"It looks like a dead jellyfish," Pan said. "Which is a step down from the mermaid called Rover thing it started with." He grimaced, and wiped at the water running into his eyes. "We beat one of these things. We know now that we can fight back. Why the hell aren’t I cheering?"
"We don’t even know what this is," Min pointed out. "Our problem is the Moths. Whole different ball game."
"It’s familiar in an odd way," Madeleine said. "I know I’ve never seen it before, but I felt like I had."
"The balls with ears from the first challenge," Noi said, using Pan’s shoulder to lever herself to her feet. "Come on, we can’t just sit here in a puddle. Nash, go see if you can spot anyone coming down the wharf. Everyone else, there have to be controls to shut these sprinklers off."
Fisher, next to his feet, held a hand down for Madeleine, and waited to check she could stay up. Then they paused to stare at the thing they’d just killed. It did remind Madeleine a little of the targets from the Manila challenge, but a car-sized doggy mermaid was a long way from a soccer ball with ears and paws. Related species? Parent? She puzzled over it while they hunted for a way to shut down the broken sprinkler system without cutting off water to the entire building.
"No sign of any movement on either side," Nash said, jogging back to the garage entrance just as they succeeded in stopping the flow. "Why alone? It seemed to know where we were."
"Maybe it’s some kind of Blue tracker," Min suggested. "Able to smell us or hear us or something."
"Doesn’t explain why they’d let it gallop off to leap on us alone," Noi said, then shivered and shook her head, a few drops of water spraying from damp curls. "Speculate later. Right now we have a big glowing corpse, no obvious Moths, and a huge decision."
"Stay or leave." Fisher said.
"At sunset, while cold and wet. When the only one of us not exhausted is Nash." Noi ticked the obstacles off. "Not necessarily insurmountable. We’ve talked about Goat Island as a possibility. We have boats and have downloaded harbour charts, and it’s a straightforward enough trip. We could probably get there in the dark without running into anything. But for all we know Goat Island is where they keep their flying snake, so condition unknown. And it’s one of the few largish islands in the harbour, so a bit obvious as a hiding place. That’s the question of leaving – what about staying?"
"The gamble is whether they have another Rover," Min said. "If, that is, the thing really could track us. They obviously haven’t been able to before now, or our pyjama party would have been over days ago. If we’re to believe the internet chatter, the Moths don’t know when Blues are hiding nearby. This building has been cleared already, and the hidden room and webcams are seriously hard to give up, so long as we think this Rover is the only Rover. The problem with staying is that." He nodded at the corpse, large and obvious in the fading light. "We could risk using the garage because it’s dim and sheltered and there’s little chance anyone will go in it to notice any damage. The glow from that thing is a neon sign marking the start point of any hunt."
"Staying or leaving, we need to get rid of it," Fisher said.
"True enough." Noi’s stomach growled, announcing another issue they needed to deal with, and soon. "Right. Fisher, grab the laptop and see if you can dig up any other sightings of Rovers. Nash, Pan, take lookout either side. We’ll try to push it into the water."
The yielding, insubstantial mass would only shift when thumped with a shield, and by the time they had knocked it out of the garage and then chivvied it to the navy base side of the wharf, all Madeleine could think of was food and rest.
The lantern glow of monster sank below the surface, and they went inside to eat and decide what next.
Chapter Fourteen
A chorus of breathing in a room lit only by the flicker of computer screens. Madeleine shifted, warm beneath a blanket, bracketed by sleeping people. Her back hurt.
With no sign of Moths following Rover, and everyone but Nash close to dropping where they stood, the decision to stay or leave had been a forgone conclusion. As a precaution they were all spending the night in the hidden study. While his fellow Musketeers filled their stomachs, Nash had shifted the computer to the top of the filing cabinet and removed the simple desk, creating a little more room. Then he’d been stuck with a lot of cleaning up, as everyone else focused on getting warm and dry before curling up to sleep and digest. The extremes of the Blue metabolism.
Madeleine had gone to sleep propped between Noi and Emily, but, drifting awake, she could see Nash sitting beneath the window with a laptop, and Noi curled next to the sprawling pile which was Min and Pan. The shoulder she was tucked against belonged to Fisher.
Noi had most likely contrived the swap during a bathroom excursion, and Madeleine decided to be grateful, to enjoy the moment. Fisher had continued to provide a fascinated audience during the portrait sittings, helping her clean up afterwards. Today – yesterday – they’d spent all of the time between the sitting and late afternoon training chatting. He’d avoided talking about himself, instead drawing her out on what still needed to be done on the new portrait, and the chances of a young unknown winning the Archibald Prize, and all her hopes for being able to study full time, to not need to compromise between what she wanted to do and what was likely to earn her a living. About scholarships, and the gaps in her portfolio. She hadn’t meant to talk so much, but Fisher was a good listener, and so interested.
The question was whether his interest was in her, or her art. And if he was pretending to be interested in her painting as a way to get closer to her. She wasn’t sure she would be able to forgive that.
But she still filled a small secret sketchpad with images of him, and worried about how little sleep he got, and wondered whether it would be stupid to suggest they surely had enough time for him to rest occasionally. Her private challenge was to capture how he would pause sometimes to be amused at himself, and it discomforted her, in reviewing these attempts, to see just how much of her own emotions the pictures revealed.
Nash had noticed she was awake, and was smiling at her, at the way she was trying to look at Fisher’s face without moving from his shoulder. Her sketchbooks really weren’t going to tell anybody anything they didn’t already know.
"What’s the time?" she whispered.
"Twenty to one." Nash’s voice was particularly delicious when he kept it low, and she regretted being unable to find a way to express the sound of him. "I promised to wake everyone to watch the challenge, but it can wait till there’s something to see." He removed the power cord from his laptop and leaned forward to hold it and the headphones toward her. "Here is something you will be glad of."
Reluctantly abandoning her comfortable contact with Fisher, Madeleine stretched to take it. The screen showed the ABC website, an article with a headline of "Shocking Survival" below a video image of a woman with a soft brown bob and sun damaged skin.
Researchers from James Cook University have reported a breakthrough in the treatment of Blue-Green. Earlier this evening, a representative of the School of Biomedical Sciences made the first announcement of this critical discovery.
"Our preliminary results show a dramatic increase in the survival rate of the infected if they are shocked with shield paralysis as soon as possible after exposure to the Blue-Green Conversion," Dr Jennifer Elliman said. "A healthy subject, even among smaller mammals where mortality has been nearly one hundred per cent, has in the area of a fifty per cent survival rate with Green stain, and thirty per cent with Blue."