“Now?”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Now.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She stood on a beach—golden sand—and saw the ocean.

Vast, powerful, its greens melted into blues, waves rose, fell, spewing white froth like liquid lace. The sun, glorious in a cloudless bowl of sky, rained down on it to drop dancing points of light.

It took her breath.

She’d seen it in pictures, in books, on DVDs, but the reality of it swept all that aside. The sheer wonder of it blew through her. The sound of it, its booming, booming heartbeat, that throaty roar of constant movement, echoed inside her.

Overhead, seabirds winged and rode the current of air over water and sand.

She drew in its scent—one she’d never experienced—and let the sheer life of it wash over her in the quick wind that whipped at her shirt.

Unable to resist, she stepped forward. Water lapped over her boots as she crouched down to dip her fingers into the Atlantic. “Cool.” Then touched a finger to her tongue. “Salty. We could find ways to extract salt.”

Even as her mind worked that problem, she picked up a little white shell. Then two more. She thought of Colin, and how he’d enjoy them for his treasure box.

Standing, she slipped them into her pocket. As she did, she caught the flash, a shimmer, a splash.

“A fish that big would feed the camps and packs altogether.”

“Mermaid,” Mallick corrected, “not fish.”

“Mermaid.”

“Or Merman. I didn’t see the whole of it.”

“You hear stories,” Fallon said. “They live in the oceans?”

“And seas, bays, inlets, even rivers.”

“Do they have warriors?”

“Fierce ones.”

She nodded, filed it away, and turned.

She saw what had been houses above the beach, built on stilts. Time, wind, storms had taken roofs, windows. Porches hung drunkenly from buildings.

“They would have evacuated anyone who lived here, or taken them. They’d have taken the dead for burning or burial. But they’d have used the buildings, maintained them. For their own housing, storage, operations. But they’re gone to ruin.”

She walked up toward them as she spoke, found it a different matter to walk on sand. It pulled at her feet—a sensation that both amused and unnerved her.

“They chose this location, Minh had said, as they could control the single road leading in, and one that ends at the water. Ocean on one side, the sound on the other,” she continued, using her hands to indicate direction, “and one road through a narrow line of land. They could control it, and it makes an isolated place for a prison. If someone escaped, where would they go? But they couldn’t control the weather. Hurricanes, storms, and the erosion from them. Those who manned the prison would be as cut off in those storms as those they guarded.”

He hadn’t known of the place, Mallick thought. But she knew, because she’d asked, peppered others with questions, dug for details like a girl with a shovel.

“Was Minh here?”

“Once, he said, in the first weeks, when he still believed they protected, defended. He believed they brought people here to quarantine them until the cure came. But he learned that was a lie. Dunes,” she said absently. “Sea oats? And those flowers, so many. Do you know them?”

“Blanketflowers.”

She repeated it as they topped the dunes.

“There.” She pointed, walked on. “The containment center. The prison.”

Made of concrete and steel, it stood windowless across the sand-covered road. Guard towers reared up on all corners and sides, and she saw in one of them, at least one of them, some sort of weapon. One, she imagined, that would have spewed bullets with a terrible thunder. It, too, stood above the ground, built on steel pilings.

The large nest of some seabird made its home in another guard tower. A good post, she thought, with a fine vantage point, for bird or man.

Two stories of forbidding, cheerless gray, and she saw now the second level had some windows, steel-shuttered.

Around it rose a high fence, with signs that warned of fatal electric charges slapping, metal to metal. The gate, wide enough for one of the large trucks she saw inside, held tight, secured with chains.

“They abandoned it. The sand’s over the wheel beds of the trucks, and there’s rust from the water and the salt. There are places on the road I can feel underfoot that are impassable with the sand, and north, there? It’s fallen in. Flooding maybe. They left it. Take me inside.”

Recognizing the snap of impatience in her voice, she turned. “I’m sorry. I want to thank you for bringing me, and ask you to take me inside the building. I want to see inside.”

“They’re gone, Fallon, as you said. There’s no life here any longer.”

“I need to see.”

He nodded. “Open the gate. You have the power. Consider,” he added, as she took a step closer. “How you would approach the gate if there was life inside. If the enemy was inside.”

She set aside the urge to simply fling out power, blast them open. Chains and locks, she mused, simple enough. But if the enemy was inside, she’d need something more subtle to bypass surveillance and security, the electronic locks, than a blast.

Then again, she’d learned strategies and tactics at her father’s knee, and magicks at her mother’s.

“First, I’d bespell the surveillance cameras. No point in letting the enemy know we’re coming. No one manning them now, no power running them, but I’d … By the power alight in me, see only what I deem you see. To all of flesh and blood you’re blind until this spell I do unwind.

“If I jammed it, the enemy would send someone to check. The chains and basic lock.” She held her hands out, broke the links. “The electronics.”

Now she walked closer, examined the gates. “If this was a real deal, we’d come at night. There would be sentries in the towers. Quickest solution: archers, simultaneous. If it’s possible to limit casualties, simultaneous sleeping spells, but that’s trickier. Then the gate—no, then the gate alarm.”

“Good,” he murmured.

“A technician could bypass or cut, but again, the quickest way.” She held out a fist, shot her fingers open. “It’s already dead—no power—but that would do it. Then the gate.”

She fisted both hands now, held them together, knuckles whitening. Slowly she drew them apart. The gate shuddered, opened a fraction, a fraction more.

She sucked in a breath. “Buried in the sand, heavy, resistant.” Muscles trembled, sweat pearled on her forehead, but the gate opened a little more.

Frustration rippled through her, punched it. “Open, damn it!”

The gate ripped open, metal crashing, sand heaving.

“I guess that could’ve been quieter.”

“Considerably. Next time you’d flow away the sand.”

Recognizing her mistake, she puffed out her cheeks, blew out the air. “That would’ve been an idea. Anyway.” She walked through the gate, across more sand, a kind of dry beach where trucks and equipment floated.

She studied the wide steel door. “Here, I would blast. Go in fast. I’d hope we had some inside intel, have a sense of the layout inside, but fast. There must be another door, maybe more. Back, sides. Same deal there. Go in fast, all directions. They’d be armed, so you have to neutralize—that’s my dad’s word—as many as possible as fast as possible, and shield the prisoners, get them out. That’s the mission. Get as many people being held out and to safety as possible.”

She looked at Mallick. “Can I blast it now?”

“Yes.”

She wiggled her shoulders, rubbed her hands together. “Here’s some birthday fun.”

It came in a lightning force, hot and potent. And felt damn good. Stress she hadn’t known she’d carried released in a single, brutal punch.

The steel doors blew open.

“Boom, boom!” A little giddy, she stepped in.

Without power, the building held dark, but the sunlight poured in through the doors. And the first body—the bones inside a scorched and tattered uniform—lay only a few feet from the entrance.