We can watch our destruction from every angle.
Despite the storm on the horizon and the unseen eruption beyond, the sea doesn’t look turbulent—the sun still hits it, shimmering and shining. The vegetation undulates in a gentle breeze. But the lightning and ash cloud on the horizon portend disaster. A shiver runs down my spine.
Everyone I love dies.
My hand falls to my belly. Mulberry catches the gesture and shifts to better face me. I’m still standing while the two guys sit. “Sydney, we will be okay.”
I shake my head. “I know I’ll be all right.” My hand lands on Blue’s head. He will be too.
As I stare at the large screen in the control room beyond the glass wall of Dan’s office, the satellite image of the storm seems to come alive, the rising ash twisting and turning. A sonic boom so loud it reaches us in the depths of the earth hits. The ground shifts and I stumble, catching myself on Blue. Mulberry reaches out and pulls me onto his lap. The glass walls of Dan’s office vibrate. The front panel cracks. The rumbling keeps going.
I put my arms around Mulberry, holding on. His arms come around my belly. The chair shifts on its wheels, rolling back and forth, our combined weight not enough to hold it in place. Blue drops to the floor, flattening himself. He slides back and forth.
Below us people grip their desks, or hide under them. The only sound is the deep groaning of the earth. My gaze rises to the screen again. It’s shaking but I can still see the ash and lightning. It reminds me of the hallucinations that live inside my mind. But this is most definitely real…or I’m still in a coma.
I squeeze Mulberry, feeling the solidness of him. No, this is real. This is really fucking happening.
The rumbling slows, begins to fade.
“Shit,” Dan says, his voice almost reverent. His gaze is on the cracked glass.
“Maybe we should get out of the glass box?” Mulberry suggests.
“Yeah,” Dan says, his voice distracted. He looks around, searching for something. His gaze lands under his desk. His lips press together and he shakes his head, then looks at Blue. “Can you get that for me?” he asks.
Blue stands, carefully, and comes to Dan’s side. “My mouse,” he explains. “Hard to do anything with this fucking cast,” he says in explanation… Blue dips under Dan’s desk for a moment and returns holding the wireless mouse gently in his jaw.
Dan takes it, wipes it off on his shorts, and then clicks around, bringing up a new camera angle—it fills the screen that used to have the chat on it. A full view of the horizon, the storm…the rising and swirling ash cloud, lightning piercing through it.
“Look,” Dan says, pointing to one of the smaller camera boxes displaying the shore below the path. Water recedes, baring the rocks—black and shining wet. It keeps going, exposing the bottom of the shallow bay inside the reef. My gaze flicks back to the wide angle Dan just opened. The ocean is pulling back from us. I swallow, fear gripping my throat.
Dan picks up the phone on his desk. “This is Dan Burke, we have a tsunami approaching the east side of the island. Everyone stay inside.”
The water fades into the distance. Anticipation tingles over my body. It’s going to come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“A tsunami will hit us in the next few minutes,” Dan warns over the intercom system. “Stay inside. Engineering team, prepare for power loss and flooding in the lower control rooms.”
Blue lies flat on the floor, his ears pinned to his head, close to my feet. I’m still sitting on Mulberry’s lap, his hands on my thighs. My eyes are riveted to the screens. The cameras display in full color, but the day has turned to grayscale.
The bay is empty and the control room is absolutely silent. There is nothing we can do now. We just have to hope our systems can survive the impending destruction.
Movement in the distance makes me squint at the screen. My focus is on the wide view that shows the horizon—the storm clouds in the distance, and the empty bay in the foreground.
A white line thickens, coming fast. “Tsunamis are not just one wave,” Dan explains in a whisper, as if he doesn’t want the ocean to hear us talking about it. “But a series of waves. They can move at speeds of up to five hundred miles per hour.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” Mulberry asks, his breath brushing my shoulder.
“No,” Dan answers. “I’m known to spout facts when I’m nervous.”
“I’ve never heard you do that before,” I say.
“Not sure I’ve ever been this nervous…”
The white line thickens into a wall of frothing water. It looks so powerful—a foaming monster racing across the seabed, eating up the space between us.
My body tenses the closer it grows. One of Mulberry’s hands shifts, reaching to rest on the lower side of my belly as my own hand comes to rest on top. We hold our son between us as we watch the wave break over the reef, reconstitute itself on the other side into a foaming mass and then crash into the side of the mountain on the island’s east side.
It surges over the vegetation at the foot of the mountain, then washes over the cameras below the path, creating a momentary view of chaos and then blackness. The water keeps rising, flooding over the path and climbs further up the mountain, before falling back onto itself. But more waves follow, the foaming sea appearing to claw at us, desperate to get in.
Then everything goes black.
Mulberry’s hands tighten on me, so I know I’m still here. Still alive. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness.
“The backup power will come on soon,” Dan says.
Blue’s nose taps my knee and I reach out and pet his head.
Sitting on Mulberry’s lap, his breath on the back of my neck, Blue leaning his weight against my leg…I feel held. In this powerless moment where there is nothing I can do to change fate, I know that I am not alone.
A hum of power and then the lights come back on. The giant screen at the front of the control room flashes blue and then green as it tries to restart. A rainbow wheel flickers to life and turns.
“I’m guessing our internet line is cut,” Dan says. “Can’t imagine the cable survived. Our solar-charged backup batteries are at the top of the mountain so we should be good for days power-wise. And our internal network will work so our cameras should come back on. We just won’t have internet until I get the sat link up and running.”
Without the cameras’ multiple views of the outside world, it starts to feel like we are underground. Almost like we’ve been buried alive. I shift, uncomfortable, ready to get back to where I can see the world with my own eyes instead of through a lens.
