Fall of Hades

  “Then let’s do this. Everyone back off a little.” I turned to Taylor and nodded.

  Taylor looked toward the guards, holding her hand up to her forehead. Suddenly the guards froze. One of them dropped his rifle.

  “Now,” I said. I reached out and pulsed. A massive wave blurred the air, sizzling with the rain it devoured. Both of the guards were knocked off their feet. A few of the monkeys fell off branches as well, screeching loudly.

  “That’s always cool to watch,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

  We ran toward the cage.

  Jack and Welch grabbed the guards and dragged them over to the back of the east cage, then handcuffed them with their own cuffs.

  That’s when I saw Quentin. He was dirty and huddled in the corner of the cage. He had partially covered himself with some of the dead palm leaves, but he was still shivering in the cold. He looked pathetic, and in spite of our history, I felt pity. Even the smell of the cage, somewhat dampened by the fresh rain air, was torture.

  “Quentin,” I said.

  He looked up at me, and his eyes showed his disbelief. “Vey?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Kill me. Please.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  Welch walked up behind me. “Quentin, it’s me. We’re getting you out.”

  Quentin rubbed the water that was running down his face. “Why are you with Vey? I’m already losing my mind.”

  “No,” Welch said. “We’re working together. Now move away from the back of the cage. Hurry.”

  As soon as he did, there was a brilliant orange-blue light behind him, followed by the sound of water hissing and monkeys screeching as they fled to the far, opposite corner of the cage. Even fifteen feet away I could feel the air warm up around me.

  McKenna stood on the platform behind the cage with Tessa supporting her, McKenna holding the metal chain in her hand, which was too bright to look at.

  In less than a minute the chain slid from around the cage’s bars like a metallic snake, then fell to the ground.

  “That’s one,” Ian said. “Now the door lock.”

  McKenna examined the lock assembly, not quite sure where to touch. She put her hand on the bolt and heated up. The entire unit turned orange-red but didn’t collapse. The heat was intense enough that we were all sweating, but still the lock held.

  McKenna’s power was different from Bryan’s, as Bryan could force heat in a direct, concentrated path, while McKenna created more heat but in a broader circumference.

  After a minute I said, “This is taking too long.”

  “I can’t do it,” McKenna said.

  “Ian, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  He looked at the door for a moment, then said, “McKenna, ignore the lock. The weakest part is the hinges. Other side.”

  McKenna and Tessa moved on the platform. McKenna could get her fingers around the hinges, which meant she could better control the heat between them.

  I looked around the square, then at Jack. “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “We’re alone.”

  Luck seemed to be on our side, which was something I wasn’t accustomed to. It was also something I didn’t trust.

  The top hinge broke through in less than a minute. “Got it,” McKenna said. She grabbed the bottom hinge and heated up.

  Just a half minute in, the second hinge creaked as it twisted and then broke through and the heavy metal door fell back toward the exhausted girls. Welch must have guessed what was going to happen, because he had run up behind them and grabbed the heavy door as it fell, pushing it to the side. The door landed with a sharp crash on the wet cobblestone below.

  “That could have cut off my leg,” McKenna said.

  “It didn’t,” Welch said. “Now get back.”

  Tessa helped McKenna down to the base of the steps, where Nichelle handed her two open bottles of water.

  “Q,” Welch said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Quentin forced himself to his feet. He was basically naked, wearing just a loincloth. Welch took his hand and helped him to the cage entrance.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Yes,” he said, though he seemed unstable on his feet.

  “He doesn’t have shoes,” I said.

  “He does now,” Nichelle said. She had already removed one of the guard’s boots. “His feet looked about your size.”

  Quentin stared at her. “Nichelle?”

  “You never know who you’re going to run into at the zoo,” she said.

  Welch put the shoes on Quentin’s feet and laced them up. I gave him my poncho to wear. “Hurry,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Quentin looked over at the other cage. “We need to rescue the prime minister.”

  I glanced at the cage, then at Jack, who was shaking his head.

  “Not now,” I said. “We’re out of time.”

  * * *

  Jack and Welch both took one of Quentin’s arms, and we ran directly into the shadow of the forest, retracing our route along the goat path. We were slightly slower with Quentin, but we still made good time.

  We stopped at the side of the warehouse. For some reason, the dock lights had been turned off and our boat was a dark silhouette against the turbulent sea.

  “How does it look?” I asked Ian.

  “Peaceful.”

  “Why are the lights out?”

  “Maybe the storm took out the generator.”

  “It’s a Starxource plant.” I took out my radio. “Gervaso. Are we clear?”

  There was a burst of static, then Gervaso’s voice. “We’re clear.”

  “Why are the lights out?”

  “I don’t know. They just turned them off. Do you have him?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll meet you at the aft ladder.”

  We moved in the dark to the back of the boat, then crossed the dock in small groups, first Tessa, Nichelle, and McKenna, followed by Jack, Welch, and Quentin.

  Taylor, Ian, and I waited until last to make sure no one had followed us, or to reboot any warehouse crew that might take interest in us. No one did. I’m sure it was the hour, but it still worried me that the security was so lax. It seemed suspicious.

  I was the last one on board, and Gervaso helped pull me up on deck.

  “I sent everyone below,” Gervaso said. “Come with me.” We climbed to the boat’s upper deck.

  “How did everything go?” he asked.

  “We had a little trouble opening the cage, but otherwise everything went as planned. It was easy.”

  Gervaso’s brow fell. “Easy?”

  “I know. When has anything with the Elgen been easy? It could be a trap.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re just overconfident. Like they were in Peru.” Gervaso breathed out. “For now we keep to the plan until we know otherwise. Come with me. I need to report to J.D.”

  I followed Gervaso into the control room.

  The captain spun around as we entered the control deck. “You made it, my friends,” he said, sounding relieved. “Did all go well?”

  “As planned,” I said.

  “Very good. And everyone is on board?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even Mr. Welch?”

  I thought it odd that he had singled him out. “Yes.”

  Gervaso looked at J.D. with a peculiar expression, then said, “We’re all here. We need to go.” He turned to me. “Let’s go back down, Michael.”

  Gervaso and I walked back out of the control deck into the rain. When we were on the main deck, Gervaso said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I think we’re in trouble.”

  My chest froze. “Why?”

  “We never told J.D. what Welch’s real name was.”

  The boat was untied, and we pushed away from the dock into the turbulent channel. From Nike we would sail north. Hades was the Elgen’s prison island and the second-northernmost island of the Tuvalu archipelago.

  Just a
s the weather service had predicted, the storm was getting worse and the waves were now white-capped. The boat slammed angrily against the dark waters. At twenty-five knots it would take us about seven hours to reach our destination. That would make our arrival time around noon, but considering the weather, we’d probably arrive much later. And now we realized that there was a good chance we were sailing into a trap.

  “What do we do?” I asked Gervaso.

  “If he’s collaborating with the enemy, we can’t let on that we know. Not yet. We’re surrounded by the Elgen’s most fortified bases. If the Elgen attacked now, we wouldn’t last five minutes.”

  “We could go back to Nike and attack their headquarters. If we could capture Hatch . . .”

  “We don’t know that Hatch is even there. And if we make J.D. turn around, the Elgen will know something’s wrong. They’ll be waiting for us.” He looked at me. “We need to talk to Welch. Get Jack, too.”

  I went down to the eating quarters, where Welch, Jack, Zeus, and Nichelle were sitting around Quentin at the main table. There was bread, crackers, cheese, and sliced meats, and Quentin, who was now wrapped in a dry blanket, was eating ravenously. He stopped eating when he saw me.

  In the light I was stunned by how different he looked. Broken. Humble. He was anything but the cocky rich kid I’d met in Peru. I guess living in a monkey cage will do that. So will Cell 25.

  “Michael,” he said, starting to stand.

  I raised my hand to stop him. “Just sit.”

  “Thank you,” he said, slightly collapsing. “My quads are pretty cramped. Welch just told me that we’re going to rescue Torstyn and Tara.”

  “We’re going to try.”

  “Let me know how I can help. I’m the reason they’re there.”

  “No,” Welch said. “I am.”

  “Hatch is,” I said. “And we’ll definitely need your help.” I turned to Welch. “Gervaso needs to see you. You too, Jack. He’s on deck.”

  “All right,” Welch said.

  They both stood, and I led them up top to Gervaso, who was standing in the dark midship beneath a canopy.

  “Yes, sir,” Welch said.

  “Have you talked to the captain alone?” Gervaso asked.

  “Captain J.D.? No. Why?”

  “He knows who you are.”

  Welch’s face tensed. “Is he Elgen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the plan?” Jack asked.

  “That’s why I wanted to see you. If this is a trap, we’ll need a solid base to fight from. Or should we go straight to the Joule?”

  “Not at this hour,” Welch said. “No one, not even an EGG, would visit the Joule in the middle of the night. There’s too great a chance they’ll submerge.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Joule protocol is that a false submersion will go unpunished. A non-submersion, even in practice, when one is required, results in automatic death to the captain. The odds are that they’ll submerge and stay down for days. Maybe weeks.”

  “We can’t take that chance,” I said.

  “What island do we go to?” Gervaso asked.

  “We have three options,” Welch said. “Hades, Hephaestus, and Demeter. Hades is the prison island, Hephaestus is the Elgen manufacturing, and Demeter is agriculture.”

  “Which one would you choose?”

  “Hades will have more stationed guards, but there will also be weapons and fortifications to dig in. We could also release the GPs and native prisoners to fight with us. Hephaestus is just factories, no food or weapons. They could quarantine the island and starve us out. Demeter has food, but it’s just fields and jungle. Little weaponry. All we’ll have to fight with is what we have on us. I’d go with Hades.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Hades it is,” Gervaso said. “There’s still hope that we’re wrong about J.D.”

  “How are we going to know for sure?”

  “Taylor,” Gervaso said. He looked around. “Jack?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell everyone they have six hours to rest and they’re going to need it. They need to be ready for battle.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At ten I’ll need you, Michael, Welch, Zeus, Ian, and Taylor to come with me to the control deck.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said again.

  * * *

  I went below deck to check on Taylor but found her, Nichelle, and McKenna sleeping. I lay down next to Taylor, my heart pounding wildly. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t sleep, and an hour later I got up and went back up top. In spite of the weather, Welch was sitting on a bench smoking.

  I sat down next to him. For a while neither of us spoke. Visible to the east of us was a long strip of land.

  “What island is that?” I asked.

  “Hatch calls it Plutus. It was Nukufetau. It’s where he’s building the bullion depository, his own private Fort Knox.”

  Even though our visibility was limited by darkness, rain, and fog, I could see that there were cranes and massive construction going on.

  “Look,” Welch said softly, pointing to a shadow in the water. “There she is.”

  What I saw looked like a large, rectangular buoy.

  “What is it?”

  “The Joule.”

  I had seen the Joule only once before, in Lima, just before we sank the Ampere, only this time it was mostly submerged, exposing only the conning tower. Again it was docked close to shore.

  Welch took a long drag from his cigarette and stared out in silence.

  “I thought Elgen guards didn’t smoke,” I said.

  “They don’t.” He offered me the cigarette. “Want one?”

  “I’m fifteen,” I said.

  “Not tonight you’re not.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  After a few minutes he said, “I hope I get to die slowly of cancer.”

  * * *

  After a half hour I went back down to our quarters. Ostin was asleep and snoring loudly, which this time made me happy. It was familiar and peaceful in its own way.

  I worried about him. Quentin felt remorseful that he’d dragged Torstyn and Tara to their deaths, but, in my own way, I was just as guilty. Ostin wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for me. He’d probably be graduating from Harvard at seventeen and getting a job with the highest bidder, Elgen Inc. That’s what I was thinking about when I fell asleep.

  “Michael, wake up.” I looked up to see Gervaso standing above me. “It’s time.”

  It took a moment for recognition to sink in. I was hoping the night before had just been a nightmare. It was, just not the sleeping kind.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, not early, but I’d still only gotten a few hours of sleep. And it didn’t look like morning. There was no sign of the sun.

  After I got up, Gervaso and I went around waking everyone and telling them to eat and prepare to dock. Then Welch, Jack, Taylor, Ian, Zeus, and I followed Gervaso up to the control deck. Ostin came as well, even though he hadn’t been invited.

  Outside the door to the control deck Gervaso said to Taylor, “I need you to stand next to J.D. I need you to read his mind.”

  We still hadn’t told everyone else about our concern, so Taylor looked surprised. “Why?”

  “We have reason to believe that he’s working with the Elgen.”

  Taylor blanched. “I’ll stay close.”

  We walked into the control deck single file. There were three crew members along with Captain J.D., who was in his chair. The men were speaking in Fijian but stopped as we entered.

  “Good morning, friends,” J.D. said. “You see our destination ahead, just as planned.”

  Ahead of us in the far distance was a sliver of land. It looked bleak, like a South Pacific version of Alcatraz. It had a five-hundred-meter-tall radio tower held up by guy wires stretching hundreds of yards in each direction. A series of red lights flashed near the top of the tower. A light plume of steam ro
se above the island, mixing in with the dark, low-lying clouds. The Elgen had burned almost every tree on the island, leaving it black and desolate.

  “There’s your Hades,” J.D. said.

  “Yeah, it looks like hell,” Jack replied.

  “Why is there steam coming off the island?” Taylor asked.

  “It must have a small Starxource plant,” Ostin said.

  We were all quiet. There was a dark foreboding, made more so by the lightning and weather.

  “Did you see that?” Taylor asked. “Lightning just struck the tower.”

  “It’s the tallest thing around for a thousand miles,” Ostin said. “It probably gets struck hundreds of times a year. And technically, it’s a mast, not a tower.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “Towers stand on their own. Masts have wires that hold them up.”

  “It’s a tower,” Jack said.

  * * *

  As we neared the island, we passed several Elgen shuttles. One of them looked like some kind of a prison barge with barred windows.

  “Where’s the prison?” I asked. I’d seen a map of the island, but it was different seeing the land in real life.

  “It’s on the other side of the island,” J.D. said. “There are two docks, an old one and the new dock for the prison. We will dock on this side. Otherwise we will be seen by the prison guards.”

  I turned to Ian. “Can you see anything?”

  “There’s activity at the far dock. It must be a changing of shifts. There’s a boatload of guards leaving.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said. “The new guards will just be settling in.”

  “I don’t see new guards,” he said.

  “They wouldn’t come and go at the same time,” Ostin said. “The old guards won’t leave until the others have taken their place.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said. “I don’t see any guards at all. I see a lot of prisoners in their cells, but no guards.”

  “That sounds like an evacuation, not a shift change,” Gervaso said.

  “Why would they all be leaving?” I asked.

  J.D. glanced at me. “You never know, Mr. Vey. The Elgen are always changing their ways.”

  “We’ve got trouble,” Ian said. “There are two very large boats coming our way. I’ve never seen them before.”