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Hilo Medical Center, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Jenny and Rebecca were waiting for Mac when he stepped out of the hospital and onto Wai ānuenue Avenue.

They both knew what had happened up on the mountain by now, the crippled drone that had missed Mac by less than twenty yards. One of the soldiers from the Corps of Engineers had seen the whole thing, come sprinting to his aid, and driven him straight to the hospital despite Mac’s protestations that all he had was a bump on the back of his head.

“Fortunately,” Jenny said to Rebecca, “the rock struck the hardest part of him. So he caught a little break there.”

“I was lucky,” Mac said.

Jenny smiled at him.

As he told them about the various injuries people were being treated for in the medical center, from broken legs to fractured cheekbones, Jenny put a hand on Mac’s shoulder. She let it rest there, and Mac saw Rebecca see her do it and then quickly look away, as if she were somehow intruding.

“You’re sure you’re still up to this meeting?” Jenny asked.

“Well, you call it a meeting,” he said. “My understanding is that in the Mafia, they refer to them as sit-downs.”

Rebecca Cruz smiled. “I’ll put our mob up against Brett’s any day of the week.”

Laniwas a native word for “paradise.” It was also the name of a new hotel located in Hilo. The rival to the city’s new Four Seasons turned out to be owned by one of J. P. Brett’s holding companies. Mac wondered if Brett, as obsessed as he was with trying to be the star of it all, had considered the possibility that his new luxury resort might be a death trap if their calculations about the diversion of the lava, including some that had come from Brett and the Cutlers, were even a little bit wrong.

But they had found out today that all of their plans and schematics and projections, all the pretty pictures that had been drawn on various computers—none of that had been worth a bucket of spit when the rocks and ash came shooting out of the earth like some angry geyser.

Now they were in a ballroom on the second floor of the Lani, all of them: Mac, Jenny, Rebecca, the Cutlers, Brett. General Rivers was on his way back from visiting the injured at Hilo Medical Center.

“Glad to see you’re all right,” Brett had said to Mac when he arrived about ten minutes after the others.

“Are you?” Mac asked.

“Fortunately, I’m fine,” Brett said.

“Not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“Just a general observation of how full of shit you are,” Mac said evenly.

All eyes in the room quickly focused on the two of them, as if a fuse had just been lit.

“Hey, don’t give me that,” Brett said. “I was in the same danger you were in today.”

“Except in your case, one of your drones didn’t nearly take your goddamn head off.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Brett said heatedly. “The drone was already in the airspace when the thing blew.”

“Which means it’s time for you to get your toys the hell away from the summit,” Mac said. “If you don’t have enough intel, then you’re wasting your time here. And wasting mine.”

“I wouldn’t need more imaging if you’d share some of yours,” Brett said. “You’ve been at this a hell of a lot longer than my team has.”

“Wait,” Mac said, “you mean the two people you just picked off from my team aren’t giving you enough help? Holy shit, Brett, did you draft the wrong players?”

Brett smiled at Mac. “I don’t see you how can blame them for wanting to be on the winning team when this is all over,” he said.

Mac stepped closer to Brett. “You’re out of line,” Mac said quietly. “You’ve pretty much been out of line from the moment you arrived on this island.”

“It’s how I get things done,” Brett said. “Over on my side of the line.”

“What you’re going to do is get people killed,” Mac said. “For the last time, this isn’t a competition. Are you not getting that, you arrogant prick? If we screw this up, maybe if we screw up any part of this, you’re going to die along with everybody else. Unless you think you can somehow buy your way out of that too.” Mac was breathing hard. “The competition is against the goddamn volcano!” Mac yelled, unable to keep himself from shouting.

Brett shook his head in either disgust or disappointment. “Do you not understand that everything’s a competition, MacGregor?” Brett said. “And people who don’t want to compete need to get the hell out of my way.”

“You’re the one who needs to get the hell out of Dr. MacGregor’s way,” Rivers said from the back of the ballroom, as imposing as ever. “Starting right now.”