“In the time it takes to knock him out, his friend pulls a gun on me—and you.”
I didn’t say anything, but it seemed to me that Sula preferred to kill people, as if she were harboring a grudge she could never pay back. “What did they do to you here?” I asked.
“What didn’t they do?”
“But you’re alive.”
Sula stopped cleaning the harpoon and regarded me for a minute. Then she slowly pulled her wet suit away from her shoulder to reveal an ugly scar that ran beneath her collarbone and across her entire chest. It was purple and red, knotted and lumpy. It looked as if the skin had been ripped rather than cut. It had obviously bled for a long time and never been stitched or cared for properly. Whoever had injured her had wanted it to hurt.
The wet suit snapped angrily as it fell back into place.
“They called it a lesson,” she said. “But they should have found a better student.”
I looked away, out to the flat gray expanse of the sea. Bluewater operated in a lawless vacuum. Governments—even the worst of them—had to answer to the people. History had proved that even the most brutal dictatorships collapsed. Wasn’t that what we’d learned in school, that Illinowa had to answer to its citizens? But to whom did Bluewater answer?
We were adjacent to the runway but sheltered behind the emergency stairwell. We could see two jets and three helicopters. A platoon of soldiers guarded the planes, but they seemed distracted and bored. They were not yet missing their two dead comrades. Alarms still rang on the lower floors, although no one had fired a shot for a while. There was no sign of Ulysses or Will.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“They’ll come.”
I wished I felt as confident as Sula. I told myself that Ulysses would protect Will. The pirate king had survived many scraps and scrapes, but surely nothing compared to infiltrating Bluewater’s global headquarters. He had his wits and Nasri’s gun and a shot of adrenaline that was wearing off. I hoped it would be enough.
Then they appeared. Ulysses looked gray and weathered, while Will was flushed and breathing hard. But they were alone.
“Where’s Kai?” I cried.
“Everyone fled when the shooting started,” Ulysses answered.
“Why didn’t you hold your fire?” Sula asked.
Ulysses growled at her. “It wasn’t our shooting. Their cozy little meeting broke up in gunfire.”
Sula’s eyebrows dipped and knitted as she tried to register this information. “Who was shooting?”
Ulysses explained that before they had reached the presentation room, they’d heard a loud argument and then gunshots.
“Put a damper on the rest of the gathering,” he concluded.
“We might have gotten in too,” said Will. “But everyone scattered.”
“What could they be fighting about?” I asked.
“What they always fight about,” said Ulysses. “The future and who’ll control it.”
“It’s bedlam now,” said Sula.
“This’ll suit our purposes,” said Ulysses. “When everyone’s running, they have to run somewhere.”
“It’s the direction I’m worried about,” said Sula.
“Patience.”
I didn’t know how Ulysses could urge patience when things had gone so disastrously wrong. If the politicians were shooting at each other, Kai and his father were trapped. And when the shooting stopped, surely someone would spirit them away, making rescue impossible.
But patience wasn’t necessary. The emergency doors on the far edge of the roof burst open, and a handful of guards emerged, leading a man who was nearly a head taller than any of them and a boy who was paler and thinner since the last time I saw him. My chest tightened.
“Hello,” Ulysses whispered. He crouched low and thrust out an arm to prevent Sula from rising. “We have guests.”
With all the shooting below, I could see now that the roof was the most logical escape route for Torq and his men. The guards were on high alert, and they moved cautiously, with guns extended and fingers on the triggers. Kai and his father were not cuffed or bound, but Torq grasped the father’s wrist in his hand. Next to Kai’s father, Torq didn’t look quite so tall, but he still outweighed the man by twenty kilos. Torq’s brown hairless body was shining like a genetically modified fruit—built to withstand drought, disease, and predators.
“There’s fifteen rounds in that chamber,” said Sula, nodding at Ulysses’s gun, “and I can take two before they even start shooting.”
“The gun’s half-empty,” Ulysses responded. “And there’s a dozen guards on the roof besides the men with baldy.”
Sula scratched a tooth with the tip of one finger. “Once they’re on that jet, there’s no way to catch them.”
“They won’t get on the jet.”