The Terminals (26 page)

“They weren't
love
notes,” she said finally.

“I want to thank you,” Cam said. Without eye contact, some other gesture was necessary to lend the appropriate level of sincerity to his expression of gratitude. He lifted a hand in the darkness to touch her arm. But she was closer than he thought, and his hand found her hip on its way up instead. Rather than grope his way up her body, he let it linger there. She hadn't expected it. He felt her pull away slightly, but not enough to dislodge him.

“It's a bit early to thank me. I could be getting you killed.”

“I might not have a chance later.”

“I guess you're welcome,” she said. She bit off the last word to eliminate any sentiment her tone might otherwise have hinted.

There was silence between them then. In the darkness, the patter of the waterfall surrounded them, and the mist it sent up made Cam shiver. His hand was still on her hip.

“The water is cold here,” Siena said, as though reading his thoughts, or perhaps she could
feel
him trembling in the dark. It was one of those empty phrases meant to save her from emotional exchange. Small talk.

“This is where you showered, isn't it?” The thought of standing in a shower with her stirred him. He suddenly wondered what she might look like with her long tangled hair brushed smooth, and without the tattered rags she wore.

“I'm jealous of your warm shower,” she said. “But that hasn't been the worst. It took me two weeks just to get up the nerve to steal shoes. The big-eyed girl and the pale one left theirs out on the steps every night. But it took me a long time to sneak down to their hut and take a pair. I thought they were the height of luxury. I'll never take shoes for granted again.”

“That was brave of you.”

“I left tracks from a dead monkey's feet so they'd think a monkey took them. Not the smartest two.”

“I never heard about the missing shoes.”

“That was before we met.”

Cam smiled in the dark. It was a schoolgirlish thing to say. It made him feel like they were a couple, in a strange way, especially while his hand was still on her hip.
And we might die today
, he thought. He pulled her close and kissed her.

Cam was surprised by the stench of her breath. It made him wince, and he immediately felt bad. It wasn't her fault—she'd been living in the jungle, and who knew what she'd been eating. Raw fish? Bugs maybe? And a few bites of poultry.

She pulled away. “Oh my god!”

“What?”

“I … I haven't had a toothbrush for months.”

“No. You're fine,” Cam lied. “I just didn't know if that was the right thing to do. This is a weird time for me. For both of us. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” she said. She still hadn't let go. “We can keep hugging.”

Cam took her in his arms, and the waterfall's spray shrouded them so that they were the warm center of its cool mist cocoon.

“I was a totally normal girl, before,” Siena whispered. “I wore tasteful makeup and went out on Friday nights. In real life, in the world of toothpaste, I would have kissed you back.”

“What do we do now?” Cam asked. He liked holding her and didn't want it to end.
But everything ends.

“The storm's over,” she said. “And the bunker is unmanned.”

Cam took a breath. “We obtain supplies?”

“Yes. Then we sneak off in Pilot's boat after they come ashore. There has to be a village along the shore within fifty miles. We can do ten miles a night and hide the boat each day.”

“What if he comes in the kayak? You and I aren't paddling to Florida.”

“He won't bring the kayak after this disaster. He and Ward will come in a fast inflatable. We're lucky they got caught away when the storm hit. We've got a window of opportunity here.”

Cam's clothes were still soaked, but there were dry sets in the bunker.

They located the northernmost rope down to the beach in the darkness. It was an easier climb than the center rope he and Owen had ascended. They felt their way to the flat wall of the bunker and let themselves in. The lights flickered on inside. Cam could hear its generator still humming. They'd have been safe from the storm inside. There were watermarks at eye level on the door where high waves or spray had hit and some flooding in the main hall. Otherwise, everything seemed intact.

“Food first,” Siena said, heading straight for the pantry. “Then fresh clothes. Is there a gun in here anywhere?”

“I don't think so, but we could check Ward's office.”

Siena gathered canned fruit and dried meats in a backpack that Cam found, while greedily stuffing fresh food into her mouth—leftover roast pork and bread. She gulped down three cans of fruit juice. Cam found a canteen and filled it with water. There were matches and knives in the kitchen. Cam wrapped a butcher knife in a cloth and wound duct tape around it to create a makeshift sheath. Siena grabbed a metal bowl. It could be used as a frying pan if they needed to cook or to boil water, she said, something Cam hadn't thought of.

Ward's office was next. It was locked, but the bunker's interior doors were cheap. Two kicks, and the jamb splintered. There was no gun, which didn't surprise him. He'd never seen Ward carry one, and the Deathwing philosophy didn't lend itself to lethal weapons. Siena, however, spotted Ward's machete hanging from a belt on a hook behind the door and helped herself, strapping it around her narrow waist. She had to cinch it up past its last hole.

The room was less an office than a place for Ward to stash his personal items during training. There were no files. No computer. No communications equipment either. Ward and Pilot carried radios on them, but there was nothing anyone could use to call the outside world. Clearly, they didn't want recruits finding records or contacting anyone.

“Blankets,” Siena said. “If Pilot goes airborne to find us while we're floating the coast we might have to dive into the jungle.”

“Do you know where we're going?”

“South.”

They'd gone south to find the
Harsh Mistress
in the next cove, Cam recalled. But they'd cruised half a day beyond that in a big, speedy yacht before hitting the pirate outpost. It might be a long trip.

The blankets were in the utility closet. Cam opened the doors and pulled out two. There were new toothbrushes and paste. He hesitated, and then selected soap and shampoo. He handed them to Siena.

“You miss this stuff, right?” he said.

“I'd love some shampoo,” she admitted. She took them while Cam pulled a first aid kit and pretended to see if there was anything else they needed.

“Want one of these?” he said as casually as possible, pointing to a toothbrush.

Siena's hand shot up to cover her mouth.

“Was it that bad?”

Cam bit his tongue. For all the care he'd taken, he'd still failed to approach it delicately enough. He shrugged and shook his head in a last-ditch effort to make it not a big deal.

“You're the one worried about it. I didn't even notice.”

She went to the nearby sink. A small round mirror hung over it. She hadn't seemed to care about her appearance, until she saw herself in the cheap plastic-rimmed mirror under the dim fluorescent light of the bunker with Cam standing by. She touched her hair and tentatively opened her mouth. Tears welled in her green eyes. They dripped into the sink as though from a leaky faucet. Red-faced, she took the brush, paste, and some floss, and she scrubbed her mouth so hard that her teeth bled.

They gathered as much as they could in backpacks they took from the equipment room.

“How are we doing on time?” Cam asked.

“I wasted too much of it being a baby. Now that the water is calm, they'll be on their way here. Every minute we're in this building doubles our risk.”

“Time to go then?”

“One last thing.”

She hurried to the training room and threw open a cabinet that Cam knew well. Inside were ten live darts, enough for one mission.

“Five each,” she said, and they packed them away.

It was still predawn, but the clouds were lifting, and the tan sand of the beach was now visible at the dim level of an old sepia tone photograph. The sea was as black on one side as the bluff's wall of foliage on the other, and the background music of surf provided a loud and steady
swish-thump
rhythm, punctuated by occasional sharp animal sounds from the jungle.

They wouldn't hear the boat engine until it was close, Cam thought, or see it until it pulled up on the sand. “Where do we hide?”

“There.” Siena led him down the beach.

His condo was gone. The note he'd left for her, gone. Three condos had survived. Two were livable. The third was still anchored, but was bent so severely that the floor was nearly diagonal.

Four snapped posts jutted up from the sand where Jules and Calliope had lived, like the legs of a flipped table. The remains of Zara's place were heaped against the bluff—it had been flattened, and its pieces were piled up so that it looked as though someone had just emptied an assembly-required do-it-yourself hut from its box.

Cam's and Owen's condo had simply been erased. No posts. Even the dip in the sand where Siena had hidden was scoured away clean. Cam stared at the empty beach. He had to concentrate to even remember what it looked like with the hut on it. Siena pulled him to the bluff, where she lifted the foliage away. There was a depression in the raw dirt, and Cam saw that it had been dug away. With no pile of sand on the beach, it was clear that she had carted the dirt away a few full pockets at a time. The hiding place was near the southern rope, the same rope Owen had pulled him up onto to save him from the hungry sea, the same hungry sea that would have claimed him had Donnie not swum after him in the riptide during scuba training.

“I can't go without them,” Cam said.

“What?”

“I have to give the rest of my team the chance to come with us.”

“You mean tell them we're going? No chance. They'll know good and well within an hour of our departure, okay? Two if we're lucky.”

“If you have questions about why I need to do this, you have every right to ask.”

“Yeah, I have a question. Are you out of your damned mind?!”

Cam sighed. “That's not a question about why.” He wasn't surprised at her reaction. He'd realized she wouldn't agree at the same moment he'd realized he had to do it.

“These people hunted me, Cam. H-u-n-t-e-d.”

“They've saved my life more than once, even Donnie.”

“Cam, you can go to them. I can't physically stop you—I'm not enhanced anymore. But now that I have supplies, I also won't need to wait for you. As soon as Ward and Pilot go up the ropes to the jungle camp to find all of you, I'm leaving.”

Cam grabbed the rope and began to climb as Siena swore loudly and slid behind her curtain of foliage.

The sky was growing light in the east, out over the ocean, and Cam's hands were raw from the rope. He made it to camp to find Zara hunched by the morning fire. She grinned.

“Morning, stranger. I wondered where you'd gotten off to.”

“We need to wake up the guys.”

Zara looked around. “Wow. I
am
the only girl left.”

No, you're not
, Cam thought.

She smirked. “Don't tell anyone I slept with five guys last night.”

Cam didn't wait for her to help. He shook Wally and Owen until they stirred. He didn't brave laying hands on Donnie, but instead went to a metal pole and began to bang it with the butcher knife.

They rose, grumpy and complaining. Wally's red hair stuck up as though he had a Mohawk. Tegan sat holding his head and wincing at the light of the fire.

“Wingman?” Donnie glared. A biting fly landed on his bare chest. He snapped his hand up to catch it by one wing between his fingers without looking. He crushed the wing and tossed the maimed creature toward the fire, where it spiraled downward into the flame and popped. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I have something to tell all of you,” he said gravely, sheathing the knife.

Donnie shrugged. The others waited, blurry-eyed with sleep and equally unmoved.

“What?” Wally said when he hesitated. “You had a spooky nightmare? Dreamed you were dying?”

“I dreamed I wasn't.”

“That's a nice dream, Cam,” Owen said sleepily. “But not worth rousting everyone for.”

“You slacks should be getting up anyway,” Zara said. “The storm has passed. We should go check the damage.”

“Listen,” Cam said. “I'm
not
dying. Maybe none of us are.”

There was silence for a moment, then Donnie spoke. “Tell me this isn't what you woke us up for.”

Cam took a deep breath. He couldn't tell them about Siena—he owed them, but he owed her too.

“During my last visit to the lab, the doc said I wasn't deteriorating,” he said.

His announcement was greeted with what he considered an appropriate period of silent surprise.
I have their attention
, he thought.

“What the hell does that mean?” Donnie seemed both intensely interested and annoyed. “Don't screw with us.”

“Did they use the ‘r' word?” Zara asked.

“Remission” was a word they'd been taught to forget. There was too much false hope in it, Ward said. Even the mention of it had them holding their breath. It was what they wanted to hear, and it would be a simpler explanation than what he believed was happening, but it wasn't the truth.

“Not exactly,” Cam said.

They let out a collective groan.

Donnie rolled his eyes. “So you'll last longer than some of us. Congratulations.”

“I don't think I was ever sick,” Cam tried. “And I think it's the TS that's killing you.”