My hands are bound behind me, held in place by rusty metal cuffs. The edges are worn and jagged, and I have to keep my hands as still as I can to avoid cutting the skin. The floor of the boat is hard plastic, cold and wet under my cheek.
It goes against everything I am to lie still. I want to take these people down, one by one, take that rifle away and shove it in their faces, listen to them beg. But the voice tells me to be calm, and I’m learning to listen to it.
Ray sees me looking up at him, and shakes his head. “The second you come off that floor, I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”
The sides of the boat are large tubes made of grainy rubber, tapering to a point at the front. A wave slaps the side, its tip launching over the tube, spraying me in the face. There’s a motor at the back of the boat, which Iluk controls using a long handle.
We crest another wave, and the engine coughs and splutters, threatening to give out. Iluk says something back in that strange language, irritated. Ray stands up, moving to help him. “Watch her,” he says, jamming the rifle into Koji’s hands.
I clear my throat, looking up at Koji. He seems calmer than Ray, less likely to lash out. “Where are we going?” I say.
No response.
“Am I the only new person?” I say. “Or are there others like me?”
Koji looks down, then back up at me. For the second time, I see something in his eyes, something I can’t quite read.
The engine starts up again. Ray straightens, satisfied, then glares at me. “You speak when spoken to, you hear?”
I fall silent, desperate to know more, but aware of how fragile my position is. Underneath me, my bound hands are in agony.
And then all at once, there’s something above us. Sliding into view, impossibly huge. It’s like a mountain decided to shoot up from underwater. I squint up at it, trying to work out what it is.
This was what I saw from the island–that strange shape against the skyline. It’s man-made, built from giant metal plates, leaning over us at a sharp angle. The plates are discoloured for a few feet above the water, painted with green fungus and brown rust. Over our heads, I see the letters A-11 marked on the metal. Each letter is white, outlined in thick grey paint, and each one has to be four times the size of a man.
There’s a wide rectangular gap in the plates, twenty feet above the waterline. Faces peer down from it. Iluk cuts the motor, and one of them shouts, the words lost in the rush of the ocean. Ray cups his hand to his mouth and yells back. “Nah, just the one. Throw us the ladder.”
The face vanishes. A second later, a rope ladder unfurls, clanking against the hull and splashing into the water. Koji reaches out for it, pulling it towards us, while Ray secures the boat. There’s an upright piece of metal that’s been welded to the hull, sticking out from it, and Ray ties the boat to it with a thick, wet length of rope.
Iluk’s face appears above me, upside down. He grabs me by the shoulders and hauls me to my feet. The rocking motion of the boat nearly topples me over, and he has to grab me by the scruff of my jacket, only just stopping me from falling in.
“How’s she gonna climb?” says Koji.
“What?” says Ray.
“Her hands are tied.”
Ray makes an annoyed sound, then grabs hold of me, spinning me around. The cuffs snap off my wrists, and I resist the urge to cry out as the blood rushes back, pins and needles digging deep into my hands.
He brings me back the other way, pulling my hands together and cuffing them in front. This time, the cuffs aren’t quite as tight.
“Climb,” he says, jerking his thumb upwards.
It takes one or two tries to grab the swaying ladder. The sides are rope, but the rungs are made of rough wood, and splinters bite into my palms as I move. The cuffs make the climb even more awkward. Halfway up, I glance back over my shoulder. Fire Island is there, and the impossibly empty sea beyond it. I look for the seaplane, but it’s nowhere to be found.
“Keep moving,” Ray says from below me.
As I reach the top of the ladder, strong hands pull me over the edge. I roll onto the deck, my heart pumping. The people standing above me are all variations of Ray, with beards and grimy skin and dark, angry eyes.
I look past them, to the space we’re in. It’s huge–big enough to park two seaplanes across, wingtip to wingtip. The walls are made of ribbed metal, with curved struts every couple of feet. Oversized fluorescent lights criss-cross the ceiling.
“This is all you came back with?” one of the men says, prodding my shoulder with the tip of his boot. “Doesn’t look like much.”
“We’ll let Prophet decide that,” Ray says. Now that he’s in here, his voice is quieter, as if shouting won’t be tolerated. He and Koji lift me to my feet, and the crowd parts in front of us.
I’m hustled through a door into a narrow corridor–so narrow that we have to walk single file: Iluk and Ray in front, Koji behind. The corridor has heavy, ribbed walls, like the entranceway. The lights are sparse, one every twenty feet or so, each one covered by a wire cage. There are enormous pipes running along the ceiling, cocooned in thick, silver insulation.
There’s no chance of escape here, nowhere to go, no door that isn’t sealed tight. Frustration starts to build–Carver and Prakesh are somewhere on this ship, they have to be, but I can’t see any way I can escape.
And there’s something behind the frustration. It takes me a moment to pinpoint it. A weird sense of déjà vu, like I should recognise my surroundings. Like I’ve been here before.
I close my eyes, irritated with myself. My mind’s playing tricks on me, just like it did when I looked at the sky for the first time. I breathe deep, letting the frustration fade, letting it be replaced with anger. I have to trust that anger–it’s kept me alive so far, and it’s going to keep me alive now.
The passage opens up a little. There’s a stairway leading up to the next level: impossibly steep, with steps even narrower than the corridor. Ray and Iluk are already climbing it, and Koji gives me a push from behind, his hand on the small of my back.
Another door, with a valve handle. When Iluk cranks it back, bright daylight shoots into the corridor. I try to raise a hand to my eyes, forgetting for a moment that I’m cuffed. Ray reaches for me, pulling me through the door.
We’re outside, on a long balcony bordered by waist-high railings. Below us is the deck of the ship: a massive space, bigger than any gallery on Outer Earth. Its surface is covered with strange markings, yellow chevrons, white stripes, warnings in huge lettering.
There are a dozen planes, lined up in rows along the deck. They aren’t like the seaplane: they’re sleek, predatory, with needle-like noses and enormous tail fins. But as I look closer, I see that their surfaces are caked in rust. The surface of their wheels has rotted away, and several of them list to one side.
We move along the balcony. My shoulder blades are hurting a little less now, and it’s getting easier to move. I keep sneaking glances at the deck. There are things I missed the first time round, like the metal plates angled at forty-five degrees to the deck. There’s a strange structure on the edge, too: a massive cylinder, capped by a dome.
Ray sees me looking, claps a hand on my shoulder. For a moment, he sounds almost jovial. “That’s the Phalanx gun. Still got plenty of ammo left. But you and your friends in the plane figured that out already, right?”
As I watch, the gun gives out a metallic whirring noise, turning a few degrees to the right. Its barrel comes into view, sticking out at right angles to the cylinder.
A moment later, we duck through a door, coming out into another narrow stairway. There’s more light here, and it’s a little quieter than down below.
Another set of stairs. Then another. And then Ray is cranking open a door, much larger than the others, and he and Iluk pull me through.
We’re in a control room of some kind, not much larger than the one in Apex on Outer Earth. The layout is immediately familiar: banks of screens, chaotic groups of chairs, low lighting. There are large windows overlooking the deck, and I can see the fog just starting to lift.
The room is packed with people. Some of them are gathered around screens, while others are off to one side, talking in small groups. Several of them have rifles, slung across their chests or hanging down their backs. I feel their eyes on me, sizing me up, taking in my mismatched clothing and bound hands.
My gaze falls on a table in the middle of the room. There’s a map spread across it, like the one Harlan showed me, only much larger. Alaska, the Yukon, other areas I can’t name.
Ray reaches into his jacket, pulling out the items he took from me: the scarf, the bear spray, the meat strips. He lines them up on the table in front of him, then clears his throat. “Prophet.”
One of the men clustered around the table raises his head to look at us. He wears a stiff, brown jacket over a dark shirt, and one of his eyes is gone, sewn closed with ugly, amateurish stitches.
And sitting behind him, bent over a computer screen: Janice Okwembu.