He nodded, his face grim as he turned the hose in his hands. ‘But enough to bring us grinding to a halt a couple of hours into the race and stranded in the middle of nowhere. Nice.’
‘Which would make us a sitting target not just for an assassin taking part in the race, but any Kaiju that happened to be in the vicinity.’ She glanced towards Elektron’s Peterbilt semi. ‘Look, the one person we know who’s been acting in a suspicious manner is Elektron. I still think we should—’
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘We are not making an official report.’
‘But—’
‘I told you, it risks exposing our real reason for being here—and that’s final.’ He looked hard at her. ‘Understand? If he causes us any more trouble, I can deal with him.’
She watched him walk away, then threw the cut hose to the ground in disgust. She thought about going to find Elektron herself and wring his scrawny, foul neck, but she had a sense that would put her on a fast track back where Wu found her.
Hold it in, girl, she told herself, fighting down the anger before it erupted and took control. Save it until you need it.
* * *
A little while later, she paused from putting in a replacement hose to watch Vishnevsky the Kaiju-hunter trundle up to the starting line. Now they’d flipped the race order, he’d be the first to depart, having come last in the time-trials.
Rapid-fire, borderline-hysterical commentary came, as ever, from Wayne Wilson, broadcasting from the flat roof of the command centre-cum-holiday apartments. Wilson had covered the race since its inception and had the demeanour of a radio DJ permanently on the brink of an apocalyptic nervous breakdown.
The sun rose higher, and the day grew hotter. She tried, as she often had in the past, to summon up more memories of Teijouan from when she was young, before the Rift and before the Kaiju came. But all she could summon up was that one moment standing on the docks amidst all the thousands of others hoping for rescue, clutching her father’s hand and looking up at him and seeing the thick red curls of his beard.
It was hard to be nostalgic for a place you barely remembered, if you remembered it at all.
She cracked a beer and sat on the hood of the Coupé and watched the two priests take their turn at the starting line. General Hurley and his navigator came next. Then came Lucifer Black, the engine of his all-black vehicle growling like it was alive.
The flag came down, and Black shot towards the raised steel gate in the security fence, accompanied by Wilson’s frenetic rambling and stuttering rock music blasted through speakers.
After Black’s departure, Countess König was next. Dutch felt an old and familiar excitement grip her. Her own turn would come before long.
She found one of Nat’s security team and got him to keep an eye on the Coupé while she took a leak and to get something to eat in a tented mess hall. She was on her way back out of the tent with a burger and fries when she heard a roar of engines and raised voices.
People came swarming out of the tent behind her to see what all the fuss was. Dutch cast a wary eye towards the Coupé, saw the security guard was still standing next to it, and decided to find out what was going on.
Instead of some Kaiju emerging from the sea, as she’d half-feared, Dutch saw six Zodiac semi-rigid motorboats come powering up to the shore. Each carried about a dozen people, all carrying protest signs or shouting through loudspeakers.
Soldiers moved to intercept them, but there were too many protestors wading ashore for them to cope with—not to mention that every news camera in the Security Zone had turned around to film their arrival.
‘Hey,’ Dutch asked one of the mess cooks, standing watching the approaching Zodiacs with a greasy spatula in one hand, ‘is that Adam Figueroa?’
The kid nodded. ‘Sure looks like it.’
Figueroa’s beard and ponytail appeared a little greyer than Dutch remembered. He strode up the beach, his trouser-legs damp with saltwater, waving to the other protestors to follow.
They came charging up in his wake like an invading army from the sea, holding their signs up high and chanting and yelling anti-race slogans. Figueroa made towards the starting line, lifting a megaphone to his lips as he walked.
‘We have a right to protest!’ he shouted, his amplified voice booming across the flat plain. ‘The Devil’s Run is a travesty. We should study the island, instead of trying to make a profit from it! Instead of funding research to reverse the Rift, foreign billionaires use it to make themselves even richer! We should be—’
A response came in a sudden wave of feedback. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the press,’ bellowed Wayne Wilson, sounding twice as loud as he had moments before, ‘if you would please direct your attention to the starting line, Doktor Elektron is set to blast off into the far reaches of the unknown!’
Elektron, up high in the cabin of his semi, slammed his horn. It blared out across the shore like the anguished moan of a lecherous dinosaur. Wilson kept up his patter, working hard to drown out Figueroa.
The soldiers now formed themselves into a cordon between the protestors and the starting line. Dutch looked out to sea. A rusty freighter sat two or three miles offshore, one of many such that resupplied the blockade. She guessed Figueroa must have bribed its captain to ferry them up close to the Security Zone.
‘Doktor Elektron!’ bellowed Wilson, ‘scourge of muggers and thieves, rescuer of little old ladies, but let’s not talk about that tell-all book by his former sidekick, not unless you want him to grab you by the balls with those electric gloves of his!’
This got scattered laughter from the press, and Elektron mouthed something inaudible in Wilson’s direction.
‘You cannot keep sending people to certain death in
