Chapter 13: The Appre

The wall cracked open and Jolly Roger hit the stone behind them like a hand shoved between their shoulder blades. The kinetic burst was raw, uncalibrated, fired through the crack at maximum output with no precision whatsoever. Jarrin's body moved faster than his brain could process. He was airborne before Jazz could grab his hand, and by the time she did, they were both already through the breach and falling into cold bayou water that hit them like a wall of ice.

The mansion's east wing collapsed behind them. Jarrin didn't look back. The water was already filling his ears, and the sound of the building falling apart was muffled under three feet of bayou, a deep mechanical scream that vibrated through his ribcage before the current pushed him deeper. He kicked upward on instinct, breaking the surface coughing, his hair plastered to his forehead, his blue Hawaiian shirt heavy with water and clinging to him like a second skin he couldn't get rid of. Jazz surfaced two feet away, gasping the same way, her black dress clinging to every angle and her fishnet stockings hanging in tatters from where the debris had caught her on the way through.

The east wing was gone. A column of dust and water shot into the sky where the foundation wall had given way, and then the entire wing slid inward, taking the upper floors with it. The mansion's architecture had been holding together by sheer structural denial for the past twenty-four hours. It had decided to stop pretending.

Jarrin tumbled sideways through the water, fighting the current that was still pulling everything toward the island's center. His fingers found Jazz's wrist. She grabbed his hand hard enough to bruise, and they stayed connected for the three seconds it took the current to shift direction, when the collapsing foundation created a brief updraft that pushed them farther from the ruins rather than deeper into them.

Then the current changed. The island's geometry was undoing itself. The shoreline was receding, the bayou floor was dropping away, and everything that wasn't anchored to bedrock was sliding toward the center.

And there, on a crumbling slab of foundation jutting from the water like a crooked tooth, stood Pryce.

Jarrin blinked the bayou out of his eyes and looked again. Pryce was impossibly upright. A slab of concrete and rebar, maybe four feet across, had tilted at a fifteen-degree angle toward the water, with half its surface already submerged. He stood at the dry edge with both hands pressed flat against something beneath the concrete, silver light pulsing through his fingers and into the stone. The light traced outward from his fingertips in thin lines that spread across the submerged portion of the slab, visible through the murky water like roots growing beneath the surface.

"Come with us!" Jarrin yelled over the roar of the collapsing foundation. The island was literally sinking, and the sound of it was like a massive structure being ground into gravel by the ocean floor. "Pryce, we need you!"

Pryce didn't move. His face had gone gray, the skin translucent enough that the silver light beneath it was visible like veins filled with something other than blood. The left side of his body was gone. The fragment had torn completely away from his torso sometime after the vault, and what remained of him was a man standing on a slab of concrete, his right arm extended into the mechanism beneath his feet, his good eye focused on something no one else could see.

"Thirty seconds!" Pryce shouted back. His voice carried strangely across the water, carrying an edge of mechanical resonance that didn't match a human throat. "The override sequence is already active. If I let go, the circuit breaks and the collapse accelerates."

"That's bullshit," Jarrin said. "We can get you out of here. Fred's blueprints show a shoreline to the northeast. We can make it if we swim."

"Swim?" Pryce almost laughed. The silver light in his fingertips pulsed brighter. "The shoreline moved. The entire bayou floor has dropped forty feet in the last three minutes. There is no northeast shoreline anymore, Jarrin. The island is a mudflat with water six feet deep." He paused. "There might still be land beyond the bayou's outer reef, but you'll never reach it if you keep arguing with a dying man about options he already considered."

Jarrin's chest heaved. Bayou water streamed off his face in steady rivulets. Behind them, the mansion's ruins had settled into a configuration he couldn't parse. The upper floors were mostly submerged, roof beams poking out of the water at odd angles, but the foundation walls still held, forming a rough perimeter that trapped the collapsing island in a ring of concrete that had been designed to last three hundred years.

Jazz was already swimming toward Pryce. Her stroke was efficient, the kind born of instinct more than training, and she cut through the water with a speed that Jarrin wouldn't have expected from anyone carrying a soaked dress and a leather jacket.

"Pryce!" Jazz called out. "What exactly is under your hands?"

"The vault's authorization mechanism. Hargrave's original dual-consent interface. It requires Stand-user signatures from both parties to complete the override." His voice cracked. The silver light through his skin flickered, and for a second Jarrin could see through the translucent flesh to the bone, which was also glowing. "My Stand is dormant, which means Hargrave's dormant signature can finally resonate with mine. The mechanism senses it. It's already reading me. Thirty seconds."

"You're standing on a slab that's tilting into the water," Jazz said. "Thirty seconds isn't enough time to walk off that thing. The moment you pull your hands away from the mechanism, the override fails."

"Correct."

"And if you stay on it, the slab goes under and you go with it."

"Correct."

"So you're planning to die in a mechanism that can't save anyone because you got too attached to the finish line."

Pryce's eye focused on Jazz. Whatever he saw in her expression made him go quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the mechanical edge had left his voice. "Two lives were spent to build that vault. Three months of stolen Stand signatures. I gave up the first one willingly, and the second one was taken from me before I could finish using it." The light in his fingertips flared again, brighter than it had been before. "If I walk away now, all of that is wasted. The island drops faster than if we'd done nothing. At least this way, the mechanism completes. The collapse sequence stops."

"The collapse sequence stops, or the island sinks faster?" Jarrin shouted across the water. "That was Pryce's explanation earlier, and I'm not sure I believe it this time either."

"The mechanism is a failsafe, not an execution order. Hargrave designed it to collapse the island only if the mansion's structural integrity was ever compromised. The override stops the countdown." Pryce's hand pressed harder against the mechanism. Water streamed off his forearm where the silver light pulsed through his skin. "I can feel the Apprentice's signature confirming the sequence. It's almost done."

The slab beneath Pryce tilted. The angle shifted from fifteen degrees to twenty, and a sheet of water poured across the submerged half of the concrete, splashing up around Pryce's legs. He didn't flinch. His feet were planted wide, and the silver light extended through his palms into the mechanism beneath the concrete, anchoring him to something that no longer had a foundation to rest on.

The rest of the slab broke off. The water rushed in from below, filling the gap with a sound like a thousand barrels being crushed at once, and the slab dropped into the bayou with Pryce still standing on it, still pressing his hands against the mechanism, still glowing with that silver light that was eating him from the inside out.

The mechanism dropped with it. The silver light flared once, a brilliant pulse that lit the bayou for half a second, turning the water around them white before the light was swallowed by the sinking island. The island's center collapsed entirely. The foundation vault, with Pryce attached to it, plunged beneath the waterline.

Jarrin stood in water that had been knee-deep seconds ago and was now chest-high and pulling him sideways. The current that the collapsing island had generated was spinning into a vortex, and the vortex was pulling everything loose into the deep. He grabbed Jazz's hand again, harder this time, and the current tore at them like a riptide that wanted its dinner.

Jarrin's grip slipped. The current had him, and he was going sideways, away from Jazz, away from the shoreline, deeper into the vortex. Water filled his nose. His lungs burned. He thrashed, kicking toward the surface, but the current was pulling him down toward the island's center, where the foundation had just disappeared into the bayou floor.

Then a card appeared beside his head. A Poker Face card, laid flat on the surface of the water, and before he could process what he was seeing, Jazz's hand was on his shoulder, pulling him toward it. The card acted like a hinge in the current, redirecting the water's flow just enough to let Jarrin break free. He gasped, breaking the surface, and Jazz hauled him sideways into a current that pointed toward the far bank.

They broke the surface together and kept moving. The vortex was still pulling, still angry, but the current that Jarrin and Jazz had been swept into was pointing northeast, where the shoreline should have been.

The shoreline wasn't where it should have been. What met them on the far bank was a mudflat, exposed after the bayou floor dropped away, and the mud was still shifting under their weight as they staggered out of the water. Mud sucked at their shoes. Jarrin's legs slipped sideways with every step, and he had to grab Jazz's arm to keep from falling flat on his face.

The others were already here. Fred stood near the edge of the mud, blueprints rolled tight against his chest, with Velma and Daphne on either side of him. Shaggy and Scooby were further back, Scooby's paws splashing through ankle-deep mud that covered what used to be the outer reef. They'd followed the same current, probably, or found their own path. Scooby was sneezing.

Velma's device was still working. Jarrin could see the screen glowing green as she adjusted the antenna, scanning the mudflat for anything that registered energy. The device's needle was steady now, pinned at the bottom of its arc, which meant the structural energy signature from the foundation was either gone or below her threshold.

Fred said nothing. He looked at Jarrin, then at Jazz, then past them at the bayou, where the mansion's ruins were now half-sunken in a configuration that would have made a naval architect weep. The roof and upper floors had collapsed into the water. What remained was the foundation walls, sticking out of the bayou like the ribs of something that had been gutted and left to rot.

"The foundation vault went under," Fred said. "With him."

Pryce. Gone, submerged, gone under the waterline with the mechanism attached to his hands and whatever remained of his Stand energy still pulsing through the silver light that had consumed his body.

"The collapse sequence," Velma said. Her voice was flat, analytical, but her hands were shaking as she adjusted her device. "The primary energy signature has dissipated. The island's structural failure has completed. What remains is... residual energy. Dormant. It's still there, in the foundation, but it's not active anymore. It's like..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Like a dead battery. The potential is still there, but the charge is gone."

"The Apprentice's signature," Jazz said. "Is it gone too?"

Velma looked at her screen. "The signature was tied to the mechanism. With the mechanism submerged and Pryce gone..." She shook her head. "The signature is dormant. It's embedded in the ruins. We'd need to enter the structure and absorb it directly to reactivate it."

"Absorb it." Jazz repeated the word. She pulled out her deck of Poker Face cards, the same deck she'd been carrying since the east wing, and began shuffling them with a rhythm that suggested she was working through a problem in a language only she understood.

"The mansion's ruins," Fred said. "The foundation walls are above waterline. The structure is partially intact. If we enter it, we might find residual Stand energy embedded in the walls, the mechanisms, the foundation itself."

"Embedded Stand energy," Jazz said. She stopped shuffling. "That's different from absorbing a signature. Embedded energy in a building is residue, not a living Stand. It's like static electricity in a carpet. You touch it and you get shocked, but you don't absorb it."

"You can," Fred said. "If the energy is dormant and not protected by a Stand's active field, a Stand user can interact with it directly. But it's dangerous. Raw Stand energy, even dormant, can overwhelm a user's nervous system."

Jazz looked at the cards in her hand. She pulled them out and laid them on the mud, fanning them in a neat arc. The cards were dry, which meant she'd been holding them in a protective pocket or compartment. Jazz was prepared for everything.

"Each card can act as a conduit," she said. "A filter. Poker Face stores concepts and properties, and it stores them cleanly. If I channel the Stand energy through the cards first, it gets filtered before it reaches Jarrin. Less shock to the system."

"You're suggesting we use your cards as a bridge," Fred said. "To draw energy from the mansion's ruins into Jarrin's body."

"Exactly. Each card absorbs a portion of the energy, filters it through Poker Face's storage mechanism, and transfers it to Jarrin. The process is untested. Probably dangerous. But it's the only option we have that doesn't involve walking away and hoping the island doesn't finish sinking."

Jarrin checked his pockets. Empty. His hands were scraped raw from the water and the debris. Jolly Roger was nowhere to be seen, which meant the bubble capacity was either depleted or dormant, and given the last twenty-four hours, he suspected both.

He had nothing left. An island that didn't exist anymore. A mansion that was half underwater. No bubbles, no lock marble, and no concept marbles in his pockets. Just a man who'd gotten lost on the way to what he thought was a Starbucks, now standing in mud on a dead island with nothing but his wife's deck of cards and a plan that sounded like it would get him killed.

"Fine," he said. "Hand me a card."

Jazz pulled a deck from somewhere on her person, the pockets of the leather jacket or a hidden compartment or maybe a pocket dimension she'd created years ago that neither of them had investigated, and shoved the whole thing into his hand. "I'm staying here. Whatever energy remains on this island could still move, and I'm not letting anything come out of those ruins without someone watching the door."

Poker Face materialized beside her. The gray woman with white hair and a magician's coat stood ten feet away, cards already fanned between her fingers, her expression giving away nothing. Jazz took position on the shoreline, boots planted wide in the shifting mud, and watched the ruins and the water for anything that still had a reason to kill.

Jarrin walked alone toward the half-sunken mansion. The blue Hawaiian shirt was soaked and heavy. The cards were pressed into his palm, warm from Jazz's hand, and the mud sucked at his shoes with every step. Behind him, Poker Face stood guard over the beach, and Jazz watched him go.