Cape Storm

She just left.

David bent and took me in his arms as if I weighed less than my equivalent in feathers. His lips brushed my temple. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s better if you sleep.”

Before I could even think about protesting, all the light winked out, and I was drifting away into warm, dark, safe eternity.

When I woke up, it was because David could no longer afford even the small pulse of energy it was taking to keep me unconscious.

I swam up out of the thick darkness to the sound of alarms, screaming, and the gale-driven shriek of wind. The air smelled of metal and salt and fear.

Heavenly, that smell.

I opened my eyes on darkness, but in the next second a lightning bolt split the sky above me in half, miles across, like a hot purple zipper letting in the darkness.

It lit up low, thick, black clouds that fired rain down like arrows from the battlements.

I was on my back on the deck, reclining in a white padded chair that was made for lounging. It slid hard to starboard, and I jerked and rolled off and to my feet before it slammed into the promenade railing. My bare soles hit cold, wet wood, and I shivered. I was soaked to the skin. How had I gotten here? And why? And what the hellwas going on?

Nothing good, obviously. The deck was thick with uniformed crew and a chaotic swirl of passengers. It was too dangerous out here, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anybody; I wondered why they hadn’t taken refuge inside, but some practical knowledge finally kicked in, and I knew.

Either the crew understood that there was an excellent chance that this ship was going down, or there was something below that was even more dangerous than the storm. Either way, not good news for me or anybody else.

“Jo!” Cherise. I barely recognized my best friend, because I’d rarely seen her look this—well, bedraggled. Drowned-rat wet, pale, and shivering with cold. “God, I thought you’d never wake up. Come on!”

She dragged me off in some random direction. No one had told her that I was prone to irrational bursts of killing fury, I supposed. Good.That would make it easier.

“We need to get to the lifeboat—”

My senses were coming back online, all of them, and in Oversight I saw the thick red streams sweeping around us, closing in.

The storm that Bad Bob had dispatched, the one powered by the Unmaking he’d pulled out of the spear, was almost on us, and it was devastating.

Cherise’s words were lost in a fresh blast of wind, a gust so flat and hard that it slammed her bodily against the metal wall. I suppose that in better times I might have tried to help her. Instead, I just clung to a metal stanchion and watched her struggle.

I saw one of the heavy lounge chairs topple right over the railing and disappear as the ship lurched to starboard again. We were heeling around, getting hammered by churning waves like a punch-drunk boxer.

The ship was still stuck in one spot, anchored by the suction coming from deep beneath the ocean. I could feel it, and it was growing stronger, not weaker.

The Dji

“Hang on!” Cherise screamed, and another gigantic wave crested and fell, pounding us with spray like nails. “We have to get off the ship, now!”

How exactly that was going to be accomplished I had no idea, but I nodded. In the brief lull between lashing waves, we staggered to the next handhold. Along the way we ran into more castaways. I barely recognized a sopping-wet Cynthia Clark, who surely hadn’t been this miserable since she’d made that epic disaster movie with Gene Hackman, back in the day. I also recognized Cho Chu Wing, one of our Weather Wardens. Cho was a tiny little thing, ski

I stood apart from them. Remote, even in the midst of my fellow Wardens.

“We need to get a bubble!” Cho screamed. “Focus on giving us clear water for a hundred feet in every direction!”

That wasn’t as hard as it might seem; it was basically wave cancellation, which is a fundamental principle of the physics of anything that moves as a unit—sound, water, a rippling flag. You need to find the specific frequency of the wave and cancel it out, and move the energy elsewhere. Normally that was the tricky part; bleed-off energy could destabilize everything, and whip up a whole mess of side problems you’d never anticipate.

In this melting stew of uncontrolled energy, another few mega joules in the wrong place would hardly matter.

“Tornado!” someone screamed, and I looked up to see the approaching black arms of the hurricane sweeping in like scythes. There were bulbous eruptions forming in the trailing clouds, swelling and then narrowing into cones. Forming tornadoes have a lazy look, almost tentative; they bob and weave and seem impotent at first, until they get their strength consolidated.

I’d never taken time to admire their elegance before. So beautiful. So deadly.

Cho was shouting something at me. She wanted my help.

Well then.

I gave it. I gave it to the tornado, and laughed as it gobbled up power like a greedy shark.

Cho must have realized what I was doing. She stepped up and gave me a sharp elbow to the back of my neck, sending me reeling into another Warden, who put me down on the deck and pi

My pet tornado collapsed—no great surprise, they always were fragile constructs, by the very nature of the physics that drove them—and the waves that battered the Grand Paradise,heeling her violently from one side to the other, eased to merely heavy instead of psychotic. I felt the waves’pounding rhythms begin to ease, like a racing heart slowing as adrenaline faded.

“You can’t stop it,” I told Cho, who was taking advantage of the breathing space to stare into the heart of the storm. “Everybody dances with the devil.”

I knew the storm was watching too, this monster of a thing that Bad Bob had imbued with life and cu

It could feel that I was an ally, if only it could reach me. I could have done more, but I felt lazily content to wait.

No hurry. I was enjoying the panic too much to end it quickly.

The ship lurched—not side to side, but down, as if a giant hand had suddenly grabbed the hull from beneath and pulled it straight down. The ship sank like an express elevator, and I watched the ocean pour in over the railings on the decks below, then come for us in a foaming, deadly rush . . .

. . . and then the force let us go, and the ship’s buoyancy popped us violently straight up like a cork from a rubber band. I don’t think the Grand Paradisequite came out of the water, but there was a sickly sense of utter stillness as momentum fought gravity and gravity’s patient pull won.

The ship crashed back into the water and settled. We were sprawled like ninepins all over the deck—Wardens, crew, staff, hapless passengers. The screaming sounded thin and lost.

“We’re loose!” one of the Wardens shouted. “Get everybody on the lifeboats!”

“No!” Cho snapped. “We’re getting control! We’ll stand no chance at all in the smaller boats!”

“Are you?” I asked. “Getting control? I don’t think so!” It felt like the kind of adrenaline rush you get from hurtling down a mountain on skis, straight for a killing drop, knowing it may destroy you but there’s nothing so beautiful as that moment when death means nothing, nothing at all . . .