Rising Tide

by Rajan Khanna

  Sergei finds me a little while later. “It is good, Ben,” he says.

  “What is?”

  “This,” he says. “All of this. Our people. Miranda.”

  I’m guessing Sergei is a little drunk.

  He’s staring at Miranda. “You know she’s like a daughter to me, yes?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “And I love her like one.” His eyes move to me. “Like my own.” He smiles, then it fades. “I knew her parents. I promised them.” He grabs my shoulder, leans in a little too close. “I promised them.”

  Leave it to the boffins—all logic while sober, all maudlin while drunk.

  I look at Sergei and see tears in his eyes. It unnerves me. I turn to go.

  Sergei’s hand claps down hard on my shoulder. Pulls me back around. “You,” he says. His voice is a little too loud. A little too emphatic. “You do a good job of protecting her.”

  “I try,” I say.

  And you make her happy.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “I am.” He pats me again. “Ben . . . you should . . . I mean, you . . .”

  “Sergei . . .”

  He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t let this slip away, you hear?”

  “Okay, Sergei.”

  “No,” he says. “No. I had someone—long ago.” He shakes his head again. “I let it just . . . slip away.” He mimes opening his hands, gives a little smile. Then his face turns serious. “I never forgave myself. Don’t do that, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Promise me,” he says.

  “Sergei, it’s okay.”

  He places his hand on my cheek. “Promise. Me.”

  “Fine. I promise.”

  “Good,” he says, the smile returning. “Good.” Then he stumbles off.

  I catch Miranda’s eye from across the room. She is happy, smiling. Gorgeous. Shining. Part of me wants to walk across the room, pull her to me, and kiss her. But now doesn’t really seem like the time.

  Still, it feels like a perfect night.

  Then I catch sight of Rosie glaring at me, too.

  Well, almost perfect.

  The next day, Lewis shows up to meet everyone and get a sense of the operation. Also to establish his authority.

  I’m not really part of either.

  I want to stay here with Miranda, of course, but there’s not much for me to do here. I crave the activity of the main island. And as long as Alpha is here, I’ll never feel comfortable.

  Miranda is busy with the boffins, sharing the new data she stole from the Cabal, giving them their assignments, answering questions.

  I wander for a bit, walking the edge of the island, and then I find myself back in the boffins’ area. They’re going to need new buildings out here, I think. If everyone is going to stay. The newcomers need a place to sleep. Right now they’re all huddled in the largest room in the place. Last night they basically passed out in any space they could. And they’re going to need more room for their experiments. We’re going to have to talk to Lewis about a long-term solution.

  Somehow, as I’m wandering, I find myself at Alpha’s enclosure. It’s kept away from the main work area. He’s in a cage in a building with another layer of fencing around. Miranda explained to me their security measures. Even I had to admit they sounded pretty thorough. And they damn well better be. Because they’re keeping a live Feral here. And if he were to escape, well, who knows what might happen? Which is why Tamoanchan has been insisting on everyone staying out here. Heading back to the island would mean another quarantine period before I could do anything.

  Then, for reasons even I’m not sure of, I go inside to look at Alpha, careful to deactivate all the security measures in place, making sure I reactivate them as I pass. This is nothing new to me. My father taught me you don’t take chances with Ferals, and I’m proud to say I never have.

  Well, except letting this one fly with me. But that was Miranda’s idea and it wasn’t my ship, so I didn’t have a whole lot of say in the matter.

  Alpha looks a lot like the last time I saw him. His hair is still long and tangled, but he looks a little cleaner. I wonder if that was the boffins. Taking blood samples might be a lot easier without a layer of dirt and shit and matted hair. Miranda has access to some tranquilizers. and they’ve rigged a system where they can easily administer injections if necessary. They might have knocked him out and scrubbed him down.

  The idea almost makes me vomit. Too easy for his contaminated fluids to get on someone that way unless you were covered head to toe.

  I’ll have to ask Miranda.

  But he’s pacing when I walk in, until he sees me and launches himself at the bars of his cage, shrieking, challenging. If he could, he’d be on top of me in an instant, his teeth on my neck or some other place where they might be able to kill. He’d let me die and then tear into me with hands that might have once held a spoon or fork, with a mouth that might have once been capable of speech.

  No longer.

  Once again, I feel the urge to pull out the revolver and splatter his brains on the other side of his cage. But I don’t. I promised Miranda I wouldn’t. But I keep hoping for a reason that we don’t need to keep this thing. A reason to dispose of him, drop him in the ocean and let the creatures there rid the world of his threat forever.

  But not today.

  I double-check the security as I leave. Okay, triple-check it.

  I mean, fucking Ferals.

  When I get back to the lab, Miranda is waiting for me. “You okay?” she asks.

  I nod. “Yeah. Fine.”

  She looks at me, doubtful.

  “I’m fine.”

  She shrugs. “Okay.”

  “What did Lewis want?”

  “What doesn’t he want?” she says. “I had to give him a breakdown of what we’re planning. What we need. What we’re going to do with it all.”

  “Was he satisfied?”

  She tucks some loose hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. I think so. But we need a lot. We have the mind power now, but we need supplies. Glassware, chemicals, hardware . . . . more. Lewis . . . I don’t know that he liked all of that.”

  I nod. “He’s going to need to organize ship captains to go forage, give them lists, teach them what to look for.”

  “I guess,” she says.

  Up until now, this plan of Miranda’s has seemed nebulous—boffin stuff, science, nothing to do with me—but right here I see a piece of the puzzle that makes sense to me.

  “Let me do it.”

  “What?”

  I feel something, a slight burning in my belly, a fire rekindled. “Let me go deal with it. I’ll talk to Lewis. Help arrange the ships. Help get you your supplies.”

  She looks up at me, unsure.

  “This is what I’m good at, Miranda,” I say. “I fly ships. I forage. I don’t know all of what you need, but I can figure out a way to get it.”

  “Ben—”

  “It’s what I’m good at,” I repeat.

  “Along with pissing people off, getting thrown in cells, getting beat on . . .” She ticks them off on her fingers.

  “I’m a decent pilot, too.”

  She sighs. “I know.” She crosses her arms. “It’s not a bad idea.”

  “Then why not let me do that?”

  She meets my eyes. “I thought that you were going to stick around this time.”

  I look away. “I can’t do anything for you here.”

  In her eyes, a challenge. I keep talking. “I know ships. I know captains. I know foraging. Can you really trust anyone else?”

  She sighs again. “No.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll do it. I’ll go to the main island and talk to Lewis and start finding ship captains.”

  “What are you going to fly, Ben?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll fly with someone else. Maybe I’ll convince Diego to take the Osprey.”

  “And Rosie?”

  “I
don’t know, Miranda. I need to figure it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes,” she says. “You’re really the only person I would trust.”

  “And I’m the best person for the job.”

  She just shakes her head.

  “Go on. Say it. Say I’m the best person for the job.”

  “Sometimes it surprises me that you’ve survived this long.”

  I smile at her. “This will work.”

  “I’ll need to give you a list of what we need.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Please do. I can figure out some of it, but not the . . . science stuff.”

  Miranda shakes her head. “I’ll take care of the ‘science stuff.’” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face. “I don’t expect that Lewis will like this much, but . . . he’s in this up to his ears. He lives or dies with us, and for us to live, we need everything. I’m polling my people to see if they know of any caches or intact research locations. We’ll need to get as much as we can.”

  “Whatever you need,” I say.

  She tilts her head at me. “You kinda like all this jumping around, don’t you? You’ve never been in one place for very long.”

  I open my mouth.

  “The Cherub doesn’t count,” she interrupts.

  “Then no.”

  She chews on her bottom lip. “Do you think you could ever get used to this island living?”

  I inhale slowly and consider my next words. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a little while now. I guess ever since the Cherub blew up. Will I ever be happy in one place? Will I ever be happy on the ground?

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think maybe.” With you, I want to say. But the words won’t come out. “But I’ll always need the sky,” I say. “I’ve been thinking that if they won’t give me the Dumah, then maybe I’ll see if I can get work aboard another ship. At least until I can figure something else out. I think if I can fly from time to time I’ll be okay.”

  “Well, then it’s a good thing you get to go back to it.”

  Yeah . . .

  “Get me your list,” I say. “We don’t have a lot to barter with, but I’ll see if Lewis can help. Maybe Diego, too.”

  She nods, then looks at me, something unspoken in her eyes.

  “Try not to get yourself banged up this time,” she says. “I won’t be there to patch you up.”

  “Noted,” I say.

  “Good-bye, Ben.”

  As I turn to go, I think about how I don’t like the sound of that.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Three weeks of supply runs, back and forth to Tamoanchan, and I’m finally on the last one. It quickly became obvious that it didn’t make sense to stop for quarantine, so it’s been grab and drop, grab and drop, grab and fucking drop.

  Unsurprisingly, I’m having a great time.

  It’s not the same as being on the Cherub, of course, and I’m not the pilot, but Diego lets me take the Osprey’s controls from time to time, and I’m back in the air. Back to foraging.

  Back to my old life.

  The only difference is that I’ve never really worked with a crew before, unless you count Claudia and my dad. For this last run, it’s Diego, Rosie, and me—as usual—and Maya, one of the new boffins we rescued from the prison camp. Miranda had the bright idea of sending a boffin along on each of the runs, to help identify what supplies were most needed and to help with some of the delicate equipment, which was a good idea. Me, I don’t know a microscope from a spectroscope from a tele . . . wait, I know a telescope. You know what I mean. So they didn’t lose too much brainpower, they stuck to the same people, but for this last run, they sent along Maya.

  Maya’s hoop earrings continue to throw me. I mean, why would you wear something like that? They’d be too likely to get stuck on something. Like a Feral’s finger. I picture it in my head, the skin tearing, an open wound just exposed, waiting to be infected.

  I can’t suppress my shudder. She’s at least wearing a hat, a wide-brimmed, light-colored affair, and a colored scarf that wraps about her neck and can be pulled up to cover her face. Otherwise, her small form is fairly decently wrapped in sweaters and a worn-in pair of jeans. Most of what she’s wearing is knitted. By the look of her eyes, she’s got some Asian blood in her, but other blood, too. She catches me looking at her and smiles.

  I hope she doesn’t get the wrong idea.

  “So tell me again what this thing is?” I ask.

  “It’s a cache of gear and supplies,” she says. “We had a pretty steady operation, Hector and me and the others, but we had backup supplies. In case of disaster. Or theft. Or attack. So we decided to stash some equipment in a safe place.”

  “And this could help Miranda.”

  “Definitely. We bring that back, and it will be a huge help.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Thing is,” she says, leaning back against the wall of the gondola, “the more machines we have to run these tests, the better. You need backups. You need contingency plans. As it is, we’re going to have to have people staffing the lab on a continuous basis. Or at least every time someone arrives back on the island.”

  Which, sure, would be great. This has been something we’ve been working toward for a long time. Being able to keep the virus off of the island would be a huge, positive change for everyone. But it’s not foolproof. I mean, you can limit infection, but new people are always going to be tricky. They got lucky with me and Miranda. But it’s still a perilous thing. Bring in a new airship crew, for example, to help bring in supplies. And if you can’t trust them, if they turn on you and sell you out to someone, then what? All it takes is one person to do something like that. Protecting against that is much harder.

  Which makes me wonder about Maya. I wouldn’t rush to let someone like her off the island so soon after getting there, but it had nothing to do with me. Miranda put her on the list and Lewis cleared it. She was offering Miranda a prize, after all, another cache of supplies. And, like the other boffins, she seems more excited by the project they’re working on than anything else. Sounds like her previous group was pretty severely taken apart by the raiders.

  It still seems so strange. I can see why raiders would want to go after someplace like Gastown. It’s valuable. It has helium. Plus, it’s a center of trade. They hold it, they get to reap the rewards. But boffin setups? All I’ve been able to figure is that the Cabal wants to stop others from studying the Bug. They want to be the only game in town. Or maybe they just want to steal what everyone else has managed to figure out. I don’t know. But their involvement in everything makes me uneasy. The Valhallans, I can try to understand. They’re about power, pure and simple. The Cabal . . . I’m lost without a map.

  “So, are you going to try to patch up this thing between you and Rosie?” Maya asks me, interrupting my train of thought. It surprises me at first, but then she and Rosie have become quite chummy.

  “I think it’s up to her,” I say. “She’s mad at me for putting Diego in danger.”

  “But didn’t you?”

  I shift in my seat. “Yes. And I’ve apologized to him.”

  She crosses her arms. “But have you apologized to her?”

  “To Rosie?”

  She nods.

  “ . . . no.”

  “So you really haven’t tried to fix this.”

  “She thinks I’m bad weather. And besides, what happened happened. I can’t take it back.”

  “You could show remorse.”

  “I have. I do. I—”

  Shit. Is she right?

  “Do you think I should?”

  Maya shrugs. “It seems like it might be a good idea.” She shrugs again. “Or maybe she’ll get over it on her own.”

  I’m tired of talking about this, so I try to shift the conversation. “So how long have you and Hector been working together?”

  “Years, now,” she says. “He came from out East. From an enclave ther
e. He came looking for a new group to work with and found us.”

  “And you?”

  She smiles. “I was born into it.”

  “Like Miranda.”

  “I guess. My parents were already part of a science commune when I was born. They taught me as I got older.”

  “Did you ever think of, I don’t know, not doing what your parents did? Striking off and doing something else?”

  She shrugs, then shakes her head. “I don’t think I ever did. It just seemed so . . . important.”

  That seems odd to me until I realize that I pretty much did the same. Ended up doing exactly what my father did, without ever questioning it. I only ever wanted to be a pilot and a forager. Not that it seemed important. It just seemed . . . me.

  “So your people were also looking for a cure?” I ask.

  “We were studying the virus, sure.”

  “Did you get very far?”

  She looks up at me and for a moment her expression is unreadable. “Yes,” she says. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

  “Then it’s too bad you don’t have any of your data.”

  She turns and smiles at me. She taps the side of her head. “The good thing about passing down things from generation to generation is that you grow up with it. It gets ingrained in you. A lot of our data is up here.”

  “I can’t imagine what that must be like,” I say.

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like without it,” she says. She shrugs. “At least now I get to use it. Your Miranda is really quite remarkable. She reminds me of someone I used to know. Back at the settlement.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I have to say I consider Miranda to be one of a kind.”

  “Oh, of course,” Maya says. “I just meant her dedication. She’s the one who hired you?”

  “Yes. It was something of an accident. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “To be honest, I never really thought that I’d still be here all this time later. But . . . here I am.”

  “Are you two—?”

  “What?” I ask it just a little too quickly.

  She shrugs. “The way I hear it, you two are incredibly close. She does things for you. You do things for her. It’s clearly more than just a business arrangement.”

  “You people talk about this?”