by Jordan Rivet
David stared at the partially repaired device like it was his firstborn child.
“What is that?” Chelle demanded.
She rushed over, her candle flickering, but David blocked her way. He held both arms out in front of Esther.
“Back off, Chelle. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“The guards are on their way,” she said. “You’re done.”
“What guards?” David said. “Everyone’s out fighting the Harvesters.”
For a moment Esther glimpsed fear on Chelle’s face. Her hand went to her side. Then Esther leaned over David’s arm and blew out the candle, plunging the room into darkness.
“Hallway. Quick,” she shouted.
She found the door and backed out of it. The corridor was still dark. David followed as the pop of a gunshot split the air.
“David!”
“I’m not hit,” David said. “Run!”
Esther took off down the hallway, David following quickly on her heels. They heard Chelle scream in frustration. Another shot rang through the darkness.
“This way.” David overtook Esther and led her down a side corridor. “That thing working yet?” he shouted.
“It better be,” Esther gasped.
She pressed the call button every few seconds, praying it would connect before sucking up the last of the power from the little battery. They needed to get outside.
They ran until they reached a doorway at the end of the corridor. It was locked, but David leaned back and kicked at the handle. Seconds later they spilled out the door into the muted daylight. The hillside dropped away beneath them. They dashed along the side of the building, staying low to the ground. At the end they rounded a corner and started climbing the rough volcanic rock.
“Is she behind us?” David asked.
Esther chanced a quick look, scanning the path and the empty windows and doors of the facility. “Not yet.”
“Good. Let’s head south. We need to stay close to the coast, but we don’t want to be anywhere near the battle.”
They climbed away from the harbor and toward the southwestern part of the island. Esther’s feet slipped and caught on the stone. She was out of practice walking on land. A strong wind pushed against them as they scrambled over the rocks. Rain swept over them in bursts. Esther protected the tatters of the satellite phone with both hands. When she lost her footing, David steadied her.
Abruptly, they came to the edge of a cliff.
“Let’s rest here,” David said. “It’ll take time for her to send people after us.”
He dropped heavily onto the rock. His face was almost as pale as his hair. He still hadn’t fully recovered from his period of starvation.
Esther looked down at the sea. The cliff wasn’t as high here as it was on the side of the island where she’d first approached in the lifeboat. This drop couldn’t be more than twenty feet. The wind howled, fierce and sharp, carrying a sound that could have been thunder, or it could have been explosions from the battle between the Harvesters and the Calderon ships. Mist coated their faces, both from the sea and the fitful rain.
The sea itself spread before them like molten steel. The clouds were feathers of iron. As they watched, the sun dripped a string of gold through the clouds and into the sea. Esther took a deep breath. She had missed that wide, empty view.
“You okay?” David asked.
“Yeah.”
She sat beside him on the rocks, and he put his arm around her. The gesture was both awkward and familiar, as if it were something that they used to do all the time but had only recently rediscovered. She wanted to say something about what he’d said to Chelle but instead occupied herself with the shattered phone and trying to make sense of the cacophony of her feelings.
She felt a whirl of elation, almost euphoria. David had finally declared his feelings for her. She was deliriously happy, yet terrified at the same time. She attributed that to their current state of peril. They weren’t out of danger yet.
She snapped another piece of the phone back into place, guessing how it was supposed to fit together. She twisted the wire connecting the battery to the device to make sure it was tight enough.
“—er. Copppp . . . yy.”
A sound that was decidedly not mechanical came from the phone.
“What was that?” David sat up straight.
“Shh.” Esther twisted the wires again.
“Do you . . . chchchch . . . Luc—”
“Hello!” Esther shouted at the device. “Do you copy?”
She gripped the wires tight, her hands shaking.
“Esther! Do you copy? This is the Lu . . . a.”
It was Neal, his voice struggling through the mangled device.
“Neal! Neal! It’s Esther. Can you hear me?”
Finally, the voice broke through loud and clear: “Esther! This is Neal! I’m on the Lucinda. We’re almost there.”
Chapter 31—Rescue
THROUGH BROKEN MESSAGES, ESTHER and David gave Neal their position. They were standing on a spur of land sticking out from the rest of the island. It should be easy enough to spot. The Lucinda would give a wide berth to the battle between the Harvester and Calderon ships. Esther pictured her friend standing in the pilothouse of the Lucinda beside Dirk as they navigated toward the island. They’d been in the vicinity for days, searching for some sign of the Calderon facility and Esther’s signal.
They couldn’t stay on the satellite phone for long. The watch battery would run out soon. Neal called in every once in a while as he charted their progress. The bearings of the device were still off, but he made the necessary adjustments. They drew closer.
When the burnished hull of the Lucinda broke the horizon, Esther reached up and planted a huge kiss on David’s mouth. It made the cut on her face scream in protest, but it was worth it. Together they watched the Lucinda grow larger. The sun started to sink. When the sky took on a rose tint, the Lucinda had traversed half the distance from the horizon.
“This has been one hell of a trip,” David said.
They sat side by side on a rock beside a cluster of wind-torn bushes. It was getting colder.
Esther laughed. “You didn’t use to swear this much.”
“You’re a bad influence on me.” He nudged her with his elbow.
“When we get Zoe back, the first thing I’m going to do is sleep for a week,” Esther said.
“The first thing?” David asked.
Esther grinned. “Maybe the second.”
The waves broke gently against the steep cliff far beneath them.
Neal called in again. “I think I see the outcropping. How close to the water are you?”
“We’re up quite high.” David held the phone together to give Esther’s hands a rest. He balanced it between them so they could both hear. “We’ll have to sneak down to the water without being seen,” he said.
“How’s the fuel supply?” Esther asked. “We’ll need to run for it as soon as we get to you.”
“Your energy system is up and running now,” Neal said. “That’s how we were able to come after you.”
“Great. We’ll head to sea level.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” A voice cut through the wind behind them. “We have you surrounded. You didn’t really think you’d be able to hide on our island, did you?”
It was Chelle, backed by a dozen Calderon men.
Esther leapt to her feet, heart pounding. One of the ships must have returned from the fight. Other armed men moved to the edges of the cliff, blocking their escape routes. David stood frozen with the satellite phone in his hand. Chelle raised her pistol. Esther made a snap decision.
“Look for us in the water, Neal!” she shouted at the device. Then she grabbed David’s arm, pulled him toward the cliff, and jumped.
The fall seemed to take a lifetime and an eyeblink. There was a rush of sea spray and cold and sound. David yelled curses into the wind. Then Esther hit the water.
She plunged deep beneath the surface,
but her bones didn’t shatter on rock as she had feared. She kicked and struggled, fighting against the undertow, trying not to gasp at the shocking cold. Her head broke the barrier between sea and sky.
Waves crashed around her. The cliff face loomed nearby. They had to get away from it. She thrashed around, frantically searching the ice-black sea. Where was he? They were too close to the rocks.
Three terrifying seconds later a blond head erupted out of the water beside her.
“Rust and boiling salt. Shit! Goddammit, Esther, are you trying to kill us both?”
David spluttered and coughed, spewing an impressive litany of curses that she’d never heard from him before.
“I could have let them do it for us,” Esther shouted. “Now swim!”
She churned through the water, trying to get as far away from the cliff as possible. The salt stung her eyes, and her fingers were already going numb, but she forced herself through the waves. David followed, choking out another curse every few strokes.
“Lost the phone,” he gasped.
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll find us.”
Esther concentrated on pushing through the burning in her lungs and the freezing in her limbs.
“You sure?”
“No choice.”
They swam onward. The sun sank, injecting the clouds with reds and purples. They were moving away from Calderon Island, but their progress was excruciatingly slow. Swells towered over them, blocking their visibility as effectively as stone walls.
“I hate swimming,” David said as he tackled the waves beside her.
“Huh.” Her laugh came out as more of a gasp. “Neal better hurry.”
The salt in her eyes and the constant dip and rise of the waves made it impossible to see whether the Lucinda was still there. Esther didn’t have the energy to worry. All she could do was swim.
“I meant what I said,” David said after a while.
“What?” Esther concentrated on not swallowing half the sea.
“To Chelle. Not happy without you.”
“And you’re barely staying alive with me.”
“Ha. Worth it.”
Esther smiled as the next wave crashed into her face. “Me too.”
David slowed for a moment to reach out and touch Esther’s shoulder. The ocean swelled beneath them, lifting them up at the same moment. As it did, they saw the Lucinda less than a hundred yards away.
“We’re going to make it, Esther,” David said.
She grinned, teeth chattering, and waved her arms desperately at the ship. The swells dipped them back down again. The next time the sea lifted them up, they heard the frantic blast of a horn from the Lucinda. A flare crackled low across the water straight toward them. Someone on board had spotted them. They were saved.
Chapter 32—On the Lucinda
TWENTY MINUTES LATER ESTHER and David huddled together in the Lucinda’s pilothouse as Neal wrapped a blanket around their shoulders. Dirk glared down at them from the helm.
“That was a stupid thing you did,” Dirk growled.
“Jumping off the cliff? It worked,” Esther said.
It was surreal to be aboard the familiar vessel. The windscreen still had a line of bullet holes, a remnant of their escape from the Galaxy Flotilla. One matched a scar on David’s shoulder. Elsewhere, the ship still showed scorch marks from the Calderon attack. Lucinda had been through a lot. Esther shivered, numb after their swim in the frigid sea. She felt like she was floating around the roof of the pilothouse, watching herself talk to Neal and Dirk.
“I mean going off with the Harvesters,” Dirk said.
“We had to,” Esther said. “The Calderon Group would have killed David for sure.”
Dirk spit on the floor. “True, but the Harvesters?”
“What do you know about them?” David asked. Miraculously, his glasses had survived their swim. They were crusted with drying salt water.
“They’re not as squeaky clean as they pretend to be,” Dirk said.
“We figured that out,” Esther said. “We were kind of in a rush at the time.”
Dirk raised his eyebrows, the creases in his forehead squeezing together. He’d come on this rescue mission under duress. Neal had told them Judith and Simon insisted on sending the Lucinda to find Esther and Zoe as soon as the energy system was complete. Apparently Judith had threatened to throw Dirk overboard—among other things—if he didn’t go after Esther.
“What news of the fighting?” Esther asked.
“It’s pretty vicious,” Neal said. “The Harvesters called in reinforcements. They have at least five, maybe six ships in addition to the Terra.”
“What?” Esther said. “So that’s why they’re attacking now.”
She wondered if the Calderon ships knew what they were getting into when they went out to meet the attack. The Calderon Group had better fighting tactics, but if too many of their ships were away they would be hard pressed against the Harvesters’ superior numbers.
“Yeah, heard ’em on the radio,” Neal said. “They must reckon they have a chance of taking the Island.”
“I thought they’d give up after how the last battle went,” Esther said. “But with that many ships . . .”
“The Calderon Group could be getting slaughtered right now,” David said.
“My glitch!” Esther said. “Salt, they’ll be sitting ducks. We need to do something.”
“Wait. Now you want to help the Calderon Group?” Neal said, tugging at his headset. “I’m confused.”
Esther hesitated. Images rose before her: Luke and Cody, Jacques, even Harry and Zeke and their Calderon captors doing their best to blow each other out of the water at their captains’ commands. And all for what? Her invention. Energy. Power.
“We have to stop the fighting,” she said.
David gave her an appraising look but kept silent.
“Can you get a message to them?” Esther asked. “Tell the Harvesters we’ll give them the plans for the system if they withdraw their attack and release Zoe. It should give the Calderon ships enough of a reprieve to get away.”
“You sure you want to do that?” said Dirk.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Esther said.
Everything had become freshwater clear to her. This technology was not worth dying for—for anyone. She looked at David. Other things were.
“I used to do business with the Harvesters,” Dirk said, “before I lived on the Galaxy. Not that the Galaxy folk were particularly scrupulous either. The Harvesters aren’t as flashy as the Calderon boys, but their leaders are ruthless. And their numbers are growing. They’d be unstoppable with your energy tech.”
“But the Calderon Group have it now too, as soon as they figure out how to fix my glitch,” Esther said. She met David’s eyes. “We had no choice.”
Dirk rolled his big shoulders. “That’ll even up the playing field for the two of them. They kept each other in check well enough before. It’s everyone else I’m worried about. The other ships will get swallowed up like krill.”
Esther’s stomach sank. A terrible image flashed before her: the Harvester and Calderon ships, indistinguishable from one another, sailing across the sea at will, relentless, consuming ship after ship as they ran out of fuel, unable to escape. Again she saw the faces of her friends—Luke and Cody, Harry and Zeke—transformed into monsters, glowering with teeth like a shark’s. How could she have messed things up this badly? She knew her technology would change their world, but she didn’t want this. It was supposed to make things better.
But it was already done, and Esther’s friends and family came first. “We have to give it to the Harvesters to get Zoe back.” She hesitated, then asked Dirk, “Did you ever meet the captain of the Terra Firma?”
“Alder? Once. A hard man, that one.”
“Would he harm a prisoner out of spite?”
Neal and Dirk exchanged glances.
“What?” Esther stood, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders. “What do
you know?”
“Maybe you guys should get warmed up and rested,” Neal said. “We can’t do anything rash.”
“Why would we do something rash?” Esther said. “What happened?”
Neal avoided her gaze. “We . . . intercepted a message between two Harvester ships just before picking you up. The Harvesters said something about hurting a prisoner if conditions weren’t met. We were confused because we thought you were still with the Calderon Group but . . .”
“Zoe. The Harvesters are going to do something to Zoe,” Esther said. “They have to know by now that I helped the Calderon guys install my technology. Luke and Cody must think I abandoned the bargain . . . Either that or they can’t hold off anymore. Rust.”
She paced back and forth across the pilothouse. Wind whistled through the bullet holes in the glass.
“What did you think would happen when you left her behind?” Dirk growled.
“I didn’t know I’d be on the Island for so long,” Esther snapped.
She didn’t need Dirk to drive home the guilt. Every thought of Zoe was like a twist from her friend’s pocketknife. It felt like a year since they had last seen each other in their cabin on the Terra Firma.
“Look,” David said, standing and putting a steadying hand on her shoulder. “They’re in the middle of a battle. If they haven’t hurt her yet—and to be honest, we don’t know they haven’t—then they won’t do it right now. Stopping the fighting is the best we can do for everyone right now.”
“It’s up to you, Esther,” Neal said.
All eyes turned to her.
Esther nodded. “I’m going to give the Harvesters the technology,” she said. And may the New Pacific forgive me. “We have to contact them and get them to withdraw from the battle.”
The faces still swam in front of her: Luke and Cody, Jacques, Harry and Zeke. Now Zoe. Cally and Dax. Judith. Her father. It was all so pointless. It would be better if none of them had the technology. None of them or . . .
“Neal!” she said. “I have a better idea. I need your help.”
Chapter 33—The Transmission
