“Depends on what I’m doing. If I’m using a hammer, sure.”
Magnolia laughed. “I don’t mean the verb, silly. I mean the music genre.”
“Oh.” He shrugged. “Sure, it’s okay.”
“Good.”
She hit the button, and hip-hop music crackled from the speakers built into the computer. To her surprise, Rodger started singing along with the ancient beat.
He wasn’t bad, either.
“I’m a bad bitch,” he sang. “A bad bitch with supernice tits.”
Magnolia chuckled as Rodger continued improvising the words.
“Them Sirens think they bad, but they never met a bad bitch diver like me…” He shook his chest like a dancer and broke out in a huge grin.
“Nice one, Rodge.”
“Thanks, Mags.”
When he finished singing, he twisted a roll of wire around the rail and she helped, trying not to look at the black water over the side. Not much in life scared her more than dark water.
They installed razor wire for the next hour and then took the crates down to the enclosed lower deck.
“That’s good for now,” Magnolia said. She turned off the music and pulled off her gloves. A faint noise came over the slap of water on the piers and boats. It sounded a lot like a Klaxon.
Rodger walked to the edge of the boat, hearing it too.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
Magnolia had her pistol out, and Rodger bent down and grabbed the small semiautomatic from his ankle holster.
“What?” he said when he saw her staring.
“How many bullets does that hold, two?”
“No,” Rodger said. He released the magazine, looked, and reseated it. “Six.”
Magnolia rolled her eyes before taking the access ladder to the pier. Then she set off for a hatch that led from the rig’s protected boat harbor to the docks outside.
“Hold on,” Rodger said, opening the hatch and stepping through first.
The rain had mostly stopped, though clouds still blocked the stars and moon over the capitol tower. On the horizon, just outside the barrier, the clouds flashed blue from the outer edge of the storm, which had finally passed.
The water was mostly dark, with a few lights from boats moving between the rigs.
Magnolia glanced up at the platform where el Pulpo had once sat and watched his wives lying out on the sundeck near the pool. Several militia soldiers and sky citizens stood there looking out over the water.
“What the hell is going on?” Rodger asked.
She unslung her backpack and pulled out her binoculars. Then she motioned for Rodger to follow her to the elevator cage.
She hit the lever, and the chain started pulling them skyward. When they were a few floors up, she looked through her binos, zooming in on several Cazador boats.
Dozens of people stood on the deck of each vessel. But it was the massive container ship that caught her attention. On the deck, hundreds of Cazadores held torches in a circle.
“Well, what do you see?” Rodger asked.
“Trouble.” She could hear the fear in her own voice. Her gut told her that the Cazadores knew about the crew of the Lion and were coming for revenge.
Why else would an entire fleet of boats be sailing in the open water while Klaxons blared from the other rigs?
The cage clanked to the top, and Magnolia shoved the gate open and rushed out. She found X standing with several militia soldiers, looking out at the flotilla gathered below.
“What in the wastes is happening?” she asked.
Miles rushed over, tail wagging, clearly not worried about the boats or anything else.
X leaned against the railing, and Magnolia relaxed a degree. His casual attitude told her this wasn’t some war party coming to kill them.
“X, what are they doing?” she said.
“Mourning.”
Magnolia followed the deep voice to the hulking figure of General Rhino, standing in the shade of a fig tree and watching over his king.
“So if that that’s not a war party, why the Klaxons?”
X looked to Rhino for the answer.
“The gods are angry from this tragedy at sea,” he said. “So many of our warriors have been lost all at once to the depths. We now must summon the Octopus Lords and ask their forgiveness.”
Magnolia recalled the shell whistle that el Pulpo had worn around his neck. The Klaxon wasn’t a call to arms; it was to beckon the underwater beasts the Cazadores worshipped.
“We must offer a sacrifice,” Rhino said. “If we don’t, the Octopus Lords will destroy everything we have built here, before any of us have a chance to.”
Magnolia looked down at the spectacle on the water. The belief about the Octopus Lords turning against the humans if left unappeased was probably just superstition. But standing here in this miraculous paradise that was the Vanguard Islands, she wasn’t so sure.
NINE
Michael awoke to the clank of shutters. He reached over instinctively to Layla, but his hand touched empty sheets. He shot up, squinting at the sunshine streaming in through the open window. He had overslept.
And where was Layla?
He swung his legs over the bed and placed them on the cold tile floor. His Hell Diver jumpsuit, freshly pressed, hung on a hook from the bulkhead. On the breast, just over the white arrow symbol, was a note.
Michael plucked it off and read it aloud. “Meet me at the fruit trees.”
Relieved, he reached outside and latched the open shutters against the bulkhead. Two days after the loss of the Lion, the skies had finally cleared, but a thousand Cazadores were still out on the water, offering sacrifices and prayers.
From what Michael had heard, the underwater beasts still had not surfaced to claim their offerings of animals and fish. So far, the Cazador leaders were not blaming Discovery for the loss of their warriors. They thought the airship had been coming to the warship’s aid.
And it was not altogether a lie. Les had tried to save the Lion.
Michael noticed another vessel on the horizon. Grabbing the binoculars from the windowsill, he zoomed in. It was Star Grazer.
The Cazador warship, back from patrolling outside the barrier, would dock at the capitol rig for provisioning before the mission to Rio de Janeiro. He had seen the ship only once, but X had told him it was the one that captured him in Florida. If X could forgive the Cazadores for that, then so could Michael.
He put the binoculars back on the windowsill. He was more worried about the Cazadores forgiving the sky people if they ever learned the truth about the Lion. Especially if he should be away when it happened.
Leaving Layla here, even on the heavily defended capitol rig with X, had him on edge. And that reminded him that he didn’t want her off on her own.
He threw on his Hell Diver suit and grabbed an orange from a bowl in the kitchen. Then he took the stairs up to the airship rooftop.
With each step inside the enclosed stairwell, the guilt ate at him. Layla deserved a husband who would be around to help her raise their child—not a Hell Diver who was constantly risking his neck on missions.
Since Trey’s death, Michael had thought a lot about his future. Over the past few days, he had been away from Layla almost every waking hour, working on Discovery and supervising new Hell Divers. Today, he would select the two rookies to join Team Raptor on the mission to Rio de Janeiro.
And today he would be saying goodbye to Layla.
At the top landing, he walked into the sunshine, searching in the glare for the soon-to-be mother of his child.
Discovery hovered above the oil rig with the Sea Wolf already secured to her belly, nestled between the two rows of turbofans. The ship was low enough that Michael could hear the hum over the wind, but high enough that the drafts didn’t disrupt the tropical canopy on the roof.