by Linda Nagata
The bike path had been cleared and patched after Nolo, but not much had been done since. Commuters still used it as a quick route to Pearl City, and on to Kapolei, but the path demanded a rider’s attention. Time and weather had left much of the paving cracked and broken, and parts of it flooded at every high tide. Ava kept her speed down, and kept up a careful watch for hazards appearing in her headlight beam.
The rocky shore gave way to sprawls of mangrove. Then the path shifted inland. It passed through stands of kiawe trees and under an elevated highway. Then it bisected a vanished neighborhood, recognizable amid the regrowth only by the few scattered concrete foundations and the fading gridlines of streets. Offshore, shards of moonlight and light from the roads glittered against restless water stirred up by the blustering wind.
The wind had been gusting throughout the evening, bringing with it a misty intermittent rain. But as they reached Blaisdell Park, a sudden ferocious gust slammed into them, bringing with it a torrent of rain that felt like it came out of a hose.
“Hey, at least tonight’s not cold,” Akasha grumbled.
No, it couldn’t be, because Huko fed off the overheated ocean, its breath as warm and moist as the breath of a living thing.
After a few minutes, the path retreated again from the shore, this time to parallel the elevated freeway. That’s when a flash of light across the rough pavement alerted Ava to someone behind them. She glanced over her shoulder. Saw a single headlight, coming fast.
“Let’s stop.”
“You think it’s him?” Akasha asked.
“Yes.” She unsnapped her holster anyway, and rested her hand on the weapon. “Identify yourself,” she called out.
The wind carried Matt’s voice back to her. “Don’t shoot. It’s me.”
“Glad you decided to come back,” Ava said sincerely when he caught up.
Matt just sounded annoyed. “How’d you get away from that cop?”
“I’m a cop,” she reminded him. “What happened to Lyric?”
“I don’t know and I’m worried. She never came back after that jam. She may be relocating, or she may have been arrested. If she’s been arrested, we don’t have much time.”
“So let’s go,” Akasha urged with a bitter edge. “It’s not much farther.”
They rode through another grove of young kiawe trees, grown up since Nolo. Ava double-tapped her mic, shifting it to tactile mode. Display current location, she subvoked.
A map popped into existence on the periphery of her vision. A glowing red point placed her almost halfway across the base of Pearl City Peninsula. The peninsula, only about a square mile in size, extended into the harbor, with Middle Loch on the other side.
Akasha called another halt. They’d come to a shelter, built of four steel posts embedded in the corners of a rectangular concrete pad. A slanted roof made of corrugated plastic held off the rain.
“Wait here,” Akasha instructed. “He lives out on the peninsula, but I have to go in alone. I’ll call you, if he says okay.”
“Let’s all go at once,” Ava said. “Leave him no choice.”
“No. You think he doesn’t have defenses? Just wait here, out of the rain. Let me convince him. I know he’s been waiting for a chance like this.”
Matt sounded guarded when he asked. “How much time do you need?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call.”
Akasha continued on her own for fifty feet or so. Then she turned off the path. Her headlight bucked as she crossed rough terrain. She switched the light off and disappeared into the darkness among the trees.
Ava sighed and walked her bike under the shelter. Matt followed her, grumbling, “I don’t like this at all.”
After a few minutes the wind calmed, but rain continued to fall, loud against the slanted plastic roof. Ava had left her scooter’s headlight on and with the rain passing through it, its white beam looked like a shimmering other-dimension.
A distant roar drew her attention farther afield. A jet engine? No, just a fresh gust blustering in across the mangrove and the kiawe, filling the low forest with motion and spraying rain beneath the shelter. Tiny kiawe leaflets fluttered in the aftermath.
Ava took off her smart glasses, using a wet sleeve to wipe the water from her eyes. “And this is just the beginning.”
A shiver ran through her. She’d been warm enough while she kept moving, but now, with her wet clothing and the wind picking up, a chill had set in. So she shoved her glasses in a hip pocket, and retrieved her newly purchased hoodie from the gym bag. It felt damp, but she slipped it on and zipped it.
Matt said, “We’ll get this done in plenty of time to get to shelter.”
“You think so?” A cynical note. “How long have you worked with Lyric, anyway?”
“More than three years and I’m still alive. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Puppet master,” Ava said in soft contempt, remembering Robert Bell and his frantic search for a way out that didn’t exist, and herself, here, tonight, by Lyric’s design.
“What was that?” Matt asked.
But her earbud beeped, her digital assistant announcing, “Call from Kaden Robicheaux.”
Ava caught her breath. Her hand trembled as she reached for her smart glasses. She slipped them on, though she didn’t need to. The call was voice-only.
“Answer,” she whispered.
She heard the confirmation beep but said nothing, half-expecting the caller to be someone else—FBI maybe?—using Kaden’s device.
But it was him.
“Ava, damn it. You haven’t checked in at the airfield.”
She realized she’d never heard him angry before. She moved away from Matt, her mind racing as she struggled to grasp the meaning behind this call. He couldn’t really have expected her to take that flight out tonight. He had to know what had gone down at the hospital after he’d left; he had to know she wasn’t going to play along.
Or—another blast of rain across her face—was there room for second thoughts? As theory hardened into reality and he faced head-on the monstrousness of the deed, had he reconsidered? Had he rejected his role?
Or had he only been playing at the villain’s role all along . . . like Matt, an undercover operator?
She wanted so much to resurrect the man she thought she’d known.
But how could she, after hearing the testimony of Astrid Robicheaux?
Hoarse with suppressed emotion, Ava finally spoke, not to answer him, but to accuse. “Earlier tonight I met some of your sailors, the nonessentials, the ones you ordered to stay ashore through the hurricane. They were helping out, aiding civilians in the evacuation. Good people. Every one of them.”
“Of course they are.”
Was that suspicion in his voice?
“You left them behind,” she said.
“They have their duty.”
“And you? What’s your duty?”
Matt had come around to look at her, the faint glow of his smart glasses illuminating worried eyes and lips silently shaping words: Is it him?
She nodded.
Find out where he is!
She knew already where he was—with Denali, and his skeleton crew.
“Kaden?” she asked when his silence had stretched through many seconds, long enough for hope to stir from its grave. Please let him reconsider . . .
But he let her question pass unanswered. Instead, he returned to his hours-old argument: “You have children, Ava. They still need you.”
She drew a trembling breath. “And what about the thousands of children here? Do their lives mean nothing to you?”
An even longer pause this time, before he asked, softly, “Will those children grow up to wear a Chinese uniform?”
“Don’t do it, Kaden. Don’t do it. For all our sakes.”
A hollow silence, and then the call dropped. She slipped her glasses off, wiped her eyes on a wet sleeve.
“It’s happening, then,” Matt said.
“Yes.�
��
They stood in silence as the wind eased. The rain backed off to a mist, and in the lull something ratcheted past the shelter on clattering wings.
Startled, Ava dropped into a crouch, catching a glimpse of the device as it swooped low to pass through the beam of her scooter’s headlight. A mechanical dragonfly, three times the size of the real thing
The dragonfly doubled back, appearing again, this time at a hover as it studied her and Matt with electronic eyes.
Ava stood slowly upright again, her heart slowing as she shook off yet another adrenaline cocktail. “Looks like Akasha made contact.”
Matt eyed the device, his hands half raised, body poised for action. “I hope that thing doesn’t have kamikaze capabilities.”
“Too bad, yeah, it does,” a tinny male voice answered. “Shut off all your comms now, if you don’t wanna see it in action.”
Shit. But they were the uninvited guests.
Ava took off her glasses, her hands shaking a little. She powered them down and shoved them into a pocket. Next, her tactile mic and linked earbud. Then she dug out her tablet, unfolded it long enough to take it offline, then turned it off too. Matt stowed his gear in his waist pack.
“Done,” Ava said. “Is Akasha all right?”
A woman’s voice, distorted by the tiny size of the dragonfly’s speaker, but recognizable: “Gideon’s an asshole, but I’m all right. He says you can come in.”
“But this better be real,” Gideon added—a low threat that made the speaker buzz.
Akasha again: “Make sure you turn your headlights off as soon as you cross the fence. And don’t turn them on again.”
The dragonfly ratcheted away down the road in the direction Akasha had taken. Ava scrambled onto her scooter and followed, with Matt close behind her. She heard the dragonfly before she saw it again, hovering at what she guessed to be the point where Akasha had left the road.
“I presume we turn here,” she told Matt.
“I’m with you.”
Their headlights picked out the ruin of a fence lying flat on the ground: bent steel posts and woven wire, a small rectangular sign, bleached white, attached to the top strand. Ava remembered: The Ewa side of this peninsula was supposed to be a protected wildlife refuge.
They bumped across the rusty fence. In the beam of her headlight, Ava glimpsed what might be the start of a path through the kiawe, but she couldn’t see more than a couple feet along its length before it angled into the trees.
Remembering Akasha’s instructions, she switched her headlight off. Matt did the same, and darkness enveloped them. She heard the dragonfly ratcheting away on its noisy wings, and then another gust of wind roaring in over the trees. No way could they see well enough to find a path through this tangle.
“What now?” Ava wondered aloud.
As if in answer, specks of blue light winked on among the kiawe, a few feet apart and just inches above the ground. Ava leaned down to look at the nearest. She caught her breath, eyes wide with surprise. Matt left his scooter, crouching to see.
“Cyber firefly,” he murmured in admiration.
Not really a firefly, but it was a living beetle with a tiny LED light on its head and a single long black antenna curving over its back. Ava gulped at the humid air, her heart beating a fast pulse as she sat back up again. She wondered: Had the beetles been positioned to illuminate a path? Or—given the wildly uneven spacing between them—did they exist in such numbers that only the handful along the path had been selectively illuminated?
Matt said, “I’ll go first.”
chapter
17
The blustery air smelled of salt, with whiffs of organic rot and traces of some sulphuric chemical. They rode slowly, their tires making grotesque sucking sounds against the muddy path. The tires slipped in the mud, or got stuck in it. Then Ava would have to feel with her feet for solid ground, or a root, something to push off against to pull the scooter free. And she quickly learned to put a foot down every time the path zig-zagged, to keep the scooter from sliding out from under her.
She could never see more than a few meters ahead. At first she thought it was because Matt, having taken the lead, blocked her view of the blue illuminated beetles that marked the way. But when she paused to look back, she saw only darkness. The lights behind them had gone out. And when she leaned to look around Matt, she counted only three points of light. But as he advanced, a new blue glow winked to life, and then another.
The constant turns overwhelmed her sense of direction and with the heavy cloud cover she could not orient to moon and stars—or even to the occasional sound of wavelets against the shore, because they were on a small peninsula with water on three sides. She knew they could not have gone far, yet it seemed far, and a profound sense of isolation closed in around her, enforced by the rustling of leaves and the pattering of rain that together made a constant background noise, muffling almost all sound from beyond the forest.
How long had they been riding, anyway? With all her devices off, Ava had no way to precisely measure time, but surely several minutes had already passed.
“Hold up, Matt,” she called softly.
He stopped and looked back. “You thinking what I am? This place is a maze.”
It had to be. The peninsula was no more than a mile long, its perimeter reduced from its historic norm by sea level rise. Before Nolo, there had been military housing at its southern tip, but the storm surge had scrubbed that, depositing a layer of harbor mud over the streets and concrete foundations. No one had suggested rebuilding.
Since then, the mangrove habitat had merged with a tangle of low jungle nurtured by years of steadily increasing rainfall. On a still night, the air would have been buzzing with swarms of biologically confused mosquitoes, but with the wind pulsing in hard gusts, no insects flew, and the mechanical dragonfly did not show itself again. Even so, Ava felt sure they were observed.
Light drew her gaze downward, in time to see a slender foot-long snake slide past her booted foot. Its body, translucent as clear jelly, gleamed from within, the circuitry of its artificial nervous system illuminated by tiny embedded LEDs. The LEDs flashed in a shifting gradient of fiery colors—red, orange, amber, yellow—divided by a dark dorsal line.
Out of instinct, Ava drew her boot back. The snake reacted to the motion. Six hair-thin spines bobbed erect from its dorsal line. An obvious warning of toxic menace.
“Nice,” she breathed in a sarcastic overtone.
After a few seconds, the spines lay flat again and the menacing little robot went on its way, slipping into a patch of head-high rustling elephant grass. Its light winked out, and all the beetle lights went out too, leaving them swathed in a velvety humid darkness.
“Stop fucking around,” Ava warned in a strong, clear voice. “We don’t have time for it. We need to get this done now, or we fail.”
Something jumped from branch to branch in the kiawe above her. She ducked instinctively, almost toppling the bike over. Even so, she caught a glimpse of the thing—small, long-limbed, agile, gleaming with a ghostly pale luminescence—and soon gone from sight.
“Probably a rat,” Matt said.
“You didn’t see it.” A slight tremor had worked its way into her voice. “It was a monkey bot.”
She pressed a fist against her chest in a vain attempt to calm the rapid beating of her heart. Did Gideon think this was a game?
Okay, maybe he did.
He had to be strange. Weird. A wild eccentric more than half cracked to be out in this proto-swamp, pumping fake biology into the world.
She flinched again as the beetle lights winked back on.
“This is bullshit,” Matt said with a soft bravado that failed to fully mask the tension in his voice.
“Or a setup?” Ava suggested.
It would be so easy for this Gideon to take them out with a pair of explosive kamikaze bots.
“Fuck it.” Matt rolled his bike forward, resuming his pursuit of the blue li
ghts. “Let’s get this done.”
◇
The rain fell in a slow misty drizzle. The path turned, and turned again—and then they were there, at a break in the trees that opened onto a small muddy clearing.
A tent crowded the available ground, tall enough to stand in and printed in jungle camouflage. The front panels were rolled open and inside, a red light hung on a hook, dimly illuminating the interior. A moped and a little box trailer with two wheels made from bicycle tires occupied more than half the floorspace. Akasha stood silhouetted at the entrance, looking out. Another figure sat cross-legged on a towel at the back of the canvas floor.
No doubt this was Gideon.
Long, loose black hair veiled his face as he hunched over what Ava guessed to be a tablet. He wore baggy olive-drab shorts and a matching T-shirt that hung loose on his bony shoulders. His arms and legs were so thin they looked fragile. Dirty toenails poked through the fabric uppers of a battered pair of reef shoes.
“Sorry about the bullshit,” Akasha said.
Gideon looked up, shaking the hair back from a startlingly young face. He looked like a teenager. “It’s not bullshit, you jackboot. It’s cool.” His was the voice of the dragonfly, but a high-fidelity version.
Ava left her scooter in the rain, alongside Akasha’s. She grabbed the gym bag, which held the food she’d bought at the stadium. But she hesitated before stepping inside.
Reading her mind, Akasha said, “Leave your shoes on. It’s a mud pit in here.”
Ava stepped inside, where she dripped onto the already damp and dirty floor. She crooked an eyebrow at Akasha, who responded with a grimace and an eye roll. The tent was only nine by nine, the windows all zipped closed against the rain. When Matt came inside, it felt crowded.
Gideon glanced up from his tablet to ask Ava, “What’s in the bag?”