She was thrown out into the corridor, hit the far wall. Then she was pushed out into the sunlight. She stood blinking in the glare, blinded. The aft hatches of the Nadia lay below her; water sparkled beyond, holding the green shadow of an island. Sucre pushed her to the rail. Men were running along the aft deck, to the stern of the ship. They held guns.
At the rail, she looked down along the hull of the ship. A couple of men were leaning over the decks below, flying down into the water towards the stern. At the Nadia's landing stage, midships, a black Gemini looked limp and low and crumpled in the water, stern down. She remembered the hunting knife on Orrick's trunks.
The men running to the stern stopped and looked over the rail every now and again, pointing their guns down, sometimes firing them.
Sucre held her arm painfully far up her back, forcing her on tip-toes, grunting with the pain. He shouted to the men at the stern of the ship. They shouldered their guns and reached for their grenades.
She bent over the rail, easing the pressure on her arm a little. Yes, she could still see the ripples. Orrick must have jumped. Swam — probably underwater as much as possible to the stern, where the overhang would protect him from the guns. But not from the grenades.
She watched them splash into the waves around the rear of the ship. She looked up into the blue, lightly clouded sky. No sign of any plane. What a nice day to die on, she thought. Sucre was still shouting behind her. Men and their noise. Suddenly, in a dozen places around the stern of the ship, the water bulged and went white, like a series of giant watery bruises. The bruises burst; fluting and climbing, white stems exploding in the sunlight and falling back. There was hardly any noise. The ship rail under Hisako's sternum vibrated with each shock.
Sucre shouted again. Then there was silence. She felt the sunlight on her neck and forearms, could smell the distant land. An insect buzzed distantly, through the continual ringing in her ears.
Orrick's body floated out after a minute; pale and face down, spread like a parachutist in free fall. The venceristas cheered, and emptied their guns into the man's body, making it disappear in a tiny forest of white and red splashes, until Sucre's shouting made them stop.
He twisted her back round to face him. He looked uninjured, but shaken and dishevelled. He took the pistol out of its holster.
She ought to do something, but she couldn't. There was no fight left. I won't close my eyes. I won't close my eyes.
Sucre brought the pistol up to her face, up to her eye, pressed it forward. She closed her eyes. The gun's muzzle pressed on to her eyelid, forcing her head back. She could see a halo of light against the brown-black, like an image of the gun barrel and the twisted hole the bullet would travel.
The gun was taken away. A slap jerked her head one way, then another. Her head sang; another instrument in the orchestra of internal noise that was crowding into her skull.
She opened her eyes. Sucre was standing grinning in front of her.
'Yeah, you're pretty cool, Señorita, he told her. He flourished the pistol; it glinted in the sunlight. 'You a man, I'd kill you. He re-holstered the gun, glanced to the stern of the ship, took a deep breath and whistled. 'Woo; that was something, huh?
She swallowed a little blood, and nodded.
Then the sound of rapid, automatic gunfire came through the open door behind them, from down inside the ship.
7: Salvages
She stood, confronting her fear at last. Everything had led up to this. It had been forever coming closer, like a distant storm, and now it had arrived and she was powerless and weak, wallowing without way in the face of the dread she'd tried and tried to confront but with which she had never been able to connect.
In school once, in a physics class, she'd tried to push two very strong magnets together, north against north and south against south, and sweated and gritted her teeth and braced her arms against the bench and watched her straining, quivering hands push the big U-shaped lumps of metal together, constantly trying to stop them glancing away, sliding to one side, struggling to twist out of her grasp, and felt her strength going and so finally putting everything into one last explosive burst of effort, and shouted out as she did so as if screaming the targeted part of the body in a kendo thrust. The magnets slid across each other, writhing in her hands like something alive, clunking one south pole against one north, the other ends of each U sticking out, so that she was left holding a solid, S-shaped piece of metal. It took an even greater effort than that she'd just made to stop herself throwing the magnet down to the floor, or just slamming it into the wooden bench top. But she put the gunmetal lump down quietly, and dropped her head a little, as though saluting a victorious opponent.
It had been the same with her fear. She had tried to force it to a confrontation, to pin it down, to wrestle with it… but it had always twisted away, wriggled mightily even as she tried to grapple with it, and sunk back into the usual shape of her life.
So now she stood in Narita airport, waiting with the rest of the NHK orchestra to board the JAL 747 bound for Los Angeles. She'd sat in the departure lounge with some of the others, chatting nervously and drinking tea and watching the clock on the wall and glancing all the time at her wristwatch, stroking the new leather bag she'd bought for the trip, trying to make the cold tangle of cramp in her belly go away.
The others knew she hadn't flown before, and that she was afraid. They joked with her, tried to take her mind off it, but she could not stop thinking about the plane; the fragile aluminium tube of its body; the screaming engines, encasing fire; the wings that flexed, heavy with fuel; the wheels that… it was that moment, the visual instant when the spinning wheels left the ground and the aircraft tilted its nose to the sky and rose, that sank her. She could think no further. She had watched that moment on television and in movies many times, and could see that there was indeed a slow-motion grace about it, and could quite happily admire the plane maker's and the pilot's skill, and know that the same manoeuvre was completed thousands of times each hour throughout the world… but the thought of being on one of those delicately huge contraptions as it lifted itself into the air still saturated her with terror. It made her bones ache.
The others talked to her. One of the younger men in the orchestra told her he'd been scared of flying at first, but then had looked into the statistics. Did she know, he said, that you were far more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane?
But not when you're in a plane! She wanted to scream at him.
Chizu and Yayoi, her flatmates, who were also in the orchestra string section, talked of a previous trip to the States, when they'd been students. How vast it was, and how beautiful; Yosemite, the Mohave, the Redwoods… a single state like a whole country, sprawling and empty and unmissable, even before the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, the fertile wasteland of the wheatfields from flat horizon to flat horizon, like an ocean of grain; the colours of a New England fall, and the dizzy verticals of Manhattan. Unmissable. Not to be missed. She must not miss it.
The hands of the clock swept on, impossibly thin wings.
The time came. She stood with the rest, clutching her new leather bag. They went to the tunnel. She lifted the bag up, cradling it tightly in her arms. It smelled luxurious and sweet and comforting. She saw the plane outside in the sunlight; massive, secure, anchored-looking. It was linked to the terminal at nose and tail by the fitted collars of the access jetties, and fuel hoses looped under its wings from tanker trucks. At one side, a catering vehicle's raised body stood perched on an X of struts over the braced chassis, its platform extended to an open door in the aircraft's side; tall thin trolleys were being wheeled from truck to plane by two men in bright red overalls. A squat, flat truck sat under the 747's bulbous nose, fixed there with a thick yellow towbar. Various other vehicles scurried like toys about the poised bulk of the big plane, squires and armourers to the impassive warrior-king above them being readied to join battle with the oceanic air.