All will be forgotten now save survival.
Riley would have dearly loved to have the luxury of thinking about his own survival, but concerns about Chevie’s fate prevented him from concentrating solely on his own.
Perhaps she has freed herself with my skeleton key.
It depended on the strength of the ether Box had administered. Chevie could already be loose in the catacombs.
I pray that it is so, thought Riley. I hope and pray.
Riley was fleet of foot, but even youth cannot outrun the flow of water, especially when it has pressure behind it. Soon enough there was water at his ankles and then fizzing around his knees, and with the water came the rank smell of sewer that Riley now knew well but would never become accustomed to. Riley took to coughing while he ran, which was not a good blend of activities; and soon his run slowed until his cough played out, and he thought that one more hacking session like that would surely sink him.
Then, mercifully, the levels dropped as the claustrophobic tunnel widened to the expanse of loading bay and dock, which was crowded with soldiers attempting to make good their escape. These attempts were hampered by the fact that all the craft that had been seaworthy had been sunk except one, and Witmeyer stood on the prow fighting off any who would board. Otto Malarkey stood behind her, shaking his head in admiration, the Thunderbolt holding full sway over his emotions.
“Otto,” called Riley, “Chevie is still in there. We must find her.”
Malarkey caught Riley’s outstretched hand and swung him onto the deck of the amphibious craft.
“Ramlet. I am glad to see you. And chivalrous as I surely am, I would most times be overjoyed to add to mine own legend and search out the Injun maiden, but…”
Malarkey did not finish his sentence but instead cupped a hand over his ear and cocked his head to listen. Riley did likewise and soon heard a sound that grew loud enough to blot out the industry of men. The noise became huge and overpowering, stomping on the other senses, rendering insignificant their input.
It was the sound of a howling torrent approaching at great speed.
“Miss Chevron is upstream,” shouted Malarkey over the din. “And unless we be suicidal fish, we ain’t going upstream.”
Around them, men hurled themselves into the canal and swam for safety through the open bridge gateway. Futuristic weapons that had been so clickety-clack were now little more than deadweights to drag a man to the canal bed, and so were discarded without hesitation.
The Revolution was over.
Men swam for their very lives.
Witmeyer smiled at the magnificent man in her life.
“Shall I cast off, King Otto?”
Malarkey watched the wall of water approach and felt the spray on his face and bore witness to its might as crates and craft were tumbled in its depths. He now knew how it must have felt for Pharaoh’s soldiers when they saw the Red Sea bearing down on them.
“Yes, my love,” he said. “Time for us to be away.”
Riley knelt on the amphibian’s deck.
Oh, Chevie, he thought, guilt racking his frame like lashes from a cat-’o-nine-tails. I have deserted you.
And then Witmeyer was behind the wheel and was pulling the amphibian in a tight circle and aiming it like an arrow at the bridge gateway.
Riley took a moment to stop worrying about Chevie so he could fear for himself as behind them the water spread across the dock, sweeping support columns aside like straw and collapsing the entire structure.
I did not realize there was this much water in all of London, he thought.
“Faster!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, as though he could possibly make himself heard in the flood. “Faster!”
And then the wave came down with all the force of a Titan of legend.
I think I told you about my dog, Justin. Well anyway, it’s possible that Justin wasn’t even supposed to be a dog. Maybe he was supposed to be a pig-crab hybrid. A crig or a prab, something like that. My point being that time travelers can mess up everything right down to the molecular level. Things we take for granted, like butterflies or bananas, could seem like abominations to someone from another time stream.
—Professor Charles Smart
The water was rising. A flood of biblical proportions had come to wash away a new ark crewed by violent men whose hearts were avaricious and whose intentions were bloody, and though Colonel Box’s chamber door had been constructed with a seal as a precaution against normal flooding, it would inevitably submit to the weight of water.
Box entered his chamber of opulence with Vallicose close on his heels, and in Vallicose’s fist was a handful of Chevron Savano’s hair. Connected to that hair was Chevie’s scalp, and connected to the scalp was her entire head, and so on.
Vallicose tossed Chevie into a corner like a sack of meat and walked a tight circle around the edges of an Arabian rug. Confusion was twisting her features into a mask of deep wrinkles and squints.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and then again, “I don’t understand.”
Box dragged two pre-packed steamer trunks from behind a tapestry and did eeny-meeny on them, deciding which he should take.
“I have considered this,” he said absently. “Trunk A is my priority. Gold and weapons. Why am I dithering now? Indecisiveness is the ultimate inefficiency.” He dragged one of the trunks around in front of his desk. “Sister Vallicose, we will carry this between us. I have a hidey-hole, if you will forgive the expression, which we can repair to.”
Vallicose’s face fell like melting wax. “I don’t understand, Lord. This is Emergence Day. What about Boxstrike?”
Box patiently explained. “That particular plan has been compromised. It is pointless to waste valuable time bemoaning its failure. I have other plans that have already been set in motion. Backup plans—you have heard the phrase, no doubt. It is regrettable that we must move on; believe me, I am as frustrated as you that this tactic was unsuccessful, but the water is rising and we must be away.”
Vallicose could not abandon the beliefs of a lifetime so easily. “Yes, I see, Lord, but Boxstrike is more than an idea. It is your divine plan to save the world.” She wrung her fingers. “It’s in the Bible. The Rosenbaum’s Gospel. We can’t just walk away from the gospel.”
Chevie was slowly getting her senses back, and she could see that Vallicose was losing her grasp on reality.
That’s the problem with being a zealot, she thought. Eventually you have to deal with being wrong.
And eventually everyone is wrong.
Chevie had no sympathy for Vallicose. It might sound callous, but the Thundercat deserved every shred of anguish that the destruction of her belief system was bringing to her. After all, she had used that belief system to justify all the pain and suffering she had inflicted on countless others for twenty years or more, and now she would have to face the fact that she was simply a monster and not an agent of a new god.
That was all very well, and Chevie could allow herself a scintilla of satisfaction, but the water was seeping under the door and sloshing across the floor. And she was far from being one hundred percent.
Those rugs will be ruined, thought Chevie. And also I will be dead.
So perhaps it might be better to indulge in the smugness re: Vallicose later, when a million gallons of sewer water weren’t swilling around outside the door.
And it may be a sealed door, she thought, but it isn’t a submarine hatch.
She would wait for her moment, then make her move, as she had been taught in her original life as an FBI consultant. In her second life, training as a Boxite cadet, there hadn’t been so much emphasis on survival. Just killing.
Wait for my moment? Chevie thought, rising slowly to her hunkers. Wake up, girl. The moment is here and now. There will never be a better moment.
It was true, Box was o
ccupied with his lecture, and Vallicose was more or less wailing her frustrations. There were no eyes on her.
They think I am still under, she realized.
Chevie searched around for a weapon, and her eye landed on a vase that lay on a velvet cushion, barely three feet away. Not the ideal weapon, but it would have to do. Chevie reached out and tiptoed her fingers over the cushion to the vase. They crept over the lip and into the vessel’s interior. There was something inside, something dry and grainy.
No time for an ugh moment. This is life or death.
Chevie made a spearhead with her fingers and wiggled them deep into the vase.
Now. Move now.
Vallicose and Box were still talking. Box was calm and pragmatic, but Vallicose was right on that thin line between emotional and hysterical.
Chevie was already rising when Vallicose turned toward her.
“And Savano,” she said, “she remembers another future where there is no Empire of Box. Is that…”
Possible, she was about to say. Maybe, or probable. In any event, Vallicose never managed to finish her question, because Chevie’s hand swiped her across the jaw. Possibly not a serious problem for a soldier, being swiped across the jaw, but Chevie’s hand was clad in the armor of a heavy clay vase.
The vase clunked on impact and then shattered, releasing plumes of gray dust into the air, dropping from Chevie’s hand in sections.
“Mother!” cried Box.