“Dammit, Brent. You get on to Gabe and you tell him,right fucking now. It won’t work, you hear? Gabe will get someone killed for no reason.”
“All right, all right, I’ll tell him.” A moment of silence. “Done.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He didn’t reply.”
“Did he get the message?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Cally growled and pushed her thrusters to maximum, shooting up after Antoine’s box as it rose somewhere above them in the gloom of the ocean.
“Slow down, damn it,” Brent snapped, trailing in her wake. “These suits aren’t made for that kind of sustained speed.”
“Follow at your own pace then.”
Eighteen
The sun was up, its rays penetrating the last hundred feet as Cally rose toward the surface. The clock on her HUD read 09:28.
It had only been an hour. It had felt three times as long.
No matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t see any signs of Antoine’s box, or the bright orange lift bags. Had they retrieved him already? Had a bag failed, only for his prison to carry him back down to the depths? Or was there simply too much ocean to search, and too little a field of view?
“You still with me, Brent?”
“Yeah, I’m about fifty feet beneath you.” He didn’t sound happy.
“Have they got him?”
A pause. “Yeah, they’ve got him.”
Thank God for that.“Gabe answering you now?”
“When he wants to,” Brent replied, his tone flat.
“Can you let them know we’re here?”
“They know.”
“Good. I’m so ready to get out.”And never to get back in.
It still took too long. They had to bob like corks in the waves while Gabe’s thralls lowered a dinghy, guided them close enough to hook on the crane cable, then hoist them out. Every minute gnawed at Cally’s impatience, and her HUD read 10:09 when she finally touched back down on the trawler’s deck.
“Get me out of this thing, Ryan!” she yelled as soon as she saw him.
“God damn it, Cally,” Brent winced over the radio.
A twinge of guilt, but she was done. The thralls couldn’t open her hatch fast enough, and she scrambled out like a cat escaping a bathtub.
Zoey watched from nearby.
“How’s Antoine?” Cally asked, as she leaned heavily on Amir’s shoulder and pulled her legs free.
“No word.”
“And Noah?”
