The Dark Water: A Well's End Novel - Hardcover

1

THE WATER FEELS THICK, SILKY ALONG MY SKIN. I TREAD easily, the way a bird might fly, lazily pushing down against the current. Even with Odessa’s ski jacket on, the water’s welcoming. It’s buoyant and warm and massages me softly.

Rob and Jo float nearby, and every few moments one of their hands brushes against mine as we tread, like we need to remind one another that we’re really here. I open my mouth to let some water in and swallow, tasting copper, like the earth, like our blood. My body shivers, craving more.

We’ve been in the water for a while now. Ten minutes maybe. We haven’t said a thing. It’s so quiet, like we’re drifting in a vacuum. The shore isn’t so far away, but I’m reluctant to move. I think I could stay here for days.

The basin we swim in is large, about the size of the lake that borders my prep school. I can’t believe that only two days ago I swam across that lake—under three inches of ice—and nearly froze to death. That feels like a lifetime ago now, though not a good lifetime. This place is something new and impossible and it makes everything I’ve ever seen or believed seem smaller. On the shore, some hundred yards away, there’s a haze of light, as if the ground itself is glowing. There are trees, plants, a full vibrant green forest leaning as far over the water as possible, as if the water itself were the sun. I peek above me, and can only see black. The darkness is complete and presses down on us. There’s no ceiling, no stalactites dripping over our heads. No stars twinkling through the haze.

Then there are the gates. Giant, beautiful, unreal. They jut from the foliage like Roman ruins. They must be two hundred feet high, suspended between massive gold pillars, the opening in a wall that I can now see stretches off in either direction and curves away from us, seemingly endless. The gates are open, beckoning, and between them are hulking shapes I can’t make out, the light is so weak here. A city, maybe? What else could it be? My mind is having a hard time processing the shapes, the gates, the endless room. It’s just too unreal, this whole thing. But what my mind believes doesn’t really matter because right now the light from the gates is real, and it shines brighter than the brightest building in my hometown of Fenton, Colorado, or the world.

“What is this place?” Rob says, finally breaking the quiet. A small part of me was enjoying that silence, that pause we were having. His voice floats along the water and disappears. It awakes the memory of why we’re here, of the lunatic we’re running from.

“I’m not sure,” I say, looking at my two best friends. They’re watching me, trusting. And why not? I guess I’m the one who brought them here. They actually dove into the well, following me, risking their lives on a hunch of mine that we should swim down and down and down through the water; now we’ve ended up floating in this underground cavern. I sort of can’t believe how amazing they are, how lucky I am to have them.

“How did you know what to do?” Jo asks. “You knew we’d show up here?”

I shake my head and picture the map, the wall of stone covered in paintings that my dad found all those years ago, with its vibrant colors and images and hints. The diving figure, the flowing well, the gates. “Not here specifically. Somewhere, yes. There were a few clues on the map.”

“What, clues to get here?” Jo replies.

“Remember that pale-skinned figure on the map? The one that was upside down and near the well?”

Jo laughs incredulously. “You jumped into the well because of that?”

I make a face. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

“You realize that we swam down, right?” Rob points at the blackness above. “When you swim deeper into water, you shouldn’t break the surface. This isn’t natural.”

I look once more at the endless space above us, like a vacuum of light.

“Yeah, this shouldn’t be possible,” I reply. We were being chased by Sutton and his men, running through the Cave and now I don’t know if we’re better off at all, or if we can even get back. “Come on,” I say, and begin swimming toward the shore. The winter gear I wear is bulkier than the drag suit I have to use in practice, but I’m soon far ahead of the others. I can’t help but swim fast, years of training refuse to go to waste. So it’s me who steps on the shore first, lifesaving water gushing from my pockets and squishing out of my boots. There’s no sand, only a very fine moss that carpets the earth. I kneel and rub my hand gently on the surface, and it’s so soft I almost want to take off my boots and go barefoot.

“I wish Odessa were here,” Rob says, splashing up from the water and grabbing at an overhanging leaf. It’s wide and thick, like a giant piece of iceberg lettuce. Almost as pale too. “She’d know what all this plant life was.” I try not to think of how Odessa and Jimmy might be captured already. Prep school townies, they escaped Westbrook with us, and now they’re stuck back in the Cave with soldiers-for-hire. Maybe they stand a chance; they’re fully grown adults now that they’ve contracted the virus and it’s aged them some. Weird how just one drop of water was enough to kill the virus in them. One drop was enough to halt their premature aging, saving them from dementia and a wrinkled death, like what happened to our teachers. To Jo’s dad. Weird to think that there’s probably enough water in this lake to eradicate all illness in the world.

“I doubt anyone would know the plant life down here,” Jo says, taking off her jacket to wring it out. The nylon doesn’t make it easy, but she has the right idea. My jacket weighs a waterlogged ton.

I remember the story Dad told us about finding the well as a student some thirty-four years ago, spelunking on a class excursion. He tripped into the water, the same water that we just dove through, and he found out that it that heals everything it touches.

“Do we get to name everything we see?” Rob asks, wiping his face. His jet-black hair is plastered to his forehead, as if he gelled it to look that way. He blinks water away from his eyelashes, then pulls out his Warbys from an inner pocket and tries to put them on. Of course, with the water coursing through his body, his vision is perfect now and he doesn’t need them. He gives a goofish smile and puts them away.

We all stop and look into the underbrush. There’s a hum to the air, and the branches sway; something, maybe a bird, flits. I’m suddenly aware of the sound of nature, as if I hadn’t been hearing it before. Rustling underbrush, quiet chirps. A bug flies slowly by, its butterfly wings familiar but its cicada-like body an odd fit. There’s an entire ecosystem deep in the earth, one that’s never been seen before. It’s thick and impenetrable, like a rain forest, dense enough that standing here below the trees makes it difficult to see the wall and the gates.

“Check this out,” Jo calls, squatting near the base of a tree. She’s tied up her hair already, looking at ease even in her scrubs. It’s like she’s back in our dorm, pointing out some mistake on my calculus homework. If my dad had died two days ago, I’d be a mess. She’s not even fidgeting her fingers the way she does when she’s nervous or distracted. I know she has to be feeling it, that she’s purposefully pushing it away, but I don’t see it at all. Man, she’s impressive.

She’s hovering by a patch of tall flowers with long, shivering petals, their stems no thicker than a millimeter each. Almost like spaghetti, like tiny Medusa heads. The petals are white, incredibly white, enough so that they actually shine. Looking around, farther into the trees, I can make out another dozen clumps, some flowers even dangling like vines from the branches, illuminating the woods. They make their own sun down here.

Jo reaches out and gently plucks one from the ground, and immediately the remaining flowers in the patch go dark, shockingly fast, as if hurt. But the one Jo holds keeps its light. On a hunch, I squeeze my wet hair and put my moist fingertip to the broken stem she’s holding, and as the flower shines brighter, I can’t help but smile. I’m suddenly ridiculously grateful for these flowers and the light they bring. How awful it would have been to arrive here completely blind.

“What now?” Jo says, waving her flower around her head in fascination. She’s gone a few days without makeup, and she looks like a softer version of herself. Her lips are a pale pink and fade into her skin, her eyes still intensely blue, but without mascara, they seem more dominant.

They both look at me like I’ve got the answer. Sure, the map gave me clues, but I wouldn’t have had the guts to jump into the well if not for Sutton and his men chasing me. They’re probably up there right now, searching for us. My stomach churns, thinking of Brayden, how he might be there with them. What if he had found me, if he’d looked me right in the eyes and then shouted for Sutton? I don’t like the feeling, the churning, because it betrays me as much as he betrayed us. Brayden, new to Westbrook, the boy who escaped with us, who helped us. Brayden, with his scarred chin and his sly smile. I blink away the thought. He’s back in the Cave, helping Sutton get his supply of the lifesaving water. I wonder if they’ll leave Dad alone when they catch him. Does Sutton hate my father that much, to hurt him even now? Will he care enough to try to contain the outbreak at Westbrook, to distribute water to all of my classmates and heal them if it isn’t already too late? Does that fall into his game plan at all? He doesn’t know them. He doesn’t care about them. I think of the party where I met Brayden, how everyone there’s probably dead. I remember the infirmary, where the first infected went. Where our teachers died, their bodies piled on top of one another, their hair turned gray, their faces so wrinkled they were hard to recognize.

I bite my lip and pull my jacket closer, and I realize I’m not cold. The water keeps me warm as my blood paces through my body. I pull my own flower and it shines enough so that I can see through the webbing of my fingers.

I take a breath. They’re waiting for me. Even if I don’t have the answer, it still falls on me. “I saw the well in the map, and I’ve seen the gates there too—”

“Look,” Rob shouts, interrupting me to point down the shore. My instinct is to jump back into the water, where I’m safe and confident I can outswim anything, but I force myself to get a grip and follow his finger. There’s a lump of something out of place on the beach, something blue and familiar.

My stomach sinks, knowing what I’m seeing before my mind does. I hurry over, maybe twenty, thirty yards, and realize halfway there that those are scrubs, like the ones we’re wearing. The only person I can think of who could have had those on and made it here is my dad. I pick them up, as if I might find him underneath, maybe a smaller version of himself—maybe the water shrunk him, maybe I’m going crazy. The shirt is wet from the lake, but it’s also stained red, a smear of blood.

“Whoa,” Rob says. I flare up inside. Whoa doesn’t really cut it. Apparently, my dad came before us, and now he’s gone. Hurt too. I can’t see any blood on the beach, though. What exactly happened here? Did he know about this place all along? Why didn’t he tell us? Why didn’t he tell me?

I look toward the gates, wondering whether I can see him, whether he’s only a few hundred yards ahead of us, limping in pain. But he’s not there. The forest has broken, and there’s a clear path from the lake to the gates, which are gaping and bright, but no naked Dad. Tall shadows loom beyond the gates, like burnt-out skyscrapers. I don’t know what Dad’s doing here, but I know where he’s gone. If we hurry, maybe we can catch him.

“We should go back,” Jo says.

“What?” I have to stop myself from shouting. “You’re kidding, right?”

She’s taken a few steps toward the lake, and stares out over its black surface. “We should wait a halfhour for Sutton and his men to clear the room, and then dive back down and swim wherever the hell we need to go to get back out.” She turns and looks at us. “We have to save Fenton, and Odessa and Jimmy and Todd and my mother and Rob’s family and everyone, if we can.” I fight down a sense of panic. I never expected this from Jo.

“What about the map?” Rob says, digging into his pocket. “It’s a gigantic golden gate, Jo. We can’t not go check it out.”

“Forget the gates, what about my dad?” I say, still incredulous, holding up the bloodstained shirt for them to see.

“There’s no blood on the ground, Mia,” Jo says, trying to sound soothing. “That’s an old stain.”

I rub my fingers against the fabric, unsure.

Rob, meanwhile, pulls out his OtterBoxed phone and starts messing with it.

“You won’t get a signal here,” I say, clenching my teeth.

“Duh,” he replies in a way that I know doesn’t mean any harm. To Rob, everyone’s a step behind. He flicks his screen a few times and then holds it up for us to see, his face smug. I remember now, in the Map Room, when he was taking pictures. His obsessiveness pays dividends, because he’s holding up an image of the map. Even from here, on the tiny screen, I can see the painted gates. He points to them. “The gates are here, so all these other things must come after.” He waves at the remaining images: a city, a waterfall, a cup, a prone figure in white, a spear-like thing sticking right through another pale figure, the strange objects we’d have to decipher if we don’t turn back. I can’t help but notice that he’s at 23 percent power.

“The well. This lake. Dad clearly figured out the map like I did, so he’s probably just following the clues. The same ones that led us here.”

“To what?” Rob asks. “I mean, I understand that this place is crazy. It’s a miracle. Yay. But there’s a virus outbreak and you were in the Cave. Why would he come here right now, especially if he knew Sutton was about to break in?”

“I don’t know,” I say uncertainly. “But he wouldn’t come here for no reason.”

“That’s not good enough, Mia,” Jo says, insistent. “We have to go back.”

I can’t believe this. I know she’s mourning her father, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon mine. “You know I can’t do that. He’s my dad.” I hold up his scrubs and wave them at her. “Why’d he strip? What if he’s really hurt?”

She turns to me, her face anguished. “Don’t you think I know that, Mia? Of course I do. I want to find your dad too, but you aren’t looking at the big picture.” She pauses, gathers herself. I can see how hard this is for her, and an ounce of my disbelief fades. “The virus broke out two days ago. It’s already infected our friends. We know that the quarantine didn’t work. That the virus managed to infect soldiers in hazmat suits. It’s spreading, Mia. And the only thing that can stop it is this water.” She rubs her thumb and forefinger together, still slick from our swim. “Even if this place is like Narnia, even if there’s a magical talking bird that spits water from its mouth and teaches you the secrets of the universe, we don’t have time. We have to get back and figure out a way to get past Sutton and bring the water to Westbrook and Fenton. If we don’t, the whole town dies. Maybe more.”

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