Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End

by Hamilton, Grace

  It had been a few seconds before Josh had managed to regain his composure enough to follow him. “Wait!” he’d called after the disappearing body, but Halley had done nothing of the sort.

  Halley had been gone and Josh was already playing catch-up.

  Running out into the rain on the deck, he’d seen Halley’s shirt flapping behind him with the freshening wind. Halley had been asking one of the probationers where Ten-Foot had gone, and with a word and a pointed answer to his question, he’d been moving into the enclosure and heading for the hatch before Josh had been able to get into catching distance.

  “Keep the ship steady going south!” he’d shouted back to Dotty-B at the wheel, and she’d acknowledged him with a confused nod. “And get on with killing the lights! Gabe’s ship is still following us!”

  Two of the young probationers, Lash and KK, had taken off from their positions at rigging stations, heading across the deck towards the oil lanterns as Josh had ducked inside the enclosure and run towards the gunfire and screaming coming from the hold.

  By the time he had reached the galley, the scientist had already slipped past Maxine, Donald, and the others.

  At least the firing had stopped.

  Josh rubbed at the painful and tender nub of pain in the center of his chest as Maxine sneaked another glance around the edge of the door, peering into the murk of the hold.

  Josh strained to look past her, too. All that could be heard from the hold now was Scally’s ragged sobbing coming from somewhere behind the barricade of the metal freezer. Josh picked out Karel’s head and Halley’s back as he moved towards the freezer.

  “Ten-Foot?” Halley called. “It’s me. The professor. You going to put that gun down and come out so we can talk about this?”

  “What, so that crazy bitch can shoot me in the face?” came the reply.

  “You said you wanted to die!” Karel spat. “Stand up and I’ll make your dream come true right now, you absolute coward!”

  There followed a stream of Polish profanities that Josh didn’t have to use too much imagination to decipher.

  “You don’t know what you want. Do you, Ten-Foot? Let’s face it. You’re confused and scared as well as angry and sad. You’re everything, aren’t you?” Halley was taking more steps towards the boy’s hiding place.

  There was no reply from Ten-Foot, but at least the gun didn’t appear again to shoot the professor where he stood.

  “Look, I get it,” Halley continued. “You’re not thinking straight. The switch has been flipped again. I saw it in your eyes when you came into the engine compartment. I saw the confusion on your face. You didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “He stabbed Jingo! Don’t give him excuses!” There was a sob in the middle of Karel’s tirade. She sprung up behind the crate and emptied her clip over Halley’s shoulder into the hull beside him. To Halley’s credit, he didn’t even flinch, and only brushed the raining splinters from his shoulders as if he were removing dandruff from a funeral suit.

  Josh watched as Halley turned his head to give a shadowed but clearly compassionate look towards where Karel was standing. “I’m not giving Ten-Foot an excuse, Karel,” he said. “You know what the supernova has done to millions of people. It’s done the same to all of us. For some of us, it’s been low-grade; for some of us, a permanent insanity. But Ten-Foot is just like my sister…”

  The words had caught in Halley’s throat. It was the first time Josh could remember that he’d spoken about his sister since the raid on Jaxport and her death. Halley swallowed, wiped a hand across his mouth, and turned back towards where Ten-Foot was hiding. “It’s true. You’re just like her. She was afflicted and affected in the same way by the Barnard’s field. One moment, she could be sane and rational. And sometimes crazy like a fox. I helped her.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Ten-Foot’s anguished voice came spiraling up from behind the metal box, fully entangled in Scally’s sobs.

  “I’m not lying. I promise I’m not.”

  “You’re just trying to trick me! The king said there would be times when people tried to trick me! Times like now!”

  Halley took another step. It would be the work of a second for Ten-Foot to raise his hand and shoot the professor where he stood. He was so close now; it would be harder for the boy to miss him than hit him.

  “Halley, come back!” Josh hissed, but the scientist wasn’t taking any notice. He hadn’t before, and there was certainly no sign that he was going to from this moment forward.

  “Ah, there you are, Josh,” Halley said as he turned his head, as if he were just asking a colleague to back him up on a verbal report related to a piddling piece of project management. “Actually, that’s a good thing that you’re here. You can confirm my story about my sister, Grace, can’t you? When you saw her all those weeks ago, when I trapped you in her house, was she or was she not being successfully treated by me?”

  Josh stood, but he kept himself half in and half out of the doorway, his pistol ready in case this wild gambit by Halley went south. “It’s true, Ten-Foot. Halley has discovered that water can somehow block the effects of the supernova on the human body.”

  Halley smiled, turning back to face the toppled freezer and the boy beyond it. “Look, I don’t understand it all yet. But I’ve been thinking about it. We all have chemicals in our brain that regulate our feelings and our moods. Whatever particles the Barnard’s explosion is spewing out, it’s having a physical effect on our brains. Maybe these particles—let’s call them Made-up-namium for now—maybe they are stripping the dopamine from our brains, causing the effects we’re seeing across the population. Maybe you, Ten-Foot, like Grace, had fluctuating dopamine levels to begin with, but not significantly low ones. Maybe your body pumps out more when you need it, I don’t know. But combined with the Made-up-namium, your mood wavers in and out of heightened aggression and serious mood swings. Sometimes you feel okay; sometimes you wanna kill the world. Yes?”

  There came the longest second imaginable in the hold as Halley let that question hang in the air. Even the sounds of Scally sobbing became a low sniffle.

  “I think I can cure you,” Halley continued. “On a permanent basis, Ten-Foot. I think I can cure the world one person at a time. Starting with you. But if you make Karel kill you, all bets are off. Put down the gun, son. Put it down and I promise you we can get this done.

  Karel’s eyes were wide, her pistol—into which she’d slammed a fresh clip while Halley had been speaking—still pointing at the space Ten-Foot would occupy if he stood up.

  Josh’s heart was the loudest sound in the world to his ears. His mouth was dry, and sheer tension gripped him like a giant’s fist as they waited for Ten-Foot to make his move.

  A shuffling of bodies behind the freezer suggested that events were coming to a head. Karel’s arms steadied. Her eyes along the gun barrel were hard and sharp.

  Halley was still as a flag pole, turned towards the freezer with his hand outstretched, as if imploring Ten-Foot silently to give himself up to treatment and a possible cure.

  In the end, Ten-Foot didn’t appear from behind the metal cold store. It was Scally Lish. Her cheeks streaked with tears, and her bottom lip trembling. Hooked around her index finger was the trigger guard of a pistol.

  “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “He’s given me his gun.”

  12

  They poured sea water, dredged from the side of the Sea-Hawk, into the hull of one of the lifeboats, and Ten-Foot, after some persuading from Halley, immersed himself in the water and used a snorkel to breathe. Henry stayed on hand, armed and ready in case Ten-Foot again made any attempts to harm anyone.

  Karel stalked the deck above the hold where Ten-Foot was ensconced in the kayak. After Jingo’s body had been wrapped in a sheet and then dropped with as much dignity as could be mustered into the sea, and with dawn already beginning to claw its way up the sky, she had made it abundantly clear that she wanted to be left alone. She was still bone-shakin
gly angry, Maxine had observed. Her blond hair was hauled back into what looked like a painfully tight ponytail, and her jaw remained set. Her hands made fists as she carved a line up and down the deck. Not making eye contact with anyone. Not speaking. Just boiling her anger into a bitter tincture.

  Maxine had watched Karel for a while, walking like an automaton. She felt for the woman, of course. When Ten-Foot had eventually emerged from behind the freezer, at which point Josh had gone fully into the hold to stand between Karel’s gun and Ten-Foot’s body, she’d thrown the pistol down with disgust and run up to the darkened deck—where she’d stayed for the rest of the night.

  Halley had ignored everyone else and gone to Ten-Foot as if he were greeting a long-lost member of his family, rather than someone who minutes before had murdered one of their number while taking Scally hostage.

  The boy’s eyes had been swollen with the unfamiliarity of tears. Maxine had gotten the impression that crying was not something that came easily to Ten-Foot. All she’d seen of him before the escape from Jaxport had painted him as a vicious and violent man—a near psychopath—who would accept nothing but full obedience, and who was in turn set gladly in the thrall of Gabriel Angel.

  That Ten-Foot seemed to have changed again, so much; he’d rescued Tally from Greene and then helped them to escape on the Sea-Hawk, giving some credence to Halley’s hypothesis. Maxine couldn’t even admit to herself that she understood a tenth of what Halley was proposing, but he’d been so right about so much else, it was clear that his methods were worth a shot. Karel, she knew, would rather be taking a different kind of shot, and Maxine realized that Josh had put Henry on guard to protect Halley from Ten-Foot just as much as he’d done it to protect Ten-Foot from Karel.

  Ten-Foot’s hands had stayed limp at his sides as Halley had actually hugged the boy, drawing him close and letting him bury his head in the professor’s shoulder. The scientist had whispered indistinct words to the boy then, who had eventually lifted up his head and nodded to Halley.

  Scally, wiping her eyes and handing Ten-Foot’s gun to Josh, had walked out of the hold at a slower pace than Karel’s apoplectic headlong rush. She had paused only as she’d come across Maxine and the others in the galley, recovering her composure by the second now that her ordeal had ended.

  “Thanks,” she’d said to Maxine.

  In that moment, Maxine had seen the shutters these kids needed to protect themselves from their chaotic lives and dangers, and she’d seen them coming back down for protection. Scally was getting back into character as the difficult kid, the attitude merchant with extra sarcasm and a side order of street survival smarts. But before the shutter had come down completely, she’d kissed Maxine on the cheek and then gone back up to the deck to regain her place among the crew.

  As the dawn’s light began to spread across the cloud-studded sky, and the wind threw raindrops at them like gravel—stinging their skin and hunching their shoulders—it became apparent that they hadn’t yet managed to shake off the Grimoire. It was a little further away than it had been during the night, but the sails were still visible, and through the binoculars, red-uniformed Harbormen could be seen setting extra sails, hauling on ropes, and generally busying themselves with catching the Sea-Hawk.

  “Dammit,” Josh breathed as he pulled the binoculars away from his eyes after confirming that the other ship was still on their wake. “How the hell did they follow us at night with no light?”

  Maxine shook her head. “It makes no sense.”

  The sense of threat from the Grimoire was palpable, but also from the weather. Back in the captain’s cabin, Donald, Poppet, and Maxine reconvened with Josh.

  “I don’t like the look of the weather. It’s closing in, the wind is up, and the sea’s getting more than a little choppy,” Maxine said. “I know a change in the weather when I see one. And it looks like going south, where we’re heading, is taking us into the teeth of something bad.”

  Josh appeared to agree, but shrugged in defeat. “But if we turn around now, the Grimoire will have a better chance of catching us. And without the engine…” He looked at Donald.

  Donald shook his head. His arms and hands were thick with oil and soot from where he’d been trying to assess the damage to the engine. “It’s kaput,” he said morosely. “Whatever Ten-Foot stuffed into it and set alight has taken away any chance of us getting it moving without a full strip-down and refit. And even if we had the time, we don’t have the spares to fix it. Not without spending time in port. We have to outrun the Grimoire on sail alone.”

  Maxine crossed her arms across her chest. “Or we could fight it.”

  She honestly didn’t know where that had come from. Maybe it was the situation, the dreadful uncertainty, or the dogged pursuit of Gabe’s ship. The sense, maybe, that striking back against Gabe, the man who had stolen her son from her, would provide a strong physic to assuage the helplessness she was feeling.

  Whatever the case, Josh and Donald looked at her as if she were speaking Martian.

  Poppet laughed with delight. “Go, Maxine! Hashtag Team Max!”

  Maxine felt the colors in her cheeks rising. “I’m tired of running. We have all those grenades and guns. Surely, we have a chance of at least a fair fight…”

  Josh shrugged again. Donald sucked in his cheeks. “If Ten-Foot is correct about that ship, and it does have a cannon, we’re going to be at least as vulnerable to them as they are to us. And we don’t know what else they have on board that we can only guess at.”

  “They’ve certainly got some way of keeping tabs on us at night. They couldn’t have followed us as closely as they have without something we don’t know about,” Josh said. “And that increases the risk as far as I’m concerned. Let’s see how things go tonight. Right now, we’ve got enough speed and distance to keep ahead, so we should see if we can turn that to our advantage over time.”

  Maxine felt the frustration spiking in her throat. “Yes, I get all that. But what if the weather gets even worse? What if the wind changes and we’re caught anyway?”

  “Then we should prepare for battle, at least,” Poppet said with determination. “No point in keeping the guns and the grenades in the hold. We need to get them up on deck and make sure everyone knows how to use them. It’s going to be all hands to the pumps if the Grimoire gets alongside us.”

  Maxine smiled, feeling glad of the support, but turned to her husband. “I know why you’re being cautious, Josh. I get it. You don’t want to lose us again. I get it. You want to keep us safe. I do, too. I don’t want to put Tally or you in the firing line. But what else can we do? We need to take the fight to them, Josh. We can’t run forever. Sometimes, the best way to defend ourselves is to turn and fight.” She met her father’s eyes next. “You taught me that, Dad. You taught me that lesson first.”

  Donald and Josh exchanged glances, and Poppet began to applaud. Then, when she realized she was the only one applauding, she looked sheepish and stopped.

  “And planning for battle will give Karel some focus, and a way to smooth out her anger over Ten-Foot. I think she’s as disgusted at us for allowing him to be shielded from her revenge as she is at him for killing Jingo.” As Maxine finished, she knew from Josh and her dad’s expressions that she’d won them over.

  Fighting Gabe’s ship might be a little crazy, but she needed to feel she was doing something other than running away, and if they won the battle, she knew it would give her a strong sense that Gabe could ultimately be defeated, and if that happened, Storm would come back to the fold.

  That mattered almost as much as anything.

  Plus, she had a lot of history with Gabe to erase. And this was a strong start.

  Because it was Maxine’s idea, she volunteered to speak to Karel up on the deck while Josh and the others worked with some of the probationers who could be spared to bring the weapons up from the hold.

  The weapons and ammunition were placed under tarps in the lifeboats to keep them out of the worse
ning weather. Everyone had already been issued foul weather gear and life jackets, too. The wind was still rising, and although it was now past midday, the sea had become a roiling boil of wine-dark water with white, cresting waves, and the sky was bruised with threat. It was hard to tell what was spray coming over the side of the ship and what was rain from the clouds.

  They took turns resting while others worked on the decks, but no one seemed to get much rest when they were below decks—not with the movement of the Sea-Hawk on the heaving swells.

  The deck was slick and darkened with water. Maxine found she had to hang on to ropes and stays in order to keep upright as the ship heeled and yawed.

  Karel had stopped walking up and down the deck. She was standing now, looking out to sea ahead of the Sea-Hawk. The woman was drenched to her bones, as she hadn’t taken the opportunity to get into waterproofs.

  Maxine stood beside her now, the wind flapping her hair and stinging her eyes. She held out yellow waterproofs and a life jacket. “Why don’t you put these on? Or come down below decks. Get warm? Get dry? I could make you a coffee?”

  The ordinariness of her words underscored the extraordinariness of the situation. That feeling undercut her words with the sudden sense that she was being trite and insincere, as well. Offering someone a coffee in all this—the danger, the threats, and the grief. Maxine suddenly felt very dumb.

  “I’m sorry. That was just stupid. You’re hurting. The last thing you need is me coming up here playing the good Samaritan. I’ve come for a reason, and it’s not to offer to make you a damn cup of coffee. We need you.”

  Karel’s face, wet with spray, turned and looked at Maxine. Her eyes were wells of hurt, her lips pale and her cheeks colorless.

  At least it was a start, Maxine thought, to have her meeting her eyes. A way in. “I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t be angry about what happened to Jingo, and how we’ve protected Ten-Foot from you. I get your need for some… balance… some, I don’t know. A sense of revenge. I feel the same thing, too.”