“So,” Skadz asked, “are you going to do it?”

“What?”

“The mission. Guns for Grillo.”

“I have to.”

He barked a laugh. “Shit … have to. Bloody hell, Sammy, you don’t have to do anything. Fly out of here and never come back. Who could stop you?”

Lightning danced on the horizon, each brilliant line bringing her visions of Grillo’s knife stabbing into that helpless, broken man in the hospital lobby. She saw herself, crouched behind the counter with a book tucked under her arm, a book he’d sent her across the continent to find, a book that everyone knew had burned years ago, lost to history.

Sam waited for the thunder to roll by before answering. “Grillo could.”

By midafternoon the next day, Samantha found herself falling to Earth. Wind screamed past her ears and rippled the skin on her cheeks as Malaysia raced to meet her.

She guided herself toward the familiar air base and tried to ignore the looming megalopolis of Kuala Lumpur to the south. The massive city stretched from horizon to horizon, and still hid under a cloud of smog five years after SUBS had relieved it of its plague of humans.

The layout of the military compound below her rushed back into her mind and she angled herself toward the large warehouse complex in the southwest quarter. Above her, strung out like climbers on an invisible space elevator, the other four members of today’s crew followed her lead. She hoped so, anyway. It wouldn’t do to look back.

Sam landed with textbook precision between two huge gray buildings, stark and windowless. Her feet touched ground at a trot, and she let the parachute drift over her and onto the cratered asphalt surface. With little wind to speak of, the giant nylon sheet settled onto the ground with a whisper.

“Clear,” she called into her headset. “Ocean Cloud, circle with minimal juice until we’ve secured a landing site.”

“Copy that,” came the response. The pilot, at least, was one of hers. A pudgy man named Pascal, who’d been flying in and out of Darwin since long before the Elevator arrived. The ground team were all Grillo’s men.

Her companions landed in sequence. They were clumsy compared to her, stuck inside environment suits, and lightly armed. Jacobites all, they’d said little on the flight out from Darwin, and though they knew how to strap on a parachute, she could tell none of them had made more than a few training jumps in their day.

Sam ordered them to spread out and hold the area, then she climbed a maintenance ladder on the side of one warehouse and found a place on the roof where she could see most of the base. She scanned the perimeter with a pair of high-power binoculars. As with the first time she’d been here, almost a year ago, the place was quiet. A barbed fence ringed the base, and there was a wall closer in that secured all but the VTOL pads.

Everything seemed to be intact, and she saw no evidence of subhumans inside the wall, other than the corpses of those she’d killed the last time out. They lay where they’d fallen, so many months ago, on the grid of landing pads to the north. She still remembered her argument with Skyler that day. “Land by the fucking warehouses,” she’d told him. Just saying it seemed all the reason he needed to do something else. He gave her some bullshit line about how the landing pads were built to handle aircraft, whereas the asphalt wasteland that surrounded the buildings would just crumble under the Melville’s weight. Even now she felt heat rise in her cheeks at his insistence on always doing things anything but her way. Jackass.

She missed him so badly that tears welled. Sam laughed at her own mopey ridiculousness and drew a sleeve across her eyes. As she climbed back down the flimsy ladder, she wondered for the hundredth time if she’d ever know what happened to him. If he lived or not, where he’d gone. Anything. Most of all: Had it all been worth it?

At her orders, Ocean Cloud dropped down from the sky like a rock, blasting her thrusters on full power at the last moment to break the fall. At thirty meters above the ground she settled into a hover, and the pilot lowered the rest of the way with ample caution.

The asphalt held, and soon the engine howl changed to a purr, then a dim whine of electric current.

“Told you, Sky.”

She led her companions into the nearest warehouse, the same one she’d looted before. The Melville’s cargo bay couldn’t hold more than a few crates, and they’d left dozens behind on that mission.

Sam left the three men to search for what they needed and went back outside to guide Ocean Cloud to its landing. Pascal set the old hauler down with expert precision, right in between the two warehouses. He waved at her from the cockpit with little enthusiasm. His body language since the moment their Jacobite friends had boarded said what he thought of their sect.

“You and me both,” Sam mouthed, and waved back. She offered the words to build camaraderie with the fellow scavenger, but in truth she found it more and more difficult to hate the zealots. Old habits die hard, but her distaste had been eroded now that they’d pacified most of Darwin. The city might be bland and quiet now, but at least one could walk through the Maze without constant fear of a knife in the back.

And their success under Grillo had all but eliminated the need to continually spew sermons from every rank alcove in the city. Success spoke for itself, and across the city people were joining the cult for the protection and privilege it provided. The pattern had been repeated throughout history—join the group in power and receive all the benefits, or refuse and suffer the life of an outcast.

One of the men emerged from the building, boarded Ocean, and a minute later drove down the rear cargo deck in a small electric cart. Two steel arms extended from the front of the vehicle, allowing it to lift and move heavy pallets with ease.

Sam followed him inside to help. Her “crew” worked with surprising drive and organization. In just a few minutes, they’d laid out at least fifty small wooden boxes on the floor and were sorting them when she came in.

“I’m going to walk the perimeter,” she told them. “Keep an eye out.”

“You’re supposed to stay with us,” one said. None of them stopped their work, and she couldn’t tell who had spoken. In their suits they all looked the same. The bulky hoods blocked her view of their faces, making them seem like automatons.

“Just around the building,” she added. “Someone should keep a lookout.”

One waved at her in acknowledgment.

Sam did a lap around the warehouse, then crossed to the one opposite their target and circled it, too. Halfway around she stopped to study the distant skyline of Kuala Lumpur. From here the skyscrapers looked like jagged teeth, the color of ash. They barely stood out against the dirty sky that loomed over the city. She’d wondered about that sky on the last visit, too. Other cities they’d flown into or over in the Melville had cleared up. Five years without people did wonders to a metropolis. Sydney, Tokyo, even Saigon … all clear. Kuala Lumpur must have some runaway processers still throwing pollutants up. Factories that ran on autonomous programs. No one had had time to turn off the lights, and ample supplies of raw materials meant the factories could soldier on without the need of human oversight.

That those gray teeth were once gleaming office towers and teeming apartments was hard for her to imagine. Now they were just tombs. She wondered how many millions of corpses lay within those buildings. Twenty million? Thirty? And so close to Darwin, she thought. What a fucking shame.

She turned back and saw the rear door of the warehouse. On a whim, she tried the handle and found it to be unlocked. A mixture of boredom and curiosity drove her inside.

The layout was identical to the building across the drive. Row after row of metal scaffold shelves, rising up into the darkness. She flipped on a flashlight and swept it across the aisles. At least half the space was empty. In a few places she saw boxes spilled out on the ground, and in one aisle she almost tripped on two skeletons. One wore a Malay army uniform. The other had on ragged civilian clothes. She stepped over them without a second thought.

Farther on she spotted a familiar logo on a series of shoe-box-sized plastic containers. SONTON. Sam grinned. The handgun manufacturer had been the dominant supplier of high-end weapons right up until the apocalypse. She set her flashlight on a nearby shelf and thumbed open one of the boxes. Inside she saw the dark sheen of brushed tungsten. The gun rested in a bed of form-cut packing material and had never been used, as far as she could tell. A tag still hung from the trigger guard. Two clips were nestled into pockets below it, and next to those, a laser sight.

She compared it to her own gun and decided now was a good time to upgrade. It didn’t take long to find ammunition of the right caliber, on the next aisle over. Samantha loaded a single magazine and pocketed the leftovers, the extra clip, and the sight. Then she slid the gun into her holster and discarded the old one.

On another aisle she found the grenades.

They were grouped by type and size, most the size of a lemon and of the fragmentation variety. But toward the end she came across smaller versions. These were no bigger than a cigarette lighter. Most were marked in a language she couldn’t read, but a few were labeled in English. High-yield antipersonnel. Sonic demobilizers. Sam smiled and, after a quick guilty glance at the door through which she’d entered, she slipped a few of each into her vest pockets.

It hadn’t been stated directly, but she knew that her crew of Jacobites were also tasked with keeping an eye on her and wouldn’t be too happy if they knew she’d brought such weapons back with her.

Satisfied, and nervous about being gone too long, Sam returned the way she’d come and reentered the first warehouse.

“Find anything?” one of the men asked. “You were gone awhile.”

“I had to take a shit,” she said casually. “Needed some tissue.”

That seemed to settle the matter.

She watched them for a while. They loaded crate after crate of weapons and associated equipment onto the cart, driving four loads out to the waiting aircraft. Sam made a mental tally as they went, and when the men declared their work finished, she realized they’d neglected anything larger than a snub-nosed submachine gun.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s none of my business,” Sam said, “but the stuff you took is all for girls. There’s much better weapons in here.”

The Jacobite inclined his head. He hesitated before responding. “You’re right,” he said. “It is none of your business. Let’s go.”

Chapter 34

Black Level

12.DEC.2284

“TO THE … WELL, screw it. To the Builders!”

Greg lifted his glass, that ever-present grin on his face somehow even wider.

Marcus echoed the motion, white wine sloshing in his own cup as he raised it. Marcus wore no smile. In fact, Tania had never seen him smile, and it wasn’t for a lack of humor. If anything he was an even bigger goof than Greg, and that was saying something.

“To the Builders,” Tania said with a shrug. Why not? Like them or not, understand them or not, the unseen alien race had certainly had their impact on the world. More so, she thought, than any human ever had, except perhaps through acts largely mythical. She clinked her glass with theirs and looked to Zane Platz and Tim. Tim joined the toast without a word, though she could see the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Zane, on the other hand, didn’t move. His eyes were set on the drink in front of him, the remnants of dinner beside it. He seemed deep in thought, as he had that entire day. The anniversary of the Belém Elevator’s arrival, so close upon the date marking his famous brother’s death, had really thrown the man off his usual affable manner.

“Zane?” she asked. “You okay?”

Her question took a second to register. Zane jerked slightly, as if he’d been asleep. He turned to her and shrugged, a movement so slight she almost missed it. “Feeling a bit under the weather,” he said.

“You look pale.”

“Do I? I feel it.”

“It’s Greg’s cooking,” Marcus said, deadpan as always. “Only the strong survive.”

Greg laughed maniacally. “Fools!” he screeched, like some cartoon villain. “It was poison all along. Soon this station shall be mine!”

Tim laughed and Tania found herself smiling as well. She’d been on Black Level for two weeks, with little to do except enjoy the silly antics of Greg and Marcus. If anything, the time in near isolation aboard the partial space station had only served to increase their penchant for joking around. In two short weeks Tania had laughed more than in the entire year before.

Zane’s expression didn’t change. He let out a small burp and put a hand over his abdomen. “Ugh …”

Tania put a hand on his shoulder. “You should rest.”

“Or purge that slop Greg prepared,” Marcus said. “Seriously, what did you make that with? Roach droppings?”

“Do roaches poop?” Greg asked.

“Never thought about it until now.”

“It’s a good question.”

“Do they even have an anus? I wonder.”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Greg whispered out the corner of his mouth. “Seconds, anyone?”

Zane groaned again. He clutched at his stomach with one hand now, while his other hand covered his eyes. His chair made a chirp sound as he pushed back from the table with sudden violence.

“My God, Zane,” Tania said, taking his forearm to steady him.

Tim stood to help.

Suddenly Zane doubled over. His head hit the edge of the table with a deep thud that rattled the place settings. Tania tried to hold on to him, but he fell limp and weighed too much for her to overcome.