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 lights. “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?”
“Food,” she told him, crouching to open it.
“Good, I’m hungry.”
Even in the dim light, she was struck by the familiar lines of his face. He appeared to be a Eurasian mix, with light eyes and a scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. But there was something in the shape of his eyes and his eyebrows, and in the angle of his chin, that made her wonder if she’d seen this kid before . . .
Matt worked it out before she did. “Hey, Akasha. Is he your brother? He looks just like you.”
Akasha rolled her eyes, lip curling in disgust. “This little weirdo doesn’t look anything like me.”
“He does look like you,” Ava said. “But I’ve seen your profile. Your brother is supposed to be dead.”
◇
According to the official record, Gideon Li had been with his parents during Nolo, sheltering in their Manoa Valley home when massive landslides broke from the valley’s steep walls, roaring through the neighborhood, burying homes under ten to twenty feet of eroded lava rock, mud, and crushed vegetation.
Before that day, Gideon had been a prickly genius on scholarship at Punahou School. Afterward . . .
“Legally, he is dead,” Akasha said. “He likes it that way.”
Gideon eyed his sister warily . . . until he noticed Ava’s gaze.
“You weren’t at home,” she said.
“I told them the house wasn’t safe,” Gideon growled, with that same lip-curling expression of contempt Ava had seen so often on Akasha’s face. “They didn’t want to evacuate.”
Akasha said, “He went to sulk in the bedroom. Nothing unusual about that. We had to share that room, and he was always sulking.”
“Shut up.”
“By that time, it was raining torrents. Too late to get to a shelter, that’s what I thought. But you couldn’t tell him no. He took his skateboard and climbed out the bedroom window.” Her face scrunched up. It was clear the next words cost her dearly. “The brat was right to leave. I went after him. It’s the only reason I’m still alive. I meant to bring him back. I mean, he was only twelve years old. I was fifteen. But I didn’t have a skateboard and I couldn’t keep up. He disappeared in the storm, and I ended up in the gym at Punahou. Afterward, I couldn’t find him on any of the survivor lists. You know how it was. If people didn’t check in, they got logged as dead. Two years later, I saw him on a moped. He didn’t stop though, even when I yelled at him.”
“I wasn’t in my right mind,” Gideon muttered.
“You’ve never been in your right mind.”
“But you need me now, don’t you?”
Akasha scoffed. “You’re sitting here at ground zero, idiot. If you want to keep your little kingdom, then you better help out.”
“Huko’s going to wipe me out anyway. You’re lucky you came when you did or you would have missed me. I’ve got a few more things to get off the houseboat, then I’m out of here.”
“So you don’t live in this tent?” Matt asked. Surely a facetious question.
“Shit, no. This is the garage.”
“Not that his houseboat looks much better,” Akasha told them.
“You could stay and clean it up for me.”
“Love you too, brother.”
Ava sighed, grateful for once that she’d been an only child. She pulled out the bento trays. “I need to eat. I only bought three bentos, but me and Akasha can share. Then, Gideon, you need to show us what you’ve got.”
◇
Fifteen minutes later they were walking single file through lashing rain, following Gideon as he led them on a muddy trail towards East Loch, the wind rising and falling in long monstrous breaths. Kiawe and elephant grass eight feet tall overhung the path, rustling, sighing, creaking in a velvety darkness that smothered the red beam of Ava’s flashlight. She walked behind Gideon, who carried his red LED lantern. Akasha followed with her own light, helping Matt to keep to the trail.
Matt had argued for the use of his smart glasses: “Come on. The infrared illumination is just a slight signal—less than the flashlights—and it’ll let me generate a guideline so I can stay on the trail.”
But Gideon denied the request: “Every device is a window for some faceless creep to look through—and I like my privacy.”
Ava had thought of Lyric and silently agreed. But now she wondered, “Don’t you get civilian drones flying in here, poking around? I mean, people have to know you’re here, and people get curious.”
Gideon slowed, looked back. Raised his finger and moved it in a small circle. “Navy no-fly zone.”
“Convenient,” she conceded. “I guess they haven’t noticed your dragonfly?”
“I keep it below the treetops.”
“What about human trespassers?”
A cold chuckle. “Nolo stirred up toxic sludge from the bottom of the harbor. Shit that goes back to World War II. Maybe even before. Storm surge dumped it on the shore. Nowadays, step off the bike path and you could get hit with fumes that’ll leave you sick and dizzy.”
The toxic sludge was well documented and quite real. Still, Gideon’s tone stirred her suspicion. “You started the rumor about the fumes, didn’t you?”
Another glance back. “It’s not a rumor. I’ve got gas bladders all along the periphery.”
“You must have a record low social rating.”
Behind her, Akasha snorted. “Shoots! If he had a social rating.”
As they moved on, the rain passed and the wind eased. After a few minutes, Gideon stopped, turned around, and said, “Now we go dark.” He switched off his lantern.
“We’re not going to be able to see anything,” Ava objected.
“Trust me.”
“That’d be crazy,” Akasha murmured, but she switched off her light anyway. Ava did too, plunging them into darkness—except it wasn’t all that dark anymore.
Ahead, in the direction they’d been going, distant electric lights shone through the vegetation. From the freeway, probably, and the stadium on the other side of East Loch. Some of the lights might even be from the navy’s docks . . . or maybe not. Ava wrestled with the geography, suspecting Ford Island lay in the way.
Then Gideon moved aside, revealing a paler illumination.
“Whoa,” Ava said, wonderstruck. “What am I seeing?”
At her feet, a black glassy surface, curving away for at least fifteen feet before it disappeared within the shoreline mangroves. Beneath that surface, scattered patches of white light—she counted seven—alive with slow sinuous motion. Only one lay close to where they stood.