Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

It wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. In the torturous moments that followed, Jenna wondered why she had imagined this to be a better alternative than the swift release of a bullet to the head.

She was simultaneously falling and drowning, hammered by the enormous volume of water and driven onto the anvil of an unseen slope. As she caromed from one jagged surface to the next, tumbling and spinning, she lost all sense of direction. Her lungs begged her to take a breath—water or air, it hardly mattered—but the pounding impacts left her unable to even gasp.

Something clipped the side of her head, just a glancing blow, but enough to drive a spike of pain through her skull. She wrapped her arms over her face, curling up into a protective ball, and braced herself for the next collision. She spun and bounced, slammed and scraped, blind and all but deafened by the roar of water. Yet through it all she remained conscious, and that eerily calm inner voice kept her company.

You have work to do.

She thought she knew what that meant. Her cloned siblings—men and women who had each followed different paths in life, and yet shared memories of something that had never actually happened—were preparing to trigger a chain reaction of destruction on the world.

Wipe the slate clean.

Jenna was not the only person who was aware of this, but she did know something that no one else knew—not Cort or Noah or any of the government assassins hunting the clones. She knew why they were doing it. She also knew that what had happened thus far—the SARS outbreak, the Internet attacks, and perhaps countless other acts of aggression and terror over the last two decades—were merely a prelude to what was about to occur. The attacks were merely preparatory moves, setting the stage for something that would trigger a global holocaust. But before the final act, the message had to be sent.

The message was the linchpin. Stop the message, and the planned destruction would be averted, or at the very least, postponed. Jenna knew from where and when the message would be sent, and only she was in a position to stop it.

Stop it? Why?

Tumbling through limestone tunnels like a spider in a downspout, the question of why—to say nothing of how—seemed unimportant. Yet, she was still alive, and as the miserable seconds stretched out into minutes, the impacts became less frequent. She could feel the rush of cool air on her face. She could breathe again! She was no longer falling, but being swept along in a subterranean river.

And sinking.

The chilly fresh water did not buoy her up the way salt water did, and as the crazy whitewater run slowed down, she was forced to uncurl her arms and legs and paddle to stay above the water line. After a few minutes, or perhaps only a few seconds, she felt herself moving faster again. The bottom rose up under her, scraping against her feet. Then without warning, she was falling again, vomited out of the cave and into daylight once more. The light was painfully bright after too much time in the darkness.

She tumbled down the face of a waterfall, splashed down into a pool beneath it, and was driven to the bottom by the force of the cascading water. Hydraulic eddies pinned her there, but she fought against them as she had everything and everyone else that had tried to kill her. After a brief struggle, she wrestled free of their grip and clawed her way to the surface.

The current, swift with the volume of rainwater feeding the river, caught hold of her. The water snaked between towering walls of limestone, slick with wet moss, impossible to climb. Jenna could do little more than tread water, dog paddling to stay in the middle of the river where she was less likely to be smashed against the rocks.

Despite the tropical climate, Jenna felt her body heat leaching away, and with it, the strength and will to keep going. Fatigue—physical and mental—stole over her, and without realizing it, she stopped paddling. The air in her lungs kept her buoyant, but when she exhaled, her head dipped closer to the surface. She knew she had to keep her face out of the water, but her consciousness was a dim light, unable to penetrate the dark clouds of exhaustion and hypothermia, fading with each passing second.

Fading…

Suddenly, she felt very heavy. The current pushed hard against her, but she wasn’t moving. The river, it seemed, had chosen to cast her up on a rocky shoal.

Safe in the knowledge that she probably wouldn’t drown, she was content to simply lay there, the tepid water continued to leach away her body heat. She needed to get out of the river and find shelter from the rain, but even the contemplation of movement was a daunting task.

Just get out of the river, she told herself. Do that much, and then you can rest.

With a groan, she rolled over and started crawling. The slippery rocks shifted beneath her, dropping her to the bottom, bruising her knees and scraping her palms. She endured the river’s final attack and dragged herself onto the shore.

Now get up. Find some shelter.

She shook her head. No. Rest now. That was the deal.