Triton (16 page)

“A triangle . . .” Jake felt his eyes narrow. “I remember on TV it was around the time they detected that weird radiation coming from deep space. How high is it?”

“Seventy-three thousand miles or something. Some crazy high orbit.”

Jake chewed on the inside of his lip. “Why’d the first three missions fail?”

“No one knows,” she said. “Each time they got close, the electronics failed and the capsules just vanished off the radar. They were hoping this time the astronauts would be able to manually pilot their capsule and rendezvous with whatever’s up there. Since they couldn’t get footage, they wanted a first-person account.”

“Yeah, fat chance.” His eyes gravitated to the closed circuit television monitors, now showing footage of the sides of the ship, balconies still dripping seawater—

In a flash, he remembered.

Footage
.

He spun toward Naomi. “You said the voices on the black box just cut off, right? As if they vanished?”

She nodded. “That’s what we heard.”

“How’d you like to see it?” he said.

After the chilling
realization sank in that someone had taken their food—which, at the moment, they could do nothing about—Cedar noticed something strange about Sky.

She was hardly limping.

“Let me see your cut,” he said, pulling her into the downstairs bedroom and seating her on the bed.

He prodded the smooth skin around the puncture wound, which had sealed shut with a reddish-black scab. “Weird. It doesn’t look infected.”

“That’s because it’s not infected,” she said, and while he leaned over her thigh, she reached forward and brushed aside a clump of hair that had fallen over his forehead.

Cedar jerked back, startled by her touch. He stared at her, but her gaze just wandered over his face, the hint of a smirk hovering at the edge of her lips. As if to erase her touch, he swiped his hand across his forehead and smoothed the rest of his hair to the side.

“It has to be infected,” he said, averting his eyes from her unnerving stare.

“I know how we can check,” she said. “Want to do a project with me?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“I’m a fast healer.”

“Not from this. You’ve never had anything like this.”

“Want to bet?”

“Sky, you got stabbed through the leg. You’ve never had worse than this. What’d you do, lose a leg?” he sneered.

She glared at him, a dark glint in her eyes. “Actually, Cedar, I was pretty much raped and murdered by my stepdad.”

Under the covers
up in the master bedroom, Brynn’s hand crept over the scar on her waist, and through the skin she felt each thump of her heart.

Seeing the holes in the ground earlier had made her think of a hideous possibility.

Simon—wherever he was—had been taken.

Brynn hadn’t.

But what about the part of
her
that was now inside him?

Her blood type was O negative; she was a universal donor. It had made perfect sense. If she could have, she would have donated her still-beating heart to save his life.

As it was, her cover story to explain the scar had made Cedar flip: that she had borrowed Dad’s car for a weekend pool party and had fallen on the diving board. The truth would have given him a heart attack.

Becoming a living donor required parental consent, a luxury she didn’t have. Instead, she had tracked down a doctor in Mexico. She had been so nervous, her mind in such a dizzy haze, that she didn’t remember any of it. Not the drive, not the operation to remove her kidney, not how she got back.

Just that her anonymous donation had saved her boyfriend’s life.

But now she wondered.

If he had been taken, but
she
hadn’t . . .

The grisly image made her spine tighten. She couldn’t help but wonder if, in the very spot where Simon had been taken, her kidney was now lying uselessly in a pool of blood on the ground.

The corridor running
the length of deck two had taken on a creepy flicker—a damaged transformer, maybe, delivering irregular spurts of electricity to the lights.

Naomi was relieved to finally step out of the hallway into the security office behind Jake.

He pointed to the wall of closed circuit surveillance monitors, each showing a different view of an abandoned hallway. “Can we rewind these?”

“You’re a genius,” she said, staring at the screens. From what she remembered, there were over a thousand surveillance cameras installed onboard, recording everything.

Including the event.

The feeds changed every few seconds, revealing different angles of deserted snack shops and corridors. All abandoned.

She caught a flash of movement—one of the bottom monitors.

Her eyes flicked to the screen, but saw nothing. Just an empty hallway . . . just one of the lights flickering again. Still, the jolt sent prickles crawling up her skin; through her peripherals, it had looked like a figure darting past the camera.

“Let’s do this,” she said, sliding into the chair behind the desk. On the computer, she brought up a surveillance feed from the Royal Promenade and rewound it to midnight, two nights ago. Onscreen, the promenade filled with late-night diners. She hit play. “It happens at thirty-two seconds past midnight.”

She felt Jake lean over her shoulder. They both watched, eyes intent on the monitor. Seconds ticked by in the upper left.

Passengers laughed and drank, waiters served, all oblivious to their looming fate. At thirty-two seconds past midnight, the lights in the Royal Promenade dimmed.

Then everyone vanished.

Right into thin air.

A tray of desserts—formerly supported on a waiter’s palm—clattered to the floor. Wine glasses en route to guests’ lips shattered on the tables. A cell phone in someone’s hand slipped through empty air and burst into parts on the ground.

The footage sent a deep chill through her heart.
Gone
. Just like that.

Jake straightened up next to her. “Call the others down here. I think it’s time we talked about this.”

Brynn’s eyes stayed
glued to the monitor in the security office even after Naomi paused it, her skin crawling. The people had just popped out of existence. Vanished. Just like that.

She broke out in a shiver.

Jake peered stone-faced around at her, Cedar, and Sky—the newcomers to this party. “That video is thirty frames per second,” he said. “We slowed it down and played it frame by frame. There’s no transition, no frame where they’re half here, half somewhere else. In one frame they’re on this ship, in the next frame they’re completely gone. Period.”

“So it happened in less than a thirtieth of a second,” said Cedar. “And no one knew it was coming.”

“They took the trees too,” said Jake. “The only plants left on this ship are fake plants . . . the only food left is dead food.”

“They took everything alive,” Brynn muttered. “Maybe everything alive on earth.”

“Who’s this
they
we keep referring to?” said Cedar. “
Who
took them?”

Silence greeted his question.

Jake’s eyes swept to Sky, and he leaned forward against the table, his weight on his palms. “You said we were attacked. What did you mean by that?”

“I was taken against my will,” she said. “I woke up with a feeding tube shoved down my throat in a tiny pod the size of a coffin. Whatever did this to us, they did it deliberately . . . and they’re hostile.”

“How’d you escape?”

“I don’t know.”

He peered around at the others. “Why were the five of us left behind?”

Naomi tugged on his sleeve. “It’s nearing high tide. We’ll want to do our breakaway maneuver soon.”

Jake clipped his radio to his belt. “Everyone back to the bridge. We’re taking this cruise ship to the East Coast . . . Let’s see if it’s worldwide or just a Bermuda Triangle thing.”

Up on the
bridge, Naomi tinkered with the joysticks controlling the azimuth thrusters. She throttled up and swiveled them to port, then starboard, attempting to wiggle the cruise ship out of the shallows. She glanced at one of closed circuit monitors. The water off the stern boiled and foamed, murky with sediment—sand kicked up from the bottom.

The ship teetered on the edge, poised to surge forward. She could feel it. She relaxed the joystick, and the vessel sank back in the mud.

High tide loomed minutes away, and if that didn’t free them, then what?

“Empty another quarter of the tanks,” said Jake, his voice tense.

Naomi accessed the water tanks through the Machine Automation System and dumped another four thousand tons of ballast. They had already emptied half. The fresh water pooled around the ship, clearer than the surrounding sea.

Free of the water’s mass, the ship rose, buoyed up another six inches. The motion rocked the deck beneath her feet.

She plunged the throttle forward. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on—”

The ship plowed forward, forcing Jake to step back to regain his balance. The hull dragged through the mud, scraping and grinding—and then lurched to a halt.

Jake stumbled forward. “Damnit,” he said. “Dump the rest. Dump the rest of the water. We’re right on the edge.”

Naomi bit her dry lower lip. “That’s all the water we have, Jake.”

“You said we had a desalination plant. We make our own water.”

“I don’t know if that system’s still online after the tsunami. Should I dump fuel instead?”

“
No!
We need the fuel; who knows how far we’ll have to travel. Dump the water. If the ship doesn’t move, we’ll wait until the next high tide and try again.”

“I’ll empty half of what’s left,” said Naomi, keying the amounts into the computer.

“Fine.”

The ship nudged upward another few inches and scraped another few feet along the seafloor . . . still mired in the sand, though.

“There’s another thousand tons of fuel,” she said. “Tanks are mostly full.”

Cedar broke into the discussion. “Naomi, we’re five people aboard a ship meant for five-thousand.
Any
amount of water left in those tanks will last us months. Fuel lasts days. Dump the water.”

He made a good point.

“Alright, here goes the rest of the water.” Naomi emptied the tanks completely. Well, not
quite
completely. She left behind a few thousand gallons; she still wanted to take showers, after all.

She throttled all the way up. The engines lugged the ship another few feet, then plowed the vessel to a wrenching halt in the sand.

Silence hung over the bridge. High tide, their ballast water all gone . . . and they were still stuck.

It didn’t make since.

The bow faced open ocean. Once they started moving, the ship’s inertia should have carried them free. Yet the ship behaved as if they were driving deeper into the sand, not escaping it.

Her gaze flicked to the island. She traced its contours: the vertical cliffs astern, the sloping beach off port . . .

Ah.

She wiggled the joysticks, jammed the thrusters full astern port, and the bow crept starboard.

“Throttle back,” said Jake. “You’re driving the stern deeper into the sand.”

“Hang on,” she said.

“Naomi, throttle back,” he warned.

“Hang on. She’s about to go.”

The hull groaned, scraping over rocks and submerged dunes. She cranked up the bow thrusters, and the ocean off port churned from the turbulence. The bow inched to the right, faster now.

“You do realize you’re pushing the stern toward the island,” said Jake.

“The stern isn’t stuck,” she said. “Look at the shape of the island. Last night, we sailed within ten feet of those cliffs and didn’t run aground. The cliffs aren’t the problem. The beach, however, doesn’t drop off like the cliffs, it forms a slope . . . it’s shallower
in front
of us; we’ve been driving into a sandbar.”

Jake scanned the shoreline, eyebrows scrunched. “So what are you doing now?”

“I’m swinging the stern toward the island and using it as a lever to pry the bow loose.”

Cedar smirked. “I believe it was Archimedes who said, ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.’”

“And this lever just happens to be one thousand one hundred and eighty-seven feet long,” said Naomi.

Jake nodded. “Carry on.”

With a final groan, the bow slipped off the sandbar and plunged into the water. The ship listed to starboard, then swung back, now freely afloat. Grinning, Cedar gave her a high five, which, honestly, might have been the proudest moment of her life.

“Full speed ahead,” said Jake. “West. We go until we hit land.”

The island receded as the
Cypress
steamed into wide open ocean.

Into deeper water.

Triton I Space Probe

Still unable to
get a GPS signal through the Electronic Navigation System, Sky attempted to flatten a roll of nautical charts on a nearby table, but they kept coiling back up. She needed something to hold down the edges.

Outside, the glimmering sea migrated steadily past the cruise ship. In the four hours since departing the island, nothing had appeared on the desolate, unbroken horizon. Nothing except the huge cloud rising from ground zero of the meteor impact.

She trapped one corner of the chart under her radio. “Naomi, can I borrow your walkie-talkie . . . and your phone?”

Naomi handed her both, which helped secure two more edges. Although the phone slipped.

Naomi eyed the whole operation with skepticism. “Here, use these,” she said, tossing a pair of polished black oxfords onto the desk.

Sky pinned down the last two corners, and her eyes lingered on the oxfords. “Nice shoes. Where’d they come from?”

“One of the officers must have taken them off . . . you know, before vanishing.”

“Doesn’t that seem weird?” said Sky “Why would clothes vanish with the person? Clothes are dead.”

“And anything in the pockets,” said Naomi. “It’s more than just living versus dead, it’s more complicated than that.”