Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera 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:

6 – Rolling Her Eyes

Katrina stands alone on the beach holding the complex controller. The fully-assembled drone crouches at her feet, black rods and spindles extending a meter along every axis. It is afternoon, gray and gloomy. The sea mutters in the lagoon, sending choppy little waves up the dark sand.

Inside the bunker, Pradeep had set up a widescreen monitor for everyone to watch. Then he retreated to his platform outside, to monitor the web app on his laptop for Katrina while she drives. Only Maahjabeen is outside with him. She sits on the edge of her platform with a heavy pair of binoculars and a tablet, taking measurements, watching a line of buoys she set on the lagoon, trying to untangle the oscillations of the ocean’s local interactions with land. The interior of the island is the least of her concerns.

“And away we go…!” Katrina whoops and gently pulls on the joystick, lifting the drone smoothly into the air. “Ah ha ha haaa! Such power!” It rises with a loud whirr, slicing the air. She engages the other joystick, just a touch, and the drone climbs at a steep angle toward the trees and the cliff.

“See what I mean?” Jay asks the room. “Those redwoods are at least a hundred meters. Look at those split trunks! So massive, even at this height! The tallest one on record is over a hundred fifteen!”

“Don’t get too close!” Alonso bellows out the door. “That whole drone package was like the second line on my budget!” He turns to everyone crowded around the monitor. “The gimbal alone to move the camera around cost like three thousand dollars. And the camera lenses? Don’t get me started.”

“You always complain about budgets.” Miriam pats his hand. “But drones like this didn’t even exist five years ago. Be happy for what you have, you old grump.” The drone clears the crowns of the trees and the cliff scrolls upward, dark and fractured. Miriam leans in. “And there it is! Finally! We’re recording this, right?”

Amy calls out, “You’re recording all this video, right, Prad?”

“In 4K!” He finds a button that allows a column of data to be displayed on the bunker’s monitor. GPS coordinates, battery life, windspeed. The altitude climbs above two hundred meters.

“Yes…” Miriam breathes. “The clarity is extraordinary. I might be able to do a proper visual exam from the ground with this tool.”

“If we could only graft a shovel onto its gimbal,” Amy laughs, “Miriam would never need to leave her camp chair.”

Up, up, up it goes, everyone silent. Jay shakes his head at the size of the cliff. It reminds him of El Capitan in Yosemite. He never would have gotten to the top. Falling to his death would have been far more likely. The drone clears a false cliff’s edge at around three hundred-eighty meters, the rounded shoulder’s flats obscured by dense shrubs. Then the true wall rises behind it.

Miriam jumps to her feet. “Here! See? I knew it! Actual igneous spine there exposed on the left! Weathered and worn. Must be ages old. Volcanic origin. Now I can start working on a model. Finally.”

Movement on the cliff face, a blur of gray. “Wait! Stop! There! There!” Amy squeals. “Back! Down! Oh, hurry! Didn’t you see it?Who’s controlling the camera?”

“What?” Katrina calls out. “I can. I think both of us can.”

“Down! We saw a mammal! Please!”

Katrina stops the drone’s ascent and the camera tilts and swivels. “Where?” she asks.

“No, it’s already gone,” Jay groans.

“What was it?” Pradeep asks, scrubbing through the captured video in a separate window. All he catches is a blur of something with the general dimensions of a domestic cat. But it’s gone now. They can’t find it again. It’s vanished into a crevice or hole.

“Lisica!” Katrina calls out. “Fox Island! Now onward! Upward!” She lifts the drone again, eager to get to the top.

“Yes…” Alonso breathes, like he’s watching a football match and the striker is nearing the goal. “Yes…!”

The last of the cliffs, fringed in green coastal grasses and thick trees, finally vanish beneath. They can see nothing now but a gray vault above. Then the camera tilts down from the sky and the entirety of the isle is finally revealed.

As one they all lean in. The bunker fills with their exclamations and sighs of pleasure. Lisica is magnificent, folds of dark green forests dropping into deep canyons. It is like a great emerald jewel, faceted a million-fold, cast carelessly into the gray-blue sea. The folds continue on, dropping and rising in a multitude of ridges and valleys. Soft gray light only makes the greens more deep.

Alonso knows more of the island than the others. He saw a hand-sketched map once in a meeting with Baitgie and his consultants that they wouldn’t let him keep. But even he is astounded by the complexity of the interior. He realizes he had expected the cliffs to be like some simple rim of an elongated bowl, with a single river running its length carving one valley within. But in reality there are uncountable rivers and streams down there, each with its own slot canyon or wide valley, all overlapping and undercutting each other to leave isolated spires crowned by redwoods and bare brown cliffs dropping into shadow.

“This looks exactly like the Santa Cruz Mountains.” Jay sweeps his uninjured hand across the features. “Super deep canyons, all in a maze. So easy to get lost. And the steepest climbs. If there aren’t any trails in there then, yeah. That’s gonna be an adventure for sure. No wonder the helicopter crews came back with nothing.”

“I mean,” Triquet sniffs, “where did they even land? I’ve seen Chinese landscape paintings with more level ground.”

“Oh, but it’s so beautiful,” Amy sighs. “And this is probably as close as we’ll ever get to see it. So pristine. Ah, well. I’m just glad spots like this still exist in the world.”

Katrina patrols the edge of the cliff, the drone never out of direct line of sight. It has a return-home function if the signal is lost but she doesn’t want to test it out unless it’s necessary.

Now Mandy points at the screen. “Oh my god! I wondered if the forests were large enough to generate their own weather patterns. Look at that moisture column riding up the thermal there. Yay. This place is going to change every weather model at NOAA!”

“The battery is at thirty-five,” Miriam calls out with worry.

“Yeh, the show is over, folks!” Katrina takes one last sweeping pass across the top of the cliffs. “Any particular way you want me to come down?”

“Safely!” Alonso answers.

“Bring it down the waterfall!” Jay calls out.

“Ooo neat!”

The drone swings aside toward its new goal. Yet the waterfall doesn’t appear. “Where is it?” Pradeep stands and crosses the beach with his laptop to stand beside Katrina so he can get a clear view of the drone.

She pilots it downward at an angle to the east, trying to intersect the line of water that must at some point lead to the falls. But the cliffs are less monolithic here, and break up into a cluster of tiny rills at the top covered by what look to be madrone trees.

Only by pulling back from the edge and getting an angle nearly a kilometer wide can they finally spot the waterfall spewing from beneath the trees at a spot nearly a hundred meters below the top of the cliffs. Katrina descends, following the falling spout through the soaring terns and gulls, until the redwoods from below hide it from view and with a happy sigh she brings the drone in for a bumpy landing at her feet.

Ξ

Flavia wrestles with Plexity. Alonso’s design document was a mess and it has taken a week just to rewrite it as a list of actionable bullet points that actually make sense and aren’t riddled with internal logic errors. Now she is building the architecture of the program in earnest, testing different modules she always keeps on hand as off-the-shelf solutions to many of its features. She is having modest success, plugging away at her laptop in the bunker sitting beside everyone else, when the magnitude of the island is revealed to her on the drone’s monitor.

It ruins her mood. Not just the enormity of it but the… texture. The mind-numbing complexity. Ah. That is where he got the word. Flavia is fluent but incurious with her English. It isn’t nearly as interesting a language as Python, for example. But no language ever invented can encompass this island. Impossible. So stupid. How can she hope to model all that in Plexity? With only seven weeks left? Alonso is a madman. Mathematics isn’t an employee you can browbeat to follow your deadlines. It is all so hopeless. His outsized ambitions are bounded by the unbreakable laws of nature and time itself.

“And if it were me,” she mutters, deleting a column of code that can be done better, more neatly, elsewhere, “that would be a cask of Nebbiolo instead of that French syrup.”

With the drone landed and the monitor off, the crowd disperses. Flavia sighs, needing a break, needing a change of headspace or scenery or something. Maybe she will take another shower. When Esquibel had told her half an hour ago that the waterfall water was testing clean but she still wanted a stool sample, Flavia had simply stared at her, wrestling with an unreasoning fury, fighting the impulse to call a lawyer.

As everyone departs the bunker, Amy hangs back, hearing the ragged emotion in that sigh. She returns to bow at Flavia’s elbow. “Flavia, I’ve got a nice—”

“No! Basta! No tea! No pity! None of your manipulation, please! You have something to say to me, Amy, you say it to my face!”

“Ah.” Amy blushes and stammers. “I didn’t… I’m sorry. I was just going to ask if you’d like a space of your own.”

“Obviously! I would like nothing more.”

“I’ve been working on these panels. To give people privacy in here. And I was wondering if you’d like a spot with a window—”

“Is there glass in this window?” Flavia stands and allows Amy to lead her to the near wall beside the door.

“Well, it’s this window.” The frame is rusted and a mineral stain in the concrete makes it look ill. It hasn’t held glass in ages.

“Then no. And no, I don’t want it.”

“Okay then let’s just move you further down the wall. Would you like to be next to the kitchen?”

“Of course not! That would be too loud.”

“Yes. Then between them. A little cubicle right here. Maybe the same size as Esquibel’s clean room?”

More protests die on Flavia’s lips. It is no use being irate when the other person is just so soft about everything. It is like punching a pillow. And it only makes her feel less understood and more alone. “Fine. Here will be fine. Thank you for making the panels.”

Katrina walks through the door of the bunker holding the drone. She is crowing in triumph, a wordless happy sound. “Did you see? Did you see it all?” She places the controller beside the monitor and claps her hands. Then she works on disassembling the drone enough for it to fit under the table.

Behind her, the sun suddenly blazes through the door. Amy laughs, “Well doesn’t Katrina just brighten a room!”

It’s the first time the sun has broken through in several days and it draws all of them outside. They find Alonso in his camp chair with Miriam dancing around him. He already has a glass of wine in his hand and his phone plays a torrid Cuban ballad. Miriam sings along…

No se que tiene tu voz que facina
No se que tiene tu voz tan divina
Que magico vuelo de traje consuelo a mi corazon

Her hands flutter around him, caressing him. He nods along to the old standard, the sun on his face. He can’t recall the last time he was this happy. Miriam is as stunning as ever. The island has finally unlocked its secrets. And the wine is getting even softer on his tongue. He kisses her fingers as they trail across his beard. Suddenly he has the impulse to cut it off. He wants to feel her hand against his cheek like he used to. But he doesn’t even have a razor. He will have to ask someone else. For now, he watches his wife remind him of her indescribable beauty. She is so long and lean, with classic lines. Her strong profile and soulful eyes have always reminded him of a silent film star. She is like Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, an imposing legend of a woman. She sways, sinuous and laughing, around him. Ah, he missed her so much!

Someone re-fills his glass before he can empty it. What a magical time. These young scientists are the future. And the future for once is looking so bright. Why, the sun has come out to celebrate with them! Even the sea lions are singing again!

Maahjabeen is called by them, drawing her away from the loud celebration. She stalks down the beach toward the small colony, noting their new positions on the rocks. Steller Sea Lions are the most massive pinnipeds she’s ever seen, three meters long and a thousand kilos. They could snap her kayaks in half. She will have to steer clear of their favorite spots until she knows them better.

The sun is already low, angling into her eyes as she studies the water. It is so lovely in the afternoon light, crystals sparkling from its edges as a deep blue gelid hue rises from the depths. The water murmurs to her liquidly and the little waves chatter and crump. And then her eye catches movement from the surf beyond the lagoon. A tall black curved dorsal fin.

She recognizes that silhouette. It’s a killer whale. No wonder the sea lions are up on the rocks so close to the humans who disturbed them. They are seeking refuge from hunting orcas.

Fantastic! She has never been in waters that orcas inhabit. This is a tremendous sighting. She should tell the biologists, but she has no impulse to share it with anyone. At least for now… The relationship Maahjabeen has with the ocean is very private and personal. This is like her spirit animal, if she had one, rising from the deep to tell her she is in the right place, on the right path. This curved dorsal fin looks like death to the sea lions but to her it is a sign from God.

Also, it means that there is a navigable route through all that crashing surf. She just needs to paddle like an orca to find it. She laughs at herself. That’s all. Just be like the most powerful swimmer in the ocean. Ha.

Oh, this entire place transforms in the sunlight!

Ξ

“There isn’t much we can do with all the pre-packaged crap but I do try to be creative.” Amy works in the kitchen, dropping a half dozen packages of ramen in a pot at a rolling boil.

Esquibel watches her, arms crossed. She’s never been much of a cook herself. It’s one of those skills she has set aside for others so she can be a proper specialist. Also, whenever she imagines herself bending over the stove she flashes on her grandfather abusing her grandmother with words and blows while she cooked for him. The outrage for this injustice still constricts her chest. And it keeps her out of the kitchen. “I am hoping that a biologist like yourself will not mind if I bring up the subject of human waste while you cook.”

“Well.” Amy wrinkles her nose. “I’ll try not to let it change how I season things. Here. Stir.”

Esquibel takes the wooden spoon from Amy with the air of a sulky teen. She swirls the noodles in the pot while Amy shaves a ginger root with a scalpel-sharp paring knife. “The trench is nearly full. And it is abominable. Not everyone has been good about using the sand to cover their messes.”

“Biggest non-secret in camp, that’s for sure.”

“We need a second trench.”

“We need a bioreactor. Then we can keep using the same trench, at least until we get something more civilized set up some day.”

“Yes, and we need indoor plumbing too but we aren’t getting it any time soon. I don’t know what you mean by bioreactor, though it sounds… experimental. We need a new trench. So I’m consulting you, as the senior field biologist, where you would like us to dig it.”

“Hmm. Well I’ve never been happy about how close that one was to the seasonal tributary that runs about twenty meters away. Let me ask Jay. Nobody has covered more ground here than he has. And let’s think about wind issues. We can’t have it upwind, wherever upwind is. So maybe we should talk to Mandy. Also, it will need to have a plentiful supply of sand nearby. Huh. What a long list. That’s tricky.”

Amy adds chiffoned carrot and a few herbs from a row of jars to an oil infusion in a bowl. Esquibel realizes this will be a process instead of an actual answer. “Well, I will get that started then.” She hands the spoon back to Amy and heads outside to find Mandy.

Esquibel skirts the celebration. She doesn’t nearly ever drink wine or smoke drugs. The whole public display of private emotion like this is discomforting. Why can’t people handle their business themselves without turning everything into a music show?

She finds Mandy crouched beside the kayaks with Maahjabeen, who is giving her much the same energy Esquibel brought into the kitchen. Tough African women, she laughs to herself. Always asserting ourselves. Never given power. Whatever we have, we have to take. She offers a formal nod to the young Tunisian oceanographer, in respect.

“Oh, hey, Skeebee. No, Maahjabeen, the problem is I don’t know how to do the roll thing. In Hawai’i it was all open deck boats. You’d just fall off into the water all the time.”

“Then I am afraid I will not be taking you out onto any of these waters, no matter how calm they are. These are my personal craft, that I brought to Japan for a specific project along the Kagoshima coast. They are my babies.”

“Oh, I totally understand. I love my gear, like, so much. I’m just trying to figure out how I can ever get out of this protected little cove here to take some real measurements. I need to get out and feel the wind!” Mandy stands and stretches, exposing her golden skin to the shuddering breeze. The long flag of her black hair flares out. Esquibel feels a deep stirring again within her. She loves Mandy so much. But she also lusts for her in ways she never really has for any other woman. It is such a deep animal impulse she is embarrassed about it. She’s never spoken of it, not even to Mandy. She only showed her once or twice in the past, getting rougher in bed than the dear Hawaiian girl ever wanted. Esquibel had pulled back then, and she will always keep that animal on a chain, coiled deep in her loins. She is a modern woman—not a beast.

Esquibel asks and Mandy falls silent, taking her question about the placement of the new trench very seriously. Maahjabeen can’t be bothered and stalks away. But she does respond with her own nod to Esquibel as she departs. Finally, Mandy says, “Well, my biggest problem is that the local effects of the cove here form a wind column, our very own thermal that’s heated by the lagoon and dark sand and swirls around as it rises. See, it’s the swirling I’m most concerned about.”

Esquibel realizes this isn’t going to be a simple answer at all. She sighs, pulling a wayward strand of straight black hair from Mandy’s eyes. “You know, I grew up watching Gilligan’s Island on TV for the English. They were all wrecked on an island together. And they never talked about where they left their waste. Not once. It never occurred to me it’d be such a huge issue until I joined the Navy.”

Mandy shrugs. “When I’m on hikes like in Waipi’o Valley you’re just supposed to squat anywhere below the high tide line. But if we did that here, Maahjabeen would tear our throats out.”

“With her sharp claws.”

Mandy leans in, coy. “I think she’s single, though. No ring. And a nomad lifestyle. I mean, uh-huh, girlfriend.”

Esquibel laughs. “Is your gaydar tingling again?”

“I’m just saying. Sharp claws make her… interesting.” Mandy gives Esquibel an impish smile and leans into her. “She isn’t mean or anything. She just wants respect.”

“Don’t we all, sister.” Esquibel gets another idea. “I will go ask Triquet. They may have an idea as an archaeologist. Where would they expect to find a trench here? If you observational scientists can’t help me, maybe the historical record can.”

Ξ

Evening falls and Amy’s ramen is shared and appreciated. The wine makes the rounds as Katrina spins her lush lounge music. The number of crabs that crowd the beaches has dramatically decreased since their first few nights, though the bold ones still scuttle around the edge of the light, in automatic scavenging mode.

Alonso remains in his chair. His wine glass is miraculously never empty. He is profoundly drunk, for the first time in years. Miriam squirms in his lap in the most pleasing way. Katrina, that elf, plays the nicest music. So relaxing. And now the stars are out. The evening star and the crescent moon. Venus is so green it is almost painful to behold. In a few hours the Milky Way will be booming across the sky. But in a few hours he will not be awake to see it. He will pass out. And soon. No. First he needs to relieve himself. He puts a hand on Miriam’s waist, interrupting her conversation with… who is that behind him? Ah. Amy. Of course. The three of them back together again, just like before. Ahh. Like destiny!

“What is it, Zo?” Miriam cups his face and kisses him.

“Bladder.”

“Ah!” She twists herself off him and beckons to Amy. “Help me get him up. Where are we going?”

But the wine makes him proud. “No no. I am fine. Just help me up. I can do the rest myself.”

Amy clucks in disapproval. “It’s pretty dark out there, Lonzo.”

They heave on him and the pain shoots through his feet and up his legs. He shudders, the torture still echoing through him, but he shakes it off with a grimace and starts shuffling toward the closest bank of shadows. And they still guide him by the elbows! Alonso pulls his arms away and draws himself up, clasping himself closely around the pain. It is his. They wouldn’t understand. It is all he has to himself now. And he must do this alone. “Please.”

“Fine,” Miriam backs away. “Don’t let the crabs eat you.”

He turns away, unable to watch how his dark gaze dismays them. He will be right back. But right now it feels as though he will burst. He shuffles through the sand to a nearby tree. Perhaps it is a bit closer to camp than he should be, but he can’t hold it any longer. He fumbles with his pants and releases a hissing stream with a sigh.

Once he’s done he can’t seem to stop standing there, leaning against the tree, the cool darkness all around him. Then to his utter surprise a shape drifts across his view, the size of a tall child like nine years old, with long pale ringlets that catch the faint starlight framing a pointed chin and triangular face. Their foot steps into a patch of dry grass and Alonso hears the susurrus of their passage. No, this is not just a drunken vision. This person is real.

He opens his mouth but the shade ducks under a branch and withdraws silently into the underbrush. Alonso stands petrified in the darkness. Has he just seen a ghost? He would scream but the alcohol has so completely bludgeoned him that he can’t manage to. And if it isn’t a ghost, then what is it? What has he just seen?

This is too much for his addled brain to handle. He needs to tell everyone. If this is an abandoned child here on Lisica then they need to make their rescue the top priority. Now where did he leave his cane? His arms wave around in the darkness until he locates it leaning against the far side of the tree. He begins shuffling back, trying to guess the implications of what having another human here will be. He can’t let it interrupt his research, though. He can’t!

And with that thought Alonso trips on a tree root and pitches forward, his head cracking against another root and his vision exploding with light.

Ξ

Jay leans back against the rusted metal panel of the sub’s engine room, smoking his heaviest indica. It’s just him and Katrina down here. She’s set up some tiny disco lights that shine pastel splotches against the dark walls and she spins a tiny disco ball on her deck. The music is a little more crunchy down here, more techno and less soulful, which only seems appropriate.

“Let me hit that.” She dances over to him, careful not to bump into his extended leg or immobilized arm, and pinches the joint. She takes an expert drag, blowing it into his face with a grin. “How you doing down there, mate?”

“Been better. But this ain’t bad.” He giggles. Katrina does too. “Hotboxing a buried sub. Definitely a first, yo.”

“I’m still so hype from flying the drone. I want to dance all night. Are you gonna stay up with me, sailor?” They’re both young souls, innocent, two kids discussing a sleepover.

“Sure, Katrina. Like I got anything else to do.” He tries and fails to keep the bitterness out of his voice. This injury and its recovery are going to suuuuuck.

She closes one eye and tilts her head. “Well, then. Let’s get this party rolling.” Katrina removes a pair of pills from a small bottle. She wears a pair of corduroy overall shorts in dark pink and the bottle remains in the square snap pocket over her breasts.

“I don’t know, dude. I’ve never done molly when I’m in pain.” That can’t be a good idea. Won’t it make him feel his injury more?

“No, it’s fine,” she assures him, swallowing hers dry. “I utterly wrecked my tailbone on a skateboard last summer and when I was rolling I literally couldn’t feel a thing. Or, rather, I didn’t care.”

He holds his hand out. “Yeah, I could use a big fat slice of not caring right now.” She laughs as he gulps the pill down. They stare at each other. “Now what do we do?”

“Now?” She runs her hands up her sides, swaying to the music. “You can watch me dance.”

“Uh,” Jay takes a sip from his water bottle and then another huge hit from his joint. “Right on.” She returns to her deck and drops the bass, then spins away into a low stance so she can bounce like an ape to the beat, her hair whipping the air. “Damn, girl,” he laughs. “Go get it!”

Jay is drawn to Katrina as a kindred spirit. They are both young and healthy and beautiful. Life is a celebration. He holds up his hand, keeping time, as the first tentacles of MDMA uncoil deep within his blood.

His head falls back and the pain in his ankle and hand and head all dull, spreading over him in an oily ooze. Great. Now he has distributed pain all over his body. He isn’t sure this is any better. He laughs, a sad sound, drawing Katrina’s attention.

She’d closed her eyes, falling deep into the mechanical structure of this classic Squarepusher track. But Jay’s harsh laugh recalls her to this time and place. Oh, the poor boy. Trapped in his body, unable to run free, unable to dance. She reaches out and brushes her fingers down his face, from his forehead to his chin, trying to draw the darkness out of him. He shouldn’t be dark. He’s far too sweet and cute. Katrina kisses the tip of Jay’s nose.

He grunts in surprise. Then she spins away, dancing again. He watches her in wonder, astounded that he has never appreciated the arch of her neck and how it vanishes so nicely into her jaw. Katrina. What a vision. And she’s just so brilliant and sweet. Why, they all are! Even the crabby ones. They are all the most amazing people here. His heart unfolds in gratitude and awe at the beauty around him, the landscape of the world now only truly discernible in emotional terms. He claps his hands to his mouth, overcome.

Katrina spins and spins, her eyes tripping on the pattern her feet make against the steel panels of the floor. The lights deepen their hue and her breath comes shorter in her chest. Oh, here comes the first flush of the trip. Always her favorite. It crashes through her like a wave of hot blood and she surrenders to it. The indescribable pleasures of ecstasy. She never gets tired of it. Her hands reach out to Jay, to join with him in this moment, but he doesn’t reach back.

Katrina realizes her eyes are closed. She opens them to find Jay weeping, his hands over his mouth, watching her. “What is it?” She leans down and pets his hair. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re just so beautiful. It’s all so… Lisica is…!” He holds up a hand, words failing him completely.

She grabs that hand, lacing her fingers through his. It’s so big and warm and the palm has so many hard calluses. She kisses his wrist. “You’re beautiful too, Jay. You are.”

He shakes his head in wonder. “I am?”

She laughs at him. He looks five years old. Until he takes another drag from the joint. He offers it to her and she puffs, but this is good molly. Pure. The best. THC doesn’t even make a dent in her glowing, pulsing aura. She is music. She is love. “We can do this…” she shares a wicked grin, “every night.”

“Damn.” The concept seems beyond him. In fact, the molly seems to be hitting Jay pretty hard. His eyelids flutter and his fingers reach out and poke at her nose and lips. “Are we…? Are we underwater?”

She smiles. “The sub is.”

“Oh.” He nods. This makes sense. They are in a sub, subs are underwater, this sub has water in it. And now they are breathing the heavy warm water. Oh, this is what he thought was blood. But it isn’t. It’s just water and light. Why is Katrina looking at him like that? She is a mermaid, floating here in the deep, bubbles playing about her mouth. Didn’t she just kiss him? A mermaid’s kiss? Wasn’t that supposed to be some kind of luck? Oh. She probably wants me to kiss her back.

Jay leans forward to cup her jaw but Katrina giggles and spins away again. Yes, they are in a sub and the sub is underwater and she is dancing happily with the whales now, the squids and octopi in the benthic deeps. If only she had some bioluminescence to play with, she would decorate herself like an aborigine.

Katrina pushes the slider on the master volume. This passage is one of her favorites. She always played it on her drives home from uni, sunroof open, speakers banging out the chords. Now she lifts her fists to match the beat but knocks one against the far hatch. Ow. That steel is unforgiving.

Steel. Steel everywhere. An entire cocoon of it, with her and Jay the transforming larvae within. For some reason she needs to claim the entirety of the cocoon. So she ducks through the hatch and dances down the hall, blessing the warrant officer and captain’s cabins with her sacred movement. Techno blasts her recklessly down the sub, echoing into clamor. Then for the big chorus she swings into the control room and spins around the periscope pillar like it’s her dance partner.

Back in the engine room, Jay is still overcome with emotion. He still feels her hand on his cheek, and a tendril of her soft hair that tickled him as it fell across his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He has never really been in love before. Girls have never been able to hold his attention for more than a night’s hookup. But the tenderness he feels for Katrina at this moment is a revelation. He understands now with deep insight how a knight can swear himself to a lady—a lady who may never love him in return. It doesn’t matter. Only the sanctity of the love does, and the purity of action that leads from it.

Jay opens his eyes. Wait. She’s gone. He laughs at himself, a big guffaw. Oh, yes, so connected to his lady fair. So connected that he didn’t even realize she’d left. Where did she go? He stands up, forgetting about his ankle until he puts weight on it. Then pain blooms in his extremity and he crashes sideways against the ground. He tries to break his fall with his broken hand and more pain blooms there. Why, he’s like a blooming fucking rosebush with all the pain that erupts from him.

But still she doesn’t come. So with a deep breath he hauls himself upright again and limps from the engine room through the hatch. “Hello?” The light is dim and indirect here. His head spins, but now he is fighting against the high instead of grooving within it. He can only see shadows in the two cabins off the hall. “Katrina?”

Jay continues to the control room, where the light has gotten really murky. Oh wait. He has a phone in his pocket with a light. Yes. Genius move. Now he’s back on top of his game. “Hello-o-o?”

But she isn’t in the control room either. Huh? Hadn’t they told him that the sub ended here? Yeah. The far hatch is welded shut, just like Triquet said. Then where did she go?

Jay’s gaze falls on one of the floor panels in the corner. It is tilted up, revealing a rectangle of darkness below.

Someone is moving in there. Someone wearing pink corduroy overall shorts. Katrina pops her head up from below. “Guess what Triquet said to me right before we came down here?”

Jay is so relieved to see her he can weep. But she demands an answer. “Uh, I don’t know. Lady Katrina. What?”

“That Tench-class diesel subs have two floors, not one.”

Ξ

Esquibel shines a pen light into Alonso’s pupils. Unlike with Jay, his are the same size. “That’s a surprise,” she murmurs to herself.

“What is?” Miriam asks, fearing brain damage. She should never have let the old drunkard go off in the darkness by himself. She must have been daft. Now she squeezes Amy’s hand in fear of Esquibel’s diagnosis.

“No concussion as far as I can tell. Your husband has a rock-solid head.” They had cleaned up his split scalp. The swelling was quite impressive. But the blood had stopped flowing by the time they had found him. Triquet holds an ice pack pressed against Alonso’s forehead. Esquibel gently peels it away to check the wound but it all seems to be stabilized.

Alonso shifts. He is conscious but he hasn’t responded with more than grunts and monosyllabic answers so far. He appears more abashed or embarrassed than injured though. Esquibel fetches a pair of ibuprofen pills and a cup of water.

“How’s things?” Triquet drawls, pressing the ice pack back onto its spot again. “Your brain still working, señor?”

“Unfortunately,” Alonso growls. “It hurts. So much.”

“Well we have things for that, bucko. Just let us mother you…” Triquet steps back so Esquibel can feed him the painkillers, “and you worry about healing yourself. Got it?”

“I drank too much. So stupid.” Alonso is filled with regret. He only recalls the faded glory of this night from when he sat in the camp chair drinking. Why had he ever left the chair? Oh, yes. To relieve himself. Well, why hadn’t he gone back immediately to it to let the good life return to him? What is it about him that always chases danger, that can never be happy, be settled? Why can’t he just let Miriam love him? “Remember, Mirrie? When I left?”

“Left? To pee on the bush? No? Left where, Zo?” She shares a concerned glance with Amy. Is he fully lucid?

“Left you to go to the Altai. We knew then. There was danger. We knew it. And still I went. Why? Why did I do it?”

“It’s where your subjects were.”

“No, I could have hired a local medical crew. I could have spent my time in the lab. Charlie wouldn’t be—Nadya…” He shrugs, dolorous. “They would both be alive if it wasn’t for me.”

Miriam drags on him, forcing him to look up at her. “Hey. Hey, listen to me, Alonso. This is very important. You didn’t kill them. Those thugs did. Those terrible men. You can’t be responsible for murderers running through the mountains. It wasn’t your fault.”

“But why, Mirrie? Why can’t I ever stay still? Why must I always run away to trouble?”

Miriam has long known the answer to this. There are several factors really—his unrequited grief from losing his mother when he was a teenager, his strict Catholic upbringing, his outsider status as a Cuban expatriate in Spain and New England. They had hashed it all out in the past and resolved to untangle his issues together. But now was not the time. “You did not run to trouble.” She kisses his gray hairline. “You collected data for an important study. It just went… all wrong.”

“So wrong.” He sighs, bleak. His mind is empty. He doesn’t deserve this much love. And yet here it is, indisputable. Miriam and Amy and even Esquibel and Triquet are treating him with such care. They are his responsibility. His family. He cannot let them down.

Ξ

Triquet emerges from the trap door downstairs, a thoughtful look on their face. This object they hold just might change everything.

Flavia is the only one still up. Everyone else has gone to bed. She watches Triquet cross the bunker, the old postcard in their hand. “Eh, what did you find, good Doctor?”

“Well… I found a den of iniquity and vice, first off. Those kids wouldn’t keep their hands to themselves. I mean, I know I’m irresistible but there is such a thing as consent.”

“What are you talking about? I thought you just went down there to check Jay’s concussion?”

“I did. As a favor to Doctor Daine so she could get some sleep. And his concussion is, well, impossible to assess when he’s tripping this hard. That’s for sure.”

“Ah, they are on the drugs? Crazy kids.”

“Like I’m saying. Oh, you’re seeing images and hearing things? That can either be your brain bleeding or the MDMA turning your perceptions into chocolate pudding. I mean, I love my party drugs, but right time, right place, please, people.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with that in a workplace, Dottore! I will make a complaint to Alonso on your behalf in the morning. That is sexual harassment.”

Triquet waves Flavia’s concern away. “Oh, thanks sweetie, but I’m harder to ruffle than that. And frankly, they were so sweet about it I actually felt a bit flattered. It’s just there’s only so many hugs a Triquet can give each night. But look.”

Flavia peers at the postcard—no, it’s an old photo—that Triquet turns over again and again in their hands.

“I told Katrina a few hours ago that the sub most likely had two floors and the crazy girl lifted one of the hatches to access it.”

“Whaaaaaat? Another floor? Underneath?”

“Yes, she says she found a cramped room filled with trash. Like they used it to dump all the things they didn’t want up top. It sounds like an absolute goldmine but I’m not going down there without a lot more lights and a good eight hours of sleep. The wine is still making me sleepy.”

“Let me see.” Flavia gingerly holds the postcard. It is damaged almost beyond repair. Black dust runs down the image. They can only make out a tree and something like a dark finger.

“Don’t touch the image. I have a few tricks I want to try. See if I can save a bit of it. Here.” Triquet lifts it to their pursed lips and gently blows. Most of the black dust vanishes, revealing a black and white landscape photo, decades old. A redwood tree stands beside a beach. The dark finger is an outcropping of rock.

“That is our beach. It is here!” Flavia recognizes the pale lines of the cliffs and clusters of trees at their base. But where the bunker is today, something else stands in its place. “Eh, but what is that?”

Triquet tilts the image toward the light and squints. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably the conning tower of a Tench-class submarine. Looks like they might have lived in it first, before the bunker was built. Then, for some reason, they cut off the tower and left the rest of it buried in the…” Triquet shrugs, unable to think of any reason to do such a thing.

“They built the bunker on top? But why?” They stare at the image, hoping for more clues. But it remains an enigma.

From below, through the trap door, House music starts pounding like a heartbeat and Katrina can be heard to whoop. Flavia and Triquet share a smile. “Kids!” Flavia laughs, rolling her eyes.