Page 15 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Nine

Ten years ago

The girl zips along underwater.

The torpedoes, according to the boy, use a wake-homing guidance system. They will turn when he wheels The Arrow of Time around and she must therefore intercept them before their trajectory curves away from her.

She adjusts the angle of her path slightly and prays that the boy is correct and the torpedoes are not equipped with acoustic homing guidance instead.

If he’s right, so long as she is headed toward them, she should be fine.

Otherwise, her DPV—diver propulsion vehicle—as light and as quiet as it is, might still trigger the torpedoes’ sensors.

Her person behind a fairing, she pushes the little electric tug, which looks like a missile with two seats, to the limits of its performance.

He has begun his wide turn, timed to the second.

She needs for the torpedoes not to change course for another three seconds.

One, two, three. She turns off the motor of her DPV and yanks it around.

Now she faces the torpedoes, which, having made a hundred-and-ten-degree turn, head directly at her.

But she, floating in place, produces no wake that would interest them.

The torpedoes are close together, only two meters apart in trajectory, one ahead of the other by about a hundred and fifty centimeters or so.

She glances down at the thin, ultra-strong cord in her hands, which can be limp like a rope, stiff like metal rod, or sculpted in two-centimeter segments.

She shakes the cord loose from its coiled state and shapes it into a somewhat straggly rod with two loops at the ends.

After making sure the loops won’t come undone, she checks the rod’s dimension again and waits between the two torpedoes’ trajectories.

They zip toward her at forty knots. Her hands shake, mostly from strain. She is holding not just the lasso, but the chains and anchors from both her raft and the boy’s boat. Even in water, at roughly 75% of their land weight, they come to at least fifty kilos.

Her heart thumps. All that dead weight was strapped to the backseat of the DPV. But with the torpedoes almost on top of her, she must hold it in hand as—

The torpedoes arrive. She lets go of the anchors just before the torpedoes’ noses press into the loops. They zoom past. She pulls her knees in and allows herself to tumble a few times, tightly tucked, in the turbulence created in their wake.

The torpedoes, dragged down by the anchors, will sink before they can reach The Arrow of Time. The girl chases down her DPV and heads for the boy.

He sails so fast his entire main hull must be in the air, only minimal contact with the surface of the sea via hydrofoil. At this rate, the longer she pursues him, the farther away he will be.

But within minutes he decelerates. The sub, out of weapons, has turned to run; he adjusts his course to intersect its path.

And he does so at precisely seven knots. Depth charges explode like underwater fireworks. The midget sub keels violently. Then almost flips stern over bow when the expanding waves caused by the explosions ricochet off the seabed and slam back into it.

The sub shoots to the surface. The girl pumps her fist, ascends, and shakes water out of her face in time to see its hatch open and a needle-sharp paddle boat emerge onto the still turbulent sea.

Two crew members climb in and start paddling.

The other two crew members grab onto handlebars at the rear of the surf ski and swim.

The streamlined craft departs the scene at a rather amazing speed, cutting across the water like a rapier.

Only then does the rippling effect from the depth charges reach her. Most of the enormous energy they released has dissipated. She tosses around a bit like a buoy in high waves, then starts the DPV and heads for the boy, who is coming this way to rendezvous with her.

After a brief discussion, she takes his boat—scarily fast and much harder to sail than it looks—retrieves her sub, and berths it near a deserted atoll according to coordinates he gave her.

Then she goes back to find that he has dived down and salvaged not only the chains and anchors that weighed down the torpedoes, but the sculptable cord with which she’d lassoed the torpedoes in the first place.

“The sub is seaworthy enough to tow, by the way,” he says, handing over the cord.

“This could have been dangerous.” The torpedoes will bother no one sitting at the bottom of the sea, but to approach them so soon after they sank, and to get so close to the explosives…

He shrugs. “I don’t like the thought of anyone in Dawan getting their hands on that technology.”

She accepts the now-limp cord from him and feeds one end into an opening on her right vambrace. The vambrace sucks up the cord like a kid at a bowl of long-life noodles. When it stops, she feeds the rest to her left vambrace.

“You have nice things,” he murmurs.

“That’s nothing, look at this.” She flexes her hands downward.

Metallic-looking plates slide out from the upper edge of her vambraces and cover the tops of her hands.

She flicks her wrists again and sharp blades emerge from these new gauntlets at the metacarpophalangeal joints.

“Supposedly this makes me look like some manga hero from long ago.”

“I’m beginning to have an idea how your sea cucumbers were so neatly sliced.”

She bursts out laughing, horrified. “I do not use these for cooking—unless I’m serving up my enemies.”

He takes a step backward, then after thinking about it for a second, another.

She chortles again. “So what are you going to do, now that you have your prize submarine to take back to the powers that be?”

He glances at the sky and the mid-afternoon sun. She imagines him to be calculating times and distances, how fast he could take the submarine to wherever it will do him the most good.

But he says, after a moment, “May I invite you to dinner, if you are free this evening?”

* * *

The desert atoll, which was most likely underwater until the beginning of the current century—sea level has been dropping alongside atmospheric CO2 concentration—has never suffered the ravages of Plant Cover.

It’s all teal lagoon and white sand, the sort of tropical paradise people in the Before used to dream about, to get away from those concrete jungles that now stand as impossible beacons of progress and sophistication.

While the boy gathers ingredients for their dinner, the girl uses her solar web to charge her raft and seals a minor leak in their captured sub.

Then she washes and puts on her prettiest frock.

The blush brown fabric, which shimmers in the light, is whisper-soft, whisper-smooth against her skin, a dress that caresses the wearer.

It is, in fact, much too costly to be worn on a beach, but she already treated the boy to her Jasperdew tea and might as well spoil him further.

She walks around the almost perfectly circular atoll twice, leaping across the few places where there are gaps in the beach—entrances into the lagoon—before he emerges, looking like a young god freshly created from the waves.

He stills, most gratifyingly, at the sight of her.

She spins around for him, her skirt flaring out into a glittery bellflower.

“You look lovely,” he says.

She is astonished. “I thought I’d have to drag the compliment out of you again.”

“I have invited you to dinner. Not the best time for me to say you look only all right.”

She chortles. “Aha, I see.”

He puts a pot of water to boil on a portable stove he brought to the atoll then shucks scallops with an oyster knife.

She sits on the collapsible stool he’s set up for her on the sand, feeling very much like a medieval princess who at last has a knight errant sworn to her.

Although the way he flicks and twists the knife makes her think more of the stealthily deadly skills of an assassin.

She is turned on either way.

Water bubbles right as he finishes with the scallops. He dices a piece of salted pork from the cold storage on his boat, tosses that into the pot with a bit of ginger, and turns down the heat for everything to simmer.

When he stands up again, she’s surprised to realize that he’s been bare-chested all this time. She’s been so wrapped up in the deft motion of his hands, she forgot to ogle his abs. And his arms. And his muscular thighs!

And strangely enough, when he leaves for his wash, with the soup simmering and the scallops marinating, she doesn’t fasten her eyes to his quads, deltoids, or even the sharply defined channel of his spine.

She only stares at the back of his head, at his still damp hair, the strands twisting slightly from that dampness.

And then, at the footsteps he left in the fine white sand.

When he comes back, bathed in the golden light of a westering sun, she is washing her hands.

He looks at the ball of dough she’s made, resting on her folding table that she’s dragged to the beach, and then back at her. “I thought for carbs we were going to do rice rations.”

She isn’t sure what to tell him. During his absence, she simply needed to do something.

To keep herself busy so that she wouldn’t be buried under an avalanche of unfamiliar feelings—bursts of longing, sudden crushes of pressure on her chest, not to mention bouts of unruly optimism that run amok like a litter of puppies.

Either she went back into the captured sub and worked on a questionable pump, or she did something else with her hands.

She chose to make dough: bits of flour would be easier to remove from her dress than streaks of machine lubricant.

She shakes water from her hands. “I’ve been eating rice rations for weeks. Thought I’d try something different. Do you like scallion flatbread?”

“Never had it.”

“It’s really tasty when my auntie makes it.”

He, checking on the soup, looks up at this. “So you don’t really know how to make it?”