by John Dixon
“So we’re back to square one,” Carl said, feeling dejected. All that work, all that sacrifice . . .
“Not at all,” Crossman said. “We have leads, and thanks to you, we have a much better idea of what we’re up against.”
“I would love to have a look at the technology they’re using,” Dr. Bleaker said. Unfortunately, the Few had wired the Cauldron labs with smaller yet adequate demolitions—the explosions Carl had first heard and mistaken as his own work—and had destroyed anything that might have helped SI3 better understand how, exactly, they were swapping consciousness from one body to another. “We conducted autopsies on the vessels,” Bleaker said. “They all had neural chips, but they’d been destroyed.” Inside the Krebs hawks, the Bunker Bots uncovered revolutionary cybernetic structures, but detonation had also destroyed their neural chips, along with what looked like the remnants of cameras.
“We owe you,” Crossman said, giving Carl’s shoulder a squeeze. “You saved hundreds of lives by deactivating the main explosives, and you saved the entire mission by recovering those sketches.”
“Give me Stark, then,” Carl said. “Shut down Phoenix Island and save the orphans.” Earlier that day, he’d given them everything, going over SI3’s satellite images and detailing practically every square foot—Stark’s quarters, Camp Phoenix Force, the armories, everything—for one half of the island. The other half, the here are dragons side, remained as mysterious to Carl as it was indefinite in satellite images, which showed only a few buildings, some clearings, and a lot of jungle.
Crossman shook his head, looking sad yet stern. “We can’t tip our hand. If we raid Phoenix Island now, the Few will go deep underground.”
Carl’s fists ached.
“As soon as the time is right, we will capture it. You have my promise,” Crossman said. “But for now, something else. Tell me what you want, and I’ll make it happen.”
Carl thought for a moment. What did he want, other than to save Campbell and see Stark and the Few brought to justice? It was hard to even think in those terms. He wracked his mind and memory, trying to dredge up something he’d wanted before his world had been reduced to high-stakes goals like life and death and stopping a madman bent on global destruction. . . .
And then he had it.
Smiling, he said, “There is something. . . .”
Several weeks later . . .
Carl stood at the edge of the cliff and spread his arms wide, as if embracing the ocean. Below him—far, far below—waves boomed and boiled, crashing against great exposed rocks that rose like monster’s teeth from the terrible waters that the fishermen of this Caribbean island called La Boca de los Perdidos: The Mouth of the Lost.
Only the dead dive here, they told him the first day, only the suicides.
He’d made the dive every day since.
Now the locals called him El Fantasma: The Ghost.
If only they knew how close he’d come to being a ghost. . . .
But he hadn’t died—or stayed dead, at any rate. For the second time, he had descended into a kind of death only to rise again.
Behind him, the little children who each day gathered to watch him dive laughed and cheered and called, “¡Fantasma! ¡Fantasma!”
He curled his toes over the edge of the cliff, closed his eyes, and smiled, feeling the bright sun on his skin. He muted the cheering children, drew his lungs full of the good, salty air, and focused on the roll and thunder of the tide. Selectively filtering his senses—hearing the surf yet not the children, for example—was one of the skills that Dr. Bleaker and the Bunker Bots had helped him to develop during the weeks he’d spent recuperating there. Now, standing with his eyes closed, he slowed the moment and opened himself to the air and water, letting the rhythm of the tide enter him. Its push, its pull, the way it broke and curled around the stones like wind blowing through a winter forest . . . he could hear it all, smell it all, feel it all. And then, feeling the heave of the tide, feeling the way the water curled up the cliffs and wrapped round the exposed stones, feeling the vastness that was the sea inhale again, he matched himself to it all: his breathing, his heartbeat, his energy . . .
And he dove.
He opened his eyes in flight, not to see whether he would cut the water safely—he knew he would—but to enjoy the rush of the wind on his open eyes. It was like flying. No . . . it was flying. Rushing free through the open air, he whooped with laughter and accelerated his senses and perception, slowing time, savoring this perfect moment.
He cut the water within an arm’s length of the largest stone, just as the waves crashed into the cliff beyond. His body arched instinctively, and he gave himself to the water, riding a long-curving inner tide that pulled him back toward the base of the cliff wall even as the broken wave receded once more toward the open water. This, he thought, this is freedom, and the current whipped him away, out into the bay again. As the current carried him, he allowed his body to twist and turn, rise and dive, and so passed through the water like a bird through the air. All those years, he had dreamed of the ocean, of how wonderful it would feel, yet he’d never anticipated anything half as magnificent as this: the blue-green Caribbean all around him, warm as a bath, stripping him clean of dirt and pain and darkness.
Then he swam, cutting the water with strength and grace, kicking smoothly and staying underwater all the way to shore, where he walked onto the sand, paused to wave at the small shapes of the cheering children atop the cliff, and walked farther around the sea wall, out of their sight, onto the isolated beach where he and Octavia had spent the last week and where he wished he could spend the rest of his life.
“Show-off,” she said, smiling up from her blanket. It had taken a long time for her to heal, but she looked well now, tanned and happy, well rested and well fed, beautiful. Her hair was growing out again, the forelock very white in the bright sun, and she looked at him not through colored contacts but with her own gray eyes, which had always reminded him of wet stones.
He leaned over her and shook his head, shedding water like a dog, sprinkling her long, sun-darkened legs with sparkling beads.
Her laughter was music.
They had spent their days walking the beach and swimming and lying there, basking in the sun and talking and just enjoying each other. Even the supervision of their “parents”—two pairs of SI3 agents, who huddled now beneath a sun umbrella down the beach—hadn’t damaged this amazing vacation.
“No matter what happens in the future,” Octavia said, “we’ll always have this.”
“It’s been perfect,” he said, and plopped down onto his blanket.
She sat up and slid her hand into his.
He smiled, but within him, something cold and hard shifted, waking: dread . . . always there, always waiting. Despite his great happiness here, dread had become a part of him, like an unwanted internal organ that periodically pumped ice water into his heart and dark memories and darker visions into his mind. It whispered to him in the night, when he woke from dreamscapes painted with blood and pain, and told him what he knew to be true: Stark and the Few were still out there in the world. . . .
His fight wasn’t over.
But at least he wouldn’t have to fight alone.
Crossman had invited him to join SI3, and he had accepted . . . under two conditions: that they set things right on Phoenix Island as quickly as possible, and that Crossman wouldn’t separate him from Octavia.
Separate you? Crossman had said, offering a rare smile. Why would I separate my best team?
“I can’t believe we head back tomorrow,” Octavia said.
His first instinct was to reply with one of those tired responses hammered into everyone from birth—I know! It seems like we just got here!—but that would be a lie. Time doesn’t actually fly when you’re having fun. It expands. And sometimes, when you’re diving off a cliff or swimming in the currents or laughing with a beautiful girl, time stops altogether. It’s only later, looking back, when you don’t want th
e moment to slip away, that time seems to have flown.
And yet the past is never really gone. As you push forward, it remembers you and your debts to it. Some nights, during silent moments here on the beach, when the wind would blow off the sea, and the campfire flames would gutter low, and Octavia would lean close to him and shiver, it seemed to Carl that he could feel the weight of his friends’ absence in the air around him, as if the loss of Ross and Agbeko and others was stitched into the wind, written upon the world. Whenever this happened, he thought of telling her but only tightened his arm around her small shoulders instead. It was easier to dive off cliffs than talk about your dead friends, and it would be time soon enough to repay the living and the dead.
“Carl?” Octavia said. She smiled uncertainly and touched a hand to his chest. “Are you all right?”
He forced a smile. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his scarred knuckles. “I know that look,” she said. “You’re thinking about Stark.”
He nodded. “Among other things.”
She gave him a hard look. “Well, stop it.”
“Stop thinking about Stark?” he said, knuckles throbbing. “How can—”
She put a finger to his lips. “Let’s just live for a little while longer, all right? We’ll deal with the future when it gets here, okay?”
He kissed her finger and felt some of the tension go out of his shoulders. “Okay.” She was right. Why let the hell they’d been through ruin this momentary heaven?
It was time to be happy, if only for a little while longer. It’s what they had.
She popped to her feet and held out her hand, and when he took it, grinning, she hauled him up. Then she pointed toward the tilted mast of the sunken ship two hundred yards out in the water. “Come on,” she said. “Last one to the shipwreck is a rotten egg!”
Then she was off, sprinting across the sand with a squeal of laughter.
He tore after her, his laughter joining hers, and together they dove into the warm waves.
And as they raced happily through the turquoise water, they freed this moment from the grasp of time. The past fled like ashes in the wind, and the future faded and vanished like constellations before the dawn. All that remained was this perfect now, incorruptible and whole unto itself, with the two of them ensconced in its heart, together at last, safe and well and very, very happy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRST OF ALL, thanks to my family and friends for your love, support, and enthusiasm.
Thanks to the incredible team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, especially my wonderful agent, Christina Hogrebe, for constant assistance in anything and everything and for talking me off the ledge time and time again.
Thanks to Adam Wilson, the coolest editor on the planet, for believing in me, for guiding me when I needed help, and for letting me run when I needed to sprint. You have been such an unbelievable advocate with this book, from the conception of its premise all the way through the finishing touches. I’m absolutely blessed to have you as my editor.
Thanks to John Vairo, for creating another knockout cover, and the whole team at Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, especially Liz Psaltis in marketing, the delightful Princess of PR, Stephanie DeLuca, and copyediting superheroine Erica Ferguson, who once again spotted roughly ten thousand errors, saving me from looking like an idiot.
Thanks to crit partner and tough guy Don Bentley, for your constant help with this book, from my early struggles all the way through the final touches.
Thanks to Dr. Gary Della’Zanna and Dr. John Dougherty, both of the National Institutes of Health, and combat medic Horace Jonson, for lending me your brains and for making research so much fun.
Thanks to cage fighter cool cats Kelly Lasseigne and Randy Pogue, for helping a boxer understand the octagon.
Thanks to my bud and constant counselor, Matt Schwartz, for keeping me safe and sane.
Thanks to author pals Melissa Marr, Lissa Price, Douglas Clegg, Tim Waggoner, and Craig DiLouie, for answering so many questions.
Thanks to the ITW, HWA, and SFWA, the OneFours, the Inkbots, the Brandywine Valley Writers Group, my Necon family, and Seton Hill University’s WPF program.
Thanks to Pete Aragno, Kimberley Howe, Brent Foehl, Jeff Wood, Joyce Wolfe, Elaine Prizzi, Bill Fay, Peter Klawitter, and the Briglias.
Obrigada to Caroline Freitas, and obrigado to my Brazilian readers, for your enthusiasm and for helping me with Portuguese.
Thanks to Metallica, for Ride the Lightning, which I listened to a few hundred times in a row writing this book.
My deepest thanks go once again to my best friend, first reader, and beautiful wife, Christina. When this book had me up against the ropes, you cheered me on, giving me the strength I needed to keep fighting . . . and that made all the difference.
Finally, thank you for reading this book. Without you, the reader, all of this is nothing. Without you, Carl, Octavia, Davis, Stark . . . they’re just thoughts, exiled to my head.
Thank you.
Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by John Dixon
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-3866-6
ISBN 978-1-4767-3871-0 (ebook)