Triton (14 page)

“Bingo,” she said.

“Start at eleven fifty-five,” said Sky.

Naomi dragged her finger across the touchpad and positioned the slider at five minutes before midnight, two nights ago. The data raced by in a blur.

She clicked on a tab at the top left labeled
Audio
, then selected
VHF Radio Communications
from a dozen different audio channels.

This was surprisingly easy.

“Don’t you want the bridge?” said Sky, pointing to a different channel. “That way we can hear what they said on the ship.”

“Good idea,” said Naomi, growing more and more impressed with Sky by the minute. She selected
Bridge/Wings
instead and clicked
Run
.

Sound hissed from the laptop’s speakers, and a vertical line started moving through an audio graph, closing in on midnight.

“Now we listen,” said Naomi, turning up the volume.

In the background, she heard voices. The ticker clicked off the time, four minutes to midnight . . . three minutes . . . two minutes . . .

“How’s that weather looking?” said an officer.

“They’re expecting the storm to burn out before it reaches Saint Thomas,” said another. “We should be okay.”

“Still, keep your eye on it,” said the first, “in case we have to give orders to change the itinerary. I don’t want to be caught at Crown Bay with our pants down if big swells hit; that port’s only thirty-eight feet deep.”

Thirty seconds to midnight, Naomi’s heart began pounding. Ten seconds. The officers continued to discuss the weather. Five seconds . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one—

The ticker crossed midnight.

“If it turns into a hurricane,” said the second officer, it could wipe out the whole eastern Caribbean. We might be looking at back-to-back sea days before we can reach a suitable port.”

Naomi exchanged a surprised glance with Sky.
Nothing?

“I’ll go ahead and alert the captain.”

“Tell her we’re watching the storm closely, and that most likely we won’t—”

His voice cut off.

So did the other voices. The audio graph flatlined at exactly thirty-two seconds past midnight. The recording had just stopped; it was useless.

“It must have been some kind of EMP pulse or something,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Whatever it was, it fried the black box. It just stopped recording.”

“Wait, turn it up,” said Sky. “That line’s not flat. I think it’s still recording.

Sure enough, blips marred the audio graph, indicating there was still some sound.

Naomi turned up the volume as loud as it would go, and she heard background noise. The hum of air conditioning, the ping of the sonar, the ticking of instruments. Every single click and beep on the bridge.
Everything
 . . . except for the voices.

“Play it again,” said Sky.

She did. Again, the officers’ voices cut off midsentence, as if they had been deleted from the audio.

“Did they all pass out?” asked Naomi, bewildered by the recording.

“No, they didn’t pass out,” said Sky, her voice flat. “If they passed out, we would have heard them hit the floor.”

Jake leaned down
into the hole to see what the hell Cedar was talking about . . .
smooth surfaces, my ass
. At his side, Brynn’s bare skin radiated heat. He couldn’t focus around her.

Jake ran his finger along the inside of one of the tunnels that branched to the side. Sure enough, the earth was damp and smooth, coated with a wet film . . . slimy almost.

“So it’s smooth. Who cares?” he said.

“What animal makes that kind of hole?” said Cedar.

“It’s a gopher hole,” said Jake. “I don’t know, they wet the dirt with their saliva. Or insects . . . termites maybe.”

“Insects?” Brynn stepped back from the pit, blue eyes wide. So cute.

“Ah, termites,” said Cedar. “Now that’s interesting that you say termites. Do you know what termites eat, Jakey-boy?”

Jake stood up, squinting in the sun, and brushed the dust off his hands. “They eat wood.”

He was seriously getting tired of Cedar’s games. Back on the ship, the guy had almost been friendly with him.
Almost
. Now you’d think Jake had eaten his sister or something.

Or kissed her.

With a jolt, he realized Cedar must have seen them. Crap.

“Now what does this hole look like?” said Cedar. “If you filled it with cement, what shape would it make?”

“I have no idea.
Snakes?
”

“Isn’t it obvious you brainless twerp? Nothing living on this island. Not a single plant, not a single insect . . . not one blade of grass?”

He still didn’t get it, but next to him, Brynn’s eyes widened. “Roots,” she muttered, and her hand rose to her mouth. “Tree roots.”

“So you’re saying there were trees growing out of these holes?” said Jake. “You’re saying someone came to this island and uprooted five thousand trees?”

“If the trees were uprooted,” said Cedar, his eyes gleeful, “the holes wouldn’t be perfectly intact like this . . . they would have collapsed.”

And then it clicked.

Then Jake understood.

He fell to his knees beside the hole, his heart slamming.

Cedar just laughed, seeing the panic in his eyes . . . a demented, hysterical laugh.

There had been trees growing out of these holes. There had been plant life covering every inch of this mountain; the island had been an oasis.

Until midnight, two nights ago.

The trees had been
taken
, like the lobsters and the fish. And the eight thousand people on board the
Cypress
. Everything alive.

All taken.

Extinction Level Asteroid

“It feels weird,”
said Sky, prodding the smooth skin around her cut. The hole in her leg had sealed, and except for a tingle it didn’t hurt at all. She pulled her knee up to her shoulder to see the underside of her thigh, and ran her finger along the exit scab. Same story.

She had always been a fast healer.

“You probably shouldn’t touch it,” said Naomi, looking on with concern. “It might get infected.”

“That’s the thing,” said Sky. “It probably
should
be infected. The glass pushed dirt and bacteria way in there. I mean, even minor cuts get infected and get all puffy and red.”

“Well, Cedar did a really good job on you.”

“Yeah . . .” Sky felt a smirk tug at her lips. “Not gonna lie, that was kind of hot.”

Next to her, Naomi gave a sly smile. “So do you like him?”

“You mean . . .
like
like?” said Sky.

“I saw you guys flirting earlier.”

“We were
not
,” said Sky, feeling both a hot blush and a twinge of giddiness. “I don’t know. He’s kind of intense.”

“Yep,” said Naomi. “But then you are too. In a good way.”

“Thanks. You’re really smart,” said Sky, making a feeble attempt to compliment her back.

Naomi shrugged. “Do you want to tell them or should I?”

“About the black box?”

“That we think everyone just vanished.”

“I think you should tell them,” said Sky. “They didn’t believe me the first time.”

Relaxing on the
bridge with Sky—the two girls just hanging out and talking about boys like best friends—Naomi realized she hadn’t felt this happy in a long time. She was actually smiling.

A year ago, right after she quit using, she had thought she would never heal. She had thought she would never experience joy or fun or happiness again for the rest of her life.

Now, here she was, feeling
normal
again.

Crystal meth flooded the brain with the neurotransmitter dopamine—with pure euphoria—at levels a thousand times what a normal person could experience. Naomi’s mom had abandoned her; it had been her escape.

When she tried to quit, though, her brain had felt like a prune, dried of all happiness.
Anhedonia
, it was called—the inability to feel pleasure. Rather than let the drug take over her life again, she had given up and tried to kill herself.

The funny thing was she didn’t remember any of it. Twenty-one days after ingesting ten times the lethal dose of Nembutal, she had woken up in the mountains—her meth withdrawal symptoms almost gone.

To this day, her mom didn’t know about it. And to this day, Naomi had no idea how she survived.

But thank God she had.

Otherwise she wouldn’t have lived to see a crew of eight thousand vanish. She wouldn’t have gotten the chance—if only for five minutes—to be captain of the MS
Cypress
, the largest cruise ship in the world. She wouldn’t have met Sky.

Naomi heard footsteps outside the bridge.

Sky caught a
flicker of motion from her peripherals and snapped her head around. She stared down the hallway past the Safety Command Center. The door off the bridge hung ajar, just the way they had left it, exposing a sliver of the mazelike officers’ quarters beyond.

Something moved.

Outside the bridge, a shadow retreated down the dim corridor away from them, and her skin came alive with prickles.

“I just saw something,” she whispered. “There’s something moving out there.”

Naomi glanced up. “They might be back.”

But the closed circuit monitors showed the yellow raft still on the beach, nowhere near the
Cypress
. “They’re still on the island.” Sky’s voice quivered.

“Ships are always moving, even if you can’t feel it,” said Naomi. “It was probably just a trick of the light.”

Heart still racing, Sky peered out into the hallway—now deserted—already doubting what she’d seen.

Just a trick of the light.

It had to be. Because they had looked everywhere, they had established that there was no one else on board . . . they had searched the entire ship.

No. They had searched
four rooms
out of three thousand. The realization soaked her with dread. Something could be out there now, haunting the endless maze of hallways—

A blinding flash interrupted her thoughts. She spun around. Outside, the sky blazed incandescent white. The wraparound windows concentrated the glare, trapping them like ants under a magnifying glass.

Sky raised her hands to shield her eyes, and saw an X-ray of her bones through her palm.

“Jesus Christ,” said
Cedar, clamping his hand over his eyes. The entire sky burned as bright as the sun. Heat blasted his skin.

A nuke.

In twenty seconds, they would all be dead. He risked a peek through a finger, eyelids narrowed to slits, and saw the glare had subsided to a silvery haze. In its place, a pinprick of white-hot light descended toward the horizon in a blinding arc, swinging their shadows across the ground. Its contrail etched the sky.

Not a mushroom cloud.

A shooting star, leaving a trail of burning debris in the stratosphere.

Never in his life had he seen one so epic. The fireball glinted off the ocean and vanished over the horizon, and a moment later the impact lit up the eastern sky—again forcing him to shield his eyes.

An extinction level asteroid
.

In twenty seconds, they would all be dead.

Jake watched the
meteor blaze across the sky. The glow intensified until he could no longer bear it, and he flinched away, eyes throbbing.

The light stained his retinas, blinded him . . . heat singed his back as if he’d stood too close to a campfire.

Then it was over.

He glanced back, and through his peripheral vision—still marred by the white afterglow—the horizon flashed.

A bright spot lingered for several seconds, then faded—leaving the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end and an icy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The
Cypress
floated offshore, perfectly still, her broadside now a black silhouette against the glowing sky, where it hit.

His hand jerked to his side. A cell phone, a radio, anything . . . he’d left them onboard.

There was no way to alert Naomi and Sky.

They were oblivious.

“Get back to the ship,” he said quietly. “Get back to the ship right now.”

Then he was off running back to the beach, his footfalls sending landslides of rock and loose dirt tumbling down the mountainside.

Sharing his panic
, Cedar caught Jake’s arm on the beach. “Going back to the ship is suicide,” he yelled, panting from his sprint after him. “We need to get to the other side of the island.”

Jake faced him, eyes dark with fear. “There’s eight thousand people onboard.”

“You saw the holes,” said Cedar. “They’re
gone
.” His eyes darted to the still glowing horizon, the contrail lingering in the sky like a scar across Heaven. How much time did they have?

“Our friends are on that ship,” said Jake, locking eyes with Cedar and breathing heavily. “
Sky
is on that ship.”

The words hit Cedar like a punch in the gut. Sky. Still onboard.

He couldn’t just leave her to drown.

Around him, the wind lowered to a whisper and the beach went eerily silent . . . the foreboding quiet before a storm.

Sky. It must have happened at some point after she appeared yesterday; he had started to care about her.

Damnit. Jake was right.

He ran forward and together he and Jake dragged the raft back into the surf.

“Brynn, see if you can signal the bridge,” said Jake.

“What are you guys even talking about?” said Brynn, climbing onto the raft after them and waving her arms at the
Cypress
.

Only once they were past the breaking waves, paddling furiously, did Cedar answer.

“What happens when you drop a big rock into water?”

“A big splash?” she said.

He nodded, face grim. “A big splash . . . and a big wave.”

On the bridge
of the MS
Cypress
, movement on one of the closed circuit monitors pulled Naomi’s attention from the glimmering horizon where the meteor had just hit.