Xiao takes us into the command center of the boat and clears the other mariners away to let us work. “What could go wrong,” Cleve mutters as he looks over the sonar device, familiarizing himself with the apparatus. Then he begins tinkering around, asking me to try sensing various safer targets than the Shadow of the Deep while he adapts the equipment. “Let’s not summon whatever’s bigger than that thing,” he tells me.
Gale makes a good test subject as she flies around the ship waiting for us to come back out on deck. Before long, Cleve’s got it all worked out, including a new switch to change the equipment from regular sonar to resonance sonar whenever needed. Somehow I can feed information to the sonar and get some back, letting me better control my sensing and also allowing others to see the reflected resonance echoes on the display as if they were produced by the sonar’s ultrasonic pings. Or maybe it’s the reverse, and I’m amplifying what the sonar is doing. I don’t know. It would make Sal happy to hear that this is something I am not really going to try to understand, I’m just going to use. Sonar just plays nicely with resonance, somehow.
When that’s all worked out, I step back out onto the deck, signal to Cleve through the window that I’m ready, and begin. Everything works smoothly, and we figure out that the Shadow of the Deep is about a day out from Cliff Island at its current speed. Xiao estimates that we’d arrive at about the same time as it if we sailed at full speed. Where we are right now, the island is between us and the sea creature. So for me to be able to draw it away, we need some lateral movement.
Xiao pores over his maps, considering the angles. “If we change our route and break off to the north, yes, you can pull it off course before it reaches the island. It’ll take us longer to get there ourselves, but we’ll have made the location safer.” He needs no convincing, nor does he consult further with me and Cleve. We keep out of the way as Xiao starts issuing orders to his crew and sending signals to Gale. They have to go against the current at some points, so her wind is crucial for the action.
No one looks worried, but there’s a lot of shouting and creaking. The engines even come on for a bit. Those will need to recharge before they can be used again, but with the clear weather we’re having, they shouldn’t be out of commission for too long.
Hours go by, and finally Xiao signals that we’re in position to pull the Shadow of the Deep off its collision course with the island. So now Cleve and I are up. We’re going to try using the resonance sonar again, but this time to amplify what I send out, rather than to try to interpret what I get back. Up until this point, I’ve generally been trying to be careful when I interact with resonance fields—at least since the siege worm incident. It’s true I’ve been a bit messy sometimes, like when I was so disoriented during that briar beast fight. But I’ve never intentionally been sloppy. That kind of goes against everything I value about personal presentation. So rather than view it that way, I tell myself I need to be flashy. I need to be flamboyant.
And, yeah, I put on a good show, if I do say so myself. I stand there on the deck, hands on the railing, and motes of glowing indigo begin to limn me, like that very first time I really played with the energy around the campfire with Cleve and Corazon. The sonar pulses rolling out from the ship are actually visible in the water with the same resonant light. Uncanny wind whips around me, ruffling my hair as the sparkles around me brighten. The light display grows and grows, well beyond the scale of any of the protective barriers I’ve made. The filigree on my boutonniere ripples in the wind, and tiny zaps of purple energy shoot between the individual wires. My eyes are aglow, as is the scar on my left arm, though rather than marring the smooth skin, that now just makes the tattoo look even cooler. I can feel tingles in my right leg, too, so that scar is probably sparkling as well. If I were an anime character, this would be my transformation sequence.
The wind stretches farther than I initially thought, since up above me Gale is having the time of her life floating around on it. I hear a wail of delight from her. ¡Vaya! I have raised the bar on fun games with this. I hope she won’t expect this sort of entertainment from me often.
From inside this indigo whirlwind, things seem pretty surreal. I can’t imagine what it looks like from the outside. And yeah, pretty much everyone on deck is staring at me. Later on, who knows what the ship’s crew will say—much like Louisa’s gang in the dome after my xenofungus eruption. Right now, though, I do hear one of them. “If only Sal could have seen this! He is truly the Child of Chiron!” Oh, right, at least one of the ensigns on this ship is a cultist.
“If anything is going to get that creature’s attention, it’s probably that,” Xiao says. He lets out a long breath, and I drop everything. The wind stills, the lights extinguish. The Shadow of the Deep will come to this location, of that I am confident—I sensed its attention. And we need to not be here when it does. “Hard to port!” Xiao shouts, and everyone scurries back to work to conduct us to the newly-dubbed Cliff Island.