2030 hours: the light was almost gone, the convoy moving at a creep.
They were in a coastal tableland of tangled scrub, the road pocked with potholes in places, in others rippled like a washboard. Chase was driving, his gaze intent as he fought the wheel. Amy was riding in back.
Peter radioed Greer, who was driving the tanker at the rear of the column. “How much farther?”
“Six miles.”
Six miles at twenty miles per hour. Behind them, the sun had been subsumed into a flat horizon, erasing all shadows.
“We should see the channel bridge soon,” Greer added. “The isthmus is just south of there.”
“Everyone, we need to push it,” Peter said.
They accelerated to thirty-five. Peter swiveled in his seat to make sure the convoy was keeping pace. A gap opened, then narrowed. The cab of the Humvee flared as the first bus in line turned on its headlights.
“How much faster should we go?” Chase asked.
“Keep it there for now.”
There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole.
“Those buses are going to blow apart,” Chase said.
A scrim of light appeared ahead: the moon. It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plump and fiery. Simultaneously, the channel bridge rose up before them in distant silhouette—a stately, vaguely organic figure with its long scoops of wire slung from tall trestles. Peter took up the radio again.
“Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?”
Negative. Negative. Negative.
Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore were watching the drydock doors. The portside door had opened without complaint; the starboard was the problem. At a 150-degree angle to the dock, the door had stopped cold. They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours.
“I’m out of ideas here,” Rand radioed from the quay. “I think that’s all we’re going to get.”
“Will we clear it?” Lore asked. The door weighed forty tons.
Michael didn’t know. “Rand, get down to engineering. I need you there.”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“You did your best. We’ll have to manage.” He hung the microphone back on the panel. “Fuck.”
The lights on the panel went dead.
Twenty-eight miles west, the same summer moon had risen over the Chevron Mariner. Its blazing orange light shone down upon the deck; it shimmered over the oily waters of the lagoon like a skin of flame.
With a bang like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward. It seemed not so much to fly as to leap, soaring into the nighttime sky of its own volition. Up and up it sailed, spinning on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a man who’s lost his train of thought, it appeared to pause in midflight. For the thinnest moment, it neither rose nor fell; one might easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with some magical power, capable of thwarting gravity. But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters.
Then: Carter.
He landed on the foredeck with a clang, absorbing the impact through his legs and simultaneously compressing his body to a squat: hips wide, head erect, one splayed hand touching the deck for balance, like an offensive tackle preparing for the snap. His nostrils flared to taste the air, which was imbued with the freshness of freedom. A breeze licked at his body with a tickling sensation. Sights and sounds bombarded his senses from all directions. He regarded the moon. His vision was such that he could detect the smallest features of its face—the cracks and crevices, craters and canyons—with an almost lurid quality of three dimensions. He felt the moon’s roundness, its great rocky weight, as if he were holding it in his arms.
Time to be on his way.
He ascended to the top of One Allen Center. High above the drowned city, Carter took measure of the buildings: their heights and handholds, the fjordlike gulfs between them. A route materialized in his mind; it had the force, the clarity of a premonition, or something absolutely known. A hundred yards to the first rooftop, perhaps another fifty to the second, a long two hundred to the third but with a drop of fifty feet that would expand his reach…
He backed to the far edge of the platform. The key was, first, to create an accumulation of velocity, then to spring at precisely the right moment. He lowered to a runner’s crouch.
Ten long strides and he was up. He soared through the moonlit heavens like a comet, a star unlocked. He made the first rooftop with room to spare. He landed, tucked, rolled; he came up running and launched again.
He’d been saving up.
In the cargo bay of the third vehicle in the convoy, among the other injured, Alicia lay immobilized. Thick rubber cords strapped her to her stretcher at the shoulders, waist, and knees; a fourth lay across her forehead. Her right leg was splinted from ankle to hip; one arm, her right, was pinned across her chest. Various other parts of her were bandaged, stitched, bound.
Inside her body, the rapid cellular repair of her kind was under way. But this was an imperfect process, and complicated by the vastness and complexity of her wounds. This was especially true of the winglike flange of her right hip, which had been pulverized. The viral part of her could accomplish many things, but it could not reassemble a jigsaw puzzle. It might have been said that the only thing keeping Alicia Donadio alive was habit—her predisposition to see things through, just as she had always done. But she no longer had the heart for any of it. As the bone-banging hours passed, that she had failed to die seemed more and more like a punishment, and proof enough of Peter’s words. You traitor. You knew. You killed them. You killed them all.
Sara was sitting on the bench above her. Alicia undestood that the woman hated her; she could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at her—or, rather, didn’t—as she went about attending to Alicia’s injuries: checking the bandages, measuring her temperature and pulse, dribbling the horrible-tasting elixir into her mouth that kept her in a pain-numbed twilight. Alicia wished she could say something to the woman, whose hatred she deserved. I’m sorry about Kate. Or It’s all right, I hate myself enough as it is. But this would only make things worse. Better Alicia should accept what was offered and say nothing.
Besides, none of this mattered now; Alicia was asleep, and dreaming. In this dream, she was in a boat, and all around was water. The seas were calm, covered in mist, without a visible horizon. She was rowing. The creak of the oars in their locks, the swish of water moving under their blades: these were the only sounds. The water was dense, with a slightly viscous texture. Where was she going? Why had the water ceased to terrify her? Because it didn’t; Alicia felt perfectly at home. Her back and arms were strong, her strokes compact, nothing wasted. Rowing a boat was something she did not recall ever doing, yet it felt completely natural, as if the knowledge had been inscribed into her muscles for later use.
On she rowed, her blades elegantly slicing through the inky murk. She became aware that something was moving in the water—a shadowy bulk gliding just beneath the surface. It appeared to be following her, maintaining a watchful distance. Her mind did not register its presence as menacing; rather, it merely seemed to be a natural feature of the environment, one she might have anticipated if she’d thought about it in advance.
“Your boat is very small,” said Amy.
She was sitting in the stern. Water was running from her face and hair.
“You know we can’t go,” Amy stated.
The remark was puzzling. Alicia continued to row. “Go where?”
“The virus is in us.” Amy’s voice was dispassionate, without any perceptible tone. “We can’t ever leave.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
The shape had begun to circle them. Great bulges of water began to rock the boat from side to side.
“Oh, I think you do. We’re sisters, aren’t we? Sisters in blood.”
The motion increased in intensity. Alicia drew the oars into the boat and clutched the gunwales for balance. Her heart turned to lead; bile bubbled in her throat. Why had she failed to foresee the danger? So much water all around them, and her little boat, so small as to be nothing. The hull began to rise; suddenly they were no longer in contact with the water. A great blue bulk emerged under them, water streaming from its encrusted flanks.
“You know who that is,” Amy said impassively.
It was a whale. They were balanced like a pea atop its immense, horrible head. Higher and higher it lifted them into the air. One flick of its monstrous tail and it would send them soaring; it would crash down upon them and smash their boat to pieces. A hopeless terror, that of fate, took her in its grasp. From the stern, Amy issued a bored sigh.
“I’m so…tired of him,” she said.
Alicia tried to scream, but the sound stopped in her throat. They were rising, the sea was falling away, the whale was looming up…
She awoke with a slam. She blinked her eyes and tried to focus. It was night. She was in the back of the truck, and the truck was bouncing hard. Sara’s face floated into view.
“Lish? What is it?”
Her lips moved slowly around the words: “They’re…coming.”
From the rear of the convoy, the sound of guns.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Michael took the stairs from the pilothouse three at a time; he raced across the deck, his feet barely touching steel, and down the hatch. He was yelling into his radio, “Rand, get down here right now!”
He hit the engineering catwalk at a sprint, grabbed the poles of the ladder, and slid the rest of the way. The engines were quiet, everything stopped. Rand appeared above him.
“What happened?”
“Something tripped the main!”
Lore, on the radio: “Michael, we’re hearing shots up here.”
“Say again?”
“Gunshots, Michael. I’m looking down the isthmus now. We’ve got lights coming this way from the mainland.”
“Headlights or virals?”
“I’m not sure.”
He needed current to trace the problem. At the electrical panel, he switched diagnostics over to the auxiliary generator. The meters jumped to life.
“Rand!” Michael bellowed. “What are you seeing?”
Rand was positioned at the engine-control array on the far side of the room, checking dials. “Looks like its something in the water jacket pumps.”
“That wouldn’t trip the main! Look farther up the line!”
A brief silence; then Rand said, “Got it.” He tapped a dial. “Pressure’s flatlined on the starboard-side charger. Must have shut down the system.”
Lore again: “Michael, what’s going on down there?”
He was strapping on his tool belt. “Here,” he said, tossing Rand the radio, “you talk to her.”
Rand looked lost. “What should I say?”
“Tell her to get ready to engage the props straight from the pilothouse.”
“Shouldn’t she wait for the system to repressurize? We could blow a header.”
“Just get on the electrical panel. When I tell you, switch the system back over to the main bus.”
“Michael, talk to me,” Lore said. “Things are looking very fucking serious up here.”
“Go,” Michael told Rand.
He raced aft, plugged in his lantern, dropped to his back, and wedged himself under the charger.
This goddamn leak, he thought. It’s going to be the death of me.
The convoy hit the isthmus doing sixty miles an hour. Buses were bounding; buses were going airborne. The tanker, last in the line, had failed to keep up. The virals were close behind and massing. The barrier of razor wire appeared in the headlights.
Peter yelled into the radio, “Everyone keep going! Don’t stop!”
They careened straight through the barrier. Chase stamped the brakes and pulled to the side as the convoy roared past with inches to spare, pushing a wall of wind that buffeted the vehicle like a howling gale. Peter, Chase, and Amy leapt from the cab.
Where was the tanker?
It lumbered into view at the base of the causeway—lamps blazing, engine roaring, traveling toward them like a well-lit rocket in slow motion. Past the turn it began to accelerate. Two virals were crouched on the roof of the cab. Chase raised his rifle and squinted through the scope.
“Ford, don’t,” Peter warned. “You hit that tank, it could blow.”
“Quiet. I can do this.”
A bullet split the air. One of the virals tumbled away. Ford was taking aim at the second when it dropped to the hood: no shot.
“Shit!”
From the cab, a pair of shotgun blasts came in rapid succession; the windshield shattered outward into the moonlight. There was a hissing groan of brakes. The viral flopped backward into the conical glare of the truck’s headlights and disappeared beneath the front wheels with a wet burst.
Suddenly the cab was at a right angle to the causeway; the tanker was jackknifing. The whole thing began to swing crosswise. As its back wheels touched the water, the rear of the truck abruptly decelerated, swinging the cab in the opposite direction like a weight on a string. The truck was less than a hundred yards away now. Peter could see Greer fighting the wheel for control, but his efforts were now pointless; the vehicle’s angular momentum had assumed command.
It flopped onto its side. The cab separated from its cargo, which rammed it from behind in a second crunch of glass and metal. A long, screeching skid, and the whole thing came to rest, lying driver side up at a forty-five-degree angle to the roadway.
Peter dashed toward it, Chase and Amy close behind. Fuel was gushing everywhere; black smoke billowed from the undercarriage. The virals were funneling onto the isthmus; they would arrive within seconds. Patch was dead, his head crushed from behind; what was left of him was spread-eagled over the dashboard. Greer was lying on top of him, soaked in blood. Was it Patch’s or his own? He was staring upward.
“Lucius, cover your eyes.”
Peter and Chase began to kick what was left of the windshield. Three hard blows and the glass caved inward. Amy climbed inside and took the man by the shoulders while Peter took his legs. “I’m okay,” Greer muttered, as if to apologize. As they hauled him out, the first fingers of flame appeared.
Chase and Peter each took a side. They ran.
Passengers had massed at the narrow gangway, attempting to shove their way through the bottleneck. Cries of panic stabbed the air. Men were scrambling over the deck of the ship to free the chains that held it in place. Many of the children seemed dazed and uncertain, drifting on the dock like a herd of sheep in the rain.
Pim and the girls were already on the ship. At the top of the gangway, Sara was lifting the smallest children aboard, pulling others by the hand to hasten them; Hollis and Caleb were shepherding the children from the rear. A man charged from behind, nearly knocking Hollis over. Caleb grabbed him, threw him to the pavement, and shoved a finger into his face.
“You wait your goddamn turn!”
They weren’t going to make it, Caleb thought. People had resorted to using the chains, attempting to drag themselves hand over hand to the ship. A woman lost her grip; with a cry, she plunged into the water. She came up, her face visible for only a moment, arms waving over her head: she didn’t know how to swim. She sank back down.
Where were his father and the others? Why hadn’t they come?
From the causeway, an explosion; all faces turned. A ball of fire was rising in the sky.
Wedged under the charger, Michael was trying to trace the faint hiss of leaking gas. Keep cool, he told himself. Do this by the numbers, joint by joint.
“Anything?” Rand was standing at the base of the charger.
“You’re not helping.”
It was no use. The leak was too small; it must have bled for hours.
“Get me some soapy water,” he called. “I need a paintbrush, too.”
“Where the hell am I going to get that?”
“I don’t care! Figure it out!”
Rand darted away.
The blast hit them like a slap, hurling them forward, off their feet. Debris whizzed past: tires, engine parts, shards of metal sharp as knives. As a wall of heat soared over him, Peter heard a scream and a great crunch of metal and splintering glass.
He was lying facedown in the mud. His thoughts were disordered; none seemed related to any of the others. A raglike bundle lay to his left. It was Chase. The man’s clothes and hair were smoking. Peter crawled to him; his friend’s eyes stared sightlessly. Cradling the back of the man’s head, he felt something soft and damp. He turned Chase onto his side.
The back of the man’s skull was gone.
The Humvee was totaled, crushed and burning. Greasy smoke clotted the air. It coated the insides of Peter’s mouth and nose with its rancid taste. With every breath it drilled into his lungs, deeper and deeper.
“Amy, where are you?” He staggered toward the Humvee. “Amy, answer me!”
“I’m here!”
She was pulling Greer clear of the water. The two of them emerged covered in gooey mud and collapsed to the ground.
“Where’s Chase?” She had pink burns on her face and hands.
“Dead.” Crouched, he asked Greer, “Can you walk?”
The man was holding his head in his hands. Then, glancing up: “Where’s Patch?”
The burning truck would hold the virals at bay, but once the fires died, the horde would come streaming down the isthmus. The three of them had nothing to fight with except Amy’s sword, which still lay in its scabbard over her back.
A harsh white light raked their faces; a pickup was racing down the roadway toward them. Peter hooded his eyes against the glare. The driver skidded to a stop.
“Get in,” Caleb said.
Alicia saw only the sky. The sky and the back of a man’s head. She sensed the presence of a crowd. Her stretcher jostled beneath her, there were voices, people crying, everything rushing around her.
Don’t take me. Her body was broken; she lay loose as a doll. I’m one of them. I don’t belong.
Clanging footsteps: they were crossing the gangway. “Put her over there,” someone said. The stretcher-bearers lowered her to the deck and hurried away. A woman was sitting beside her, her body curled around a blanketed bundle. She was murmuring into the bundle, some kind of repeated phrase that Alicia could not make out, though it possessed the rote rhythm of prayer.
“You,” Alicia said.
One syllable; it felt like lifting a piano. The woman failed to notice her.
“You,” she repeated.
The woman looked up. The bundle was a baby. The woman’s grip on it was almost ruthless, as if she feared someone might snatch it away at any moment.
“I need you…to help me.”
The woman’s face crumpled. “Why aren’t we moving?” She bent her face to the baby again, burying it in the cloth. “Oh, God, why are we still here?”
“Please…listen.”
“Why are you talking to me? I don’t even know you. I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m…Alicia.”
“Have you seen my husband? He was here a second ago. Has anybody seen my husband?”
Alicia was losing her. In another moment, she’d be gone. “Tell me…her name.”
“What?”
“Your baby. Her…name.”
It was as if nobody had ever asked her such a question.
“Say it,” Alicia said. “Say…her name.”
She shook with a sob. “He’s a boy,” she moaned. “His name is Carlos.”
A moment passed, the woman weeping, Alicia waiting. There was chaos all around, and yet it felt as if they were alone, she and this woman she did not know, who could have been anyone. Rose, my Rose, Alicia thought, how I have failed you. I could not give you life.
“Will you…help me?”
The woman wiped her nose with the back of a wrist. “What can I do?” Her voice was utterly hopeless. “I can’t do anything.”
Alicia licked her lips; her tongue was heavy and dry. There would be pain, a lot of it; she would need every ounce of strength.
“I need you…to untie…my straps.”
Soaring leap after soaring leap, Carter made his way down the channel toward the isthmus. The mushroom shapes of chemical tanks. The rooftops of buildings. The great, forgotten debris fields of industrial America. He moved swiftly, his power inexhaustible, like a huge heaving engine.
A great backlit shape rose before him: the channel bridge. He unleashed his body skyward; up he flew, seizing a handhold just below the bridge’s shattered surface. A moment of calibration and he hurled himself upward again, grabbed a guy wire with one hand, and somersaulted to the deck.
Below, the unfolding battle was laid out before him like a model. The ship and the mob of people funneling aboard; the truck roaring down the causeway; the barricade of flames and the viral horde amassed behind it. Carter cocked his head to calculate his arc; he needed more height.
Using one of the support wires, he climbed to the top of the tower. The water shone below him still as glass, like a great smooth mirror to the moon. He felt some uncertainty, even a bit of fear; he pushed it aside. The tiniest fleck of doubt and he would fail, he would plummet into the abyss. To traverse such a distance—to master its breadth—one needed to enter an abstract realm. To become not the jumper but the jump, not an object in space but space itself.
He compressed to a crouch. Energy expanded outward from his core and gushed into his limbs.
Amy, I am coming.
From the pilothouse, Lore was watching the viral horde through binoculars. Blockaded by the flaming wreckage, it appeared as a column of thrumming light that stretched far back onto the mainland and beyond, widening to encompass virtually all of the far shore.
She raised the radio to her mouth. “I don’t want to rush you, Michael, but whatever’s wrong, you have got to fix it right the fuck now.”
“I’m trying here!”
Something was happening to the horde, a kind of…rippling. A rippling but also a compacting, like the gathering action of a spring. Beginning at the rear, the motion slithered forward, gathering speed as it proceeded down the causeway toward the flames. The truck was lying lengthwise across the roadway. What was she seeing?
The head of the column crashed into the burning tanker like a battering ram. Gouts of smoke and fire shot into the sky. The tanker began to creep forward, scraping along the roadway. Burning virals peeled off into the water as more were propelled from behind into the destruction.
Lore looked down from the rail. The chains connecting the hull to the dock had been released; dozens of people were splashing helplessly in the water. At least a hundred, including some children, remained on the dock. Panicked cries knifed the air. “Get out of my way!” “Take my daughter!” “Please, I’m begging you!”
“Hollis!” she cried.
The man looked up. Lore pointed toward the isthmus. She realized her mistake: others on the dock had seen her. The mob surged forward, everyone attempting to wedge themselves onto the narrow gangway simultaneously. Blows were thrown, bodies hurled; people were trampled in the crush. From the center of the melee came the crack of a gunshot. Hollis rushed forward, arms swinging like a swimmer’s, carving a path through the chaos. More shots; the crowd scattered, revealing a lone man with a pistol and two bodies on the ground. For a second the man just stood there, as if amazed by what he’d done, before he turned and charged up the gangway. Too late for him: he made it all of five steps before Hollis grabbed him by the collar, pulled him backward, placed his other hand under the man’s buttocks, hoisted him over his head—the man flailing his arms and legs like an overturned turtle—and hurled him over the rail.
Lore grabbed the radio: “Michael, it’s getting ugly up here!”
A froth of bobbles appeared. Rand passed Michael a three-foot length of pipe and a tub of grease. Michael wrenched the old pipe free, greased the threads of its replacement, and fitted it into place. Rand had returned to the panel.
“Switch it over!” Michael yelled.
The lights flickered; the mixers began to spin. Pressure flowed into the lines.
“Here we go!” Rand cried.
Michael wriggled free. Rand tossed him the radio.
“Lore—”
Everything died again.
She had failed; her army was gone, scattered to dust. With all her heart Amy wanted to be on that ship, to depart this place and never come back. But she could never leave, not on this boat or any other. She would stand on the dock as it sailed away.
How I wanted to have that life with you, Peter, she thought. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The truck was racing east, Caleb at the wheel, Peter, Amy, and Greer in the cargo bed. Ahead the lights of the dock loomed; behind them, across the widening distance, Amy saw the burning tanker pivoting. The first virals appeared through the breach. Their bodies were burning. They staggered forward, man-sized wicks of flame. The gap continued to widen, opening like a door.
Amy turned to the window of the cab. “Caleb—”
He was looking through the mirror. “I see them!”
Caleb floored it; the truck shot forward, sending Amy tumbling. Her head impacted the metal floor with a clang and a burst of disorienting pain. Lying on her back, her face to the sky, Amy saw the stars. Stars by the hundreds, the thousands, and one of them was falling. It grew and grew, and she knew what this star was.
“Anthony.”
Carter’s aim was true; as the truck zoomed past, he landed behind it on the causeway, rolled, and came up on his feet. The virals were careening toward him. He drew himself erect.
Brothers, sisters.
He sensed their confusion. Who was this strange being who had dropped into their path?
I am Carter, Twelfth of Twelve. Kill me if you can.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know!”
The radio squawked: Lore. “Michael, we have got to go right now.”
Rand was madly checking gauges. “It’s not the charger—it has to be electrical.”
Michael stood before the panel in utter desolation. It was hopeless; he was beaten. His ship, his Bergensfjord, had denied him. His paralysis became anger; his anger turned to rage. He slammed a fist against the metal. “You bitch!” He reared back, struck again. “You heartless bitch! You do this to me?” With tears of frustration brimming, he grabbed a wrench from the deck and began to slam it against the metal, again and again. “I’ve…given…you…everything!”
A sudden rumble, like the roar of a great caged beast. Lights came on; all the gauges leapt.
“Michael,” said Rand, “what the hell did you do?”
“That’s got it!” Lore cried.
The sound increased in intensity, humming through the ship’s plating. Rand yelled over the din: “Pressure’s holding! Two thousand rpm! Four! Five! Six thousand!”
Michael snatched the radio from the floor. “Engage the screws!”
A groan. A shudder, deep in the bones.
The Bergensfjord began to move.
They skidded into the loading area. Amy leapt from the back of the truck before it stopped moving.
“Amy, stop!”
But the woman was already gone, racing toward the causeway. “Caleb, take Lucius and get on that boat.”
Standing by the cargo bed, his son seemed stunned.
“Do it!” Peter ordered. “Don’t wait!”
He took off after her. With every step he willed himself to go faster. His breath was heaving in his chest, the ground flying beneath him. The gap between them began to narrow. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten. A final burst of speed and he grabbed her around the waist, sending both of them rolling on the ground.
“Let me go!” Amy was on her knees, fighting to break free.
“We have to leave right now.”
There were tears in her voice. “They’ll kill him!”
Carter coiled. He flexed his fingers, claws glinting. He flexed his toes, feeling the taut wires of ligaments. Blueing moonlight doused him like a benediction.
Reaching one hand forward, Amy released a wail of pain. “Anthony!”
He charged.
They had to clear eight hundred feet.
At the rear of the vessel, a wall of foam churned up. Shouts rose from the dock: “They’re leaving without us!” The last of the passengers rushed forward, shoving themselves onto the ramp, which had begun to scrape along the pier as the Bergensfjord pulled away.
Standing at the rail, Pim watched the scene unfold in silence. The bottom lip of the gangway was inching toward the edge; soon it would fall. Where was her husband? Then she saw him. Supporting Lucius, he was racing at a quickstep down the pier. She began to sign emphatically to any who might see: That’s my husband! And: Stop this ship! But, of course, no one could make sense of her.
The gangway was clotted with people. Crammed between the guardrails, they squeezed forward onto the deck of the ship only one or two at a time, ejected from the squirming mass. Pim began to moan. She was not aware that she was doing this at first. The sound had emerged of its own volition, an expression of violent feeling that could not be contained—just as, twenty-one years ago, in Sara’s arms, she had wailed with such ferocity that she might have been mistaken for a dying animal. As the volume increased, the sound began to form a distinctive shape altogether new in the life of Pim Jaxon: she was about to make words.
“Caaay…leb! Ruuuuunnnn!”
The lip of the gangway halted. It had lodged against a cleat at the edge of the pier. Under the pressure of the ship’s accelerating mass, it began to twist on its axis. Rivets were popping, metal buckling. Caleb and Greer were steps away. Pim was waving, shouting words she couldn’t hear but felt—felt with every atom of her body.
The gangway began to fall.
Still chained to the ship, it cantilevered into the side of the hull. Bodies plunged into the water, some wordlessly, their fate accepted, others with pitiful cries. At the bottom of the ramp, Caleb had hooked an elbow through the rail while simultaneously holding on to Greer, whose feet were balanced on the lowest rung. The Bergensfjord was gathering speed, dragging a roiling whirlpool. As the stern passed by, the ones in the water were dragged under, into the propeller’s froth. Perhaps a cry, a hand reaching up in vain, and they were gone.
In the bowels of the Bergensfjord, Michael was running. Deck by deck he ascended, legs flying, arms swinging, heart pumping in his mouth. With a burst he flung himself into open air. The point of the bow was passing the end of the drydock door.
They weren’t going to clear it. No goddamn way.
He took the stairs to the pilothouse three at a time and charged through the door. “Lore—”
She was staring out the windscreen. “I know!”
“Give it more rudder!”
“You don’t think I did that?”
The gap between the door and the ship’s right flank was narrowing. Twenty yards. Ten. Five.
“Oh, shit,” Lore breathed.
Peter and Amy were racing down the dock.
The ship was departing; she was gliding away. Gunfire spattered from the fantail, bullets whizzing over their heads; the virals had broken through.
A crash.
The side of the hull had collided with the end of the drydock door. A long scraping sound followed, the irresistible force of the ship’s momentum meeting the immovable object of the door’s weight. The hull trembled even as it failed to decelerate, thrusting forward.
The great wall of steel slid heartlessly by. In another few seconds, the Bergensfjord would be gone. There was no way to board. Peter saw something hanging off the side of the ship: the fallen gangway, still attached at the top. Two people were clinging to it.
Caleb. Greer.
With one arm crooked around the gangway rail, his son was calling to them while pointing at the end of the pier. The drydock door had been nudged away from the ship; it now stood at an acute angle to the moving hull. When the gangway passed the end of the door, the gap between them would narrow to a jumpable distance.
But Amy was no longer beside him; Peter was alone. He spun and saw her, standing a hundred feet behind him, facing away.
“Amy, come on!”
“Get ready to jump!” Caleb yelled.
The virals had reached the far end of the pier. Amy drew her sword and called to Peter over her shoulder, “Get on that ship!”
“What are you doing? We can make it!”
“Don’t make me explain! Just go!”
Suddenly he understood: Amy did not intend to leave. Perhaps she never had.
Then he saw the girl.
Far out of his reach, she was crouched behind a giant spool of cable. Strawberry hair tied with a ribbon, scratches on her face, a stuffed animal gripped tightly to her chest with arms thin as twigs.
Amy saw her, too.
She sheathed her sword and dashed forward. The virals were charging down the dock. The little girl was frozen with terror. Amy swung her onto her hip and began to run. With her free hand she waved Peter forward. “Don’t wait! I’ll need you to catch us!”
He raced down the drydock door. The bottom of the gangway was thirty feet away and closing fast. Caleb yelled, “Do it now!”
Peter leapt.
For an instant it seemed he had jumped too soon; he would plunge into the roiling water. But then his hands caught the rail of the gangway. He pulled himself up, found his footing, and turned around. Amy, still holding the girl, was running down the top of the wall. The gangway was passing them by; she was never going to make it. Peter reached out as Amy took five bounding strides, each longer than the last, and flung herself over the abyss.
Peter could not remember the moment when he grabbed her hand. Only that he’d done it.
They had cleared the dock. Michael ran down from the pilothouse and dashed to the rail. He saw a deep dent, fifty feet long at least, though the wound was high above the waterline. He looked toward shore. A hundred yards aft, at the end of the dock, a mass of virals was watching the departing ship like a crowd of mourners.
“Help!”
The voice came from the stern.
“Someone’s fallen!”
He raced aft. A woman, clutching an infant, was pointing over the rail.
“I didn’t know she was going to jump!”
“Who? Who was it?”
“She was on a stretcher, she could barely walk. She said her name was Alicia.”
A coiled rope lay on the deck. Michael pushed the button on the radio. “Lore, kill the props!”
“What?”
“Do it! Full stop!”
He was already wrapping the rope around his waist, having shoved the radio into the hand of the woman, who stared at him in confusion.
“Where are you going?” the woman asked.
He stepped over the rail. Far below, the waters swirled in a maelstrom. Kill them, he thought. Dear God, Lore, kill those screws now.
He jumped.
Toes pointed, arms outstretched, he pierced the surface like a spike; instantly the current grabbed him, shoving him down. He slammed into the mucky bottom and began to roll along it. His eyes stung with salt; he could see nothing at all, not even his hands.
He fell straight into her.
A confusion of limbs: they were both tumbling, spiraling along the bottom. He grabbed her belt and drew her body into his and wrapped his arms around her waist.
The slack ran out.
A hard yank; Michael felt as if he were being sliced in two. Still holding Alicia, he vaulted upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Michael had already been in the water for thirty seconds; his brain was screaming for air. The screws had stopped turning, but this no longer mattered. They were being pulled along by the boat’s momentum. Unless they broke the surface soon, they’d drown.
Suddenly, a whining sound: the screws had reengaged. No! Then Michael realized what had happened: Lore had reversed the engines. The tension on the rope began to soften, then was gone. A new force gripped them. They were being sucked forward, toward the spiraling props.
They were going to be chopped to bits.
Michael looked up. High above, the surface shimmered. What was the source of this mysterious, beckoning light? The sound of the screws abruptly ceased; now he understood Lore’s intentions. She was creating enough slack in the line for them to ascend. Michael began to kick. Alicia, don’t give up. Help me do this. Unless you do, we’re dead. But it was no use; they were sinking like stones. The light receded pitilessly.
The rope went taut again. They were being pulled.
As they broke the surface, Michael opened his mouth wide, sucking in a vast gulp of air. They were beneath the stern, a mountain of steel soaring above them; the light he’d seen was the moon. It shone down upon them, fat and full, spilling across the surface of the water.
“It’s all right, I’ve got you,” Michael said. Alicia was coughing and sputtering in his arms; from high above, a lifeboat floated down. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”