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Finally, he saw the murk of sand and seaweed and bunched his legs up, timing it with precision. He kicked with all his might, feet slamming mud, and shot upward through the water like a breaching whale. Up right beneath Erin. He reached for her, snagged her ankle with what gentleness he could manage, and dragged her with him to the surface.
“Aaaah! Aaaah!” Erin cried as she gulped air.
Justin had no words. The scale, the amazing, appalling scale of it all, overwhelmed him. He had done all this! He, Justin DeVeere, art student. He . . . Knightmare!
Justin kicked his legs, used an awkward stroke of his sword, swung back and forth like a ship’s propeller, and tilted his head back to look up. That glance was not reassuring—the bulk of the roadway, thousands of tons of steel and concrete, had not yet come down, and if it did while they were still beneath the bridge, they would very likely die.
But escape was at hand, as it so often was for superheroes, Justin thought. A ship piled high with faded containers and with too much momentum to stop was racing to clear the bridge and reach the safety of the open sea, but it would pass them a hundred yards off.
Justin yelled, “Grab my neck!” He seized a length of cable with his claw and pulled hard, and they shot through the water. Another cable end, another pull, like some aquatic Tarzan swinging from vines, and they were at the ship, the tall steel wall rushing past. The ship’s hull rang like a bell as the flailing main cable slapped it, leaving a dent a foot deep, scarred with rust-red paint.
At the last possible moment, Justin stuck his sword into the side of the ship and felt the sudden jerk and then the steady drag as the ship’s momentum carried them out from beneath the bridge.
Justin dug his claw hand into the steel as if it was no more than cardboard and climbed the side, stabbing with his sword, biting into steel with his pincer, Erin O’Day clinging to him like that blond girl in the King Kong movie. They spilled, wet, freezing, numb, and stunned, onto the deck of the ship between two stacks of containers. A black Prius lay upside down, its windshield shattered, the small Uber sign still in place.
Erin, on hands and knees, vomited seawater and stomach contents, retching until there was nothing left.
Justin stood unharmed, looking back at the Golden Gate Bridge twisting and tearing itself apart in spectacular death throes. The center section of roadway fell at last, more than a mile of roadway, and hit with the impact of a bomb, sending up a geyser of green water as high as the still-standing towers.
“Wow,” Justin said in his huge rumble. “Cool.”
And far away, or perhaps very near, the dark watchers silently applauded.
CHAPTER 12
Being Used
“ARE YOU READY?” Peaks asked.
“Beyond ready. Are we finally doing this?” Dekka asked.
“We are,” Peaks confirmed. “I apologize for the delay, I had to go to Chicago for . . . for an event.”
Dekka felt the return of an old, old friend: fear. It was not a panic fear, not a horror movie fear, more a nervous uncertainty, a combination of hope and worry, anticipation mixed with a dread of disappointment mixed with a countervailing hope that nothing at all would happen.
And I can go back to being Jean from Safeway.
Funny, Dekka thought, how much she had come to accept that life. Fifteen dollars an hour, thirty hours a week. Plus ten long hours at the customer desk of an auto body shop every other Saturday.
When she had a little money to spend, she sometimes drove her motorcycle down to Oakland to Club BnB, had drinks, danced, and occasionally hooked up—not that this ever resulted in a real relationship. In the four years since the end of the FAYZ, Dekka had dated half a dozen women once or twice, and for two months lived with a very nice young woman whose only real failure was that she was not Brianna.
Brianna: Dekka’s crush, her love, her obsession. As a legal adult now, she was well aware that it was bizarre, even a little creepy, to still be hung up on a straight twelve-year-old girl. But her love for Brianna had never been physical. It had never been Brianna’s body that drew Dekka, not even when she was just fourteen or fifteen herself; it was the fact that Brianna, the Breeze, had been the funniest, most reckless, and bravest person Dekka had ever met.
Brianna had set an impossibly high standard for any normal woman to meet. Unrealistic? Yes, Dekka knew that, just as she knew her obsession was dooming her to a life of disappointment and loneliness.
All that time with Brianna, that whole mad world of the FAYZ, was a million years ago. Sometimes. Other times it was like it was all still happening. Dekka had thought it was all in her past—not just Brianna, but love itself. Where would she ever find the friendship she had known? She was like a combat veteran who welcomed peace but knew that his wartime experiences would make the rest of life dim by contrast.
But now . . .
She’d been five days at the facility, playing along with the tedious physical and psychological tests, playing along though it galled her, remaining compliant, biddable, and in every way not like herself.
Why?
Because I hate being Jean from Safeway. Because I miss . . . I miss . . .
. . . the power!
Now, as Peaks, a doctor named Amanta Malireddi, a nurse, Jane Prettyman, and two blank-faced, unobtrusive security people accompanied her down a long hallway, Dekka knew where she was going: the Secure Lab, shortened, in the argot of the facility, to the Slab.
