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Now, HP has been destroyed. Nelinha’s future is once again a giant question mark. Like me, she doesn’t have any family or home to return to. All we have is this boat ride to the middle of nowhere …
‘This is crazy.’ Her voice breaks me out of my trance. I wonder how long I’ve been standing there watching her work.
‘What’s crazy?’
She holds up her gadget, which looks like a bespoke metal tennis ball that had a head-on collision with a Slinky. ‘If I’m right, this is a LOCUS.’
I try to place the name. The memory of Dr Hewett’s dryvoice comes back to me from some long-ago theoretical marine sciences lecture. ‘An electrolocation sensor?’
‘Correct!’ Nelinha wriggles her immaculately groomed eyebrows. ‘Imagine a more effective, undetectable alternative to radar and sonar, based on aquatic mammals’ senses. Whales. Dolphins. Platypuses. If I can figure it out, it could allow us to check for incoming hostiles without giving away our position.’
‘Or it could make us light up on sonar screens,’ I speculate.
‘Maybe,’ Nelinha agrees cheerfully. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
I shake my head in amazement. ‘How can you take all this so calmly? Stuff like that shouldn’t be scientifically possible.’
She tosses the LOCUS into the air and catches it again. ‘Babe, our understanding of the laws of science changes all the time. We’ve only got so many senses. We have such a narrow perspective on reality –’
‘Uh-oh.’ I realize I’ve blundered right into a #NelinhaLecture.
‘That’s right,uh-oh. This LOCUS … it’s like something dolphins might engineer if they wanted to augment their natural senses. Or squid, if they had a few more millennia of evolution. Your ancestor was a genius. It’s like everybody was looking at the world in three dimensions, and somehow he was able to step back and see it infive. Everything is the same, but everything is different. If we could replicate –’
I’m saved from the rest of the lecture when Ester stumbles in breathlessly, Top at her heels.
‘COME WITH ME – YOU NEED TO SEE THIS.’ Her eyes are red from crying. ‘YOU DON’T WANT TO, BUT YOU NEED TO.’
What I hate the most?
None of us will ever be able to get these images out of our heads. The feed recorded at HP by Dr Hewett’s drones is playing on six monitors on the bridge. We will be reliving this trauma in full colour for the rest of our lives.
Tia stands back from the console, her hands tented over her mouth. Virgil and Dru seem paralysed at their stations. When we walk in, Nelinha grunts like she’s been punched in the chest.
The drones show us our former campus from six different angles. The bay churns white and brown, frothy with debris. The cliff has been sheared away in a near-perfect crescent, like some god took an ice-cream scooper and helped himself to a giant serving of California. Nothing remains of Harding-Pencroft except the buckled asphalt of the main driveway leading to the now-abandoned gatehouse. None of the videos show any people. I can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.
What happened to the guards at the gate? Is it possible some of the students got out before the buildings collapsed?
My gut tells me no. There wasn’t time. There probably wasn’t any warning, either. Everyone at HP is now at the bottomof the bay. Given what I’ve learned about marine decomposition, it may be a long time before any evidence comes to the surface.
Evidence.Oh, god. How can I think of my schoolmates asevidence?
I remember Dev smiling at me.You’re leaving for your freshman trials today. I wanted you to have the pearl for luck – just in case, you know, you fail spectacularly or something.
My mother’s black pearl feels like an anchor around my neck.
‘There’s – there’s this, too.’ Tia hits a button on the keyboard. All six screens switch to the same image: a dark triangular shape, floating underwater just inside the entrance of the bay. It’s hard to judge the object’s depth or relative size, but it looks massive, like a sunken stealth bomber. As we watch, it ripples and vanishes.
‘TheAronnax,’ I say.
‘It has dynamic camouflage,’ Nelinha notes.
Pressure builds in my throat. I need to howl. I need to throw things at the monitors.This is so wrong. And it’s way too much for me to handle.Somehow, I manage to push down my rage.
‘Anything else?’ I ask Tia.
‘Um …’ Her fingers tremble over the keyboard. ‘Yeah. Dr Hewett was recording satellite newsfeeds for a couple of hours after the attack. We made international headlines.’
The monitors switch to television reports from around the Pacific Rim: California, Oregon, Japan, China, Russia, Guam, the Philippines. On Seattle local news, a grim-faced reporter talks over the taglineMASSIVE LANDSLIDE CLAIMS SECONDARY SCHOOL IN CA: OVER 100 FEARED DEAD. On China’s state network, the news ticker reads in MandarinCRUMBLING AMERICAN INFRASTRUCTURE CAUSES ANOTHER TRAGEDY.The anchor quotes ‘unnamed sources’ who believe faulty foundationwork and lax building regulations may have led to the tragedy. None of the stories call the incident an attack.
