But Lam had plans of his own. He was not going back to prison. He would get the girl, and he would have his revenge. No matter what it took.
Even if he had to kill Peng and every single one of his men to do it.
Li Na fell hard onto her knees in the wet mud, eagerly lunging down to the small running stream in front of her. With cupped hands, she repeatedly brought the cool water up to her mouth and gulped it down. She paused with her eyes closed, savoring the liquid before seeking more again and again.
She hadn’t passed water in hours and was beginning to feel like she was overheating. Barely able to concentrate, she couldn’t tell how fast she was moving or whether she was still headed in the right direction. Instinctually, it felt like she was, but the forest was becoming harder to navigate. Increasingly dense trees all around her acted more like walls, blotting out any visibility of her desired direction ahead. And the smells were getting stronger.
The wind had also picked up considerably, bringing more smells from every direction. As if she’d walked through a cloud of odorants. Some were pleasant, reminding her of flowers or pollen. Yet others were disgusting, smelling of decay. Then there were a few she didn’t even recognize.
Even through her fragmented thoughts, one that kept coming back was that something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Everything seemed to be malfunctioning. Her nose, her ears, and even her sense of touch was becoming so sensitive. Now, it was almost painful to touch things with her fingers.
Another splash of cold water on her face seemed to briefly bring her out of it. Familiar and refreshing. Revitalizing.
She held her breath and tried to listen through the rustling leaves behind her. Even the thicker pine needles seemed to flitter noisily through the air before hitting the ground.
To make matters worse, she was out of food. She searched her satchel again, praying she’d missed something. But she hadn’t.
Her mind switched again and she peered up, trying to locate the sun. Then she looked forward, trying to guess how much further Shenyang was. Her eyes darted to her hands, dirty and worn. She rubbed her fingers together tenderly when it finally hit her.
She wasn’t delirious. She was getting sick. It explained why she couldn’t concentrate, why her head felt tired and hot. She must have caught something. But what? What could she have caught out here? God, why her?!
Li Na began to cry and slumped helplessly to one side, resting in a cold patch of mud.
In some moments like this, she couldn’t even remember why she was headed to Shenyang, or why she was running at all. It was those thoughts that left her feeling the worst. An utterly helpless dread, crashing each time like a wave over her tired body.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go on anymore. They were still behind her, and they wouldn’t give up. Her father had warned her about them in his letter. They would keep coming for her as long as she was alive. So, all she was doing was delaying the inevitable.
Li Na broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. They would never give up, and she would never be safe. She was going to die, just like her parents had. Alone, in the middle of nowhere.
Then it happened.
A sound so soft and so deep that it didn’t even feel like noise. It was a profound and deep-seated reverberation.
She raised her head and peered past a set of thick tree trunks, through teary eyes. A beam of sunlight managed to penetrate the canopy above and reach the forest floor. It left the spot engulfed, even if only for a moment, in a broad golden beam.
Tiny insects were temporarily silhouetted as they flittered back and forth in front of the light. But it wasn’t seeing them that caused Li Na’s jaw to slowly open. It was that she could hear them.
She could hear their clicking and buzzing. Not just from those she could see but from all around her. The girl was completely enveloped within the life of the forest.
It was the teenager’s last lucid thought before she lost consciousness.
70
“Still?”
“Yep. They’re still looking for her.”
Neely Lawton leaned in closer behind Will Borger, studying the screen on his laptop. It was filled with windows of cryptic text. “How can you tell?”
“I can see it. Through the activity in these logs. Search strings and pieces of text within their results. They’re still searching. If they’d found her, we’d know it.”
“Any sign of your hacker friend?”
Borger grimaced slightly and shook his head. “I don’t think anyone wants a friend like that. But no. Nothing. It’s very strange. And there’s just so much we don’t know.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Neely straightened. “If that teenage girl is going through what I think she is… none of them have very much time.”
The room fell silent while they remained staring at the screen, both thinking. It felt like things were continuing to unravel with so many events and relationships that they had no control over. And every new person affected only caused the ripple to grow larger.
The silence was interrupted by a loud chime on Lawton’s computer. She rolled her chair back to the other table and tapped her own keyboard. She studied it for several long seconds.
“Hmm.”
“What is it?”
“A message from my team. The ones I was working with onboard the Bowditch.” She looked at Borger. “We were in the middle of a large project when we’d gotten the orders from Admiral Langford.”
“Some kind of sonar array, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “A new full-spectrum system. Interlinked and much more sensitive than anything a sub or ship could do.”
“Is there a problem?”
She shook her head. “No, they’re still working on it and picking up some false positives, probably from the Pathfinder. It’s not unusual since we’re still fine-tuning some of the interferometer coding, allowing us to combine different wavelengths and magnifying the sensitivity to—”
Borger grinned. “Oh, I’m familiar with interferometry. That’s how we first found that giant ring underwater.”
“Then you know how touchy it can be.”
At this, Borger chuckled. “I would say touchy is putting it mildly.”
Neely nodded, her eyes sharing in the humor, and turned back to her screen. They still had a long way to go before the sonar project would be complete. And it would take at least a year or two after that to get it tuned properly. But when it was done, what they would be able to detect underwater was going to be one of the biggest achievements in naval history. Somewhat equivalent, from a military standpoint, to what Alison and her team had done with IMIS.
If they could only eliminate the false alarms.
71
“Well, Mister Borger, any more news on our missing hacker?”
Borger shook his head. “No, Admiral. Not that I can find. Everything has been scrubbed. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Langford and Miller remained quiet. Unfortunately, they had seen things like it. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it meant someone had been very deliberately erased. Almost always because they knew too much. The modern world wanted to believe things were different now. That the world was less… barbaric. But it wasn’t true. For all of today’s political correctness, the sad truth was that it was only a veneer. Terrible things were still happening. Everywhere.