Ghosts

NINE

Magnolia hung from the tangle of canopy and shroud lines, hardly daring to move. She wanted to look at her left arm, but she was too afraid—if the girder had cut through her suit, she wouldn’t last the day.

She had heard noises in the street below. Whatever had made them was gone now, but she could see shadows moving around down there.

They moved with stealth, as if they were hunting.

If this were a normal dive, she would have had weapons and supplies. She would also have had her Hell Diver brothers and sisters for support. Instead, she had a ripped chute and a mean headache.

Another shadow below snaked around the shells of vehicles. She looked closer, but it melted away. She activated her NVGs with a bump of her chin. The vivid green bones of the building filled her visor, but she still couldn’t get a lock on the moving shapes.

She tried to open a line to the Hive by tapping the comm link. White noise filled her helmet.

“Command, this is Raptor Three,” she said as loudly as she dared. “Does anyone copy?”

More static hissed from the speakers.

The storm was still blocking out her signal, or else the Hive was too far out of range to pick it up. Another flash from the dark clouds filled the street with even more slinking shadows, which began to fan out like a cloud breaking apart in the sky.

She felt for her tactical knife and remembered that she had lost it in the fall. Leaning down, she stretched to grab the spare tucked inside her boot. Her fingers gripped the handle but slipped off. She breathed out to make her belly smaller and stretched again. This time, she pulled the blade free.

The girder holding her tangled chute and lines groaned in the wind as a flurry of dust and soot came swirling through the scraper’s skeletal remains.

Magnolia froze, holding the blade to her chest, eyes combing the terrain. A shadow darted across the asphalt below. Another shifted on the sidewalk. She leaned forward, straining to identify what was down there.

In the green hue of the night vision, she saw that the shadows weren’t Sirens or some other mutated monsters after all. They were just… ghosts. Optical illusions caused by the flashes of lightning.

She checked the layout for an exit route. This place looked as if it had been through hell and never left. Deep burns marred the structural steel, and a carpet of ash and grime covered the floor. Concrete columns, black and heat-chipped, supported the upper floors, but she couldn’t fathom how they were still standing. The tower’s foundation had settled to the point that the floor sloped at a ten-degree angle. Once she cut herself free, she would have to be careful not to slide down it and out into thin air.

Her exit was an enclosed stairwell a hundred feet away, past one of the pillars. From there, she would make her way down to the street and try to find cover to run a diagnostic test and check the integrity of her suit. Perhaps, on the way, she would find some sort of weapon more substantial than her dinky little knife.

She used the blade to cut her lines one at a time, leaving the left-rear suspension line for last. Then she bent her knees to prepare for the three-foot drop. This was going to make some noise.

She touched the knife to the weighted line, and it parted with alarming ease. Even favoring the injured ankle, the impact with the floor sent a painful jolt up her leg. She didn’t let the pain keep her from moving, though. She ran for the stairway, aware that she was leaving tracks behind her in the ash. Vivid green snags of rebar reached down like tree branches from the ceiling. She ducked them as she ran, trying to balance speed with stealth, supremely aware that a single misstep could put another tear in her suit. Approaching the stairwell entrance, she held the knife loosely, ready to slash and stab.

She scanned the passage leading down to the next floor. Cracks ran everywhere across the floor and walls. At some point in the past 260 years, the stairs had shifted out of true. The top two treads sagged, and the third was broken in two. She leaped to the fourth step and stopped to listen.

The whistling of the wind and the distant crack of thunder echoed through the dead city. It was an eerie and beautiful sound, a change from the everyday noises aboard the airship. This was the real world. This was where humanity was meant to live.

For Magnolia, the greatest wonder of the surface world had been all the different colors to be found. On the ship, almost everything was gray, black, or brown, just like the desolate city outside this scraper. But once, there had been more colors than one could even name. That was what kept her scanning the archives on the ship each night into the morning hours. Whenever she was exploring the surface on a dive, she searched for pastels in particular. Those were her favorites: pink, baby blue, lavender. Those shades soothed and fascinated her, but she was drawn to any scrap or fragment of color. She couldn’t wait to see what she would find in the lighthouse, with its fiery red dome.

Another distant crash rolled across the city, echoing through the tower. It was powerful enough to rattle her visor. Though she couldn’t see it, she knew that the storm was rolling east over the city.

She continued down the staircase, carefully navigating the skewed and broken steps, knife at the ready. The walls seemed to narrow as she proceeded. Or was that just a trick of the light? She couldn’t be sure.

At the first landing, she finally stopped to check herself. A quick glance revealed what she had feared all along: the girder’s corner had scraped her armor—and torn her suit. She craned her neck to assess the damage. It had sliced through the layer that insulated her from lightning. Beyond that, she couldn’t see whether the secondary layer, the radiation shield, was compromised. At least, the alarm sensors had stopped beeping, although that didn’t mean she was in the clear.

She tapped at the screen of her wrist monitor and brought up the control panel. A diagnostic should tell her the status of the suit’s radiation shield. Digital telemetry scrolled across the screen. The battery unit was at 50 percent—only about twelve hours of juice. She scrolled through the data, heart rate increasing with each swipe of her finger.

A clatter and snapping from deep in the building distracted her. She lowered her wrist and raised the knife in her other hand.

The sound faded, and silence reclaimed the space. Magnolia waited in the safety of the enclosed stairwell, where the wind couldn’t reach her. Listening for the barest creak or rustle, she raised her wrist monitor and continued swiping through the data. The radiation level here was in the red—high enough that Sirens might nest here. The divers still weren’t any closer to understanding the monsters’ habits or biology. Hell, they didn’t even know what the things were or where they had come from. Maybe they were mutant animals, changed by radioactive fallout after the war, though they didn’t look much like any of the creatures she had studied in the archives. They couldn’t very well bring a specimen back to the Hive to examine, either. The ordinary people aboard the ship had no idea what was down here, and it was probably best left that way.

She finally brought up the diagnostic controls for her suit. Across the screen rolled the first good news she had gotten all day:

Suit integrity, 100 percent.

“Thank—”

A clatter like dishes falling on the floor cut her off. A creaking and snapping joined the sound, followed by a crack and a thud.

Something alive was inside the building.

By now, her nervous tension was rising at roughly the same rate the thing below was climbing the stairs.

The noise stopped just as Magnolia turned to run. A cardinal rule of surviving on the surface was never to draw attention to yourself. If she ran now, anything in the building with her would hear it.

The knife in her hand suddenly looked more like a nail file. Sweat dripped down her forehead, but she didn’t bat an eye.

Part of her wanted to find a cubby to hide in, but the other side of her nature told her to run. That was the side that had always goaded her into taking risks, such as stealing from the market, or jumping out of a freaking airship onto a planet filled with monsters.

Remember, no dying before you dip your toes in the ocean. That was the deal.

A minute passed in silence.

She had a decision to make: go back up the stairs and look for another way to climb down, or keep moving forward.

Her curious side won, and she moved down to the next step. Her footfall was soft enough that she couldn’t even hear it. In another lifetime, Magnolia had been a thief, with a reputation for sneaking in and out of places. It was time to put those skills to work.

Pausing every few steps to listen, she made her way down the flight of stairs without attracting any attention. The next landing opened onto another story. Debris littered the dark tile floor. A metal chair arm protruded from a pile of concrete rubble. An upside-down table, its legs bent in opposite directions, lay in the dust a few feet away.

Magnolia remembered the Pepsi machine she had discovered in Hades, on X’s final dive. The freezing temperatures there had preserved the ancient artifact, but Charleston’s climate was much warmer and wetter. Nothing of value seemed to have survived the years.

She continued down the cracked and twisted steps, holding her knife as if she were about to spar with the darkness. Her breath fogged the inside of her visor with every step. The pane was so blurry, she almost didn’t see the strange ivy clinging to the wall.

She took another wary step and raised the knife, staring at the first living thing she had seen on the surface in months. The vines grew thicker on the next landing and snaked around the corner.

The sinewy vegetation covered the wall like gigantic cobwebs, each strand ending in barbs as thick as her hand. Magnolia knew better than to touch one of them. Half the shit down here was poisonous, and the other half was carnivorous. She proceeded cautiously down the steps, listening for movement and hugging the rail to keep her distance from the vines.

Halfway down the next flight, the entire stairwell lit up with a pinkish glow. Magnolia flinched and then froze as the barbed heads of stems snapped free of the walls. The labyrinth of vines pulsated and came to life, dozens of them, each twisting and undulating independently of the others.

More pink lights flashed across her path.

This wasn’t exactly the sort of pastel she was hoping to find.

Two years ago and a thousand miles to the west, she had come across groves of glowing, tentacled plants like these. Matt Shaw, a diver on Team Angel, had wandered too close. It cost him a leg. Magnolia had helped hold him down while Andrew sawed through flesh and bone to stop the spread of the venom. Matt had survived, earning himself a cushy job in the water reclamation plant, where he sat and stared at monitors most of the day.

After the accident, Magnolia had visited him. Privately, she had felt that a desk job was the last place she wanted to end up. But right now she would gladly trade with him.

She hugged the opposite side of the stairway as the flora continued to move. The ends waved about as if searching for her. The monstrous vines stretched across the next landing, too, and into the open room beyond. She peered inside, where the pulsating stems all connected to a central trunk growing in the center of the space.

It looked almost like an old-world tree, but twisted and wrong.

Magnolia spotted the cracked hole in the center of the room. The tree thing had grown right up through the floor. But could it really be that big? The tower had to be thirty stories high, and she was still a long way up.

She pressed her back against the wall and steadied her breathing. Never in her forty-seven dives had she seen anything like this.

Keep moving, Mags! You want to see the ocean or not?

Fear crawled through her. She forced herself to take another step. Then a second and a third. With each step, the glowing foliage grew thicker. As she worked her way deeper into the guts of the tower, the vines grew harder to avoid. She plastered herself against the far wall, sidling carefully.

Above the next landing, she could just make out the stenciled characters that read floor 6.

She still had a way to go.

Holding the knife in front of her, Magnolia moved around the next corner. The pinkish lights were blinking frantically now. It was almost as if… but no, that was crazy. The vines couldn’t be talking to each other. It was just a plant—a very weird, very big plant.

Her next step made a squishing sound. It was enough to make her cringe, but as she backed up, she saw that she hadn’t stepped on one of the vines. The sound came again as she stood still, holding in a breath and tingling with adrenaline.

A noise like a dog chewing on a bone echoed off the walls. The web of vines glowed an angry red, filling the staircase with a ghastly light.

Frozen in place, she breathed silently and did her best not to move. The crunching turned to cracking and then a guttural choking.

She took a cautious step backward at the same moment a shadow flickered across the wall below. The sound of creaking ligaments and bones filled the stairwell. It reminded her of the Sirens, but the thing that emerged was nothing like one of the creatures from Hades. This time, it wasn’t an apparition. The thing stretched furry skeletal arms lined with thorns, and raised something over its bulbous head.

Magnolia stumbled backward, falling on her butt. She scooted out of view as the creature skittered up the stairs.

A huge eyeball on a stem poked around the corner. The leathery eyelid snapped over the black pupil several times like a camera shutter before the stem retreated.

Raising the knife in one shaky hand, Magnolia pushed herself up with the other. As soon as she was on her feet, she backed up the steps. The sound prompted a screech, and the furry creature connected to the eyeball bounded around the corner on two peg legs and a third limb connected to its bony chest. The webbed feet and hand slapped the concrete.

Magnolia backed up several more steps, and the creature halted. A vine, dripping pinkish goo, hung from the long, curved beak on its feathery face. Swinging the stem from side to side, it rolled back its head and slurped down the snack.

She finally understood. The vines weren’t reacting to her. They were reacting to the beast that was feeding on them.

“Stay back,” she said, angling the blade toward the monster. It tilted its eyeball at her as if trying to understand.

“Don’t come any closer.”

It was the tone, not the words, that mattered. She had often employed the same tone when one of the junior Hell Divers tried to get a little too familiar with her on the night before a dive.

She took another step backward. The creature blinked again, its eyelid snapping open and shut like a hatch. She poked at the air again with her knife. If forced to, she would kill it. The beast was only half her size, but the sharp hooked beak and long talons gave her pause. A single strike from any one of them could tear her suit wide open—and maybe her flesh, too.

A cackle escaped from the open beak. She lunged with the knife to scare it off, but that only seemed to make the creature even more curious.

Magnolia staggered back up another step, brandishing the knife. The foliage continued to glow, filling the passage with pulsing light. The subscreen on her HUD showed that her power was already down to 45 percent.

She was wasting time.

In a swift motion, she swiped at the beast. The blow didn’t connect, but the creature flinched and the eyeball reared back. She took off running, back up the stairs. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she could hear the creature chasing her. Another eerie cackle followed her. It sounded as if the creature was trying to speak and throw up at the same time.

She loped up the stairs, her injured ankle hurting but not slowing her down. At the next landing, she went left into the main room. The vines there flared red as she stomped all over them in her haste.

Magnolia leaped over clusters of thick roots. The beast was inside the room now, trying to flank her on the left. She kept moving, matching its pace, keeping it in sight. She could not allow it to get behind her.

Wind rustled her suit as she crossed the room. It was rushing in through the missing windows. She pivoted her helmet slightly so she could see the ocean lapping at the shore less than a mile away. The move cost her dearly. Staggering, she fought to regain her balance as she tripped over a vine. She managed to fight her way upright and continued running, but the floor ended in a sheer drop. The seven-story fall would kill her outright or at least break her legs—in this place, a fate worse than sudden death.

Two options remained: turn and fight, or jump.

Magnolia eyed the nearest building. It was close enough that with a running start, she might make it across. Assuming that the beast wouldn’t follow, it was her best way out.

The monster screamed, and she screamed back at it. It was galloping toward her, the stalked eyeball leering.

Magnolia pushed hard, trying not to second-guess her decision. The winking red stems guided her path. In the glow, she saw the vines shifting and breaking away from the surfaces they had grown on. The central trunk creaked and groaned behind her, as if it was coming to life and might attack at any moment. She had thought the one-eyed creature was the biggest threat in the room, but what if she had been wrong?

She shoved her curiosity aside and sprinted toward the ledge. About ten feet lay between her and the sloping edge of the next tower. To clear the gap, she would need to leap as she never had before.

One of the stems snapped free of the concrete and shot through the air past her helmet. She moved to the right at the last instant. The ground raced by below her as, arms flailing, she jumped. A screech followed her across the gap between the buildings, but that didn’t concern her right now.

She was not going to make it.

Her momentum quickly dissipated, and gravity took hold. She reached out for the ledge of the building, but she was still a good five feet away, and then she was falling headfirst toward the pavement.

Time seemed to slow and speed up at the same time. Lightning surged above the city, giving her a snapshot of her landing zone. Derelict vehicles littered rubble-strewn asphalt. Would it hurt more to land on one of them, or should she aim for the bare ground?

Something wrapped around her left ankle, jerking her upward. The abrupt motion put her stomach in her throat. Blood rushed to her head as she stared at the ground, which was now falling away.

Magnolia twisted to look at the vines that had caught her boot. They had snaked up to the floor she jumped from. She caught a flash of movement between two broken pillars. She wasn’t the only thing the vegetation had caught. The beast fought the vines wrapped around all three of its limbs. They pulled from all directions, as if determined to tear it apart.

Magnolia did a midair sit-up and grabbed the stems so she faced upward. She hacked at the vines just as the creature above came apart. Stems snapped the two legs and single arm away from the body, carmine blood gushing from the wounds as more vines pulled the torso away from the ledge.

Her heart was beating at double speed now. Red sap oozed as she sawed through one of the vines holding her left boot. It snapped free, and the wounded vine writhed back to the floor above.

She grabbed the remaining stem with one hand and sawed at it with the other. If she cut herself free now, she would fall to the street. Her only chance was to wait until she was close enough to the building she had jumped from to grab on to something.

Above, dozens of the stems waited at the ledge, their snakelike heads weaving back and forth in search for prey.

Magnolia waited for the right moment, then gripped the vine right above her saw marks and cut herself free.

The shortened tentacle pulled her back to the floor she had jumped from. Her helmet and shoulders rose above the ledge, and in the hellish red glow she saw something that took her breath away.

Hundreds of vines were squirming around the central tree, which had split down the middle. Something that looked horribly like a mouth surrounded the torso of the one-eyed beast, and jagged teeth the size of her hand chopped the creature to pieces.

A dozen of the vines shot toward her, and she let go of the one she had cut. She was dropping again, this time not to the ground but to the next floor. The vines there pulsated at her presence, but Magnolia was off and running by the time they started crawling toward her.

Nothing was going to stop her from reaching the ocean—especially not some big, ugly tree with teeth.

Weaver had pushed all his thoughts and worries aside the moment the launch tube doors opened.

He led the other two divers through the clouds, constantly checking the subscreen in the upper right corner of his HUD. The data was a jumble of meaningless characters because of the electrical currents they were passing through. The hair on his body prickled. He was giving the storm a run for its money, as he always did.

One day, the storm would win, but maybe not today.

Weaver was falling at 150 miles per hour. This was his eighty-ninth time reaching terminal velocity in his career as a Hell Diver. He had shattered all records but the one held by Xavier Rodriguez. And somehow, he continued to make it back from each dive. But part of that was due to the so-called safe dives Captain Jordan had assigned them. Jordan favored green-zone jumps, where the biggest threat was lightning. This was the first dive into a red zone in over a year, and now he wasn’t sure he would ever break X’s record.

Thunder boomed, farther away now. The storm had weakened, but sporadic lightning still flashed across his flight path. He bit down on his worn mouth guard. The piece of plastic should have been jettisoned from the Hive with the rest of the trash long ago. But he had kept it for sentimental reasons ever since the last dive from his home ship, Ares, when he lost everyone and everything but the equipment he was carrying.

He searched the clouds below for a glimpse of the city that could possibly harbor survivors. Janga had said that a man would lead them to the promised land, but the transmission from Hilltop Bastion had been a woman’s voice. Weaver hadn’t told any of the other divers about his visits to Janga. They wouldn’t understand. Worse, they might laugh at him. Hell, right now the prophecy looked silly to him, too.

The bed of wind pushed up against him as he slowly turned his body in the air to look for Andrew and Rodger. Both divers were to his east, the cool blue of their battery packs sparkling in the clouds. Weaver was glad Jordan had sent Rodger, but he feared that an extra team member wouldn’t be enough. He had no idea what they would find on the surface. Maybe there was a bunker full of supplies. Maybe Magnolia would be waiting for them, wondering why it had taken them so damn long to show up. Maybe Rodger would give her the toy he had made her, or whatever it was, and they would live happily ever after in the promised land. But for now, Weaver just needed to get his team safely to the surface.

As the storm weakened, the data on his HUD sorted itself out, and he bumped his chin pad. “Apollo One and Raptor Two, you guys okay?”

“I’m good,” Andrew replied.

Rodger let out a belch. “I don’t feel so good, Commander. I think I’m going to have—”

“Keep your cheeks clenched. That’s an order.” Hadn’t he just been thinking how glad he was about having Rodger along? The guy was brilliant, but he needed to figure out when it was time to be serious.

As the thunder waned, Weaver turned his mind to the next hazard. The landing could be just as deadly as the lightning. His neck ached as he tilted his head. Everything hurt when you were over fifty years old, especially if you had spent most of those years trying to get yourself killed.

His HUD showed an altitude of four thousand feet. They had to be getting close.

All at once, the city bloomed into view, outlined in green by his night-vision optics. He brought his arms out to his sides and bent his knees to pull up out of the nosedive and slow his descent.

The coordinates for the Hilltop Bastion were two miles east of here. Two miles of uncharted terrain in the middle of a red zone—a trek that didn’t exactly buoy him up with confidence.

At two thousand feet, he pulled his rip cord. The suspension lines tightened as the chute inflated and slowed his fall.

He licked the bottom of his handlebar mustache—a nervous habit he had developed over the years. He switched off his night vision to study the city with unaided eyes. He instantly saw something he had missed with the optics.

Andrew’s deep voice boomed over the comms. “Angel One, do you see what I’m seeing?”

Weaver blinked just to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks.

“Angel One?”

“Roger that, Pipe,” Weaver muttered. He blinked twice more. To the east, waves slapped against a rocky shoreline, but it wasn’t the ocean that Weaver was staring at. It was a tower not far from the water. A scraper pulsed red from the inside, as if it had a massive battery unit for a heart.

“What the hell is that?” Rodger said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Andrew replied.

The numbers on Weaver’s HUD ticked down. They were at one thousand feet now.

“We’re two miles off course,” he said. “Follow me.”

He grabbed the toggles and headed west, away from the ocean, but he couldn’t force his gaze away from the tower. The groves of glowing bushes were the only thing even remotely close to what he was witnessing, but even those didn’t compare to this.

“Commander, you think we should check that out?” Rodger asked. “What if it’s some kind of settlement?”

“Aw, hell no, man,” Andrew said. “That scraper may be a settlement, but it sure as shit ain’t humans.”

“Sir?” Rodger repeated.

“Negative. We proceed to the coordinates.”

The three divers came together in a V formation as they sailed over the ruined city. Weaver finally pulled his gaze away from the tower and did what he had promised he would do. Bumping his chin pad, he selected the open frequency. If Magnolia was out there, she would have her set tuned to the channel.

“Raptor 3, this is Angel One. Do you copy?”

Weaver raised his wrist-mounted monitor to check the coordinates again as a wave of static crackled inside his helmet. The noise didn’t surprise him. He had already resigned himself to the idea that Magnolia was dead. It was easier that way. Hope hurt.

“Princess, you out there?” he said, trying one last time.

White noise was the only reply.

“Magnolia,” Rodger said over the comms. “Please.”

They sailed over girders and piles of debris. Vehicles littered the streets below like the carapaces of dead insects. It was a sight all too familiar to Weaver. There was no way humans could have survived down there for centuries among the monsters and bombarded by all those rads.

There was no one to rescue down here. If they were lucky, they might find some salvage or a couple of fuel cells, but Weaver had already written this dive off as a waste of resources.

A wave of static broke, and a voice rang out over the channel.

“I’m here!”

Heavy breathing sounds filled the speakers, as if the person on the other side of the comms was running.

Weaver’s heart skipped.

“Princess, that you?”

“My name,” the voice panted, “is Magnolia Katib.”

There was a pause, and before Weaver could reply, she said, “I hope you brought me my two hundred credits, Angel One.”

He felt the smile crack below his mustache. “You’ll get a chance to win ’em back,” he said. “Relay your coordinates, and we’ll rendezvous.”

Several agonizing seconds passed before she replied, her words garbled by static.

“Vines are everywhere… I can’t get away…”

“Magnolia!” Rodger shouted. “We’re coming. Just hang on!”

Weaver snapped out of his trance. They were halfway to the coordinates of the Hilltop Bastion. He could see the raised earth in the distance, but Magnolia’s beacon wasn’t showing up on his minimap.

Weaver dipped his finger and thumb into his vest pocket and rubbed the old-world coin. He couldn’t very well flip it in the air right now, and it wasn’t going to help him decide what came next, but he found massaging the smooth surface with a gloved finger and thumb calming.

“Magnolia, relay your position,” Weaver said.

“I’m in a tower, but my monitor isn’t working!”

“What do you see? Give us something.”

“Vines. All I see are vines… and… the ocean. I can see the waves.”

Weaver’s eyes flitted from his HUD to the ground. Forced to make a decision, he said, “Pipe, you and Rodger head to the target. I’ll go find her.”

“Yes sir,” Andrew replied.

Another silent pause over the comms.

Rodger spoke next. “Bring her back, Commander, or I’m coming for you!”

Weaver pulled his right toggle and turned east toward the glowing tower. Magnolia didn’t need to respond with her coordinates. He had a feeling he was already looking at her position.