Nicholas Sansbury Smith
To my editor, Michael Carr. An adventurer, scholar, and globe-trotter
—a real-life Xavier Rodriguez.
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
PROLOGUE
Ada Winslow knew she would likely die soon, but human nature and a strong will to survive kept her aching hands on the oars. The ocean had calmed through the day, but now the swells were growing in size, beating the hull of her boat.
She leaned back, putting her weight into the oar stroke, but the twenty-foot aluminum fishing boat seemed to be getting no closer to her destination.
Blood from the repetitive friction made her uncalloused hands slick inside the gloves. Almost in a trance, she continued the motion: pulling, grunting, pulling, grunting.
It took every atom of her will not to rest. Climbing back into the narrow compartment designed for supplies and sleeping sounded like heaven. She could strip off the gloves, clean her hands, and bandage them up.
She stopped only to straighten her sore back. Both arms throbbed, near cramping. Her body wasn’t used to this type of exercise. Life in the sky hadn’t required anything like it. She had mostly sat in front of a monitor, crunching numbers about storms or the amount of recycled water lost each month. Monotonous stuff that required using her brain more than her body.
In her first days working on the bridge of the Hive, Ada had helped map out dive zones, using actuarial science to calculate risk to the divers. She wasn’t used to labor that didn’t tax her brain.
But there was an easier way to get to where she was going…
She eyed the small vessel’s steering wheel and controls. Switching to the ancient four-horsepower motor would give her a reprieve, but her supply of gasoline was too precious to use now.
Ada had set a goal of rowing a hundred miles before she switched to the motor. Since her youth, she had always been a goal setter. Goals had helped her rise from the filthy lower decks to second in command of an airship.
And she had wiped away all her hard work with a simple press of a button, dropping a container full of Cazador warriors into the ocean. This was her punishment.
Rowing into the darkness, toward a destination in the wastes that she would probably never see. The journey to Florida was over a thousand miles, and the thought of rowing over half that distance filled her with anxiety.
King Xavier Rodriguez had given her just enough gasoline to get halfway there, which felt like a second punishment, or perhaps a lesson.
She glanced at the steering wheel again but didn’t take the bait.
Don’t give up. Keep rowing, she repeated.
Even now, while she was on her own, X was teaching her a lesson on survival. She pulled the oars through the water for the three-thousandth time since leaving the Vanguard Islands. Maybe the ten-thousandth.
You didn’t leave.
She had been exiled into the wastes. It was a surprise when King Xavier showed up at her cell with a key and not a sword. But not long into her journey, she had realized that it was no act of mercy.
How could she possibly survive this?
If she did somehow survive, the trip from the Vanguard Islands to the ruined city on X’s map would leave her exhausted and broken. At this rate, even with the fuel he had given her for the small engine, it would take her months just to get there.
A sword would have been quicker and more merciful.
Out here all alone, she’d had plenty of time to think about all the ways death could come: from capsizing, sea monsters, radiation poisoning, or simple infection of her blistered, bleeding hands.
Keep calm. Keep steady. Stay alive. This was her new mantra.
She took in a deep breath of filtered air from the flimsy plastic helmet she had found in the crates. It wasn’t one of the advanced Hell Diver helmets, with armor and a plastic face shield, but it made her feel better. Wearing the mask was an important lesson from growing up on the lower decks. Always protect your body from the rads.
The survival instincts ingrained in her and every other soul from the sky had given her a mental edge, and she had plenty of food and supplies, as well as the gear to survive. What she didn’t have was the training or knowledge of how to survive.
She didn’t know much about how to sail a boat, or fight, or hunt, or avoid the beasts and the poisonous plants and the storms. She wasn’t much better off than a child tossed into the postapocalyptic remains of the Old World.
But just because she didn’t know how to fight didn’t mean she wouldn’t fight when the time came.
She dug the oars deep, inching her way closer to Florida or wherever she could find to stop and rest on the way.
For the next few hours, she lost herself in the monotonous motions, her anger sinking into despair as she thought about everything she had left behind at the Vanguard Islands.
The sunny paradise was the place she had always dreamed of while growing up—the place all sky people dreamed of finding.
Except for one thing: the Cazador warriors who lived there.
Dropping the container full of sailors and soldiers into the water had been her way of avenging Captain Katrina DaVita, who had taught Ada never to stop fighting for their people, never to give up.
Despite the repercussions, she still did not regret pushing that button. The only thing she regretted was not trying harder to persuade X to kill the warriors after the battle for the Metal Islands ended with the sky people’s victory.
Instead, he had signed a peace treaty allowing the warriors who swore loyalty to stay in the Cazador army.
“We need this peace,” X had said. “The real enemy is the defectors.”
Maybe Ada could have bought that if she didn’t know what the cannibalistic barbarians had done to Katrina after killing her.
She dug the oars harder into the water. Sweat poured down her forehead.
X had told her she could come back home in five years, but she had a feeling that if she lived that long and managed to return, her people would be dead at the hands of the Cazadores.
Killing the crew of the Lion had helped even the playing field, but it would take a lot more dead Cazador warriors before her people were truly safe.
But looking out over the whitecaps, she knew they would never be safe. It wasn’t just the cannibalistic society that threatened them. The defectors were still out here, hunting down the survivors. The machines would never stop until every human was dead.
A hot breath clouded the inside of her visor. It cleared a moment later to reveal a glowing dark sky that seemed alive from the constant flash of lightning.
A wave hit the port side and knocked the oar out of her throbbing hand.
Taking it as an omen, she decided to rest for a while.
After shipping the oars inside the hull, she climbed into the enclosed cabin in the stern. Crates of gear and supplies were stowed neatly and secured to the bulkheads.
Ada had made a bunk of the metal seat, laying a couple of blankets down for padding. The gasoline supply was stored underneath, along with the motor.
She shut the hatch, blocking out the wind and salt spray and nearly all the light. But it wasn’t completely dark as blue lightning flickered in through cracks and holes where the metal had rusted through.