by Linda Nagata
The lid came off. Her fingers fished in the canister. She clutched a floating ampule, a single ampule.
“Hold onto the wall,” Kaden repeated.
Instead, she brought her free hand up, out of the water, holding the ampule hidden in curled fingers, her gaze fixed on his. “I loved you,” she told him. And as if she meant to caress him, she brought her trembling hand closer to his face.
The current rested. The passage was flooded now almost to the ceiling.
Now or never.
She sucked in a sharp breath, filled her lungs. Then she used her thumb to pop the top off the ampule, snapping the powdery contents out into his face as she ducked under the water. Using her legs for leverage, she wrenched her wrist free of his grip and pushed away.
The current reversed, sucking her with unholy force down through the lower half of the passage.
◇
An instantaneous mental calculation warned Ava not to resist. If she fought the current in the hope of riding the next inflow back to the upper passage, she would exhaust the oxygen in her system within seconds; she would be dead before the current reversed. So she arrowed her body instead.
Arms extended beyond her head, one hand atop the other, feet together. She kicked hard in mermaid fashion, shooting down the straight passage with her eyes open, salt-stung, her vision a watery blur but good enough to perceive the round windows on either side. Dull gray daylight gleamed behind them, guiding her. A gray glow of open water at the passage’s end became her sacred goal. Reach it, and live.
With every kick, a mental chant:
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic.
And don’t think about the burning explosion building in your chest. You’re going to make it out. You can do this. And the gate will be open. It has to be open. All the debris in the upper passage guarantees that. So kick, and—
Don’t panic.
She saw the gate ahead of her. It was arched like the passage and it was open. Open! Standing open at an angle so that its dense steel mesh looked ominously solid in the blur of her vision. Sand swirled around it as the outflowing current eased.
Oh God, no.
Within seconds, the current would reverse. She had to be clear of the passage before then, or she would drown.
She kicked harder, pulled at the water with her hands. Darkness loomed on the periphery of her vision. She ignored it, all her intent, her effort fixed on the necessity of reaching open water.
Don’t panic.
She shot past the gate, into a cloud of sand grains stirred up from the shallow sea floor by an incoming wave. Within that veil, just feet away, two dark aquatic shapes—six feet? seven feet? eight feet long? One darted toward her. She recoiled, tumbling back as the force of the wave took her, shoulder crunching against the sandy bottom.
Deep instinct controlled her now. Survival mattered most. She kicked off the sea floor, rocketing toward a foam-laced gray daylight even as her brain noted the presence of a third dark shape appearing out of nowhere to join the other two.
◇
Ava burst past the surface into a driving rain. She had emerged in the long trough between two massive breaking waves.
She filled her lungs with a wrenching gasp, forcing air past a salt-swollen throat, and then she blew it all out again. Breathed in, breathed out. In and out, forcing oxygen into her blood stream. Then she ducked under the water again, diving for the bottom ahead of the oncoming wave, so that the brutal chaos of its foaming break passed above her.
Even so, the rolling force of the wave dragged the bottom, tumbling her. She didn’t fight it. She relaxed in its grip, shaping herself to its flow, riding it, kicking at the water and pulling when she could, surfacing only when the boiling white water had safely passed.
Cold rain sluiced over her upturned face as she breathed, deliberately hyperventilating. The weight of her duty belt forced her to kick hard and paddle at the water just to stay at the surface. She could have popped the buckle, but she didn’t, because the belt’s weight would make it so much easier to return to the relative safety of the bottom.
She dove again as the next breaking wave bore down. She rode its vortex, swimming when she could. And when it left her behind, she surfaced. Breathed. Looked for the next oncoming wave—still several seconds away—and then turned to gauge the distance to the shore.
The smooth back of the last wave loomed like a blue mountain. Beyond it, she saw the peaks of crumbling dunes, and then hotel towers. Off to her left, at least a hundred feet away, maybe more, waves crashed and fountained against the artificial stone of Komohana Point.
Astonishment coursed through her. The usual longshore current ran east to west, from Diamond Head toward Ewa. If she’d been caught in that, she would have been swept west past the point, toward the Ala Moana seawall—and away from any chance of ever making it alive to shore. But in that raging sea, the usual current had reversed, running west to east, carrying her with it as it paralleled Waikīkī Beach.
She drew another breath, and dove, stroking hard under water, then tumbling in the surge of the passing wave.
Usually, the largest waves came in sets with a relative lull between them. Ava would have waited for that lull before trying for the shore, but in that wild sea she could not judge the wave height. Her only strategy was to keep going. Dive, then swim hard underwater as the seafloor grew shallower—and then it became so shallow there was nowhere left to dive.
Pummeling white water swept her up, rolled her, slammed her against the bottom, lifted her again. Sand got into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Then the worst of it passed. All along her body she sensed the force, the direction, the velocity of the foaming water. Flattening her hands, she used them like fins to stabilize her body in a wild ride as the wave carried her up the beach. When she felt her momentum slow, she struggled to get her feet beneath her, finally standing up into wind-driven rain.
The wave reversed. Its powerful backwash streamed past, threatening to drag her back into the sea. She leaned in to counterbalance, her shoes sinking into water-logged sand, helping to anchor her. As the water subsided, she pulled her feet free and staggered up a beach strewn with bits of vegetation and plastic, small fish, crushed jellies, and even the long, pale blue corpse of a sea serpent. Seaweed trailed from her duty belt.
She looked for a path inland.
Wave action had undermined the dunes, collapsing their seaward slopes, leaving towering cliffs of sand that she didn’t dare try to climb. With that much sand, if it gave way, she would die beneath it. Instead, she ran down the beach searching for a low point, where a paved path had been.
Another wave washed up, fountained past her ankles—a small wave, compared to those marching in behind. The roar of the sea filled her mind and she felt the power of those waves as a vibration in her chest.
There!
A low point in the sand cliff, only a little higher than her head. Ava bolted for it as a massive wave roared onto the beach, flooding it with white water. She clawed at the vertical face, using hands and feet. The sand gave way as she scrambled over what proved to be a narrow ridge, formed by the collapse of the dunes on either side. She splashed down onto a sand-covered path where rainwater pooled. Momentum carried her on for a few more steps before she dropped to her knees, bent over in exhaustion.
After a minute, after her breathing calmed, she remembered the canister on her belt and reached for it, fingers groping inside. Empty. All the ampules gone.
She hoped the sea would open them and kill the spores of Angel Dust.
Her tactile mic was gone too, of course.
And Kaden was gone.
She’d seen him, hadn’t she? That dark shape that had seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d emerged from the tunnel just seconds behind her. Two divers had been there waiting to meet him.
So he would live, for a time.
And what of Akasha and Ivan? Had they made it out of the tunnel?
And where was Matt?
Kaden’s bitter voice echoed in her memory: Domanski was Sigrún, too, Ava. He proposed this operation.
But Matt worked for Lyric. The call for Sigrún to carry out a false-flag operation must have begun with her.
Ava straightened up as best she could in the fierce wind. She looked up at the hotel towers, with their windows of hurricane glass. There, only a little farther east, the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower.
She got to her feet and stumbled through the dunes to the line of lagoons, wet sand pelting her legs. Palm fronds, ripped from the whiplashing coconut trees, cluttered the path. She started across the bridge, her head down against the wind until someone yelled her name.
“Ava!”
Looking up, she saw Ivan running toward her—and dread slammed in. “Where’s Akasha?”
“Upstairs, with a massive headache. She’ll be okay.”
They met in the middle of the bridge. Ivan gripped her shoulders, gazing into her eyes as if he could read some truth there, his own eyes narrowed against the rain. “When you didn’t come out of that tunnel I thought we’d lost you.” His grip tightened. “You went after him?”
She nodded.
“Damn it, Ava. Do you know how crazy that was?’
“No choice in it. Had to try.”
A hollow note in his voice: “You couldn’t stop him . . . could you?”
“In the end I didn’t want to. I hope he made it out. I hope he’s taking out his regulator and coughing out Angel Dust into the cold air of Denali’s lock.”
If Kaden had breathed in the spores and if the spores were viable—then how long would it be before the deadly fungus spread throughout his skeleton crew?
chapter
25
Ava stood in the locker-room shower, hot water sluicing over her body long past the time when all the salt, sand, and bits of seaweed had been washed away.
Still not warm.
She shivered as she dressed in the spare uniform she kept in her locker: long-sleeve black athletic shirt with her name and the glinting badge part of the weave, and black knee-length cargo shorts. Ivan could fire her tomorrow. If they had a tomorrow.
She combed her wet hair, then picked up her shoes, rinsed clean in the shower but still wet. Shoes in hand, she rode the dedicated elevator up to the operations center.
Ivan had warned her, when they were safe in the ready room, “From now until the storm has passed, no one goes out no matter what.”
“No matter what we see on camera?”
“Yes.”
“But you went out after me—and you saw me on a camera, didn’t you?”
“Gideon spotted you. But the wind hasn’t reached hurricane force yet.”
“When it does, maybe we should turn the cameras off, so we’re not tempted.”
“No. I won’t close my eyes. I know you don’t want to, either.”
The elevator doors opened. Ava stepped out past the little Christmas tree with its colorful LED lights, and into the operations center, where she was met with a barrage of hugs, good wishes, and the repeated phrase, We thought we’d lost you. Besides Ivan, there was a shift supervisor, a dispatcher, a researcher, and two officers on duty—all from day shift. The rest of the staff had been sent home.
Akasha lay in a cot beside the observation window, her head propped on a stack of blankets, wound glue gleaming on her scalp where her dark hair had been clipped away.
She gazed at Ava with the wide-eyed look of someone who’d been cursed with a vision of apocalypse and couldn’t get it out of her head. “It was all real, then?” she asked as Ava crouched beside the cot.
Ava nodded. “It was real. Is real.”
Gideon sat cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the cot, a tablet on his lap. He studied Ava with narrowed eyes. “You figured out a way to get the Angel Dust on that submarine.” A twitch of his lips that might have been a smile. “Hope it works.”
She turned, to gaze out past the rain-hammered windows to the raging sea . . . until she remembered to ask, “Where’s Matt?” A pistol had gone off as she ran through the park—but his shotgun had instantly answered. “He’s okay, isn’t he? I need to talk to him. Confirm some things.”
“Too late for that,” Gideon said. “They got him. He’s dead.”
“Oh . . . please, no.”
Ivan came over and confirmed it. “The two armed males in the vehicle you were pursuing—both were found with gunshot wounds, severely injured. But one could still pull a trigger.” Ivan touched his throat. “Domanski took a bullet right here. It’s too bad. I had questions for him, too.”
This news grieved Ava—she’d liked Matt—but it stoked her anger, too, and left her feeling cheated. She wanted the truth, all the truth, and with Matt gone, she didn’t think she’d ever get it.
“What about the two sailors?” she asked. “What’s their status?”
Ivan shrugged. “Both were critical when they reached the hospital, but we’re not going to know any more than that. The navy’s claimed them, and they’re untouchable.”
“I found your secret agent,” Gideon volunteered.
“You did?” That was something. “Show me.”
Ava moved to his side, kneeling to look at his tablet. It displayed a still image, taken at a distance, of a tall woman who resembled Lyric only in her height. This woman was heavyset, with large breasts, her hair thick, long, and wound into a neat twist down her back. “That’s not her.”
“It is,” Gideon said. “Here.”
He shifted to a night shot taken along Nimitz Highway. “Image is from a public traffic camera. This is right after she disappeared from that settlement. See, she gets into a cab. And then . . .” He scrolled through a succession of still shots: a cab on the airport viaduct; a cab on the airport exit ramp; a cab at the curb of the airport terminal, with a heavyset woman exiting it.
“She had her get-away set up,” Gideon concluded. “She must have hacked the cab, pre-loaded it with her gear, and then pulled off a quick change on the way to the airport. Voila! When she gets out, she looks and walks like someone different. But it’s her.”
Ava looked doubtfully at Ivan.
“HADAFA denies any connection between the two women,” he told her. “But I’ve gone over the sequence and I’m convinced. Whoever that woman is, she’s got high-level connections and a security rating that lets her use HADAFA to fake her identity, or hide it altogether.”
Stolen credentials? Or legitimate? Either way, it only proved again that HADAFA could not be relied on to interpret truth.
Ava asked, “Where did she go after that?”
“Into the terminal,” Ivan said. “That’s what the outside camera showed. But by the time we got authorization to access the internal surveillance, the subject wasn’t there. HADAFA had scrubbed her presence from the record.”
Ava grimaced. “And changing her appearance protected her from private cameras and eyewitness recollections. So we don’t know if she caught another cab, or got picked up . . .”
“Or if she had a seat booked on a flight out of here,” Ivan finished for her. “She could be anywhere, this time tomorrow.”
Ava squeezed her eyes shut as a blush rose in her cheeks, pushed by a heated combination of embarrassment and anger.
Deep breath.
She stood up again and stepped to the window, to look out at the storm. Lightning flickered on the horizon. “We talked to her, Matt and I. She claimed she’d recruited a Marine general who was standing guard at the door of the facility where she was working.” Her stomach knotted. “She was probably drinking champagne in first class at the time.”
Ava pressed her fingers to the heavy, hurricane-proof glass, steadying herself as a mental haze descended over her. What was real? What was a lie? And who was Lyric, really? What side had she been on? What was her game?
Kaden had said Matt was first to propose the idea of using a nuke to kick off a “cleansing war.”
&nbs
p; Had Matt done it at Lyric’s direction?
Had the puppet master been playing both sides of the game from the very start? Had Lyric ignited the scheme and then, when it got out of hand, scrambled to quash it?
And when would it be game-over?
◇
Despite Ivan’s philosophy of eyes-open, Ava resolved not to watch any camera feeds, fearing she’d see the ghosts of two little girls drowning all over again. Instead, she got a couple of blankets out of the supply room and made herself a nest on the west side of the observation deck, alongside the floor-to-ceiling window. From that vantage, she could look out over the shoreline, where the wind tore at the summits of the dunes while the storm surge and the crashing waves eroded them from their base. And—between the passing rain bands—she could see the west half of Waikīkī, along with Ala Moana, Kaka‘ako, the airport, and Pearl Harbor beyond.
Stupid, to sit by a window waiting for a nuclear detonation. Ivan pointed this out. “I want everyone not on duty to move downstairs. It’s safer there, with no windows.”
Ava helped Akasha down, but then she returned to the observation deck, and bundled up again in her blankets. One of the officers brought her a hot meal from the kitchen. Sometime after that she dozed, only to waken, startled, her fingers clawing at the floor as she felt the building swaying. Wind roared past the window. Rain hammered. Lightning flashed. She could not see more than a quarter mile and it was so dark outside it looked as if dusk had fallen.
“What time is it?” she shouted, voice cracking in panic.
Someone answered from the pit: “11:30 AM.”
“My God.”
Was the city still out there? Or had it already happened?
Surely I would know if it had happened . . .
She walked around the observation deck, trying to calm her racing heart. Her only company, the researcher and the dispatcher still at their stations in the pit, monitoring the video feeds.
