Charleston, South Carolina. Year 2029. Population 330,903.
Lowering her wrist, she scrutinized the city and the ocean beyond. It was hard to believe that so many people had once lived here. Hell, it was hard to believe that so many people were ever alive in the first place. Magnolia had grown up surrounded by hundreds of people, but hundreds of thousands? How could that be possible?
Her eyes shifted from the network of rusted girders rushing up to meet her, to her HUD. Numbers ticked across the display as her velocity increased. The chute wasn’t catching enough air. The suspension lines twisted with her collapsing canopy. She grabbed the right cascade lines again and shook them, trying to coax the deflated cells open.
She couldn’t die this close to the ocean. She didn’t care that it was a toxic soup crawling with mutant monsters. Ever since she was a kid, she had longed to see the world as it once was, but she had fixated on two things that she wanted to behold more than anything else: the stars in the sky, and the vast sea.
It would take a change of luck, but she just might see one of them before she met her maker.
Or maybe not.
The rip had widened into a gaping wedge in the far right cell of her canopy, and the sail was sagging badly. At this rate, she would hit the ground way too fast. She had to land on top of a high building before her chute turned into a wad of garbage.
She scanned desperately for a place to land. There to the east was the enclave of towers she had spotted earlier. She was close enough to see the guts of the buildings. Staircases and sagging floors filled her view. Steel girders bore the structures up despite gravity’s best efforts to bring them crashing down.
Rooms where people had worked or lived came into focus. She switched off her NVGs, hoping that maybe some of those wonderful twenty-first-century colors remained, but she saw the same brown and gray as always. Every other hue had been lost to time.
She toggled left, toward the first tower. Her altitude was two thousand feet, but she was dropping at an alarming rate. Even if she managed to put down on the rooftop, at this speed she wouldn’t be walking away from the landing.
Magnolia shifted her gaze from the towers to her canopy. The tear was spreading, opening a gaping hole in the chute. She wasn’t going to make it.
Yes, you’re going to make it. You’re going to run on the beach and dip your feet in the ocean, just like you dreamed of doing when you were a dumb little kid.
She almost laughed at how insane that sounded as she flew over the edge of the valley, catching a glimpse of the sea beyond the scrapers.
A suspension line suddenly snapped, and the canopy slowly folded in two. Helpless, she sailed toward the first tower with only three lines attached to her disabled canopy. The lines twisted, and she twisted with them, her vision a blur of gray and brown as she spun.
She was falling with hardly any resistance, and although she couldn’t determine her speed, this was not looking like a survivable landing.
Magnolia chuckled—a squeaky little sound that surprised her. Her whole life had been one shitty turn of luck after another, but today had been the absolute worst. It was enough to make her laugh. She wasn’t going to spend the last seconds of this sorry existence screaming in fear.
“Fuck you!” she shouted.
The spinning made her queasy, and she caught the taste of bile and shine and greasy potato. She was coming in fast toward the roof of the tower. Bending her knees slightly, she pulled both toggles all the way down to flare what was left of her canopy and lessen the impact.
As she stopped spinning, she caught another glimpse of the tower. She had to move left, away from the top. Swallowing, she said her first prayer in years. She vaguely remembered the words that Weaver had repeated during an epic dive into an orange zone.
Lord, I am not worthy of your mercy, but I ask that you please grant me…
Her eyes fixed on the horizon. At least she had seen the ocean before she died.
A hard jolt rocked her as her canopy and lines caught on something and then snapped free, and she swung forward as if she had been shot from a giant slingshot back into the sky. It wasn’t until her left arm scraped against steel that she realized she was actually inside one of the buildings. She had sailed right into one of the open floors, and something had snagged the mess of lines and canopy. But it wasn’t enough to slow her down completely.
Her right boot hit a piece of rebar. The pain was instant, lancing up her thigh and hip. It felt as if her damn foot had come off, too.
She continued swinging upward until the risers and shroud lines caught and held. The force pulled her violently backward.
Something snapped. A bone, maybe, or a ligament? The burning pain was intense, and red encroached on her vision until she could see nothing but a bloody haze.
Magnolia struggled to take several deep breaths. Blood rushed in her ears, singing like an emergency siren. The extra oxygen entered her body, and the curtain of red slowly retreated. She fought the pain by biting down on her lip. Nothing like more pain to make you forget about other pain.
She could feel her feet again, and they weren’t touching anything solid. She was hanging from a beam on one of the top floors of a scraper, and ten city blocks away was the most beautiful sight she had ever beheld. Massive waves ate at the shoreline, crashing on the beach before receding back out to sea. This close, the ocean was even more beautiful than she had imagined.
Maybe it wasn’t luck she needed at all, she mused. Maybe what she needed was a little faith.
She hung from the beam, staring for so long she lost track of time. The rusted carcass of a boat lay on the beach. It wasn’t nearly the size of the Hive, and its sailing days were clearly over, judging by the massive hole in the starboard side of the hull.
Past the wreck, a columnar tower jutted up from a rocky promontory. She had seen a building like it in one of the picture books in the Hive’s library. It was a lighthouse, built to warn ships away from the shore.
A flash arced overhead, backlighting the red dome of the tower. In this drab landscape, it stood out like a flame in the night.
Magnolia realized that being all alone might have an upside. With no captain or commander to tell her what to do, she was free to make her own choices. Her heart thudded with excitement. She was going to visit the lighthouse—right after she dipped her feet in the ocean.
A clatter and creak from the street below pulled her back to reality.
She held the air in her lungs and slowly twisted in the mess of lines to look for the source of the noise. Old-world vehicles littered the road. None had moved for a long time. She had to wait several moments before the sound came again. A flash of motion darted for a tunnel in the debris field.
Something was down there.
Maybe she wasn’t alone after all.
SEVEN
Captain Leon Jordan leaned over the table in the empty conference room and took in a breath through his nostrils. The emergency sirens and the shouts of his crew had died away. He used the quiet to gather his thoughts.
The blisters on his hands stung from the sweat. That was what happened when you gripped wooden spokes for hours. The splinter that had pricked his palm didn’t help. He was the twenty-second captain to bleed and sweat behind the oak wheel. If things ever calmed down, he was going to have Rodger sand it smooth and apply a new coat of varnish.
He reminded himself how lucky he was. The rudders were fixed, the ship was clear of the storm, and Magnolia’s snooping was no longer a problem. Her death was an unfortunate accident. There would be those who disagreed with his decision to keep the turbofans going, but now he was faced with another major decision: Should he risk more Hell Divers on a mission to check out the coordinates of the Hilltop Bastion and keep his promise to Katrina, or keep flying south in search of parts and fuel cells?