Ignis

by Tracy Korn

  “It’s arrogance. They think they’re gods who can do anything—that’s when they get sloppy,” Denison says.

  We approach the ion gate leading into and out of Skyboard North. Shuttles and heliocars are backed up as far as I can see.

  “Why don’t they just widen the dome clearance?” I say, feeling an ache start in the back of my head as I try to process the champion level idiocy of the people in charge of this place. “Why are they even bothering with the damn gate now?”

  “Look at the breakers!” Avis says, pushing over Ellis to get a better look out the wrapping window. I turn to look out the window on my side of the heliocar and stop breathing for a second.

  “Crite…those have to be fifteen feet high.”

  “Can you see the trough? Look at the bottom of the breakers…” Avis says.

  “It’s too dark,” I answer.

  “Then open the sky port.” Avis runs his hands back and forth over the roof. “Isn’t there a skyport in this thing?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Azeris says, scanning the dashboard console.

  “Then can you hear the water? Can you hear, like, a growl?”

  “I just hear the sirens,” Zoe says, narrowing her eyes against the vacillating, pitching wail that has just started.

  “How far out are we?” I ask as we move easily through the abandoned gate. I try to scan the shuttles coming in for anyone from Seaboard North, but we pass too quickly. “They need to raise this dome clearance or those people will never get through in time.”

  I see the probability equations taking shape in my peripheral vision, but I shut my eyes hard to push them aside. I don’t want to know the estimates.

  Denison blows out a breath. “They’ll figure that out as soon as Sandra gets a visual of this. Luz will make that happen, don’t worry.”

  “All right, five minutes should get us there,” I say.

  The streets below are deserted, and I only hope the rooftops are too. Only we’re not heading for the rooftop.

  We come to a stop in front of two buildings with stone pillars at the base of each. A second later, both doors of the heliocar wing upward to let us out.

  “Which one is it?” I say, staring at two more rundown buildings.

  “Neither,” Azeris answers. I sigh audibly without even trying to hide my impatience. I’m getting tired of his stupid riddles. “It’s in the middle of them, stretch.”

  “Wh—?”

  “Come on.”

  Azeris walks toward the two buildings like he’s going to walk between them, but there’s only sand and sky between them.

  “There’s nothing there,” I say a little louder than I should. He doesn’t stop. When we get a little closer, I see that there actually is a structure between the two buildings. Dark, concrete blocks edge either side of a glass tower that goes about halfway up, then turns into more dark blocks on the second floor. From the street, it looks like that half of the building isn’t even there. The hole in the sky…

  “Keep moving,” Azeris says to everyone, then walks directly into the concrete blocks in front of us.

  “Uh, what just happened?” Avis asks, trading shocked expressions with me. Ellis laughs.

  “Heh, it’s a hologram,” he says, putting his hand through the stone. We follow him through to see, on the other side, a set of stairs that just leads to another wall. I watch Azeris and the others walk right through that, too. A feeling of total body exhaustion hits me. When will things be what they seem to be again? Or…were they ever what they seem?

  Through the wall at the top of the stairs is a small room loaded with equipment: different pieces of consoles, discs, piping, button panels, and more wiring bundles than I can count. There’s a chiller in the far corner that sits at the end of a sink, counter, and a makeshift table. The main space has two chairs and a couch surrounding a beat-up wooden coffee table that looks about as old as this decrepit building. Avis crosses directly to the tech equipment, nearly squealing.

  “So the gear you brought in the box was your scrap?” he says, wide-eyed. “This is military grade field equipment—an oxygen scale…a nanite encryptor? Are you serious?”

  “That’s nothing. Here,” Azeris says, crossing to the far side of the room to retrieve a cart. He wheels it over, then removes the tarp over it.

  Avis swoops in. “This is not here. No way is this in front of me.”

  I study the mass of twisting coils and slim, metal lines emerging from the cart for a second, and I understand why Avis is about to wet himself.

  “Where the hell did you get a sonic arc relay?” I ask, moving in to take a closer look.

  “I built it,” Azeris says, waving Avis away so he can get the machine powered up. “How do you think I found your crew when they synced with the NET device?”

  “Is this what you used to find the ship then?”

  “Initially, but it only worked because it synced to the NET—somebody on board must have it. I used that baseline to capture the ship’s feed with the mobile unit back in the box. Should be able to reconnect with this now,” Azeris explains, pushing a final series of buttons and clamping a wire. The front panel of buttons starts to glow, and a blue, 3D hologram bubble appears over the device.

  “Don’t get any ideas—and I mean that literally,” Denison says. I turn to him, confused. “We need a filter if you’re going to do anything with that machine, and I don’t have the equipment here to put one in your head.”

  “What if we can put something on the machine?” Ellis says, looking around the junkyard that is this room. “If you have a nanite encryptor here, there must be something we can use to block his neural connection to the code.”

  “It might work,” Denison says, joining Ellis in picking through the heaps of tech equipment littering every surface. I shake my head and return to the hologram, which isn’t reporting much more than the ship’s coordinates.

  “They moved twelve feet with that last quake,” I say, reading the time-lapse of the last tremor and the distance traveled.

  “The oceanic crust is getting thinner closer to the top…” Avis adds. “Look at the number of pore pockets compared to here.” He traces a grid line from the earth above the ship to that below it.

  “Can you access the controls?” I ask. “There has to be an engineer database in there somewhere.”

  Azeris nods and starts tapping away at the detached key panel lying flat on the cart in front of the machine. The monitor screen floods with code a few seconds later, which translates to a blueprint layout with key boxes and diagrams in the hologram field above it.

  “Ha!” Azeris says. “Thatta girl…”

  I skim the diagrams and the data entry field for trajectory input and see the coordinates for that slab of rock near Phase Three.

  “OK, enter an all-stop command. It should work like a remote control, right?

  “Already ahead of you, stretch,” Azeris says, typing into the keypad.

  The controls don’t move, even though the data entry field populates with the command.

  “The ship isn’t reading that. Are you sure you’re connected to the control schematic?” I ask.

  Azeris looks at me like I just asked him to dance. “Wouldn’t you move your britches before watering the weeds?”

  I close my eyes in a long blink and let out the breath in my lungs. “If it’s connected, the controls should have moved. Can you get them online? We can talk them through how to stop manually.”

  “That is the itch I’ve been workin’ to scratch,” he says like I’m pestering him. I press my teeth together.

  A frequency wave flares, and the high-pitched squeal makes me cover my ears. It levels out into the crackle of static and a lower frequency wave. Azeris looks at me, surprised.

  “I think that means it worked,” he says, then nods in confirmation. “All right…Liddick? You picking this up?”

  There’s no answer at first, but the frequency wave starts to send images into the lower half of
my peripheral vision—a metal floor with rectangular skid-rugs just in front of a row of seats behind a wrapping console. And then, endless black.

  “Azeris!?” Liddick says, and the sound of his voice makes the images in my vision blur and fade out. “This ship is coming through the ocean floor. Fast.”

  “We know. I found the control schematic, but we’re locked out of remote access.”

  “Do you see the all-stop command in the input field?” I ask.

  “Hart?”

  “Listen to me. You just plowed through twelve feet of oceanic crust since the last pulse that ship emitted, and the breakers here are up to fifteen feet. You need to stop that ship.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Hart. We’re running blind down—wait, we got it! We got the relay! Liam is entering it now.”

  I close my eyes and listen to the frequency mixing again with the static. Liam is a blur at the console as something heavy settles in my chest.

  “What’s wrong?” I say without opening my eyes.

  “It’s not working. He entered it twice and is try—“

  The feed visuals warp and bend like a funhouse mirror in my head.

  “Now what’s happening?” I ask, looking over at Azeris.

  “Incoming,” Avis answers, studying a device he’s arranged on the coffee table. He barely finishes the sentence before I feel the vibration start in the floor, traveling up my legs all the way to my teeth.

  “It hasn’t even been an hour since the last one!” I shout over the growing rumble, which is already stronger than the peak of the one that hit back on Skyboard Mountain.

  “We’re at sea level! It hits here first!”

  “Steady the machine!” Ellis says, pushing toward it with Denison. I lean against the wall, gripping the arm of the couch and the side of the cart to stabilize it.

  Denison turns to Azeris. “Where’s the output hub? Hurry!” he shouts.

  Azeris crosses to the cart slowly, stumbling as the room shakes. He holds out his hand for the sheet of steel mesh in Denison’s hands and attaches it.

  “We can’t stay here!” Zoe shouts over the rumbling, which finally starts to subside. “We gotta get back to higher ground.”

  Azeris makes his way to the other side of the room and opens a panel in the wall next to the chiller. Several screens appear, along with a control console below each. The far screen shows the view from the abandoned street, and the center screen shows a blue grid field with several moving dots. The far-right screen shows nothing until Azeris taps something into the console below it. When he finishes, a series of lights grow in unison.

  “What is that?” Ellis shouts to him. I move closer to the screen and feel my stomach sink.

  “That’s the Maritime Council’s surface scanner,” I say, then watch the lights continue to grow: 37…42…59… “That wave is going to be seventy feet high when it breaks. Jazz…”

  CHAPTER 45

  Seaboard

  Jazz

  Finn lands behind the strip of Seaboard North habitat stacks, which are lit up by search lights from airbuses running paths back and forth to the Skyboard mountain. I look for the relay dome light in the water, which should be glowing red or blue, but it’s nowhere to be found. Even the rock pier has been swallowed by the surf.

  “The swells are building,” Lyden says, studying the water against the dark sky and the various search lights.

  “Then we need to hurry,” my father says as the doors of the shuttle slide open. We jump out and head for the doors of our hab just as a spotlight from one of the aircrafts hits us.

  “Return to your hovercraft and evacuate this area immediately!” a booming voice says.

  “Hurry!” Lyden shouts, motioning to Arwyn to follow us. “I’m going to check my parents’ house!” he says.

  “You can’t go alone!”

  “I’ll go with him—hurry!” Ms. Reynolt says as she and Lyden begin running up the beach to the detached housing strip, reserved for Council members.

  “Return to your hovercraft immediately or you will be forcibly removed!” the aircraft voice calls again.

  We push through the corridor leading to our hab. Fraya and Arwyn race up the stairs. I get to the retina scanner first, barely able to stand still long enough for it to scan me. The door slides open after what seems like an eternity.

  “Mom! Nann!” I shout, tearing through the rooms, which are dark and empty.

  “Nann!” Jax shouts, moving into the back hall toward the bedrooms. He returns almost immediately. “They’re not here. I’m going to check the other habs,” he adds, going to pound on the neighbors’ doors.

  “Then they have to be in transit,” my dad says. “Come on.”

  Fraya, Myra, and Arwyn meet us in the corridor without their parents.

  “They’re all already gone…” Fraya says. “Avis’s and Ellis’s family are out too. There’s no one on the whole top two floors.”

  The open doorway to the hab complex is flooded in light from the aircraft above, and in the light, I can see the black water in the distance moving in.

  “Crite, come on! Come on!” my father shouts. “Jaxon!”

  Jax rushes back down the corridor, shaking his head. “They’re all gone!”

  “Good, good, come on,” my dad says, motioning everyone back into the shuttle.

  “Wait! We have to get Lyden and Reynolt!” Arwyn shouts as we close the doors.

  “Hang on!” Finn turns the shuttle and flies up the beach where Lyden and Ms. Reynolt are trying to carry a large man down the stairs of one of the houses.

  “That’s not his father,” I say, trying to figure out who they’re carrying.

  “That’s Paxton!” Jax says. “How was he not the first one out of here?

  “Ed Paxton is still the Council leader?” my dad asks, but abandons the question when the doors to the shuttle fly open again and Jax jumps out. He takes the arm Ms. Reynolt was trying to brace over her shoulder and moves Mr. Paxton, who seems unconscious, onto the shuttle with us.

  “Go! Go!” Lyden says as the surf crashes behind him in a wall of white. The water splashes into the heliocar with him and gets into my mouth. I start coughing in shock because the shoreline is normally at least three hundred feet from our habitat stacks.

  “The waves!” I choke. “Hurry!”

  Lyden closes the door as the aircraft spotlights shine blindingly through the windows of the heliocar, then move over the houses and stacks we’ve just left. The beams climb higher into the sky, then over the buildings toward the forest at the edge of Seaboard North.

  “Where is it going!?” Lyden shouts. “There could still be people in the other buildings!”

  “There are people in that forest, too. Vox’s people.” I cough again, watching the aircraft’s searchlight stop.

  “Hold on! We’re blind!” Finn says, flying into thick, black smoke as we try to make our way from the beach. He makes a hard turn, and we all push into each other before we level out again.

  “What…?” Mr. Paxton rouses, his round face shiny with sweat. His meaty hands push over his forehead and through his thinning hair as he looks at us in amazement.

  “Jack Ripley…” he says with the ghost of a breath. “I…I’m dead?”

  “Not yet!” Finn yells as we pull out of the smoke long enough to see the aircraft searchlights illuminating a wall of black, roaring water. “Crite! Hold on!”

  I look at Jax at the same time he looks at me, and we both know we won’t be able to escape the wave.

  The movements of his face slows so that I notice every wrinkle between his eyes as it forms. Every beat of his heart in the pulse at his neck, and the stretch it causes in the tip of the Vishan’s S-shaped treatment scar just over his collarbone. I hear the roar of the water fall to the background of my own, quick breaths that are getting ahead of me—that are competing with the swell in my chest for space in my lungs.

  Breathe...I mouth to him as the window behind him turns from t
he wall of dark green to white. Breathe...

  ***

  Arco grips the edges of a tall metal machine on a standing table. His eyes are closed and his head is bent in front of it. Something tells me not to talk, not to get his attention, but I don’t know why. The feeling in the air is tight, constricting, like he’s holding a bomb. I take a step because I have to go to him, but then stop myself when he warps and bends like Vox did when she was in my channel at Admin City. I take another step and the machine blurs out entirely until it takes the shape of something else...of a console? I walk toward it, even though everything in me says to stop, but I have to see. The blur spreads, and there are people—Liam—typing. Liddick shakes his head, both of them moving in slow motion. They’re talking, but I can’t understand the muffled, distorted words.

  The window in front of them is black, and it’s not until then that I realize they’re on the ship that was under the Lookout Pier.

  Are you dying, sand dollar? Vox says in my thoughts. I look for her but don’t see her anywhere.

  I don’t know, I answer.

  “Jazz?” Arco says from behind me, and I turn over my shoulder just as he’s raising his chin from his chest. He looks directly at me, then reaches for me from the room I was just in with him. I try to walk toward him, but he warps and blurs again.

  “What’s happening?” I ask, but my voice sounds so far away. He takes several steps toward me, and when he’s finally close enough, he moves his fingers over my cheek. His thumb brushes my bottom lip and the corners of his mouth almost tack into a small smile. But then he moves past me and starts typing into the console. His hands move normally at first, but then so fast, I don’t understand how he could possibly know what he’s entering.

  “It’s cracking!” Liam yells, but again it’s muffled and in slow motion. Everything is in slow motion except for Arco’s hands over the console.

  A loud roaring crashes against the dark window, filling the room with the reverberation. Liddick and Liam stumble and reach for two of the seats that line the console station to steady themselves.