Cut Off (12 page)

Tristan grabbed a bike and coasted downhill. Tom must have just been by; she caught up to him on the road next to the cemetery. She hopped off the bike and stood far enough from him that he probably wouldn't be able to smell the sweat she'd worked up.

"That was fast," he said. "Hope I didn't pull you away from something important."

"Nothing's more important than Alden's safety."

Tom frowned. "Isn't he like twenty years old?"

"And the way things are going, he won't make it to 21."

"Well, that's...yeah. Anyway, this morning, I heard Lewis tell the others he was going to take a few days off to go camping. Get a better feel for the island."

"I take it he isn't the camping type?"

"He's never asked for something like this before. Mostly, all he wants to do is work on the town. Or shout at me to do it for him."

Tristan let her expression betray nothing. "Did he say anything else?"

"He's leaving tomorrow morning." He laughed, suddenly self-conscious. "This is stupid, right? Am I totally wasting your time?"

"For sure. I'll never have time to study for the bar exam now." She got back on her bike.

"One more thing—the Guardians are hosting a luau next month. Kind of a 'get to know your neighbors' thing."

"Biblically, I bet," she muttered. "What about it?"

Tom shrugged. "Just passing it along. If you want to go, I can probably get you in."

She tried to think this through, but her mind only had space for the task ahead. "Could be fun. Thanks again."

She rode home and prepared her supplies, including a set of green corduroy pants and a forest green tank top. Once these were in order, she went to the shack to see Alden. "Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be gone for a few days. If anyone asks, tell them I'm up north checking out boats."

He quit sawing, but didn't look up from his work. "Tristan..."

"This will be the end of it. Trust me. Once it's done, I'll explain everything."

She went to bed as soon as she thought she had a chance of falling asleep. She got up sometime between two and three in the morning, forced herself to eat some macadamia nuts, then gathered her things and got her bike. There was too little moon to ride by, so she walked it down to the highway, then headed toward town. She hoped she wouldn't have to use it past that morning. Would be much harder to hide.

She set up down the street from the pink house behind a thatch of bougainvillea that was threatening to overwhelm the yard. At dawn, Lewis walked outside with a hefty backpack. She was relieved to see he was alone: for the moment, he seemed to be keeping it to himself. No bike, either. He headed down the street. She let him get a good long head start, then followed on foot, leaving her bicycle behind.

Not the easiest task in the world, following a man, unseen, across forty miles and most of the island. But as far as she knew, the coastal highway was the only road to the other side of the western mountains, and unless he intended to loop around the Hana Highway for some reason, there was only one good route to the top of Haleakala: the same one she and Alden had taken. As long as she was careful, all she had to do was follow it, staying out of sight, but close enough to be able to see him mount the crater. On the off chance he did see her, she could even claim, quite reasonably, to be headed to the same place he was.

She set a slow pace for herself. As they neared the fringe of town, she picked it up, and caught a glimpse of him hiking down the road through the trees. She didn't see him again until he climbed the highway on its way through the craggy hills with their view of the tiny, crescent-shaped island to the south and the much larger one behind it. He paused to eat and drink and she did too.

The next miles were easy ones, a flat road through tall grass and overgrown sugar cane gone to seed. She walked on the dirt shoulder beside the grass, ready to duck into it if she were to come in sight of Lewis. She didn't see him for some time, however, and began to fear he'd taken the northern fork, or cut overland. At the straight stretch of road at the country club, with its sprawling, grassy fairways and the water hazards colonized by orange-crested egrets, she saw his distant figure walk to the clubhouse and sit in the shade.

From there, he took to the hills, following a hiking trail that would soon be devoured by the grass and shrubs. Haleakala climbed and climbed, the Platonic vision of what a volcano ought to be. It had been a long day and Tristan was exhausted. She feared he might try to take a piece of the mountain that day and was relieved when Lewis pulled in at a service shed near its base. Through her binoculars, she watched him go inside, then reemerge and use a hand axe to take branches from the gnarled trees behind the shed. Unless he'd caught an animal along the way, he had no need for a fire, yet he lit one anyway. The kind of man who couldn't be at peace with the outdoors until he had lit a piece of it on fire.

She stamped down a patch of grass and went to sleep immediately. She got up before dawn to eat and stretch and brush her teeth. After, she hunkered in the grass with her binoculars aimed up at the dark blot of the shed. She had barely positioned herself when Lewis got up and on his way. As the light coalesced, a haze clung to the tips of the mountain. She hoped it would last. Give her some cover.

Trees appeared on the slopes in ones and twos, then in bunches, and at last in a forest. She lost him for a while and had to hurry forward until she heard him swearing at the brush that had entangled his pack.

The forest gave out, revealing a quarter mile of open ground leading up to the crater. The mist began to soften, but enough remained to make the world gauzy and indistinct. Tristan ensconced herself behind a long-leafed shrub and watched as Lewis summited the ridge.

At the top, he hesitated, scanning the ground ahead. Tristan got out her rifle and sighted in on his back. He continued forward and dropped from sight. She jogged uphill and set up behind a minty-smelling shrub two hundred yards from the peak, the rifle braced over a branch. She kept her eye from the scope to keep watch on the whole of the peak. Minutes dragged by. Flies landed on her neck and she fought not to flinch. Up in the heights, the morning was chilly, and she rolled down her sleeves.

A figure appeared on the rim. Heart racing, she sighted in on it. And went still with shock. The alien on the ridge raised its two thick sense-pods, rotating them, trying to taste any movement beneath it. A pseudopod of mist streamed in from the side, obscuring the alien. When the air clarified, it was gone.

Tristan spent another hour watching the grounds, scoping in on any waggle of grass or leaves. At last, she shouldered her pack and backed away from the clearing. Once she was into the woods, she headed downhill as fast as she could safely do so.

As soon as she got down to the houses in the foothills, she rooted around garages until she found a bike to replace the one she'd left in town. The chains were rusty enough that she wouldn't have been surprised if they'd snapped a half mile into the ride, yet it held all the way across the island. As she neared Lahaina, she veered onto the unpaved road that ran beside the ditch, bypassing most of the town. It fed her into Lewis' neighborhood. She stashed the bike in a shed—you never knew when you might have use for something later—assured herself she was alone, then hiked across the hills back to the house.

It was time, she thought, to bring Alden into the full reality of their new world.

He was at the shack, of course, because he had no problem getting to work and was obedient to a fault. For a moment, watching him lean forward to brace a board with his knee and hammer it into place, she was sad that things couldn't be as genial and easygoing as he was.

She told him everything that had happened. What she'd seen and heard in the last week. How the Guardians had pretended everything was settled only for Lewis to trash the shed once he discovered it was more secretive than Tristan had let on. How she believed this action had been motivated as much by senseless anger as it had been a calculated threat. Finally, she laid out the ugly undercurrents she had discovered within Lahaina.

"I told Lewis the crater was full of drugs," she said. "He went to see for himself. He didn't come back."

"Dude," Alden said. "You fed him to the aliens?"

"I highly doubt they ate him. An asshole like that, it won't stop until he has full power over you. I took care of it before it could get serious."

"No, I mean,
dude
. That's some Lady Macbeth stuff. I don't know whether to be in awe or terror."

She laughed in disbelief. "When did you read
Macbeth
?"

"One of the hotel rooms had a suitcase full of graphic novels. I read all kinds of things."

"I don't even know what to make of that." She shook her head, then met his eyes. "I'm glad you're not mad at me."

"The only thing I'm mad about is you doing all of this by yourself. When we're both in danger, we should
both
be working to get ourselves out of it."

"Makes sense. For now, though, we should be fine."

That night, she slept for twelve hours. With their distractions behind them, they got back to the rebuilding of the Fallback Shack with renewed energy. In just two days, it was done. She high-fived Alden, stepped back to admire their work, then ran straight to the house to take a bath.

With their work finished, Tristan woke when she felt like, went running on the beach, practiced paddling the canoe out to deeper waters. It seemed like things had calmed down, slowed once again to that warm and lazy paradise she had first sailed to after a year of chaos among the ruins of the world. It felt like it could last that way for a long time.

Three days after they'd cleaned up the mess of their rebuilding, she came home to find the flag up on the box. The letter inside was inked in blocky capitals: "THEY KNOW. THEY'RE COMING."

8

The alien held the pad before him, silently demanding an answer. Without another look at Sebastian, Ness nodded.

Number Three pivoted and thumped across the floor, which was surfaced in a thin layer of spongy orange matter. With a short lurch and a whirr of engines, the sub drove forward and descended. Ness caught his footing and followed Number Three down another curled ramp and then into a passage leading to the round chamber that housed the Collective. The air was damp and smelled like raw shrimp. The other members of the Collective watched from their alcoves set into the wall, baseball-sized eyes unblinking.

Number Three gestured over the electronic pad and held it up for Ness to read. "EXPLAIN"

Ness took a moment. The others were silent, watchful. It was vanishingly rare that Ness spoke to them without Sebastian as an intermediary. The only one of them capable of basic English was Number Three, and Three was no Sebastian. Instead, what Ness typically read from the being was hostility.

Course, he had to be careful on that front. He could assume nothing about their body language or moods. Not when every dang one of his instincts was geared toward reading the social signals of humans (and, to a lesser extent, cats and dogs). His breakthrough moment had come from the understanding that they weren't mammals who shared a bunch of DNA with him and might therefore share common cues for fear, aggression, curiosity, and so on. They weren't even reptiles or fish or cephalopods. Back when Ness had owned fish, the only emotional states he'd recognized in them were when they were startled, aggressive, or hungry (and he wasn't sure whether "hunger" truly counted as an emotion). If he couldn't read the feelings of fish, who he shared a distant ancestor with, how could he begin to think he could read a species that shared no evolutionary history with him whatsoever? He might as well be trying to befriend a virus.

Even so, it sometimes felt as if Number Three was trying to loom over him, stare him down, or otherwise intimidate him. Like a dude who dates a woman, discovers he disapproves of her chihuahua, gets engaged, and spends the rest of the marriage scowling at the dog when his wife isn't looking.

Main problem was Ness didn't know his role on the sub. He was pretty sure he shared the Collective's positions and goals: serving the universe's mysterious will to live, and putting a stop to the shenanigans of the Swimmers who weren't yet finished messing things up for humans. But there were times he felt...like a token. A lady's chihuahua. He wasn't sure what he would do if something were to happen to Sebastian.

Number Three handed him another pad. Ness used his finger to write, "Can you be more specific?"

"WHAT HAPPEN WHY SHOOT WHO HUMAN"

Ness explained what had gone down at the Galaxy. This took a long-ass time; Number Three interrupted constantly, and frequently broke away to translate Ness' words to the others ensconced in their cubbyholes, who then had questions of their own before Ness was able to move on. When he got to the bit where the gladiator claimed to have been betrayed and handed over to the humans, there was much wringing of tentacles and gnashing of beaks.

"HOW" Number Three wrote.

"I don't know. They must have locked it up or sedated it."

"HOW CAN BETRAY," it wrote. "NOT DONE"

"Sounds like its group was out of food. They must have got desperate."

"NOT DONE NOT TO GUTBROTHER"

"Don't ask me," Ness scribbled on the pad, managing to maintain his penmanship despite the rolling of his eyes. "To me, the important thing to come from this is clear evidence of Swimmer activity."

Number Three waited for more, then wrote, "AND YOUR THOUGHT"

"Well, we ought to find them."

"NEED HUMAN 'SPRITE' YES NO"

"What would you do with him if I said no?"

"PUT ON ISLAND"

Ness laughed to himself; that sounded a lot worse than it was, given local geography. "He knows the area. Might be of help."

Number Three spoke with the Collective for a moment, then turned back to Ness. "OKAY"

"Okay what?"

"OKAY WE CONSULT. GO AWAY"

He went upstairs to find Sebastian and Sprite. The two of them stood across from each other in the galley, one of the largest spaces in the sub. Ness hardly had time to bring Sebastian up to speed before Number Three returned to bring Sebastian before the Collective.