Ari and Zac

Chapter 36: True Love To The Rescue

Chapter 36: True Love to The Rescue

Zac stood at the end of Pier 18, shielding his face with his arms as he strained to see in the darkness. His chest heaved with labored breaths. He'd sprinted the whole way here, from the moment Ari's message came through on his phone. He hadn't paused to explain to Lucy or Cyrus where he was going.

Now he wished he'd brought along his cousin. He could've used the iScroll out here, with its floodlight projection mode. As it was, his only source of illumination was the flashlight on his phone, and that didn't shine more than a few feet.

"ARRRRRIIIIIIII!" Zac shouted her name at the top of his lungs and then paused to listen for an answer. But his ears were only greeted by the keening of the wind.

A dull weight had settled into the pit of his stomach. This was bad. Very bad. He needed to do something. Take action! He knew what she had in mind when she sent him that song link. She had to be out there, somewhere in that black expanse of water.

And it was all his fault.

He never should have recorded her. His grandfather was wrong. Grandfather had insisted they use whatever means necessary—that the stakes were too high to hold back with the SirenSong IPO looming.

But not...not at this price. That couldn't be what grandfather had intended. It couldn't be!

Zac shoved the thought away. He didn't have time to think about it now. He had to find her before it was too late. This whole mess was his fault, and it was his responsibility to fix it. He would make it right. The fact was, he genuinely cared about Ari. He liked her. A lot. He never intended to hurt her. Maybe he could convince her of that, if only he could find her...

He bounced on the balls of his feet, cursing loudly as the seconds ticked by. He needed a plan. Maybe he should call for help. 9-1-1?

Zac was just about to place the call, when a massive sheet of lightning lit the sky. The roar of the thunder deafened him, and for one long moment, the world turned bright as day. He gazed out onto the ocean's surface, scanning for any sign of her. He might not get a better look than this.

In the flash of light, the water turned from black to a shimmering turquoise. It reminded him of something. He didn't know why he thought of that now, at a time like this, but for some reason it called to mind the first night he ever met her. Ari came with her sister to that fake-ass TV casting party, and she kept her eyes glued to her cellphone the entire time. He remembered the way her eyes had struck him—the way the glow from the phone had lit her face, and transformed her eyes from pools of black to blue-green fire. It had given him the strangest feeling at the time. A shiver down his spine. A premonition...

A premonition of tonight?

Or maybe not. Maybe more like deja vu.

Zac realized what it was, gasping as the answer hit him. He knew where he'd seen those exact same eyes before. He'd seen them just this evening. During the Disruption meeting! Cyrus had projected it on the wall. That video of Dominick Torrent, addressing investors in the run-up to the IPO.      

Torrent had been speaking in front of a slide projector, walking back and forth across a stage... and every time he stepped into the beam from the projector, his eyes caught the light. And they flashed. Just like Ari's. Blue-green fire.

How could he have missed it? How could he have failed to understand?

The lightning flashed again and broke through his scattered thoughts. He spotted something this time, off in the deep water, twenty feet from the end of the pier where he stood. A patch of dark red mixed in with the churning waves.