Hull & Eden
Sheppard waited on the airport tarmac with Keel, watching the DOD chopper as it touched down. He didn’t want to be here. But in the event they needed Keel’s two thousand troops, he felt he should try to work with the man.
“So why is your boss coming here?” Sheppard asked.
“His chief engineer apparently has a theory about these Crows. They want to go to the most recent spot where the Crows were seen.”
“The bookstore, in other words.”
Keel nodded. He didn’t look too happy about the situation.
A couple emerged from the chopper, both of them dressed like tourists. Hull, a short man with thinning, curly salt-and-pepper hair, carried a laptop case and walked briskly alongside a slender blonde in skin-tight jeans. Her sleeveless black silk shirt set off the color of her long hair. She carried a voluminous shoulder bag and looked as if she’d walked off a movie screen.
“She’s the engineer?” Sheppard asked.
“Yeah. Eden Curry. She has so many initials after her name I can’t keep track of them.”
They came over to Sheppard and Keel, who made the introductions. “So I understand you want to go to where the Crows were seen most recently,” Sheppard said.
“That’s the best place to take readings,” Eden said.
“For?”
“My suspicion is that in those areas we’ll find electromagnetic fields that aren’t generated by power lines or household and industrial appliances,” Eden said.
They were on their way to the parking lot then and Keel looked over at her, frowning. “So? What will that tell you?”
“That these Crows generate their own EM fields, much like machines do.”
“You’re saying they’re machines?” Sheppard asked.
“AIs, Agent Sheppard,” replied Hull.
Keel burst out laughing. “No. I don’t think so. They’re biologically different. During the autopsy on the lightning woman, the coroner found two hearts and the organ just beneath them that acted as an electrical transformer. That’s not artificial intelligence. It’s biological evolution. Rapid biological evolution. We don’t know enough about how that happens to completely dismiss the fact that it might entail generating an EM field.”
Eden listened closely, then shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
“See how?” Sheppard asked.
They stopped between Sheppard’s SUV and Keel’s Jeep.
“Okay, basic EM stuff here, gentlemen,” said Eden. “EM waves are carried by particles called quanta. Quanta of higher frequency waves—shorter wavelengths—carry more energy than lower frequency or longer wavelength fields. You with me so far?” She slipped on her sunglasses as she said this and flicked her pretty hair off her shoulders.
Sheppard decided it wouldn’t take much to dislike this woman. “We’re with you,” he said. “Or ahead of you. Some EM waves carry so much energy per quantum that they have the ability to break bonds between molecules. So you’re assuming it’s the shorter wavelengths that you’re going to find at the site.”
She tipped her sunglasses forward and peered at him over the rims, as if seeing him for the first time. “Very good, Agent Sheppard. That’s exactly it.”
Like he was a student. “Then follow me to the bookstore and I’ll unlock the place so you can get in.”
Keel unlocked his car, rolled his eyes at Sheppard. “We’ll follow you.”
Halfway to the bookstore, Sheppard’s cell rang and Carmen Rincon’s name came up. “Hey, Carmen, what’s…”
“The door of Ian’s office… it’s been blown off the hinges and he isn’t here, Shep.” She sounded frantic, her voice broken up with sobs. “Inside, dios mio… it’s a mess of broken wood, glass… and all the cabinet doors are open and he never leaves those doors open.”
“Did you just get there?”
“I walked in, like, two minutes ago.”
“Was Ian at the office?”
“Yes, yes, he went in earlier this morning and he… he wasn’t answering his phone, so I drove over… here.” Her voice broke again. “Something’s happened, Shep.”
“Shit. I’m on my way.”
He made an erratic U-turn and in the mirror, saw that Keel did the same, and sped toward Rincon’s office. His imagination tossed up various possibilities, each one worse than the last. He pulled into the rear lot, Keel screeched to a stop beside him and leaped out. “Ian?”
“He’s missing.”
They both ran toward the rear entrance, where the door hung on a single hinge and creaked as it swung in the breeze. Nigel stood there like a sentry, barking excitedly, tail wagging. “Hey, you gorgeous dog,” Sheppard said.
Nigel barked again and vanished through the gaping hole where the door had been. Sheppard’s alarm deepened. It looked as if a wrecking ball had been taken to the door and knocked out huge chunks of the wall on either side of it. Debris littered the area, concrete and splintered wood.
“Jesus,” Keel muttered.
“Carmen?” Sheppard called out.
“Back here, Shep.”
“Give me five minutes or so with her.”
Keel nodded.
Sheppard hurried through the scattered debris. Carmen stood in the middle of the autopsy room, her face frozen with fear, eyes wet with tears. Nigel, panting hard, had plopped down on the floor in front of her.
“I… I found it like this.” Carmen threw her arms out to her sides, a gesture that encompassed the entire wrecked room.
The bathroom door had been ripped off its hinges, the open cabinets revealed a total lack of order, shit knocked over—drugs and syringes and boxes of gauze and instruments. Definitely not the way orderly Rincon did things.
“And the computer was on when I arrived. He doesn’t do that, either, Shep. It all looks like the Crows took him.”
“Probably because one of them was injured and needs medical help. If you’re being hunted you don’t go to ER, Carmen.”
She bit at her lower lip, crossed her arms at her waist. “You think Mira suggested Ian?”
“It would make sense.”
Her tears spilled then and Sheppard put his arms around her. It wasn’t entirely clear who was comforting whom. Nigel poked his snout between them and Carmen hugged the dog.
“You and Ian are on the same cell plan, right?”
“Carajo. I was so upset it didn’t even occur to me to check.” She brought out her cell, clicked on the app for finding your phone. “Yesssss. Look.”
Rincon’s cell was in the building somewhere—not quite what Sheppard had hoped, but maybe it would reveal something. Carmen tapped the screen and a loud, shrill noise erupted from the bathroom. They both hurried in there. Sheppard retrieved the cell from under some towels in the linen closet. “What’s the code, Carmen?”
“Six sevens.”
Sheppard tapped in the numbers and the cell opened to text messages, where it looked as if Rincon had started texting him but hadn’t had the chance to finish. Mira here w/invisible crows, one injured needs med attn they’re
“Christ,” he whispered.
Carmen squeezed his shoulder. “At least Mira and Ian are together, Shep. They’ll have each other’s backs.”
But what would that mean in terms of the abilities of these Crows?
Just then, Keel came into the room with Hull and Eden. Nigel barked and trotted over to them, tailing wagging. Sheppard introduced them to Nigel, then to Carmen. “Why don’t you explain your theory to Carmen, Ms. Curry?”
“Sure.”
“Hold on.” Carmen patted the air with her hands. “What possible interest does the Department of Defense have in all this?”
“These Crows are terrorists,” Hull said. “We’re trying to figure out how to defeat them.”
Eden spoke up again. “I understand that when your husband autopsied the body of the lightning woman, he discovered she had an organ just under the heart that he believed might function like an electrical transformer. If he was right, then it’s possible the other Crows have something similar that enables them to do what they do. And if that’s true, it may show up on my equipment.”
“So your implication is that they’re part machine?” Carmen asked.
“Pretty much,” Eden replied.
“And just so we’re clear,” Keel piped up. “I completely disagree. They’re evolutionary outliers. White Crows.”
“What the hell difference does it make?” Sheppard asked.
Hull answered that one. “If these crows are machines or even AIs, then once the island is completely evacuated, we’ll annihilate them.”
His words and the way he uttered them, with a kind of gleeful delight, chilled Sheppard. He stepped up to Hull, who stood at least half a foot shorter, got right in the fucker’s face, and sank his finger into the man’s bony chest. “I’ve got news for you, Mr. D-O-D. You are NOT going to annihilate Crows while my wife and Carmen’s husband are their hostages. Clear?”
Hull drew back, calmly pushed Sheppard’s arm to the side, and laughed. “The DOD is in charge of this operation, Agent Sheppard. You don’t tell me what to do.”
Wanna bet, fucker? “Likewise.”
He was certain a call to the governor would clear that up. But before he could say anything, Keel spat, “Jesus. Knock it off, Rudy.”
Hull spun and turned on Keel with a fierceness completely disproportionate to what had just happened. “Fuck off, Frank.”
Keel’s expression told Sheppard that Hull had just moved Keel into the FBI’s court. Eden regarded them all like they were first graders who had just taken a shit on the classroom floor. “Testosterone exhausted now, guys?”
She wasn’t warm and fuzzy, Sheppard thought, and he should have liked her better because she’d mocked them. But it wasn’t due to moral outrage on her part. She just wanted to get on with her EM testing without being embroiled in a power struggle.
“It’s not clear to me why you’re even here, Ms. Curry,” said Sheppard. “You’re not in the National Guard, you aren’t wearing a DOD badge, so who the hell do you work for?”
She set her bag on the computer chair, brought out an EM field reader, then turned and faced him. “I work in the artificial intelligence division of the Department of Defense, Agent Sheppard. After studying the videos and all the other evidence we have, my suspicion is that White Crows were artificially enhanced and then programmed with a false narrative about their origins.” She wiggled her hands in the air. “On that long migration inland, nature made these extraordinary evolutionary leaps that usually take centuries and voila, children with incredible powers came into being.” Her arms fell to her sides. “What crap.”
“You haven’t seen what I have,” Keel countered. “How does artificial enhancement enable someone to render things and people invisible? How does it create the ability to liquify people and solid objects or enable someone to shoot fire from their hands?”
Eden shrugged. “I don’t know, Frank. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. I’ve seen the videos, you know.”
Keel laughed, a sharp, derisive sound. “You don’t know enough to conclude they’re AIs. You haven’t seen it up close and personal.”
“You think an AI did all this?” Carmen threw her arms open. “If artificial intelligence means superior intelligence, then these Crows aren’t AIs. They’re like street terrorists.”
“Is it okay with you if I take some readings, Mrs. Rincon?”
“Fine.”
Eden moved around the room with her field reader and reminded Sheppard of the old codgers who often scoured Tango’s beaches with metal detectors, searching for pieces of eight from some sunken pirate’s ship centuries ago. The reader clicked just like the detectors, an irritating, rhythmic sound. Nigel moved alongside Eden, perhaps drawn by the repetitive noise. He sniffed loudly, then suddenly veered away from Eden, pursuing a scent.
“Where’d Ian go, Nigel?” Sheppard asked him.
“Encuentra Papi,” Carmen instructed.
Find dad. He looked up at her, barked, and headed for the door, nose to the floor. Sheppard and Carmen hurried after the dog, leaving Keel and Hull and Eden to their EM field search. They veered around the debris and moved out into the parking lot, where Nigel trotted along, tail wagging, still pursuing a scent.
“Shep, if Mira and Ian are still hostages when they made their move against the crows…”
“The Crows aren’t AIs, Carmen. Annie says that Hal is her and Mira’s descendant. Maybe it’s true their abilities have been enhanced in some way, but they’re as human as we are.”
“How do you explain that lightning woman’s two hearts? Or some of the other physical anomalies?”
“I can’t. But Frank’s theory about rapid evolutionary change makes more sense to me than these crows as AIs. I’m thinking the DOD is trying to come up with a theory that will withstand Congressional scrutiny if they decide to obliterate them. Or to render them unconscious so they can all become property of the federal government and used however they want.”
Nigel stopped at Rincon’s car in a corner of the lot and trotted around it, sniffing at the tires, the metal, the bumpers. From there, he moved to another spot, sat down, dropped his head back and howled.
“That sounds mournful,” Sheppard remarked.
“It is.” Carmen nodded. “Ian’s scent dried up. My guess is that he was herded into a vehicle back here that headed into the trees. And beyond these trees, are dozens of sleepy neighborhoods, Shep. Apartments, homes, Airbnbs, seasonal rentals.”
“Which should all be evacuated by dark.”
“There are always holdouts.” She went over to Nigel, wrapped her arms around him. “We need dozens of Nigels, dogs that can find the holdouts and teams that go from neighborhood to neighborhood, house to house. We can flush them out that way.”
“Carlos has ordered a canine unit that should arrive by dusk. But I think we may want to find a compromise, something the Crows can live with. If they release Mira and Ian, we will…” What? Just what the hell could they do? Help them integrate into a twenty-first century society? Promise them immunity from prosecution for the dozens they already had killed? Convince the government or academic institutions or think tanks to hire them as experts on climate change? On time travel?
Sheppard felt lost, directionless, and terrified he might never see Mira again.
2
Hal, standing with the others in Squirt’s bedroom, watched Rincon checking out Squirt, his hands gloved. Hal liked that he explained what he was doing and why. Temperature. Blood pressure. Flexibility in joints. Muscle tension. He also vocalized his findings and Mira jotted them on a yellow pad Hal had handed her. Rincon’s last test was with a device that vaguely resembled something from Hal’s own time.
“What’s that?” Hal asked.
“New technology. A handheld MRI. It arrived yesterday. I’ve never used it before. Squirt will be the first.”
“So you can get rid of that bulky mobile X-ray machine you used on the woman who turned to stone?” Mira asked.
“Yes. Let’s take a look inside of Squirt.”
Just then, Whiskers strolled into the room and rubbed up against Mira, purring. She leaned over and picked him up. “Did he come with you?” she asked.
“Of course not.” Hal took Whiskers out of her arms, rubbed his face against the cat’s beautiful fur, then set him gently on the floor. “He was left behind by his owners. He’s mine now.”
That word mine: Mira reacted to it, he saw it in her expression. “You have a problem with that, Mira? That the cat is mine?”
“As long as the cat’s happy, no problem. But the way you said that word, Hal, tells me that your tribe, Ian and I and Tango Key are all part of the package called mine.”
Her remark startled him. Not that long ago, Wind had said something similar but specific to their relationship. You don’t own me, I don’t belong to you, I’m not yours, we clear on that Hal?
And her sister, Red: You’re not my leader.
“You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Hal snapped.
“And no one asked for your opinion, hostage,” Trixie added.
“I’m starting here.” Rincon turned on the device and began running it over Squirt’s body.
Images appeared on the iPad set up next to the bed. Even Hal, who knew pathetically little about the physical body, recognized the anomaly in Squirt’s brain, but Rincon provided the name. “The primary motor cortex generates neural impulses that control movement. It’s located in the rear portion of the frontal lobe.” He tapped the iPad screen, indicating the area he was talking about. “In Squirt’s brain, the part of the motor complex that controls hand and arm movements is at least three times larger than that of a normal brain.”
“Is that why he can throw like he does?” Trixie asked.
“It could be one reason.”
Rincon continued scanning Squirt’s body. “The ligaments and muscles in his arms and shoulders are well developed and he has double jointed wrists.”
“Sounds about right,” Cam remarked. “Maybe you should scan all of us, Doc. So we better understand why we’re Crows. How we evolved.”
“I don’t know if any of this will explain how you evolved, but it would be illuminating in terms of your own physiologies.” He scanned Squirt’s face, nodded to himself. “He has a really bad sinus infection. That would explain the high fever. He needs a stronger drug. A Z-pack.”
“Why didn’t the amoxicillin work?” Hal asked.
“I don’t know. He might be resistant to it. Your physiology is different than ours.”
“Suppose the Z-pack doesn’t work?” Hal asked.
“Then we’ll try something else. We’ve got plenty of drugs at our disposal. Mira, could you get the Z pack from my bag?”
“Sure.”
“And Betadine and Hydrogen Peroxide.”
Mira went over to his bag. Whiskers brushed past her and leaped into the windowsill and settled down. Red leaned in closer to Squirt, ran her palm over the side of his face. A maternal gesture.
“He won’t wake up for a while,” Hal said. “He was so uncomfortable I made him go deeply asleep. Can you give him a shot for now and we can start the pills when he comes to?”
Rincon nodded. “Yes. Mira, a syringe, please.”
“Got it.” She handed it to him.
Hal watched them carefully, certain one of them would try to trick him. Rincon gave Squirt the shot, Mira set two containers on the nightstand, and Hal turned them so he could read them. Amoxicillin pills and a package of sterile gauze pads. Rincon handed her the spent syringe and she dropped it in the trash can. Hal didn’t think any tricks had been involved.
“Let’s take a look at his stomach.” Rincon unwrapped the dressing from Squirt’s abdomen and examined the injury and Nico’s work. “Beautifully stitched, Nico.”
Hal flashed Nico a thumbs up and he grinned.
“I don’t see any inflammation around the wound, no pus, and it looks like it’s healing really well. Just to be sure, a bit of hydrogen peroxide will tell us.” Rincon poured a little from the second bottle over Squirt’s injury. “No bubbling. Excellent.” He dabbed it dry with a piece of sterile gauze, then covered the stitched area with Betadine. “When did you stitch this up, Nico?”
“Yesterday.”
Rincon’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “My God, these stitches will be ready to come out tomorrow. Do you Crows always heal quickly?”
Did they? Hal didn’t have any idea. He’d never been injured. “Beats me. Red? Cam? Nico? Trix? Liz?”
He could tell from the expressions on their faces that they were either clueless or didn’t want to talk about it.
“You don’t know?” Mira asked.
“I know. Maybe,” Liz said. “Once, before Hal rescued me, during one of the purges, I was caught. They tortured me by… by cutting off part of my wings. By the next day, when they came back to torture me some more, my wings had healed and were stronger and better than before. I shifted right in front of them and tore at them with my claws and beat them with my wings and escaped. So, yeah, I heal quickly.”
Now Cam spoke up. “When I was in my twenties, I was caught in a purge. Shot with a tranquilizer that also tore off part of the skin at my waist. As I was losing consciousness, I camouflaged myself as my mother and leaped up and ran.”
“If it’s just a different appearance, how could you get up and run?” Rincon asked.
“Because I basically become the person I camouflage.”
“With access to the person’s memories, talents, immune system, all of it,” Liz added.
“Well, most of it,” Cam corrected. “Even if I looked like you, Liz, I couldn’t do what you do. We tried that once, remember? Same with Hal.”
“I remember.” Liz grinned. “It was actually kinda funny.”
“That’s… incredible.” Rincon applied a fresh bandage to Squirt’s abdomen. “So if you camouflaged yourself as me, Cam, would you have my medical knowledge?”
“Some of it.”
Hal wondered why no one had ever told him any of this. “How come I never knew this about you, Cam?”
The old man’s eyes held Hal’s for an uncomfortable moment. “You never asked, Hal.”
Trixie laughed. “Shit, that’s how Hal is. Totally non-curious about any of us.”
“That’s not true,” Liz snapped. “Hal has asked me plenty of times about my life, what I can do.”
“Your relationship with him is different,” Red said. “You’re like his kid.”
They talked about him like he wasn’t here. “Hey!” Hal waved his arms. “Talk to me about me.”
“Cam has a point,” Nico said. “The only interest you’ve shown in most of us, Hal, is in terms of how our abilities can augment your mission.”
Is that true? But as soon as he thought it, he knew it was. Except for Liz and Wind, of course, it had never even occurred to him to ask if they had other abilities or to ask about their earlier lives or their families or anything else that was personal. He just didn’t give a shit.
“Well, he made it possible for you to go back nearly two hundred years,” Mira said.
“And you were able to escape the dome,” Rincon added.
“Damn right,” Liz said. “If it weren’t for Hal, I would’ve died a long time ago.”
Trixie, pacing back and forth across the room, suddenly stopped. “Look, none of this matters. We’re here. Squirt’s going to improve, and we’ve now got these two.” She nodded at Mira and Rincon. “What the hell’re we going to do with them?”
“For now, we’re going to keep them around,” Hal replied.
Red shook her finger at him. “You’re doing that wannabe dictator shit again. I say we vote on what we do with them. The majority rules, Hal.”
3
Mira and Rincon exchanged a glance and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Talk fast. Sound convincing. Rincon didn’t blurt out anything, didn’t stutter or hesitate. He sounded calm when he spoke. “If you’re smart, you’ll vote on getting the hell off Tango Key. By tonight the entire island will be empty except for cops and soldiers. They’ll bring in dogs to find you. And if the Department of Defense decides you’re part machine, no telling what they’ll do.”
Red exploded. “Machines? What the fuck. We’re not machines. We’re as human as you two are.”
“I’m not entirely human,” Liz said. “But I’m not a machine, either.”
Cam held up his long thin hands. “That goes for all of us.”
“I suppose you could fight two or three thousand soldiers on your own if you had to,” Mira said. “Unless they decide to bomb your location.”
“They’d have to find us first,” Hal said. “And if we’re shrouded, that’ll be tough.”
Mira shrugged, feigning an indifference she didn’t feel. “More challenging, but not impossible. The DOD has a lot of classified technology.”
“If they locate us and bomb this place, they’ll be taking out you and Dr. Rincon, too,” Hal said. “They won’t do that. Which is why I want to keep you two here for the time being. Anyone else have a suggestion we should vote on?”
As Hal glanced around at the others, seeming to dare them to speak up, to offer something to vote on, Mira felt tension mounting in the room. Then Cam said: “Frankly, I think we should get off this island while we still can. Try to blend in. We’ve got enough gold and cash to set up new lives for ourselves. Mira and Rincon can be helpful in getting us elsewhere. Then we let them go. That’s a suggestion that I’d like to put to a vote.”
“It a fucking terrible suggestion,” Hal said.
“So is yours,” Cam snapped.
“Anyone else?” Hal glanced around at each of them.
Red, Trixie, and Nico looked down at the floor. Mira sensed they were afraid to go against what Hal wanted. Then Red glanced up. “Not exactly fair to vote since Squirt is asleep.”
“Squirt would vote with me,” Hal said.
Red looked irritated. “You don’t know that, Hal.”
“Yeah, I do. When we talked about this on the ferry, Nico said we weren’t here to play nice. You were there, Red. You heard him say that.”
“Things have changed since then,” Red pointed out. “He got shot. His heart stopped. It’s not fair to count his vote as on your side unless he himself votes that way. Democracy says the majority rules of those who cast their vote. Dictatorships rig the vote. Which are we?”
Confronted in such a direct way, color rose in Hals neck and cheeks, his mouth pursed, his eyes burned with fury. And suddenly, the wall he leaned against started liquifying and he leaped away from it, muttering, “Shit, fuck,” and ran out of the room.
Mira grabbed a pitcher of water from the nightstand and hurled the contents at the liquifying wall. But it kept melting away. The cat leaped off the windowsill and ran past them and vanished through the door.
Rincon and Cam shoved Squirt’s bed away across the room, but the liquifying kept advancing, taking part of the floor, the front of the nightstand, then the wall under the window, so the frame gave way and crashed to the floor, glass shattering. Cam and Nico scooped up Squirt, and ran for the door. Mira grabbed Rincon’s medical bag, Liz swung Squirt’s pack over her shoulder, and fled the room with Red shrieking from the hallway, “Do something, Trixie! Stop him! Stop the melting!”
Mira made it into the kitchen and stared at Hal, dancing around in the front room, shaking his arms and hands as if to rid himself of the destructive energy. He didn’t melt, but things around him did—couch, TV, front windows.
Trixie hurled her staff at him and it slammed into the backs of Hal’s knees and he pitched forward. But before he hit the floor, she lifted him again. Three, five, six feet above the floor, then he crashed down and was knocked out.
Trixie’s staff flew back into her hand and became a hose spewing something that instantly froze everything that was liquifying. For moments afterward, no one moved or spoke, then Trixie dropped the staff and it rolled across the floor. She rushed over to Hal, dropped to her knees beside him, lifted his head.
“Fuck, Hal, I didn’t mean to… But my God, you lost control, you… you ruined this place.”
Mira hooked her arm through Rincon’s and they stepped back, carefully, slowly, away from the others. “You have morphine with you?” she whispered.
“In the bag.”
Mira set the bag on the kitchen counter, found the syringe of morphine, pressed it into Rincon’s hand. “Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
She squeezed his shoulder, then he moved toward Trixie and the others now crowded around her and Hal. “I can calm him,” Rincon said.
Trixie’s head snapped toward him, her expression torn between suspicion and surrender. “And it could be something that’ll kill him.”
“Jesus. We went through this earlier. I’m a doctor, Trixie. Do no harm.”
Mira knew Trixie wasn’t convinced. But Cam came over, took her gently by the shoulders, and spoke to her in a calm, measured voice. “Let him be a physician, Trixie. Hal’s been under a lot of pressure. He’s in desperate need of recharging.”
Her head bobbed, she looked at Hal, drew her knuckles across his cheek, stifled a sob. Then she moved away from him. Rincon injected him and within seconds, Hal’s features went slack, his body looked rubbery against the floor, his bladder let loose.
Red hurried over with towels and Liz hovered around him, her wings partially visible, fluttering. Nico slipped his arms under Hal’s shoulders. “Where should I move him?”
“The couch,” Cam suggested. “We need to get out of here. This place is a fucking wreck. They’ll find us if we stay.”
Nico and Cam set Hal on the couch. They all crowded around him.
“Get out of here to where?” Liz paced, biting at her nails.
“Hey, since the island’s emptying out, we have a lot of choices for places to hide until we can catch a ferry out of here,” Nico said.
“But they’ll turn us in!” Liz gestured at Mira and Rincon, her voice broken, terrified.
“We’ll take them with us,” Red said. “We’ll steal a car and Nico will shroud us and Mira and the doc will direct us about where to go.”
Yeah? We will? But Mira said nothing.
“Let’s vote on it,” Trixie said. “Without Squirt. Everyone in favor?”
Nico, Cam, Trixie, and Red raised their hands. Liz was the only holdout.
“Shit,” Liz said. “You’re going against Hal’s original mission.”
“That mission failed,” Red said.
“I’ll go with you on one condition. I fly outta here, following you.”
“I don’t think any of us would object to that condition.” Cam glanced around at the others. No one objected. “Then let’s start packing up our food and belongings and find somewhere else to stay until Squirt can walk on his own.”
“What about Hal?” Nico asked.
“We carry him out to the car,” Cam said. “Nico will shroud us.”
“The cat, where’s Hal’s cat?” Nico glanced around.
“Probably hiding,” Mira said.
“We have to find him.” Trixie started whistling and calling for Whiskers.
“He may have taken off through the broken windows.” Rincon nodded toward what remained of the windows, jagged peaks of glass that surrounded a huge, gaping hole.
“He’ll find us,” Cam said.
“Okay, gather up your stuff,” Nico said. “We’re outta here.”
With that decided, the group dispersed to different areas of the apartment and Mira and Rincon remained in the living room with Hal, curled up on the couch like a fetus. Mira took in the extensive damage—the pools of carnage that had been windows, melted furniture and floor, melted counters, and the looming hole in front of them. The outside beyond that hole beckoned, whispered, C’mon, you and Ian can make it. Run, leap, and run again. She and Rincon looked at each other and she knew they were thinking the same thing.
“You go, Mira,” he whispered. “Now, while you can.”
“You. I’ll cover for you.”
“No. I’m staying.”
“Me, too.” Mira squeezed his arm. “How much morphine did you give him?”
“If he were one of us, he would be out a good twelve hours. But I don’t have any idea how his body metabolizes anything. Look at what happened with Squirt. The drug he’d taken should have licked that sinus infection.”
She hoped twelve hours was enough time for her and Rincon to sow dissent in a group whose unity was fracturing.