Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Bubble and Squeak

by David Gerrold & Ctein

Knit Three, Save Four

by Marie Vibbert

Command and Control

by David D. Levine

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our September 2021 issue!

August was my first pain-free month of the year. With that came a boost in energy and an ability to turn my attention to sidelined or delayed projects. After months in development, I launched a new website for Clarkesworld and changed hosting services. I managed to get most of the Clarkesworld Year Twelve anthologies finished (publishing this month) and a significant portion of the Year Thirteen anthologies done (likely publishing in November). I chased down some loose ends on projects related to Xia Jia’s collection and hope to have a complete update for those readers in the next week. On the downside, I heard that my editor at Night Shade Books resigned and Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Six had to be rescheduled for November.

September is looking like it will be another busy month. Aside from any further work I need to do with Night Shade, the Clarkesworld anthologies, and general around-the-house projects, I have to start pulling together the Spanish language submissions project for Clarkesworld, which will be a major investment of time. Assuming they aren’t cancelled, I have two conventions bookending October: Capclave and Astronomicon, so I’ll need to do some October work in September. Despite what it sounds like, I’m actually looking forward to all this. It’s nice to feel like I’m accomplishing things again.

Until next time,

-Neil

Bubble and Squeak

David Gerrold & Ctein

Hu Son ran.

He ran for the joy of it, for the exhilaration—for that moment of hitting the wall and breaking through into the zone, that personal nirvana of physical delight. What others called “runner’s high.” A sensation like flight—Hu’s feet didn’t pound the ground, they tapped it as he soared through the early morning air.

A bright blue cloudless sky foretold a beautiful day. A sky so clear and deep you could fall into it and never come back. Later, the day would heat up, glowing with a summery yellow haze, but right now—at this special moment—the beachfront basked in its own perfect promise.

Hu usually started early, when Venice Beach was mostly deserted, all sand and palm trees and stone benches, all the storefronts sleeping behind steel shutters. It was the best time to run. Hu liked the crisp air of dawn, the solitude of the moment, the feeling that the day was still clean, still waiting to be invented—before the owners could ruin it with their displays of tacky, tasteless, and vulgar kitsch.

Some of the cafés were open early though, and by the time Hu reached the Santa Monica pier, run its length, and then headed back toward home, the morning air was flavored with the smells of a dozen different kinds of breakfast, the spices of all the various cuisines that flourished here.

Heading home, Hu passed other morning joggers. This was a favorite track. Nods were exchanged, or not—some of the runners were lost in hidden music, others in their personal reveries. He recognized most; he’d been running this track for more than a year. He was probably regarded as a regular by now.

The final leg. He trotted past the last of the brash touristy areas. Later this strand would teem with summer crowds, exploring the souvenir stands, the ranks of T-shirts printed with single entendres, the displays of dreadful art, all the different fortune tellers and street performers, but right now, this community was still lazily awakening, coming back to life at its own pace. There were still the occasional shapeless lumps on the stone benches—the homeless, wrapped up against the chill of the night, waiting for the heat of the day to revive them. Even in July, the morning air had a bite, with a salty flavor from the grumbling sea.

Hu turned and jogged up the narrow way that pretended to be a street, a block and a half, slowing down only in the last few meters. He hated to stop, hated to drop back into that other pace of life—the faster more frenetic life, where you weren’t allowed to run, you had to walk, walk, walk everywhere.

He glanced at his wristband, looking to see where his numbers were today. Not bad. Not his personal best, but good enough. “Probably still stuck on the plateau,” he muttered. “Gonna have to push to get off. Just not today.”

Hu opened the back gate and started peeling off his T-shirt. He liked the feeling of the cold morning air cooling the sweat off his skin. He took a moment to slow down, to let himself ease down into this world, then finally stepped through the door and called affectionately, “Honey, I’m homo—” then headed straight for the shower.

Hu Son didn’t just appreciate hot water, he loved the luxury of it. In eighteen months, he’d have his master’s degree in cultural anthropology, and after that, he’d go for his doctorate, but already his studies had given him a clear sense of how lucky he was to be living in an age where clean water was taken for granted—and hot water available on demand.

California’s drought had officially ended some years before, but Hu rarely lingered in the shower. Even at this remove, he could still hear his mother banging on the door, shouting, “Leave some for the rest of us!” Old habits endured. Today, however—today was special. So he took his time, soaping up and rinsing, three times over. He closed his eyes, paced his breathing, and allowed himself to sink into his personal contract with himself.

“I am powerful,” he whispered. “I am vulnerable,” he continued. And smiling, he concluded, “And I am loving.” He repeated it a few times, a personal mantra, until it was no longer a declaration, only his renewed experience of himself. And then, one more phrase. “Especially today!” Opening his eyes, Hu nearly shouted that last. “Because today, I am getting married!”

An electric screech interrupted him—alarm sirens outside. It sounded like the whole city was howling. Like any other Angeleno, anyone who’d lived in the city more than six months, Hu ignored it. It was meaningless noise. Everything was noise, from the daily growl of motorcycles and Asian “rice-rockets” to the nightly screams of drunks and junkies.

Hu turned off the water and heard James calling from the kitchen. “Hu, you need to get in here!” Something was wrong, James only called him Hu when he was upset. He grabbed a fresh towel and wrapped it around himself. A second towel for his hair and he headed toward the kitchen where James was standing, leaning with his back against the counter, a mug of tea in his hand—but focusing intensely on a small television on the end of the kitchen table. Without looking up, James held out the usual mug of tea for Hu.

Hu took it and pecked his fiancé on the cheek. “What’s up, Bubble? What are all the sirens for? Some kind of test?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but took his first sip. Chai . . . “Ahh.” He glanced toward the television. The president was talking.

“Now what? Are we at war?”

“It’s Hawaii,” said James.

“We’re at war with Hawaii?”

“There’s been a quake—”

Hu’s buoyant mood evaporated. “Oh no. How bad?”

“Both Honolulu and Hilo were hit by tsunamis. Really big—the biggest ever.” James turned to Hu. “When did your folks fly out?”

“They didn’t. Dad needed an extra day. So they’re flying out this evening, they’ll catch up with us tomorrow at the hotel.”

“No, they won’t. And we won’t be there either. Honolulu airport is gone.”

“Wait. What?” At first, Hu didn’t understand. How could an airport be gone? Then he realized what James was telling him. “That’s not possible. A whole airport—?”

“And half the city—”

“Oh, shit,” Hu said, his mug of tea suddenly forgotten in his hand. “That’s—just bad.”

On the TV, the president was still talking, a row of grim-faced people stood behind him. Or maybe it was a repeat. The scroll-bar across the bottom of the screen was filled with incomprehensible words. They moved too fast for him to make sense of them. And outside, the sirens still screamed.

“Shit!” said Hu. “All I wanted was one little honeymoon—” He became aware of the sirens again. “And what’s all that noise about—? We’re not—Shit! What’s going on?”

James put down his coffee. He turned to Hu. He took Hu’s mug from him. “Squeak. Sweetheart—” His expression was grim. “It’s not just Hawaii. It’s the whole California coast. The tsunami is headed for us now. We’ve got maybe three hours before it hits—”

“A tsunami? Here—?”

“A tsunami. Here. A mega-tsunami. Just like the movie, only bigger—”

“But that was only a movie—” Hu stopped in mid-sentence, remembering that movie, that scene.

James Liddle had been SCUBA diving since his teens. After college, he’d set up his own small company, specializing in SCUBA services to local studios. “Underwater? Let it be a Liddle thing. Call us!” Because of his skill, his professionalism, his dependability, and his charming good looks, he was on speed dial for several stunt coordinators.

More than once, James had been called in to teach various film and television actors how to dive safely—or at least look like they knew how to dive safely. More than once, he’d doubled for actors who were too valuable to the studios to be allowed to do their own diving, but he couldn’t say who. Most of the bigger shoots involved nondisclosure agreements.

Hu’s family had moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver when he was eight, where his father opened a consulting service/business school, where he taught westerners how to do business in China and occasionally set up deals himself.

When Hu was twelve, an aunt he’d never met died of cancer, so his mother came south to Los Angeles to manage her brother’s large unruly family; she brought Hu with. As the new kid, as the Chinese kid, and also as the smallest and the smartest in his class, Hu was a target for bullies of all sizes—so his uncle enrolled him into a series of physical activities to build up not only his body, not only his ability to defend himself, but also his self-esteem. Eventually Hu studied karate, judo, Tae Kwon Do, and modern dance. By the time he was nineteen, Hu was earning extra money doing stunts in occasional action films. Though he never doubled for any of the major actors, he was often somewhere in the background—and in a memorable comedy, he’d been featured as one of the dancing ninjas.

James and Hu had met at Culver Studios. A massive team of stunt doubles had been assembled for a disaster picture, another overblown disaster picture, a fantasy of multiple simultaneous disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and the return of disco. Everyone knew the picture was going to be awful; it was assumed (though never spoken aloud) that nobody upstairs knew how bad it was—either that, or it was actually intended from the beginning to be a flop, a tax write-off, or perhaps even some bizarre kind of money-laundering. Who knew? The only people who understood Hollywood financing were alchemists, and few of them were ever allowed out of their dungeon laboratories into the light of day.

But on the ground, the money was good. A lot of people had a profitable summer working on the film. As with any big effort, there were sexual relationships, babies started, babies stopped, babies born, and of course, a few divorces and emotional breakdowns, plus a number of lifelong feuds begun and exorcised, some in private, others in public.

James had worked for seven weeks on various underwater sequences. Hu had come aboard in the last week as a stunt player, running from the onrushing water. The first few days, there was no actual water. All that was to be added later by a team of talented CGI artists in Hong Kong or New Delhi. Anyone whose name came before the credits would be taking home seven figures and points on the gross, but domestic jobs were shipped overseas in cost-cutting acts of dubious economy. But there was still work to be done locally.

They had to shoot one key scene on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard—from Rodeo Drive to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—and they had exactly seven minutes out of every thirty when the Beverly Hills Police Department would block off traffic for the director to capture his carefully orchestrated panic, a frenzied evacuation from unseen waves.

Hu’s job was to be part of the crowd, running down the street, running through the cars, until he finally hit a specific mark, where he would fall to the ground as if he was being swept under the killing wave—except one of the assistant directors liked his look and gave him a different role where he got to be a featured kill.

The camera started at a high angle, looking up the row of stopped cars, with the distant wave roaring toward the foreground. Hu ran toward the camera, running between the line of vehicles. The camera lowered, promising a closeup, but just as Hu arrived at that spot, a panicky driver—another stunt player—opened his driver-side door so Hu slammed into it—and then the wave overtook them both. The unseen side of the car door was carefully padded, so Hu could hit it hard without injuring himself.

The director liked the shot so much that he decided to add a follow-up bit, giving Hu two additional days of work. Finished with the devastation of Wilshire Boulevard, the film moved to a Hollywood backlot for specific closeups of death and destruction.

For these shots, the director needed real water, not virtual, and the production relocated to the Paramount lot, the site of the city’s second-largest outdoor tank—the Blue Sky Tank, so called because its towering back wall could be painted to represent any kind of sky, stormy to cloudless, that a director might need. Although the Falls Lake tank at Universal was noticeably larger, it was also more expensive to fill, filter, and heat.

The filmmakers needed a variety of shots with Asian men and women as background players. This was so their Chinese co-financers could edit a somewhat different version of the film for the Asian markets. The Chinese version would include several characters and subplots not in the American version. The joke had initially been whispered in the front office, but of course it eventually filtered down to the production crew as well—the picture would do well on that side of the Pacific, because Asian audiences like to see white people die. But to be fair, a few Chinese extras had to go down too.

Hu didn’t care, he was just happy to work. Because of his marvelously startled expression when he’d slammed into the car door, the American director wanted to follow up by showing Hu struggling for a while in real waves before finally (fake) drowning. So Hu spent a hot August morning in the tank, pretending to die—“On this next take, could you look a little more terrified, please?” Dutifully, Hu struggled, gasped, and waved his arms for help that would never come, until finally disappearing obediently beneath the surface of the foaming water.

The tank was barely four feet at the center, the waves were machine-produced, and the foam was a specific detergent. Floating across the entire surface of the water was an assortment of Styrofoam flotsam, representing the debris stirred up by the tsunami. The shot didn’t seem very dangerous—at least that’s what Hu believed until he was caught unprepared by a sudden sideways push of prop debris, hard enough to punch the air out of his lungs and leave him gasping for air, involuntarily sucking in a mouthful of water, coughing, and choking desperately as he flailed.

James was one of the safety coordinators. He’d dived into the water, swam under the crapberg, grabbed Hu, and pulled him off to the side of the tank, hanging him on the sloping surface and staying with him until he regained his breath. Neither noticed when the director shouted, “Cut! That’s the best one yet, we’ll use that one! All right, let’s get the camera in the water for the dead body shot—”

The director hadn’t noticed what had happened, but one of the assistant directors had seen, and on James’ direct recommendation, quietly added an additional stunt-fee to Hu’s paycheck. No one said anything to the film’s director—a man notorious for arguing with stunt players about the cost of each gag. He had a bad reputation in the stunt players’ community.

After that, James kept an eye on Hu. In the last shot of the morning, Hu had to pretend to be dead, floating face down in the water while a camera crew in dive gear photographed him from beneath. James had been there to coach the camera crew, showing them how to keep their bubbles out of the shot. And that was when Hu, not knowing James’ name, had jokingly called him the bubble-wrangler.

Later on, at lunch, they sat opposite each other—the group shared a table under a large craft-service tent that dominated the parking lot next to the commissary.

Hu had a smile. James had a grumpy charm—it was enough.

The two began that long careful dance of curiosity that would eventually, though not immediately, lead to James’ little house in Venice Beach. Hu had gotten his nickname—Squeak—from the sound his running shoes made on James’ tile floor.

It began as a physical thing, but eventually grew into a relationship. Bed-buddies became roommates. Roommates became lovers. And lovers became—

One strange stormy night, while the two of them were lying side-by-side, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rain, the usually taciturn James had said, “What do you think—”

“About what?”

“About us, about stuff—”

Hu was still learning how to listen to James, but this time he heard more than the words. He heard the intention.

“I think . . . ” he began. He rolled onto his side to face James. “I think yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, you big bubble-wrangler. Yes, I will marry you.”

“Oh,” said James. “I was going to ask you if we should get a cat.”

“Huh—?”

James grinned. “But getting married—that’s a good idea too.” He pulled Hu close, and kissed him intensely.

The rest was details.

After a few weeks of dithering about plans and schedules, and how much neither of them wanted the gaudy circus of an actual wedding ceremony, they decided to just go down to City Hall, do the deed, and then fly to Hawaii for a week. Hu’s parents, now together again, were initially more concerned about Hu marrying a Caucasian than a man—but finally decided to show their acceptance by joining them on the island.

The plane tickets were sitting on the kitchen table—and the president’s voice was still droning on—now repeating the original broadcast. Outside, the sirens abruptly fell silent. “I suppose—” said Hu, staring at the travel folder, “I suppose—we can get a refund.”

And then, it hit him.

The grim expression on James’ face said it all.

“Shit! We’re going to lose the house, aren’t we? Jimmy—?”

“We’re gonna lose everything. Everything we can’t carry on our backs.”

There were only three people in the world who had ever called James Liddle “Jimmy.”

The first had been his mother, right up until the day he came out to her. From that moment on, to express her disappointment, he was “James.” The second had been Nate Lem, his arrogant, overweight fraternity brother—he’d called him “Liddle Jimmy” once too often and gotten a bloody nose for it. After that, he didn’t call James anything at all, he left the room whenever James entered.

The third was Hu Son. When he said “Jimmy” it was either affectionate—or important.

James said, “They don’t know how big it’s going to be, but we’ve only got three hours to get out of here.” He took a breath, his mind racing. “Let’s not panic. Let’s take a moment and think. It’s all about the prep. We gotta get all our cash, all our IDs, all our cards. Um, I have a go-bag, you’ll have to pack one. We’ll need bottled water and protein bars and—and whatever else is important. Tablets, laptops. All our legal paperwork, especially the insurance stuff—”

Hu Son stood frozen for a moment, his heart racing. “You’re serious—oh my god, you are. Oh, god, Jimmy—”

James grabbed him, held him close. “It’s okay, it’s okay—we’re going to be okay. Let’s just take it one step at a time. First step, think—what’s important? What are we going to need? What can we leave behind? What do we absolutely need—?”

Hu said, “Um—I don’t know. Um—” He looked around the kitchen, mentally sorting through everything, his favorite mug, the pictures on the wall, the beautifully sculpted merman figurine they’d bought on a trip to New Orleans. None of that really mattered. He realized he was naked. He headed toward the room they had christened as “the badroom”—the place where it was good to be bad.

“Um, clothes. I’ll grab clothes—”

“Not the big suitcase,” James called after him. The one they had packed last night for Hawaii. “Only what can fit in the carry-on. Jeans, hoodies, T-shirts, underwear, socks—”

Hu was already pulling things out of drawers. “Toothbrushes, deodorant, first-aid kit—”

“Right, good.” James realized he was still holding a mug of hot tea. He took one last swallow, poured the rest into the sink, and opened the dishwasher to put the mug on the rack. It didn’t matter now, did it? But he put the mug on the rack anyway.

“Okay, Jimmy-boy,” he said, talking aloud to himself. “What else? The camera, for sure. Eight thousand dollars for an underwater camera rig—I’m not leaving that behind. And the memory cards and batteries. Oh—” He turned to the shelf, grabbed a nearly full box of Ziploc plastic bags and followed Hu into the badroom. “Here. Triple bag everything that isn’t waterproof.”

“You think—?”

“I think we’re going to plan for the worst, hope for the best, and prepare for anything. We’ll stuff it into dry bags at the office.” While Hu pulled on shorts and shirt, James continued sorting through drawers, throwing stuff onto the bed. “Fuck—”

“What?”

“The motorcycle is in the shop—”

“No prob. We’ll take the van—”

James had gone to the nightstand. He grabbed a large folding knife from the bottom drawer, and the travel-safe, then the travel bag from the closet shelf. He shook his head. “Bad idea.”

“Huh?” Hu stopped, shirt halfway down over his head. His voice came muffled.

“Squeak, you didn’t grow up in this city.”

“Yes, I did—”

“Not as a driver. We are not gonna be traffic today—”

Hu finished pulling his shirt down. “Then, how—?”

“My SCUBA gear is at the office. I can’t leave that behind—” James tossed the travel-safe into the carry-on. He shoved the knife into the pocket of his jeans. “I don’t know how bad it’s going to be, but I’m thinking there’s gonna be a big need for divers after this thing hits. I don’t know, but I’ll need to be prepared. We can bike to the office, grab whatever gear, and from there, we can head inland. Are you ready—?”

“Half a minute—” Hu stopped, looked around. “Last minute check—”

“I don’t want to scare you, but we need to get moving.”

Hu debated with himself, finally lost the argument, grabbed his running shoes and shoved them into the carry-on. “I paid too much for these shoes. They’re coming.” He stopped, looked uncertainly to James. “You think it’s gonna be that bad—”

James looked grim. “You know all those safety courses I had to take, the fire and rescue courses, the Red Cross courses, lifeguard, all the paramedic stuff?”

“Yeah. You did that for the licenses, so you’d be more valuable to the studios—”

“It was part of the job. Stunt safety. Water safety. Everything.” He gave the badroom one last check of his own, still talking. “We had to learn about disasters, all kinds, and prepping for survival too. That’s why I keep a go-bag under the bed, and why I’m always nagging you to keep one too.” He stopped, he took a breath. “I got to see the pictures from the Christmas Tsunami and Fukushima as well, the ones they didn’t show on TV. I never told you—but it was . . . ugly. So we are walking out of here right now and we are heading for the highest ground we can get to the fastest way we can. Is that it? You got everything?” James moved to close the carry-on—

Hu stopped him long enough to toss in two more items, a fist-sized bronze Buddha that he grabbed from the top of the dresser, a wooden cross with a naked Jesus pulled from the wall—and one more, a small resin replica of Mickey Mouse in red robe and blue sorcerer’s hat. “Gotta take the household gods, Bubble. Bad luck to leave ’em.”

The television was no longer replaying the president. Now, the Mayor of Los Angeles, backed up by a phalanx of city councilmen and police, and confronted by a forest of microphones, stood behind a podium, trying to look calm as he laid out the first attempts at emergency evacuation plans. His voice was shaking.

James and Hu stopped long enough to listen, long enough to realize that whatever the mayor was saying, none of it was going to help them. “Wait,” asked James, “Have you eaten? Grab those boxes of protein bars. Eat two of them now. And the water bottles, drink one now. Don’t scarf, don’t guzzle, bring it along. Come on, let’s go.”

They almost made it to the door, James with the knapsack holding his expensive new underwater camera, and his go-bag in his left hand—Hu with a knapsack holding water and travel-rations, his carry-on in his right hand.

Hu stopped abruptly. “No! Wait!”

“Now what?”

Hu dropped the carry-on, ran back to the badroom, came out a moment later, carrying a small black box. “I almost forgot the rings! The wedding rings!” He held the jewelry box high for James to see, then shoved it into his pocket. “Hell or high water, we’re getting married.”

“Probably high water, but yeah. Hell or high water.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. Now let’s go—”

James pulled the plastic tarp off the bikes and unlocked them. Despite the high wooden fence around the tiny yard, he still didn’t trust the neighborhood’s population of permanent transients.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” Hu said.

James didn’t answer. He just shook his head and led them out to the bike path. They took a moment to pull on their helmets and double-check the bungee cords around their bags, holding them firmly to the racks on the back of the bikes.

“You ready?”

“No. But let’s go anyway.”

It wasn’t a long ride to the office. The beachfront had gone curiously empty—few of the stores were open, several looked abandoned. There were still people here but not the usual slurry of ambling shoppers and tourists. They saw a few speed skaters with backpacks, several people puffing and pulling oversized wheeled luggage, a scramble of surfers running for their van, and more bicyclists than usual. Most had backpacks and other luggage strapped to their bikes and handlebars. But everyone was moving with purpose. Most were walking fast, trotting, a few were even running. It wasn’t a panic—not yet, but the clock was running.

James’ company, their company now—Liddle Things—was set in a small white building, three blocks up from the beach. James didn’t rent to casual tourists, too much risk, so there was little need to be on the beachfront where rents were noticeably higher. He unlocked the heavy front door; they wheeled their bikes inside and locked the door behind them. James went behind the desk and unlocked the back room where he kept the tanks and masks, the diving rigs, tool belts, and assorted other paraphernalia.

“Shit!” he said, looking around, taking stock, realizing how little he could save. He blew out his cheeks. “We’re gonna lose it all, Squeak. More than fifty thousand dollars invested in this stuff—all gone.”

Hu wasn’t sure if he should say anything. He recognized the mood—the same growling darkness that always came over James when dealing with money, especially a shortage of it. “The insurance—?”

“Won’t cover the half of it—” James shook his head. “No—there’s just no way to save it, no fucking way.” He sighed in resignation. “All right, let’s get the bike trailers. You take the new one, it’s lighter. You attach, I’ll do triage.” He began pulling things off the wall and out of lockers.

Hu knew the drill. The bike trailers were convenient ways for cyclists to carry surfboards, SCUBA gear, camping gear, or even a few bags of groceries. They attached easily. He and James used them a lot, for almost any trip less than three miles. Hu didn’t mind driving, he could listen to his music, but James hated getting behind the wheel, because he found urban traffic frustrating—the poor behavior of other drivers made even the shortest outing feel like a death-defying exercise.

James talked as he worked, annotating every decision with a justification. “I’m gonna want my wet suit and my new dive computer—that thing cost fifteen hundred dollars. It does everything but make coffee, and I still haven’t had a chance to use it. I’m gonna need it if there’s rescue work. You grab those spare tanks and put them on your trailer. And the camping bag. I’m afraid we’re gonna need it. I’ll take the main tanks and the portable compressor. I might have to wear the rig. Hmm, harness, backplate, maybe I should wear a couple of tanks, too? What else? A pro-grade mask—the new one with the dual lamps, fins, tool belt—I can hang the belt on the handlebars, anything that isn’t waterproof goes into the dry bags, we can put those in our knapsacks, everything else in the travel case, that’ll go on the trailer. Oh, and grab those new headlamps too—”

Hu laughed. “We’re gonna look like a couple of underwater bag ladies—and you with the SCUBA gear on your back—”

“Not gonna leave it—”

“Jimmy—? Isn’t it all too much to carry? All this weight?”

“If it is, then we’ve both wasted a fortune at the gym. And all that damn healthy eating.” James paused, got serious. “Squeak, this is my career. Just like your new expensive laptop. I need this.”

“You don’t have to convince me, Bubble. Give me whatever you need me to carry. We’ll do it.”

They finished quickly. Less than fifteen minutes.

“Is that it?”

“It’s gonna have to be.” James looked to his partner, his tone abruptly thoughtful. “We’ll take the bikeway—that’ll be the fastest. The only traffic will be other cyclists. But only to Twenty-sixth Street, or Bundy if we can, then we’ll turn north. I think if we can get to Sunset, we can go up one of the canyons to Mulholland, maybe take it to Topanga, get down into the valley that way—”

“And from there?”

“I dunno. Who do we know in the valley with a guesthouse? Or a backyard big enough for the tent?”

“Whatsisname—that writer who’s always calling you?”

“Mr. Source Material? Maybe. What about your cousin?”

“Maybe. If you’re willing to put up with my uncle—”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“Maybe if we can get to Pasadena, there’s Chris and Mark—”

“Melinda has a guest house—”

“So does—never mind. We have options. First thing, let’s get out of here.” James pointed to the bikes. “Okay, safety check on the bikes. Is everything secure?”

Three minutes to double-check all the tie-downs and bungee cords, and they were ready to leave, but at the door, they paused. James put his hand on Hu’s arm. “Okay, Squeak, we’ve got two and a half hours. We can do this. Ten miles an hour, easy-peasy. We could get all the way to Union Station if we had to. All we have to do is pace ourselves. The idiots are going to ride like crazy and exhaust themselves before they even get to the 405. Just keep thinking of Mike Sloan’s teddy bear—”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you remember? Sloan’s teddy wins the race—”

“Oof. Remind me again why I agreed to marry you?”

“Because I’m the daddy, that’s why.” James grinned.

“Except when it’s my turn.”

They pushed the bikes outside, first Hu, then James behind him. Hu started to plug in his headphones, but James stopped him. “You don’t want to do that—”

“Shouldn’t we listen to the news—?”

“Aren’t you scared enough already?”

“Oh.” Hu shoved the earphones back into his knapsack, glanced at his wristband, looked west toward the beach. Beyond a lonely palm tree, the horizon looked peaceful and bright. Hard to believe a disaster was rising somewhere beyond. “It’s gonna be hot today,” he said. “Especially inland.”

“Yeah,” James agreed, behind him. “Gonna need the extra water.”

Hu turned back to him. “All right. I’m ready.”

With the trailer attached, his bike was loaded heavier than he expected. He had to take a running start to catch up to James, but they were on their way, heading east.

It wasn’t far to the bikeway, less than a mile, but they weren’t the only ones who’d had this idea. The bikeway wasn’t crowded, not at first, but the farther they rode, the more cyclists joined them—a steady stream of riders pedaling inland with a grim determination. Every few minutes, a light-rail train passed them, howling east on elevated tracks that paralleled the bikeway. Despite himself, Hu looked up—the railcars were already crowded. James had guessed right.

“Sloan’s teddy,” called James. “Just like one of your marathons.”

“Ha ha,” said Hu. He focused on his pace, using the same steady counting exercise he used when he ran in the morning. Occasionally, other cyclists passed them at a furious pace, almost panicky. Not wise—but their choice.

Two miles in, and the bikeway was filled. Most of the traffic was other cyclists in professional gear, helmets and backpacks, but sometimes just ordinary people on bicycles—sometimes whole families pedaling in a group. Most were wearing knapsacks, or had cases strapped to the backs of their bikes or hanging from their handlebars. A few, like James and Hu, had well-loaded bike trailers.

Occasionally people passed them, a few speed-skaters, and motorized skateboards as well. Once a couple of assholes on motorcycles came roaring past. Hu stood up on his pedals to look ahead. If the bikeway kept filling up, kept getting more and more crowded, those motorcyclists weren’t going to have much of an advantage.

By the time they reached Twenty-sixth Street, traffic on the bikeway had slowed to a sluggish crawl—and east of the avenue, there were so many cyclists ahead of them riding was impossible. People had to dismount and walk their bikes. A few groaned in annoyance, a couple others shouted angrily, some muttered to themselves, but most just kept pushing along. Hu and James dismounted and walked their loaded bikes side-by-side.

More frustrated riders piled up behind them, but no fights had broken out. There was still plenty of time. Most people were helping each other. One woman was holding another’s bike while the first one changed her baby’s diaper. Elsewhere, a professional-looking rider had stopped to patch a flat tire for a crying teenage girl. Another was helping an uncertain middle-aged man put a loose chain back on his bicycle’s gears.

It wasn’t a panic, not yet. It was still an exodus. Not disorderly, but it wasn’t moving fast enough. At this pace . . . James looked to Hu, shook his head, leaned over and whispered, “Time for an alternate route.”

It took them nearly ten minutes to work their way to the next opportunity to exit the bikeway, Cloverfield Avenue. They weren’t the only ones abandoning the narrow route. Some of the cyclists were turning south, most were turning north.

James and Hu went north. Just on the other side of Colorado Boulevard, there was a good-sized parking lot. The lot was already emptying of cars, the last few people driving away frantically. James pointed, and Hu followed.

They pulled themselves out of the steady stream of people remounting their bikes. Hu pulled out the first water bottle, took two swallows and passed it to James, who did the same, then passed it back. A familiar ritual. Having done that, they both pulled out their phones. Hu checked the Weather Channel—the temperature was already above eighty and still rising. Okay, not unexpected.

James went to Google Maps, then he tapped for Waze. Both were bad news. Red lines showing heavy traffic everywhere, some routes already painted with stretches of black. Absolute gridlock was beginning. But at least the bikes were moving here—in the bike lanes and on the sidewalks, and even between the long rows of cars. The automobile lanes were barely inching forward.

“It’s crowding up faster than I expected. Apparently people are taking this thing seriously. All right, we’ll head north here—” James started to push his bike forward again.

Hu said, “Wait.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a text.”

“Forget it—”

“It’s from Karen—” A series of messages rolled up the screen. Hu looked to James. “She’s at work. She needs someone to pick up Pearl.”

“Can’t she do it?”

“She’s doing triage in the E.R. She couldn’t get out, even if she wanted to. The streets there are gridlocked.”

“Pearl can’t get a ride?”

“The neighbor who promised left without her.” Hu read the next text. “What an asshole. Apparently, her cats were more important.”

“There’s no one else?”

Hu kept scrolling through Karen’s frantic notes, his expression darkening. “Doesn’t look like it. Karen says it’s desperate. Pearl is trapped. She can’t get an Uber or a Lyft, Ride-Share is down, Access isn’t picking up. The Fire Department is moving all their equipment eastward. She tried calling for an ambulance, but—” Hu lowered his phone. “James, we can’t leave her there. We gotta get her.”

James made a raspberry of disgust. “Fuck. The problem is . . . that damn wheelchair.”

“Can we pull her—?”

“I’m thinking—” A heartbeat. “The wheelchair is light enough—it’s Pearl. She’s not exactly a spring potato. Fuck.”

“James—”

“I know, I know—” He puffed his cheeks, blew out his breath, exasperated. “Yeah, we have to try. Uh . . . all right, lemme think.” He went to scratch his head, fingers fumbling across his helmet instead. “Fastest way there—”

James made a decision. “Okay. Forget Sunset. Forget the mountains. We’ll go up to Santa Monica, it’s the next one after Broadway. Then . . . ” His voice tailed off as he plotted a route. He turned to Hu. “It’s a long slog. If Pearl can get herself down to the street, we’ll figure something out. We might have to lose one of the trailers, I dunno, I’ll do the math in my head while we ride.”

“Can we make it in time?”

James looked at his watch. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Can we get her to high ground? Can we get us to high ground—?”

“Straight north up Fairfax would take us to Laurel Canyon. Might be high enough. I don’t know. That’s not a great route, but . . . fuck, I don’t know.” James shook his head. “Worst comes to worst, I don’t know, we might be far enough inland. Even a ten-story building might be tall enough. Maybe. I don’t know. This is fucked. Let’s just do it. Come on, we’ve been through worse—”

“No we haven’t,” said Hu. “This is the worst.” But he was already tapping a message into his phone. “We’re on our way.” He sent it to both Karen and Pearl, shoved his phone back into his pocket and grabbed his handlebars. “Okay, let’s go.”

James and Hu pedaled east on Santa Monica Boulevard, weaving their way through a slow-moving mass of cars and people. But at least it was moving. Both sides of the avenue were headed inland. There was no westbound traffic. It helped—a little.

It was a business district here, but none of the stores were open. There were a few broken windows, but not many. People were determinedly walking east, most of them turning north at suitable intersections. Some of the cyclists were walking their bikes because there wasn’t enough room to ride. James and Hu had dismounted as well and were now walking their bikes side-by-side.

The exodus was serious now. Even the motorcyclists were having trouble maneuvering through the impatient lines of automobiles. It was turning into a crush. The inevitable speed-skaters darted everywhere, sometimes nearly colliding with unwary pedestrians. Occasionally, they saw an ambulatory bundle of rags doggedly pushing an overloaded shopping cart. Even the homeless were leaving. And once a pair of hipsters rode by on hoverboards.

A woman behind them started complaining loudly—making pointed remarks about their overloaded bikes and bike trailers. James muttered a curse under his breath, but shook his head and kept pushing forward. Hu looked over to him. “Are you okay?”

“I will be. Are you?”

“I’m . . . not complaining,” said Hu. He had a thought. “I’m wondering. Do you think maybe Pearl’s building might be tall enough? If we could get her to the roof—”

James went silent, thinking about it. Finally, “I wouldn’t want to risk it, would you? It’s an old building, wood frame, it might not survive the impact. It’s not just the water, it’s all the crap being pushed by the water. It’ll hit like a horizontal avalanche. And even if the building survives the impact, she could be stuck up there for days before anyone could get to her. And the damn wheelchair is another problem. So, no.”

“It was just a thought. I was worried about the time.”

James looked at his watch. “We’re okay.” He pointed. “We’re almost to the freeway. Once we get to the other side, it should be easier going. Well, could be. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.” James pushed his bike ahead, effectively ending the conversation.

The 405 freeway divides the L.A. Basin. It separates the western and southern communities from the rest of the megalopolis, as it winds south, vaguely paralleling the coast. Parts are elevated highway, parts are sunken, but all of it is a ten-laned barrier to traffic trying to move to and from the coast. The inadequate and infrequent underpasses and bridges that cross the 405, its on- and off-ramps, are bottlenecks that can back up traffic for blocks even on a good day.

This was not a good day. Gridlock spread outward from every crowded access ramp and crossover. In a few hours the entire length of freeway—from the Sepulveda Pass all the way to the Mexican border—would be gone. But right now it was a major obstacle.

Where Santa Monica Boulevard crossed under the 405, several LAPD motorcycle officers were calmly working to unravel the chaos at the underpass. Surrounded by frantic and desperate drivers, they were doing their best. They were scheduled to withdraw at least twenty minutes before impact—if they could get out. That wasn’t certain anymore.

At the mayor’s desperate orders, both sides of all major surface streets were now mandated for eastbound and northbound vehicles, especially through the underpasses and across the bridges. Both sides of the 110 and the 405 were now handling northbound traffic.

It wasn’t enough.

Police and news helicopters circled overhead. Other choppers, all kinds, were shuttling east and west, their own small contributions to the evacuation. The apocalypse was being televised. Further south, at LAX, every plane that could get off the ground was heading inland, some with passengers sitting in the aisles.

James and Hu came to a stop on the sidewalk just past the Nu-Art theater—an ancient movie house that had survived for more than nine decades. For most of its history, it had been a cinematic sanctuary, unspooling an assortment of independent films, obscure foreign dramas, various cult classics, assorted Hollywood treasures, a variety of otherwise forgotten and questionable efforts, occasional themed festivals, and the inevitable midnight screenings of crowd-pleasers like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and other film-fads of the moment. In a few hours, it would be closed forever.

James pointed ahead—the underpass was gridlocked. The officers had blocked off the northbound on-ramps with their motorcycles, and were now directing traffic to use the southbound off-ramp instead, their only remaining access to a northbound escape, but even that was moving slowly. Too slowly. Even with cars crawling along the shoulders of the freeway, the 405 just couldn’t accept any more traffic.

Los Angeles had not been designed for an evacuation—not on this scale. No city had ever been designed for such a massive torrent of people, an exodus of unprecedented size, a titanic crush of desperate humanity.

And yet, somehow, it moved.

Not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. But it moved.

Some of these people would survive—if they could just get over the hill into the San Fernando Valley, or even halfway up the Sepulveda Pass. There was time.

Except—

—except for the angry shouting.

Which was why James had stopped.

An old green van, a decrepit-looking Ford Windstar, hastily overloaded, had collided with a silver Lexus, a fairly new model. Both vehicles were in the middle of the road, blocking three separate lanes. A frightened woman sat in the passenger seat of the Lexus.

Two desperate drivers had left their vehicles to confront each other—neither had given way, both had tried to force their way forward, only to demonstrate that specific law of physics that two objects cannot occupy the same space—so now they were screaming at each other in near-incoherent rage.

A crowd of other drivers surrounded them, also screaming, demanding that they move their fender-crunched vehicles out of the way. Snippets of conversation echoed off the underpass walls—

“Get your fucking cars out of the way—”

“Not until I get this asshole’s insurance—”

“It’s your goddamn fault, I want your insurance—”

“There’s no time for that, you assholes—”

“Will both you idiots move your goddamn cars—”

“Daddy, I wanna go home—”

“The police are right there—”

“Good! They can arrest this jerk—”

“Just please move it to the side, so the rest of us can get by—”

“Move it where?! We’re boxed in by the rest of you—”

“I don’t back up for assholes—”

“It’s okay, I do—”

“I’m not moving till he gives me his insurance information—”

“We don’t have time for that, and your piece of shit Ford isn’t worth it anyway. You’re just trying to hold me up, and I won’t stand for it—”

“That’s just the attitude I’d expect from a spoiled brat manbaby—”

“Guys, please! This isn’t helping anyone—”

“Daddy, I gotta pee—”

“If you won’t move it, I will—”

“Touch my car and you’ll regret it—”

“Why don’t the police do something—”

“Okay, enough is enough. You’re gonna move this shit outta the way now—”

That last was a burly member of the sasquatch family—red-faced, longhaired, scruffy-bearded, flannel shirt, and the kind of expression that usually stopped all conversation.

“You gonna make me—?”

“Officer, over here! Please!” That was a woman shouting.

Two of the officers were busy trying to stop impatient drivers from backing up onto the southbound on-ramp, intending to join the northbound exodus that way. Two more were struggling to keep the evacuation orderly—one had to dodge sideways as an impatient driver forced his way around the sluggish line of cars ahead of him. They had more immediate priorities than the argument in the underpass. But the backup of cars was growing, and so was the angry crowd.

From his position at the ramp, one of the officers waved furiously at the drivers of the two vehicles, urging them to get back into their vehicles and move, but the two men were too angry, each so focused on winning this argument they couldn’t see past their own rage. It looked like violence was inevitable.

“Can we get past that?” asked Hu.

“I don’t know,” said James. “I’m wondering if we should try to go around it.” He pulled out his phone to study the map again. Where was the next closest underpass? Half a block north. Ohio Avenue.

The immediate problem would be just getting across the street. Santa Monica Boulevard was gridlocked. The closest cross street was Sawtelle, just on the other side of the Nu-Art theatre. Maybe they could thread their way around the stalled cars—

A sudden shift in sound, a scream of incoherent rage. Both James and Hu whirled to see—

Sasquatch was now waving an aluminum baseball bat. “You gonna move it—?” This was followed by a well-aimed blow. The right-front headlight of the Lexus shattered in the impact. “You gonna move it now—?”

“What the fuck are you doing—?”

“Giving you a reason to move it—”

“Fuck you! You’re gonna pay for that—”

“Let’s make it two—” Another swing of the bat, it bounced off the left headlight. A second swing shattered it. “And three—” The windshield shattered next. The woman inside flinched and tried to scramble across the seat.

“Stop it, goddammit! Stop it!”

“Move it and I will!”

The driver of the Lexus scrambled into the car, but instead of starting the engine, he came out waving a—

“Gun! He’s got a gun—!” The crowd scattered. The panic rippled outward. At its spreading edges, people ran or ducked, hiding behind the most convenient cars.

And just as quickly, three of the police positioned themselves, flattened across the hoods of several stalled vehicles, guns drawn, and pointed, held steady in both hands, red laser dots wavering on the Lexus driver. The lead officer shouted, his voice electrically amplified—“Drop it! Drop the gun! Now!”

Confused, the Lexus driver turned, staring from one officer to the next. “But he . . . he smashed my car.” He waved the gun around, as if to point it, but Sasquatch had conveniently disappeared.

“Drop the fucking gun! Now, goddammit!” Not exactly standard LAPD procedure, but the pressures of the situation were getting out of hand.

“I just want to get out of here!” the Lexus driver wailed.

“Drop the gun and move your car!”

“No, no, no!” The man insisted. “I didn’t do anything! He hit me! He has to move!” Sensing that he was blocked in, he turned around and around, pointing the gun from one driver to the next. “Everybody get out of my way! Let me out of here—” He looked desperate, he was shredding into incoherency—

“Last warning! Drop the gun. Drop it. Now.”

“Please! Just let me out of here—”

“Oh fuck,” said James, quietly. “They’re gonna shoot him.”

Hu put his hand on James’ shoulder and pushed. The two of them flattened to the sidewalk together, their bikes falling beside them.

Three quick gunshots, followed by a beat of silence—and then the screaming started. “Oh my god, my god!” And: “You didn’t have to do that—!” Followed by orders from the cops. “You, move that Lexus. Move it now! You, back up! You, follow him!”

But there was no organization. There were too many voices. There was too much screaming, and too many people pulling in too many directions at once—

And a couple more gunshots, coming from another direction—

James half rose up to look, then quickly lowered himself back to the sidewalk. Once, a long time ago, he’d seen a riot start. It was ugly.

This was worse.

James looked to Hu. “Let’s go back.”

Tentatively, they levered themselves back to their feet, both a little shaken. Hu touched James’ arm and pointed. The building behind them had a fresh hole in one of its windows.

James smiled weakly, nodded, pointed west.

Hu hesitated. “Shouldn’t we see if anyone needs help?”

“Pearl needs us more. Let’s get out of here.”

Hu hesitated, uncertain.

James touched his elbow and said quietly, “Triage.”

Hu didn’t like the thought. But James was right. He followed.

Somehow, despite the narrow sidewalk, despite the people around them, they got their bikes turned around and headed a half block west to Sawtelle.

They weren’t the only ones. Drivers who had gotten out of their cars to see what the blockage was at the underpass were now climbing back into their vehicles and turning north onto Sawtelle. James and Hu threaded their way across the intersection and remounted. There was just enough room on the sidewalk to pedal north.

It wasn’t far to Ohio Avenue, a block and a half. But when they reached the intersection and looked right, they came to a stop, both at the same time.

This underpass was blocked even worse. It was narrower and too many cars were trying to get through it. The avenue was backed up with cars arriving from the west, but adding to the gridlock, traffic from Sawtelle was also trying to merge into the sluggish flow.

“Can we get through there?” asked Hu.

James considered it. There was a cluster of motorcyclists blocking the sidewalk that went through the underpass. It didn’t look like they were getting by. Something blocking them on the other side, maybe—?

“No,” said James. “Too narrow.” That was the most convenient excuse, but he was still thinking about the violence they’d just escaped. This was another potential disaster—another riot looking for a place to happen. He pointed north instead. “Let’s see if we can get across. We’ll take Wilshire.” There weren’t any other options.

They pushed their bikes forward. Most of the going was single-file, but there was still room to make it through. Despite their urgency, most of the drivers here were leaving almost enough space for the two cyclists to navigate carefully across the intersection. Their bike trailers bumped a few fenders where they had to push between the lanes, but aside from one red-faced future stroke victim who shouted at them for blocking his nonexistent way forward, most drivers pretended to ignore them.

And then they were on Sawtelle again, pedaling into the Veterans Administration Healthcare Center. Where Sawtelle dead-ended inside the campus, before a cluster of shining white buildings, there was a concrete path cutting directly north, and it was wide enough for them to pedal. They weren’t the only cyclists with this idea; a few others raced past them. But James and Hu stopped to walk their bikes because of the foot traffic—the old men in bathrobes and pajamas and shapeless sagging trousers.

In the rising heat of the July day, these ancient men trudged steadily north. They were clusters of fragile age, old but determined. Most of them were using canes or struggling with walkers, a few pushed others in wheelchairs, a few were coming with their IV stands, but all of them were heading slowly and deliberately toward Wilshire. They smelled of old age and soap.

These were the leftovers, the forgotten warriors, the heroes of yesterday—the abandoned ones, abandoned one more time. No one had remembered they were here. There was no evacuation plan for them. The buses had never arrived, they’d been commandeered for the schoolchildren and for anyone else who could scramble aboard.

Maybe, when they reached the boulevard, someone would give them a ride. Or maybe they would just end up as a few more bodies in the long line of hopeful old men gathering along the side of the road, more zombies for the frightened drivers to ignore.

James and Hu passed them as quickly as they could—they tried hard not to meet their eyes, tried hard not to see their frail bodies and watery expressions. But one of the men stopped James with an outstretched hand. “You go. You go on, get out of here. Go and live. Find someone to love and live a glorious life.” Another added, “But tell them about us. Tell them to remember. Please—” And a third, “Tell them how we were forgotten, betrayed, abandoned—” And a fourth, “And tell them to go fuck themselves too—”

Both James and Hu nodded and promised. “We will, we will.”

They nodded and said yes to everything, they shook the trembling hands of those who reached out to them—and then they pushed on, a hard lump in their throats. They wanted to do more, but what could they do?

And then one of the old men called, “Jimmy, is that you?” Hearing his name, James stopped. Force of habit. He turned and looked.

A frail specter, dragging an IV stand, came wobbling, hobbling across the grass. “Jimmy, it’s Grampa.”

No, it wasn’t. All of James’ grandparents had passed a decade earlier. But still, he was startled enough to stop and stare.

Another old soldier came shuffling up. “It’s all right, pay him no mind. He’s—he doesn’t know who anyone is anymore.”

But Grampa had grabbed Jimmy’s arm. “I knew you’d come,” he said. “I told them, I told them you would come to see me—”

The other man shook his head. “Jimmy died. A long time ago. But he doesn’t believe it. Or he forgets.”

James said, “Hu, hold my bike.” He dismounted, put his arms around the self-appointed Grampa. “I love you, Grampa. I’m sorry I waited so long to come and see you. I missed you so much. I have to go now. Your friends will take care of you. But I have to go. They need me at the . . . at the station, okay?”

The old man didn’t want to let go. His frail hands trembled as he tried to hang onto his long-lost grandson, but Jimmy pulled away anyway, and finally Grampa said, “Okay, Jimmy. Okay. You be a good boy now. You tell your ma you saw me, okay?”

“Okay, Grampa.” Jimmy gave the old man a quick hug, then pulled away just as quickly. He took hold of his bike again—

James mounted and they pedaled on.

“That was . . . that was a good thing you did.”

“Triage,” said James. “Goddammit.”

Hu didn’t answer.

They traveled past the line of old men, castoffs in a younger world, all of them struggling in the rising heat. As they turned right to go up the ramp to Wilshire Boulevard, even more old and frail men were gathering in a crowd. Some of them were weeping. Others were stepping into the traffic lanes, knocking on the windows of slow-moving vehicles. Others stood silently on the sidewalk, sunken in despair, gaunt and resigned in the heat of the day. Two looked like they were unconscious on the sidewalk. Here and there, car doors were opened for them—but not enough.

It was a nightmare.

They pushed past. Most of the old men ignored them. They were just two more bodies in the passing parade of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t help them.

A couple of the old men were shouting obscenities—mostly at the cars, but a few directed their streams of abuse at James and Hu. One hollered at Hu, “That’s right, you dirty Jap, run away, run away—or we’ll get you again like we did at Pearl Harbor—”

“I’m Chinese,” said Hu, but the old man didn’t care, or didn’t hear. Hu followed James; they pushed on.

There were officers working the underpass here too, but without the same frustration and confusion that they had seen a mile further south at Santa Monica Boulevard. The officers here were also directing traffic up onto the southbound lanes of the 405, pointing cars up the off-ramp, shouting and waving them forward, even demanding they use that side of the highway as an additional northbound escape. Some drivers looked reluctant, this felt wrong, but they followed the officers’ directions and headed up the off-ramp anyway

The traffic inched along slowly, jerking spasmodically, filling every spare foot of space—but it moved—only a little at a time, but it moved with a single-minded purpose. If these vehicles could get far enough north, far enough up the Sepulveda Pass, these drivers would likely survive.

James and Hu lowered their heads and pushed themselves forward as quickly as they could. They blinded themselves to the naked desperation and pushed east, somehow getting through the traffic at the ramps and into the cooling shadow of the underpass. They didn’t linger, the place smelled of fumes. Finally, they were out to the other side and across Sepulveda. They threaded their way through the cars on this side.

When they came to the giant Federal building on the south side of the boulevard, a massive white monolith, Hu looked to James, an unspoken question in his glance. They looked to the crowds gathering at the structure, surrounding its entrances, including another legion of old men. James shook his head, an unspoken reply. Bad idea. Not gonna be enough room for everyone . . . and still too close to the shoreline.

They pushed on.

A long row of tall buildings lay ahead of them, not quite skyscrapers in the modern sense, but tall enough to be imposing—tall enough to look like safety. Already, the foot traffic was getting thick—businessmen, residents, students from the UCLA campus a mile north—the buildings were filling up. The top floors would be crowded.

When James and Hu finally got to the intersection of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards, they hit a new obstacle—a huge gaping hole in the ground that was the excavation for the Westwood terminus of the Purple Line, the latest extension to the Los Angeles subway system.

If it had been completed, if the tracks had been laid and energized, the city could have evacuated another half-million people. But today, it was a gaping promise. Unfinished. Empty. And shortly to be flooded, inundated, and scraped away by a bulldozer of debris—

James stopped himself.

Don’t go there. Just don’t.

He checked Google Maps, nodded, pointed to the right. “We’ll take the side streets.”

A block south, along Wellworth Avenue, they could easily pedal east again. It was a residential area, mostly one- or two-story houses. Traffic was thick here, but not impossible—just a steady stream of cars, pushing slowly east. James and Hu kept to the sidewalks; there weren’t many other riders here, and they made the best progress since leaving Venice.

James glanced at his watch. They were behind schedule, but there was still time. They were going to make it.

If there were no more shootings.

They followed the side streets—Wellworth, Warner, Ashton, Holmby—past the worst of the jams, and then they were back on Wilshire. It cut easily through the golf courses, but it was an uphill slog, and the bikes and trailers were heavily loaded.

Halfway up the hill, Hu called for a stop. He opened a fresh water bottle, drank half of it, and passed it to James, who finished it . . . and tossed the bottle over the fence onto the green. “Always wanted to do that.”

“Jimmy—?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s awfully hot.”

“Yeah—” But he knew that wasn’t what Hu meant. Their shirts were sweat-stained, they were both damp with the effort of pedaling with the extra weight. The uphill part was just an excuse to stop.

“The bike-trailers,” said Hu. “The tanks—”

“I know—”

“They’re holding us back—”

James fell silent. He took a deep breath, then another, tried to compose himself. Hu was frustrated. And when Hu was frustrated, then James got frustrated, because he had to talk Hu down. But this was different.

“I think we can make it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“We have to try.” James pointed. “This part is all uphill. Once we get to the top, it’ll be an easy ride down the other side.”

Hu looked past James, up toward the crest. It really wasn’t that far. He knew he could make it—but it wasn’t the top of the hill he was worried about. It was the rest of the distance, to Pearl’s house and then to safety. He felt overwhelmed, almost to the point of tears.

“Jimmy, you know I’d never ask you to—”

James leaned his bike against the fence, went quickly back to Hu. “Squeak, I know, you wouldn’t ask unless there was no other way. And it’s the same for me. I wouldn’t ask you if I could see any other way. But I don’t think we can leave any of this behind.” He stopped himself. “Wait—”

Beside them, the traffic chugged slowly past. James ignored the curious stares of several small children leaning out the open windows of a passing SUV.

“Okay, look,” James said. “Let’s put only our must-haves into our backpacks, okay? All our paperwork, money, phones, your computer, all the stuff we can’t leave behind. The stuff in the dry bags, right? And then let’s see how much farther we can get with the rest. Is that okay?”

Hu nodded reluctantly. It was a concession. Not the one he wanted, but he had to trust James—James was the better planner. He started thinking what he could repack. It wasn’t much. He’d already put the most important things in his knapsack. Some of the weight was water bottles. He felt damp and sweaty all over. For a moment, he dreamt of the long luxurious shower he could take when they got back home.

Then he realized he would never see that shower again. Abruptly he realized he had to pee.

Hu looked around. They were at least a mile from anything that might serve as a rest stop—the hell with it—he turned to the chain-link fence, lifted up the left side of his shorts and let loose a personal torrent, splashing at the fence. James joined him, yanked down his own shorts, and for a moment, their two streams arced toward the silent green of the golf course.

Hu giggled.

“What?”

“Don’t cross the streams—”

“You see too many movies.”

“You watch ’em with me.”

“Hey!” a distant voice called. “Stop that!”

They looked through the fence. Three middle-aged men in bright-colored shirts and pants were playing golf, totally oblivious to the evacuation. One of them was waving his golf club angrily at them.

“Didn’t you hear the news?” James called. “There’s a tsunami coming in.”

“Don’t you believe it,” one of them called back. “Just another drill.”

“Fake news,” muttered the second.

The third said, “I’d rather die golfing than running—”

“Have it your way,” said James, pulling up his pants, and suddenly doubting. What if they were right—?

No. They were wrong, he wished he could believe them, but they were wrong—and in a couple hours, they’d find out how wrong. He wondered if they’d make it to the eighteenth hole in time, shook his head in disbelief, turned back to Hu. “Idiots.”

Hu smiled weakly. “Suddenly, I don’t feel so stupid.”

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

Refreshed by their rest, rehydrated by the water, they made it to the crest of the hill, then half-coasted, half-pedaled down the other side.

They continued east on Wilshire Boulevard, past the Beverly Hilton Hotel to where it crisscrossed Santa Monica Boulevard. Navigating the wide diagonal intersection with Santa Monica wasn’t as hard as James feared. Traffic was inching along here, but there was still room to thread the bikes between the ranks of cars.

Wilshire was a straight line east from there, a gilded belt around the waist of Beverly Hills, lined with elegant palm trees. Much of the traffic here was turning north at every opportunity, aiming for Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, any higher ground at all. A lesser but steady stream of vehicles pushed eastward and inland. At an average speed of ten miles per hour, there was still a chance for most of them to survive.

Overhead, the sky was filled with more helicopters than either James or Hu had ever seen. Police, news, rescue, fire, military, and private services as well. Some were monitoring, others were evacuating.

Here, the sidewalks were wide enough, they had room to ride—they were an incongruous sight pedaling through the most elegant district in Los Angeles. Elegant—and doomed. All the surrounding communities that kept these businesses thriving would be gone in less than two hours.

As James and Hu pedaled steadily east, they heard a continuous drone of chattering voices leaking from the radios of the vehicles they passed, bits of audio flotsam that refused to assemble into any kind of coherent narrative.

Here the pedestrian traffic was lighter. There were other cyclists on the road and on the sidewalk, but not a lot. Motorcycles growled between the rows of cars. Three people on Segways rolled past them. And surprisingly—for this neighborhood, anyway—they even saw a pair of homeless women, determinedly pushing their overloaded shopping carts eastward. There were buses too, all kinds, packed and overloaded, some with people even riding on the roofs, something Hu had never expected to see in America.

If anyone had expected last-minute desperate looting of Wilshire Boulevard’s elegant storefronts, they would have been disappointed. Even those who might have been tempted were seeing survival as a much more useful priority.

The day was growing hotter, and this far inland, the hot yellow sun was shaded by a smoggy brown haze—a rising cloud of dust, stirred up by a million vehicles.

For some reason, James was reminded of a scene from Disney’s Fantasia. The “Rite of Spring” segment. All those thirsty dinosaurs, plodding slowly east across an orange desert, toward a sanctuary that didn’t exist, eventually dropping to the dirt and dying, leaving only their whitened bones as evidence they had ever existed. He wondered what future archaeologists would be digging up here, a thousand, ten thousand years in some unimaginable future.

“James?”

“Huh?”

“Are you all right?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m fine.”

“It’s time to stop. Drink some more water.”

James shook his head to clear it. He rolled to a stop. Hu was right.

But they’d made it down the hill, past the golf course, past the Hilton, past the intersection, even past the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. What was that—two miles? Three? Whatever. He was starting to feel the exertion—not tired, not exhausted, but definitely, his muscles were tightening. He hoped Hu wouldn’t mention the trailers again. He might be tempted to give in.

But Hu said nothing. He passed James a water bottle. James had to resist the temptation to gulp it all down. Instead, he sipped carefully, once, twice, a third time. “Where are we?” he asked, looking around.

“We just passed Robertson. We’ve still got another couple miles.” Hu burrowed into his pack. “Do you want a protein bar?”

James nodded, held out his hand. He unwrapped the little granola brick and hesitated with the wrapper—then he realized how little difference it would make if he found a trash can here in Beverly Hills or not and let it fall to the sidewalk. He chewed and swallowed slowly.

Hu grabbed a water bottle and a protein bar for himself as well. “Do you think the tsunami is going to get this far?”

James didn’t answer immediately. He chewed thoughtfully. “Well . . . if this wave is as big as the president said, a hundred feet high, it’ll certainly get as far as the 405, but how much farther, I dunno, that’s a lot of water. If it was less, then the 405 would be a pretty good breakwater—except around LAX, of course. The airport’s just gonna disappear. But—” James frowned, picturing the geographical layout of the basin in his head. “But I don’t think the 405 will stop it. Might slow it down a bit, but a lot of water is still going to get over it, under it, through it.” He took another bite, still thinking. “Y’know, those underpasses are bottlenecks, they’re going to generate a lot of pressure, all that water trying to force through. Anything directly east of any of them is probably gonna take a hit, and if the pressure is strong enough, the overpasses will certainly blow off. So yeah—it’s gonna get this far. A hundred feet—it’s just too much water.”

Hu looked west, toward the beach, as if he could already see the onrushing catastrophe. He looked at his watch. “How far east do we have to get?”

James shrugged. “It’s not just one wave. It could be several waves. You haven’t seen the footage I’ve seen, from Sumatra and Fukushima. It’s not what you think. It’s not like a wave at the seashore, just bigger. It’s like the whole ocean rises up in a flash flood that comes in for . . . I don’t know, an hour? Maybe more? All that water pushing in behind. It has to go someplace, the path of least resistance.

“It’s gonna hit hard, really hard. It’s gonna knock loose, knock down, knock out everything it hits, pushing it all forward, like a horizontal avalanche. Everything loose, cars, boats, buses, everything that breaks free, trees and billboards and lamp posts, everything that collapses, houses, stores, buildings. All that water, it’s going to drive that in like the front end of a bulldozer.

“It’s gonna be bad. Real bad. Maybe those golfers had the right idea. Do what you love doing, right up to the end.” He took another bite and waited for Hu’s response.

Hu looked nervously to his watch, then back to James. “We’re not gonna make it, are we? I mean, with Pearl. Where she is, she’s awfully far from any hills—and we’re running out of time.”

“I know—” James said. He took another thoughtful bite, chewed for a moment, then spoke with his mouth half full. “But I’ve been thinking. There’s that big black building, less than two blocks from Pearl’s house. It’s what?—ten stories high. We can get there, easy-peasy. The top two floors should be high enough.”

“What about the bulldozer—?”

“There’s a big building just to the west of it that should catch the brunt of the wave and most of the crap it’s pushing.”

“It’ll be crowded—”

“Probably. But it’s our best hope.” James took another drink of water. Despite the grim conversation, he was still concentrating on energy and hydration. “Squeak. There has never been a mess like this before. It’s gonna be—well, a challenge.”

“We’re gonna be on our own for a bit, won’t we?”

“Yeah,” said James sourly. “It’s gonna be an adventure all right.” He looked to the street, at the desperate stream of cars filling the boulevard. A terrible thought was finally becoming real.

“That bad, huh?” Hu asked.

“Worse than that,” James said. “Worse than anyone can imagine. Hate to say it, but a lot of people are gonna die—”

And even as he said the words, he realized just how impossible an idea it was. He couldn’t comprehend that all this—the cars, the buildings, the people, everything—was about to be wiped away. And yet, he couldn’t deny it any longer. The magnitude of this thing—James couldn’t speak it, but he realized that somehow he was still hoping that this was somehow all just a colossal mistake, a false alarm, and that maybe somehow—

He finished the last bite of his protein bar, took a last swallow of water, and tossed the empty bottle at a darkened storefront. It bounced harmlessly to the street.

“—But not us. Not today. Come on, let’s go.”

Two blocks west of La Cienega, James and Hu turned right on South Stanley Drive. Halfway down the second block stood a white two-story building. Once, it had once been a private residence, but now it was subdivided into three Tetris-shaped apartments, with a handicapped access ramp cutting through what had once been a lush front lawn.

At the bottom of the ramp, underneath the inevitable palm tree, Pearl sat waiting in a lightweight folding wheelchair. She had a carpetbag on her lap and she held the leash of a large, sloppy-looking beast that might have had some pit-bull in its parentage, but probably dumpster dog as well. She waved happily when she saw “the boys,” James and Hu. They pedaled to a stop in front of her. Several cars passed them in the street, drivers looking for alternate routes.

James looked unhappily at the dog.

“Oh, don’t mind Fluffy—he’s just a big friendly goofball.”

“Fluffy?” Hu raised an eyebrow.

“That’s what we call him. His real name is—never mind. He’s Joey’s dog, but Joey’s off in Bakersfield or somewhere, so we keep Fluffy when he’s traveling. Mrs. Petersen hates it, but she’s afraid to complain or we’ll tell the city about her cats.”

“Some people—”

“Tell me. She went screaming out of here with a dozen cat carriers the moment the president said tsunami. But the old bitch wouldn’t take us. Didn’t want to be in the same car with Fluffy. Selfish old bitch. And I just couldn’t leave Fluffy behind. He’s family.”

James sighed. “I admire your gumption, Pearl, but sometimes—”

Pearl’s expression changed then. “Honey, where’s your car?”

“We didn’t bring it,” said Hu. He waved his hand to include the bicycles and the trailers. “This was faster.”

“Are we in trouble—?” Pearl asked.

“I don’t think so—” James pointed. The top of the LFP building was visible even from here. “We’ll go up there. It’s high enough. If the wave is only a hundred feet high when it hits the shore, by the time it gets this far inland, it’ll have lost most of its power—”

“James! What are you talking about?” Pearl half-rose out of her chair. “Not a hundred feet! Three hundred!”

Both James and Hu stopped in mid-word. “What—?”

“Three hundred feet! It’s what the guy on the internet is saying! The one in Hawaii—the one who measured it!”

“Oh, fuck—” That was Hu.

James didn’t say anything. His expression went ashen. When he finally did speak, it was almost automatic. “No, no, it can’t be, the president—”

“Honey, that sumbitch is just plain wrong. Or stupid. The guy on the internet is an actual geologist. He’s the director of the Volcano Lab. Now, who ya gonna believe? The politician or the scientist?”

Hu touched James’ arm. “What are we going to do?”

James ignored it. He leaned in, grabbed Pearl’s arms, stared into her face, and almost shouted, “Are you certain? There are a lot of cranks on the internet.”

She met his stare, unflinching. “James, honey—what do I do for a living? I do research, remember? For the studios. For that stupid movie where you two met. I didn’t just google him. I did the whole data-dive. This isn’t bullshit. He’s for real. Three hundred feet.”

James released her, whirled away, furious. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck, fuck, fuck.” He turned to Hu. “Remember that map I hung in the office? The one that showed the effects of global warming—what the coast line would look like if all the ice caps melted and the sea level rose two hundred and sixty feet?”

Hu nodded. “Yeah. Everything up to Boyle Heights would be underwater.”

“Yeah. Well, if this guy’s right, this is gonna be worse.”

Hu said, “Okay, okay, okay—but we’re not dead yet. I’ve got an idea.”

“It’s too late—”

“No, it isn’t.” Hu pointed east. “The subway! The La Cienega station. It’s across the street from the tower. Remember how excited Pearl got when it opened? If we can get onto a train, we can get all the way downtown in ten minutes, fifteen.”

“And then what? We’re still in the disaster zone.”

“We’ll do what you said. We’ll figure something out.” Hu rubbed his chin. “I dunno, maybe the Gold line out to Pasadena. Maybe Chris and Mark can put us up. They’re always having those big sprawling house parties. If not—I dunno. Maybe Amtrak to my cousin in New Mexico? If we have to pitch the tent in some park, we can do that. But let’s go.”

“Oh, hell—if I’d known you boys didn’t know, I’d have wheeled myself over—” Pearl’s face crumpled. “Oh, boys, I’m so sorry. I’m so stupid, you could have gotten up into the hills by now—”

“Stop it, Pearl.” That was James. “You’re family. Shut up and let us rescue you!”

Just out of her field of vision, Hu tapped his watch meaningfully.

“Right,” said James, as if the matter was finally settled. “So let’s get out of here. Um—” He fumbled with one of the ropes on his bike trailer. “Here, tie this to—um, loop it around yourself—and we’ll pull you.”

In reply, Pearl handed him Fluffy’s leash. “Here. Tie this around your handlebars. The monster-dog will help pull.”

“Really?”

“Really. Let him lead. Don’t worry, people will get out of his way. Real fast.”

“We’re gonna be a whole circus parade,” said James, but he took the leash.

Fluffy led the way. He pulled his own weight, and half of Pearl’s too—up the side streets back to Wilshire, a block east and the subway station was directly ahead. The station had only been open a few months, a promise for the future, but this would be its last day of operation. Even if the system survived, there would be nothing left above ground for anyone to come to.

James was right, they did look like a parade. But Pearl was right too. People saw them coming, saw Fluffy grunting and slobbering in the lead, and they moved fast to get out of the way.

They had to wait a few minutes to cross the street. James kept glancing at his watch. Hu put his hand on James’ arm. “It’s okay. We’re gonna make it. We will.”

“Cutting it close, too close,” James muttered.

“Sloan’s teddy . . . ”

“Sloan looks terrible in a teddy,” James said, then added. “Halloween. Before your time.”

“Oh. Dear.”

“Let’s go. Light or no light—” They pushed their way into the street. The huge garbage truck waiting to turn north had left enough room for them to squeeze through. The next driver, a frightened-looking woman, had opened her car door and was standing in the street, still clutching the handle, looking confused and desperate. “There’s not enough time, is there?”

“Come with us. The subway’s still running—”

“The subway?” Her confusion increased. “Los Angeles has a subway—?”

Hu pointed past her. “It’s right there—”

The woman grabbed her purse and hurried after them. A few others followed—a black woman dragging two small children, a portly man with his arms full of file folders, the driver of the garbage truck as well.

The elevator to the lower level wasn’t working and even if it had been, neither James nor Hu wanted to risk getting stuck in it. The station’s turnstiles were frozen open for the evacuation.

The escalators weren’t working either, but there was a wide staircase and most of the travelers with baggage were hurrying down it. Hu waited with the bikes while James maneuvered Pearl’s chair down the stairs. Pearl held Fluffy’s leash, his stub of a tail wagged in excitement, he was having a great time. He looked around the platform eagerly—all these great new playmates—but even the nearest people were keeping a careful distance.

James came trotting back up the stairs, and he and Hu began working the bikes and the trailers down. A couple of people grumbled at them as they passed—but they were dragging their own bags down the steps, so James and Hu ignored the comments.

The bottom level was crowded, but not packed, not insane, not panicky. Most of the people who had thought to escape by subway had already gone. These were stragglers, people who had finally abandoned their vehicles. Many were carrying backpacks or dragging suitcases on rollers.

The overhead signs were promising trains arriving at this terminus every four minutes. Hu pointed. “See, we’ll have time.”

James started to say something, thought better of it, and shut up instead. He scanned the faces of the crowd, looking for signs of desperation or panic. He could still hear the screams and the gunshots from the Santa Monica underpass.

UNION STATION

The Red Line and Purple Line trains were arriving so fast, one after the other, that sometimes as many as three trains would have to wait in the tunnel while the first in line unloaded. As fast as each train unloaded, it was sent out again.

The outbound Red Line trains went directly to the Hollywood and Highland station, picking up passengers there and taking them out to the North Hollywood station on Lankershim Boulevard. The area surrounding the Universal City station had already reached overload capacity.

Inbound, all the trains were staggered to pick up passengers from the most overloaded stations. As soon as any train was packed to capacity, it went straight to Union Station. It was a frustrating experience for those waiting on the platforms, watching the densely packed trains screech by without stopping, but every available train was running, and most people were able to board a train in less than twenty minutes.

The Purple Line trains were on a similar schedule, with most going directly to the Wilshire/La Cienega station, picking up passengers from the most desperate locations first.

Several trains were running direct shuttle service to the Seventh Street station, the terminus of both the Expo Line and the Blue Line from Long Beach. While many evacuees assumed they would be relatively safe this far inland, most were taking advantage of the train service departing from Union Station.

At Union Station, every available train—both passenger and freight—was loaded to capacity. Most were heading north through Glendale and Burbank, all the way to the Burbank airport, where a tent city was being set up on the top level of the parking structure. Others were heading west with stops in the San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley. Ventura County was an uncertain risk. Although parts of it were sheltered by the Santa Monica mountains, there wasn’t a convenient train service. Other trains headed north to Santa Clarita, or as far east as Ontario. The closest returned for another trip as soon as they were unloaded.

Additional relocations would be necessary after the initial evacuation. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, and other cities were already making plans to receive refugees. But the initial goal was to get as many people as possible out of the disaster zone as fast as possible.

In the last half-hour before impact, police and fire rescue would withdraw their personnel and any vehicles still not evacuated. When further evacuation operations became too risky, the subway trains would also be removed to their safest locations.

The last train from Union Station was being held for emergency workers. As soon as the tsunami reached San Clemente Island, a five-minute alarm would sound and the train would pull out before the onrushing water overwhelmed the coastline. It would not wait for stragglers,

That was the plan, anyway.

Just one little glitch.

Roy Jeffers.

He did not look like a hero. He did not intend to be a hero.

He was a skinny little bastard (accident of birth), stuck behind thick glasses and a scowl. He was also a stubborn son of a bitch. He had issues with authority, and the surest way to get him to do anything was to tell him, “No, you can’t.”

Roy Jeffers had another bad habit as well. He was a rescuer.

He had a long history of opening his house in south-central Los Angeles to anyone needing a place to crash—cousins, friends, stray dogs, the occasional feral cat, and once in a while, even a girlfriend. (And once, as an experiment, a boyfriend.)

At the moment, however, he was single, about to be made homeless by the tsunami, and genuinely resentful that the evacuation was going to take a horrendous toll on those who could least afford it, his entire demographic. People of Color was the current euphemism. Among friends, he’d occasionally rant, “First we were Colored People. Then we were Negro, then we were Black, then African-American. Now we’re People of Color. Progress my black ass!” But he didn’t have a lot of friends, so it wasn’t a rant that many had heard.

Adding to his annoyance was his realization that as a driver for the Purple Line, he was servicing many of the wealthier neighborhoods along Wilshire Boulevard, where if he had been working the Blue Line, he would have been rescuing his own neighbors. Even the knowledge that the Crenshaw connection directly served part of his community did not alleviate his smoldering anger.

But—

The knowledge that the Crenshaw connection directly served part of his community had somehow transformed his annoyance into a specific commitment. He wasn’t going to abandon anybody, and he didn’t care what color they were. He was going to do the job anyway.

So when he unloaded at Union Station and his supervisor, Molly Cantway, waved to him and said, “Okay, that’s it, Roy. Take your train out to the service yard,” Roy Jeffers said no.

“There are still people out there. My people—” he insisted. “Our people.”

Cantway shook her head. “Roy, I am not sending any more trains out. There’s no time.”

“Then let’s not waste it arguing,” Roy said. “I’m going.”

“You do and I’ll fire you.”

“Ain’t gonna be no job after today anyway—”

Jeffers pushed the control lever forward. His train rolled west into the tube. Cantway didn’t know whether to be annoyed at the inevitable loss of a Purple Line train—or admire Jeffers for his stupidity.

On the other hand, there probably wasn’t going to be much of a subway system after this. After Hurricane Sandy, parts of the New York system were down for five years. This was going to be worse than that. Maybe Los Angeles would never have a subway again.

Cantway watched as the last car of Jeffers’ train disappeared into the dark tunnel. If that damn fool was able to outrun the incoming flood, he’d be a hero. If not—well, he’d get a nice obituary. And maybe even a funeral, if they ever recovered a body.

Somebody called for her attention and she turned back to the more immediate problem—getting the last of these people upstairs and onto a train out of the city.

And very shortly, herself as well.

She crossed herself and went back to work.

The subway platform was filling up. More and more people were realizing that an eastbound train might be their only remaining hope of escape.

A steady stream of future refugees came down the stairs, or walking down the frozen escalator. As the crowd became ever more dense, people jostled for position, all wanting to make sure they’d be able to board the next train.

Most kept checking the overhead arrival signs, but even before the sign flashed, “Arriving now,” they could feel the breeze of its approach, as it forced the air from the tunnel ahead of it, then a distant howl echoing out of the tube, a glimmer of light that ballooned into a glare, and finally the train came screeching into the station.

As soon as the doors slid open, the crowd pushed in. Hu held the bikes and James pushed Pearl forward. Fluffy grumbled at the people pushing past him. Abruptly, a female police officer blocked their way. She was short, all muscle, and she wore a don’t-fuck-with-me expression. Her nametag identified her as Officer Reese.

“You can’t take that dog on the train,” she said.

Almost immediately Pearl began wailing loudly. James recognized the performance, he’d seen it before, an award-worthy rendition of Frightened Old Crippled Lady. It usually worked. “Oh no, no,” cried Pearl, clutching her heart. “I can’t leave him. He’s my service dog. He doesn’t bite. He’s big and friendly. I don’t know what I’d do without him!” She was loud, very loud, and people already aboard the train, or still trying to board, turned to look. Pearl was playing to the court of public opinion.

Reese was immovable. “Sorry, ma’am. That animal looks dangerous. We can’t take any chances—”

James started to object. “You want to leave him here to die?”

But Pearl spoke first. “No, no, James, we must obey the officer. Officer—” She peered forward. “—Officer Reese.” She shifted her performance from Frightened-Old-Lady to Frightened-Old-And-Confused-Lady. She held up the end of the leash, offering it to the officer. “Officer Reese, will you hold him till we get back?” Pearl patted the dog’s head. “Here, Slobberchops, go with the nice lady.”

Fluffy’s posture changed dramatically. He was suddenly alert, suddenly eager—he curled back his upper lip, revealing enough teeth for a piano keyboard. He grunted and drooled and pulled at the leash as if someone had just announced fresh peasant for dinner.

Officer Reese put her hand on the hilt of her gun.

“No, no, don’t do that! He’s just being friendly. Honest. He just wants to play.”

Officer Reese must have been painfully aware that all eyes were on her. And the clock was ticking. Fluffy grumbled impatiently. Reese blinked—and took a step back and aside. “Oh, the hell with it. Just keep a tight leash on him.”

As James pushed Pearl into the already jammed subway car, those nearest squeezed back to make room, especially room for Fluffy. James bent to her ear and whispered, “Slobberchops?”

Pearl whispered back. “That’s his real name. When you say it, he gets ready to play. That was his smile. Works every time.”

“Nice.” James let go of the wheelchair, turned back to Hu. “Come on—”

Hu gestured. The bikes? “There’s no room—”

“Leave them. Grab your case. Come on—”

“You sure, James—?”

“Just do it!”

Hu let go of the bikes, grabbed his most important bag, and started to board, but Officer Reese stepped in ahead of him, into the last available space, blocking his way. “Sorry. This one’s full.”

James started to object. “But he’s my—”

She half-turned. “You got the dog, don’t push your luck. There’s one more train coming, he can get on that one.”

James made a decision. He leaned quickly down to Pearl. “Give ’em hell, sweetheart.” Then, “If he stays, I stay.” He pushed past Reese and stepped off the train.

As the subway doors closed, Officer Reese glared at them both. James didn’t care. He grabbed Hu. “Wedding or not, you’re my husband, and I’m not going anywhere without you.” Then he kissed Hu passionately.

Which surprised them both—because James had never kissed Hu in public anywhere before.

They weren’t alone on the subway platform. There were at least thirty or forty others, the last few stragglers. Several of them were screaming at the departing train they’d been unable to board. A couple had even been pushed out as the doors closed in front of them.

“You selfish bastards!” Somebody else yelled, “That was the last train.” Followed by, “Come on, upstairs. The roof of the—”

His words were drowned out, running for the stairs. There was still time to get to the roof of the tallest nearby buildings. It might be enough. But if Pearl was right—and Pearl was rarely wrong—it probably wouldn’t be.

James looked to Hu. “You want to follow them?”

“She said there was one more train coming.”

“Do you believe her?”

“She wasn’t Miss Congeniality, was she?”

“More like, I dunno, Miss Convenience Store.” James looked to the stairs, looked down the track, looked to the stairs again.

Hu said, “Are we fucked?”

James didn’t need to consider the question. The answer was obvious. “Well . . . yes. Probably.”

Hu looked at his watch. “The water is probably pulling away from the shore by now.”

“Uh, no,” James said. “It’s not gonna work like that. Not this one. That’s what they were explaining while you were in the shower. A big part of the island fell into the sea, it pushed an equivalent volume of water outward. The first thing that hits is the wave. Afterward, more waves. Like the whole Pacific is sloshing.”

“Should we wait here? Or . . . ?”

Before James could answer, a Korean woman came dragging a little girl, five or six, maybe seven, running down the stairs. “She was out playing, I couldn’t find her! Are we too late? Are the trains still running—?”

And as if in answer, they both felt a rising breeze.

“One more,” Hu said to the woman. “The last one.”

“Oh, thank God, thank God.”

Down the tunnel, the distant light became an onrushing glare. The train’s horn howled like an electric banshee. It came screeching into the station, the doors sliding open almost immediately.

James and Hu let the woman rush past them, the little girl almost flying like a rag doll, then they pushed their bikes into the subway car. The bikes and the attached trailers filled the space at the end of the car designed for bikes and wheelchairs and luggage on wheels. As soon as the doors slid closed and the train lurched into motion, James looked to Hu and smiled. For the first time today, since walking out of their small house in Venice Beach, James allowed himself the smallest bit of confidence. Finally, they were on their way. If they could beat the onrushing wave to Union Station, maybe.

Would there be a train waiting there? Maybe. Maybe. Otherwise . . .

Without stopping, the subway could get downtown in seven minutes, probably less. If they stopped for passengers, if there were people still waiting at each station, and there probably would be, then you’d have to add a minute for each station, maybe even two or three for braking, loading, accelerating again—okay, so figure maybe fifteen minutes at worst.

James wasn’t certain about the speed of the onrushing water, somewhere between ten or twenty miles per hour, but that was an ordinary tsunami. A mega-tsunami? That was a whole different kettle of physics, but he had to believe they had a chance.

Union Station was sixteen miles inland from Santa Monica. The waters should be slowing that far inland, but—again, the physics on this were unknown. Okay, doing the math in his head, fifteen minutes to get downtown, maybe there’s another ten or fifteen minutes margin at Union Station. If Pearl was right, there would be that one last train for evacuees and emergency workers. They’d probably have to abandon the bikes and take only what they could carry. James studied what they’d brought, already sorting it in his head.

The train stopped at the Fairfax station; there was a larger crowd here, everyone who couldn’t fit into the previous train. But there was room. At least a dozen more people pushed into the car. James and Hu pulled themselves back against one side. The woman and her little girl stood across from them, the little girl staring curiously at their bicycles. The doors closed and the train lurched forward, quickly gaining speed and rushing eastward toward La Brea.

“What’s that?” the little girl asked, pointing at the air tank on James’ bike-trailer.

“It’s my rocket-pack,” said James. “For when I’m being rocket-man. Like in the song. Do you know the song?”

“No it isn’t,” the girl said. “It’s an air tank. And you’re being silly.”

“Well, if you knew it was an air tank, why did you ask?” James pointed at her, as if catching her in a game of tag. She giggled and buried her face in her mother’s side.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

That was enough. She stopped hiding and turned back. It was all a game. “Julia. What’s yours?”

“I’m James.” And then, for no reason he could understand, maybe because he just didn’t care anymore, he added, “And this is my boyfriend. We’re going to get married. His name is Hu.”

Julia looked at Hu curiously. “Who?” she asked. “Like Doctor Who?”

“No,” Hu said. “Just Hu. Like boo-hoo without the boo.”

“Oh, okay.” And then she said, “Could I be your flower girl? I did it for my cousin’s wedding.”

That’s when Julia’s mother put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder, pulled her back. “That’s enough, Julia. Don’t bother those men.”

Something about the way the woman said “those men”—James sensed her disapproval. Her expression had hardened.

“It’s okay, ma’am. Just being friendly. We’re all in this together.” But he turned away anyway. Maybe another time, another place, he might have said something more. But not here, not now. There was still the problem of this time and this place.

Hu put his hand on James’ arm. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing—”

“You should tell that to your face.”

“I was just . . . doing the math in my head.”

“Are we all right?”

“Should be.”

Hu knew James too well. He recognized the lie. But he said nothing. Neither of them said anything until they reached the La Brea station.

This platform wasn’t as crowded as the platforms had been at Fairfax and La Cienega stations. Fewer people here believed they were in danger. Maybe they were right. Or maybe they’d believed that they would find safety on their roofs.

The train was momentarily delayed in pulling out—there was a last minute rush, someone up ahead was holding a door and calling something to the motorman. The reason was quickly apparent. Nearly a dozen people, including several police officers, came charging down the stairs and across the platform—they pushed into the forward cars.

As the train pulled out again, Hu looked to his watch. “The wave, the first one. It just hit.” He held up his phone for James to see. “No wi-fi down here, but I downloaded the sim while we were getting Pearl to the subway.”

James studied the screen, a blue stain spreading inland. “You think it’s accurate?”

“It’s the one all the links pointed to. It’s that scientist in Hawaii. It’s supposed to be the most accurate geographic model. If his timeline is correct, our house is gone, the Third Street Mall—” Hu looked at the map. “Everything up to Bundy. Do you think the 405 might slow it down?”

James shook his head. “Not a chance, not if the wave is as high as that guy said.”

“Well, Pearl said he passed the sniff test. And she is the research queen.” Hu frowned at his phone. “I wish we had wi-fi down here.”

“I don’t.”

“We could see what the news choppers are broadcasting—”

“I don’t need to see it.” James said. “I don’t want those pictures in my head. Do you? Give me your phone—”

“Huh?”

“Give me your phone.”

Hu handed it over. “Why?”

James didn’t bother to answer. He pulled out his own phone and shoved both into a watertight bag, then slipped it into his backpack.

“Really?”

“Just a precaution.”

“Uh-uh. You’re thinking of something.”

James lowered his voice. “When the wave hits, if it reaches the Purple Line before we’re in the safe zone, that water’s gonna go down into the stations and flood the tunnel. We may not be safe down here.”

“How long till it catches up with us?”

James stopped. He hadn’t considered the question. He’d been so focused on just getting to Pearl, just getting her to the subway, just getting everyone aboard a train, just outrunning the wave front—he hadn’t thought much beyond that. He frowned in thought, trying to decide what he could say—and whether or not he should say it.

“James. Answer me. Can this train outrun it?”

James didn’t reply immediately. He took a deep breath. Finally, he reached across and put his hand on Hu’s arm, sliding it all the way up to his partner’s shoulder. “We’re making good time, Squeak. A mile a minute. We’re moving faster than the wave front—”

Hu reached over and put his hand on James’s. Quietly he said, “I looked at the video—the simulation. It looks like the water comes in awfully fast. Fifty miles an hour, maybe even faster—”

James thought hard. Finally, he admitted, “It’s plumbing. It’s physics. It’s everything. It’s the depth of the water, how much volume on the surface, how big the tunnel is, and how much pressure—” He trailed off, trying to visualize the problem.

“If there’s a hundred feet of water above us—” He was thinking aloud now. “I don’t usually dive that deep. A hundred feet, maybe a hundred thirty, that’s pretty much the limit. At a hundred feet, that’s 3 atmospheres, 4 counting the weight of the air above the water, 44 PSI—pounds per square inch. That’s a lot of pressure. If there’s that much water, it’ll be coming in fast, over the streets and through the tunnel. And if the water’s higher, there’ll be even more pressure. It’ll move even faster.” Seeing the look on Hu’s face, James stopped himself.

“We’re gonna get hosed, aren’t we?” Hu said. He kept his voice soft, trying not to attract the attention of the other passengers.

James realized his mistake then. He tried to cover quickly. “Only if it hits, only if it hits—” It wasn’t enough.

Hu closed his eyes against the mental picture, against the rising turmoil of emotions that were suddenly flooding up inside him, fear and anger and something unidentifiable. His expression collapsed and suddenly, he was sobbing. “I’m sorry, Bubble.”

“What for—?”

“For . . . everything. For the subway. It was a stupid idea—”

“No, sweetheart, no. It was a good idea. A really good idea. You’ll see. We’ll be okay.”

But Hu refused to be reassured. The moment was reawakening his panic—that same panic he’d felt that day in the tank at Paramount. And this time, there wouldn’t be anybody who could save either of them.

James slid his hand up Hu’s shoulder, putting his palm on the back of Hu’s neck—their own private gesture of reassurance. He pulled him into a hug and whispered, “Hell or high water, Squeak. I promise.”

Hu pulled back, just enough to smile at him.

The train screeched and rocketed through the dark tunnel, but James and Hu didn’t notice, didn’t care. They had retreated into a private space between their shining eyes, their own special world of connection.

After a moment, Hu pulled away, recovering enough to reach into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled out the small velvet-covered box, opened it, withdrew the larger ring and slid it onto James’ finger. “This is not the way I wanted to do it, this is awful, but . . . I take thee, James D. Liddle, as my awfully wedded husband, forever and ever, and for all the days of my life.”

James took the box from Hu, took the second ring and likewise slid it onto Hu’s finger. “I take thee, Hu Son, to be my husband, to be my lawfully bedded husband, forever and ever, and for all the days of my life.”

They looked into each other’s eyes again, trying to make the moment last forever. Finally James leaned forward and gently kissed Hu. He wanted to kiss him more passionately, but it wasn’t necessary, not here—not with so many strangers watching. He hadn’t realized they had attracted an audience. Several people applauded and cheered, but not the uncertain Korean woman still clutching the little girl close to her.

There were tears forming in Hu’s eyes. He said, “This is the real one, Bubble, but I still want a ceremony.” He whispered, “After all, we’ve already got a flower girl. I mean, if her mother will let her.”

It was too much, all too much. James finally laughed. “We’re about to lose the house, the car, the motorcycle, our business—we still don’t know if we’re going to survive—” He couldn’t help himself, the words came tumbling out. “—And here we are, this is the happiest day of my life.”

“It’s certainly going to be one to remember—”

And that’s when the subway train lurched.

The train lurched as if it had gone over a speed bump. Someone gasped, someone else screamed. Then the train roared on, faster than before.

“What was that—?” Hu had to raise his voice to be heard.

James shook his head. “Dunno. Felt like a power glitch to me.”

“Do you think they’re shutting down the grid?”

“Makes sense they would—”

“But not the subway—”

“We’re still rolling—”

Hu opened his mouth, not quite a yawn, something else. “James—?”

“What?”

“My ears just popped.”

“Yeah.” James forced his own yawn as well. “Mine too.”

“What would—?” But Hu already knew the answer.

“Air pressure,” said James. “The water is definitely in the tunnel. It’s coming in fast, compressing the air—”

“It’s gonna hit us, isn’t it—”

James didn’t answer. He looked down to the rear end of the car, but there was no view out the back. Even if there had been, there were too many people in the way. He turned around to his bike, pulled his divebelt off the trailer, made sure his knife was in its sheath. He pulled Hu to his side. “Face your bike, now. If you have to, throw yourself over the tank. Hide it from view.”

“What? Why—?” And then understanding. “Oh.” And then, “Oh, shit—”

“Yeah,” James finished buckling his divebelt around his waist. “It’s gonna get ugly.”

“James—”

“There’s nothing we can do—”

Hu grabbed his arm. “We can do something. We’ve got two regulators on each rig. We can save Julia and her mom.”

James wanted to argue, but Hu was right. He stepped over to the Korean woman, looked directly into her terrified eyes. “Come stand next to us. Both of you. Please.” He reached out and touched her elbow. It was enough. Still clutching her daughter, she moved closer to the bikes.

“Listen to me,” said James. He lowered his voice, almost to a whisper. “I’m a SCUBA professional. The wave is coming, it’s going to flood this car. When the water hits, it’s going to get panicky in here, but each of the tanks has two mouthpieces and there’s enough air here for four people, Hu and myself—and both of you. You’ll be okay if you do what I say. Here’s what you need to know. Are you listening, Julia?”

The little girl nodded, her eyes wide.

“Okay, when it’s time, Hu’s going to give you a mouthpiece. We don’t have a mask for you, so you’re gonna want to close your eyes and just concentrate on breathing as slowly as you can. Take really long, really slow, breaths, in and out, only through the mouthpiece, really slow—okay?”

Julia nodded solemnly.

“Now, remember, I want you to keep your eyes closed and just concentrate on breathing—” Julia looked confused. James leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Okay, here’s how to do it. You count a hundred breaths to yourself, because that’s how long it takes. And if the water still hasn’t gone down, then you start over and count to a hundred again. You might have to do that more than once, but that’s how Hu and I are gonna do it—” He straightened and turned to the mother. “Did you get all that? You and I will share the other tank—”

The woman started to say something, an objection—?

James held up his hand. “Don’t say anything. Just stand here. Turn away from anyone else. Both of you. Keep your backs to them. And—”

The subway lurched again. This time, the car bumped as if something had struck it from behind. Someone at the other end of the car screamed, several people screamed, both men and women—

Something lifted the rear of the car off the tracks, tilting them forward. Outside there were sparks—the train was slowing, there was no more power to the wheels—and then there was light outside, flickering light—the subway train was careening into the Wilshire/Western station and angry brown water flooded up onto the platform from the tracks. More water poured down the stairways and escalators, battering the walls and the train with debris, all of it rising rapidly and rocking the car with its force. The air smelled suddenly wet.

The other passengers, mostly men, began shouting and pushing, scrambling at and over each other. Muddy water was already flooding into the car from underneath. Men were shouting, several were trying to force open the doors, trying to escape. Others were demanding they stop, terrified because the darkness outside the train was already rising past the windows—

And then someone finally pushed the doors open and the flood—cold, salty, and gritty—came roaring in, pummeling and pounding, an inescapable torrent. People screamed and floundered, pushing at each other, climbing over each other, trampling anyone smaller, fighting their way through the current, desperate to get up the station stairs toward the air they imagined was waiting for them.

And then the last of the lights went out.

Green emergency lights flickered on, self-powered, but they weren’t enough. And they didn’t last. They were extinguished one by one by the rising muddy water.

James and Hu were already pulling the bungee cords off the bikes, off the tanks. They fumbled in the gloom, depending on experience and muscle memory.

Hu pushed the first regulator at Julia; the water was up to her chest. She grabbed the mouthpiece with both hands, pushed it into her mouth. James had already pulled Julia’s mother to the other bike—yanking the whole rig off the bike trailer, he shoved a regulator toward the terrified woman, then helped her get it into her mouth as the water rose to her neck. He looked to Hu, who gave him a quick thumbs-up, pushing his own regulator into his mouth.

Hu rummaged in his case, triumphantly pulled out two headlamps, and pulled one over his head. Right, James thought, we’re going to need those! His own facemask had a headlamp built in, but he felt around in his case for the other lamps. He slipped one of them over Julia’s mother’s head, started to hand her the second one for Julia—

“Please, sir—me too, please—”

James grabbed his facemask and pulled it down over his eyes just as the water came rising up over his chin. He turned and saw a frightened young teen, a black boy in a red T-shirt. The boy bobbed up desperately, his hand out for help. “Please—”

“We’ll have to share—”

“Okay, yes, okay—”

James held his mouthpiece to the boy, they were bumping up against the top of the car. “Long slow breaths, okay. Two, three breaths—into the mouthpiece, both in and out. Then it’s my turn. Okay?”

“Okay.” The boy took the mouthpiece just as the water forced the last of the air out of the subway car. James put the last headlamp on him and switched it on. Then he turned to his left, looking to make sure Hu was all right.

He wasn’t.

There was a struggle going on. James couldn’t see far in the murky water, but one thing was clear. Someone was fighting Hu for the regulator. Someone else was trying to get to Julia. She was curled up in a ball, holding her regulator tightly in both hands.

James kicked off, directly head-butting into Julia’s attacker, pushing him backward toward the open subway door. Outside the rushing water surged past the train, filling the station and pushing into the next bore. James head-butted the man again, forcing him into one side of the open door. The current grabbed him, yanked him away, and he went flailing into the turbulence, disappearing into the dark and muddy gloom. James had to grab a pole to keep from being pulled after him. Desperately, he grabbed the overhead bar and worked his way back to Hu.

Hu’s eyes were wide, his mouth bubbling open. The stranger had gotten the regulator away from him. Hu was grabbing futilely for it—it was his drowning nightmare all over again, but there was no James at his side.

The stranger was holding Hu at arm’s length, while sucking greedily for air. Hu saw the man pulling away into darkness—until one of James’ arms came reaching around the stranger’s chest and another hand sliced across his throat, releasing a cloud of red-brown darkness, expanding outward like inky smoke. The man stiffened, choked, gasped, struggled, and thrashed away in the dark, pummeled by the rushing water, but still held by the regulator tube.

James came around from behind the thrashing man, pulled the regulator from his mouth and as the body turned away into darkness, he pushed the regulator into his own mouth, grabbing a quick suck of air for himself—rule number one, take care of yourself first—but he was already swimming back to Hu. He met Hu’s terrified eyes, then passed the regulator over, watching to make sure that Hu had it safely back in his mouth. James held firmly onto Hu, watching to see if all his careful training was paying off. Hu was scared, but somehow he remembered what to do. He choked past his panic—James watched to make sure that Hu was finally breathing again, breathing slowly and deliberately, before he gestured for the regulator. He’d waited almost too long—his own lungs were feeling tight.

Hu passed the regulator back to James, who took three hasty breaths, then turned. headed back to his own tank. He had to take a moment to steady himself. This was all happening too fast. He was still feeling his own adrenaline-panic as he swam back to the teenager, still holding his knife—

He had vision, of a minimal sort. Paired fingers of light probed at the gloom, illuminating almost nothing.

The teen and the mother were equally visible, another small circle of brightness. James swam back to the teenager, still holding his knife, and turned the boy to face him. The water was cold and it was pounding at them, shoving them this way and that. The boy could barely focus in the dark, he didn’t have a facemask, but he saw the lamps on James’ mask and he could see enough to recognize the man who’d saved him. He gave James a thumbs-up and passed the mouthpiece over—

James was glad. One murder was already one murder too many. He knew that Hu had seen it, but he couldn’t tell what Hu was thinking, how he was reacting. Probably he was still trying to calm himself. James hoped that both Julia and her mother had kept their eyes closed as instructed. This was going to be a long afternoon.

Now it was James’ turn to manage his breathing—and his fear. If he didn’t manage himself, he couldn’t manage anyone. He took three long breaths, then passed the mouthpiece back to the boy. Then, finally, he remembered to slide his knife back into its sheath.

The thrashing of the water was lessening. They were still being pummeled by surges of uneven pressure, why was that? Something up the tunnel must be blocking the flow of water, alternately blocking and opening. James imagined a giant pink heart valve, but it was probably a humongous piece of debris being pushed back and forth by the torrent. If it could settle, if it could block the worst of the flow, then maybe—but no, they shouldn’t depend on it.

He had to convince himself that they could do this. He wasn’t sure for how long. It depended on how much water they had above them, on how much pressure they could stand, on how long their air would hold out, and on how long they could last in the cold. Maybe the incoming coastal waters were warm enough they wouldn’t be plunged into hypothermia. Maybe, just maybe, they had enough air to hold out for an hour, but probably less because they were sharing? He had to figure this out—

Then he remembered. His fifteen thousand dollar dive computer. He’d packed it, hadn’t he? For a moment, he felt embarrassed, but then he realized, he hadn’t had a chance to use it, so it wasn’t part of his muscle memory. What bag was it in?

He went back to the boy, shared his three breaths, steadied his breathing, and visualized the morning. He usually talked to himself when he worked. Saying things out loud imprinted them in his memory. Ah, there—

He passed the regulator back, went straight to the case he’d almost left behind, and it was right where he remembered, right where he’d said when he packed it. It would have been easy to find anyway. It had switched itself on when the water hit it—its display was bright, even in this darkness, and now it was beeping an alarm. He slid it onto his left wrist and tried to focus on the dials.

The numbers flickered with confusing speed. The device kept beeping contradictory warnings. James was an expert in sport diving. At a hundred feet deep, a diver would use his air four times faster, but right now the dive computer was telling him that his current rate of air consumption might be ten times faster, might be twenty, might be five—the numbers kept changing, up and down, too fast to make any sense. They were either five hundred feet underwater or fifty. It was the fluctuating pressure of the water still pounding through the tunnel. The damn thing couldn’t calibrate.

James tried to visualize what was happening. How much water? Too much and they wouldn’t be able to stay down for long. If they needed to decompress, then the longer they spent under pressure, the longer decompression would take, and if they had limited air that would be a problem. They’d have to start up as soon as the flow of water ebbed. But how long could they wait for the current to slow? He had to balance time at this depth against time needed to ascend.

The tsunami was still pushing inland, what were the physics of that? Here in the tunnel, the rushing water was still battering at the car and stirring debris throughout the station. And all the things that should never have been debris—

Unless and until things equalized, they could be stuck here. How long until the water stopped flooding eastward? How long till it settled? How long till it started receding back into the sea? And how fast would it retreat? When would the next wave arrive? James had no idea.

He wondered if Pearl’s train had made it safely to Union Station. Maybe. Probably. It had been packed full, so it wouldn’t have made any stops. They would have gained a few minutes. And maybe with this train blocking part of the tunnel, maybe the flow would have been less, and maybe Pearl’s train could have made it all the way downtown—?

And maybe that was all wishful thinking.

And maybe, despite everything, they weren’t going to make it after all.

The churning slowed.

It didn’t stop, but it slowed.

And they were still alive.

How did he know that?

Because they were still alive.

It didn’t make sense.

They hadn’t outrun the tsunami.

And they were under how many feet of water—

And yet . . . here they were, still alive, still breathing.

Still alive.

The water was brown and murky; where the headlamp beams pierced it for a few feet it looked like as much mud (and who knew what else) as water. If they hadn’t had the headlamps . . .

Maybe that was what had attracted the attackers, maybe they saw the light as a beacon. He wasn’t sure. It had all happened too fast, the subway car had flooded so quickly. James was wearing a professional-grade mask, it had extra-bright lamps, but down here, the advantage was minimal. He had only a small tunnel of vision, a gloom just a bit lighter than the darker gloom surrounding. He hung in place, thoughts trying to race, circling in confusion. He was a frozen moment of awareness in a shadowy underwater coffin.

He looked to the others. Julia was holding onto the regulator with both hands; her eyes were closed. She was fine, almost relaxed. Her mother too, though not as calm—she understood how precarious their situation was. Hu was floating close to Julia, watching her carefully. And the teenager—he was watching James as warily as a feral cat. He must have seen what James had done. James took his three breaths, then turned to look toward the raised end of the car. There were dark shapes floating in the water. He didn’t look long; he didn’t want to see them clearly. He already knew, and his gut churned.

He turned his attention to the dials on the tanks. They had air—just not enough. Nowhere near as much as he had hoped. The chaos, the exertion, they were sucking air faster than he had planned. And the pressure, more pressure meant each lungful sucked in more air. He had to assume they were under at least a hundred feet of water.

But how deep were they, really? How much water was pressing down on them?

It didn’t matter. They were in trouble. They had to move.

James wanted to stay nice and safe. Underwater was always nice and safe—if you knew what you were doing. But if you knew what you were doing, then you’d also know you can’t stay underwater. It’s not just how much air—it’s the other reason. At any serious pressure, they’d get wonky.

James knew what it felt like. It’s a little like being drunk or stoned—except it isn’t. It’s the rapture of the deep. And if you succumb to it, you become a statistic of the deep. No, you have to focus. You have to concentrate on every single task. Each specific task, one careful moment after the next.

James focused. He took his next three breaths and passed the mouthpiece back to the boy. Options. He had to consider the options. They weren’t good. But they were options. That was more than most people had—especially the ones now floating limp in the darkness. There were so many of them, and they couldn’t escape them, could they? They were a silent gauntlet, guarding any exit.

In the chaos of the moment, James hadn’t considered the panic, the terror, of those caught in the water, unable to escape, those last few desperate moments of grasping for possibility, gasping for air, choking on their own last screams of denial and rage.

James knew what it was like to drown. It had been one of the worst parts of his training. He’d never understood the necessity of the exercise—being pushed into that near-death moment—at least, not until afterward when he’d been painfully pulled out of the tank, choking and gasping and coughing up water, not until the medic checked his heart and listened to his lungs and nodded to the trainer. Not until the trainer had looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Now do you understand what you’ll be dealing with when you try to rescue a drowning man?”

And James had somehow managed to get the words out, “Was that fucking necessary?”

“I hope to fucking God it never is. But if it saves one life—yours—then, yeah.” The trainer added, “Given a choice, I’d rather lose the idiot. His funeral I don’t have to go to.”

James had made up his mind, there and then, never to repeat the experience. Not voluntarily. And definitely not involuntarily!

That had a lot to do with his relationship with Hu, as well. That first day, in the tank at Paramount, he’d been watching this beautiful young man with multiple overlays of awareness. At first, he’d thought him just a gangling teenager, then he realized not only was Hu older than he looked, but also how inexperienced he himself was at gauging ages, especially the ages of Asian men. He just didn’t have enough history.

For a moment, he’d wondered if Hu were . . . what’s a good word? Accessible? An interesting question, not one he usually considered, and not one he intended to pursue here. It was only a passing thought, quickly pushed aside by the necessities of the job.

Once in the tank, once the plastic and Styrofoam flotsam had been added, once the wind machines had been turned on and the mechanically produced waves had started churning, it became obvious—to James at least—that Hu did not have a lot of experience with this particular kind of stunt work. And even though plastic and Styrofoam looks and feels lightweight—if enough of it piles up against you, or on top of you, it can rapidly become an impenetrable mass. You can drown just as easily as if it were the real thing.

So James had watched Hu. He watched all the people in the water, but he watched Hu especially—because the beautiful young man wasn’t watching out for himself, not the way a more experienced stunt player would have.

James hadn’t waited for anyone to call “cut!” The rule was simple. Don’t worry about ruining the shot. Get out of the way of the bus. Dodge the falling rocks. Don’t get bitten by the mechanical dinosaur head. Don’t. Get. Injured. Especially don’t get killed. That costs money. It shuts the production down for two or three days. And it pisses off producers.

Rule Number One: Getting killed can ruin your whole day.

So James had dived into the tank, swum under the prop flotsam, grabbed Hu, and pulled him off to the side. He hadn’t been thinking of anything more than just getting the poor dumb schmuck out of danger. It wasn’t until later, over lunch, that he’d realized what an amazing smile shone on Hu Son’s face.

And even then, he hesitated. He’d been burned enough in the relationship fire. He wasn’t that eager to put his hand back into the flames—or any other part of his anatomy. But one thing led to another anyway—and now he had a ring on his finger.

It was an unfamiliar sensation. Hu’s life was the other half of his now. His responsibility. And not just Hu. Three other lives were depending on his expertise.

So. Options. They could head up the nearest stairwell, head for the surface. Except, where was the surface? Right now, Wilshire was under water. James didn’t know exactly how much, but it had to be a lot of fast-moving water. Ten mph, twenty mph, it didn’t matter. It would be like stepping into a hurricane, except they’d be weightless with no footing. The waters would carry them away like balloons in a storm.

Wait for the waters to subside? That would work. If they subsided fast enough, before the five of them ran out of air or succumbed to cold. That was another problem. The temperature of the water. It was cold—not cold enough to produce hypothermia in an adult, not right away, but Julia’s smaller body put her at increased risk. And perhaps the skinny teenager as well. They had to get above the water.

The subway car lurched, distracting James. Not quite unseen, the drifting bodies lurched too.

James took an extra deep breath, then passed the mouthpiece back to the young man. He swam deeper into the car to investigate. His headlamp gave him some sense of the mess—one of the subway doors was jammed open—by a body. His internal conversation was deafening. Please, God, no children. No children, please—

God did not comply.

His beam illuminated an infant, blanket still unraveling around its lifeless body.

Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck—fuck you, God—

James retreated, his mind already postulating what must have happened. A mother rushing home from work, finding the baby sitter gone, grabbing the baby, rushing for the subway, but somehow getting to the station just a few minutes too late, getting on the last car, hoping to escape. Dying in cold dark terror.

He bumped into a floating cat carrier, a furry body within, the handle still gripped by an elderly woman, her white hair floating around her head like a cloud.

Another body, this one in a dark uniform, the garbage truck driver? James didn’t want to know. It was too much. He was starting to feel the horror—and painful pressure in his chest.

The subway lurched again—and all the separate bodies echoed the movement, a synchronized ballet, all the different dancers bumping sideways to the same unheard music. The moment passed and they resumed their slow deliberate gavotte. No longer panicked, in death they had become patient observers. The staring jetsam of disaster, their faces now relaxed and lifeless, they hung almost motionless, a silent jury—their fatal judgment dark and unspoken.

The dive computer was certain now, it beeped in alarm—they were too deep. They had to start ascending now. And as quickly as possible. Too much water, too little air—the bends would be inevitable.

James swam back to the others, back to the air tanks, still struggling with the math of their survival. He couldn’t sort it out, it was the pressure, the paralyzing effects of it. His thoughts wandered in a drunken haze—and if he was having trouble, then the others were probably faring worse.

He had to focus. He hadn’t expected to do this, not this soon, but there wasn’t any alternative. He had to switch the tanks now, before he got fuzzier.

Switching tanks underwater wasn’t hard. He’d done it before, but he hadn’t done it a lot, so—after the necessary three breaths—he took his time to make sure he was doing it right. He had to focus carefully on each part of the process. As soon as the connections were secure, as soon as the pressure gauges were good, he relaxed a little. Hu and Julia had a little more time. He’d switch their tanks in fifteen minutes, maybe ten.

What had he been thinking about? He concentrated—oh yeah, options. Can’t swim for the surface, can’t wait for the waters to subside. Could they get higher?

Maybe! The Wiltern—wasn’t there something? He tried to remember. There was a subway entrance in the building, wasn’t there? Part of some expansion project? A pedestrian tunnel under the street, from the lobby to the platform. That would get them up a couple of floors—that is, if the building was still there and if it was tall enough to stick out of the water, then maybe they could get to one of the upper floors before they ran out of air. So many ifs—

But the numbers didn’t leave any room for negotiation nor delays. They were too deep and they had too many bodies breathing too little air. But maybe—

Everything was maybe. James shared another three breaths, passed the mouthpiece back, then fumbled in his bag of gear until he found what he was looking for—a plastic panel and a grease pencil on a leash. Another three breaths of air, then he wrote frantically. “Get out now. Tunnel to Wiltern.”

He didn’t have time to write more. He wouldn’t have anyway. But when the waters started to recede, when the worst of the flood finally started to flow back to the sea, he worried that the pressure in the station would also reverse and the subway train would be sucked back into the tunnel, where no escape would be possible. He wasn’t sure about the physics, his mind wasn’t focusing that far, but he couldn’t chance it.

Three breaths, then he held the panel in the teen’s headlamp beam. The boy’s eyes were wide, bright in the gloom, he gave a thumbs-up response. James maneuvered himself over to Hu, held up the sign. Hu gave a thumbs-up too, then reached for the panel. He touched Julia’s shoulder. She opened her eyes and then squinted them almost shut—this muck hurt! Hu tapped her shoulder again, holding the sign in front of her, his lights pointed at it. She nodded. She was tired, she was scared, but she was determined. James admired her spirit. She gave him hope.

James took the sign back, turned back to his own tank for another three breaths, then to hold the sign for Julia’s mother to see. She was too frightened to respond with anything more than a half-nod of acknowledgment.

Another three breaths.

Stay focused, James told himself. One thing at a time.

Another tough decision. They were going to have to leave the bikes behind—and everything they’d so carefully packed. Abandoned. For a moment, he considered the impossible—could they carry any of this? None of them were wearing weight-belts, they had a buoyancy problem, they were all bobbing toward the roof of the subway car, the bikes might serve as ballast, and keep them from rising too fast—

No, it was too much to ask, too much effort. Not enough air. But at least, he and Hu had already transferred their most important belongings to their backpacks, they could take that much with them. Three more breaths. He waved to Hu, caught his attention, and pointed to his backpack. Hu nodded. He gave a double thumbs-up and checked his straps.

James turned back to the bikes and pulled the air tanks off the trailers, the ones they were using, and the last set of spares. Another three breaths and he gave the signal. He was in a small circle of light, fingers of illumination surrounded him. He gave a thumbs-up signal and the entire group began to move—Hu and Julia, the teen and Julia’s mother.

They worked their way to the jammed-open door of the subway and somehow he managed to push the bodies out of the way. Two? Three? He wasn’t sure and it didn’t matter. The doors stayed open, one small piece of good luck.

Three more breaths.

The subway car was tilted. A wedge of debris had been thrust under its rear wheels, raising it at a lopsided angle—it leaned away from the platform, its upper frame jammed against the outer wall of the tunnel. The end of the car was more than a foot above the platform, wheels caught on the edge of it. Their door at the front of the car was almost a foot above the platform, and angled upward. Without the water, it would have been a hard leap. Here, this deep, under this much pressure, gravity was almost irrelevant. If anything, they were going to have a hard time staying down.

Three more breaths.

James swam to Julia’s mom, patted her on the shoulder reassuringly, gave her a thumbs-up, then to the boy to reassure him as well—three more breaths—and then back to look at the pressure gauge on Hu’s tank.

Two and a half adults had drained his own tank, but Hu’s tank, with only one and a half bodies draining it, still had a useful margin. James gestured to Hu, pointing at the mouthpiece. Hu understood; he passed it over, sharing his air.

James took four breaths, a luxury, but a necessary one, then passed the mouthpiece back. James went through the door first. Hu brought up the rear. He had learned from James, they’d spent time together underwater. Be slow. Be methodical. Keep the beginners between you. Do one thing only, then the next. There’s no rush. Impatience kills. Panic kills. Count to three. Or four.

Once out the door, they bobbed upward, bumping into the ceiling. Hu shared his air with James again. He looked worried, but James refused to acknowledge it. He’d already made up his mind. They were going to live. They hadn’t come this far to die.

Another few breaths from Hu’s tank and James swam away for a quick reconnaissance of the flooded station. He had to find the pedestrian tunnel.

There were bodies here. Too many, most of them floating up toward the ceiling, bobbing there like dreadful balloons. He tried not to think about them, but some of them turned toward him as he passed, he couldn’t ignore their faces.

And fish, there were fish here too! Not a lot, and nothing James could identify, but some struggled feebly in the muddy currents. They wouldn’t survive.

It gave him pause. Maybe later he would think about it. Maybe later someone would be able to explain how they got there. Maybe there’d be “later.” Too many maybes.

At the front of the train, where it had shuddered to a stop, James pulled himself down to look into the first car. His headlights found the motorman’s booth, the driver still behind the controls, his face an angry expression of disbelief and rage. James’ beams illuminated the badge on his chest. It said “Jeffers.”

You stupid schmuck, thought James. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You should have just run for home, we could have made it. But no! You had to stop, didn’t you. One more station, one more heroic pickup. Instead of saving a few, you killed us all.

That last thought startled James. He hadn’t realized it, but he’d been identifying with the dead. Down among the dead men, he had no choice. Despite his conviction, he still had no certainty.

It didn’t matter what he thought. He kept going. He pushed a little further into the gloom, now exploring along the walls—no, nothing here, nothing here, nothing here. The darkness refused to give up its secrets. The tunnel had to be in the other direction.

Feeling the pressure rising in his lungs, James headed back to Hu and sucked eagerly, much too eagerly, at the regulator. He had to take a minute to recalibrate himself. Slowly, dammit, slowly.

This time he headed around the escalator, feeling along the walls—but carefully. If he bobbed up that diagonal shaft he might not be able to get back—but there it was. The pedestrian tunnel, a darker dark in the dark. Maybe it was his brain playing tricks on his eyes, the way he could “see” the furniture at home when he got up in the middle of the night to pee. And maybe it was a hallucination from nitrogen narcosis. Too many maybes. But no—a little closer and he was sure. It was the tunnel. He turned around, and just as carefully, he worked his way back to the others.

Three more breaths.

Time to switch out the tank that Hu and Julia were using. It didn’t take long, but he had to concentrate, had to be careful. He had to focus.

When he finished, all the headlights were pointed at him. He existed as an oasis of light in a dark universe. He passed his mouthpiece back to the boy and pointed. Time to go.

Everybody but Julia had to carry a tank. They had the two they were still breathing from—and the last two spares.

As a group, they moved, all five of them—James and Hu, Julia and her mother, and the unnamed teen. It was a tough swim; they bounced along the roof of the station, James herding them carefully away from the escalator shaft. Their headlights weaving in the dark.

They made their way slowly toward the promise of escape.

James didn’t know what was at the end of the tunnel. He hoped it wasn’t blocked by debris. Or worse—

There were bodies floating in the pedestrian tunnel. Their headlamps revealed a gauntlet of bobbing shapes. James tried not to think about the panic that must have happened in here, the water flooding in so fast, it would have been like trying to swim up a waterfall. Dark shapes bobbed everywhere. And the floor of the tunnel was littered with everything they’d tried to carry with them.

They paused several times for James to suck air. This was not what he had expected. Or hoped for. They had to push their way through a nightmare, faces coming out of the dark—all too close. It was a bumping gauntlet of horror, a gallery of silent accusations, each body turning in its own final orbit. James tried not to look, tried not to illuminate them, but he had no choice. They were passing through a tunnel of horror—a silent community, patiently waiting for James and the others to join them.

Three more breaths—

And at last, the end. Another set of steps. They half-swam, half-bobbed up the diagonal shaft. At the top—only darkness. James made them wait. He took three breaths and entered first, turning around slowly, looking to see if it was safe.

He could barely make out any details. It was still way too dark in here. But they were definitely in the foyer of the Wiltern tower, the part that had been carved out for a pedestrian entrance to the subway. That much he could recognize, but he was otherwise unfamiliar with the building. The lobby ceiling was high. He didn’t want to get caught up there with no weight-belt to bring him down. There was a railing here, he held onto it against the eddies of current. He could feel himself being pushed this way and that—not a lot, but enough to make him uncomfortable. Outside, the water must still be moving, but he couldn’t tell which way. The gloom was that complete.

James swam back into the tunnel. He took breaths from Hu, then from the boy. He didn’t want to be selfish, but he didn’t want to lose himself to the rapture either. He steadied his breathing and aimed his light around the group. He wasn’t familiar with the layout of the building. This was the lobby of the theater. He grabbed his grease pencil and scrawled on the plastic slate. “Stairwell?”

Hu shrugged. He didn’t know either.

But Julia’s mother reached out and grabbed his arm. She pointed outward and then toward the left. Over there—

But they couldn’t just swim over. The problem was buoyancy. They needed to get across the lobby without rising so high they couldn’t get to the door.

James looked back into the tunnel. A weird thought—

Three more breaths.

He swam back into the pedestrian tunnel, searching. The bottom was littered with the abandoned belongings of the dead. James was looking for suitcases—the canvas ones with one handle on top and another on the side. Whoever these poor fools had been, they weren’t smart enough to leave their lives behind. James tested several of the cases for weight, then pulled the two heaviest back to the end.

Three more breaths.

Hu understood immediately. He’d take one suitcase, holding it by the top handle. James would take the other. Julia’s mom and the teen would hold on to the side handles. Hu would hold Julia’s hand. They should be able to make it.

Three more breaths—and James gave the thumbs-up signal.

As a group, they moved, a curious underwater tableau, a cluster of bobbing lights that revealed air tanks and baggage and faces tight against any further horrors in the dark. The Korean woman kept pointing and gesturing. James kept checking back with her, but in the darkness, it was impossible to know if they were actually heading in the right direction. He had to stop for breath again—and even a second time, until he realized they were paralleling a wall. But he wasn’t sure if it was the outer wall of the lobby or the one they had been swimming toward. He didn’t know this building, but maybe the lobby wasn’t rectangular.

Left or right? James had to guess. He could make out vague shapes in the distance, but those could have been hallucinations. He took three breaths from the teen, then made a decision—the fire stairwell would be against an outer wall of the lobby. Okay, he’d lead them to the left and hope it wasn’t a dead end.

It wasn’t. Left was right. He realized with a start that he shouldn’t be thinking word games now. That was dangerous.

But they were at the door. It had a wide emergency bar, the kind that pushed to open. For a moment, James felt fear. Without leverage, how could he push it?

Hu was already there, he batted the door with the heavy case he was holding. It bumped open enough for James to wedge his shoulder in. He pushed it further open, revealing only darkness.

James let go of the case he was dragging and entered the stairwell. He grabbed a railing and turned around slowly, looking to see if it was safe. Above, far above, did something glimmer? The surface?

It looked doable.

He gestured, a slow-motion wave.

Hu and the others pushed their way in. James shared three breaths and considered their circumstances. The stairwell was a silent column of dark water, but it was clearer water. They could actually see something. Their headlight beams penetrated for several yards. There wasn’t a lot of debris here, and nowhere near as much mud and murk. The water must have filtered in instead of flooding, rising at its own rate.

James looked back. Hu had dropped his case to push the door closed. His own abandoned suitcase—the teen was pulling at its zipper, curious to see what was inside. James swam over and touched the boy’s shoulder. The boy looked to him and he waggled his finger no. We’re not grave robbers. Out of the water, the boy’s gesture would have been a puzzled shrug, but he let go of the zipper.

Here inside the stairwell, with the fire door closed behind them, they should be safe from any rough currents. Even better, if all the fire doors above were closed, then this column of water would be a convenient chimney. They could ascend at their safest rate. Maybe . . . If the building hadn’t been weakened, if it didn’t collapse around them.

The dive computer was still beeping in annoyance. It said the water’s surface was less than a hundred feet above them. It wanted to know how much air they had—but James couldn’t tell it, he didn’t know.

The surface might be reachable. If their air held out. If hypothermia didn’t get them first.

If a second wave didn’t arrive and destroy everything the first wave had already weakened.

James calculated in his head; it was still hard to focus down here, but the math wasn’t impossible. One floor every five minutes. Maybe two—? No, they didn’t have enough air. They had to get as high as they could as fast as they could. They might manage an extra ten or twenty minutes of decompression nearer the surface. Maybe they could make it.

He took his three breaths, passed the regulator back, and pointed upward.

The light at the end of the tunnel was still a hundred feet above them, and it was still invisible.

It is not a good idea to laugh underwater.

You could drown.

But as James did the math in his head, as he computed the safest rate of ascent through the stairwell measured against his estimate of the amount of air they had left, he ended up reminding himself—

Sloan’s teddy . . .

For a few dangerous seconds, he splurted bubbles. The more he tried to stop himself from laughing, the funnier it got. Hu looked at him, curious, then worried. James finally somehow managed to control himself. He held up a hand, then grabbed his board and wrote on it. “I’m fine. I’ll tell you later.”

Three breaths and he pointed upward. A single flight of stairs. Then another. Thirty feet. Sloan’s teddy indeed.

Five minutes max, then they bobbed up a flight of stairs. Except the dive computer on his wrist beeped to let him know that they were still ascending anyway, even as they waited. The waters were receding and somewhere, the chimney must be leaking. Not good. If it leaked too fast and too much. If they “ascended” too rapidly, they were in serious trouble.

James had had the bends. Twice. Once was bad planning, once was stupidity—not his, the diver he’d had to rescue—but either way, it was not something he wanted to do a third time. Rashes, joint pain, headaches, even paralysis. But the bends are survivable—most of the time. Symptoms of decompression sickness can show up in the first hour, almost certainly in the first six hours, and if not in the first twenty-four hours, then probably not at all.

But if it was a choice between the bends and death?

Another joke occurred to him. “Death? Good choice. But first, Oompah!” He had to suppress a giggle. And then he wondered, what the fuck? Am I getting giddy? Nitrogen narcosis was playing at the edge of his brain.

Three breaths from Hu, then three breaths from the boy. He was going to have to start watching himself. All these people were depending on him. It was time. He pointed. Up the next flight of stairs. And the next. And the next.

The higher they rose, the brighter the stairwell, the brighter the promise above. The water here wasn’t as murky as it was below, but now there was debris floating in their way—a lot of paper, and a large rubber trash can, someone’s jacket, and when James looked up, he thought he saw a body caught under a railing.

He checked his goddamn beeping dive computer and frowned. There was nothing he could do. Maybe they should wait an extra two minutes here? He took three breaths from Hu, three from the boy, gestured for them to wait and swam halfway up to look.

Yes, a body. A woman, stocky, possibly in her fifties, hard to tell. Her hair floated like a cloud around her head, but her dress had floated up revealing thick legs and pale underpants, they had become translucent, revealing her nakedness before his light—one last embarrassment. The tsunami had not only taken her life, it had taken her dignity as well.

James came back down again, grabbed another six breaths, then gestured for the others to follow him—but he waved his hand down past his eyes to show Julia and her mother to close theirs. Up the stairwell, and James tried to push the woman’s body into a corner while the others rose past. Her name badge identified her as Mrs. Hayes. She was entitled to this much consideration—he didn’t want the others to invade her privacy. Poor Mrs. Hayes.

Another flight up, another rubber trash can. And here was the cause of the decreasing pressure. The fire door was jammed open by another body, this one a janitor in a dark uniform. James could feel the current here—the water was being sucked away. Outside the broken tower, the current must have become too strong to resist. James felt himself being pulled—it was strong enough to be a challenge.

He pulled on the fire door, pushing it open enough for the poor man’s body to be sucked through and away. He let go and the current pushed the door shut again, cutting off the water’s escape.

He was surprised that he’d been able to pull the door open at all. The force of the water was less than he’d expected. This was both good news and bad news.

They were closer to the surface—but they were also more at risk of decompression sickness. He swam back down to the others. Three breaths from Hu, three breaths from the boy, and three more breaths from Hu. They were going to have to wait here ten minutes at least. Maybe more.

And they were already on their last tanks. He didn’t remember when they had switched over, but apparently he had done so at some point going up the chimney of the stairwell. Maybe at the bottom, before they started up? Not a good sign that he didn’t remember. He studied the dials on the last two tanks.

Good—

—Just not good enough.

He floated on his back so he could peer upward through the gap between the stairs. There was light up there, brighter than before. He watched his bubbles rise up through his headlamp beam toward it.

He did the numbers in his head. The math was not negotiable. The bends were no longer a risk, no longer a possibility. Now they were simply inevitable. The only question was how to manage the ascent to make them survivable.

They had maybe twenty minutes of air left in the tanks, maybe thirty. They had at least fifty feet still to ascend. That is, if the dive computer was correct. James sorted through his memories—his research, his training, and the experiences of other divers.

His instinct was to ascend slowly and safely. That was what his training demanded. But the math said no—not gonna make it. The alternative was to rise to a point maybe ten or fifteen feet just below the surface and wait there. At that depth, their air would last much longer, giving them more time to decompress before it ran out. From there, they could safely ascend the last short distance to the surface.

James would have preferred to stick with the advice of the nagging, beeping dive computer, but that wasn’t his best option. The water was still receding, draining out of the building around them. Even if they waited here, they were still ascending—or rather, the surface was descending to meet them.

And in addition to everything else, he was starting to feel the cold as a painful presence. He was starting to shiver. That was okay. If he stopped shivering, that would be very not okay. It would mean his body was shutting down. He wasn’t worried about that, he knew his tolerances. But what about the others?

He was reaching that point where he really wanted to get out of the water—he wanted to get out now. And if he was feeling this way, then it was probably a lot worse for the others. He turned his headlamps toward Julia and her mom, who was holding Julia close to her body, trying to share warmth. In this water, it was a futile effort.

James took his three breaths. He looked across at Hu, who looked back at him hopefully.

It was enough.

Fuck it. We are not going to die today.

He swam from one to the other, Julia, her mom, the boy, and finally Hu, checking once again to make sure that each was all right. Later on, perhaps, he might be able to marvel at their endurance—but right now, they had no choice. Either they hung on, or they became like all those others they had passed below. Like poor Mrs. Hayes.

More breaths. And another flight of stairs. Another and another.

The surface was a lot closer than he realized. The stairwell must be leaking somewhere. Had they closed the door at the bottom? He didn’t remember. Or maybe the fire doors weren’t all that watertight. Or maybe there was enough structural damage that the whole building was as secure as a screen door.

The good news, the afternoon light flickered brightly above. He could see rippling light through the water’s surface now, a promise of survival, and even though he still swam in a dirty murky world, filled with little floating things, the walls of the stairwell were no longer hidden behind a fog of gloom. But he wasn’t ready to feel confident. Not yet. Overconfidence is just another way to die.

They had to wait here as long as possible. James took his three breaths and studied the dive computer. It had finally given up and stopped beeping, but it still insisted that the surface of the water was steadily descending to meet them.

A large rubber trash can drifted by. Was this the fourth or fifth? Why so many? Something else to wonder about. He began to imagine the episode of Nova that would examine these events.

Three breaths. Three breaths. Three more breaths.

He checked the gauges again. He studied the dive computer, blinking. It didn’t make sense. No, it made sense. He wasn’t making sense. It didn’t matter what the gauges said, they were running out of air. There was no more time.

James fumbled for the plastic slate, felt along the leash for the grease pen, wrote on it frantically. “Drop tanks. Go up. My signal.” He turned to the others, holding the slate so that each of them could see the words. He took three quick breaths, then pointed up. Waving his arm in a broad “Let’s go, now!” motion.

He didn’t have to push them. They were eager to go. They each took a last long suck of air, then dropped the regulators and scrambled up. Hu grabbed Julia by the waist and they half-swam, half-walked up the last flight of stairs. James pushed Julia’s mom and the teen after them. He followed, the pressure in his lungs growing. He should have taken a last breath himself.

He looked back. The tanks were tumbling away, bouncing in slow-motion irretrievably down the stairwell, a lost opportunity. He pushed himself upward. He couldn’t see. His vision was blurry, closing in, he needed one more breath, he couldn’t hold it—

The top of the stairwell was open to the sky. The walls were broken here. A twisted doorframe remained where a fire door had been. James struggled to reach for it, he felt himself sinking back—

—and a pair of hands reached down and yanked him roughly out of the water.

A confusion of words, an unfamiliar voice, “Are there any more—?”

“No, no. Just the five of us—” That was Hu. His voice sounded strange, garbled by water. Someone else was choking, a small high voice. Julia?

He couldn’t see. Everything was a glare. He was on his back, gasping, choking, coughing up water—how had that happened? His last strangled ascent? Everything here was blue, incongruously bright. Two faces abruptly blocked his view, dark silhouettes, he didn’t know them. Where had they come from?

“Don’t try to talk. Just concentrate on breathing, okay?”

There were hands all over him, pulling away the last of the rig on his back, pulling his mask away, loosening his shirt. Someone had their head to his chest, trying to listen to his heartbeat. James coughed, choked up more water, and the person pulled away. His lungs hurt badly.

“Hu—?” he called. “Hu?”

“I’m here. I’m okay.” A hasty answer.

James concentrated on breathing now. A deep breath. Another. Stop to cough, spit up, cough, then breathe again.

Three deep breaths. Three more. Three more. Don’t hyperventilate. Hold your breath a moment and appreciate that you can.

He was almost back when he suddenly remembered an old movie, a favorite. He called out, “Are we dead, mon?”

Hu called back, falsetto. “I’m not dead yet, I’m not.”

James laughed. He laughed until he choked and coughed up even more water. His throat hurt, but he laughed anyway. He rolled over on his side and looked across at Hu. His husband was half up on his knees, also laughing.

James flailed helplessly, trying to sit up. Hands grabbed him from behind, someone helped him to a sitting position. James looked around. They were on a wide empty floor, slightly tilted, very broken. But his vision was still blurry, partly from the glare of the day, partly from the painful tears filling his eyes, an involuntary reaction to the overwhelming dazzle. The whole world looked overexposed, the people here were silhouettes, vague shapes in the glare. Maybe a dozen, he wasn’t sure.

Hu scooted over to him, looked at him carefully, then scooted around to sit beside him. He bumped him affectionately with his shoulder. James looked at Hu, a weak grin on his face. Hu looked tired. But alive. Even smiling.

After a moment of silent acceptance, a moment of just surviving, James looked around at their rescuers. “Who are you people? How did you get up here? How did you get through?”

“We should ask you the same question,” said one of the men. “I’m Scott Copeland. Who are you?”

“James Liddle. And that’s Hu Son. And the little girl is Julia. I don’t know her mother’s name. Are they all right?”

“They will be, yes. Sophie’s looking after them. And the teenager too. Looks like you had a rough ride.”

James nodded. “The subway. The last train. Didn’t make it.”

“Yeah, we heard—” The man pointed. “We’ve been following the news. The cellphone towers are down, but Jack’s Walkman has FM. Three trains were lost.”

“Three—?”

“Yeah. Real bad scene at Union Station.”

James didn’t say anything then, didn’t want to say what he was thinking, didn’t want to make the fear real. He realized he was weak. Exhausted. He looked around. They were on a sloping tile surface. The stairwell was a square opening with a few broken steps rising out of the water. “Is this the top floor?”

“No. This was the tenth floor. The top three floors were ripped away.” Copeland’s expression went grim. “That’s where most of the people went. I suppose it seemed like a good idea. It was wall-to-wall crowded. Probably exceeded the structural limits. But, see, the top floors of a building are never the strongest. The lower floors are built to hold the weight of the floors above.”

“You’re a builder—?”

“Architect. I know this building. It’s a good one. Well, it was. We started on the seventh floor, that’s where our offices were. When the water started rising, we moved up to the eighth, eventually the ninth. Had to stop there. The people above wouldn’t let us keep going, said there was no more room.” Copeland sighed and shrugged—a gesture of both sadness and grim irony.

“We’d been shredding old blueprints. We had thirty or forty bins of paper we still hadn’t emptied. When the water broke the windows and started rising inside the building, we emptied all the biggest trash cans, turned them upside down and stuck our heads in to breathe. It was a gamble, but it worked. Each bin had enough air to last ten minutes, twenty if we were careful. And we had, I dunno, thirty bins. I saved my people. Most of them.”

“But you lost a couple . . . ” James glanced toward the broken stairwell, wondering if the bloated cadaver of poor Mrs. Hayes might suddenly bob up on the surface of the trapped water.

Copeland followed his glance. “Yeah. We had some panic. It was pretty bad. We did everything we could.” Copeland was reluctant to explain. “What about you? Down in the subway—?”

James remembered the man who’d tried to take Hu’s regulator. He could still see the man’s startled expression, the sudden horrified realization that he was dying—dying twice, once by drowning, once by knife—and the crushing certainty that this was truly death. James shook his head, he didn’t want to talk about it.

Copeland recognized the expression. “Yeah. Bad day all around.” He straightened. “Let me see if there’s any water left.” He disappeared from James’ field of view.

James concentrated on his breathing for a while. Open air. There was a delicious luxury. How had he ever taken breathing for granted? Finally, he looked around, searching for Julia and her mother. Spotting them, he crawled over on his hands and knees. He still didn’t feel like standing. Julia was clutching her mother, her face buried in her mother’s side, her shoulders rising and falling as if she was sobbing.

“Are you okay?”

“I prayed to God, and he sent you to save us.”

“Well, I don’t know about God, but—”

“No, it was God—”

“Okay. It was God. I’m just glad that you and Julia made it. You must have been scared.”

“No. I knew that God sent you. So I wasn’t scared. I just kept praying and thanking God for sending you to us.”

“Ahh. Well, I guess it worked.”

“Yes. And God will bless you for what you did.”

“Not gonna argue that—I can use all the blessings I can get. I’m just glad you both made it.” James patted her shoulder, patted Julia’s shoulder, but the little girl didn’t look up. James had seen this behavior before; Julia was going to have nightmares. She was going to have some serious post-traumatic stress. And she was going to need some serious therapy. Oh, hell—they all would.

He turned away, crawled back to Hu. The unnamed teenager was sitting next to him, sucking at a bottle of water. He passed the water bottle to Hu; the two of them had been talking, sharing, debriefing each other.

Hu looked to James. “This is Jesse. He’s a student at LACC.”

James held out his hand. “I’m James. I’m glad you made it.”

“So am I, man! That was intense! I am never riding that subway again!”

“I don’t think anybody will,” James agreed.

Jesse waved his arm, indicating the world around them. “How long we gonna be up here, you know?”

James hadn’t even considered the question. He put one hand against a fragment of wall. He raised himself half-up onto his knees—

The hot July sun blazed above. The landscape rippled and foamed below. Everything was too bright. It took a moment for James’ vision to clear, for his eyes to focus all the way to the horizon. And then it took another moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing—all the devastation that surrounded them.

James levered himself to his feet, holding onto the spur of the broken wall. He turned slowly, slowly, shaking his head, saying only, “Fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.” And then, even more sadly, “Oh, fuck.”

They were alone in the middle of a vast brown sea. The water was receding—slowly. But more water was still trying to push in—uneven ripples of the reverberating shockwaves. Everywhere, the water foamed and surged, churning the debris. Things tumbled in the water, all kinds of things, broken signs, buses, cars, trees, the inevitable palm fronds, pieces of buildings, roofs and walls—and bodies. Too many bodies.

The sea of desolation extended north, all the way to the Hollywood Hills. A few buildings stuck their tops out of the water—but not many. To the west and the south, the view was much the same. There was a rise in the southern distance. Baldwin Hills was now Baldwin Island, probably nothing more than a naked lump. The ferocious power of the waves would have scraped everything away.

The rest was mud.

James saw the past as if it were still the present. The riot at the Santa Monica underpass, the old men at the VA Health Center, the carefree golfers, and all the people in all the cars they’d passed, the little boy staring from a car window on Wilshire Boulevard . . .

How many of them had escaped and how many more had been caught in the overwhelming wrath of the tsunami? It was all unknowable, all washed away too quickly to comprehend.

James tried to imagine—something, anything—a future.

He couldn’t.

It would take months just to catalog the devastation. The scale of this thing—there was nothing left. Nothing to rebuild. The city was gone.

“Fuck,” said James.

It was going to be a long uncomfortable afternoon.

Hu pulled him back down, pulled him next to him. “You okay?”

“No.”

Hu didn’t respond to that. He waited a bit before saying anything else.

Finally, “You kept your promise.”

“I did?”

“You said we weren’t going to die today.”

“The day’s not over.”

“Shut up.” Hu said it gently, affectionately. He took James’ left hand and held it up to admire the gold band on the third finger. He traced it with his own fingers. “But I will say this.” He paused.

“What?”

“This is the worst honeymoon I’ve ever been on—”

“Oh, really? How many others have you had—?

“This is the first.”

“Then it’s also the best honeymoon you’ve ever been on.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Hu leaned his head on James’ shoulder. They were silent for a while. Just being together.

“Hey—” said Jesse, interrupting their silence.

“Yeah?”

“You guys are fags, aren’t you?”

James hadn’t heard that word in years. He was more surprised than offended. “Yeah, I am. I’m not so sure about my husband though. Is that a problem?”

Jesse pointed to James’ discarded facemask, as if looking for the lost regulator. “Yeah, man—! I had your—your thing in my mouth. Yuck—” He got up and moved away.

Hu and James looked at each other. Both started laughing.

“What an ungrateful little prick,” Hu said. “Why did you save him, anyway?”

James shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Swarms of helicopters filled the air over the seething brown water that used to be Los Angeles. They were clattering dragonflies, darting here and there, exploring, recording, reporting. The afternoon was bright but ugly.

Some of the newer buildings, the ones designed to resist a massive earthquake, had survived. They stuck up out of the water like broken stumps.

Where there had been neighborhoods, there was now only mud and water and debris, occasionally patterned by the gridwork of streets that had survived. Mostly the terrain below was a vast sea of desolation. What remained of the 405 was a scar. The Federal Building looked like a fractured tooth. The Veterans’ Health Care Center was gone, only a broken steel outline remained to mark its location.

Nevertheless, the choppers swarmed, relentlessly searching—and occasionally, improbably, also triumphantly rescuing. Here and there, despite impossible odds, some people had survived the onslaught of the tsunami. Soon or eventually, whenever they could get to safety, they would have the opportunity to tell their stories to the hungry cameras. Every survival was an improbable adventure—a delusion of luck and prayer, sometimes even a bit of good judgment and courage.

Several Air Force communications planes circled patiently overhead, coordinating the fleets of choppers. The army, the navy, the air force, the coast guard, and several civilian companies were patrolling, each in their assigned area. All other air traffic was forbidden. Even the news choppers were under military guidance now. The Goodyear and Fuji blimps as well.

Three navy choppers were assigned to an area formerly known as Little Korea. There were few landmarks left on the ground; they had to depend on GPS mapping to locate themselves.

“There—” said the copilot. “Two o’clock.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Over there. It’s a light, hard to see in the glare—”

The chopper pilot brought the machine around. “That green stump sticking out of the water—?”

“Yeah. See that flicker?”

“I see it.” As they approached, the pilot said, “Holy shit. That used to be the Wiltern!”

“You recognize it?”

“My grandmother used to live in this area.” He added, “Actually, it’s the Pellissier building, but everyone calls it the Wiltern.”

They came in lower for a closer view. The tsunami had ripped the top off the building. But it had left enough for several stories to remain sticking up out of the water. Open floor space was visible, enough for several people to gather. One was waving a light of some kind.

The copilot called to the divers in the back of the machine. “We’ve got survivors. More than a dozen.”

“Any injuries?”

“Maybe. Some of them are down.”

“We’ll take the worst. Blue Team can pick up the rest.”

“Copy that.”

The chopper came in low and the people on the top of the building stood up to wave at them. One of them was aiming the headlamps of a diver’s mask. He switched it off as the aircraft approached.

The heli hovered over the building, stirring up the waves in great rippling circles. Four lines dropped from the machine. Two figures in wetsuits came down two of the lines, two rescue stretchers came down the others.

“Who’s the worst injured?” asked Seal Team Commander Wright.

The survivors looked around, uncertain, but a young Chinese man pointed. “Take the little girl. She’s got hypothermia and maybe the bends.”

“The bends?”

“Long story,” said the man next to him. “And her mom too.”

The other Seal was already pulling the rescue stretchers over to Julia and her mother. “Anyone else with the bends?” asked Wright.

The Chinese man pointed to an African-American teenager, held his own hand up, then pointed to the man next to himself, who tried to wave them away. “I’m okay—” But his hand trembled.

“Bullshit, you are.” Commander Wright peered from one to the other. He spoke to his microphone. “Gonna need two more stretchers. No, make it three.” He turned to the other survivors. “We’ve got another bird coming in behind us. We’ll have you all out of here as quickly as we can.” Back to the microphone. “We’ll need water and blankets. And maybe some protein.”

The first two stretchers lifted away, one after the other, Julia and her mother wrapped in heating blankets. Three more stretchers, all tied together, hanging in a cluster, came down another line—and another Seal Team member as well.

When they came for James, dragging a rescue stretcher with them, he shook his head. “No,” he said, pointing. “Hu Son first.”

“What?” asked Wright.

“He’s on second,” said James. But they were already wrapping him, lifting him into the stretcher, fastening the Velcro straps.

As they secured Hu into his own rescue stretcher, he looked over to James, a bemused expression on his face. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

James said, “It’s been a long day—” and passed out.

Wright signaled the chopper; the first stretcher with James lifted away. A moment later, Hu followed. Then Jesse. Wright followed them up, leaving two Seals behind with the remaining survivors. Even as they clattered away, the second chopper was moving in for the pickup.

“Where we taking them?” Wright asked.

“Wait a minute—” Copilot called back. He was talking to someone on one of the communication planes. “Getty isn’t taking anymore. And Dodger Stadium is full. The parking lot is tent city now.” Abruptly, he paused, listening. “Okay, copy that.” To the pilot, he said. “Griffith Observatory.”

The pilot nodded. The copilot turned back to Wright. “Did you hear that? Griffith Observatory. They’ve got an aid station there—and they’re running shuttles down into Burbank. They want to shorten our turnaround time.” Turning back to the pilot, he added, “They’re bringing a fuel truck up too.”

The pilot nodded, his only acknowledgment.

The Hollywood Hills were directly ahead. But below them, muddy water still churned across the flooded city.

The center of Los Angeles was gone—and so was its heart.

Griffith Observatory stands on one of the highest hills on the southern edge of the basin. It overlooks the entire city. It is a familiar landmark for both tourists and filmmakers.

Today, its wide lawn and parking lot served as a rescue station, a place for helicopters to bring survivors and refuel, a place for ambulances and buses to take survivors down the northern side of the hills to Burbank and North Hollywood and other places safely beyond the reach of the churning ocean.

James and Hu stood at a western railing, one of the better viewing positions, and looked out over what was now called the Bay of L.A. Or Bayla for short. On the hills to their right, the Hollywood sign survived untouched. It still declared the fabled town, but of Hollywood there was nothing left. Only a sea of mud. Already a smell of wet decay was rising from below. Despite the lingering heat of the day, they were both wrapped in blankets.

They held hands, but neither had anything to say. Despite their mutual joint pains, their headaches, and their blotchy patches of red skin, they had not been considered at severe risk. They’d been given oxygen. It had helped, but Julia’s condition was much more serious, so was her mother’s, so they were taken for immediate treatment. James and Hu would have to wait awhile for further attention. If at all.

“Triage,” someone had explained, not understanding why Hu and James had exchanged a look.

But it was obvious now. Sooner or later, everybody is triage.

They both hurt all over. Hu had thought to dump the contents of their medicine cabinet into his backpack. They had ibuprofen and it helped—a little. Just not enough. They were going to have to walk this off and wait it out.

The wide lawns in front of the observatory were filled with tents, tables, and bustling emergency workers. The parking lot in front of that was filled with more tents and more crowds of people. The only open area was a space set aside for helicopters to land and take off. A fuel truck waited nearby. Several television vans were parked on the grass.

A Red Cross tent had been set up where people could get coffee and donuts and even some packaged meals, but despite their growing hunger, neither James nor Hu felt like eating. They were still too uncomfortable.

A young black woman came up to them, carrying a tablet. Her badge identified her as some kind of city official, James couldn’t read it. He was still having trouble seeing clearly.

“Have you been logged in?” she asked, holding up the tablet.

James shook his head.

“We’re trying to assemble a roster of survivors. You were in the Wiltern building?”

“No. We were in the subway. We came up the fire stairs of the Wiltern building—”

She looked puzzled. “How did you do that?”

“SCUBA,” said James. He was still holding his facemask. He held it up as if that was the only explanation he needed.

“Um, okay,” she said, not quite sure what he meant, but it didn’t matter anyway. “Your names?”

“James Liddle. Hu Son.”

The young woman was wearing a headset. She repeated their answers to her headset, checking that the tablet properly translated her speech to text.

“Address?”

“Nowhere now,” said James.

“Venice Beach,” said Hu. He told her their address, but it was meaningless now.

The woman asked a few more questions: Email addresses, cellphone numbers, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and preferred gender identification. Finally, “We’re going to try to find you a place to stay. I can’t promise that you’ll be together—”

James held up Hu’s hand in his own. “He’s my husband. We stay together.”

She didn’t blink. She referred to her tablet. Apparently it was connected to some master database somewhere. She looked up. “Do you have any documentation?”

James held up his left hand, showing the ring. “Is this good enough?”

“Um, I’m sorry. No. We’ve had people trying to lie to us.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does.” She looked annoyed. “The relief benefits are different for married couples—”

Hu interrupted. He was already fumbling in his backpack, pulling out a dry bag. “Does a marriage license count?” He had a sheaf of papers, all safe inside three concentric Ziploc bags. He sorted through the papers, passed one over.

She took it, looked at it, shook her head, and passed it back. “It’s not signed—”

“We were supposed to get married today. We would have been on our way to—to our honeymoon.”

James said, “Is there a judge up here? Or a minister? Someone who can sign this?”

“Uh—” She looked confused. “Let me check.” She walked away, already pulling her phone out of her pocket.

Hu said, “Well, that’s—”

“—fucked.” finished James.

It was all too much.

James turned away, leaned on the stone railing, not wanting to look at anyone or anything anymore. But there it was—the muddy sea of Bayla and its broken towers. He tried hard not to give in to his rage. But—it was all too much. Everything was gone. Everything. He had nothing. No words. No feeling. He was numb.

He had the clothes on his back, whatever was still attached to his tool belt, a diving watch that had stopped, an expensive dive computer he never wanted to see again, a half-empty backpack, and for some reason, he was still holding onto his facemask, afraid to let it go, even up here.

And Hu.

He still had Hu.

But . . . he had nothing else. Nothing left to give. Nothing for Hu. Nothing for anyone. He was empty. Scraped raw. Numb.

He had finally hit bottom.

Hu stood next to him, silent. He put his hand on James’ shoulder, but James didn’t react, didn’t even acknowledge the touch. Finally, Hu reached out to take the facemask from him, but James pulled it back.

“Jimmy—? Talk to me. Please?”

James didn’t respond. He looked at the mask—as if seeing it for the first time, an ugly reminder of everything he would never see again. It was a useless appendage. He might as well throw it away and have nothing left at all. Without thinking, he lifted his arm, poised to throw it over the edge of the railing and down to the rough hillside below.

But Hu grabbed his wrist and stopped him—

“Jimmy, no—”

As if startled awake, James looked to Hu. “What—?”

Hu took the mask, turned it around and held it up to show something to James. “Did you know your camera was on?”

“It’s automatic,” James said. He took the facemask from Hu. A pair of fisheye lenses were mounted above the glass, one on each side of the two headlamps. They were designed for capturing virtual-reality 3D video. James frowned at the readout on the left side of the mask. “Hmph,” he said. “Looks like it recorded everything from the moment the water hit—”

“Really?”

“I’d have to pull the card, but yeah—”

Hu cut him off. “Jimmy, maybe we could sell that footage to someone? Some news channel? Or maybe even Nova? Someone? It might be worth something—”

James shook his head. “I doubt it. Everybody will have footage. Every survivor with a phone. And probably a few thousand amateur drones as well. There’s going to be more video than anybody will have time to review.”

“But nobody has underwater footage of the subway—”

James stopped in mid-sentence. Hu was right. He started to agree, then stopped abruptly. “No. We can’t.”

“Huh? Why not?”

James put his hand to his belt, touched his knife.

Hu’s eyes followed. “Oh,” he said, realizing what James meant.

“Squeak—I killed a man—”

“It was self-defense—”

“No. It wasn’t. It was deliberate—”

“We could talk to a lawyer—”

“Christine retired, remember the party—”

“She could recommend someone. Maybe Suzanne? Or Cindy?”

James didn’t answer immediately. “Yeah, maybe. But—”

“But—?”

“But—that’s not the point.”

“What is?”

“I killed a man, Hu. That’s murder. I committed a murder—”

“Jimmy—”

“And I did it without thinking. I did it so easy—”

“You didn’t have a choice. You did it to save me—”

“—and I’d do it again. In a heartbeat. But—”

Hu understood it—James was in pain. A lot of pain, and most of it wasn’t physical. Hu wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. “Bubble—?”

“I don’t know who he was. I don’t want to know. What if he had a family? People waiting for him? Oh, God. What if they recover his body someday. They’ll see his throat. And someone will figure it out—”

“Jimmy! Stop it. Look out there. Look at that mess—nobody’s going to recover anything.”

“Squeak, you stop it! I know what I did! I have to live with it.”

Hu put his hand on James’ arm. “Bubble—listen to me. What we went through—it was horrible. It was all my worst fears, everything, all at once—but I made it because you were there—you. Just like the first time.”

James started to protest, but Hu grabbed him by both shoulders and poured out the rest of his words in a frantic rush. “Out of all the millions of people who died today—God knows how many, but we survived, you and I—and Julia and her mother, and that little prick Jesse too. We survived because survival is what you do. It’s who you are.”

“Who I am—?” James couldn’t stand it. “I know who I am now. I don’t want to be who I am—I couldn’t save him! I had to—had to—”

“No, listen! Listen to me—as much as I hate to say this, because it’s so fucking cruel and selfish to even think this way, but it’s still true anyway—that man was already dead when he boarded the subway. Every single one of them. We all were. We just didn’t know it. And if you and I had left the bike trailers behind, if we’d abandoned the tanks when we thought they were too heavy, we’d be dead too. All five of us. And your last thoughts would have been rage at yourself for listening to my whining—this is better! Isn’t it?”

But James was adamant in his pain. “I know what you’re trying to do, Squeak. And I love you for it. But—I know what I did—and it hurts me so much inside to know that I did it—that I’m even capable of it. This hurts like you can’t imagine—”

“Excuse me, guys—?” An interruption. A voice from behind them. They turned to see Seal Team Commander Wright. He was holding Jesse by the upper arm. “You the guys from the subway?”

“Yeah?”

Wright let go of Jesse, but not before saying to him. “Stay.” Then he held out his hand to James. “I heard what you did down there, heard it from the kid. It must have been rough, but I wanted you to know, it’s one of the best things I’ve heard today. I mean, you done good.” Wright shook James’ hand, then Hu’s. He nodded back toward the chopper. “We’re refueling, going back out in thirty, but I wanted to make sure you were good. And uh, the kid here has something to say to you too.” He poked Jesse. “Go ahead, mister.”

Jesse looked embarrassed. He swallowed hard and looked at his feet. When he looked up, his eyes were wet. “I’m sorry for what I said. I don’t know why I said it. It just fell out. But I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for you guys. So . . . um, I guess, I want to say thank you, I owe you my life, and I hope you’ll forgive me for being such a dick.”

Hu’s smile came easier than James’. He said, “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I mean, why’d you do it? You didn’t have to. I mean, I saw what you did to that other guy and—”

James interrupted quickly, “You said ‘please.’ ”

“Huh? That’s it?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“Whoa,” said Jesse. “Whoa.”

“Yeah, whoa.”

Jesse looked confused. “I don’t get it.”

James smiled sourly. “Neither do I, kid. Neither do I.”

Wright had watched the whole exchange. He spoke up now. “There’s nothing to get. You did what was in front of you.” To Jesse, he said, “He gave you a second chance. Now you gotta make the most of it. Make a difference.” He pushed the teen gently.

Jesse held out his hand. James took it, shook it. So did Hu.

“We’re good then?”

James and Hu nodded. Wright seemed satisfied. He lifted his hand in a salute of respect and headed back to his chopper.

Jesse stood there, still looking embarrassed, shifting from one foot to the other. Finally, he gave a nervous smile. “I’m gonna go get in line for the phone. Okay? Gotta call my gramma and let her know I made it. I hope you guys land on your feet.” And then he was gone, too.

“Well,” said Hu. “That was something.”

“Yeah,” agreed James. “He said please.”

But he was still in a funk so deep it was no longer blue, it had gone to indigo. He turned back to the railing and stared across at the Hollywood sign without really seeing it.

“Excuse me—?” Another interruption.

This time it was a man in a clerical collar. He looked like some casting director’s idea of the perfect priest—but one who is falsely accused of molesting little boys until exonerated in the third act denouement. “Are you the ones looking for a minister? I’m Father Feigenberg—”

“Father Feigenberg? Really? You’re kidding me.”

“I get that a lot, yes. Someone said you needed a priest.” He looked at them with puzzled curiosity. “Do you want me to pray with you?”

James and Hu looked at each other, then back to Father Feigenberg. Hu spoke first. “We need you to make us legal. We want you to say some nice words and then sign this—” He passed over the marriage license.

Father Feigenberg looked at their marriage license, looked from one to the other, back to the license, then back to the two of them again. “Um, I’m afraid I can’t—my faith doesn’t recognize same-sex unions.”

“Oh, hell!” said James, frustrated. It was just too much. He said it loud enough that a few nearby people turned around to look. James turned angrily to the railing, glowered out at the landscape of mud and desolation and everything buried under it—then, just as abruptly, he whirled back. “Father? Will you hear my confession?”

Hu’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know you were Catholic—”

“Recovering,” admitted James. “Father—?”

Father Feigenberg nodded. He led James a short distance away, to the best privacy they could find—a quiet space behind a pedestal with a bronze bust of James Dean. It had been installed as a commemoration of the famous observatory scenes in Rebel Without A Cause.

Hu watched from a distance as both James and the priest knelt together. First James crossed himself, then bent his head to whisper in Father Feigenberg’s ear. He took a long time, and halfway through, the priest reached over to put his hand on James’ shoulder, a gesture of solidarity and comfort. James kept talking—and then a little after that, he started weeping. Father Feigenberg pulled him close and let him cry into his shoulder.

Finally, James pulled back and Father Feigenberg made the sign of the cross over him, and said some words—some words that James so desperately needed to hear. His whole body relaxed. And even from a distance, Hu could see that James’ pain had been lessened. Not released, not yet—but lessened. It was a start.

Finally, after a few more minutes, Father Feigenberg led James back to Hu and the two shared a look.

“Are you all right?”

“A little better. Yeah.”

Feigenberg looked from one to the other. He hadn’t met many same-sex couples, a side effect of his particular calling. But he felt there was more that he needed to say before this moment could be considered complete.

“The two of you—” He looked from James to Hu and back again. “You didn’t get here by accident. You got here because . . . yes, I know it sounds presumptuous, and you don’t have to believe me, but I’m certain that the two of you are here because you’re supposed to be here. Together.”

That last word from Father Feigenberg surprised both James and Hu. It wasn’t the word so much as the man saying it.

Hu managed to speak first. “Thank you.”

Feigenberg nodded an acknowledgment. “So how long have you two been together?”

“Three years.”

Feigenberg was impressed. “Mm-hm. That’s a commitment, isn’t it?”

“Commitment, hell,” said James. “It’s a privilege.” He put his arm around Hu’s shoulder and pulled him close. “He’s the one.”

“Yep,” agreed Hu, smiling. “Today was gonna be the day.” He held up his hand to show his ring.

James held up his hand to show the matching ring. “We made a promise. Hell or high water, we’re saying our vows today. It was high water. Really high water. So we said ’em. In the subway. Just before the water hit.”

Hu said, “It was really romantic. And terrifying too. I spent the whole day afraid I was going to lose him—”

Feigenberg nodded gently. It seemed a polite acknowledgment, but then he said, “Listen to me. As a priest ordained in the Catholic Church, I cannot formally bless your union in the eyes of God. But . . . as a legally established authority in the state of California, empowered to recognize the union of two consenting adults—” He paused to clear his throat. “—I now pronounce you . . . married. Congratulations. Mazel Tov. Now, let me sign your document.” He held out his hand for the marriage license.

And now it was Hu’s turn to cry—but this time for joy.

Originally published in Asimov’s, May/June 2018.

Knit Three, Save Four

Marie Vibbert

The ship was two days overdue for docking, more or less. As a stowaway, I didn’t have access to status reports. My passive data sniffer patiently checked for the docking station network, telling me, “Nope. Not there yet.” My calendar showed the original estimated time of arrival—two days and three hours ago. Having now reached the point at which I’d said I could start worrying, I was busy calculating a new point at which to start worrying again. There wasn’t much else I could do—if I tried anything and got caught, I’d be tossed out an airlock because, as I said: stowaway.

So I knitted. I always knit when I’m bumming. It helps to have something to do while you count your remaining rations and wonder if this is where you die. Also, traveling in storage containers meant I had a constant need for warm knit garments and blankets.

Since I was sure I was about to die, I was doing this insane lace stitch. Everything was slip-slip-knits and cables and knit-three-into-two and shit. Getting angry at the person who wrote this pattern distracted me from my inevitable demise.

The wall panel over my head wrenched open, flooding me with light, and these two people were staring at me and I realized I was in the middle of a cable and I didn’t remember if it was a cable-front or -behind.

The moment of confusion got me through being discovered without a heart attack.

I was wedged between boxes of whatever, helmet and gloves off, knitting in front of me, yarn pulled taut and looped around one finger, my instruction screen floating near at hand. There were crumbs all around me because I had eaten the last, most dried-out biscuit. Also, I probably stank. I’d been in the cargo box for seven days and my Ever-SaniTM wasn’t as “Ever” as it claimed.

My captors had vaguely Asian features: a guy with a shaved head and a woman with her black hair in tiny pin curls. Pin Curls was holding the hatch. She looked like she might close it over me again.

Shaved Head said, “Well, that figures.”

Pin Curls pushed the hatch door all the way open. “Fuck. Of all the . . .fuck.”

“It’s not as if this makes things worse,” Shaved Head said.

This was not the typical discovery reaction us stowaways get. The typical reaction was a swift kick out an airlock, or detention until landing. Since we were two days overdue for docking, I was hoping for detention. They had to be close to docking. Right?

“I’m throwing her out the airlock,” Pin Curls said.

I let go of my knitting to hold my hands up. “You can have my stuff. Please don’t kill me.”

Pin Curls pursed her lips like my pleading made her day worse.

Shaved Head held his hand out. “Come on,” he said. “You might as well be doomed with the rest of us.”

He pulled me into the crew’s common space. It was about the size of an apartment kitchen, and as crammed with potted herbs and potholders and garage-sale junk as my uncle’s place. A barrel-bodied robot crouched in an alcove, holding a ladle. An old woman was bouncing back and forth between the only porthole and a table. She saw me, closed her eyes, and said, like a prayer, “Let this be the last bad news today.”

“Nothing in storage we can use,” Pin Curls said.

The old woman looked like she would cry. She pressed her face to the porthole.

Didn’t feel like I was their top worry. “Is there something I can help with?”

“The station won’t let us dock,” Shaved Head said. “No one’s coming to resupply us. Even with the plants, we have maybe forty-eight hours of air left, and you’re using up an extra person’s oxygen.”

Well, excuse me.

The old woman said, “Gong, be nice.”

“I’m being nice, Abuela. Shirley wanted to chuck her out an airlock!”

A radio crackled, and I swear the air pressure dropped from all the intaken breaths. Abuela approached the radio like it was a poisonous spider on the wall. Then she relaxed her whole body at once. “Just static.”

Pin Curls (Shirley) had her hands on the ceiling like she was going to powerlift it. “There’s some sensor, says our hull is too weak. Electrical resistance patterns or something . . . The station says it’s too dangerous, and the cargo owners won’t come get us, either.”

I knew how to fix this. “Disable the sensor. You can fake the readings with—”

“Tried that,” three voices declared wearily.

Gong leaned toward me. “It might’ve helped if we hadn’t ‘fixed’ our problem so fast after they detected it.”

“Ya think?” Shirley kicked the wall to propel herself to the robot and, briefly, tussled with him over the ladle.

“Okay,” I said. “So, we figure out where the hull is weak and reinforce it.”

“With what?” Having successfully wrested the ladle from the robot, Shirley pointed it at me. “Our exploration of the cargo turned up one freeloader and a bunch of crumbs.”

Yeah, eating crumbly food in zero-g is a faux pas. Two days overdue for docking, times how much oxygen and fuel? I saw the others sizing me up against their own survival. “So . . .hey, I’m Mouth,” I said.

Shirley sneered. “Is that a first name or a last name?”

“It’s the one I’m giving you.”

She looked like she thought this was another reason to kick me into the cold embrace of space, but Gong grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Welcome! You’ve met me, and Shirley, and Abuela. That’s Fat Robot Chen.”

The robot perked up and saluted. “That I am!”

“That’s an . . .interesting name.”

“He looks like my buddy Chen.” Gong shrugged. “You know, if he were a robot, and fat.”

Abuela tsked. “So friendly. Not enough concern about how we are all going to die! The station’s insurance company refuses to allow us to dock as they would be financially liable for structural damage if our ship failed during docking.” She showed the message to me. They’d tacked “not to mention the tragic loss of human life” on the end. I wondered if it was an AI correcting their lack of humanity, like a grammar-check for decency.

“And there it is. Rhea Station.” Abuela held her hand over the porthole like she was holding back a curtain. “So close, and so far.”

The station was the size of a teacup in the view, but close enough that we could see the flitting lights of other ships coming and going.

“I still say we abandon ship.” Gong floated at my elbow. “Hop in our EVA suits and the station rescue team will pick us up.”

Abuela met this with a string of Spanish curses that I’m going to guess added up to, “My ship and cargo are worth more to me than your nutsack remaining attached to your body.”

Gong rolled his eyes, which resulted in more curses, and Shirley snapping at the both of them to “Get over it,” which gave me the distinct feeling this was an argument that had been going on for about two days. Maybe longer.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, I’m okay jumping out for station rescue, myself.”

They looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. (Except Fat Robot Chen, whose eyes tracked Gong.)

Shirley raised one hand, a smug/sour look on her face as if to say, “Tossing you out the airlock was my idea first.”

Abuela pursed her lips. “They might not pick up a stowaway. No, I forbid it. And Shirley, hija, I can hear you thinking. No one is getting tossed out of anything.”

Abuela was right: A lot of people killed stowaways to discourage the practice, because capitalism. Time to save the day. “We lower the air pressure. Get rid of all the nitrogen and go pure oxygen. That’ll relax the hull, maybe close some tears?”

Abuela snapped her fingers and pointed. Gong swam to the controls. “Yeah, we can do that.”

I turned back to the cargo box to get my knitting. Shirley flew neatly in my way, glaring death at me.

“I left stuff in there.”

“Too bad.”

With the air of a sentry putting up a deadly weapon, Shirley Velcroed the ladle into place over a set of potholders.

The air vents hissed. Maybe it was my imagination, but it felt colder as the air mix changed. I went in the other direction, then, and checked out the cargo manifest. It’s nice to know what’s been poking you in the back. Three hundred popsicle forms. A gross of personal AIs. Freeze-dried food rations. “Novelty items.” Best not examine that one. “Wait . . . you have twenty-five-hundred meters of cable aboard?” I asked.

“None of your business.” Abuela shooed me away from her control panel. “I am asking the station to please check us again, that we have lowered our pressure.”

“The sensor still says it’s not good enough,” Gong said, coming in from aft.

“I’ll disable it again.” Shirley pushed herself forward. I was relieved to have some distance between us.

Abuela hung by the radio like it was prom night and her date hadn’t called. After a long time, there came a reply from the station, peppered with half-legal terms, which ended with, “Lady, look at it from our perspective. Any ship docked is a hole we can’t close. I’m sorry, but no.”

Abuela curled into a ball, a little old lady bean right there. It broke my heart.

Shirley gathered a handful of my jacket. “So we toss her, right? To buy time?”

“Wait!” I windmilled in her grip. “What about the cable in cargo?”

Shirley, expressing her rosy outlook on others, said, “No way am I letting you go back for some weapon from your hidey-hole.”

I wrenched out of her grip and caught myself against a bundle of bags hanging on the wall. “Trust issues much? Tell me about the spool of cable you got in the cargo. It might save us.”

Gong answered for them, “It’s a high-strength polymer. But what are we supposed to do with it? Tie the ship together?”

I turned to Abuela. “How thick is this cable?”

Shirley huffed. “What does it matter how thick it is?”

I mimed looping cable around my arm, twice, and realized that I sucked at miming. “We tie the cable around the ship.”

Gong shook his head. “We can’t make the pressure even—tie in one direction, you weaken the other.”

“Let me have my knitting. I’ll show you.”

Shirley was neatly in my way again. “I’m still not letting you go back there.”

Ugh. More inept miming, then. “We make a bag, a mesh bag, then slide it around the ship. I’ll need at least two others helping. When we get to the far side—” I wriggled my fingers around an imaginary egg-shape and then mimed pulling strings “—we pull it tight. Bam. The whole ship is more secure. The pressure adjusts evenly because of the give in the stitches.”

Gong looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

Shirley, the one I expected the most objection from, was frowning thoughtfully. “You’ll need a hole in the bag for the docking ring,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“The cable is not ours!” Abuela smacked the table.

“Knitting can always be undone,” I said. “We won’t be cutting it. Come on, who’s with me?”

There was an awkward silence.

“You’re an idiot and a stowaway,” Shirley said, “but I’m not letting you take all the glory. I’m in.”

Unexpected ally! I held a hand up for her to high-five. She glared at it.

“I don’t know,” Abuela said, which was better than “no.”

Gong asked Fat Robot Chen, “What do you think, buddy? Can this plan work?”

Chen cocked his bucket-shaped head. “What plan was that, dude? Also, did you mean ‘can’ this plan work or ‘may’ this plan work?”

Gong patted the flat robot head. “He’s a work in progress.”

Gong and Abuela resumed arguing. Shirley declared she was going to her bunk, forgetting she was keeping me from accessing the cargo hold. YES! I got my knitting and my tablet. I pulled apart the lace thing I’d been making and started a simple mesh bag for demonstration purposes.

Crap. How big was this ship? I loaded up the instructions for the bag and tried to convert units from inches to meters.

Gong opened and closed cupboards and storage-ties around the room. “Are we out of anything remotely good? Who bought all these pouches of wax beans?”

Fat Robot Chen trundled along the ship’s deck, gripping it somehow. “I got you, bro. The special of the day is chipped beef on toast.”

“No no no . . . ” Gong gently steered Chen away from the microwave. “Buddy, you gotta stop trying to cook. You’ll get us both spaced.”

This struggle escalated, which I thought unwise since it increased Gong’s breath rate. Abuela saved me from having to mention this by flying screaming at the both of them.

Shirley leaned in from the opening to the crew cabin. “Are we going to eat? If eating is still something we get to do?”

They were exhausted. A captive audience. “So, that plan I was talking about?” I showed them my bag. I wrapped it halfway around a wax bean packet. “You see?” I pulled the bag-fragment tight and poked at the packet. “Evenly supported.”

Abuela paused in grabbing Gong by the ears while Gong was wrestling the ladle away from Chen. “That could work.” She narrowed her eyes. “But I’m not doing it, and I’m not sending my grandson out into vacuum.”

Before I could say, “Well, if there’s compensation in it for me,” Shirley bundled me into my helmet and gloves and pulled me with her out the airlock.

Rude, but she showed me where to clip my safety line while Fat Robot Chen spooled the cable out from the cargo bay. The cable was flexible enough to loop around my forearm. I wished I had four ship-size needles, but I could let stitches float free, given the lack of gravity. Dropped stitches (when a loop falls off your needle) aren’t as much of a problem in zero-g knitting. They float there, the friction of the yarn holding the loop open until you get your needle into it again. Lucky for me, because I was a terrible knitter when I started bumming.

The ship was an uneven football shape, round at one end and tapered at the other. The round end would be the perfect bottom of my bag, so we moved toward it to start.

I was clumsy in the suit gloves, but we were going huge here. I made a slipknot the size of a Hula-Hoop and knit ten stitches as big around as my forearm into it, making a disk. It was fun, knitting so big, and went fast. It was like spinning a huge beret, the disk doubling in size with each revolution.

Shirley gazed down the length of the ship, to where Fat Robot Chen was handing cable out the airlock. “Is this going to be enough?”

I should have finished my math. The ship was bigger on the outside. Inside, it had felt the size of my uncle’s camper van. Outside, it looked the size of a trailer truck that delivers camper vans. “Uh . . .how long is this ship?”

“Twenty-four meters and some change, if you don’t count the antennas. Ten meters in diameter.” I couldn’t see her face with her helmet turned away from me, but I heard the suspicion in her voice.

Twenty-four meters, twenty-five-hundred meters of cable? I needed, what, surface area to compare? It was something something 2-Pi-R. “I’m sure it’s enough,” I said, not remotely sure.

We’d know before we ran out of oxygen, right?

Knitting stopped being fun after five rows. My arms were sore and I was sweating and my stomach hurt from holding myself rigid; it’s a natural reaction in zero-g to lock on with your feet and keep your body in a sitting position. Stupidly. You don’t need to but your brain wants to. I made myself stop, but three stitches later, I was doing it again.

Around ten rows, the disk was big enough that I needed someone else to hold the other side. Shirley “sat” on the hull, passing loose floating loops under her hands, spinning the disk while I knitted the other side.

When we were halfway around, the trailing cable tangled in our suit tethers. “Crap,” I said. “We’ll have to unclip and re-clip every rotation, or else we hold the mesh still and we move.”

“You could have started this inside the ship,” Shirley said, unhelpfully.

This is the point in a knitting project where it starts to suck. Before, every row made visible progress. Now, every row looked the same, and I was annoyed with the tethers. My hands slipped with sweat inside my suit gloves. “I need a break.”

“No,” Shirley said, firmly. “We need to finish this in twelve hours so we have another twenty-four to come up with Plan B.”

A secret optimist, our Shirley.

We untethered and retethered, rotating the knitting. We worked silently until the disk was as big around as the butt-end of the ship.

“Um . . .yeah, we should move this . . .you know, so it’s centered on the ship’s butt? Kinda?” I did more bad miming, hampered by suit arms, hoping I conveyed the picture adequately.

“Stop explaining. You’re making it more confusing than it is.”

Shirley hopped easily from handhold to handhold, re-tethered, and moved the disk into position. I enjoyed the momentary rest. Better yet, there weren’t any more increases now. This was as long as the rows would get. And it had only taken an hour! We might actually get this done.

It was no longer sensible to rotate the knitting. There were too many random antennas and other things poking out of the hull for it to snag on. Shirley and I crawled in tandem, losing sight of each other, but I saw Fat Robot Chen every pass. He peered along the cable length like he was worried about me.

When we were just under halfway along the ship, it was time to make a hole for the airlock. I looped the yarn ten times around my arm, a convenient way of marking off a long length. It felt odd slipping my arm free and letting the loops float. I was very careful with the next stitch, not pulling at all so my gap would stay open.

Shirley came back from the far side to watch. She thumbs-upped, which I guess meant she realized what I was doing. I poked the loose yarn all around Fat Robot Chen while he tracked me like a rapt gopher. I knit the next stitch into the big loop. Here on out I’d be going back and forth instead of around and around, stopping each time I hit the big loop with one stitch into it. I checked the time. Another two hours eaten up. I was slowing down, but there was still plenty of time.

I was a few stitches away from returning to the gap from the other direction when my triceps went “boink” and then my forearm and my elbow and my pinky finger all cramped up at once.

Shirley came to me. “You stopped.”

“Can’t move my arm.”

She touched my elbow. “Show me what to do.”

I flinched away. “I can’t. Ow. Ow. Ow.”

“Shush. Look. I saw you take a loop and put it through another loop, right? Like this?”

She made a damn slipknot. Close, but not the same thing. “No . . .no . . .just . . .ow. Let’s . . .can we go inside and rest?”

“No. That’d take too long. Rest here. Stretch.”

I double-checked my tether and let my body go slack. I floated off the ship, a me-balloon. It was a relief. Maybe I should take my chances with station rescue. At least I’d die lazily. “Why are you such a hard-ass?”

“We’re in danger. It’s not being a hard-ass if you’re trying to save everyone’s life.”

Hell, my arm hurt. “Pushing me won’t make this go faster. You might have noticed I’m not in the best physical shape.”

“Shush. I’m watching a video tutorial on knitting.”

I made fists and slowly released them. “I’m sorry about stowing away.”

“I bet you are.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. But I mean . . .I don’t intend to be a burden on anyone.”

“Here. Watch this.” Shirley waved me over.

I crawled up my rope. I was able to grip again, but my forearm still twinged.

Shirley slowly and carefully completed a knit stitch. “Yes,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

She did three more. Her fourth she almost did backward but I corrected her. After the fifth, she asked, “Why stow away? You gotta risk getting killed a dozen ways.”

I wished I had a noble story to tell her, some manifesto to conquer the solar system for the proletariat, but the truth was rather more self-serving. “I like traveling. I have a festival crew job during Lunar New Year on the Moon, and every now and then I stay a full year on Mars, because I have family there and they can always use the help on the farm, but other than that, I’m on a new planet, a new station, a new country every six months. Eating weird new things and meeting weird new people. This is the only way someone like me could ever do that.”

“You should join a cargo crew.”

“Yeah. And how easy is that?” She didn’t answer, because of course she knew exactly what it took. Connections. Family. A ship that didn’t break. “Anyway,” I said, “how much of the solar system do you get to see on a cargo ship? Orbits and docking bays.”

Shirley grunted. I showed her how to knit stitches into the dock-hole. I’d guessed the size pretty good. The hole was ten percent bigger than the dock.

“This is hard,” she said. “It hurts!”

Told you so, I thought.

We took turns, then, every other row. I think Shirley tried to go faster than I did. Which made me go faster. I was hurting all over when Chen said, “Hey, guys? Do you want me to tell you when the cable is almost all gone?”

I looked at the whole third of the ship still left to cover and wanted to cry. Shirley’s fists were on her hips.

“Gauge!” I said. I started pulling stitches out. “Chen, spool this back, we’re starting over.”

“No,” Shirley said.

I ignored her. So did Chen, fortunately.

She grabbed me. “No,” she said. “You failed. It’s not enough.”

We still had five of her twelve hours! “Knitting has this concept called gauge,” I said. “The size of the finished work will increase if you make bigger stitches. We’re going to make bigger stitches. I’ll double loop each stitch. It should double the size.” As soon as I said it, I remembered it wasn’t that simple, but I didn’t want her to lose faith.

Shirley was breathing heavy over my radio. Panicking, maybe.

“Knitting bigger also goes faster,” I added. “And unraveling is fast.” I left a floating trail of loose cable behind me as I pulled myself recklessly, tether unclipped.

As Chen drew the cable in, it danced.

When I reached the butt, Shirley was there, guiding the loose cable, watching me. “You’d better tether. I’m not chasing your ass if you fly off.”

We were silent as I restarted knitting. It did go faster, with enormous-enormous stitches. I gripped as lightly as I dared to try to keep from cramping up, but after three rows, we had to alternate again, taking catnaps on our tethers. We’d used up another six hours. Holy crap. I needed to rest.

“It’s been thirteen hours since I gave you twelve,” Shirley said as we were working our way over the edge of the butt again. “Now there’s no time for a Plan B.”

Well, thanks, Mary Sunshine.

We made it past Chen with another big docking loop, and I started knitting two together every tenth stitch to narrow the bag as the ship narrowed. I hadn’t done that last time.

“Hey, me and you are on suit air, and maybe lower pressure means they’re breathing lighter inside?”

I decreased every ninth, then every eighth, then every seventh. This was going to work. The hull was narrowing faster. I decreased every sixth.

“Hey, guys?” Fat Robot Chen said.

Oh no. No no.

“This indicator says there’s seventeen meters left?”

There was maybe a fifth of the ship still to go. “It’s not enough,” Shirley said, crying.

I was stupid with exhaustion. My eyes raced over the ship, the lovely loose net enclosing it. There was nothing I could do except at the start. “I have an idea.” I held the loose end toward Shirley. “Hold this.”

I went back to the beginning, undid the starting slipknot, and carefully unknit the first ten rows. You can’t pull knit stitches loose from the bottom like you can from the top. Unknitting is slow and annoying. If this were crochet, I could tug it free . . . Maybe we could start over . . .

No, crochet uses more yarn per foot.

“What are you doing?”

“Unknitting the far end. Ugh. I’ll have to do it all the way to the edge of the butt. We’re going to make a tube instead of a bag. We move the tube to center it, so there’s, like, a small bit uncovered on either end, and then I’ll knit this back as much as I can over the butt. Two medium-sized holes are better than one small hole and one big one.”

“You’ll move the dock hole away from the dock!”

I froze. How obvious. Our “tube” had an opening halfway along it. “Yeah . . .okay . . .that’s a problem.” What other options did we have? Undo the whole thing? “I’m making a hole at the starting point. Yeah. Tug when I tell you. It’ll at least give you another foot of coverage on that side. There’s some slack around the airlock. One foot won’t move it too much, just make it tight on one side.”

“What is a foot going to do?”

“More coverage, more structural integrity. One more foot is one more foot. Start tugging.”

“It’s . . .ugh . . . ”

“I said go. Tug now.”

“I am tugging! Do you feel anything at that end?”

I didn’t. Damn. I remembered all those small projections from the ship that made us not want to turn the net earlier—thrusters, welds—anything could be caught anywhere.

“Chen? We need help.”

“Help with what?” Chen said.

“Get up here and help us move the netting over all these greebles.”

Chen mused, “May I leave the ship? I may. Can I leave the ship? No, I can’t.”

“Get Gong.” I wanted to murder a robot just then.

Shirley crawled to me. “Chen’s not built for extravehicular motion. Don’t blame him. He can be cute when there isn’t an emergency.”

We hung there, both exhausted and despairing and not in a mood for conversation. Gong crawled up to us. His face was streaked with soot and something like . . .hoisin? “Plan B was making glue from beans,” he said. “Don’t ask.” He looked at what we’d done so far. “Why did you put a hole in it? Why didn’t you plan to end it around the dock?”

Mutual desire to kill Gong united us as Shirley and I silently started unravelling the whole thing.

Every time you try to save time by not undoing something, it turns out to take too long and you end up undoing it anyway. It hurt to start over, but this time we started with an about-the-dock-sized open ring on the far side of the ship from the dock. This way we’d save material and the two holes would balance each other. “Now,” I said, resting while Shirley micromanaged Gong’s first turn knitting, “we’ll go as far as we can, but if we’re short, that’ll just leave a bigger opening around the dock. And airlocks are reinforced anyway, right?”

“Ow ow ow!” Gong said. “My arm’s cramping.”

It took eleven hours to finish, including nap-breaks, but we knit a bag around a spaceship. Twelve hours of air left, then we’d all get into the suits. Shirley and I each had maybe an hour of suit air left. Gong had twelve hours. Abuela had a full twenty-four and wanted to top up our tanks with hers, but I said we’d know if it worked in an hour anyway.

Then Shirley and I slept, because we had to. I was so incompetent-tired, Robot Chen had to tie me into a berth.

I stared at my insensible arms, floating in front of me. “I’m never moving my hands again.”

“We don’t even know it’ll work.” Gong had a gallows smile. He held on to the treadmill on the ceiling as he pushed Chen out of the compartment.

I ought to have slept like the dead. The hammock was way more comfortable than a cargo box, but instead I fidgeted, slipping in and out of fitful dreams about knots. When we were down to six hours, Gong woke me and forced me into my suit, visor open, for now.

Abuela woke me by taking my helmet off. “Shh, shhh, hija. We’ve docked with a supply ship!”

I enjoyed my breath of air and swam past her to the main compartment. A big man floated by the table. “We’ll get your crew and contents to Rhea Station,” he said, “but first we need our cargo. It’s a spool of twenty-five-hundred meters of multi-stranded polymer cable.”

Abuela’s victory hug froze around me.

Gong coughed.

Shirley was the one to break the silence. “Your cable is holding our ship together.”

We laughed. I don’t know who started—it might have been Chen. Our would-be rescuer muttered about oxygen deprivation and topped up our reserve tanks before leaving us to die.

Ha, ha.

“Don’t look so worried.” Shirley elbow-jabbed me.

Now that we’d successfully docked and undocked with another ship and our sensor was quiet, station rescue had no problem letting us dock.

Which would have been a relief if stations didn’t kill stowaways.

We stepped through the station airlock, heavy and dizzy like climbing out of a pool. Security people were staring at us. Security people who looked up from the crew manifest and exaggeratedly counted our heads.

Abuela stuck her arm in front of me. “This is our engineering intern. Such a good girl! She agreed to work for transport. Better not to put in writing and get taxed. You understand.” She pouted.

I woulda hugged her, but that woulda broken our cover.

So that’s how I joined the crew. Now I get to travel outside of storage containers like a good capitalist, as we market our “emergency structural nets” to cargo ships around the planets. I also make cardigans. Fat Robot Chen graciously models them.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2019.

Command and Control

David D. Levine

Blood spattered the inside of Amirthi Kandiah’s visor. “Balli kar dena!” she swore, her native Tamil returning under stress . . . and then she coughed again, a wracking spasm that left more red drops obscuring her heads-up display.

“What’s wrong?” asked her helmet, in its precise neutral Hindi.

“Just another damn nosebleed.” She raised the visor and cleaned it, eking out the last use from an already-blood-saturated wipe, then sucked down more water from her canteen before lowering it again. They had drugs for altitude sickness, drugs for headaches, drugs for pain and fatigue and nausea, but the air of the Tibetan Plateau—the chill, bone-dry, oxygen-poor air at nearly four thousand meters—led to coughs, cracked lips, and constant nosebleeds, and drugs couldn’t help with those. It was just physics and physiology.

Bad enough that the Chinese were shooting at them. Even the air here in Lhasa was hostile.

Kandiah checked her heads-up for any nearby movement, following up with a visual scan of the area, before hunkering down again behind the fragment of wall where she’d been waiting for the last twenty minutes. “Dighe.” Her helmet beeped and opened a connection with Lance Naik Dighe. “Waitin’ on ya.”

“Almost there, Havildar.” Dighe’s Hindi words through the headset came as a labored gasp—not too surprising, as her helmet cam showed she was moving at a near run over bomb-shattered pavement. Even walking was an effort at this altitude, and she was carrying over fifty kilos of gear. “Had to wait for a patrol to pass.”

“Roger,” Kandiah replied. The English word roger was a sign of modernity and respect across ranks. Even though Dighe was only a Lance Naik, the lowest rank in the squad, and Kandiah was her Havildar, or sergeant, Kandiah tried to consider herself first-among-equals.

The local map in her heads-up showed the six other members of Strike Team Makdi already in position. They were moving to surround a Chinese unit camped out in what had once been a tourist mall—dozens of stalls where impoverished Tibetans had sold ‘authentic handicrafts’ under a Chinese-built roof with harsh old-fashioned LED lighting—but was now a fortified base ringed with sandbags and snap wire. Symbolic of the whole thing, really.

As she waited, Kandiah peered in all directions. Electronic intelligence was imperative on the modern battlefield, but there was nothing like using your own senses. Nothing moved except a scrap of plastic sheeting, whipped by the wind at the broken edge of the wall behind which she crouched. The wind was running fast and cold today, raising a rushing whistle at the edges of her visor; it carried smells of rust and explosives and shattered concrete. From above, on all sides, came the ever-present mosquito whine of drones, beyond that the cough and rattle of tracked vehicles, and far above that the deep authoritative rumble of Indian air support. But the battle right now was on the ground, nasty and personal and house-to-splintered-house.

Sometimes she fantasized about calling in a teleport strike—dropping a pellet on the base would eliminate it without requiring her or anyone in her squad to risk their lives. But no one, not even Kandiah herself, believed that a single small target like this was worth the billion rupees a teleport strike cost, never mind the political repercussions. So this sort of task fell to ground troops, as it had for centuries.

Her helmet beeped and highlighted Dighe on the map, the little glowing triangle right where it was supposed to be. “Set to pounce,” Dighe said.

“Acknowledged.” Kandiah cycled through her squad’s helmet cams and scanned the local and regional intel reports. All was as expected, at least to the degree possible in the middle of a war zone. “Strike Team Makdi, move out.”

She didn’t have to give any more instruction than that. Her people were good; they knew their parts, and furthermore they could be trusted to make the right decisions when the situation changed, as it inevitably did. That was the whole point of their extensive training, and, again, symbolic of the whole thing . . . the Chinese troops against whom they were moving, in contrast, had been given only enough training to be effectively micromanaged by their commanders. Which was why the Indians had made it as far as the Tibetan capital, despite being outnumbered and at the end of a hideously long supply chain.

But the Chinese were dug in, had a big advantage in troop strength, and were more than prepared to keep throwing people at the Indians. The war could still go either way.

First contact came at the left flank, with Naik Vallabanath surprising a pair of Chinese troops in a sandbagged gun emplacement. Vallabanath succeeded in sneaking around to their less-protected left side before opening fire, bringing one down and sending the other scuttling for cover. Naik Rajadhyaksha, seeing the opening, charged in past the now-silent gun and looped right, taking down another gun crew from behind with a neatly tossed mini-grenade. That created a big hole in the Chinese perimeter, and the other members of the team quickly moved to exploit it. Kandiah, laying down suppressive fire on the right flank, offered a few words of advice, but mostly left her squad to their own devices. They were in a better position to direct themselves than she was, just as she was better placed to command her strike team than the generals behind the lines. It was a kind of fractal, and it worked.

The map in Kandiah’s visor showed Indian triangles penetrating the perimeter of Chinese circles—those circles more fuzzy or less, indicating the degree of uncertainty in their position—and spreading out within that perimeter to approach the base. Everything was going according to plan, mostly, and with any luck Rajadhyaksha or maybe Sori would soon be close enough to the base to fling a satchel charge and take the whole thing down. For her part, Kandiah kept the Chinese off balance, dashing back and forth outside their right perimeter, harassing them with rifle bullets and flash-bangs while the real attack was proceeding on the left. That was just how it had worked out; if the Chinese positions had been slightly different Kandiah might have wound up taking point herself. She was actually a little disappointed that she had not; she would have liked to be in on the kill.

And then a big, thick arc of sharp-edged circles suddenly sprang into existence on the map. “Ommala!” she swore.

The Chinese troops were thick in the space between Rajadhyaksha and the former mini-mall. Electronic intelligence hadn’t spotted them—the Chinese must have really upped their game in sweeping for relays—so they didn’t appear on the map until they came in view of Rajadhyaksha’s cameras. Even as Kandiah watched the number of circles grew. “Raj! Fall back!” she called—unnecessarily, as he was already doing so—even as she charged toward his position, firing smoke grenades in an attempt to cover his retreat.

But there were too many Chinese. The arc quickly closed on him—the lightly armored, rested Chinese troops advancing faster on their own home ground than Raj could retreat—and a moment later Raj’s camera view went black. “Saale bhadwe!” she cursed, then “Strike Team Makdi, fall back!”

It was a difficult retreat. Sori, who had been nearly as close to the base as Raj, had to drop his satchel charge—it detonated ineffectively on the ground a hundred meters from anything, spattering the Chinese with small rocks but otherwise doing no damage. But it served as a distraction, and Sori managed to get away. Chatterjee and Kaur were nearly surrounded by swarming Chinese, but were fortunate enough to be within visual range of each other; they coordinated their fire and together they managed to shoot their way out. Even Kandiah herself, far from the action, was surprised by an automated sentry gun she had thought disabled, suffering a painful strike on her shoulder armor before she slapped it down for good. “Rendezvous at checkpoint twenty-six,” she told her squad once they’d all cleared the perimeter, and they fanned out, each retreating on a separate, circuitous path through scouted and prepared ground.

More than a few pursuing Chinese stepped on Indian mines before they gave up the chase. But there were many, many more behind them, and this was just one base.

“We lost Raj,” she told Kripanand that night, her low-energy transmission hopping across thousands of relays to disguise its source. Each relay, the size of a sequin, lasted only a few days; drones were constantly scattering more of them across the battlefield. They were supposed to be biodegradable. “There are just too fucking many Chinese.” She spoke in English; Kripanand’s Tamil was nonexistent, and Hindi was only his third best language.

Kripanand Gurudata sighed. The sound was nearly indistinguishable from the digital noise introduced by the relays and by the satellite link between Tibet and India, but during the four years of their extended and mostly long-distance relationship she’d grown attuned to the little noises he made. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, and they both knew it was inadequate, and they both knew there was nothing more to say. “We are doing all we can here. Not that I can tell you about it.”

“I know.” Kripanand was in military R&D, working at a secret facility buried somewhere in the Himalayas.

“I can tell you that we had a public demo of the G3 today. Went off without a hitch.”

“Yeah, I heard. Not that it’ll do us much good here.”

The United States had revealed the existence of weaponized teleportation technology over twenty years earlier, delivering a fifteen-gram osmium pellet to the headquarters of the Islamic Caliphate. On arrival the pellet had intersected with about one milligram of air molecules, transforming their mass instantly into energy: an explosion equivalent in power to twenty tons of TNT. This was far less than an atomic bomb—the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki had been twenty thousand tons—but still an impressive bang, especially given that it could be delivered at the speed of light to any point on Earth that could be located with sufficient precision. For a while this technology had returned the US to superpower status.

But that requirement of locating the target proved the weapon’s Achilles heel. After first the Pentagon and then the Kremlin were reduced to smoking holes in the ground—once teleportation had been demonstrated, it had not proved difficult for other nations to work out the theory and practice—all major powers began using secrecy, mobility, decoys, camouflage, and other countermeasures to make their key command and control centers impossible to pin down. Cities, of course, could not be hidden, but that applied to all combatants equally, so any such strike would certainly be met with a comparable response. This led to decades of cold war, with international conflict reduced to espionage and border skirmishes under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

During this time a second-generation teleport technology had been developed, this one capable of swapping an object for an equivalent volume of air at the target location. This eliminated the explosive effect, but the tech still required the power of a city-sized nuclear plant to teleport an object less than ten centimeters on a side, and the payload arrived with a bang that was hard to disguise. It turned out that noisily delivering a small munition or spy device to a particular location, even without warning, was not as much of a game changer as everyone had expected; between drones, artillery, bombers, and ICBMs, that capability pretty much already existed. Apart from a few notable successes and a few even-more-notable failures—errors in targeting tended to spectacularly destroy the transmitting facility—the cold war had continued unabated.

Kripanand had been working on G3—Generation Three teleport technology—since before he and Kandiah had met, though he had not been able to tell her about it until recently. Even now, he could share only the broad outlines: the tech could deliver ‘a person-sized payload’ without harming either the payload or the target. “Does ‘person-sized payload,’” she had asked him, “include an actual living person?”

“No comment,” was all he had replied. But the length of the pause before replying, and the smile she could practically hear in his voice, had been all the confirmation she had needed that her guess was correct.

But the problem of targeting still existed. The major targets were too well hidden, and the minor targets didn’t justify the use of such an expensive and disruptive weapon. Yes, you could now put a soldier, or a spy, anywhere you wanted—but the arrival was still far from subtle, and if you didn’t know exactly where he or she would land, you might blow up both the soldier and the transmitter. Transmitting to a locating beacon avoided that problem, but if you could put a locator on a spot, you could probably place a person there by conventional means.

So warfare at Kandiah’s level continued pretty much as it had for over a century: boots, bullets, and grenades, with a few technological tweaks. And, just as it had been for centuries before that, the side with the greater numbers had an advantage. Not an insurmountable advantage, to be sure, but an advantage nonetheless.

Their conversation continued for a while longer, but eventually it ended as it always did, with him telling her “I love you” in Tamil, and her replying “I love you too” in Marathi. It was nearly the only phrase each of them knew in the other’s childhood language.

Kandiah folded up her phone, kissed it, then turned off her lantern. Tomorrow would be another day.

The next morning dawned clear, cold, and windy; dust storms seemed likely. After a quick cold breakfast Kandiah blew her nose—disgusted at the mixture of snot and dried blood that came out—and conferred with her squad and her superiors. They soon came to an agreement that a gun emplacement on Chagpori Hill, which defended the main army’s most straightforward path to central Lhasa, was their best target for the day. Strike Team Makdi would coordinate with Strike Team Lomri to take it out.

The squad’s comms were uncharacteristically quiet as they deflated their tents and began hiking toward the objective. They were all still somber, angry, and thoughtful at the loss of Raj, but now even more determined to complete the liberation of the Tibetan people from their long Chinese domination—not to mention gaining India access to Tibet’s impressive reserves of copper, uranium, lithium, and graphite.

Soon they came in sight of Chagpori Hill, and rising beyond it Marpori Hill, topped by the impressive Potala Palace. This vast complex of white and red stone, containing over a thousand rooms, rose nearly untouched above the bomb-blasted buildings of central Lhasa. The residence of generations of Dalai Lamas, it was a world heritage site; not even the Americans would deliberately attack such a place. Seeing it shining in the coppery light of the rising sun gave Kandiah hope for the future.

But then she turned her head to the right, and zoomed in her camera on Chagpori, soon locating the gun emplacement: a house-sized blocky plinth of concrete, with narrow horizontal slits facing the road beneath. “There’s our target,” she said to her squad and Lomri. Without further discussion they fanned out, Makdi to the left and Lomri to the right, as they’d planned that morning. Kandiah’s breath came harder and heavier as she began to climb, and her squad’s breathing hissed in her ears as well, but no one complained. They had a job to do.

After yesterday’s debacle, Kandiah kept a sharp eye out for Chinese troops who had slipped through the Indian relay net. But they encountered no one as they climbed, and soon her squad was set for their attack. Makdi’s job would be to assault the objective frontally, drawing the emplacement’s defenders out; Lomri would climb past the target and strike from above and behind. “In place,” she sent to Lomri’s Havildar.

“Roger,” he replied. “Give us five more minutes.” His voice was more peppered than usual with digital artifacts, indicating that few relays were in range. This made Kandiah still more nervous, and she raised a camouflaged periscope camera for a detailed visual scan of the area. Still no sign of any defenders.

Her helmet beeped. “We’re set,” said Lomri’s Havildar.

“Acknowledged,” Kandiah replied, then “Makdi.” Another beep as her squad was added to the link. “Strike Team Makdi, Strike Team Lomri, prepare to attack on my mark.” She took a deep breath of the cold, thin air . . . and coughed, spattering her visor with flecks of blood. “Ommala,” she hacked, then forced another breath. “Three,” she gasped. “Two. One. Mark!”

Automatic weapons fire burst out from all sides, much of it only chipping the emplacement’s thick concrete. But her squad’s aim was good, and many bullets found their way into the slits. Flashes came from the darkness within, and shouts in alarmed Chinese. Kandiah grinned fiercely and kept firing.

And then a pair of sally ports burst open at the emplacement’s base, dozens of Chinese troops swarming out with their own rifles blazing. This was the reaction the Indians had anticipated, even desired, but the sheer number of defenders and their heedless aggression was unexpected and alarming. Kandiah hunkered down behind a rock and returned fire, but for every defender she felled it seemed that two more emerged from the armored doors behind them. “Lomri!” she called as she continued firing. “Request immediate assistance!”

“Sorry, Makdi,” came the reply, even more torn by interference than before. Gunshots were audible as well. “We are pinned down at the moment.”

“Baagad bullya!” she swore. Another beep drew her attention to the map, where a swarm of fuzzy circles was climbing the hill below her position. Her squad was minutes away from being surrounded. “Makdi! Retreat to the west!” The terrain in that direction was rough, a mixed blessing; there were few defenders there, but Makdi would also find it slow going.

Moving in a crouch, still firing, Kandiah scrambled to her left, shifting from rock to bush to bullet-riddled Buddha statue as the Chinese troops pressed in from above and drew closer below. Her breath grew ragged and painful from the cold thin air, and she tasted blood. Comms fell nearly silent except for the sound of automatic weapons; all her people were focused on survival.

Then the path to the west ended suddenly, as Kandiah found herself and her squad wedged at the top of a rocky three-meter cliff. “Makdi!” she called. “Dig in and return fire!”

For a seemingly endless half-hour they hammered the Chinese with everything they had—automatic weapons, antipersonnel bombs, mini-grenades, even sidearms. Makdi’s elevated position and the rocky ground gave them an advantage, and the carnage was appalling; the foliage beneath their cliff was soon shredded and red with blood. But the Chinese troops kept coming.

“I’m getting low on ammo, Havildar,” said Vallabanath, and Sori and Kaur echoed this.

“Acknowledged,” Kandiah replied. There was nothing else to say. She kept firing, trying to make every shot count.

“I’m out!” said Sori. His helmet cam changed to a view of a rough rock wall as he ducked down behind it. Then he drew his combat knife. Even in the tiny display Kandiah could see the blade tremble.

Kandiah gritted her teeth and threw her last mini-grenade, watching it arc over palm trees toward a dense group of Chinese.

But the explosion came sooner than expected and was far bigger than any mini-grenade—it was the huge red bloom of an antipersonnel bomb, even though Kandiah was sure her squad had none remaining. Screams in Chinese and the sound of charred fragments peppering the foliage followed. “Sorry for the delay, Makdi,” came the voice of Lomri’s Havildar. Then a second AP bomb detonated to the left of the first, and a third to the right, opening a huge hole in the Chinese forces.

“Makdi!” Kandiah called. “Through that hole, double time!”

They rushed through the hole and down the hill in a mad half-run, half-tumble. Chinese bullets pinged off Kandiah’s helmet and armor, but more AP bombs from Lomri put a stop to that.

As they descended the hill toward Indian-controlled territory the circles on the map grew fewer and sharper, and it became easier to avoid them. Soon Kandiah called her squad to a ragged halt under the canopy of a car charging station that was still mostly whole. They were safe, at least for the moment.

Gasping, hands on knees, Kandiah looked around at her people.

There were only five of them, plus herself.

Sori hadn’t made it.

Damn it.

The survivors looked like hell, their armor scarred and pockmarked and their faces wrecked with exhaustion. Her own face in Vallabanath’s camera was frightening—its whole lower half smeared with blood from her nose. She pushed back her visor and cleaned her face with her hands, as best she could, then wiped her hands on her thighs. But all that did was make everything filthier.

She wiped and wiped, but the blood on her hands wouldn’t come clean.

Blood on her hands.

How many Chinese had she killed today? Dozens? Hundreds? They had just kept coming!

There had been no choice. She would have died otherwise. But she couldn’t help but think of Sori, and Raj, and the holes their losses had torn in her heart. Every one of those Chinese had been someone’s squad mate, someone’s son or daughter. The pain this war was causing to both sides was . . . incalculable.

They were not her enemies. Their government was.

And their government, which had thrown them by the double handful into the meat grinder of Makdi and Lomri’s weaponry, was their enemy too.

“Havildar?” It was Kaur. Her helmet was off and her filthy face showed concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m . . . I’m fine.” She wiped her nose with a hand and sniffed back blood and snot and . . . yes, dammit, tears. “I’m fine.”

She was not fine. This was not how she was supposed to be feeling—it was contrary to all her training. She was traumatized—shell-shocked and exhausted and demoralized. She needed immediate counseling.

She was also, still, responsible for her squad.

“Anyone need medical attention?” she said, raising her head and firming her spine.

“I think I do . . . ”

Everyone’s heads turned to the new voice.

Sori.

He had just arrived under the canopy. Staggering, helmetless, clutching his dangling right arm with a blood-soaked left hand—it looked like a bullet had found the weak spot in his armor’s right elbow—but still alive.

His knife, Kandiah noted as the squad rushed to prop him up, was missing. But he’d made it out.

She wouldn’t let this happen again.

Chatterjee gave Sori a quick medical once-over, shook her head, and gave him a shot for the pain. “Havildar!” Sori said with urgency even as his eyes began to flutter closed, “I got something for you.” He gestured left-handed to the pouch at his waist, from which Kandiah drew a battered, bloodstained rectangle.

It was a Chinese military tablet, with a green light blinking in the corner.

“Great work, soldier.” She gripped his shoulder, hard enough for him to feel through the armor, and he smiled and went under.

They rigged up a travois to get Sori back to camp. There they cleaned up, licked their wounds, and debriefed. Kandiah wanted to understand the engagement from all her people’s perspective before reporting to her superiors. Everything had gone according to plan . . . except that the Chinese had been far more numerous, and far more determined, than their intel had led them to expect.

After Chatterjee, the last to report, left Kandiah’s tent—Sori was stable, but would need evac ASAP—Kandiah pulled out the Chinese tablet and looked it over.

She had considerable latitude in dealing with captured electronics. Standard operating procedure was to send it up the line, where people with specialized resources and training would extract as much information as possible. But if the situation was urgent, she was permitted to investigate on her own initiative—keeping in mind that such investigation could destroy intelligence that might be ferreted out by a more skilled operator at headquarters.

But she wanted to know what secrets the device held now.

Her finger hesitated over the power button.

And then the tablet trilled and the screen lit up, taking the decision from her.

The face on the screen was familiar—astonishingly so.

It was General Fu Jiaoyang.

No question it was her, with the scar and the gold headset and the famous piercing eyes that, even on a crappy little scarred screen, seemed to penetrate Kandiah’s visor, bore right through her skull, and keep going out the back of her helmet.

General Fu was the Chinese Army’s Rommel, or Patton—a larger-than-life force of nature who combined strategic brilliance, ruthless efficiency, charismatic personality, and gigantic ego. She had taken most of the credit for China’s successful campaign in Laos . . . deservedly so, in the opinion of Kandiah’s instructors. But she was also known as a hot-tempered martinet who micromanaged her subordinates—symbolized by the ever-present command headset which was her personal trademark and which, according to rumor, she’d had permanently grafted into her left ear. Her management style served her well within the Chinese tradition of central control and respect for authority, but was viewed by the Indian military as a potential weakness.

And now here she was, live and direct, glaring at Kandiah when she’d probably expected some low-level field commander. Hazily visible in the background was something complex, red and gold and green. It didn’t look military.

General Fu was not stupid. Her eyes narrowed, the screen blanked, and immediately the tablet in Kandiah’s hand grew too hot to touch. “Magi!” she cursed, and flung the thing out her tent flap. A moment later came a sizzling bang. “Anyone hurt?” she called.

“No, sir,” came the reply. “What was that?”

“Actionable intel, I hope.” She massaged her stinging fingers and refocused her attention on her visor. “Did you record that?”

“Yes,” said her helmet. Video of the brief encounter appeared in a window.

“Analysis.”

The general’s face was outlined. “General Fu Jiaoyang of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force.”

Tell me something I don’t know, Kandiah didn’t bother saying. “What’s that in the background?”

The tablet’s screen froze, then zoomed out to fill the window. The general’s face vanished, replaced by an extrapolation of what had been behind her . . . fuzzy at first, then quickly resolving into focus. The object that had caught Kandiah’s attention was a dragon—an ornate gold dragon with a green head and a huge red horn on its nose, coiled around a pillar. Definitely not military.

“Where is that?”

“Just a moment.”

Kandiah’s fingers drummed on her knee. “Come on, come on, come on,” she muttered under her breath.

Suddenly another window opened—the same dragon pillar, and another matching one, and between them three elaborately-ornamented Buddhist figures. It looked like an image from a tourism website. “Lokeshvara sandalwood statues,” the helmet said, “at Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet.”

Kandiah’s heart thudded beneath her armor. General Fu was here, on the ground in Lhasa, no doubt micromanaging the Chinese defenses with her usual ruthless brilliance. This was new, and explained their unexpected recent changes in tactics. And, defying numerous treaties, she’d set up her headquarters in a world heritage site.

Prying her out of there would be hard. But now Kandiah knew where she was.

“Gotcha, motherfucker,” she said in English. It was a quote from an action movie.

“We will not attack the Palace,” said Lieutenant Singh, Kandiah’s commander. “And you are expressly prohibited from doing so yourself.”

“But it’s General Fu! You know how she works! She will already have eliminated a whole layer of command structure in favor of directly commanding the field officers. Take her out, and the whole defense will collapse!”

“And if we destroy one of the most holy sites of Tibetan Buddhism in the process, the whole rationale of our liberation offensive will collapse!”

“You don’t have to destroy it! You can drop a pellet on her!”

“Absolutely not! For one thing, even a one-milligram teleport strike would certainly damage irreplaceable religious artifacts, and might destabilize the entire structure. For another thing, we would have to locate her precisely within the complex.”

“But we know from the imagery exactly where she is!”

“Where she was. That was hours ago, and don’t think she doesn’t realize how much can be extrapolated from a single image. She might not even be in the Palace any more.” They glared at each other across the noisy video link, both breathing hard. “I appreciate your initiative, Havildar Kandiah,” he said at last, “but you have sustained casualties, you are low on morale and materiel, and your own judgment may be impaired. I am afraid I must ask you to stand down.” His expression softened, becoming avuncular. “Look, you need to evacuate Naik Sori anyway. Take the whole squad back to Xigaze for some R&R. You’ve earned it.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. To come so close to complete victory and let it be . . . just snatched away? “Is that an order, sir?”

“Do I have to make it one?”

His eyes were not nearly as intense as General Fu’s, but Kandiah looked away. “I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She closed the connection, then let out the breath she had not let him see her holding.

Snatched away, she thought.

Then she pulled her phone from her pocket.

She stared at it for a long time before unfolding it.

The stood in a tight little circle, six dark brown faces under the chill blue of Tibet’s cloudless sky. Sori, still unconscious, remained in his tent. “I need two volunteers for a special mission,” Kandiah said. “It isn’t exactly authorized. No support, no backup, no guarantees. You could wind up in the news, and not in a good way. But it could end the war right here, right now, and save a lot of lives.”

Every hand went up, and Kandiah’s heart swelled with pride. “Thank you all, but, really, only two.” She paused, considering. “Chatterjee, you’re our best medic. I want you to take care of Sori. Get him back to Xigaze in one piece.”

“Roger,” Chatterjee acknowledged, though her eyes showed her disappointment.

Kandiah looked at the other four faces. “Jain . . . Dighe . . . ” They perked up, and she hated to see it. “You both have kids. I want you to accompany Chatterjee and Sori back to base.”

“Sir, sir sir,” Dighe said, the old-fashioned, obsequious response of an Indian sepoy to a superior officer. It was a pointed comment on Kandiah’s override of her self-determination, and Kandiah was keenly aware of how much she had earned it.

“Sorry,” Kandiah said, and meant it, and that would have to do.

After the four had departed—Jain and Chatterjee carrying Sori’s stretcher, Dighe taking point—Kandiah looked at the remaining two, Kaur and Vallabanath, who looked back at her with an entirely justified mixture of anticipation, determination, and trepidation. They were not only both childless, but her two best remaining fighters, and she was very pleased to have them as her partners in this insanity. “All right,” she said. “Kaur, I’m going to need you to requisition three LX20 units from Forward Base Haathi . . . ”

Kandiah cursed to herself as the LX20 banged against a rock, swinging to her right and threatening to send her tumbling down the craggy slope below. But she didn’t swear aloud; she couldn’t risk giving away her position. She kept climbing.

The LX20 devices were bigger, bulkier, and heavier than she’d hoped. They didn’t even have handles. She and Kaur had rigged up webbing belts so they could be carried over the shoulder, but even so the heavy cylindrical device threw her balance off.

Vallabanath was bigger and stronger than she was, and he practiced martial arts. He might have been a better choice for placing this particular device. But this was by far the most exposed location of the three, and she could not justify giving this part of the mission to anyone else. So it was Kandiah who was scrambling up the rocky hillside on the west side of Potala Palace, shielded from view by her armor’s active camouflage and electronic countermeasures, to place her LX20 above the Palace and to its north. Vallabanath and Kaur had the still difficult, but somewhat less hazardous, tasks of placing their devices to the Palace’s southwest and southeast.

Gasping, wheezing, head aching and limbs straining from the altitude, Kandiah finally reached the crag that she and Vallabanath had identified on the satellite image. As they’d hoped, it combined a good location, moderately decent accessibility, and a thick stand of scrubby brush that shielded it from the Palace’s view. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she extended the device’s legs and planted it firmly in the scree at the crag’s top, then pressed the power button. The unit’s tiny screen lit up, displayed a bootup sequence, then, after a long, nerve-wracking pause, indicated first GPS and then satellite acquisition. She shut and armed the panel covering the device’s controls—anyone attempting to pry it open would get an explosive surprise—then sent a brief coded pip to Kaur and Vallabanath indicating her success. Then, before descending, she took a moment to admire the view.

Top of the world. The Potala Palace stood on the upper slopes of Marpori, one of Lhasa’s ‘three sacred hills,’ and from here she could see the entire city of Lhasa, the valley in which it lay, and the snowy Himalayas rising still further on all sides.

It would be a beautiful place to die. But she hoped that she would not, and that tens of thousands of others would also be spared by her actions.

The really hard part of the operation still lay ahead.

She dragged herself to her feet and began descending the slope.

Kandiah, Kaur and Vallabanath crouched above a path on the lower slopes of Marpori, weapons drawn, concealed by brush and active camouflage. They had nearly been caught three times on their way here—this area was thick with Chinese troops, coming and going from Potala Palace like ants from an anthill. Which was, of course, the reason they had selected it. Now they waited . . . hoping to spot a patrol small enough for them to overwhelm, but large enough to be carrying what they sought, before they themselves were spotted.

Several times individual soldiers passed, and the three members of Strike Team Makdi waited for a better opportunity. Once an entire platoon swarmed by, and Kandiah and the others crouched down behind bushes and held their breaths, willing themselves not to be noticed. Once a group of four came by, and they nearly pounced, but then a second, larger, group approached from the other direction and they pulled back again. Kandiah kept one eye on her visor display at all times, but General Fu’s people had been ruthless in clearing Indian relays from the area and the data was extremely spotty.

Then came the opportunity Kandiah had been hoping for—a small detachment of three soldiers, one of whom wore a specialist’s three chevrons. Neither eyes, ears, nor visor indicated any other troops nearby. As the Chinese group approached her position, Kandiah indicated with gestures that this would be it. All three of them gripped their weapons and prepared to strike.

The Chinese, moving fast through what they thought was safe territory, drew near Kandiah and her two squad mates. Kandiah tensed, ready to spring.

And then, just as they were nearly beneath the Indians, the second Chinese soldier looked up. The eyes behind her visor grew wide and she started to take in a breath.

Immediately Kandiah leapt from the rock on which she crouched, smashing down on the startled trooper with all the weight of her muscular, armored body and full strike team kit.

She hit feet-first and remained standing as the woman collapsed beneath her. Before she could recover, Kandiah struck her in the head with her rifle butt, hard enough to stun even through her helmet. Kaur and Vallabanath were only a moment behind her. Kaur made short work of her target, slitting the man’s throat with her combat knife, but Vallabanath had worse luck—the specialist upon whom he leapt, the third in line, had more warning than the other two and was able to bring his rifle up before Vallabanath landed on him. The two of them struggled with the weapon briefly before it went off, an earsplitting rattle that sent hundreds of black birds wheeling and cawing into the blue sky above. But the bullets hit only brush and trees before Vallabanath succeeded in wrenching the weapon from the Chinese specialist and reversing it, pinning him to the ground with the muzzle shoved hard into the space below his chin. Realizing he was defeated, the man raised his hands and spoke a few words which Kandiah’s helmet translated as “I surrender!” The other survivor quickly followed suit.

The sound of the specialist’s rifle would bring others to the spot in minutes. “Find his tablet,” Kandiah hissed to Kaur, and she quickly ransacked his pack.

“It’s not here!” Kaur whispered back.

“Translate into Chinese,” Kandiah told her helmet, then leveled her rifle at the specialist. “Your tablet,” she said. “Where is it?” But the man only shook his head.

“They’re coming fast,” Vallabanath said, and in Kandiah’s visor a swarm of fuzzy circles was indeed approaching quickly.

Suddenly Kandiah remembered that not all of these troops were Chinese nationals. “Translate into Tibetan,” she said. “Where is your tablet?”

Immediately the specialist pointed to a large pocket on his thigh. Kaur slashed it open with her knife—the man cried out, damn him—and handed the small black rectangle within to Kandiah. She stashed it in her own pocket.

“We have to move out now!” said Vallabanath.

They did indeed. Circles were moving in on their position from both directions along the path. “Up!” Kandiah said, and she and her two squad mates scrambled up the rock to their previous position, continuing from there up the slope toward the Palace above.

“We’re moving deeper into enemy territory!” said Kaur. “And they’re right on our tail!”

“I only need a minute!” But she might not get even that—the circles were approaching fast.

Kaur stopped, then readied her rifle. “I’ll get you that minute.”

Kandiah looked back in shock, and through Kaur’s visor she saw nothing but grim determination. “Roger,” Kandiah said after a moment. “Rendezvous at checkpoint seven.”

“Roger,” Kaur echoed, snapping a fresh magazine in place. “See you at checkpoint seven.”

But they both knew the odds were against it.

Not wanting Kaur to see the expression on her face, Kandiah turned away and inspected the map in her visor. “That way,” she said to Vallabanath, pointing. They kept climbing, scrabbling across rock and scrub, moving ever upwards. Gunfire and shouts in Chinese, or perhaps Tibetan, sounded from behind. “In here!”

It wasn’t quite a cave. It was just a pocket in the rock, not nearly deep enough to hide two people, but it was surrounded by enough bushy undergrowth that, with their camouflage, they might escape notice for a short time. Kandiah pushed herself as deep in the rocky cleft as she could; Vallabanath, without need of orders, backed up against her and readied his rifle to defend their position.

Kandiah pulled out the tablet and her personal phone. Kripanand answered her call immediately. “I have a tablet,” she said.

“Found it,” he replied a moment later. The Chinese device’s transmissions were encrypted, of course, but with the GPS and antennas in her phone it could be located precisely and its incoming and outgoing signals identified.

With her helmet’s help, she found the tablet’s communication function. This was it—the moment of truth. “Here goes.” She initiated a call to headquarters.

The face that appeared on the device’s display was not General Fu’s, but she hadn’t expected that much luck. “Translate into Chinese,” she said. “Get me General Fu!” Then she winked, which she knew was incredibly rude in Chinese.

The face blinked, gaped, then vanished. Kandiah gripped the tablet hard, hoping it wasn’t about to explode in her hands.

“Someone’s coming,” whispered Vallabanath.

“Keep quiet. Maybe they’ll pass by.” Kandiah squeezed the tablet even tighter. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.

And then the display lit up again—this time with General Fu’s face. The general spat three syllables, which Kandiah’s helmet translated as “You again!”

“Me again,” she acknowledged as she raised her personal phone. “Now!”

“Got it!” came Kripanand’s triumphant response.

A moment later the tablet’s screen flashed, and a tinny bang sounded from its little speaker. When the screen cleared, the General’s face had been replaced by that of an inflatable plastic clown.

Pandemonium. Shouts and alarms came from the tablet, and at the same time cheers and hoots from Kandiah’s phone. “We have her!” cried Kripanand. “We really have her!”

“Incoming!” shouted Vallabanath, and began firing.

Kandiah dropped the tablet, shoved her phone into a pocket, and took up her rifle. But even as Chinese bullets smacked into the rock wall above her head, she was grinning ear to ear.

The Chinese defenses, as Kandiah had hoped, became ragged and uncoordinated almost immediately following the loss of General Fu, and after Kandiah and Vallabanath fought their way out of immediate peril they made it to safety without further bloodshed.

“Generation three teleport technology,” Kandiah told her commander, “avoids the explosive effect of G1 by swapping the payload with an equivalent volume of air at the target destination. I realized that if we could identify General Fu’s exact location—and thanks to that damn gold headset of hers, I knew we had a chance—we could use G3 tech to swap her with a volume of air at the origin. It was my boyfriend’s idea to stick a plastic clown in there. So now General Fu is in custody in a secret weapons lab in the Indian Himalayas, and the Chinese army in Lhasa is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Even though the Chinese comms were encrypted, Kandiah explained, the coded signal pattern that left Kandiah’s tablet was the same as the one that arrived at General Fu’s headset. With the three LX20 locator-transceivers she and her squad mates had planted around the Palace, Kripanand and his team had been able to pick her headset signal out of the noise and triangulate its location exactly.

It took Lieutenant Singh a good long while to come to terms with all that. “There will certainly be a court martial,” he said at last. “For you and your boyfriend. But I believe you may have won the war.”

“Thank you,” Kandiah said. “But before you arrest me . . . I’d like to put Naik Rupinder Kaur in for the Param Vir Chakra.”

The PVC was India’s top military decoration.

It was awarded for the highest degree of valor or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy.

Kaur had not made the rendezvous.

“Of course,” said Lieutenant Singh.

“Thank you, sir.”

Beyond the smoke and wreckage of Lhasa, peak after peak marched to the horizon, gleaming white and clean in the fierce Tibetan sun.

Originally published in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

David Gerrold & Ctein

David Gerrold & Ctein are the proverbial twin brothers from different mothers. Both are obsessive-compulsive control freaks who fight ferociously with each other about getting the details right. Ctein is the author of Saturn Run (with John Sandford) and Digital Restoration, the definitive guide to digital restoration of old photos. David Gerrold wrote a script for Star Trek once, and some other stuff too. He is also the author (and the father) of “The Martian Child.”

Marie Vibbert

Besides selling fifty-odd short stories, twenty-some poems, and a few comics and interactive fictions, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. She has been translated into French, Chinese, and Vietnamese! By day she is a computer programmer.

David D. Levine

David D. Levine is the author of Andre Norton Award winning novel Arabella of Mars, sequels Arabella and the Battle of Venus and Arabella the Traitor of Mars, and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Tor.com, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, will published by Night Shade Books in November. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.