Rising Tide Read online

  And through it all, I see Miranda. Tied to the same pipes I was, waist deep in the cold, dirty water. The water rising every hour.

  Tick tock. Tick tock.

  At some point, some others come in to put my chair back upright, and the change in position makes my body hurt in all sorts of different ways. I’m just glad that I’m not coughing up blood. Not yet, anyway. But even breathing hurts as my abused muscles expand and contract.

  All I have left right now, aside from the pain, is a white, blinding rage. I think about all the things I can do to my tormentors. I think about beating them in retaliation, but that’s not really my thing. All that contact. All that blood. And I don’t like inflicting pain. I don’t relish violence.

  Except in this moment. The thoughts expand in my mind, each one more violent than the last. Guns, knives, large rocks. I think about bringing the Raven in and using her guns—one for Danning, the other for Marcus.

  I know, it’s not very productive, not useful in any way, but it helps me get through the pain and it gives me a sense of hope, strangely. Something to look forward to.

  I’m picturing what I can do with an old spoon when the door opens again. This time they replace the bag, then take me out and drag me to another room. I’m lifted and slammed onto a table or something. I feel my feet up higher than my head. My arms and legs are locked into different restraints. Then they pull the bag from my head. Now it’s coated with my sweat. My blood.

  Danning’s face, upside down, above my own. “Ben, Ben. You’re not being cooperative. So we have to get serious. I’m going to ask you one more time why you came here. Why you really came. And then things are going to get bad.”

  From upside down I can see that her features are all thin lines. A thin slash of a mouth. A straight, narrow nose. Thin eyebrows that arch in neat angles. “Okay,” I say. “Fine. The truth. I came because, well, I want to join up.” I smile at her and feel my scabbed-over lips crack. “What do you say, will you take me?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No, wait,” I say. “It was because I heard you had the last Twinkies in all of North America.”

  She walks away.

  “Or was it that I thought you could help me with a fungus problem I have?”

  “Do it,” is all she says.

  A damp cloth is placed over my face, and a hand holds it down over my nose and mouth. Then water starts washing over it.

  I start to drown.

  I try not to let the water in, but at this angle and with the cloth, it’s flowing right into my nose and down my airway. I try to shut it out, but I can’t. I start trying to move, twisting, pulling on my arms and legs, but they’re held fast and all I can think of is that I’m drowning.

  I’m drowning. Water is in my nose, my mouth.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. I can’t breathe.

  I can’t breathe.

  Oh, God.

  I’m going to die.

  This is it. Really it. I’m dead. I’m—

  The water mercifully stops and it’s sweet relief. The cloth is removed, and I splutter and cough and through it all I taste and smell vomit. In my mouth. In my nose.

  “That was seven seconds,” Danning says, returning to view. “A taste. Next time, we double that. Unless you tell me the truth.”

  “I told you the truth.” My voice is a watery croak and my throat aches with the effort. Knives of pain spear through my sinuses.

  “You said you were working for your friend with the boat. But your companions tell a different story. That you weren’t one of them. That you were a newcomer. That they didn’t know your agenda.”

  Fuck.

  “So tell me what you’re really doing here and I’ll get you back to your cell with a meal and something warm to sleep on.”

  At this part I really just want to tell her to fuck off. Tell her that she can eat Feral shit and choke on it. But is that only killing Miranda? Should I make something up? Try to do what I can to get out of here?

  “What will you do to me, if I tell you what you want to know?” I ask. “You’re just going to let me go?”

  “It depends on what you tell me,” Danning says. “I’ll need to know it all. But we can start with a little relief and go from there. I don’t want to keep you and I don’t want to kill you.”

  She sounds sincere. So very sincere. Something about that seems reachable.

  “Please,” I say. “I need to get out of here. Someone I care about . . . she’s in trouble. And the longer I spend here, the closer she gets to death. I came here to help her.”

  “She’s a hostage?” Danning asks.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were sent here to get something to trade for her life.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I told you. It’s the pumps. It’s only ever been the pumps.”

  She snarls and shakes her head. “I thought we were finally going to be honest with each other. And yet you persist with your lies. What do you take me for, Ben?”

  The moment, if it was ever there, is lost, and my momentary hope sticks in my throat along with the vomit. It’s replaced, almost instantly, by rage.

  Maybe that’s why I spit in her face.

  It’s a good one, full of snot and spit and vomit. And it hits her on one cheek. She’s so shocked, she freezes for a moment. Then the panic sets in. No matter where you are in this world—out in some camp on the ground, up in an airship, or safe behind military walls, the fear of the Bug, of infected fluids, gets drilled into you. She puts a gloved hand up to her face, her eyes wide, then turns away.

  I smile. I can’t help it. If I’ve scared her at least a little bit, it was all worth it.

  My excitement is short-lived, as one of the men with her slams a rifle butt into my head.

  Then . . . nothing.

  When I come to a few minutes later, I’m back in my cell. They’ve replaced the bag and left me in a crumpled, beaten heap on the ground. My whole body is throbbing with pain, and there’s still water in my nose and throat, a kind of raw, abused feeling there, but now is as good a time as any to sleep for a bit. So I do.

  I wake up to the door being opened again. I hear it slide, then hear it close again. Did they leave something for me? Did they end up feeding me? I get to my knees, trying to figure out how to feel around in front of me without possibly stumbling into it.

  Then the bag is tugged off of my head.

  It’s dark in my cell, the only light coming in through the rectangular window that I knew was there. A figure, also in uniform (hell, they all seem to be in uniform) stands there. Almost hesitant.

  “You come for another beating? Or is it drowning time again?” My voice sounds like someone else’s.

  “Neither,” comes the voice. A woman. Something’s weird, though. “What would you do if you got out of here?” she asks.

  “I would go back where I came from,” I say. “But I need what I came for.”

  “And that’s a pump? A bilge pump?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Several.”

  She bends down so that we’re face-to-face. I can’t make out much, but she seems young. “You’re not going to get your pump. Never. Captain Danning won’t authorize the release of any military equipment. Not to civilians.”

  “Is she even using them? All of them?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She follows the code.”

  “I need those pumps.” I hang my head. Shake it.

  “How were you going to get them out?” she asks.

  I narrow my eyes. “Is this more interrogation? You’re here to be the really nice one?”

  “No,” she says. “I can help you.”

  “That’s what Danning said.”

  “No, you idiot. I can get your pumps.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “We have some in storage, in one of the unused machine shops. I should be able to get a few out, but it depends on how you planned to get them aw
ay.”

  “Why would you do that?” I ask.

  “Because I want to get out of here.” She pauses. “I need to get out of here.”

  “You want us to take you with us?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  I consider this for a moment. I can’t blame her, seeing who her friends are, but I also don’t trust her. “Why?”

  She hangs her head, shakes it. “I just do.”

  “Not good enough.”

  She looks at me, and I think I see the hint of tears in her eyes. “I grew up here,” she says. “I was born into this life.”

  “Then why would you want to leave?”

  She starts pacing. “Because I’ve spent my whole life stuck within these fences.”

  “They don’t let you out?”

  She shrugs. “I’ve left a few times, on supply runs. But that’s it.”

  “Sorry, kid,” I say. “You’re not convincing me. Way I see it, you’re safe here, protected, with plenty of weapons to keep you set up that way.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says, shaking her head. “Captain Danning . . . she thinks that we have this charge, and it’s all that matters.”

  “What kind of charge?”

  “That we’re holding the base. And all it has. Until the government is reformed.”

  “The US government?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ve . . . we’ve been here for generations. The children of officers here when everything happened. When the . . . disease spread. We’ve been taught to uphold the Navy way. The code. To fulfill our duty.”

  “Only you don’t believe,” I say.

  “It’s not that,” she says.

  “No?”

  “I, just . . . the way the Captain treated you. And the others. She thinks you’re after our secrets. After our . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind.”

  I think about what she said. Try to imagine what it would be like to grow up in this kind of place. To be young again and want, what, freedom? My own life? It makes sense. “So you want out,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “You help us get the pumps, and we take you with us.”

  “Yes.”

  It feels eerily familiar. I remember a man named Atticus back at Gastown’s helium plant. He helped Rosie and me find our way around the plant. We originally took him captive, but he was all too willing to help. All he wanted was for us to take him out with us. I told him I would think about it—I never told him I would take him—and then he died. Helping us.

  The truth is that I need her help. I don’t have many other options, and I know that the next time they come to get me, it’s back to the table. And the drowning. And I don’t know that I’ll last the next time. Maybe I’ll tell them about Tamoanchan. Suddenly I have sympathy for Diego, who was tortured on Gastown and gave up its location.

  “Okay,” I say. “You get us all out of here, and I’ll take you with us. But you have to get us the pumps. You get that? Consider your life tied to them.”

  “I can do it,” she says. “The pumps at least. Getting you out of here isn’t going to be easy.”

  “But you have a plan?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We’ll have to move quickly.”

  “That’s fine by me.”

  “First I need to get the pumps. How did you come here?”

  I close my eyes. Time to start blindly trusting. “Airship,” I say. “It dropped us off so we could approach on foot.”

  She grabs the back of her head as if thinking. “That could work. You can’t approach the base—we have guns for that—but . . . if I can load the pumps into a raft, I could get them into the water. Your ship would have to pick them up from there.”

  It could work. And it would prevent us from having to bring the Raven near the base, but . . . I consider that this could be a trap. A way to get her back to our ship so that all of us could be captured. It would be a good plan, too. And yet . . . she’s only one person. If she frees all of us, and gets us back to the Raven, we’d outnumber her easily.

  Unless there’s something I’m missing.

  “What do you say?” she asks, and I can hear the urgency in her voice. “I’m not supposed to be here. If someone finds me here, this whole plan is ruined.”

  Which is exactly what a spy would say. Try to push for a decision. But I don’t have many other options, and I’m running out of time. If this saves me from more simulated drowning, it’s enough.

  “Okay,” I say. “How are you going to get the pumps out?”

  “It’s night,” she says, “and I’m on patrol duty. Malcolm is supposed to be checking in, but he has a thing for me, and I think I can convince him to give me an hour or two.”

  “That still sounds risky,” I say.

  “It is. But you said you need those pumps.”

  I nod.

  “I’ll be back for you soon,” she says. “Be ready.”

  “Wait,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “Sarah,” she says.

  Then she leaves me to wait. In the dark. And I start thinking about my poor choices.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  All those years ago, back at the police storage facility, I had crept back in to hear a male voice I didn’t recognize. The only two men on this job were Mal and me, and I knew Mal’s annoying tone well enough. So I kept a tight hold on my father’s revolver and moved forward, crouched low to the ground.

  And here’s one of the parts that I’m not proud of. I thought of leaving. I had the feeling that the job was losing gas, and I thought to myself, Your airship is still outside. You could grab it and leave.

  I thought it.

  Two things kept me there. One was obviously Claudia. Our relationship was . . . difficult to define. I don’t know that I was in love with her. Not the way the books describe at least. It was . . . something else. She was closer than a friend, not quite family. We fucked, yes, and I enjoyed it but she was, I don’t know, a kindred spirit. Someone who had my back. Someone who’s back I always had. I wasn’t going to just abandon her.

  The other thing that kept me there was, frankly, the stash. The score. It was supposed to set me up for a long time, and I wasn’t going to turn my back on that.

  But I like to believe that Claudia came first.

  As I moved forward, I could hear the words more clearly. Cheyenne said, “You sold it to me!”

  The male barked a laugh. “So that you’d do all the hard work. We figured you’d set up a team, clear the area, break in, and, uh, take all the risk.” He had a deep voice, with a kind of slow drawl to it.

  We, I noted. He said “we.”

  “And you did!” The man said. His voice sounded delighted. “So now we’ve come to, uh, take what’s ours. After we take care of you.”

  “You are a liar and a coward,” Cheyenne said, her voice sharp.

  “I wear all kinds of shoes,” the man said. Then I heard a gunshot.

  It sent me moving around the corner, the gun up, trying to take in what was happening.

  I saw the open room. Mal stood by the table, and Cheyenne was in his arms, a large, bloody gunshot in her chest. She jerked, gasped. She wasn’t coming back from that.

  Tess and Claudia were nearer to one of the armored vehicles. Thankfully okay.

  “We” proved to be five men, standing in the middle of the room, holding rifles and shotguns. Considering that only Mal and Claudia could shoot, they seemed to have the drop on everyone. But they didn’t know I was there.

  I raised my pistol, bracing my shooting arm with my left arm, and I fired, aiming for the stranger nearest me. I remember he wore a puffy, black, leather jacket, and the shot hit him in the shoulder.

  I was lining up my next shot when the room erupted into a mess of gunfire.

  Two of the men turned to shoot at me, one of them the man that I hit.

 
Mal reached for a gun and began to fire, but one of the men turned to shoot at him, with no cover, and the other two started shooting at Claudia and Tess.

  Shots filled the air as we all began firing. Then we all dropped into cover. I ducked back around the corner from the room. Claudia and Tess took shelter behind the vehicle. I saw Mal dive behind some weapons cases.

  There’s too many, I kept on thinking. I fired from my cover, keeping my eyes on the newcomers. I couldn’t tell what was happening to Mal or to Claudia and Tess. I heard a cry, male from the sound of it, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Then hell ripped open. An explosion in one corner of the room. Then another. Then smoke. We were packed into the space with explosives and weapons all around. I couldn’t tell who was using them or who might have been hit.

  I just knew where Tess and Claudia were.

  I ran. Forward. I held the revolver down by my waist, close to my body, so it couldn’t get easily knocked away. When I reached where the men had been, I fired. Once. Twice. Three times. I didn’t know if I hit anyone—friend or enemy. By that time, my ears were ringing from the gunfire and explosions. A fire was raging in one corner of the room.

  Something whizzed by my head, a near miss, but I kept moving.

  Finally, I reached the armored vehicle, moving my way around the side with my free hand, trying to keep hold of the revolver as I coughed and choked.

  A hand fell on my arm, gripped tight, and yanked me. I brought up the revolver. And had to stop myself from shooting at that last moment. I caught sight of Claudia’s face through the smoke. She pulled me to where Tess crouched.

  “Can you get this thing working again?” I yelled. Shots were still going off.

  “I think so,” Tess said.

  “Then do it.”

  I turned and fired, trying to give her cover as she climbed into the driver’s seat. Claudia fired as well, using a gun she no doubt took from the stash. In the swirling smoke, I saw several dark figures. Muzzle flashes, from shotguns and worse. Automatic rifle fire peppered the area, and we had to duck down.

  I was leaning against the Big Black Beast when it roared to life, the vibration shaking through my bones.