Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on our escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this Chapter:

4 – Welded Shut

It rains through the night. Those who choose to sleep in the bunker have a generally peaceful night of it. But not Flavia. One of the biggest holes in the roof is on the spine near the door, exposing the pitted I-beam to the elements and requiring two tarps to cover the rusted gaps in the corrugated steel on either side. She was the last one convinced to come inside the night before and that was only if she got the spot beside the door. But the wind picked up the corner of one of these tarps during the night and during gusts she got doused. First she cursed at the sky and the storm and her own ill luck that brought her to Lisica and keeps her here. But she just can’t find the energy to rouse herself and go out into the cold rain to lash it down again. Finally, she decides around 3 am to just relocate, dragging her sodden bedding further in beside Esquibel and Mandy. She notices they lie in an embrace, and how warm that must be. She misses her big dog Boris suddenly with a sharp intensity. Whenever she gets cold at home, the fat Alsatian jumps onto the foot of her bed and covers her legs with heavy warmth.

Flavia sleeps fitfully, finally glad to see the dawn light in the gaps beneath the tarp over the door. Standing, she yawns and stretches her aches and pains away. As far as she can tell she is the first one up. Flavia is surprised how few people took the option to get out of the rain. Jay remained out in his hammock, as did Maahjabeen in her tunnel tent. Pradeep trusted his pyramid. And Miriam and Alonso added a few tarps to their tent roof but remained in what Katrina refers to as their Love Palace.

Dawn light means no clouds, which also means no rain. Flavia steps clear of the huddled, sleeping bodies and peeks out the door. Perhaps she can find some caffeine out here in one of these bins….

Well well well. She isn’t the first one up at all. Down the beach, she can see Maahjabeen and Pradeep carrying the blue and yellow kayaks down to the shore.

Ξ

“I’ll stabilize you.” Maahjabeen puts the nose of her craft in the water and pushes Pradeep’s out to the edge. In his wide-brimmed nylon hat, long sleeve polo windshirt, and dark sunglasses he looks like a golfer. He buckles on the spray skirt and lifts the double-bladed paddle over his head like a weightlifter, stretching. She holds his boat stable as he slips neatly in and seals the skirt. Then she sends him off.

Pradeep glides out silently onto the lagoon with a private laugh. He loves kayaks. With powerful strokes, twisting from his hips, he propels the narrow craft out onto the water. These are pristine fiberglass boats, unbranded, with lines he’s never seen. They must be custom, worth thousands.

Maahjabeen, in her boat, scoots forward into the water. She calls out, “Now before we go any further, show me a roll.”

“What, now?” The chilling water has already spattered Pradeep’s hands and he is unprepared to face more.

“I said last night. Never again. She has brain damage, Pradeep. Now you promised me you all know how to paddle but ecch, I don’t really know. Show me.”

“Yes… You did say.” Pradeep tightens the leash on his sunglasses and grips the sides of his boat. With a grimace and a deep breath he rolls the boat upside down. What a shock it is, even when it is expected. Aach! He is too bony for such cold water. No fat to insulate him. Pradeep holds the paddle lengthwise as he’s been taught. Once he’s under, he leans as far back as he can in the seat and sweeps the paddle back and forth while rocking to roll him up the far side. It is relatively easy for him. He is strong and knows how to leverage his arms correctly. But he still comes up shivering and sputtering and shooting water out of his nose. “How’s that?” He finally manages one of his movie star smiles.

“Sufficient.” Maahjabeen paddles out past him, a half smile on her face. “Now stay behind me. I’ve never seen trickier currents.”

Pradeep is glad to get a bit of direct sun on his shirt. It might dry before this is over. But the wind chills him. He can do nothing but take deep breaths and remember his muay thai training. He flexes every muscle in his core, from his knees to his sternum, and flutter kicks his feet, anything to get himself going. Cold means adventure. He had read that in a popular book by the tracker Tom Brown. It was never more true than today.

“Do you think we are breaking any of Esquibel’s rules by being out here?” he asks Maahjabeen, considering this a neutral subject. “This is the first clear sky since we got here. Satellites could maybe see us out in the open here.”

“I don’t care about the satellites or any Hollywood nonsense.” Maahjabeen is irritated by the reminder that she might be secretly watched the entire eight weeks she is here. Her tent is too small for her to find any consistent privacy. And so far, the ocean is too wide. She paddles cautiously up toward the mouth of the lagoon. But she doesn’t like what she sees. By her calculations, this morning is their best chance over the next forty-eight hours to find a calm swell. Yet the rollers still crash against the breaks with uncommon force. It would take all her skill to get past the front rank of surf and then who knows how to navigate the three or four ranks behind. There are so many breaks out there and the waves are so strong she despairs of ever being able to escape the lagoon.

Maahjabeen never curses. Instead, she hisses. She grips her paddle with all her strength and hisses like an asp.

Pradeep, warmer now, pulls up close enough to hear her. But her frustration is easily understood. The water past the breaks would chew them to pieces. He wouldn’t go out there for love nor money. They surrender their greatest ambitions for the day and peel away from the current drawing them toward the lagoon’s mouth back into still water.

“Careful. Sea grass. The blades get tangled.” Maahjabeen steers them toward a clearer patch, where a liquid sound from ahead indicates that they just missed seeing someone pulling their head underwater who had been watching them.

“Otter? Sea lion?” Pradeep wonders aloud. “Did you see that?”

“I didn’t, but the otters are real rascals out here. I’ve watched them. No fear. I guess no one has hunted them for a long time. They are unlike most populations I’ve known. And so big.”

“Good eating here, I’m sure.” Pradeep looks down into the green murk, visualizing a coral ecosystem directly below of urchins and parrot fish, a sea otter’s ideal feeding grounds. Then he recalls the story of the girl swimming in Lake Shasta who disturbed a pack of nesting freshwater otters. She nearly died before she made it back ashore and required hundreds of stitches. He narrows his grip on his paddle so that his hands don’t reach over the sides.

They back-paddle, hovering in place. “Well, Alonso did say last night he wants us focusing on the lagoon and beach first.” Saying it aloud allows Maahjabeen to release some of her irritation. She will unlock the secrets of the ocean yet. If nothing else, she can follow the channel the Zodiacs used and skate away from this shallow shelf somehow far out into the blue water, but she’ll definitely need support for that. And a lot more research and observation. She once again drags her eyes from the horizon. “So. Here in the lagoon we might share some common goals, I think. You are a field biologist? Any marine biology?”

“Well, yes.” Pradeep immediately grows animated. The number of people he is able to share his enthusiasms with are very few. “Actually you could say it’s been about half my work. I’m neither terrestrial nor aquatic, which doesn’t help my grant proposals any. I have a very strange approach to the species I study. I really only like the weird ones, the ignored ones, the interconnectors that prop up whole ecologies. You could more properly say I’m a systems researcher. I like identifying these weird little ecological bottlenecks wherever I find them, in the sea or on the land or up in the clouds, and characterize them in detail for wider research communities. I’ve already gotten quite a few journal citations, even though as a junior researcher I’ve only had my name on a couple published papers. Parasites and nematodes.”

“You sound like Doctor Alonso.”

“Yes, Amy said he and I would get along famously. I can’t wait to hear more about Plexity. I’ve had similar ideas myself. And what about you? Are you much of a marine biologist yourself or are you strictly about the water and waves?”

“I am strictly about the water and waves,” Maahjabeen says. “And the weather, I suppose. For me, it is the dynamics of the moving water I care about. The fish and the birds and the sea lions, they are just…” she searches for the word, “passengers.”

“Ha. That’s a very unique perspective, I guess. More physics and less biology, I suppose. Well we should make a good team. If you find any interesting diploblasts let me know. And I’ve brought a fairly good USB microscope for seawater samples, among other things, because I’m getting into radiolarians these days.”

“And I suppose it is finally time for me to focus on lagoons and reefs and intertidal zones. My adviser told me someday I must.”

“That’s where my research takes me.” Pradeep skims the flat of his blade over the glassy blue-black water. “The edge of things. Where complexity happens. So many biologists, they are just census takers, you know? Count the herd. The flock. The swarm. I am more like… a criminal investigator. I follow lines of dependence through systems and biomes…”

“Yes yes. It is fascinating.” Maahjabeen’s voice is as flat as the water here. She swings her blade back and forth over its surface, restless. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the mouth of the lagoon but every time the passage clears of a wave another is already coming in, with such tall faces and sharp closeouts that she’s sure she’d be crushed or spun. Those just aren’t waves she can paddle over. “It didn’t look so bad from the ship, or the Zodiac.”

“Yeah,” Pradeep laughs. “Well, give me an outboard motor and like five times a kayak’s stability and I’ll get out there no problem. So…” he surveys the closest arm of coral that breaks the surface, “Shall we start there? You can tell me what you’ve learned about the lagoon and I’ll stop going on and on about my esoteric crap.”

Ξ

“Theory.” Jay kneels in front of Mandy, who sits cross-legged in the sand on a SpongeBob beach towel. “Like engineering theory. Mechanical engineering. Not science. Ready?”

She regards him, eyebrows raised, her consciousness taking its time detaching from the columns of data she’d been comparing.

“Sorry. Am I interrupting?” His eager smile fades, a crestfallen puppy. “I just thought you were someone who could—I heard you talk about building a guyed-out steel tower.” His enthusiasm builds again and his hands come up, describing each word and concept with deft fingers. “But listen: the tallest redwoods, those right there, are already a hundred meters high. And we might already have good reason to climb one. What do you think?”

“Just what are you proposing?” Mandy squints at the tousled and roguish California boy, wondering if he is at all like those jackals she had to contend with at UCLA. So far he hasn’t been lecherous at all, thank god. But what is he saying about the trees? She could put some instruments up near the top, still hidden from Skeebee’s satellites but providing much better meteorological data than what she is able to collect on the ground.

Jay holds up a persuasive hand. “I’ll do the climbing. All the dangerous stuff. Don’t worry about that. Stephen Sillett at Humboldt State developed a system, super safe, for climbing the trees without damaging them. He uses a crossbow to get fishing line over the lowest branches… but I don’t have a crossbow. Or ascenders. But, uh, I was just wondering if you had any ideas.”

“My ideas are usually to call the tower company and tell them where to install it.” Mandy feels hopelessly out of her depth. “I mean, could you like use some of the platforms from camp to build a scaffold to get you up to…? I don’t know. Why do biologists want to get up to the top anyway?”

“Let’s say I get ninety-five percent of the way up one of the big trunks, onto a solid platform where the major branches divide out. Look at the trees closest to the cliffs. Their tops can’t be more than like ten meters from the cliff. But the face is bare rock there. No more dirt or clay at that height. Then maybe I can build like a rope bridge from the trees to the cliff and…” He shakes his head and laughs. “Yeah, now that I say it out loud, it sounds less like a theory and more like…”

“Lunacy?”

“I guess. Unless you think of anything, Doctor Hsu. Well. Let me know. Also, the crowns of Coast redwoods are among the most dense ecosystems in the world. Hundreds of species up there just waiting to be discovered. That’s why. But I’m sure we’ll get to it sooner or later. Thanks for listening. See you on the flip side.”

And just like that he is gone.

Mandy, bemused, goes back to her work.

Ξ

Flavia returns to her tent on its platform to retrieve a battery pack. She has already set up a solar panel in the bare patch of sunlight beside the bunker. But she just discovered that the panel has two ports! So she will maximize her charging hours by filling two of her seven batteries at once. Her tent survived the storm relatively well. It only failed in one corner, where the damp found its way into her clothes and bedding. She will have to get those up and out next, to air them. But she wants the solar panels to… Wait. Flavia pauses her noisy activity and listens. Is that someone crying?

Emerging from her tent, she realizes it comes from the big platform beside her. Alonso is alone in there, his deep husky sobs shaking him. Without a thought, Flavia ascends the ramp and ducks into his tent.

She kneels beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Alonso. What is it?”

He turns, surprised it isn’t Miriam. He’d heard the creaking on the steps and anticipated the touch, but not the voice. His face is a storm. “Ah, Flavia. Thank you. It is just my poor feet. The pain. The doctors wanted me to stay on the opiates for the rest of my days but I wouldn’t. I can’t. I will not be a junkie. I will live with the pain instead.”

Flavia transfers her hands to his feet. She finds them red and swollen, misshapen with lumps where none should be. She just rests her hands lightly on them. “Your feet? What happened to your poor feet?”

“They broke the bones. Again and again. Ahh. Thank you. Just no harder than that. But thank you.” He takes a deep shuddering breath. “I have so many nightmares locked up in my feet.”

She feels electric tremors passing beneath his skin, a jagged disquiet that rises in her like nausea. Flavia wants to pull her hands away but that would be so cruel. So she takes a deep breath and tries to share a smile with him. “I am so sorry, signore dottore.”

“Being here. Doing our work. No dream could be better. Right, Flavia? Worth every bit of agony. So what do you think of the project now that you’ve taken a look at it?”

“Well.” She shifts and her knee rolls forward, crushing the ball of his left foot. Alonso roars in pain, his face squeezing shut. Flavia pulls her hands back, horrified, to her face. The sound coming out of him is a terrible and unending wail.

Miriam comes running. Amy appears from out of the bunker. Flavia pleads with them. “I didn’t—No, please! I was only trying to…” She stands and backs out of the tent. “Ai mi.”

Miriam pushes past her to Alonso’s side. “Amy, we need ice!”

“There’s a small electric cooler. It has a little. But we’ll need more. I guess it’s time to plug in the big one.”

Alonso rocks back and forth in Miriam’s arms like an infant. His eyes are closed, his face twitching, trapped in his trauma. Then he bellows, unable to hold it in any longer.

His release is volcanic, way out of proportion to the small injury to his foot. Flavia falls back, appalled, as he roars and roars. Alonso throws his head back, shredding his throat, years of horror ejecting itself. Amy rushes back up the ramp holding a white washcloth and a handful of ice. But she stops several paces short, stupefied by the outburst. She never knew one person could suffer so.

They all draw close from their platforms and from within the bunker. Esquibel approaches the distraught Flavia and puts a comforting arm around her shoulders. Flavia squeezes her hand in gratitude, but she can’t take her eyes from the big platform.

Finally, after minutes on end, Alonso’s roars lose their power. Finally he chokes on one and gasps in Miriam’s arms. She only rocks him. Now Amy slips in and places the ice within reach before withdrawing again. Alonso’s breath is ragged, still tortured. In her mind, Amy just keeps telling herself, he is a giant, such a giant, but a broken giant now. How can you even break a giant?

Ξ

Triquet stands in the door of the bunker, watching the camp return to a semblance of order. Today they wear a kilt over boxer briefs and their bare legs can only take so much sun. Their mind skitters away from the emotional power of the scene. In Rostov on Don they once toured an orphanage. They heard a child in a ward screaming down a long sterile hall like this. It still resides in their bones, that chilling sound. Now Alonso’s heartbreak would be with them forever as well. That poor man. What he must have endured.

Work. The answer, as always, is work. Work has gotten Triquet to see the world and placed them atop one of the most competitive fields in academic science and research. Work cures all.

And that means the door at the bottom of the stairs. “Where is Esquibel…?” they ask themself, trying to see what has become of her. She has left Flavia’s side, that’s all Triquet can tell. Pradeep is out on the water. Jay is gone. Miriam is… occupied. Maybe they’ll just have to open the door alone?

“That is a terrible idea.” And yet Triquet finds themself back inside the bunker at the top of the stairs holding their helmet and eyeing the door regardless. No water seeps from under its frame. Whatever exists down there, it remained dry through the night. That’s a comfort. More living space perhaps. At least a place to store gear…

Now they’re somehow on the bottom step, their fingers curling under the gap. “This is poor decision making, Triq.” Their voice breaks the spell. They laugh, rueful at their weak will when it comes to underground mysteries. “I can find someone to help. I can. Come on. Take five minutes to do this properly!”

Disturbed by the fugue state from which they just roused themself, Triquet arrows to Amy at the lab tables. She is putting together rows of trays for her specimen collections. “Any chance,” Triquet begins, “you feel like being the bait this time when I open the door?”

“Bait? What door? The door downstairs?”

“As far as I know,” Triquet drawls, looking around, “it’s the only actual door on the island.”

“I was thinking about that,” Amy says, putting the unordered piles of collection equipment back in a bin. “What if we move that door from downstairs, assuming it’s safe, to the front door here so the bunker can finally be closed up again?”

“Otherwise it’s coconut crabs all day and night?”

“Among other things.”

“Well, let’s go see, shall we?”

“Let me just tell…” Amy surveys the camp. “Where did Esquibel go? I don’t want to disturb Alonso and Miriam.”

“Good grief!” Triquet exclaims. “I’ll need to get the whole camp together again before that door is opened!” They look up at the sky. Their sunny morning is ending with a gray shawl drawing itself over the sky. “And if that means more rain Mandy will never let me in there!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

She follows them into the bunker and down to the bottom of the stairs, where Amy waits on one of the lower steps and watches Triquet test the movement of the door. It creaks a bit, stiff but still functional. “Well, here goes nothing.”

Triquet opens the door.

Darkness yawns before them. With a muttered curse, Triquet remembers to turn on the light and begin recording with the camera. A cone of yellow-white LED light illuminates an oval hatch and the dusty floor. Rusted metal panels cover the walls, ceiling, and floor. The room is narrow, cramped with bowed walls. It smells vaguely of oil and diesel, like an engine room. Assemblies of pipes and conduit run along the walls and a cluster drops from the ceiling to a spot in the center of the room where something used to stand. A single stanchion remains, but otherwise the metal panels sport eyelets for bolts that no longer attach to anything.

“So weird.” Triquet ducks through the hatch and breathes in the fumes among the otherwise clean air. “Some kind of wonky DIY adaptation here. This room used to be something else. And look.” Triquet enters the room, followed hesitantly by Amy. “Another door lock. Like in a ship.” The door on the far wall is a watertight portal with a wheel. But it hangs open. Triquet swings this door wide and peers further in. “Yeah, another room like this one. I wonder what they used it for? Come on. There’s another door.”

Amy hesitates at the second hatch. She doesn’t want to let the door and the stairs and the reflected daylight out of her sight. But Triquet crows with delight and beckons even more urgently. “The third room! Wardrobes and bunks! The jackpot! Still narrow. Like super narrow for living quarters. But there will be so many clues in here! Clues upon clues!” They touch a dented and dull piece of chrome that served as a mirror. Initials and phrases are etched in the corners in the immemorial language of graffiti.

Triquet crosses this third room to another hatch. This one opens on an extremely narrow hall. Triquet turns back to Amy, careful not to blind her with the headlamp. “Uhh, Doctor Kubota…?”

“What is it, Doctor Triquet?” Amy doesn’t like how shaken Triquet’s voice is. She presses her mouth into a thin line to overcome her fear of dark cramped spaces like this and stoops to step through the second hatch so she can keep them in view.

“This is, I mean, I think this is a submarine. Like a postwar sub. Probably diesel. Decommissioned and… what then? Buried at the beach? I mean, how? And why? Why would they put an entire submarine in the ground? This is crazy.” Triquet’s wild laugh echoes off the metal plates. They touch the closest one, feeling the accumulated grime.

“We should tell the others.” Amy’s voice is as sober as it gets.

Triquet nods at her, eyes wide.

Ξ

“My guess,” Miriam says as they have another meeting around the long tables while eating a late lunch, “is that Lisica may have become a place for the US military to get rid of a piece of kit they no longer wanted. Maybe the sub was some top-secret prototype?”

“Then why didn’t they just dismantle it at one of the shipyards?” Among them all, it is Esquibel who is reacting the most strongly to this news. She knows how militaries operate and it isn’t safety first. Her initial thought had been to geiger counter the entire beach, but nobody had the forethought to bring radiation sensors. Why would they? “Wait. Triquet. You said you carried a radon sensor. Radon is a kind of natural background uranium decay that leaks from rocks, isn’t it? We can perhaps use it to test the bunker for any nuclear fuel or weapon leakage.”

“I’m telling you it was a postwar diesel sub.” Triquet is unshaken by the possibility they were exposed to radiation. “I’ve seen Operation Petticoat enough times to recognize a Gato-class sub…”

“Actually…” Amy interrupts them, consulting her laptop. “I can’t find a clear floorplan for any of the subs you’re talking about, Triquet, but it definitely isn’t Gato-class. The layout is all wrong. Maybe a Balao or Tench-class from the late-forties instead. Those are still diesel. Anything later than that is much bigger, and that’s when they added nukes.”

“I still think we should scan the island.” Esquibel fights down a rising worry that complacency among the others might just lead to a catastrophe. “As the medical doctor here, please don’t make me deal with radiation poisoning for two months. Just run the test.”

Triquet shrugs. “Fine. But we may want to add like a flange or nozzle to the sensor or something so it isn’t just sampling ocean breezes blowing by. Maybe a control reading in the bunker is our best bet. I’ll get right on it.” They inhale the last bite of their cous-cous, daintily wipe the corners of their mouth, and depart.

Now it is down to seven around the table. Maahjabeen and Pradeep still paddle the lagoon. They’ve been out for hours. Nobody can find Jay. And Alonso still occupies his tent, a forearm flung across his eyes.

“Lastly, ladies…” Miriam nods at them. Her smile is unsteady and her voice is low. “I’d like to thank everyone for your patience and support with…” she waves a forlorn hand at the big platform, “…this. All of this. I didn’t know what I would find and he is… he is very damaged. But this work is not about Alonso. He wouldn’t ever want that. It’s about the system he created, the interdisciplinary classifications that we must always be thinking about, working on.”

“Miriam, I am so so so sorry. I didn’t even realize I was touching his poor foot when I just shifted, just the tiniest—!” Flavia claps her fingers over her mouth.

Miriam consoles Flavia with a calm hand on her shoulder. “No no. If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else. It was bound to happen. I think you… he is filled with poison and you popped the swollen thing and perhaps let it start to drain. It was inevitable and necessary and I hope you don’t hold it against yourself.”

“Grazie, dottore.” Flavia wipes tears away. “I felt so horrible.”

Amy appears at her elbow. “Tea?”

“Oh my god you always do this,” Flavia laughs. “Yes, of course, let me join the club of those who have been shamed publicly so Amy has to make it up with tea. And lots of sugar if you have it.”

The others laugh as Amy scurries off.

Triquet returns, holding up a small unit with a silver lcd screen. “Like I said. All clear. No trace of uranium upstairs or downstairs or anywhere around the bunker. Or, at least, according to a radon sensor I bought on Amazon. This isn’t its intended use at all. So can we rest easy? And get back to exploring the sub?”

Nobody can think of any more objections. With murmurs of excitement, Esquibel, Amy, Mandy, and Miriam disperse to their tents to collect their things, then follow Triquet into the bunker.

Ξ

Flavia remains, sipping her tea glumly. Katrina stares into the middle distance, brooding.

“Well,” Flavia says, “even though the environment here leaves a lot to be desired, eh? The people… the people are very much top notch. Especially after Esquibel calmed down, no?”

But Katrina hardly hears her. Only after a long moment does she say, “Sorry. I’m back now. You said something?”

“No. Just complaining. I feel like I’m the only one complaining here and everyone else is having the time of their lives. Is that how it is for you?”

“Totally. I’m absolutely having the time of my life.” Katrina flashes Flavia a sweet smile. “How about an actual real honest-to-Satan underground rave tonight? In a decommissioned sub buried ten meters deep? I mean, yes please, that is absolutely a legend waiting to happen.”

Flavia frowns at her. “I don’t understand you, Katrina. Is that what you are spending all your time here thinking about? Alonso said you are some great thinker, but so far I don’t see you thinking about anything very much, if you will excuse me.”

“Oh, I’m not thinking about that, Flavia. That’s just a fun little party plan. I’m actually thinking about Miriam and Mandy. And Maahjabeen. Ha. All the M ladies of the project! I’m thinking that it’s easy to say that Alonso brought a geologist because she is his wife but why did he bring an atmospheric scientist and an oceans researcher? It means he must be very serious about mapping the context of every biological classification in time and space, in what he believes constitute the matrices of his life network. Now, Lady Miriam’s already dropped the panspermia word so I don’t think there’s any model I can propose at this point that will be too wacky for this crew but still, we’re going full Gaia hypothesis here if I’m not mistaken and I’m all for it. But what I’m beginning to think now is about your programming, Flavia, and how your greatest challenge will be somehow fixing his data within the context of sea and sky, you know what I mean? And rock too, if you’ve heard Miriam talking about the extremophiles living in bedrock. So we’ve got these fluid surfaces to place our networks on, dynamic and moving, exchanging information and energy themselves. I can see one of your biggest challenges will be some bespoke algorithms that are able to account for this fluidity. That’ll be quite the puzzle. I might be able to help you with that. I’m not a horrible maths girl, but most of my work has been in topology, security stuff for the Australian Defense agencies. Now how can we most simply and elegantly adapt Alonso’s ivory tower thought processes to systems that work in the real world, which by necessity means in real time because anything else will be an intolerable reduction of data to an almost unusable set. So you’ve got to keep it lean, with the user inputs minimal but information-rich, and I’m thinking where I might help best is in some data visualization for the end user, giving them the feedback they need in the field to record better data and interact with their sites more effectively. Maybe some pop-up windows onscreen hosted by cute little animals? That would be too dear. So yeh. In the end I guess I’ve been thinking more about you, Flavia, than anyone.” Katrina’s smile is innocent.

Flavia shakes her head, bemused. “Yes, I see. I see that you’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. That is good. Ha. What an interesting young person you are, Katrina.”

“Oh, come on. I can’t be more than six years younger than you! Let’s just say I’m young at heart. And I’m sorry you were the one who popped Alonso’s poison balloon. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Oh my god I wanted to kill myself. I had no idea…”

“I knew it. I knew it was coming. I just thought it would be with Miriam, of course. But nobody can handle it when it happens…” Katrina shivers as a nasty dark memory slithers through her.

“You’ve gone through this before?” Flavia realizes. “Ai me.”

“My brother. He was in the gulag with Alonso. They met there. Pavel was released first. He… They went through all the same things. Endless interrogations. Electric shocks. Beatings.”

“Why did the Russians do it?”

“We’re not sure who was running the camp. I mean, Pavel was sent to the gulag by the Russians for trying to film a documentary in Saint Petersburg. But no one knows much about the camp itself. There was a guard, Gerasim, who befriended Pavel. He told him the gulag he was in didn’t belong to any one country. They were a bandit group in the Altai mountains right at the intersection of four countries, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China. Hired themselves out to anyone, I guess. Well, we scraped together a ransom and got Pavel home about a year ago. But he didn’t just have one bad night like that, by the way, screaming like that. Many many nights. Though he’s starting to get better now.”

“My god.”

Katrina unwraps a piece of bubblegum and pops it in her mouth. She starts braiding her hair. “Pavel kept in touch with Gerasim, funny as that might sound. And though he wouldn’t talk about much of what happened at the gulag, Pavel would tell me of this amazing Cuban scientist he met in there, and how his fascinating theories would make the hours speed by. I found his information theory so fascinating. So I began writing to Gerasim too. Because that’s how my own brain works. And Alonso and I became, like… I mean, he’s basically my best friend. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about all the things I think about except him. And he’s the only one who understands what Pavel is going through.”

“So what are your advanced degrees?”

Katrina shrugs. “Crystallography and French modernism. I can’t seem to settle on one thing. Still, in all my departments I never found people who talked about the world around them the way he does. I guess, I’m basically his groupie.”

“No, from the way he talks about you it is obvious that he is yours. Crystallography and French Moderns? What kind of crazy brain do you have?”

Katrina cocks her head and gives Flavia the full elfin effect. “The craziest.” She kisses Flavia on the forehead and skips away.

Ξ

Triquet leads the line of explorers down the trap door’s stairs and through the first three rooms. They follow in silence, swinging their own headlamps and flashlights at the walls.

They stop at the third hatch, leading to the cramped hallway. “This is as far as I got,” Triquet says. “This is when I realized where I was. I bet these are like warrant officer rooms and radio and captain’s quarters along this hall here.”

“How do you know so much about submarines?” Amy asks.

“No more than I know about anything else. I’m just an item fiend, doll. Old, new, big, little. If I didn’t have any scruples I’d just work for Tiffany’s or Christie’s or something. If it’s been made by human hands, I’ll know at least a bit about it. That’s my kink.” Triquet winks at Amy and steps into the hall.

The doors along the left wall are narrow steel panels, rusted nearly black. Triquet taps on one of them and it echoes, hollow. “I swear,” they sigh, “this just becomes more and more of a horror movie set every day. Hello? Housecleaning.” Triquet knocks and opens the door. They whistle when a desk is revealed, its drawers open and empty. Triquet steps in and tries to turn on the desk lamp. It clicks but remains dark. “I mean, of course. That would be so wild if it actually had power.” Amy watches them from the door. Miriam slips past her to the next door. “Excuse me, dear ones. You can take peeks but please don’t handle anything you see until Captain Archaeology here gets a chance first.”

“Of course, Doctor Triquet.” Miriam sings it out cheerily but in the metal hallway underground there is an unsettling flatness to its echoes. She tries to open the next door. “Locked. Or sealed shut somehow. What did you say this one is? Radio room?”

Triquet steps back into the hall. “I’m really just guessing. But there has to be a control room up here. Periscope and conning tower and all that, right?”

“Wouldn’t a conning tower be aboveground?” Esquibel still doesn’t trust this wreck and refuses to touch anything.

Mandy turns and turns, the last one at the rear. “Which way are we faced here? West? This is still west. It was the west side of the bunker and then we extended out west, maybe southwest?”

“Yeah, directly west means trees and taproots,” Amy says. “I’m guessing the sub extends under the beach instead. So we’re kind of at an angle to the shore?”

Mandy says, “Maahjabeen will be so upset when she finds out someone else brought a boat without asking her.” They all laugh. Mandy blushes at her own joke, made at the expense of someone not here. “But maybe there will be some oceanic or naval records for her here. Maybe some weather data for me.”

Amy opens the third door. It is the Captain’s wardroom. A thin veneer of wood paneling is peeling away, but it’s the first color they’ve seen down here besides gray and black. A low bunk is built against the back wall. A built-in desk against the right-hand wall is closed, its top folded up. The chair is against the back corner. It almost looks lived in. Amy tests the mattress. It crackles.

Everyone else crowds the doorway, looking in. “No touching!” Triquet reminds Amy.

“Right. Sorry. I just needed to see if it’s better than my sleeping pad. Cause this is looking pretty cozy down here if you ask me.”

Mandy is still drawn by the siren song of weather logs possibly kept in the control room. She steps toward the hatch at the end of the hall, finding it cracked open. It swings open silently on oiled hinges. She ducks down and sweeps her flashlight through the larger chamber. Yes, the control room has workstations with the screens and vacuum tubes removed. And in the corner are rusted file cabinets. She reacts more strongly than she thought she would to see the periscope column. “Oh, I’m too much of a pacifist to be in this thing for very long, that’s for sure.”

“What did you find?” Mandy didn’t expect Esquibel’s voice so close behind her and she startles, stifling a scream.

“Don’t sneak up on me down here, Skeebee! It’s too creepy!”

They edge their way into the control room. “No spiders, no worms, no signs of life at all. The hull must still be intact.” Esquibel skirts a rusted grate and opens one of the file cabinet drawers to find it empty. “So crazy. This is like stepping back in time. The control rooms of today look nothing like this. I’ve only been on a sub once, a decommissioned one at Diego Garcia. But the control room was like a penthouse suite compared to this.”

“Again with the touching.” Triquet stares their disapproval at Esquibel’s hand on the file cabinet drawer handle. She recoils, guilty, and steps away from it, dusting her clothes. Triquet slowly enters, taking in every detail, their camera recording it all. “Oh, baby.” They clap their hands, doing their best Daffy Duck. “I’m rich! I’m wealthy! I’m independent! I’m financially secure! Is this why Alonso brought me? It must be. Did he know about any of this? Why oh why did they bury this thing in the sand…?”

Miriam, stepping through the hatch, says, “He never said a thing about a submarine in our emails. I got precisely two from him, each three paragraphs. I can recite them from memory, if you like.” She stands and grins, turning on a lantern function on her flashlight that provides bright yellow diffuse light to fill up the room. “There. That’s better. There’s not even any mold down here. I still don’t understand where the air is coming from.”

“Where’s the fire torpedo button?” Amy inspects the conning tower, its oiled hydraulics now clotted with black grease. “Don’t want to do anything crazy here.”

Mandy laughs. “Poor Maahjabeen and Pradeep! Just boating around the lagoon and all of a sudden the beach blows up!”

“It’s… this one?” Triquet frowns at the cluster of buttons and switches below the conning tower faceplate. “Frankly, this is me just using Hollywood as reference again. Always a bad idea. It could be over on that wall somewhere for all I know.”

Mandy sniffs the air. “It is fresh though.” She shares a nod with Miriam. Encouraged, she crouches and tries to follow the gentle air currents. She’d show them that a meteorologist can still be helpful, even underground! Nobody understands convection like she does! It’s one of her favorite atmospheric dynamics! She crosses the control room to the far hatch. This one is still sealed.

No, air issues from the grate below her feet. She kneels on it, finding it still quite solid, and spreads her hands over the gaps. The voices of the others recede as she focuses on the gentle movement of the air, which rises up from the grate. Then after a moment it stops. “Why did it stop?”

That silences the room. “The air?” Miriam asks.

Mandy feels the air sucked gently out of the room now, in a reverse exchange that reminds her uneasily of a giant creature’s respiration. She stands and nods. “Yeah. I’m, uh, not sure we should open that door, Doctor Triquet.”

Triquet, at the hatch, turns lazily away. “Can’t anyway, darling. This is the end of the line, It’s welded shut.”