Dark Life: Rip Tide Read Free

with my chest aching as though I’d inhaled too much Liquigen. Whoever he was, he could have been dead for a while. Maybe even years. He was so perfectly preserved, who could tell? The lack of air and frigid water temperature had to have turned the township into one giant walk-in freezer.
    “Ty,” Gemma’s voice said softly inside my ear. “Come back. We’ll radio for help.”
    Sounded good to me. I sure wasn’t itching to go poking around a ghost town, but a single thought kept mefrom stroking away. What if someone inside was still alive and needed help?
    Doubtful, yes, considering that seaweed had put down roots on the exterior. But a stationary township wasn’t necessarily a broken one. What if this township had been sitting here awhile but the engines had conked out only days ago? I had to check for survivors, no matter how unsettling the thought was.
    I motioned to Gemma that I was heading inside. When she said, “Be careful,” I realized part of me had been hoping she’d talk me out of it.
    Dropping under the immense structure gave me the uneasy sense of swimming beneath an island. The bottom was flat, so finding the entry port was easy enough. But one glance told me where the problem lay.
    I swam out and circled the township’s perimeter. But with each hatch that I passed my stroke slowed. By the time I made it all the way around, my arms felt too heavy to lift—not because I was tired but because of what I’d seen.
    Every single hatch door had been chained shut … from the outside.

CHAPTER
THREE
    “Are you sure we shouldn’t wait for your parents to get here?” Gemma asked as I used the cruiser’s extendable metal clippers to cut through the township’s anchor chains.
    “Why?” I replied. “I’m doing exactly what they’d do.”
    I shattered the last link, and as the final chain fell away, the township pulled free and began a lazy ascent to the surface. “I could tell it was built to float,” I explained. “The hydro-turbines under the ship are just for propulsion.”
    We watched the township’s progress as it knocked into debris. Satisfied that nothing would stop its rise completely, I zoomed the cruiser toward the surface, passing the township, to crash through the waves.
    The setting sun cast a pink glow over the wide-open expanse of ocean. There wasn’t a hint of land or a ship in sight. When Gemma threw open the hatch in the sub’s canopy roof, I braced myself for the blast of hot air. She hopped right out and slid down the hull onto one of the narrow runners along the cockpit.
    I stayed put, needing longer to adjust. Even at this late hour, the light seared into me while the heat boiled my body into overcooked seaweed. Whenever I surfaced, all I could think about was diving back into the ocean. But after another deep breath, I forced myself up and out of the hatch.
    Gemma leaned back on the sub’s canopy, one leg bent. She’d put on a diveskin to come out with me, even though she had no intention of getting in the water. With all the time she’d been spending at the Trade Station lately, her face had a permanent flush and her long brown hair was streakier than ever. The effects of UV exposure looked pretty on her, but I shifted my gaze to the patch of churning water where the township would surface. I knew that living subsea didn’t come naturally to some people. They couldn’t get past their terror of drowning or the wildlife or the black depths. I wasn’t sure which fear ended up being too much for Gemma after just three months of living with us. All she would say was that the ocean scared her and that she missed the sunlight and air. Still, I kept hoping that she’d give living subsea another chance.
    Gulls screeched overhead and waves smacked against the hull, but we remained silent as the township emerged from the ocean, growing wider as it rose.
    “It’s a spiral,” she said finally.
    “A nautilus,” I agreed, spotting the pattern under the barnacles. “The