by Jordan Rivet
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 seemed 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 impress
ion 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 sinking 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.
The level markers appeared in descending order as Esther got closer to the top: seven, six, five. So the structure had at least nine levels (she couldn’t help but think of them as decks). There were no windows, and she didn’t know whether or not she was above ground yet.
The Calderon Group couldn’t have built this facility themselves. There were too many signs of the old world: the paint on the rails, the light fixtures in the hallways, the way the numbers were printed by the doors rather than scrawled. Whatever this facility was, it had been here for longer than sixteen years.
At the doorway to the Level 3 corridor, Esther waited, catching her breath and listening for footfalls. Nothing.
The Calderon Group didn’t seem to be early risers, if they lived here at all. Vacant, well-lit hallways didn’t provide much insight into how they were using the Island. She was going in blind. She pulled the knife from her belt and pushed open the door.
This was the longest corridor she’d seen yet. The walls were a faded blue. Dozens of evenly spaced doors lined the hall, like in the residential quarters on a ship. Chairs sat beside a handful of the doors. Esther smelled something chemical.
She tried the first door. It was locked. So was the next one. The third led to an enormous bathroom with cracked tiles and empty stalls. There was a flicker of movement. Esther jumped and jerked her knife forward before she realized it was just her reflection in a full-length mirror. She scowled at the tangles in her dark hair and the salt rings on her clothes.
Back in the hall, her boots squeaked on the linoleum as she crept along, trying each knob. All the doors were locked, the rooms silent. When she reached the middle of the corridor, she put her hand on a doorknob, only for it to turn of its own accord. She leapt back.
“. . . shouldn’t let you keep me up like this, mate.”
Esther pressed back against the wall as a man pulled open the door from the inside. He spoke into the room with his back to the corridor. He had a shock of red hair and narrow shoulders.
“You’re a bad influence, for a prisoner,” he was saying.
Esther brought up her knife but hesitated. She didn’t want to stab anyone. She yanked the flashlight from her belt to crack the man on the head instead. But her hesitation gave him time to turn around. He saw her coming, gave a strangled yell, and pulled back from the blow.
“What the hell!”
Esther shoved her shoulder against the door. She caught a glimpse into the room beyond: a familiar shock of white-blond hair and a cable-knit sweater. It was enough. She hurled herself into the red-haired man, knocking him to the ground. The flashlight flew out of her grip. She swung her fists, keeping the man pinned beneath her knees. For a moment it was all elbows and clothes and shouting.
Suddenly, she was being lifted into the air and tossed aside. She yelped and rolled to her feet, ready to face this new threat.
David Hawthorne was holding the red-haired man on the ground, straining with the effort. Esther quickly scanned the room, but no one else was there. David had been the one to pull her off the guard.
“Help me,” David grunted. “The bedsheets.”
The man pinned beneath him hollered and swore.
Heart pounding, Esther tore the thin sheets from a bed in the corner. Together they used them to bind the guard’s arms and legs behind him. David ripped off a strip of cotton and forced it between the man’s teeth.
“Sorry abou
t this, Harry,” he said.
The guard’s face went as red as his hair.
David sat back and looked at Esther. “Now do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”
“Breaking you out,” she said. “We can’t waste time. When will they change the guard?”
She darted to the door to check that the corridor was still empty.
“Hold on, Esther,” David said. “I need a minute.”
She turned back and got her first good look at him. He’d been ill. He was always thin, but now he looked positively skeletal. His wrist bones stood out in sharp relief against the tattered cuffs of his sweater. Tackling the guard had clearly taken a lot out of him, and he was breathing heavily.
Even so, Esther was shocked at how handsome he was. The strong jaw and straight back. The cracked glasses sitting slightly askew. Those eyes.
“You look awful,” she said. “Why didn’t you let me deal with this guy? You look like you’ll need to sleep it off for a week.”
“I was afraid you were going to stab him,” David said with a shadow of his old smirk. “We’ve become friends. Did you hear that, Harry? I don’t want you to get hurt.”
The red-haired guard grumbled and tried to spit the wadded-up cloth from his mouth.
“What’s the situation here?” Esther asked, scrutinizing the room. “Have they been hurting you? Are the guards armed?”
Now that she actually had David in front of her, Esther didn’t know how to behave. So she babbled.
“I’ve got a boat, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to get back to it. I left a guard somewhat incapacitated in the basement. Where’s the nearest exit? How many people are here?”
“Esther. Stop.”