by Linda Nagata
The woman said, “I don’ know your business an’ I don’ wanna, but no way you can stay here.” She pointed to the mangrove growing along Moanalua Stream. “You like my advice? Go down there. Cross the bridge. Get buses on the other side, in the park. They take you to the stadium, no questions asked.”
With that, she moved on to interrogate a couple arguing over what possessions to bring and which to leave behind.
Ava turned to Akasha, who shook her head, whispering, “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”
“Shit,” Ava answered, side-eyeing Matt. “Deep, deep dirty shit.”
“It is real isn’t it?”
“It could be real.”
“And we gotta keep going, ’til we know for sure.”
“Yeah. Come on. Let’s move before those cops get down here.”
Ava felt confident the officers wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking—there were more important tasks to deal with tonight—but better for everyone if they stayed out of sight.
She looked again to where the woman had pointed. Beyond the rapidly disappearing encampment, she saw an old man with a stiff gray beard, a small backpack, and a hefty walking stick, disappear into the hedge. Must be a gap there. “Let’s cross the bridge,” she said. “Re-evaluate on the other side.”
She turned to look for Lyric, but didn’t see her. She scanned the encampment. Tall, thin, black-skinned, Lyric was an anomaly in this gathering; she should have been easy to spot. But she was nowhere.
“Lyric’s gone,” Matt announced.
Ava turned on him. “Gone where? If she has transportation, a way out of here—”
“She’ll find a way. Easier on her own. She has to get back inside, back under the umbrella of the agency—and you need to decide if you’re in or not.”
“Like there’s a choice? You’ve burned my career. Akasha’s too.”
The sound of a police siren, circling around.
Shit.
Ava hooked her fingers at the younger officer. “Let’s go.” Moving off at an easy run, she made for the gap in the hedge. Akasha and Matt followed.
What to do?
For now, stay out of sight. Get in a secure position. Then reach out, see if she could negotiate her way back inside.
A simple plan, but she was doomed to fail the first step as long as she looked like a coastal cop.
Eyeing the abandoned possessions scattered on the ground, she spotted a gym bag, mud-stained and with a hole in the corner. Empty? She grabbed it. It felt empty. Without slowing down, she checked. Found only a couple of candy wrappers.
“What?” Akasha asked.
“I don’t want to look like a cop. Find another bag, a backpack, something to stow your gear in.”
They kept moving, but they cast around as they did, kicking apart piles of debris. Akasha came up with a kid’s green backpack, printed with a dragon’s face, one eye gone and the toothy mouth half ripped off.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Matt hadn’t waited. He’d gone ahead. He didn’t look like a cop. With his vest and brown-camo waist pack, he looked like a hard-bodied civilian modeling mercenary chic. They sprinted after him, catching up as he entered the mangrove. Akasha followed him, then Ava. The mangrove’s dense canopy cut off the moonlight and the light from the settlement. Just a few steps in, darkness closed around them. One more step, and Akasha slipped in the mud. She fell hard on her ass, cursing.
“Stay put,” Ava told her. “We’ll change here. Get your shirt off. Turn it inside out to hide the insignia—and stash your belt.” She followed her own instructions, wrestling her shirt off, elbows banging against branches, rustling against leaves. Large drops of accumulated rainwater dripped from the canopy, cold against her head and her bare shoulders. And all around her, mosquitos whined.
Working blind in the darkness, Ava reversed her shirt, then pulled it on again, yanking the long knit sleeves down to her wrists. Next she unclipped the flashlight from her duty belt, then stuffed the belt into the gym bag. She zipped the bag up, then shouldered it. Not much of a disguise, but better than nothing.
Finishing ahead of Akasha, she took a few seconds to check her alerts. Ivan had left a message; so had an FBI special agent. Each a request to turn herself in.
Not yet.
“Ready,” Akasha announced.
Ava leaned close to whisper. “Let’s be careful when we cross. It’s supposed to be no-questions-asked on the other side, but if HPD has officers on scene, we need to stay out of sight.”
“I’m with you.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Ava triggered the flashlight. She rotated quickly through its white-light and green options, settling for a paltry red beam that would let her eyes adjust to the dark.
The ruby light revealed a muddy path chopped through the mangroves and partly paved with broken concrete blocks. As Akasha’s fall had proven, the footing was treacherous, but mangrove stems provided handholds, polished from use.
With the light revealing the way, they moved down the shallow bank to where Matt waited at the water’s edge.
“Damn, the water’s already high,” Ava observed.
The stream had risen to drown the path. The start of the floating bridge was now six feet out in the slow-moving current.
Rainfall could not explain this flood. There hadn’t been enough rain yet to make an impact. No, either the tide had pushed in, or this was the leading edge of the storm surge.
Matt went first, wading through the muddy water as a misty rain wafted down from moon-limned clouds. Akasha went next.
Ava took off her rain-speckled smart glasses, stashing them in a pocket. Then she entered the water, placing each foot carefully, feeling for the concrete blocks that marked the path. Cold water lapped at the hem of her shorts by the time she reached the bridge.
Despite the clouds, there was light enough from the moon that she could see the old man who’d preceded them, already nearly across. She switched off her flashlight.
The bridge was constructed of aluminum rowboats chained together, each with outriggers for stability. Sheets of plywood had been fitted over the thwarts to level the path for walking, and a single line of taut rope provided a hand-hold.
The first rowboat bobbed as Matt boosted himself onto it. Its stern sank, but the outriggers kept it from going under. He moved quickly, and as soon as he stepped onto the second boat, Ava signaled Akasha to follow. When she was clear, Ava scrambled up, flexing her knees to balance as the plywood rocked beneath her. She advanced with small, carefully measured steps that allowed her to smoothly transition to the second boat, and then the third. Ahead of her, Akasha moved confidently, and Matt had almost reached the other side.
Another wall of mangrove crowded the opposite shore. Glints of light shone through the trees from the park beyond. A gust of wind rocked the branches, sending a loud spattering of water showering off the leaves. And the moonlight brightened—enough that Ava could see someone huddled on the path just above the reach of the water, head bowed and arms wrapped around knees. Her first-responder instincts kicked in at the sound of sharp halting gasps—a woman taken by grief, on the edge of heartbroken weeping.
The old man stood alongside the forlorn figure, gesturing, his grumbly low voice chiding: “Mo’ people coming. Mo’ gonna come. You like dem see you geeve up? Is hard, sistah, I know, but you not dead yet. Come on now. We go. One mo’ night, one mo’ day, one mo’ miracle. Dis all happening again, no mean it’s your turn. You see dat boy again when God wills it. Not before.”
Matt slipped past them, a ghost unworthy of even a glance. But Akasha remained solid and real. “Eh, Auntie,” she said, bending down to speak. “Come, we help you. No one gets left behind.”
Ava switched on her flashlight as she waded ashore. The red beam revealed a bony woman shivering in the rain. Caucasian, though years of sun had left her skin dark and heavily lined, contrasting with white hair tied neatly behind her neck. She looked ancient i
n the red light, but that might have been more grief and hard living than years. Mud covered her hands, the front of her blouse, and most of her knee-length trousers, as well as her splayed feet and the rubber slippers she wore, the kind that people on the mainland called flip-flops.
Easy to see she’d had a bad fall trying to climb the bank.
Acting on instinct, Ava moved in to help. It’s what she’d always done. It’s why she’d gone out into the storm in defiance of orders—because when people needed help, you helped them.
Guilt chided: You still nevah learn, eh, Ava?
Yeah, maybe not.
The cold equation of mission priority demanded she follow Matt’s lead, walk away, don’t waste time on this sad, broken woman. But a sense of community, of connection, of humanity, knit this island together. Ava was part of that—and it would take only a few minutes to lend a hand.
“Let’s go, Auntie,” she said. “You can get warm at the stadium. People there gonna need you to comfort them.”
“Dat’s right, dees ladies right,” the old man said. He wore only shorts and a T-shirt, but didn’t appear cold. Reaching out, he pulled the woman to her feet. She was small, maybe five-two. Probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds.
“My things,” she said in a whisper.
Ava played the beam of her flashlight around and found two large shoulder bags under the mangrove roots. Designer brands, now covered in mud. She picked them up and handed them to Akasha. More people were coming over the floating bridge. Blue lights flashed through the mangrove on the other side of the stream.
“Let’s go, Auntie,” Ava said again, extending an arm for the woman to hold. “We’re all called to do what we can for each other tonight.”
They made their way up the path, to the well-worn lawn of a city-and-county park. More debris on the ground, evidence of another settlement, newly abandoned. A couple of young men stood nearby, enjoying their electronic cigarettes, exhaling clouds of sweet-smelling vapor. They were outliers of a crowd of over a hundred, some in line to board one of two buses waiting in the parking lot under amber lights, others standing uncertainly in small groups. Many of these had dogs leashed beside them. No doubt they’d been told the animals would not be allowed on the buses.
Ava looked for police, but saw none. Instead, a squad of sailors wearing the latest blue-themed revision of the navy’s working uniform organized the evacuees, helping them tag and then load their possessions onto a flatbed truck before steering them into the line for the first bus.
The woman had only her two shoulder bags and the old man only his small backpack. “I think you can just get in line,” Ava advised them.
Akasha handed the woman her bags, saying, “Take care.”
A murmured thank you. The old man nodding, assuring her, “We stay in God’s hands.”
Ava had felt grounded as she helped the old woman up the bank, comfortable in a world she understood. But as she turned away, familiar reality retreated. A strange sensation swept over her. She felt all the quiet activity in the park contracting, closing in around her. The artificial lights brightened and blurred, the anxious incessant murmur of human voices rose in volume, and the drizzling rain fell slow and warm.
Where was Matt? She looked around, but couldn’t see him. Had he vanished like Lyric? Ava remembered how he’d moved like a ghost up the stream bank. The old man had not even looked at him. Maybe he hadn’t really been there at all. A hallucination? A fantasy conjured from her lonely imagination? And Kaden . . . uncertainty surrounded him too. Ava swayed, rocked by a sudden sharp suspicion that she’d suffered a break with reality and none of this was real . . .
Deep breath.
No getting out that easily.
Akasha touched her arm, unwittingly anchoring her back in the world. “Look what’s coming.”
Ava followed the direction of her wide-eyed gaze to see a young sailor approaching with a tentative smile. Slender, no taller than her. The dark-blue ball cap he wore bore a silver submarine warfare badge, and above it a name: Denali.
Ava tensed. Her hand twitched as she gauged the time it would take to pull her sidearm.
But there was no aggression in the kid’s bearing, no malice in his eyes. She guessed his age to be nineteen, maybe twenty. He spoke to her softly, shyly. “I think I seen you before, ma’am. You the commander’s friend?”
Her throat tightened. A simple question with an answer too complicated to convey. She mustered a short nod, then asked, “Isn’t your vessel due to deploy?”
“Not s’posed to say, ma’am. But what I can tell you is, me and my shipmates are tasked on an emergency basis to help out with evacuating civilians out of inundation zones.” A self-deprecating smile. “We the non-essentials.”
“I don’t think there are any non-essentials aboard an attack sub, son.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we all got our place, but Denali can make do for a bit with a skeleton crew.”
“You gonna stay ashore for the hurricane, then?”
“That’s what I’m told, ma’am. It’s gonna be excitin’.”
Ava drew a shaky breath, striving not to reveal her inner horror. She glanced around, looking more closely at the other sailors. She counted six, in a range of ages and ranks. Two other youngsters were white or maybe mixed. The others, like this kid, were black.
These would be the crew loyal to the country. None would be members of Sigrún; they’d probably never heard of it. And because of their loyalty—and the risk that they would object to and interfere with a nuclear launch—they’d been put ashore, condemned by Kaden to die in the blast. That was the reality guiding Ava’s actions tonight—though she still didn’t truly believe it.
The kid’s brows knit. “Whatcha doin’ out here, ma’am?” he asked, now with a skeptical edge, like it had just hit him how odd and unlikely that was.
She answered in a carefully neutral voice. “Same as you, son. Seeing how I can help with the evacuation. Is Ohta out here with you?”
“Ah, no ma’am. The officers are needed at the dock.”
Of course. Every sailor making up the skeleton crew was surely either a Sigrún member or had been flagged by HADAFA as compliant, or sympathetic to their cause. Sigrún had surely planned well. None of those due to sail aboard Denali would rise up to stop the launch.
Ava held out her hand. The young man looked surprised, but he shook it. “Thank you, sailor, for helping out. And thank you for your service.”
“Yes, ma’am. I better get back to work, ma’am.”
She walked away, heart pounding, sensing Akasha trailing behind.
“How you like that for a fucked-up coincidence,” Akasha said, just as Matt faded back into existence, materializing alongside them.
“He sent the innocents ashore,” Ava told them.
“Shit,” Akasha said. “I guess that’s true. So what do we do now? What can we do?”
Ava glanced at Matt, who was eyeing the line of vehicles. More had come in, civilian farm trucks by the look of them, parking behind the flatbed. She said, “Let’s get to the stadium and figure it out. There’ll be people there, enough that we won’t stand out. And the open market should still be operating.”
“You want to go shopping?” Akasha asked.
“I want to stay out of custody. Easiest way to improve our odds is to change into civilian clothes. But I don’t want to ride the bus there—”
“Yeah, no way. If Sigrún comes after us, or even HPD, it could get ugly fast.”
“And any confrontation would slow the evacuation. We are not going to put these people in danger.”
“Let’s see what those trucks are doing,” Matt suggested. “Maybe we can hitch a ride. Once we’re there, I’ll see about finding us our own means of transportation.”
chapter
14
With the gusting wind and Huko imminent, people were in a mood to help each other—no questions asked. Two farm trucks—both flatbed electrics, Chinese manufactu
re—had been brought in by volunteers to evacuate the animals not allowed to accompany their owners to the stadium. Cardboard carry boxes and battered airline crates secured the small dogs, the cats, and a family of rabbits. A few larger dogs were confined too, but there weren’t crates for all of them.
So after the driver agreed to squeeze three human passengers onto the flatbed for the short drive to the stadium, Ava found herself comforting a frightened pit bull while she huddled with Akasha and Matt at the hollow center of the flatbed’s stacked load. A nerve-grating cacophony of plaintive mewing, whining, and competitive barking surrounded them—and still it felt like a respite.
The truck started to roll, startling the pit bull. It raised its head from Ava’s lap. “It’s all right,” she murmured.
She waited until the truck pulled out onto Kamehameha Highway. Then she leaned in, eyeing Matt. With her voice hushed and the rush of wind to cover her words, she told him, “So talk. We kept you out of Sigrún’s hands. We got you out of the hospital. Now what? Tell me you’ve got a plan that’ll keep Denali from launching that missile.”
“Lyric’s working on it.” He met her gaze, his bruised face calm, assured. A modern portrait of belief.
“You know that? You’ve been talking to her?”
“No, but when she gets to a secure position, we’ll hear from her again.”
Ava considered this. Lyric had deep access into HADAFA, but she didn’t have superpowers. If this was all a set-up—if Ivan’s intel was right and Lyric really was a double agent working for the Chinese, legitimate officers should have already brought her down.
But if she was loyal? If she was the real thing, despite the fatal game she’d played with Robert Bell? Then the evidence she’d gathered on Sigrún should have triggered an emergency action.
That hadn’t happened—and Ava could parse that only by accepting what Matt had said, before they’d left the hospital room: Somewhere in the chain of command, is Sigrún.