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from filling with tears.

She placed her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. These abilities are not free.”

Even though it felt premature to say it, I turned to her and said, “You have to be my new best friend. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded and, taller than me, she put her arm around me and leaned me into her brown shoulder. “It’s time to be brave.”

We stood like that for approximately fifteen seconds before she got to the point.

“I didn’t come to get you because I want to take over in the Ocean Room. I came because Rhuk is making a racket. It won’t stop moving.”

In the next second, it had skidded across the sand and thumped that it had news.