The Secret Sea by Barry Lyga Page B

and Moira helped him down the steps into the subway. Zak realized that he didn’t have his MetroCard, but Khalid swiped him in, and soon they stood on the platform. Zak gazed around. It was just a subway platform in Brooklyn. Nothing exciting or exceptional about it—rusted overhead steel, trash-strewn tracks, bored commuters loitering. A darting shadow in the distance that his experienced eyes knew—without even seeing it totally—to be a rat, scavenging in the wasteland of the tracks.
    Where are you, Tommy? How can you still speak to me?
    He stared down at the tracks. A fork lay there. Not a plastic fork dropped from a takeout bag or tossed aside after being used—that would make sense. No, this was a shiny silver fork, clean and new, sitting on the track.
    For a moment he forgot why he was here. What on earth was a perfectly good fork doing on the subway tracks?
    â€œHere,” Moira said. The platform vibrated, and the air went a-roar. Zak thought he was back on the ship, its hull shaking with each crashing wave, but the vision stubbornly refused to come.
    They clambered onto the Q train to Manhattan. At this time of day, most straphangers were headed in the opposite direction, coming to Brooklyn from the city, so there was no trouble finding three consecutive empty seats. Khalid and Moira flanked Zak.
    â€œAre you okay?” Moira asked him. She had been holding his hand off and on since they left his hospital room.
    Tommy, come back. Please. I need to understand.
    â€œHe looks a little pale,” Khalid said, worried. The flickering confines of the subway car warped in the lenses of his sunglasses. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
    â€œI’m fine,” Zak said. He was close, he knew. Somehow, he could sense that he was close to understanding. Close to Tommy. Again.
    â€œAre you sure?” Moira this time.
    â€œYes. Trust me.”
    I’m coming, Tommy. His heart skipped a beat and he froze, but it picked up its reliable rhythm immediately. One way or another, I guess, I’m coming.
    *   *   *
    The train rattled along, making its usual stops in Brooklyn before diving under the East River to trundle toward Manhattan. The car was eerily silent as only a subway car can be. The noise of the car itself, of its hissing, squealing mechanics, became divorced from the interior, as though it belonged to another world, and the universe within purged itself of sound.
    â€œThey must have named him after my uncle,” Zak said, needing to break the silence. He felt nothing; he heard nothing. If he didn’t talk, he would go mad.
    â€œNamed who?”
    â€œMy brother. Thomas Oscar Killian. For Uncle Tomás.”
    â€œRight,” Khalid mused. “Does that mean you’re named after someone?”
    â€œMy dad’s stepfather. Grampa Zachary.” He’d never really thought about it before, this business of naming people for people.
    He’d thought his imaginary friend was his dead uncle; now he knew it was his dead twin. But how? Why? There were other dead people in his life—Grampa Zachary, for one—and he’d never received a visitation from any of them. Not until Tommy. Was being twins enough to breach the barrier between life and death?
    He wanted to ask Moira. She subsisted on a steady diet of comic books, science fiction, and fantasy novels. If anyone had a theory on this, it would be Moira. But she would probably have ten theories, each one with fifteen subtheories, and if asked, she wouldn’t stop until she’d expounded on each and every one. So, maybe not.
    â€œWhat’s the plan here, Moira?” Khalid asked. “We’re almost in the city.”
    Zak thought he heard something just then, but maybe it was just his imagination. He’d never really heard the voice when he was trying to—it had always sneaked up on him.
    â€œWe need to go to the World Trade Center,”