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Does this roaring contain some wavelength just as damaging?
He stumbled backward, his sight blurring.
Shouldn’t have come outside.
Then Kowalski was there. He grabbed Monk and held him upright. Kowalski pointed past the stern.
Monk blinked and squinted. Raoul Island still smoldered and smoked. Its caldera remained fiery. But the cascade of flames had died away. The flows of lava down its flanks appeared to be petering out. The mountain gave one last burp of fire, then stayed quiet.
Monk shifted forward, still beaten down by the roaring. He searched to the south. The line of volcanos had similarly subsided. The distant glows had vanished. The nearest peak slowly disappeared into the gloom.
He raised his walkie and yelled into it. “Byrd, cut it off!”
He was deaf to any acknowledgment, but the sirens and speakers wound down, finally dying away.
With his ears still ringing, he turned to Kowalski. “I didn’t think it would work,” he admitted. “Especially that fast.”
“What are you talking about?” Kowalski scowled at him. He lifted his cigar, which had burned down to a stub. “It’s been nearly an hour.”
“What?”
Kowalski dug a knuckle into an ear. “Don’t know if I’ll ever hear right again.”
Monk stared at his prosthesis and rubbed the side of his head. Time had slipped for him. He opened and closed his fist. All seemed fine now.
“Look!” Kowalski pointed across the bay.
Without the torch of the volcano, the world had grown darker. Across the water, the layers of ash glowed, suffused with soft lights from below. The patches grew steadily brighter, skimming and gliding. More and more rose, until the bay was swarming with them. A few broke through the powder, shining in brilliant flickers of emerald and cobalt.
The Rainbow Serpents.
Monk stepped out onto the deck, awed and breathless. Still, he felt wobbly and caught a hand on the steel A-frame that hung over the stern. It was the launch-and-recovery system for theCormorant.
Reminded of the others, he raised his walkie to his lips. “Bridge, any word from theCormorant?”
He waited for a response. It was slow coming, dragged by the grim news.
“No,” Byrd said. “We may have to consider them lost.”
6:45P.M.
“Do we have any clue where we are?” Adam asked.
Phoebe heard the desperation in his voice and understood it. They had been traversing this labyrinth for more than an hour. They would soon be running out of oxygen.
She shook her head and studied the sonar. TheCormoranthovered in a large cavern. It was full of coral, flowing with vibrant, radiant life.
By now, even her enthusiasm had dimmed for this lost landscape.
“Four tunnels and chasms extent eastward,” Phoebe reported. “I can’t tell which one might lead to Raoul Island.”
“If any of them do,” Datuk added, exhausted and defeated.
Bryan offered the only option open to them. “We can always flip a coin.”
Phoebe frowned, unwilling to accept defeat.
After leaving the first cavern, they had discovered a maze of crisscrossing tunnels, jagged rifts, and bottomless chasms. Even their compass betrayed them, at times spinning wildly in some magnetic flux. She was not sure she could even trace their way back to where they started.
