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He gave her a long, narrow stare that faded out at the end into uncertainty before making a few more passes over the lake. He finally found the bank, but between them and it, the grassy slope seemed entirely empty. “I…I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Whatever it was, it seems to have moved on. But if there’s mud down there—”
“Yeah, there is. We checked it out earlier. I almost lost my boot.”
“Then it might have left footprints. They won’t tell us much, but we can at least get an idea of size.”
“Good point.” He gave the grass one more sweep with the flashlight and then nodded—a firm, commanding nod. “Okay, Bierce. You’re back on the team.”
She opened her mouth to point out that, as far as she was concerned, she’d never been off the team, but mutely closed it again. Just like when Nicci had come shuffling back with her half-hearted, “I didn’t mean it, Amber. You know that,” Amber just nodded and kept her fat mouth shut.
“Listen up!” Scott was saying, now oblivious to her and her status on the ‘team’. “We’re going to go down and check it out. Now we’re not going to go look for it,” he said as people began to rumble out their first startled mob-protests. “We just want to look at the mud and see if it left any footprints.”
The rumbling died down.
“I’m not saying everyone has to come along,” Scott continued. “But if there are prints, I think we’d all probably feel better for knowing exactly what they look like. And if there aren’t, I’d personally feel better knowing that you all saw there was nothing instead of me just saying it and you all thinking I’m covering something up.”
“Don’t be paranoid, man,” said Dag, patting his shoulder.
“I’m not, I’m just being careful.”
“Plus, I’d really like it if we all stayed together,” said Eric, switching on his own flashlight and coming to stand at Scott’s side. “So let’s do this smart, people. Stay calm, get your boots on, find yourself a buddy and stick close to someone with a light.”
And the Fleetmen were the ones with the lights. The four Fleetmen…and Scott, of course. His own little army. And she had to remind herself all over again to be nice.
She limped back to her blanket, which was weighted down at one end by her duffel bag and at the other by her boots but was still flapping and crinkling like crazy in the middle. She rolled it up, packed it away, put on her boots, and then, for no real reason, picked up her duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder.
“What are you doing?” asked Nicci, alarmed, as if the idea to carry all her shit around with her at all times were a direct order she’d been caught disobeying.
“I just don’t want it to get lost,” said Amber. She knew that was a stupid answer, but mumbling ‘I don’t know’ and putting her duffel down again seemed stupider and people were watching.
Nicci tied her boots nervously and packed up her own blanket. When she too picked up her duffel bag, some of the other people around them did the same thing.
The Fleetman whose light they were sharing, Dag, watched them with a puzzled smile and finally aimed his flashlight at Amber. “You know, we’re coming right back.”
“I don’t want to lose anything.”
“Like what?”
An emergency blanket blew suddenly and noisily between them before being yanked up into the sky and lost.
“You were saying?” Amber prompted.
“Smart ass.” But Dag cupped his mouth and shouted, “Remember to pack up your blankets if you don’t have a tent, people! Keep your stuff together! Let’s go!”
They made their way down to the water in the dark. And it was dark, much darker than it had been up on the apex of the ridge, where the sullen red glow of the smoldering ship had been their nightlight. It was a lot steeper on this side as well, so they went slow. It seemed like hours before they actually reached the water’s edge and saw with their own eyes that the many tracks left in its muddy bank were all made by their own boots. Even after they spread out and searched, just exactly the way Scott had assured them they would not do, they found nothing.
“Well, we might see something in the morning,” Eric began as he and Dag slogged their groups over to join with Scott’s. He said something else after that—Amber could see his lips moving—but he made no sound.
All the sound was gone. Even, for that split-second, the wind. But that was all the warning she got. And then she was in the water.
She thought she’d been pushed—the name Everly Scott leapt to the top of a short list of suspects—and while that thought certainly brought out a lot of anger, outrage and confusion, it didn’t come with fear. She didn’t gasp or try to scream; she knew she was underwater, even as she was curiously unable to process that the water had lit up brilliantly orange and churned out of all visibility.
Then something struck her in the back of the thigh and she realized that she wasn’t the only one in the water. She arched instinctively, trying to surface, and instead bumped painfully into a rock. Her world spun; she was upside-down, absent all sense of gravity and perspective. She twisted clumsily and got her feet against the ground, knowing that the water couldn’t be very deep this close to shore, that she should be able to just stand up, but although her legs straightened out, she remained submerged.
It was then that several revelations came to Amber: the slight ache of her lungs as they began to make their first complaints for air, the orange murk that had been perfectly normal water just an instant ago, the shadowy figures of other people struggling in the pond around her—any one of whom might be Nicci—and over all things, the terrible roar that was not merely the sound of water in her ears after all, but something else, something bigger.
Something burning.
Underwater, she had no idea how deeply, Amber jumped. Her feet left the ground, but her reaching hands did not break into the air. She’d never learned to swim, never had the opportunity and never really felt the lack, but now here she was and she had the rest of her life to learn. Amber kicked upwards, directly into the path of a flailing arm that punched into her stomach. Bubbles spilled out of her mouth in a watery cry, but there was no new air to pull in. Panic flared, hot and tight inside her aching chest. She lost her last hold on calm and began to thrash, clawing at the water above her without any sense of rising, right up until her face broke out into the wind.
The hot, glowing, smoke-thick wind.
Amber gasped in new breath, but it burned in her lungs. Her second was mostly water. She sank briefly, came up fighting again and was driven under a third time by some screaming lady trying to use her as a float. She didn’t want to hurt whoever it was holding her down, but she was underwater, where restraint meant drowning. She broke free with several clumsy punches and grappled her way to the surface once more.
Only now did she see that she had not merely fallen into the lake, she had somehow been thrown in and thrown pretty damned far. She oriented herself to the shore through a screaming mass of splashing limbs, but managed only a few clumsy strokes before she stopped again and this time, turned around.
The light. The smoke. The roaring.
The ridge they had crossed over was burning. The flames blew sideways in the wind, flapping like party streamers, beautiful. The sky—the whole sky, as much as she could see in the treeless expanse of the hilly plains—was on fire. Heat blasted at her face, chapping her lips and searing at her eyes even as she choked on water.
Like the moment between standing on the shore and finding herself submerged, the next little space of time just seemed to melt away. Amber was not aware of swimming, but she must have done so because she had been ten meters or more out into the lake when she breached and at her next dim moment of awareness, she was only knee-deep and sloshing her way onto the bank. She grabbed the first duffel bag she saw and then two more before she found the one that was probably hers, but she didn’t let any of them go. Their weight and the wind made her stagger at every step, but she fell only once and landed with her face in some kind of rough, smelly hole. Pushing herself awkwardly up in the mud, she could see dozens of short, pipe-like openings all around her that she was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.
They were boots, she realized. Everyone’s boots, stuck in the mud. Her own boots included. They had all been blown out of their boots.
Her first steps were toward the ridge, but she made herself stop. There would be nothing left to see, not if the whole fucking sky was on fire. There would be nothing left to see and she knew it.
She knew it because there was nothing to hear beyond the ridge except the roaring of the fire. No screams. No cries for help. No coughing. Just the fire.
In the crowd, in the panic, she heard Nicci scream her name. Even when she could make out no other single sound, she heard that. Hearing it pushed all the rest of the world out of focus and into it at the same time. She turned her back on the burning sky and fought her way through the tangle of wet, panicked people, shoving them into the water or into the mud until she could catch at her baby sister’s arms and pull her protectively close, just as if her arms were some shield against the heat that had already dried her hair and her clothes and wouldn’t need more than a few minutes to boil away the water in the lake and burn the skin off all their bodies.
But she held Nicci anyway, bellowing into her ear that it was all right and she was there and to close her eyes and keep them closed. She knew it was all over, but she wasn’t scared. There wasn’t time. The same numbness that kept her from understanding how she’d gotten into the water or how she’d gotten out kept her nicely cloaked against the horror of being burnt alive. She could only hope it wouldn’t take long.
But the wind changed. Suddenly and forcefully, it blew back against the ridge, pushing both the heat and the smoke entirely away and replacing it with choking cold.
Amber staggered in the wake of this new wind, trying to clear her lungs of the sediment made by water, smoke and heat. She didn’t feel very successful and the effort left her throat, chest and, oddly, her eyes feeling scraped and bruised. Cold, clear air cut at her lungs, making her cough even harder.
“What happened?” Nicci’s hands dug painfully at her neck, but Amber didn’t push her off. If anything, she pulled her sister closer, so that Nicci’s next frantic shout rang out painfully right in her ear: “What happened? Oh God, what is this?”
“It’s the ship,” Amber croaked, even though she knew Nicci couldn’t hear her through her own panic just yet. There wasn’t much point in talking, but Amber said it all anyway, just to hear it out loud and know that it was real. The waiting was over; the worst had happened. “The ship blew up.”