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  CADENCE

  Book Two of The Waterblaze Trilogy

  BY CHINA DENNINGTON

  Copyright © 2019 China Dennington

  Cover Design by Lisa Spinnenhirn

  The Waterblaze Trilogy Logo by Lisa Spinnenhirn and Coraliz Dereta

  All rights reserved.

  First edition.

  Double Eagle Media

  4400 N Scottsdale Rd, #9129

  Scottsdale, AZ

  85251

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019900061

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9907274-6-0

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  ✽✽✽

  The merwoman screamed as much out of fear as of pain. The contractions grew stronger and she felt her daughter emerging from her body like a storm ripping through a forest. She prayed desperately for the child’s survival. I can’t stand to lose one more. Her husband squeezed her hand as with one last push the baby slid into the water.

  The mother’s breath caught as she saw the paleness of her sweet daughter’s face as the cord was cut. The doctor stood staring at the little girl with his mouth twisted in barely concealed disgust.

  “I can’t lose another, ” the mother muttered. “Something is wrong. Help her!” she screamed at the apathetic doctor.

  He shrugged.

  “Her heart is weak. I’m sorry, but as a sixteen she doesn’t have the level of medical coverage necessary to save her. Better off this way anyways.”

  The mother scooped up her child and brought her soft, clammy skin to her own. She locked eyes with the doctor and spit, “I am a one and my daughter will survive. If she doesn’t, you will answer to the royal courts. Consider carefully. You know a three won’t win against a one.”

  Elaina hated using the class card. But when her healthy, live daughter was handed back to her hours later, she didn’t regret it. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you have a weak heart, Astrid,” she whispered, stroking the child’s innocent face.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Astrid stared down at her scientific notetablet. She pushed her thin red stylus against the screen, frustration cramping her fingers. Sighing, she looked up towards space through the water, pushing strands of rich, ruby-colored hair out of her face and gathering them into a side ponytail.

  She didn’t want to move. Her thoughts felt crowded, suffocating and she wanted to sort them out. But she also knew that moving would make her feel better. Besides, she couldn’t let two months of work go to waste.

  She made herself get up off the assortment of smooth blue and purple rocks that spread for miles around her. The plain of colorful stones felt like it was swallowing her up in its vastness. She could make out only two things; the outline of the city in the distance, and, of course, her six monitoring devices only a short swim away.

  Astrid finally reached the stout, waist-high cylinders halfway buried in the smooth pebbles. Reaching out, she touched one. The slight buzz jumped through her hand, and through her body to a lesser extent. Temperature: Just right.

  She’d set up these sensors weeks ago to monitor the activity of the core. Something no other Akaytan scientist was doing. The sensors sent out various signals to the core that took readings then boomeranged them back.

  Astrid glanced around nervously out of habit. She felt lucky no one had discovered her project. She didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the experiment was traced back to her. That was one part of her life she never examined too closely: what would happen if her scientific activities were discovered.

  The logical part of her mind knew that she had no reason to be worried about their discovery. No one she’d ever known dared, or even desired, to travel outside of Akayta.

  A pang of sorrow hit her stomach. At least no one she knew now.

  The devices were measuring the cycles of the melions inside the rock core of her planet. This experiment hadn’t been done in centuries. That’s what made it so intriguing to her. The melions: particles inside the core that shrank and grew with a rhythm. If that rhythm ever got thrown off kilter, the core would shatter. And if the core shattered, then the center of gravity of the water planet would be destroyed and the water would disperse into space.

  Of course, the possibility of the melions getting out of rhythm was only a theory. It would probably never happen. Among other things, she was measuring the core’s temperature, pressure, and water content.

  Geology had always been one of her favorite branches of science. Astrid spent hours on end in her room, hunched in her closet, studying rock fragments under her portable light. Even though her room was in the center of her large house, and she was the only one living in it, she always felt safer conducting her experiments in her large closet.

  Her sister, Effie, was technically the one who owned her dead parents’ house, but she allowed Astrid to continue to reside there. That was one thing the mergirl was grateful for. Effie had every right as the owner of the house, and a firstborn, to send her to the area fondly referred to as the double digit sector.

  She had passed through the sector just that morning. It was small, confined to the boundaries that the royal family set, no matter how the population grew. The cluster of one-room huts sagged so much they appeared to sink into the sand itself. Dark, devoid of variation, crowded. Abandoned children sat caked in salt and mud, absentmindedly drawing in the sand.

  A young girl had locked eyes with her as she passed. The hopelessness was as apparent as the dirt on her face. Her clothes—little more than loose fabric—were too small, and she quickly broke eye contact in fear and shame. The stench in the water was nearly unbearable. Too many bodies packed into a small space.

  She’d seen double digits as young as eight and nine years old living there alone. Some parents just didn’t want to deal with the shame of having a person of such a low number in their household. So they’d ship them off to the double digit sector. There was no one to take care of them, or the older ones for that matter. That’s why they lived in such poverty. When they were old enough to obtain a job, the work would barely pay for food.

  Most people hurried past the double digit sector and frowned on it with scorn. But Astrid wasn’t one of those people. She knew she could’ve easily been relegated to living there. Most others wouldn’t give a second thought to how the outcasts survived, or their responsibility for those living conditions. But Astrid slowed down each time she passed through it, and watched how many of the outcasts, with their meager victuals, would s
hare with the others.

  The double digits were always hungry, but most survived. She didn’t want to think about how many children would die if that spirit of commiseration wasn’t present. And most single digits didn’t even care. What was meant to deny their humanity had only amplified it.

  She turned on her notetablet and glanced at the timer, which was counting down to the point when all data gathering would be complete.

  Ten minutes. She had some time to think.

  Astrid took a seat on the uncomfortable field of pebbles. She took a deep breath and then let it out. For a second she just focused on the feeling of water rushing in and out, giving her oxygen.

  Her thoughts felt all jumbled. Closing her eyes, she tried to think clearly. When she turned seventeen, she would choose a job based on her mark. She wanted to be a scientist, but only the eldest siblings were allowed such a high-class job.

  She was the sixteenth child. I am a sixteen, she thought, as though that would change the fact. The wish of being a firstborn, or maybe even a two or a three, was often present. But then she always felt guilty for wishing that. She believed there was nothing actually wrong with being born a sixteen. The mindset of Akaytan society was where the perversity entered the scene. When she wished to be something else, she felt as if she were abandoning her ideals.

  The caste system all stemmed from the story that when the thirteen Sirof created the world, they poured the most intelligence, creativity, and aptitude into the first child of a family. They poured less into the second child, and so on and so forth. Fours or more only made it to the afterlife as servants.

  She’d never bought into it. Astrid saw the system for exactly what it was, a religion designed to keep a caste system alive and thriving.

  As a scientist, she was practical. She didn’t believe in magic. When she looked at the beauty and complexity of the world around her, she knew it was created by something. It was scientifically impossible for all the right elements to come together in just the right way to create life and the universe by chance. She just didn’t know what or who that creator was. It certainly wasn’t the Sirof, though.

  It wasn’t easy being a sixteen. Even a lucky one. It was a common occurrence to be the object of disdainful glances and the target of cruel jokes. But she couldn’t change who she was. She was only allowed to choose from jobs considered low-level, such as servant. I will not be respected, none of my discoveries will be taken seriously. I cannot be a scientist, for it is against the law. She wished she could cry, but she just felt numb. Numb about everything. Her future had no prospects, she only had life as the lowest class to look forward to. For her, the limit was way before the sky.

  Astrid looked back down at her notetablet. Finally, the results were coming in.

  A slight smile passed across her face as she remembered how she got the all-in-one science device. Her older sister Effie smuggled it to her when she found Astrid trying to do a test with makeshift materials and learned of her love for science. Perhaps out of guilt about her privileges, she chose to be a scientist to aid her sister in her endeavors. Since each scientist was given two notetablets, she gave one to Astrid. Now, whenever Astrid needed any other materials, she just asked Effie.

  She ran her hand over the blue metallic surface. There were streaks where silver showed through the blue paint that had been scratched away by endless hours of use.

  A clicking sound came from the device to remind her that it was still on. She looked at the purple bars and other data that covered the screen and began making notes.

  After a while she reached the data about the melions. She hadn’t been able to find much information on them before this experiment. Excitement thrummed through her veins as she examined it; a simple bar graph showing the size of the melions every hour over a period of a few weeks. The first bar stated that all of the melions were twenty micrometers wide. The second hour they were eleven micrometers wide. The third hour they were twenty micrometers wide again. The fourth hour they were eight micrometers wide. She stared at it for several minutes then muttered, “This isn’t right.”

  The bars were growing farther apart with each passing day. They were moving unsteadily, while they should’ve been moving back and forth with a steady, predictable path. She looked at the results once more with disbelief, hoping she had made a mistake. Astrid rechecked the monitor settings...all correct.

  She stared at the rocky ground that stretched farther than the eye could see. The melions will continue to get more erratic each day. This means… she glanced back down at her notetablet, doing the math. It’s going to explode in just a few weeks.

  Astrid felt like she was choking as she inputted the information to calculate the exact date. Swyn 27th at 3:48 in the afternoon.

  Her heart pounded as she stared wide-eyed at the landscape without seeing it. This was her planet...her people. This would all be destroyed in just over six weeks. I have to tell someone. She swam upwards, her golden tail glistening as she snatched her notetablet and left hastily.

  Nearing Akayta, Astrid could see several ships on their way to and from space. Though she couldn’t see it from this distance, she knew the word Oreclay was scrawled across their sides. Oreclay was a government company focused on mining ore from nearby moons and asteroids.

  Finally, she came into view of the city-state of Akayta itself. Its buildings were mainly a shiny white and black; pointed arches abounded. There was a respectable distance between all the buildings, though not too far. It felt airy, and none of the buildings were extremely tall. It was a city that gave you a sense of order and place. Nothing too dramatic. Even the Temple of the Sirof was relatively uniform.

  One of the two areas that differed was the Palace Complex where the royal family of Akayta—supposedly the living incarnation of the Sirof—lived and worked. It rose in the middle of the city above all the other works of architecture. It, too, was black and white. It was a structure with few curves (except for those of the pointed arches). It spread wide and was surrounded by a low, black and white striped wall made of painted bricks.

  The only other place that broke the order was the double digit sector.

  The wide streets gave way to a steady flow of merpeople swimming to and fro, but they weren’t overly crowded. A few grey platforms—transports—carried metal in the travel lane. They were automated. Everyone dressed in simple clothes, each piece a single color. Many wore multi-strapped sleeves.

  As she swam through the streets and over the white, fine sand her mind was flying. Who should I tell? Her heart raced as she tried to conjure up solutions. She stopped in the middle of the mainplace, a triangular area full of merpeople, shops, and businesses. I could just shout it to everyone, it seems like they all need to know. She dismissed the idea as soon as it entered her head. It just wasn’t sensible. No, no. That would just cause mass panic. I know, I’ll tell Effie. Then Effie can get an audience with the royals. Her sister worked as one of the royals’ scientists, so she could speak with them.

  Effie. The one relationship Astrid held onto. It was her anchor in life. Even though she was a sixteen, and therefore had fifteen siblings, they all died at birth except Effie. Her parents also died when she was very young. That left her extremely vulnerable as a child in a society that despised her.

  The merpeople she sped past stared at her with disdain when they saw the red-and-black mark on her upper arm. It had been given to her at birth. Everyone had a mark. The numbered castes were color coded by group. Red-and-blacks were the most hated bracket. Her short sleeved, shiny silver top revealed the repulsive colors. She realized she left her jacket back at the test site. Showing up in public without a jacket was a mistake she rarely made, no matter how warm the water. But Astrid ignored the scorn. There were more important things to deal with. She sped up a little bit.

  She arrived at a building that looked just like the others, but she’d been here so many times it was instinct, she didn’t even have to look at the number on the door. Astrid ha
stily knocked. She heard the creak of a chair and a swish before the it slid open. Her eldest sister Effie stood there, her thick black eyebrows, long black hair, and ornery smile gave her a playful air. The golden mark on her arm swirled in triple loop triangle surrounded by a circle, the Akaytan symbol for one. Effie’s smile fell when she saw the look on Astrid’s face.

  ​“What happened? What’s the matter?”

  ​Astrid glanced around at the passing hordes of merpeople and then hurried inside and closed the door behind her.

  “What is it?” Effie asked.

  Astrid’s eyes radiated fear. She leaned against the door and closed her eyes, trying to gather her thoughts. Hesitantly turning on her notetablet, she handed it to Effie.

  Astrid watched the disbelief grow on her sister’s expressive face as she glanced over the data. Knowledge of melions was common, basic fact. So common, that most people would be able to interpret the data. Effie looked up with a tense seriousness that Astrid rarely saw from her. Effie’s brown eyes held Astrid’s bright blue ones.

  ​“Are you sure that these results are accurate?”

  ​“I wish they weren't.”

  That was all Effie needed, she grabbed her sister’s hand and began to pull her. Astrid followed. She didn’t need to ask where they were going, she already knew. The palace complex loomed as they drew closer. The disdainful glares continued as she swam with her sibling, but for the moment she ignored them. For all of her life she’d been their target, it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, but sometimes it is better to focus on other things. Effie flashed a card by one of the guards on the other side of the gate. They nodded and pushed a button causing the gates to silently open. Effie rushed in, pulling Astrid with her.

  She had never been in the palace except for once when she was a child. She winced at memories of intense judgmental glares and whispered words of disgust. Except for the royal family, all of the merpeople who lived or worked here were eldests. The gold insignias seemed to scream at her as they passed, people hurrying about or just chatting. Her older sister was used to it and was rather preoccupied, otherwise she would’ve been more considerate of Astrid’s feelings. She focused on what was in front of her and tried to blur the people from her vision. Effie abruptly stopped at a large door that was being guarded.