by Jordan Rivet
By the time Esther said good-bye to Neal, she felt more confident. She wasn’t entirely alone, and she had a job to do.
She tweaked the motor and sailed straight toward the island. She would see David soon somehow. She’d just have to come up with a plan along the way.
Chapter 22—The Island
CALDERON ISLAND GREW LARGE on the horizon. Its tall conch shape cast a dark shadow in the night sky. Esther cut the engine, switched off the flashlight, and reached for the oars at the bottom of the boat. They were sound enough, and she paddled slowly through the darkness. She had to be stealthy until she knew what she was up against.
The moon grew larger as it approached the sea. Was the sky a shade lighter already, the contrast between the island and the sky a little more defined? Hopefully that was just her imagination.
She kept an eye out for patrols. She didn’t know how tight security would be, but the recent attack by the Harvesters must have increased the Calderon Group’s vigilance. But they wouldn’t be expecting a lone woman in a small motor-powered lifeboat.
As Esther got closer, she realized the Calderon Group had little need for security. Sheer cliffs stretched the length of the island. They must have been battered by storm surge after storm surge. Esther wouldn’t be surprised if this was the last remaining high point of what had once been a much larger landmass.
The wind picked up and the sea started to get rougher. Esther rowed along the bottom of the cliff, straining against the oars to keep from being tossed against the rock face. Fear prickled along her spine. She might have been spotted from above already. She searched for inlets in the rock face, but in the darkness every patch of stone looked like a cave, until she got close and it was just another hue of gray.
The sky was definitely lighter now. The clammy cold of the early morning had set in. Esther fought off the fear that threatened to paralyze her. Her muscles ached. She needed shelter before daybreak. She could hide in the predawn darkness, but someone was sure to spot her from above if the sun tipped over the horizon.
Suddenly, the lifeboat caught in a current, swirling and spinning directly toward the cliff face. Esther rowed frantically, no longer caring if she made any noise. She was close enough to smell the algae clinging to the cold stone cliffs.
She fought the current. The rocks loomed to meet her.
Esther regained control of her vessel, but then the wide blade of one oar struck a rock and broke off. Salt. The sudden change made her lose her balance, and the current wrenched the other oar out of her hand. Esther cursed and lunged after it. A wave flung the oar up and shattered it on the rocks.
The lifeboat spun.
Esther flipped the shorn handle of the remaining oar and thrust it forward to keep her prow off the cliff. She shoved against the rock, splintering the handle further. Then the current spun the lifeboat again.
The sickly morning stars vanished. The world went dark.
At first Esther thought she had blacked out. Her ears roared, but she still felt the solid wood of the oar in her hands. The lifeboat spun. Esther planted her boots against the slope of the hull to remain seated. Her stomach lurched. Darkness surrounded her.
Then she slammed to a halt. Stillness reigned.
The rush of the waves roared and echoed strangely around her. Gingerly, Esther crept to the side of the lifeboat and poked around with the broken oar handle. She felt only water. Then the oar struck something solid. She heard the unmistakable ring of metal. She leaned over the prow, reaching out to whatever held her boat steady. Her hands met a smooth shape in the blackness. She ran them up a rounded panel to a sudden edge. There were rivets just beneath the edge, and on the other side the object seemed to slope inward. She was lodged against another small boat.
Esther retreated to the center of her lifeboat to grab the flashlight. She listened to that strange echoing roar for five breaths—and then turned it on. Light exploded into a thousand tiny refractions. She stifled a shout and switched off the flashlight. A rainbow of colors danced across her retinas in the darkness.
“Get ahold of yourself,” she muttered, and turned the light back on.
She was in a tall and narrow cave, its upper reaches swallowed in shadow. Thousands of crystals lined the cavern, running in fine veins across the walls. The weak beam of the flashlight became a chandelier of dancing lights and colors on their surfaces. The mirrored facets of the crystals sparked and shone around her. Stalagmites and stalactites spiked fingers of shadow across the cavern. Esther had never seen anything like it.
As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw half a dozen small boats in the alcove, each one tucked into a crevice or bound tightly to a stalagmite. Apart from the weather-beaten look typical of all vessels in the New Pacific, these boats were clearly well maintained. They floated high on the water, indicating they were still seaworthy. The ropes were whole and tightly knotted. Someone was coming back for them.
Esther scanned the cave, turning slowly on the lifeboat bench. The water filling the front half of the cave looked fairly deep. Waves rushed in and out of the narrow opening through which she had been tossed. Jagged rocks rimmed both sides. She was lucky she hadn’t been dashed against them. She aimed her light into the back of the cave along the crystal veins. The cavern went on, and if the refracted light patterns weren’t deceiving her, it went upwards. A rock floor emerged from the water, seeming to lead back into the Island. This was her way in.
She gathered a few tools, including the satellite phone and the small knife from the lifeboat’s emergency compartment, and clambered from her lifeboat to the one beside it, which was firmly moored against the rocks. She looked around for some way to conceal her little boat but saw no options short of sinking it. Oh, well. She couldn’t really expect to get David out without the Calderon Group realizing she was there. She was going to have to bargain anyway. There must be a larger port somewhere on the island, because the bigger ships would never fit in this cavern. She’d just have to hope no one would come down here too soon, notice the extra boat, and raise the alarm before she had time to scope out the situation. Now would be a good time to come up with that plan.
Esther scrambled across the second boat to the rocks beyond it. They were slick and polished, and she had to put the flashlight in her teeth and use both hands to scuttle across them. It didn’t seem to matter which way the light pointed, because the crystals amplified the illumination. Esther knew almost nothing about rocks. Were these sorts of caves typical beneath the land? It looked like a magical kingdom from a story, but maybe this would have been as routine as twenty-foot swells were to her if the world had experienced some other fate.
Esther had cut fresh tread into her boots recently, but they still slid on the wet stone as she made the painstaking journey toward the back of the cave. She felt a little queasy without the rocking of the sea beneath her. The cave floor sloped upward, the passage twisting so she couldn’t tell where it led. She began to climb.
Crystals crunched under her feet. The flashlight beam revealed they were broken, smashed almost to powder, as if hers were not the first boots to tread here. The rush of the waves echoing through the cave grew softer the farther she walked. The crunch of the crystals and the squeak of boots rubbing against stone began to take over. The cave narrowed until it was a tunnel climbing upward. Soon Esther could hear herself breathing, low and quick.
It got warmer the farther into the Island she got. Used to a world of sea-chilled metal, Esther couldn’t be sure where the heat was coming from. Did rocks have their own inherent warmth? It felt that way. They were solid and natural, the antithesis of the cold, unforgiving sea she had known for most of her life. As Esther climbed deeper into the Island, she imagined hot sand between her toes, the call of gulls on the California coast, the warm embrace of a hill as she rolled down it, welcoming grass stains and dirt in her hair. This was real, living land, and she was climbing straight into its heart.
The crystal veins ended abruptly. The warmth se
emed to pull closer, a blanket wrapped just a little too tight. Esther didn’t know how long she had been walking. Weariness pulled at her, and she drew on her fear to keep her awake. The tunnel might never end. She could be trapped in here. She crushed the thought as soon as it arose, stamping it into the dirt that now met the soles of her boots.
After what could have been a year or a day but was probably just an hour, Esther heard a noise. She crouched against the wall, which provided precious little shelter, and held her breath.
The sound drifted down the passageway again. It was a hum. A machine? A breeze? She crept forward a few more yards. It was too high to be natural. Could she have made it all the way to the top of the Island already?
She’d hidden her light at the first hint of the strange sound, but now she flashed it on and off again to get a quick glimpse. The tunnel looked the same as it had for the last hundred yards: mostly rock, with a few remaining traces of crystal ground into the dirt floor. She edged forward. There it was again! As she cleared another bend, the sound began to take on meaning in her ears.
Someone far up the passageway was singing.
Chapter 23—The Guardian
THE MERRY TUNE TRIPPED down the tunnel and echoed off the rocks. Esther wondered if she’d hit her head after all. There was still no hint of light, except when she turned on her flashlight in brief bursts. Where was the song coming from?
She felt her way further along the passageway. She made one more turn and reached a dead end. Her boots scuffed against the dirt as she groped around a shallow bowl forming the end of the tunnel. All was quiet. Had she imagined the sound? Then the tune began again, coming from over her head.
Carefully, Esther reached upward. Her fingers met wood. It was rough and damp but solid. She slid her hands over the grain, pulling away when a splinter caught in her finger. She scraped it out in the darkness, then reached up again, moving slowly until she found an edge. She hoped whoever was singing on the other side of the wood couldn’t hear her. She felt along the edge to a row of old-fashioned hinges. It was a solid oak trapdoor.
A rough layer of rust met her fingers where the wood joined the iron, but the joints themselves were clean. Esther smelled oil on the hinges, mixed with the heavy musk of the damp wood. A search to the other side of the door revealed no clasp of any kind. As far as she could tell, the trapdoor had no lock.
Very slowly, Esther pushed upward on the trapdoor. It was extremely heavy, barely shifting at all. At least the hinges didn’t squeak. Esther wished, as she had half a million times before, that she were taller so she could get better leverage.
The singing grew louder. The heavy thud of footsteps approached above. Esther held her breath.
“Shoobeedoobeedoo. . . and a something something tells me just what to do . . .”
The singer was male, and his voice had a nasal quality through the garbled words.
“And my pretty lass a something something with me-eee-e-e-eeee!”
The thud of feet turned to tapping, and then the man was dancing a jig directly above Esther’s head. She kept one hand on the door, and the vibrations jolted down her arm with each step.
She made a snap decision and pounded her fists on the wood.
“Let me up!” she shouted, pitching her voice as low as she could. “Quit your cawing and open the door!”
“Well soak me in oil and call me a cat! You’re back early!” the man shouted.
Esther heard grunting as he heaved at the door. She was ready.
As soon as a foot of light appeared above her head, Esther grabbed the edge of the opening and vaulted out of the passageway. She caught a brief glimpse of an overcrowded storeroom before she flipped open the small knife and pressed it to the singer’s throat.
“Say another word and you die,” she hissed.
The man made a gurgle in his throat like a sea lion with a cold, but he didn’t move. He still held the trapdoor at a forty-five-degree angle above the black hole Esther had come from. He was a large-boned man, and his skin sagged off his features as if he’d recently made a drastic transition from pudgy to slim. He was bald, and a big white mustache twitched uncertainly beneath his bulbous nose.
“Lower that door slowly,” Esther said. “That’s it. Now sit down and tell me if anyone else is likely to come into this room soon.”
“It’s just me working down here,” he croaked. “What are you?”
“Huh?”
The man’s eyes were dilated and rolling. His shriveled hands shook as he sank to the ground and folded them over his long knees. He looked like a giant pale crab crouched above the trapdoor.
“Are you a sea demon?” he said. “I heard some men seen them when they was sinking, but I never get that effect normally. Are you really here?”
“Of course I’m here. I—”
“If you’re a demon, I swear I’ll never touch the stuff again. I use it to pass the time, you know? It gets boring down here.” The man gestured around the room, which was stacked with barrels, crates, and buckets, a seemingly endless supply of motley storage containers.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said, feeling uneasy.
“I never had one like this. Please let me go!”
“Shh. Not so loud.”
“I was just havin’ a sink. Nothing wrong with that.”
He stared wildly up at Esther. If her knife hadn’t still been pressed to his neck, she got the impression the man would be rocking back and forth.
“Keep quiet. I need information,” she said.
“I swear I don’t usually do it when I’m working. Please forgive me!”
The man made a sudden lurch as if to throw himself to his knees.
“Stop! Don’t move. Rust, are you drunk or something?”
Esther glanced around the room for some sort of restraint. There was a coil of rope in one corner, but it was so thick—thicker than her wrist—that it probably wouldn’t hold the man well.
“Look, you’d better cooperate. I need to know what’s outside this storeroom and how many men are on the Island.”
“The whole island? I don’t know. They come and go. The ships are always out. I don’t know! Please forgive me!” The singer’s voice broke, and his shaking intensified.
“Any idea how many ships are around right now?” Esther pressed.
“All I know is extra patrols is out ’cause there was a ship spotted not far away. Some kind of scrape. There’s prob’ly only one or two at port right now. The patrols should be back soon.”
Esther nodded. She had to hurry.
“What’s outside this door?”
“Just rooms and hallways. Staircases. Food. People. I don’t know what you mean! I was just sinking! It don’t hurt nobody.”
Tears leaked from the singer’s eyes. He seemed to be on something, and Esther wasn’t sure it was alcohol. She took pity on him and eased the pressure on his neck.
“Hey. Calm down. You got any more of that stuff?” she said. “Why don’t you have a bit and get some rest? That’d be good for you, right?”
He sniffed. “I’m on duty.”
Esther patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, feeling the loose skin slide over his bones. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep an eye on things. Do you know where they’re holding the man they took from the Amsterdam Coalition?”
“The chatty one? He’s on the third level.”
The man pulled a worn canvas bag from his pocket and dug through fragments of some sort of grayish-green substance. Esther had never seen it before, but hopefully it would keep him occupied, even if it didn’t knock him out. With any luck he wouldn’t remember meeting her.
“Who’s guarding him?” she asked.
He shrugged, making him look even more like a crab. “Probably Harrison. You know how he likes his cards. He and Chatty Cathy in there sometimes play all night.”
“Great. Stay here. Oh, and you probably shouldn’t tell anyone you saw me. You wouldn’t want them to know you were sin
king on the job.”
The man nodded solemnly. As Esther made her way to a steel door on the far side of the storeroom, he was already humming again.
Outside the door was an empty corridor that could have been inside any ship. Esther had to remind herself she was actually standing on real, solid ground. A scattering of identical doors lined the short hallway. Esther walked quickly to the one at the end, praying her luck would hold a little while longer.
The lights in the corridor were on despite the hour. It was still very early, but Esther had been climbing long enough that the sun could be in the sky already. She wondered what sort of power source the Calderon Group was sitting on if they could waste lights like this. Even land-bound power had to come from somewhere, though she couldn’t shake the impression she’d grown up with that energy and light had been available in abundance on land, and it was only on the sea that they had to scrimp, save, and innovate. My energy tech had better still be worth something to these guys. It’s my only hope to save David.
The door at the end of the corridor led to a stairwell. It was unlocked. Esther listened for a moment before entering. She seemed to be at the very bottom of whatever facility she’d found herself in on the Island. The number nine appeared beside the door she had come through. The angles in the stairwell hid how high the building extended.
As Esther put her boots on the first step, the stairs rang with footsteps above. She froze. Voices drifted down the shaft, but she couldn’t make out their words. After a moment, the voices cut off as a door slammed. The sound echoed and faded away. She steadied herself on a cold railing coated in chipped white paint and began to climb.
Chapter 24—The Captive
IT TOOK CLOSE TO fifteen minutes, as far as she could tell, for Esther to make her way up through the facility. She stopped to peek in the doors off the stairwell every few levels, catching glimpses of more empty corridors, lights blazing. Once a man wandered down a hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist, but he didn’t see her.