Mulberry clears his throat and my eyes are drawn to the crack in the glass panel that fronts on the control room. An ugly fissure runs from top to bottom. “Should we get out of the glass box now?” Mulberry asks, again.
“Let’s just wait a second,” Dan says, his focus on his rebooting computers. “Let’s see if the computers come back online and tell us anything.” So we wait. Tension torques in my body as we all watch the monitors, waiting for the connection to be restored.
I swallow, trying to control my anxiety. We are stuck, locked away. Am I still in a coma?
I have to stand up. Mulberry’s hands fall off me reluctantly as I rise.
Blue moves with me as I pace the length of the office. Below us, Dan’s team are all as focused on their own computers as he is on his. The shared screen at the front of the room flickers and then stabilizes.
“The internet is gone,” Dan confirms. “But our internal network is still up so we can see our cameras. The ones that survived, anyway.”
I pace back toward the door, unable to stand still, needing to get out of here.
When I turn back, Dan has the camera boxes back up on his screen. I squint at them. What am I looking at? Blurry globs of brown-gray dot the lenses—it feels like viewing the world with dirt in my eyelashes. And the light is so strange, like a strobe light. “The ash,” Dan says. “And lightning.”
I swallow, that sense of being buried alive rising up my throat again. Blue’s nose taps my hip. I move closer to the monitors. The path is still obscured by swirling, foaming water—it just keeps trying to climb the fucking mountain. Trying to get to us.
Except it’s not personal. We are just here while it’s happening. Not everything that happens to us is about us…my hand comes to my belly again. The stark reality is that we have so little control. We humans spend our lives trying to decide our fate, when really, fate doesn’t even exist. Life is just a series of chaotic events—one of which kills you.
“Water breached the vents,” Dan says. “The original design prepared for a tsunami, but this is a thirty-foot monster swell; we are going to have a lot of damage. The batteries have a lot of storage capacity, so power should stay on. But this lightning…I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dan types on his keyboard. My gaze rises so that I’m looking through the cracked glass at the large screen below. The wide angle image is up again. Ash rains down from a black sky. Lightning shivers over the world. “I’m not going to be able to get a satellite link until the ash storm stops,” Dan says. Mulberry stands, his energy matching mine. We can’t just sit here watching anymore. “I’m not hearing back from Selena,” Dan says, referring to our head of engineering.
“I’ll go upstairs and check on the battery station, talk to her in person,” Mulberry says.
“I’ll come,” I say quickly, ready to be above ground level.
“Let me try the walkie talkies,” Dan says. He picks up a small black box I hadn’t noticed before and speaks into it. “Selena, come in.”
The only response is a crackling. “Maybe it’s your unit,” Mulberry suggests.
“No, it’s the distance and all the solid material between us. Without internet our units depend on radio signals alone and that won’t work now. Shit,” Dan says.
“I’ll go,” I say quickly. “We should all go, right? Am I the only one who thinks the crack in the glass is ominous?”
“This structure is very secure,” Dan says. “It won’t collapse; what we need to worry about is flooding and fires.”
“Comforting,” I say.
Dan ignores me. “There are more walkie talkies on the couch,” he says, pointing to the black leather slouchy monstrosity that takes up most of the back wall of his office. A walkie talkie charging station with six units rests on one cushion.
I grab one out of the base and hand it to him. He tries reaching Selena again…but again, only crackling. Mulberry takes the one Dan was using earlier, checking that the frequency matches the other, then speaks into it. The feedback makes me wince. “Well, we know it’s working when we are close, so we just need to get higher,” Dan says.
“I’m going up there,” Mulberry says, grabbing a walkie talkie from the couch and putting it in a back pocket.
“I’m coming with you,” I say.
“It’s too many flights of stairs,” Mulberry says gently. “We can’t use the elevators.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
The two men share a glance. When their gazes come back to me they both quickly find someplace else to look. Men sharing glances about me…yeah…how to piss off Sydney Rye for $500, Alex.
I grab another walkie talkie and head for the door, Blue by my side, and Mulberry bringing up the rear.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The cement stairwell has red emergency lighting. It’s not a good look for the stark space. “Think they wanted people to be terrified while fleeing on these steps?” I ask Mulberry.
He’s following behind me and huffs a laugh. “Maybe,” he says.
“Do you think we should be?” I ask. Blue’s nose brushes my hip.
“No,” Mulberry answers. “The staircase is one of the safest places to be. It’s designed for a secure exit. Structurally speaking, the whole place would have to collapse for this to come down. Mountains don’t usually collapse.”
“Waves don’t usually climb to the height of buildings and ash doesn’t usually rain from the sky,” I point out.
“No,” Mulberry answers. “They don’t.”
I don’t respond, needing to save my breath for the climb. My legs are burning and my pace slows. We are only on the third flight. “You should keep going,” I say. “Leave me and Blue. I’m too slow.” I come to a stop. “I need to rest.”
Keeping hold of the railing, I turn and lower myself down onto the steps. Blue sits on the one above me. Mulberry holds out a bottle of water. He is always thinking. I take it. “Thanks.”
Mulberry’s lips are thin and his brow creased. The man doesn’t want to leave me but he’ll do it. He’s a good person. Robert wouldn’t leave. He’d rather the whole world burn with everyone on it as long as he got to keep me. Keep us.
“I’ll take it slow,” I assure him. “And meet you at the top.” I hold up the walkie talkie. “And I’ve got this.” He nods, still not speaking. “What?” I ask, annoyed by the silence of this tall, narrow, eerily lit space.
