its head, trying to dislodge the harpoon, while Rick crawled away. He sat up and drew his machete. “Come on, fight!” he shouted at the bird.
Karen heard Rick’s voice. It brought her to her senses-she had passed out momentarily. She started hyperventilating, drawing air into her lungs, but she couldn’t get enough to breathe. Prickles of light flashed in her eyes, a sign of oxygen starvation. She became aware of the spray bottle clutched in her fist. She pulled the trigger, and felt a horrible burning sensation as the chemicals surged out and spread around her. The muscles squeezed tighter, and the stars turned into fog and then into nothing-
The mynah wasn’t happy. The harpoon had pricked it, and there were unpleasant sensations in its crop. It vomited.
Karen King landed in the moss and the bird took off.
She was unconscious. Rick knelt by Karen and felt her neck for a pulse, and discovered that her heart was still beating. He placed his mouth on hers and drove a breath into her lungs.
With a rasping sound, she took a breath on her own. She coughed, and her eyes opened.
“Ohh.”
“Keep breathing, Karen. You’re okay.”
She still gripped the spray bottle; her hand was locked around it. Rick pried her hand open and released the bottle. Then he dragged her under a fern. There, he helped her to sit up, and then he cradled her in his arms. “Take deep breaths,” he said. He pulled a strand of hair off Karen’s face, and smoothed her hair. He didn’t know where the birds were, whether they were still hunting in the area or had moved on, but their screams had grown more distant. He propped Karen against a stem and sat beside her, drawing his knees up. He kept his arms around her.
“Thank you, Rick.”
“Are you injured?”
“Just a little dizzy.”
“You weren’t breathing. I thought you were…”
The cries of the birds faded. The flock had moved on.
Rick made a quick survey of their remaining gear. Their survival was in real jeopardy. The truck was gone. Erika dead. Most of their supplies had gone over the cliff with the truck. The harpoon was gone, as well, for the mynah had flown off with the barb still lodged in its neck. The backpack lay near the pool. They still had the blowgun and the curare. A single machete lay on the ground. Danny Minot was nowhere to be seen.
But then they heard his voice coming from above. In his panic, he had climbed up a vine, and had come out at the top of the rock. They saw him crouched up there, waving his good arm. “I see the Great Boulder! We’re almost there!”
Chapter 34
Nanigen 31 October, 10:20 a.m.
Drake had taken over the communications room. He was staring at the screen of the remote tracking system that had been pinging the hexapod truck. Right now, he was a little puzzled by what he saw on the screen. The crosshairs on the cliff face, indicating the approximate position of the truck, had suddenly shifted downward by a hundred and fifty meters-by about five hundred feet. At first he suspected a system error. But as he watched, and waited, the truck’s location didn’t change. It wasn’t moving.
He allowed himself a modest smile. Yes. It looked like the damn truck had fallen off the cliff. That had to be it. The truck had plunged down the cliff face.
He knew that a micro-size human body could survive any fall, any distance. But the fact that the truck wasn’t moving meant that, at the very least, the truck had been damaged. It might be busted.
The survivors would be in a total panic by now, he realized. They weren’t getting any closer to Tantalus. And the bends would be just starting to affect them. They would not be feeling exactly chipper.
He got Makele on his phone. “Have you been to Tantalus?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I didn’t do anything. Didn’t need to. It’s-”
“They’re not going to make Tantalus anyway. They took a tumble, poor souls.”
Chapter 35
Kalikimaki Industrial Park 31 October, 10:30 a.m.
Lieutenant Dan Watanabe parked his brown Ford in the single, lone parking space marked VISITORS. The painted metal building stood next to the skeleton of a half-finished warehouse on one side and an empty lot on the other side dotted with thickets of underbrush. By the warehouse, he noticed an area covered with gravel. He walked over to it and picked up a few pieces. Crushed limestone. Interesting. It looked like the same stuff trapped in the PI Rodriguez’s tires. He dropped a few pieces in his shirt pocket, for Dorothy Girt to have a look at.
The parking lot around Nanigen’s building was full of cars.
“How’s business?” he said to the receptionist.
“They don’t tell me much.”
A coffeemaker on a table diffused the sour smell of coffee that had been heating for hours.
“Would you like me to make some coffee?” the receptionist asked.
“I think you already did.”
The company’s security chief walked in. Don Makele was a heavyset man packed with muscle. Makele said, “Any news on the missing students?”
“Could we talk in your office?”
As they entered the main part of the building, they passed doors that were shut. Windows looked into rooms, but the windows were covered with black blinds on the inside. Why were the blinds all drawn? Why were they black? As he walked along, Dan Watanabe felt the presence of a hum, a vibration coming up through the floor. That hum meant there was a lot of AC electrical current running in the building. For what?
Makele ushered Watanabe into his office. Windowless. Watanabe noticed a photograph of a woman, must be the guy’s wife. Two children, just keiki s. He noticed a plaque on the wall. U.S. Marine Corps.
Watanabe sat on a chair. “Nice kids.”
“I love ’em to death,” Makele said.
“You served in the Marines?”
“Intel.”
“That’s cool.” Chitchat never hurts, and you can pick up things. “We found your vice president, Alyson Bender-” he began.
“We know. She was very depressed.”
“What got her depressed?”
“She’d lost her boyfriend, Eric Jansen. Who drowned.”
“So Ms. Bender and Mr. Jansen were romantically connected, I take it,” Watanabe said. He could feel the uneasiness of the man under the surface. Cop instinct. He went on: “It’s actually pretty hard for seven people to vanish in these islands. I’ve called around to see if the students showed up anywhere. Like Molokai. Everybody on Molokai knows everybody else on Molokai. If seven kids from Massachusetts showed up there, the Molokai folks would be talking about it.”
“Don’t I know. I was born on Moloka‘i,” Makele said.
Watanabe noticed that he pronounced the name of the island in the old way. Moloka‘i. With the glottal stop. It made him wonder if Makele spoke any Hawaiian. People born on Molokai sometimes did speak Hawaiian; they learned it from their grandparents or from “uncles”-traditional teachers. “Molokai is a beautiful place,” Watanabe
