They moved with stealth, as if they were hunting.
If this were a normal dive, she would have had weapons and supplies. She would also have had her Hell Diver brothers and sisters for support. Instead, she had a ripped chute and a mean headache.
Another shadow below snaked around the shells of vehicles. She looked closer, but it melted away. She activated her NVGs with a bump of her chin. The vivid green bones of the building filled her visor, but she still couldn’t get a lock on the moving shapes.
She tried to open a line to the Hive by tapping the comm link. White noise filled her helmet.
“Command, this is Raptor Three,” she said as loudly as she dared. “Does anyone copy?”
More static hissed from the speakers.
The storm was still blocking out her signal, or else the Hive was too far out of range to pick it up. Another flash from the dark clouds filled the street with even more slinking shadows, which began to fan out like a cloud breaking apart in the sky.
She felt for her tactical knife and remembered that she had lost it in the fall. Leaning down, she stretched to grab the spare tucked inside her boot. Her fingers gripped the handle but slipped off. She breathed out to make her belly smaller and stretched again. This time, she pulled the blade free.
The girder holding her tangled chute and lines groaned in the wind as a flurry of dust and soot came swirling through the scraper’s skeletal remains.
Magnolia froze, holding the blade to her chest, eyes combing the terrain. A shadow darted across the asphalt below. Another shifted on the sidewalk. She leaned forward, straining to identify what was down there.
In the green hue of the night vision, she saw that the shadows weren’t Sirens or some other mutated monsters after all. They were just… ghosts. Optical illusions caused by the flashes of lightning.
She checked the layout for an exit route. This place looked as if it had been through hell and never left. Deep burns marred the structural steel, and a carpet of ash and grime covered the floor. Concrete columns, black and heat-chipped, supported the upper floors, but she couldn’t fathom how they were still standing. The tower’s foundation had settled to the point that the floor sloped at a ten-degree angle. Once she cut herself free, she would have to be careful not to slide down it and out into thin air.
Her exit was an enclosed stairwell a hundred feet away, past one of the pillars. From there, she would make her way down to the street and try to find cover to run a diagnostic test and check the integrity of her suit. Perhaps, on the way, she would find some sort of weapon more substantial than her dinky little knife.
She used the blade to cut her lines one at a time, leaving the left-rear suspension line for last. Then she bent her knees to prepare for the three-foot drop. This was going to make some noise.
She touched the knife to the weighted line, and it parted with alarming ease. Even favoring the injured ankle, the impact with the floor sent a painful jolt up her leg. She didn’t let the pain keep her from moving, though. She ran for the stairway, aware that she was leaving tracks behind her in the ash. Vivid green snags of rebar reached down like tree branches from the ceiling. She ducked them as she ran, trying to balance speed with stealth, supremely aware that a single misstep could put another tear in her suit. Approaching the stairwell entrance, she held the knife loosely, ready to slash and stab.
She scanned the passage leading down to the next floor. Cracks ran everywhere across the floor and walls. At some point in the past 260 years, the stairs had shifted out of true. The top two treads sagged, and the third was broken in two. She leaped to the fourth step and stopped to listen.
The whistling of the wind and the distant crack of thunder echoed through the dead city. It was an eerie and beautiful sound, a change from the everyday noises aboard the airship. This was the real world. This was where humanity was meant to live.
For Magnolia, the greatest wonder of the surface world had been all the different colors to be found. On the ship, almost everything was gray, black, or brown, just like the desolate city outside this scraper. But once, there had been more colors than one could even name. That was what kept her scanning the archives on the ship each night into the morning hours. Whenever she was exploring the surface on a dive, she searched for pastels in particular. Those were her favorites: pink, baby blue, lavender. Those shades soothed and fascinated her, but she was drawn to any scrap or fragment of color. She couldn’t wait to see what she would find in the lighthouse, with its fiery red dome.
Another distant crash rolled across the city, echoing through the tower. It was powerful enough to rattle her visor. Though she couldn’t see it, she knew that the storm was rolling east over the city.
She continued down the staircase, carefully navigating the skewed and broken steps, knife at the ready. The walls seemed to narrow as she proceeded. Or was that just a trick of the light? She couldn’t be sure.
At the first landing, she finally stopped to check herself. A quick glance revealed what she had feared all along: the girder’s corner had scraped her armor—and torn her suit. She craned her neck to assess the damage. It had sliced through the layer that insulated her from lightning. Beyond that, she couldn’t see whether the secondary layer, the radiation shield, was compromised. At least, the alarm sensors had stopped beeping, although that didn’t mean she was in the clear.
She tapped at the screen of her wrist monitor and brought up the control panel. A diagnostic should tell her the status of the suit’s radiation shield. Digital telemetry scrolled across the screen. The battery unit was at 50 percent—only about twelve hours of juice. She scrolled through the data, heart rate increasing with each swipe of her finger.
A clatter and snapping from deep in the building distracted her. She lowered her wrist and raised the knife in her other hand.
The sound faded, and silence reclaimed the space. Magnolia waited in the safety of the enclosed stairwell, where the wind couldn’t reach her. Listening for the barest creak or rustle, she raised her wrist monitor and continued swiping through the data. The radiation level here was in the red—high enough that Sirens might nest here. The divers still weren’t any closer to understanding the monsters’ habits or biology. Hell, they didn’t even know what the things were or where they had come from. Maybe they were mutant animals, changed by radioactive fallout after the war, though they didn’t look much like any of the creatures she had studied in the archives. They couldn’t very well bring a specimen back to the Hive to examine, either. The ordinary people aboard the ship had no idea what was down here, and it was probably best left that way.
She finally brought up the diagnostic controls for her suit. Across the screen rolled the first good news she had gotten all day:
Suit integrity, 100 percent.
“Thank—”
A clatter like dishes falling on the floor cut her off. A creaking and snapping joined the sound, followed by a crack and a thud.
Something alive was inside the building.
By now, her nervous tension was rising at roughly the same rate the thing below was climbing the stairs.
The noise stopped just as Magnolia turned to run. A cardinal rule of surviving on the surface was never to draw attention to yourself. If she ran now, anything in the building with her would hear it.
The knife in her hand suddenly looked more like a nail file. Sweat dripped down her forehead, but she didn’t bat an eye.
Part of her wanted to find a cubby to hide in, but the other side of her nature told her to run. That was the side that had always goaded her into taking risks, such as stealing from the market, or jumping out of a freaking airship onto a planet filled with monsters.