Dark Life: Rip Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the door. “I should get going.”
    “Ty, wait,” she called after me.
    But I’d already stepped out. I saw that the ocean had lost its glow, which seemed fitting. She joined me on the docking-ring.
    At that moment, Jibby clambered down a ladder from the promenade. “Oh, good,” he said, spotting Gemma. “I thought you’d left with John and Carolyn.”
    “No,” she said, but didn’t mention that she was living here full-time now.
    “I just wondered …” He shot me a guilty look.
    “Ask her whatever you want,” I told him. “Has nothing to do with me.”
    Relief swept over his features, though hers seemed to tighten.
    “You want to see your brother?” Jibby asked her.
    Of all the things I expected him to say—including proposing marriage again—that was not one of them. Gemma looked as surprised as I felt.
    “I got two tickets to the bare-knuckle boxing matchat Rip Tide tomorrow night.” He held up a synthetic paper flyer. “Won them in a poker game. Then I saw who was fighting.”
    “Richard?” she asked in amazement.
    “Yeah, well, Shade,” Jibby said. Which was the name her brother went by ever since he’d become an outlaw and the leader of the notorious Seablite Gang.
    “How do you know it’s the same Shade?” I asked.
    He waved us under one of the lights that circled the edge of the promenade. “There can’t be two that look like that,” he said, handing her the flyer.
    Standing in the pool of light, Gemma studied the flyer and smiled. Then she showed me the drawing of the two boxers. One of the men pictured was her brother, no question. The dark-skinned, tattooed version of him anyway. What the flyer didn’t mention was that Shade had a Dark Gift that let him change the color of his skin at whim like a squid.
    “What’s Rip Tide?” Gemma asked as she read the flyer.
    “An off-coast city south of here,” Jibby said. “Kinda like our Trade Station but for surfs.”
    “Sounds great,” she said absently, her eyes on Shade’s picture. “Can I keep this?”
    Her apparent longing for her brother had me worried. She hadn’t heard from him at all in the past four months.Not since he took off with his gang after locking a group of us—her included—in the lower station when it disengaged from the Surface Deck and sank. To be fair, Shade hadn’t known the lower station had sprung a leak. But still, trapping us subsea without vehicles or Liquigen was just another item on a long list of his dangerous activities, which included deflating our neighbors’ house. Reckless, menacing, and vengeful—why would anyone miss him? But clearly, she did.
    “Sure, keep it,” Jibby said. “So, does that mean you want to go?” When she didn’t answer him right off, he added, “We can get a note to Shade. Tell him that you’re ringside.”
    Since she’d lit up at the mention of her brother, I didn’t understand her hesitation. Then I noticed her gaze had drifted to me. Did she think I’d judge her for wanting to see Shade? Just because I didn’t like him or his gang didn’t mean—
    “I’d love to, Jibby,” she said abruptly. “I do want to see Richard. Shade,” she corrected.
    I headed for the cruiser, desperate to submerge and let the ocean close over me. As I unhitched the tether line, they made their plans. A minute later Jibby strode toward his sub, and I couldn’t help but notice the extra bounce in his step.
    Gemma joined me by the hitching post. It was time to say good night, but the thought of leaving her here allalone stung like a cut rinsed in salt water. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back with me for the night? Zoe misses you more than you can imagine.”
    When she hesitated, I saw my chance and grabbed it. I pointed at the derelict township that banged against the docking-ring with every swell. “It’s just that I worry about you, sleeping here, with a ghost town hitched right outside your window….”

CHAPTER
FIVE
    “Lots of people have bad diving