*
His laptop’s encyclopedia has an article about the tsunami. He watches satellite footage of the sea receding, then rising, washing over the land, some of which never broke the surface again, leaving empty water where islands were.
After thunderstorms, sometimes, the wireless comes in. He puts the earpiece in and tries to show the ghost things—the hotel, the coastline, the glowing, mountainous clouds—but she says nothing.
He knows he has to go but in the heat of the sun, the sigh of the water, he can find no urgency. He seems to have found an eddy in time where everything has stopped. When his money runs out he can live on the beach, eat coconuts, learn to fish, disappear into the somnolent life of the villages.
*
She emerges from the cool of the bathroom into the dim light of false dawn, padding across the dorm’s filthy linoleum in grey underwear and a sweat-stained army T-shirt, mussed and slit-eyed and smelling of sleep. He pulls back the sheet to let her in, relieved, wondering at his good fortune, and then he remembers that Kayla’s gone, and not coming back, and so he wakes to the grey light of a new day, the stertorous breathing and rank flesh of the heavy, graceless foreigners who’ve washed up at the training camp. The sheet, twisted, won’t tear in his hands. What discipline, he thinks, what practice, could be proof against this. That day he leaves the camp for the interior.
40
In the Palm of Her Hand
Silent silver pulses of fireworks in an empty black sky, sparks sifting down as the smoke drifts away, and then the detonations touch her and rumble by. She wakes to find Fabienne leaning over her, shaking her shoulder. “Wake up,” Fabienne says, voice hushed. “We’re under attack. Missiles are landing, and their strike teams are three minutes away.”
“Your father’s defenses?” Irina asks as she sits up, head spinning, willing sleep away.
“Overwhelmed,” Fabienne says. “There’s a VTOL waiting—leave everything and come now,” and though Fabienne is probably younger Irina feels like her mother is waking her for a long trip. Another explosion and the villa shakes as dust falls from the ceiling but Fabienne’s poise is flawless, like some undauntable heroine of the Blitz.
“Your children?” asks Irina, following her through the corridor. Iliou had anticipated a counterattack but not one so fast or so decisive.
“They went ahead.”
“And your father?”
A little catch, and then, “He’s dead. The first strike. I think they targeted his room. It was in a tower. A mistake, in retrospect.”
The power is out and Irina keeps stumbling in the almost dark. Armed men run past, exchanging a few words with Fabienne in Greek, and then at an intersection Fabienne says, “I have to make sure the au pair is out. Just keep going straight—the VTOL is on the small beach just south of the property. Hurry. I’ll see you soon,” and then she’s gone.
Nightmare continuum of rooms, courtyards, passages. Now and then there are distant explosions—missile strikes, presumably—but they seem to be getting farther away. She’s never heard of private militaries using cruise missiles, had thought it went beyond what was tolerated, but guesses Cromwell is pulling out all the stops, and she wonders if this action will merit a footnote in some future history of war. She hears men shouting in the distance, then gunfire and a sustained cry of raw animal pain that goes on and on, is then silenced abruptly. She’s more frightened, with Fabienne gone, though this is obviously absurd.
She’s getting close to the beachward door when she turns a corner and almost runs into a soldier in power armor, the lighter kind that makes him look more like a medieval knight than a man-shaped tank, and some inane part of her wonders if this is Iliou’s man, but through his faceplate she sees his surprise, and that he looks somehow American, and then he backhands her into the wall.
Lost in fields of quiet and grey, she remembers that there’s something important that she has to do, something truly pressing, and she comes back tasting blood, and it’s pouring from her nose and dripping down her chin, and she’s worried that her jaw might be broken, but for all that, her thinking is surprisingly clear. The blow knocked her out but she knows that even so he must have pulled it—lots of stories about soldiers in armor killing civilians with a slap—so he must have orders to take her alive, and yes, he’s now fumbling in the webbed pouch on his thigh for what seem to be syringes, but his gauntleted hands are clumsy and this gives her a moment to turn on her wireless.
The villa’s machines impinge on her awareness and there’s the armor and its security is as dense as she’d expect for military hardware, and to break in would take more time than she has, so that’s it, now she can wait and later she can suffer, but no, there are the servers Iliou got her, still there, idle, awaiting her word. Her gratitude is overflowing, and she thinks, Sorry, boss, and then she eviscerates the armor’s security.
The soldier is opening his mouth to speak into his comm so she burns it out and as she does it strikes her that this is too easy, that by now they should know what she can do and be forearmed, but on the other hand they’ve had little time to prepare—the Cloudbreaker attack was just yesterday—and she remembers a documentary about the storied fiascos of the Persian War in which a weathered Marine colonel straight out of central casting made aggressive eye contact with the camera and barked, “A mediocre plan violently executed is better than a brilliant plan delayed,” and in any case they’re probably willing to lose soldiers.
There’s no good way to power down the armor, which is probably by design, and she realizes it has something like an immune system, which is already trying to come roaring back and push her out, which interests her, professionally, and not knowing what to do she’s starting to be afraid again but then she finds the armor’s medical system.
There’s been a breach, she tells the armor. There’s massive damage to the pilot’s left femoral artery, and the left leg of the exoskeleton is filling rapidly with blood. The suit considers, accepts this, and applies a tourniquet; the cam in the soldier’s helmet shows her his astonishment as his left leg goes numb, and then she starts on the other.
Now his heart has stopped, she tells the armor.
No, it hasn’t, replies the armor. I’ve just confirmed that it’s beating, and that his blood pressure is normal.