I’m not afraid of dying, she’d told herself.
That didn’t mean she wanted to die. But she would gladly give her life to save her fellow divers, just as X had done for her many years ago. If she had to do it over again, she would have sawed right through the rope without blinking.
She wiped the rain from her visor for her first look at the postapocalyptic world below. From above, the terrain was split into squares, like the farms she had seen in the archives: corn, beans, wheat, all arranged like a giant game board across the land. There were also the great wooded areas of the Old World in those pictures. God, she wished she could have seen those endless fields and forests. The only vegetation she had ever seen was the toxic bushes that lit up like LEDs and ate anything that got too close. Everything else had either been incinerated in the blasts or killed in the radioactive fallout that followed.
Brilliant flashes of electricity filled the clouds to the east. The annoying chirp of the warning sensor continued to beep in her helmet, but she was too focused on the sky now to notice. The sprawling clouds looked… strange.
Different.
Unlike the typical storm clouds, these were wrinkly, like the leathery flesh of a Siren.
She tried to bump on her night-vision goggles, but the damn system was all screwed up from the electrical storm. The radio was still down, her electronics were malfunctioning, and her chute was pulling her toward the ruins of an ancient city.
Less than a half hour ago, when she was standing on top of the Hive, she had felt small and insignificant. But now, dangling over a radioactive wasteland, with no way of contacting the ship, she felt like a marble falling into a bottomless hole.
Captain Jordan would never send the ship to rescue her. The bastard hadn’t even been willing to shut down two of his precious turbofans to save her life. That said a lot about the man, but nothing she didn’t already know.
Lightning flashes split the darkness overhead, backlighting her canopy—and what looked like a tear in her chute.
“No,” she muttered, twisting in the harness. “Please, please don’t do this to me.”
Another flash illuminated the rip, near the upper right edge of the sail. It wasn’t from the turbofans, so what could have damaged her chute? It looked almost as if someone had deliberately cut the fabric, but that was crazy.
No one would sabotage a Hell Diver’s chute.
Would they?
She squirmed again for a better look. The tear hadn’t expanded much, but the air pressing on the sail would slowly open the rip. She thought back to the launch bay before she climbed the ladder. Ty had brought her gear, and she had no time to check the chute or the booster before the mission.
She looked hard at the tear. It was more of a slash, really, and it wouldn’t be long before the entire cell collapsed and sent her to earth way too fast. She was surprised it had held this long.
With her system down, she had no way of knowing how far up she was, but if she had to guess, there was still another three thousand feet between her boots and the surface. She scanned the skies one last time for her home, even though she knew it was gone. Michael and Layla and everyone else must think she was dead.
She was very much alive, although that could change in a few seconds.
She raised her arm and checked her wrist monitor. The data showed her heart rate revving… to an inhuman three hundred beats per minute.
“Seriously?” she yelled.
Even her wrist monitor was out of whack.
She was having one hell of a day. Her beautiful straight flush had ended up in a mess on the floor, she had been thrown from the ship and nearly pureed by the turbines, her chute had a rip from possible sabotage, and now her life-support system was malfunctioning.
If she somehow made it to the surface in one piece, she was going to have another problem. The radiation here could be astronomical. She didn’t see any craters from the bombs below, but something had devastated this place. Her battery pack wouldn’t keep her suit powered for long. Then it would be a toss-up to see what killed her: the radiation or the mutated beasts that thrived in it.
Lightning fractured the sky, casting its fleeting glow over a boneyard of flattened buildings. The city was one of the largest she had ever seen, and she wondered which of the great ancient metropolises it was. Atlanta, maybe? Whatever it had been, it was now just brown and gray and dead.
Magnolia pulled lightly on the right toggle, turning in a slow circle to scan the terrain. Roadways snaked through the decayed city, and the few buildings that still stood were nothing but skeletons held together by concrete and rebar. She had heard that the East Coast was hit hard, but this city was completely leveled. In her mind’s eye, she imagined the citizens crowding the streets, their hands shielding their eyes from the inferno that incinerated almost everything in its path.
Another jagged hand of electricity cast a flickering blue wave over the city. Something in the distance caught her eye. Despite all odds, a cluster of buildings had survived. To the east, the terrain formed a shallow depression that seemed to have protected some of the larger towers.
She had seen scrapers before on dives, though never any as tall as these.
She pulled the left toggle to steer away from the debris field and toward the structures, searching for a clear drop zone. The damaged canopy pulled her to the right, and she gave it more left toggle to hold her bearing. The storm was rolling over the city, providing just enough light to reveal the ground now looming up at her.
Ever since she was a kid, she had always seemed to get the short end of the stick. She couldn’t even remember her mom and dad. Both had died before she was old enough to talk. Since then, she had basically been on her own, passed from caretaker to caretaker until she landed in jail for stealing a scarf from the trading post. Diving had changed her life. The other Hell Divers were the only true family she had ever known. She had lost her only lover, Cruise, and X on that dive ten years ago, but without them, she would never have made it to the age of thirty. She was thankful for every minute she had spent with those men, with her fellow divers Michael and Layla, and even with Katrina. They were the closest thing to family she had ever known.
Now she was alone.
And that was what she had always feared most.
Her eyes went from the ground to her chute. She had done some lousy things in her life, but nothing to deserve this. Part of her wondered whether she even wanted to survive the landing. Then anger took over again.
“One time!” she yelled. “Give me some luck just one damn time!”
She chinned the pad in her helmet to open a channel to the Hive, but white noise hissed back. Next, she tried the NVGs again. On the third bump, a green-hued view of the city exploded across her field of vision. The electronics controlling her suit surged back to life.
Anger and frustration gave way to awe when she saw what lay beyond the outskirts of the dead metropolis. Those wrinkly clouds she thought she had seen earlier weren’t clouds at all, and that valley wasn’t a valley.
“My sweet Lord,” she whispered.
Waves. Endless waves stretched across the horizon. The ocean seemed to go on forever. She held a breath in her chest and blinked rapidly. Was it an optical illusion?
She let go of the toggles to check her wrist monitor and pull up a map from the archives. Digital text rolled across the screen.