by Rob Boffard
“You haven’t heard?”
Anna manages to controls herself. “Tell me.”
The woman shakes her head. “The escape pods launched,” she says, speaking as if she can’t believe the words herself.
Anna stares at her, eyes wide. “How many?”
The woman doesn’t answer. She shakes Anna off, then jogs away down the corridor.
Dax.
He wasn’t giving her a choice. He was just buying himself time, taking her out of the equation so she wouldn’t warn anyone before he could make his escape. How could she have been so stupid?
Anna’s shoulder is on fire. She ignores it. She takes one last look at her dad, down in the amphitheatre.
Then she turns, and runs.
51
Riley
“We’re getting close,” Eric says.
His words jerk me awake. Until that moment, I hadn’t even been aware that I was sleeping, but the vibration of the plane and the whirr of the engines made me drift off. My back is kinked from the hard chair, and, despite the meat strips I ate a couple of hours ago, my stomach feels hollow and tight.
I raise myself up a little, looking out of the cockpit glass. I can’t see a damn thing. Dawn is starting to glimmer behind us, but I can still barely tell the difference between the ground and the sky. It’s hard to believe that Eric knows where he’s going.
“Shouldn’t we be seeing lights?” I say.
“We don’t know what we should be seeing,” says Eric. He sounds more subdued than before, a note of worry creeping into his voice. Not surprising–soon he’ll have to land the plane, one way or another.
“Don’t you worry about Eric,” says Harlan, his voice coming crystal-clear over the headset. “He’ll fly us right. Hey, Riley–come back here for a second, would you?”
I stretch briefly, kneeling on the seat. Then I clamber out into the main body of the plane, leaving my headset behind. Eric is making a gentle right turn, and it nearly throws me off balance, but I manage to keep one hand on the side.
Harlan and Finkler have turned the place inside out. Boxes lie everywhere, their contents upended and scattered across the metal floor: scrap metal, spare parts, tools, pieces of foam rubber, articles of clothing so threadbare that it’s a wonder they don’t fall apart when I look at them. Finkler is on all fours, picking through a pile of seemingly identical screws. Bandages and bottles are stacked on his right. A single dim bulb, set into the ceiling, is the only light.
Harlan waves me over. He passes me an extra set of headphones, the cable running into a box bolted to the roof.
“Here,” he says, bending down, once I’ve got them in place. There’s a backpack by his feet, covered in lurid red and green stripes, the fabric torn in places. By the way he grunts as he lifts it up, it’s clear that the pack is heavy.
“Food, some extra clothing, odds and ends that you might need,” he says. “There’s a gun in there, too, although we can’t find any ammo. Still, might come in handy. Oh, and here.”
He passes me a piece of clothing–his coat. When he sees my expression, he shrugs. “It’s thick, you know? Thicker’n the one you got on, anyway. You’ll need to keep warm.”
I tell him thanks, pulling off my coat and exchanging it for Harlan’s. He’s right. It’s scratchy and uncomfortable, but it’s also warm. The fabric smells of smoke. The pockets are stuffed full–I decide not to pull everything out now, where it could roll around the plane. I’ll check on it later.
“I still think we should give her those socks,” says Finkler, from his position on the floor.
Harlan rolls his eyes. “They’re more hole than sock.”
“I’m just saying.”
“She’d be better off wrapping her feet in marsh grass.”
“Fine. Then I’ll keep them. I like socks.”
I try to smile at Finkler’s words, and don’t quite manage it. The thought of going out there by myself, of leaving them, is almost too much to take.
I crouch down to Finkler’s level, putting an arm around his shoulders. He stops picking through his pile of screws, letting his hand rest on the cold metal floor. “Just get back to Whitehorse safe.”
I reach over and grip Harlan’s shoulder. “You too, all right? You’d better be around when I get back.”
He nods, not looking at me. “The terrain down there isn’t going to be what you’ve seen before,” he says. “Alaska’s a bad place.”
“Bad? Like how?”
“It’s tougher for things to grow. The land isn’t honest. It plays tricks on your feet. It’s all bog and swamp, especially this close to the shore. You watch yourself.”
“Thought you’d never been to Anchorage.”
“I ain’t. But I’ve been a little ways west. I’ve seen how it gets.”
Eric’s voice comes over the headphones, crisp and cold. “We’re coming up on Fire Island, which means Anchorage is north of us. I’ll go a little way past it, down the inlet. I don’t want to put this bird down in Anchorage, not when I don’t know what’s out there.”
“Fire Island?” I say.
Harlan points to the window, and I bend down to look through it. There’s more light in the sky now, enough for me to see the vast ocean stretching away from us, a thousand times bigger than Fish Lake. I try to take it all in, but the sheer size of it makes me blink with astonishment.
At the very bottom of the view, peeking over the edge of the window, is a black strip of land. Water pushes in on it from all sides. We’re coming in low over the ocean, and I can just make out scrubby plants on the shoreline. Water laps against the rocks.
Almost there.
Finkler stands up, resting one hand on the wall for balance. He puts his head close to mine, gazing at the view out of the window, and whistles softly. “You keep that incision clean, you hear me?” he says after a moment. “Don’t wreck my beautiful stitches.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good. Because if I find out you picked up another infection, I’m never going to let you forget it.”
And that’s when the sky explodes.
It’s like we’ve flown into a meteor shower. The plane shudders as objects pelt it from all sides, too many to count. And the noise. All at once, I’m back on the Shinso as it plunged down through the atmosphere, tearing itself apart.
Eric banks the plane sharply, shouting over the headset. Harlan is thrown to the floor, and Finkler and I nearly land on top of him. At the last second, I manage to grab one of the headphone brackets on the wall, and stop myself falling. But the plane rocks from side to side, shaking to pieces as the storm gets more intense. My fingers slip loose, and my knee slams into Harlan’s shoulder. Finkler is on his feet, whirling his arms, desperately trying to keep his balance.
A window detonates, glass raining inwards. Something is burning, and I smell the sharp stench of fuel, shooting upwards into the cabin from an unseen puncture. It’s like we’ve flown into some insane weather pattern, a localised storm that—
Gunfire. It’s gunfire. We’re being shot at, by what feels like a million stingers going off at once.
We lurch to the side, tilting almost ninety degrees. Finkler slams into me, knocking me off Harlan. I feel his arm wrapping around me, like he’s drawing me into a protective embrace.
We’re heading right for a closed door in the side of the plane. The thoughts come in split-second bursts: It slides open sideways, it’ll hold us, it has to.
Finkler takes the full force of the impact. I feel the bang, and it’s so powerful that it rips the door off the wall.
I don’t know if the metal is too old or the rails it’s on are too fragile, but one second we’re in the body of the plane and the next there’s nothing but open sky above us. My headphones are yanked right off my head.
The tracer part of me kicks into overdrive, adrenaline and instinct overwhelming everything. I see the plane’s pontoon and grab it in the same instant, wrapping my forearm around it. With my oth
er arm, I reach for Finkler, already bracing to take the weight.
I get one last look at him, at the raw shock on his face. Then my hand closes on empty air and Finkler is gone.
Bullets are whizzing by me like angry insects, and the roaring chatter of the gun is everywhere, coming in quick bursts now, like whoever is firing is trying to save ammo. The plane took fewer hits than I thought, but it’s still holed in a dozen places, gushing black smoke.
Harlan is above me, spreadeagled in the doorway, trying to get a better grip. He sees me, shouts my name, but then Eric swings the plane back the other way.
For a moment, I’m weightless, the motion of the plane cancelling gravity out. I can see the ocean below me. The white caps on the waves look as if they’re frozen solid. We’re seventy feet up, maybe more.
Harlan reaches out from the doorway, desperately trying to find my hand.
Another bullet hits us. I feel the plane tilt, and my arm rips free from the pontoon.
52
Riley
I thought I knew real panic. Not even close. As I plummet towards the water, the panic that surges through me is knife-point sharp.
I’m face up, windmilling my arms. Harlan is still leaning out of the plane, still reaching for me, as if his arm is going to extend and catch me. Then I’m falling, and I find that my mind is capable of only one thought, repeating over and over, Harlan’s voice in my head. Water that cold, it’ll shut your body down in thirty seconds.
I have to stabilise myself, brace for landing, do something. But my tracer instinct, so strong a few moments before, has vanished.
When I hit the water, it’s with a thud so loud that it feels like it cracks my skull open.
It’s as if someone has flicked the switch, turning out all the light in the world. I try to breathe, and suck in a mouthful of seawater. It’s foul, as cold as space itself, but forcing it back out is almost impossible. Somewhere, very distant, the muscles in my back are screaming at me. My lungs are on fire. I’m panicking, thrashing in place. I don’t even know which direction to swim in.
Light. A tiny glimmer, no more. It takes me a good three seconds to get my muscles to push me in the right direction. My chest has turned into a supernova, and with every foot I swim, my vision gets smaller, shrinking down to a tiny circle.
My sight is almost gone when I break the surface.
I breathe too soon, before I’m fully out. I suck in a mouthful of water, coughing and spluttering. My eyes open so wide that it feels like they’re going to tear right off my face.
The water is so cold that it’s as if it’s burning me, scourging my skin. It’s slate-grey, spattered with white foam, hissing like an angry monster. There’s a black shape rising out of it, an uneven jumble of contours.
Fire Island. I have to get there, and I have to get there now.
It takes every ounce of effort I have to keep my body above the icy water, but I manage it, kicking hard to stay afloat. More than once, the panic grips me, like a tentacle threatening to pull me under. I have to fight it off, willing myself to keep kicking, using my hands and forearms to push through the water.
I’m not going to last much longer. The muscles in my back are dull and useless, and the cold is shutting my body down, robbing me of energy. A chemical reaction in my cells. Prakesh would know…
The thought of him makes me force my exhausted arms to keep going. Prakesh is just over the horizon, and Carver, and Okwembu, and I did not come all this way just to drown here.
Kick, stroke, breathe. Kick, stroke, breathe.
Soon, the only sensation I can feel are my trembling lips. I can hear the teeth behind them chattering, my tongue a dead slab of flesh in my mouth.
And then something changes. I try to make a stroke, and my hand bounces back at me.
I keep going. My forearms slam into dirt, and I’m raised up on my knees. I start crawling, and when I fall, face crunching into the dirt, I pull myself along with my hands.
I don’t know how long it is before I stop moving. But I can feel another sensation now: grains of sand, rubbing against my lips.
I’m out of the water. I’m on land. Wonderful, amazing, solid land.
I blink. Or I try to, anyway. The second I close my eyes, I discover that I don’t want to open them again. They feel like they’re welded shut, and what’s behind them is too sweet to turn away from.
Don’t.
It’s the voice–the one at the back of my mind, the angry one, except this time it’s not angry. It’s distraught, crazy with fear, pleading with me. You have to get up.
It’s like waking from a deep sleep, where you’ve stayed in one position all night and your arm or leg has gone dead. I have to focus on my fingers, slowly clenching them into a fist, then pull backwards until I’m resting on the forearm.
I raise my head. A muscle in my shoulder twinges, sending a sharp, shooting pain down my back. I push a clenched, angry noise through gritted teeth and open my eyes.
Black sand gives way to jagged rocks, sloping steeply away from me. I can see plants pushing up between the rocks, but they’re withered and stunted, barely alive. There are a few trees further inland, their branches bare. The sky beyond them is ash-grey, and the only sound is the pounding of the ocean, the steady swish of water around my ankles.
My clothes are soaked. Streams of water fall off me, soaking into the sand. The wind has picked up, and it’s like a blast from an open freezer, chilling me to the bone.
I look at the rocks again. There’s something there, something splayed across them.
Finkler’s neck is broken, his arms twisted at unnatural angles. The shocked expression is still on his face.
53
Okwembu
Okwembu’s eyes fly open. She sits bolt upright, so quickly that she nearly hits her head on the underside of the bunk above her.
She listens hard. There: distant, humming bursts of gunfire. The Phalanx gun.
Okwembu kicks the thin blanket off her legs and slides off the bed. She’s been given her own room, a tiny space on one of the upper levels of the ship, with low ceilings and a bunk bed bolted to the wall. She has to hammer on the door three times before the guard outside unlocks it. Okwembu ducks under his arm and strides down the corridor, only stopping when he grabs her above the elbow.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the guard says. He’s in his thirties, with blond hair and an angular, almost blocky face. His voice is alert, but Okwembu can see the fog of sleep in his eyes.
She shrugs him off. “I’m going up to the bridge,” she says.
“Get back inside, right now.”
Okwembu has a sudden, surprising urge to reach out and wrap her hands around his throat, to squeeze until that bright voice is extinguished. She shakes it off. “I’m going up to the bridge,” she says again, her voice cold. “Touch me, and you’ll have to answer to Prophet.”
Another burst of muted gunfire rumbles down through the ship. The guard must see something in her eyes, because he stays rooted to the spot. She starts walking again, not looking back. He follows, but at a discreet distance, and after a few steps she forgets that he’s even there.
The bridge is at the top of a central tower on the deck of the ship. Okwembu pushes herself up the last flight of stairs, ignoring her protesting legs, and pushes open the door.
The space reminds her of the main control room on Outer Earth. It’s longer, and wider, but it has the same banks of screens and uncomfortable wheeled chairs, the same sickly fluorescent lighting. There are three large tables in the centre of the room, spread with yellowing maps and charts. Floor-to-ceiling windows line the wall to her right, looking out across the deck of the ship to the ocean beyond. Through the glass she can see the first faint glimmerings of dawn.
The bridge is packed with people, most of them still blurry with sleep. She picks out the alert ones instantly. They’re the ones holding rifles, the ones who were on nightshift, or whatever these people call it. She can fee
l their eyes on her, hear their whispered, angry mutterings. Ray and Iluk are there, hunched over one of the tables. Ray’s eyebrows almost touch his hairline when he sees her.
She spots Prophet immediately, standing before one of the windows. He’s holding something up to his face, using both hands–some kind of binoculars, black and bulky. It’s still dark outside, so Okwembu supposes they must have some kind of night vision.
She strides around the bank of screens, ignoring the suspicious stares. “What’s going on?” she says, when she’s standing next to Prophet.
He glances at her, irritation slipping on and off his face in a microsecond. “You should be sleeping.”
“Just tell me.”
He doesn’t speak. She’s about to ask again when he says, “An aircraft came in over the water. Our gunner caught it.”
“Aircraft?” Okwembu squints, looking out over the water.
“Seaplane. Haven’t seen one of them in years. Could be Nomads.”
“Did you shoot them down?”
“Not sure. Definitely hit ’em, though, Engine be praised.”
The words are taken up by the others on the bridge, rippling out from Prophet. Just as before, Okwembu can’t help but notice a few people who conspicuously fail to praise the Engine.
She turns back to the window. “Who were they? Do you know?”
“Prophet.” The voice comes from one of his men, standing off to their right. He has an identical pair of binoculars, and he’s leaning forward, resting them on the window glass. “Got something.”
“Where?” Prophet raises his own lenses again.
“Over by the island.”
The murmuring on the bridge drops even lower. Prophet scans the horizon, tracking right to left.
He shakes his head, lowering the binoculars. “I don’t see anything.”
“Could have sworn,” the other man says. “Right around the rocks on the western point.”
“Nothing could have survived a fall from that plane,” Prophet says, more to himself than to anyone else. “Not even if they hit the water.”