Chapter 12
When the earth shook, startling a flock of pigeons roosting on the iron railing in Battery Park, the wind knew the boy was calling it.
The man was dead. The earth was shaking. The boy needed the wind.
The boy!
It laughed—a jubilant, wild noise—as pigeons vaulted frantically toward the sky. The earth shaking wasn’t the sort felt by man. It was only noticed by birds, rats, dogs, and the wind.
This quake was so far to the east it was only a distant, muted rumble.
What was the boy doing far, far out in the Atlantic? No wonder the wind hadn’t found him. He wasn’t in the Hudson, the harbor, or even the islands around the city. He was far, far away, in the vast Atlantic Ocean.
Under normal circumstances, it would take the wind long, albatross-winged days to reach the epicenter of the boy’s plea for help. The wind would meander, soar on wings and wispy clouds, and rest for a while hammocked in a boat’s white sails.
But the boy needed the wind now.
So the wind caught the pigeons’ frantically beating wings and launched itself skyward. Up. Up. Up. It flew heavenward. It climbed until the air was weak and thin, so threadbare that icy molecules nipped and stung. It gasped and huffed, veering west, pushing up.
A human might think the wind should fly east, toward the boy. Then down, toward the ground. But humans were always thinking illogical, straight-lined things. It was exactly what the wind had told the girl. The only way up is down. The only way back is forward.
A giant sonic boom, like a mountain breaking in half, struck the wind.
It spun, flung violently through the air.
There!
A black hawklike jet torpedoed through the heavens, charging east. This human-made thing was faster than any creature on earth. Faster than the wind. Faster even than sound. It moved like a cosmic storm, racing the sun. This black jet would speed the wind to the boy in a heartbeat and a half.
The wind had once ridden a rocket missiling on fiery plumes toward space.
It had once sailed on the air bubbles whirling around a submarine’s torpedo.
And in wars past, it had whistled through dark skies littered with the percussion of falling bombs.
But it had never flung itself onto the back of a black hawklike jet speeding faster than sound.
It was far from safe. It was reckless.
But the boy needed the wind. The boy was calling for help. Many humans cursed the wind when it destroyed. Many blessed it when it cooled their perspiring skin. Some tried to destroy it, and others tried to corral and use it. But no human cared about the wind.
Except, perhaps, the boy.
So it flung itself at the jet and desperately clutched its tail.
It screamed as it rocketed across the Atlantic sky, shrieking at the whiplash force of the jet’s propulsion.
It was torn apart, fraying and flagging.
Its voice was ripped away, and far below, the ocean blurred until it became a giant, waving field of green, gold, and navy grass, slippery and luminous.
And then the grass became snakes, wave after wave of them, undulating in indigo currents. The snakes had swallowed the boy.
The wind’s voice had been stolen by the jet, but when it saw the black, rippling, scarred surface in the middle of infinite blue, the wind let out a startled, soundless shriek.
It shoved free from the jet and screamed, diving toward the ocean.
It hurtled through thick, wet clouds, shivering at the cold.
It sped through thin cobweb clouds, blowing them aside.
It rushed through sunlight, sped past sea birds, and hurtled toward the water.
Help! Help!
The wind shrieked. The boy was calling it. He was under the ocean. Deep, deep underwater.
Oh, the wind hated deep waters. What could the wind do in deep water? Nothing but float, trapped in an air bubble, crushed beneath the breathless pressure of an endless sea.
Of course, there was the fun of soaring beneath a cormorant or a shearwater’s wing, diving down and then bursting free.
But that was a breath, a flicker of sun.
And yes, the wind had traveled with the girl underwater when the rocklike one chained her beneath the surface without air.
But what was a small concrete pool compared to an ocean? Nothing.
Was the boy in the Hadal—the nightmare abyss the water currents whispered about and the fearful streams gurgled over? Was he trapped in the midnight lands, where there was no light, only dark, dreadful, twisted things?
The wind hadn’t liked the Hadal when the Bards built their game around it, and it liked it even less now.
The wind moaned and tapped a cresting wave.
It wasn’t fearful. The wind was never fearful, but it might hesitate.
It might consider. It was prudent, the wind.
It couldn’t just dive into the water and kick to the bottom of the ocean.
No, the wind couldn’t do that. The water always pushed it back, shoving it out like an angry rodent expelling the wind from its nest.
The wind sliced through another wave, stirring up froth. It circled and spun, trying to find a way to breach the water’s impregnable surface.
The earth rumbled again, shaking far, far below. The wind shrieked when cold, salty water splashed over it.
Oh, the boy needed the wind. But how would it descend?
The wind knew—because the current mumbled, gurgled, chattered, and sighed so much that the wind couldn’t not know—below the Atlantic waves was a giant canyon.
The Hudson Canyon, they called it. The underwater earth was gouged and split wide like the gaping maw of a giant, hungry beast. It sat at the edge of a flat plain, waiting to swallow the city or to expel giant buckets of water over the land.
The wind had barreled through the twisty, red and orange sunset-streaked canyons of the west. It liked the deep, scooped-out grooves, the switchback curves, the wild, sheer drops, and tumbling rockslides.
It especially liked flicking the expressive ears of the slow, plodding mules picking their way over steep canyon slopes.
Those were canyons. The air, wind, sunshine canyons.
But these underwater canyons? The rainwater plopped a tale that this canyon was deeper than the tallest building in the city stacked on itself again and again and again and again and . . . well, the raindrops just kept saying “and again.” How deep could that be? Very deep.
The wind moaned, shoving at the water.
The boy was there.
The boy was right below him.
It circled and paced, and then it jumped back, startled.
A giant leviathan rose from the depths. Saltwater-gray, twilight-eyed, and slick-bodied.
Oh! Yes!
The wind rushed at the sperm whale, catching the hot mist shooting from the whale’s blowhole. The mist flashed in rainbow shards, and the wind sped through it, scattering the rainbow.
Down, it shrieked. Down, down, down.
The whale sucked in a lungful of air. The vacuum of it yanked the wind. It grasped the fleshy tube and dove into the whale’s lung.
Down!
The expanding walls of the lung were hot, spongelike, and wet. The wind circled the lung, swishing impatiently with the salty air. The brine and bitter seaweed scent stung and poked at the wind.
Then it trampolined up as the whale crashed through a wave and dove.
Down, down, down, the wind chanted.
It poked at the fleshy lung, prodding the whale to dive deeper, faster. Down! How far could a sperm whale dive? Could it outrun sunlight? Could it flee the twilight? Could it survive in midnight waters?
Down!
The wind cautiously climbed the long, warm tube toward the whale’s blowhole. The descent was dizzying, and it kept falling back into the stagnant-air lung. It tried to rise. It tried again. But each time the whale’s dive jarred the wind and sent it tumbling back down the wet slide into the lung.
It was a cage, and the wind feared it would be trapped, until the whale breached the surface again and shot it out in a spray of mist.
No. The boy needed the wind. And the wind was a daring, courageous being who rode inside whales to the bottom of the ocean. A slick blowhole would not conquer the wind.
So as the whale shot into the depths, the wind climbed to perch at the edge of its blowhole. But the hole was covered. It was sealed. It was a locked door without a keyhole. There wasn’t even a tiny crack for the wind to slip under. The whale was sealed tight, and the wind was sealed in it.
The wind shoved at the whale’s pink flesh.
It bounced and kicked and shoved. And then a drip, drip, drip began.
It was a slight, rainfall echo. The wind swirled about, testing the bars of its lung cage.
And yes, just there, it found a space where something as diffuse as the wind could slip through.
It only had to make itself very small and very thin.
It had to make itself into almost nothing at all.
It whispered though the tissue. These were microscopic, spongelike holes, and the wind wound through the maze of them. The tissue pulsed with the giant’s heartbeat, and each pulse squeezed the tissue walls closer around the wind. It was a desperate, stupid thing.
The wind had traveled to many dangerous places for secrets. Secrets lasted a long time. They kept the wind company. It could pull them out and flip through entire epochs of them.
It had never traveled to a dangerous place for something as temporary as a human. There weren’t even any secrets here.
It sighed and finally burst free of the whale’s lung. It clung to the edge of the blowhole, gripping the fleshy lip. The ocean was dark. Not midnight-dark but instead the cold, gray light of twilight.
The sun, as mighty as it was, could only reach this depth in blues and grays. The wind shivered as the cold saltwater waterfalled over it. How long could it grip the whale’s exterior before diving back into the lungs?