Fragment

8:47 P.M.

Zero set his camera up on a tripod outside Hender’s door. Switching to night vision, he saw a greenscape with the broken ring of jungle around the bottom of the island lit up like a galaxy. He zoomed in on the Trigon over a mile away and saw helicopters coming and going and Humvees speeding back to the base.

“Hell, it looks like they’re packing it in and getting out of here.”

Zero panned west. He saw that the crack in the far wall of the island had grown. Seawater had swelled the pool that had saved his life to the size of a lake.

“That crack’s opening up. The ocean’s coming in.”

“Shit!” Nell moved aside so Geoffrey could look.

“When water hits old dry fault lines…Bang! Instant earthquake,” Geoffrey peered through the viewfinder. “And every quake will just let more water into the island’s substratum.”

“Terrific,” Zero muttered.

“Do we trust Thatcher?” Geoffrey asked abruptly.

Nell frowned. “The answer lies in the question.”

“I don’t think he has the courage to kill himself along with us,” Geoffrey told her.

“You’re probably right. So he probably told Cane the right thing to say. But Cane might not have done it. And I’m beginning to wonder if, even if he did, we can count on being rescued. I know it’s an awful thing to have to think about, but we have to be realistic. Thatcher might not be the only one who doesn’t like the idea of intelligent life getting off this island. Maybe the news didn’t go down too well with the powers that be. Or maybe Cane just ditched us.”

“I was thinking the same thing. That kid was pretty freaked out,” Zero said.

“And we don’t have any means of communication or transportation,” Geoffrey said.

A swarm of glowing bugs swept over the moonlit purple fields. “Time to go back inside, kids,” Zero warned.

Nell, Geoffrey, and Zero entered the B-29 and closed the door tight behind them.

A tense Thatcher sat surrounded by curious hendropods, who were fondling his red beard and peering into the pockets of his clothing. One discovered a peanut straggler that Thatcher had missed and one of its eyes bent down as it examined it closely- then it grabbed the peanut with its lips and crunched it while registering what seemed to be a smile of pleasure with its wide mouth. Between two arching fingers it offered Thatcher what looked like a miniature dried embryo.

Andy had been keeping watch through the cockpit at the far end of the fuselage.

“Hey, you guys,” he yelled. “They’re leaving without us!”

The humans and the hendropods moved forward and looked out through the patchwork windshield of the B-29.

Thatcher stayed, sitting near the door, and checked his watch.

Two Navy ships were leaving glowing green wakes of bioluminescent phytoplankton churned up by their propellers as they shipped out. Rounding the cliff below, a ship appeared, heading north.

“The Trident!” Nell shouted.

Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. “Eh?”

“It’s the ship from SeaLife,” Zero explained.

“Oh,” Geoffrey said.

“I never thought I’d be so glad to see her!” Nell said.

“Wait a minute!” Zero pulled out a palm-sized short-range video transmitter from one of his pants pockets and unfolded the transmission dish.

He quickly hooked up a jack to the camera and another to a speaker and handed the transmitter to Geoffrey.

“Aim the antenna at the Trident,” he said. “There may be just enough juice left! This thing’s only got a seven-hundred meter range but we might get a bounce off the water. Come on, Peach!”

Peach was playing Halo 5 with earphones on, listening to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys and crunching spicy cinnamon Red Hots between his molars.

He vaporized a gallery of monstrous aliens with furious efficiency and, suddenly, his Spider Sense detected a status message in the upper right corner of the computer screen: