Secrets of the Deep Read Online Free Page B

her tail, Sapphira left the warm, sunlit crystal shallows and followed the sound eastward. Pushing off the sandy bottom now and then with her stingray spear, she swam at a moderate pace, gliding alongside the descending curve of rocky mounts crusted with sea anemones.
    Along the way, she stopped and carefully dislodged one of the countless alicia mirabilis growing there. The phosphorescent sea anemone stood like pillar candles fixed to the rocks, each about six inches tall and topped with a shock of tentacles like wild hair blowing in the wind of the current.
    The merfolk called them sea candles.
    By day, the alicia mirabilis looked like any ordinary sea anemone, but by night, they glowed in the dark like delicate magical lanterns. This would prove helpful if she needed extra light when she reached the deeper valleys of her father’s realm, where it seemed the noise was leading her.
    Carefully tucking the alicia mirabilis into the satchel she carried over her shoulder, she decided she needed more speed, and summoned the fastest fish in the sea with a watery whistle. A pair of huge, strong bluefin tuna darted over to attend her. “Mind if I hitch a ride?”
    They were not as communicative as dolphins, but they seemed happy to comply with a royal request. Each over a thousand pounds and nearly ten feet long, the two massive tuna swam into formation side by side and allowed her to loop a length of kelp around each one as a makeshift harness.
    She held on tight and gave the green reins a jangle. “Ready!”
    At once, they tucked in their dorsal fins a bit to reduce drag and took off at top speed. Sapphira let out a yelp of glee. She couldn’t help laughing as her chariot team streaked across the Ionian Sea in a foaming wake, speeding around rock formations, whizzing through the center of schools of fish.
    They pulled her so fast that her long, dark, spiral-curled tresses stretched out almost straight behind her. The shades of blue all around them kept her apprised of the changing depths as they traveled due east.
    The deepening water turned from aquamarine to cerulean then cobalt and grew cooler. Heading ever deeper, she passed the black coral hills and the red sea fan forest.
    Before long, the barely winded tuna had carried her all the way to the far edge of her father’s kingdom. She was leagues away now from the warm, familiar waters around Coral City and the royal palace.
    At these depths, the sea was at its most mysterious, the surface above not even visible anymore. The surrounding waters had turned a thick, soupy indigo, sluggish and cold. Just a little deeper, they’d turn black. Here below the bottom edge of the normal ocean currents, the stillness was eerie.
    She murmured soothing words to the nervous tuna. She knew they couldn’t go much deeper than four thousand feet. Nor could she, for that matter. She could already feel the increasing pressure on her ribcage and her eardrums.
    “Come on, just a little farther,” she urged her team with a twitch of the reins. They balked but obeyed.
    Ahead, an ominous sight awaited: the edge of the Calypso Deep, named after one of her ancient ancestors.
    It was said to plunge more than three miles down into the Earth’s crust, its waters as black as octopus ink.
    Nobody knew what was down there. Oh, the whales could withstand its depths and chose private retreats like the canyon in which to birth their young. The occasional giant squid and certain species of large sharks also liked to lurk there. They did not mind the cold.
    But even the great sharks never ventured all the way to the bottom. Sharks’ teeth were no defense against the poisonous sulfur fumes belching up out of the sea vents from the Earth’s molten core.
    The seafloor was sown with the towering mounts of undersea volcanoes, around whose feet the tectonic plates crashed and crumbled ceaselessly, churning with their never-ending little earthquakes.
    The whales had reported that the Calypso Deep was full of