“It’s good to be back at work,” Eevi said. “Keeps my mind off Alexander.”
“That’s how it’s been for me after losing Trey,” he said.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, aside from Samson’s sporadic coughing. When they got to compartment two in the lower decks, all the divers were in their armor and preparing their gear for a dive.
“We’re out of enemy firing range,” Les said. “So everybody can relax for now. Timothy’s got the Cazador vessels on the surface locked on, just in case.”
The divers circled around, more relaxed now.
“I’ve got something to tell you that’s classified,” Les said. “Something I learned from Pedro.”
“The leader of the refugees?” Sofia asked.
“Right. Timothy, bring up the recording of my conversation with Pedro and feed it through the monitor in compartment two.”
The divers huddled around the wall-mounted monitor. A video of Les talking to Pedro inside the launch bay came on the screen.
Wearing a space suit to avoid exposing the refugees to germs, Les had Timothy with him to translate their conversation.
“Turn up the volume,” Les said.
“Pedro, I want to be very clear, we’re here to help you,” Les said in the feed. “We’re going to bring your people to a place where the sun shines and the water is clear. A place without monsters and the machines we call defectors.”
The bunker survivor revealed very little emotion throughout their conversation.
“But this place we call home isn’t safe from the machines, and I need to understand better what you know,” Les said.
Pedro raised a bushy brow. He finally spoke, and the conversation continued to feed through the monitor in compartment two.
“The machines have a base—a place that humanity tried to destroy during the war many, many years ago. Unlike most of the major cities, Rio de Janeiro survived the nukes, but the machines forced my ancestors underground months after.”
“The machines came to the city to hunt survivors?”
“Yes,” Pedro said. “My ancestors joined a coalition of other surviving South American countries to fight them many, many moons ago, and we launched an offensive to their base in East Africa.”
Even now, watching the video on-screen, Les got the chills.
“It was believed that they could shut down the machines if they destroyed the ITC hub facility,” Pedro said. “The offensive did destroy many of the machines, but in the end, it failed, killing every man and woman who set out to destroy them.”
“And afterward?” Les asked.
Pedro looked at the floor in the video. Then he glanced back up. “We hid like everyone else out there, and we never came out until you and those monster men found us.”
Ada hid under a lab station. She had never experienced fear like this—so paralyzing, she couldn’t move anything but her trembling lips.
The station was in the back of the pitch-dark lab. For the past eight hours, she had hunkered down with her legs pulled up to her chest, like the skeletal remains of the scientist she had discovered. Praying that the creatures prowling the passages wouldn’t get in.
But at some point, she would have to face them. She couldn’t bring herself to move from under the lab station. No matter how much she wanted to be like X, she couldn’t summon the courage.
He would never have gotten on this ship. He would have stuck to his plan and kept rowing until he couldn’t row anymore. The risk wasn’t worth the simple rope and tools she had scavenged, or the brief respite from the choppy water.
As she sat there cursing her stupidity, she suddenly realized she hadn’t heard the beasts for a while.
In fact, she wasn’t sure when she had heard them last.
This is your chance, girl. Time to move your ass.
She reached up and turned on her helmet lamp, praying for it to work. The beam lit up one of the exploded glass chambers across the room.
Careful not to make a sound, she scooted out from under the lab station. Then she pushed herself up and started back toward the hatch she had entered.
Crossing the lab gave her time to look at the broken vats. Skirts of glass shards lay on the deck where the chambers had shattered. From the looks of it, whatever was inside had broken out.
But what?
She had spent so much time hiding, she hadn’t been able to explore this lab. Now wasn’t the time to start, though.
Her lamp showed a path to the hatch. She kept it aimed ahead, trying to ignore the brown stains on the overhead and the deck. It was hard to ignore, just outside the beam of her light, what looked like a ripped garbage bag made of skin.
She froze, keeping her head forward.
The edges of the white glow illuminated the rust-colored pile, but she didn’t need the full beam to recognize human remains.
No, you don’t need to look.
She couldn’t help herself, though, and the beam roved to the pile of bones. Moving the light away, she kept walking, alternating glances between the hatch and the deck. The last thing she wanted to do was step on glass.
Halfway across the lab, she spotted something on the bulkhead to the right—something she had missed on the way in. Another room lay beyond the shattered glass wall. Inside, a row of empty cages sat against another bulkhead.
Again powerless to resist, she angled her light at the room. Most of the cages were open, but several had closed gates. The bars of several were pulled apart, as if the animal inside had bent them back to escape.
She returned to the vats.
Whatever animals the lab technicians had kept in this space had broken out.
But how?
It doesn’t matter. They’re here.
Ada pressed on, not stopping until she got to the hatch. She slung her rifle, grabbed the handle, and listened for the beasts outside.
Hearing nothing, she pulled up the bar, flinching at the clicking noise. She pulled her rifle out again, heart pounding.
No more screeches echoed through the ship. Once she had her breathing under control, she strode into the passage with her rifle barrel pointed to the right.
The beam revealed no contacts that way, but she did see the vegetation. Seeing nothing to her left, she went that way, back through the engine room.
A few minutes later, she was heading up the same dark ladder she had unwisely descended. The next level up, the remains of plants she had chopped littered the floor. But they looked different somehow.
Drawing closer, she saw why.
Something had eaten them.
The ends of several vines were frayed like a gnawed rope, and purple goo wept from puncture wounds in the thicker limbs. Her light confirmed teethmarks.
But if these beasts fed on the flora, why hadn’t she seen that earlier?
Perhaps these vines were like a farm they hadn’t yet harvested, and her cutting through them had prompted a feeding. Tamping down the panic, she hurried through the half-eaten mess.
One of the vines reached up as she stepped over it, snagging her ankle. She kicked out of it and took off at a wary jog.
She reached the passage where she had to crawl under the broken overhead and support beams. To avoid any unnecessary clanking, she put everything hanging off her belt into the backpack.
Her lamp flickered as she approached the sharp debris.
No, no, no!
She shook it, and when the beam came on again, she wasted no time. Crawling under the crossbeams would take a few minutes if she was fast but going fast could compromise her suit. She wiggled under the beams and collapsed bulkheads, keeping low, rifle in her right hand.