I have to keep moving. I have to find the answers.
One more minute.
She tried counting the seconds, but her time-honored method of measuring the passage of time—one alligator, two alligator—made her think about the local wildlife, so she quickly gave up on that endeavor.
Something splashed nearby. The sound repeated again and again until there could be no doubt that something big was moving through the marsh, headed straight toward her. The memory of alligators, still fresh in her thoughts, was enough to get her moving. She unbuckled the seat belt that held her fast. As soon as it was loose, she slid out of the seat — it had been tilted slightly forward without her realizing it — and she was dumped in the shallow water.
The unexpected baptism snapped her out of her fugue. She stood up and took a few unsteady steps toward the drifting airboat. She half-climbed, half-fell onto the floating platform.
“Jenna?” It was Mercy, calling to her from out of the darkness. “Jenna, is that you?”
“I’m here,” Jenna croaked. “On the boat.”
The splashing intensified and a few seconds later, she felt Mercy’s touch. “Are you all right?”
The question struck Jenna as funny, but she was too tired to laugh. “Not really.”
“Where are you hurt?”
“Everywhere,” she replied, but then she managed to roll over. “Zack… Over there.” She gestured weakly to the spot where she had made her stand. The outline of the half-submerged pilot’s chair jutted up from the water like a buoy marker. “Night vision goggles.”
Mercy seemed to understand. She splashed over to the area Jenna had indicated and began rooting around in the marsh. A few minutes later, she returned. “Got ‘em.” She held the monocular to her eye. “How do you make them work?”
Jenna felt a twinge of disappointment. Had immersion damaged the device? “There’s a…switch.” She couldn’t seem to get out sentences of more than two or three syllables.
“Found it.” There was a pause, then Mercy continued. “Ah, that’s better… Oh.”
“What?”
“Honey, you look awful.”
This time, she couldn’t help but laugh. “Told you.”
Mercy began poking and prodding her, spending almost a full minute probing the gash in her arm. “Okay, the good news is, I don’t think you have any broken bones. Given that little stunt you pulled, that’s nothing short of a miracle. What possessed you—?”
“Bad news?”
“Well, the bad news might not be all that bad if I can get you to an emergency room.”
“No,” Jenna shook her head and immediately regretted doing so. “Gotta get to…Miami. Cort.”
Mercy gave a disapproving sigh. “You’re in no shape to argue. But I suppose if we can get out of this swamp and back to civilization, I can patch you up. But you’re going to need antibiotics. I don’t even want to think about what might have crawled into that cut.”
Jenna had almost forgotten that they were still lost in the Everglades, with no way to orient themselves, much less navigate to someplace where Jenna could get medical attention. “Check…body.” She tried taking a deep breath, felt pain in her chest and wondered if Mercy had missed a cracked rib in her hasty assessment. When she spoke again, she was able to get an entire sentence out. “He must have had a phone or some way to talk to the drone.”
“That makes sense.” Mercy went to Zack’s body again, moving with more certainty now that she could see. When she returned, she was holding something slightly larger than a cell phone. “Found this. I think it’s a GPS receiver.” She played with it for a few moments, then pointed into the featureless darkness. “The alligator farm is just a couple of miles back that way. We can go there.”
“Why there?” Jenna’s brain felt too addled to make sense of this on her own.
“These guys left a car behind, remember?”
“Did you find the keys while you were searching him?”
There was a short pause. “No. But we can hotwire it, if we have to.”
“Hotwire?” Jenna struggled to a sitting position. “I don’t know how to do that. Do you?”
“One thing at a time.”
Jenna couldn’t tell if Mercy’s indirect answer was meant to conceal the fact that she did not possess that particular skill, or rather to avoid admitting that she did. Instead, she helped position Jenna more securely and comfortably for the ride, and then started the engine.
It took Jenna a few more minutes to process the fact that Mercy piloted the boat like an expert. She recalled her friend’s initial ambivalence about using the airboats and contemplated the contradiction. Maybe she’s a quick learner, too. Everybody’s full of surprises tonight.
She was far too preoccupied with what Zack had said to worry about Mercy’s omissions.
They were right about you.
Who?
Dangerous.
She thought about the bomb, left in the Kilimanjaro’s salon. It was never meant for Noah. The bomb was for her. Why? Because she was dangerous? How could she be dangerous? She was just a teenager. She didn’t even have a driver’s license yet.
Who said I was dangerous? Dangerous to whom?
That, she realized, was a much more important question, and there was only one answer that made any sense.
Those men are not federal agents, Noah had told the deputy, but what if he had been lying? Or what if he had meant something else? That they were not FBI agents, but part of some super-secret, alphabet-soup, black ops agency, working outside the law, beholden to none.
Noah had been part of something like that when he had been sent to destroy the compound where she had lived, ordered to kill everyone, including her parents.
Had they been dangerous, too?
Had Zack and Ken and the other killers simply been trying to finish the mission that Noah started — and abandoned — fifteen years earlier? Did it all come back to that?
She could have believed that if not for Zack’s statement. They were right about you. This was more than just a shadowy government agency tying off loose ends. The people responsible for this were convinced that she was a threat, and that made absolutely no sense.
Except in a weird way, it sort of did.
You don’t even know what you are.
What am I?
The engine throttled down as the blocky silhouettes of Gator Station came into view. Jenna pushed herself up to a sitting position and watched as Mercy nudged Zack’s airboat alongside the dock, where they had boarded the destroyed airboat less than an hour earlier. She felt stiff and achy, but surprisingly better than she had any right to feel. More than anything else, she was famished.
Mercy cut the engine and hopped down from her chair to tie off the boat, but stopped abruptly. “There are two bodies here.”
“That can’t be right. There was just the one guy, and the gators got him.”
“I think these are the people who live here. The owners.”
Jenna winced as she stood and stepped onto the dock. She couldn’t see much detail, but she was able to distinguish a man and a woman, both about Noah’s age. The man wore jeans and a wife-beater tank-top. The woman was clothed in a muu-muu with some kind of swirly pattern. The fabric of the woman’s garment hid any signs of violence, but the man’s sleeveless T-shirt showed a dark stain directly over the sternum. A shotgun lay on the dock beside him.
It wasn’t too hard to piece together what had happened. The couple had heard the airboats or perhaps had been wakened by the gunshots. They had come out to investigate and discovered Zack and his crew taking the second boat.