She sniffed and brushed a stray tear from her cheek. "No. Yes. d.a.m.n it, I"m not sure why I called. Maybe I just needed a sympathetic ear." She gazed out the window. "It"s been a rough couple of weeks."
"I know."
"I"m sorry I"ve been less than-communicative. I appreciate everything you"ve done for me. And I"m glad you"re here. I didn"t say that, but...yeah."
Should she tell him about Sinnder"s visit?
If she"d had the feeling he would spill the beans about her still being alive to Scarlet or the other Fyres, she probably would have mentioned the run-in to Jack, but she got the sense maybe he"d tried to apologize in his strange Elemental way. Like he felt bad for what Scarlet did to Gavin and her.
And Sinnder had definitely proven his point about the power of Fire. Maybe Gavin couldn"t have resisted Scarlet any more than Zoe had tried to resist Sinnder.
"You had s.h.i.t to work through. I get it. Gavin"s been the same, wringing his hands like an old woman, crying over Hallmark commercials, forgetting his hair gel. You whipped him pretty good. I almost feel sorry for him," Jack teased.
She pressed her lips into a thin smile, which turned into a near-giggle. "Gavin would never forget his hair gel," she joked back.
"Scout"s honor." The smile hanging on the tail end of his voice faded when he spoke again. "He misses you."
Her breath caught. Ditto.
The accident wasn"t Gavin"s fault. He"d said he loved her. She believed him. Wasn"t that enough? It was time to let go of the hurt she"d bottled up inside. The hole in her heart was another senseless death waiting to happen if she didn"t stanch the blood now.
She had to start healing.
The CRN team headed toward the car, Adriene hobbling on her crutches, Dani and Elizabeth on either side.
Zoe sighed. "Sorry, I gotta go. I"ll call Gavin tomorrow. Thanks for listening."
"Holler if you need me," Jack said.
"Thanks, Dad."
An hour later, Zoe sat down at the computer and strapped on her headphones while the girls chattered around the dinner table without her. She"d lost her appet.i.te and possibly a dress size or two in the days since the accident.
She played the whale songs the DTAG recorded from yesterday and sifted through her notes. Using a computer application she"d helped develop, Zoe separated the many voices with quick mouse clicks and saved each in a separate file. Twenty-six unique singers all going at it in a quarter mile stretch of ocean. Unbelievable.
Clicking on the first song, she settled into her chair. Up and down the pitch swung. Squeak, squeak. The tempo increased, then slowed. She memorized the nuances and scribbled feverishly in the notebook she bought a few days ago. She"d already filled more than half of the pages with her chicken scratch codes.
The song ended, and she listened to the next. This one was nearly identical except for a couple upsweeps and drags. Flipping through her pages of notes, she noticed an unusual pattern layered deep within the code.
What the h.e.l.l?
She returned to the beginning of the notebook and grabbed a highlighter from the desk drawer. Yes, there it was again. She yellowed the relevant notes in the whale song, from beginning to end of the notebook.
These were numbers. 25. Pause. 075648445630502. 152. Pause. 874755859375.
What would a whale use numbers for? Basic needs? Nutrition, warmth, and shelter were obvious necessities. They could be sharing information about food sources, but their prey was in Antarctica-nowhere near here.
s.h.i.t, that was it. She pulled up the GPS data from the last two weeks and correlated it with the numbers she decoded from the whale song. The location for this data set was somewhere in the middle of the ocean, southeast of j.a.pan.
That couldn"t be right.
She pored through the songs again and caught a slight drop in pitch just before the first number in all the samples. A negative? Her pulse raced. She adjusted her coordinates to make the first number negative and pinpointed a location just north of the bay.
Holy h.e.l.l. The whales were singing coordinates across the Pacific Ocean. The ident.i.ty of the moving target they heralded could only be Lily. And if Zoe"s calculations were correct, the whale would arrive in Hervey Bay tomorrow.
"I"ve been thinking about our Fyre problem," Jack said later that night.
Gavin stomped his foot into the muddy remains of the Fyre he"d blasted to h.e.l.l and faced his trainer. Good thing there were no more of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds around at the moment. He was almost out of Water again. Out of habit, he searched the Dreaming"s red-tinged horizon for smoke, screams, or other signs of distress. All clear. For now.
"What did your "thinking" turn up?" He started toward the ocean, listening for Zoe"s song.
"A memory," Jack said. "Yileen once told me a story about the Rainbow Serpent I"d never heard. At the time, I blew it off as a myth, but the other day, it occurred to me that there might have been some truth to it. So, I did some investigating in the Sentinel archives."
Gavin caught a whisper of the notes he needed to hear. The sad tone shook the wall he"d erected around his heart. Another fissure cracked a veined web of vulnerability into the stone.
Rubbing his chest, he paused his paces and turned to Jack. Myths didn"t interest him. Facts did. But his growing desperation had reached a breaking point. "Lay it on me."
"According to Yileen, in man"s earliest days, Rainbow Serpent appointed a warden to watch over the Dreaming."
"You mean like an Archelemental?"
"Yeah, sort of. But more powerful."
Aside from being a G.o.d, you didn"t get much more powerful than an Archelemental. "Who is this "warden"?"
"She"s called the Dreamweaver. She"s referenced in the ancient texts up through medieval times as "the keeper of the Dreaming.""
Gavin straightened. "No f.u.c.king s.h.i.t."
"From what I can tell, she-like the Archelementals-keeps order and acts as the go-between for the Wyldlings and Rainbow Serpent. Things get outta whack, she steps in and hammers "em back in place."
"How come we"ve never heard of her before?"
Jack shrugged. "All mentions of her stop after the Middle Ages, which is probably why she"s considered a myth. I don"t know if people stopped believing in her, she disappeared, got abducted by aliens..."
Gavin met Jack"s steely eyes. "What does your gut tell you?"
Jack crossed his arms over his chest. "My gut tells me Yileen never mentioned anything "in pa.s.sing," no matter how innocuous his remarks might have seemed. He was an expert at interpreting Songlines-a skill very few Sentinels possess. Maybe he saw something down the road. Or in the past. h.e.l.l, with him, there"s no telling."
Gavin nodded slowly. Jack was right. Yileen calculated every move he made like a master chess player. And he was always five moves ahead of his opponent. Maybe there was something to this Dreamweaver thing.
"Okay, I"ll bite. What do we do?"
"If the Dreamweaver watches over the Dreaming, she must know how and where the Fyres are getting in."
"So, we go on another hunt. For a person this time."
"Yep."
"What are we looking for? Lady of the Lake type? A winged angel playing a harp? A dominatrix with machine guns?"
"No idea, man. I guess someone with a lot of power who gives your Dreamsense screaming o.r.g.a.s.ms."
Gavin forced a smile. "That would be the most action I"ve seen in a while." He cast a wistful glance out to the ocean.
"Well, then, strap on your c.o.c.k ring, whip out your dollar bills, and let"s find this babe. I could use some action, too."
Tomorrow Gavin would have to give Scarlet his answer. He dared not get his hopes up about this mysterious Dreamweaver, but a tiny spark of relief welled in his gut. Maybe things weren"t quite as dismal as they could be.
But one thing bugged the s.h.i.t out of him. If the Dreamweaver"s job was to protect the Dreaming, why had she let it descend into chaos? You"d think she"d be in the middle of the fray, or at the very least, working with the Sentinels to squash the hostile, fiery takeover.
A boulder of dread hurled from the Cliffs of d.a.m.nable Hope and squashed the short-lived flare of relief with twenty tons of f.u.c.ked.
Chapter Twelve.
September 12 We"re here.
Lily"s voice lured Zoe out of her dream. Shrugging off the night cloak she"d become accustomed to wearing in the increasingly dark Dreaming, she eagerly crossed the threshold and returned to Realis.
She sat up in bed and glanced around the room. Her clock blared 4:46 in gaudy red neon. She threw off the covers, hopped out of bed, and peered through the window. No wind, no rain. Good.
Bathing suit and work clothes in hand, she hustled to the bathroom to get dressed and brush her teeth. She stopped at Adriene"s door along the way and knocked lightly. "Up and at "em."
Adriene expelled a loud, grumpy sigh from the other side. Staccato hops followed a moment later. The door opened. "I"m not sure how much longer I can keep this up," Adriene said. Bags puffed under her eyes, her hair stuck out every which way. She shoveled a long wisp of black to the top of her head.
"Give me one more day. Please, Adriene. I know I"ve been a total dictator lately, but there"s a reason. Trust me, okay?"
"Honey, unless you"re planning to bring Gavin Ca.s.sidy back into your life, it won"t be just "one more day." You gotta either get over him or find a way to forgive whatever he did. This wallowing in this despair s.h.i.t ain"t cuttin" it for anybody."
Zoe lifted her chin. "You"re absolutely right. I"ll talk to him tonight. I promise."
Adriene"s face started to light up, but her brow hit a speed b.u.mp before it leaped too high. "Really?" Her voice was guarded.
"Pinky swear." Zoe held up her little finger.
Adriene leaned against the doorframe. "I want my best friend back."
"She"s right here. I"m putting on a new att.i.tude, starting now. I have a good feeling about today."
Adriene nodded slowly and hooked pinkies. "Okay. The boss from h.e.l.l is forgiven."
They shared a long hug. Zoe had forgotten how nice it was to feel another person"s warmth against her. But much as she loved Adriene, she hoped tonight, that person would be Gavin.
Using the most recent coordinates she"d deciphered from two-day-old whale song data, Zoe pointed the Zodiac to Platypus Bay, off the northwest pocket of Fraser Island. At six a.m., the sun began its morning routine, stretching its arm-rays, opening its eye, and climbing out of bed on the eastern horizon.
"Do you guys think it"s weird that we haven"t seen any whales outside of the one spot this week?" Elizabeth asked beside her.
Nope. Not at all. Zoe shot her a sideways glance from the driver"s seat. "Yeah, it"s pretty odd for so many to localize like that. I"m looking at it as a great research opportunity."
"Maybe Catherine Marchand has some insights." Dani swigged the cup of coffee Zoe wouldn"t let her finish at home. "Her team"s collecting skin and fecal samples. They"ve got biopsy darts. You should call and ask if they found anything interesting."
Reality seeped into Zoe"s fantasy-riddled brain. Man, to conduct research like the Oceania Whale Trust did, knowing what Zoe knew about humpbacks and their culture... But Randy had all but given her a contract for the Vice Presidency at CRN. Once she wrapped up this season in Hervey Bay, she"d have a real-live office, a handpicked team of a.s.sistants, and her choice of a.s.signments anywhere on Earth.
Catherine"s group might have had better equipment, but they were limited to Australia and its surrounding waters. At multi-million dollar CRN, Zoe would be queen of the whale world.
And Randy, as president, will be your king.
She pa.s.sed her tongue over her twitching lip. The reputation and notoriety would be worth it. And so would the funding to pursue her dream of decoding whale language. She already understood the humpbacks. Imagine how the knowledge would help her unravel other cetacean species" communication strategies.
Several blows mushroomed in the distance. The whales were traveling northwest. No surprise there.
"Yeah, maybe I"ll give Catherine a ring tonight. Right now, we"ve got whales to tag." She kicked the throttle to full speed.
The girls clutched handholds, their ponytails whipping like mad in the wind. Adriene shot her a "slow down" frown, but Zoe ignored it.
Lily, where are you?
A shower of confusing song rained around her. She scanned the horizon, trying to nail down the one song she needed.
A string of numbers ticked off in her mind. It took a few iterations, but once she committed the values to memory, she used the GPS to pinpoint the exact location.
Thirty minutes later, the Zodiac bobbed like an apple in the whale soup of Platypus Bay. Zoe counted fifty blows at one point, but there were many more whales here than that. No way to keep up with all of them. She had never seen so many humpbacks in her life.
Adriene, Dani, and Elizabeth stared at the unfolding scene with dropped jaws.
Zoe grinned. "We"re gonna have to work quick, ladies. Tourists will be here in about an hour. Once everyone finds out the whales are in one spot, they"ll be on the scene like white on rice."
She shoved the carbon fiber pole with a locked and loaded DTAG attached to its end into Dani"s hands. Without turning from the whales, Dani accepted it.
"Let"s play a game," Zoe suggested. "How many tags can you get on without me?"
Adriene shook her head. "Wait, where are you going?"
Zoe tugged her shirt over her head and wriggled out of her shorts. "For a swim. I"ll be back shortly. You guys have ten tags. I want them attached by the time I get back."