‘Check the map!’ she screamed. ‘I think there’s a road tunnel up ahead.’
Nat twisted the paper around until he had it oriented the right way. ‘There is, about half a kilometre ahead.’
The road continued to bend and twist as it followed the contours of the land. Then she saw it, dead ahead—a tunnel that drilled straight through the hillside. She made for it at speed, all too aware that any mistake would be her last one. Once they were inside the tunnel, she pulled over, listening to the beast as it bellowed in impotent rage.
They sat like that for a minute without speaking. ‘A word of advice, Nat,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t shoot the damn things unless you have to. It’s counter-productive, believe me.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Nat, his voice small and still.
She pushed the door open. ‘I need to stretch my legs.’
She got out and walked towards the tunnel exit. The ground still trembled as the Kaiju thudded about somewhere outside. After another minute, Nat came to join her.
How long has it been? She wondered. An hour into the race? And as close as I’ve ever come to dying.
In that moment, Dutch realised her five years in jail were the reason she was still alive.
‘You said we were going inland.’
‘That’s right.’
She let out a slow breath. ‘Nobody’s gone inland and returned with their sanity intact since before they evacuated Teijouan. It’s impossible.’
‘But say a shortcut existed,’ he said. ‘A place where the derangement field doesn’t affect you. A safe corridor, stretching the whole way across the island from one coast to the other.’
She turned to stare at him. ‘Bullshit.’
‘Someone did it—got to the Rift and back and lived to talk about it.’
‘What happened to them?’
Nat shrugged. ‘They died. Eventually.’
Dutch felt a tightness in her chest like she was about to have a heart attack, and realised she was holding her breath. ‘Not what I’d call encouraging.’
Nat stepped closer to the tunnel exit and listened. ‘I can’t hear it. Maybe it’s gone.’
Dutch didn’t share his optimism, but then again they couldn’t hide in the tunnel forever. Nat followed her back over to the Coupé and slid in beside her.
‘I want you to tell me everything,’ she said, one hand on the wheel, ‘starting the moment we’re sure the coast is clear.’
‘Sure. Nice driving back there, by the way.’
She regarded him coolly for a moment, and started the engine.
* * *
She eased the Coupé out of the tunnel at a bare crawl, peering up the neighbouring slope, ready to reverse back inside at a moment’s notice. She took it slow at first, afraid of drawing the Blackjack to them with the noise of the engine, but they saw no further sign of it. Before long, they reached the outskirts of Takau.
Dutch checked the dashboard and observed that the day was heading towards evening. ‘Tell me the rest.’
‘Back about nine years ago, they rescued someone alive from the ruins of a coastal village near Truku Gorge. He’d been there for years, since before the Rift first formed. The way he babbled at the ship’s crew that found him, they figured constant exposure to the d-field had fried his brain. They put him in an asylum and forgot about him until he died a few months back.’
‘And?’
‘The coroner who autopsied him found a map, tattooed onto his chest. It showed a route cutting across the centre of the island, starting from Shinchiku in the north-west and cutting across to Truku Gorge in the East, passing a few kilometres north of the Rift. Apparently, during his more lucid moments while he was still alive, the man was in the habit of insisting he’d found a safe route across the island.’
‘And nobody believed him?’
‘Would you have?’
Dutch’s hands flexed on the wheel. A shortcut—impossible as it seemed—would cut most of a day out of the race. She pictured herself breaking the all-time round-island record and felt a rush of adrenaline. ‘Go on.’
‘Wu learned of it and locked the coroner into a very expensive NDA. Six weeks ago, he had a remote-controlled robot sent along the same route as the map on the dead guy’s chest. The robot got most of the way to the Rift without its electronics losing any of their functionality—which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, unprecedented. So Wu had his people follow up with a manned scientific expedition aboard an armoured RV.’
‘I never heard about any of this.’
‘With good reason,’ said Nat. ‘Anyway, the RV and everyone on board disappeared without trace. We figured Kaiju got them all, but then a week ago a survivor made his way to the coast on foot and fired off a distress flare. A Japanese corvette picked him up. He’d been burned by Kaiju venom and died within a day. But first, he gave this to his rescuers.’
Nat reached inside his driving suit and pulled out a thin, cigarette-length rod of dull grey metal. He passed it over and Dutch took a hand from the wheel to study it, turning it this way and that.
‘Doesn’t look like something worth dying for,’ she said dismissively, passing it back.
‘It’s worth a thousand times its weight in gold or diamonds. This,’ Nat explained, ‘is a room-temperature superconductor.’
‘A what?’
‘The solution to all the world’s energy problems, Dutch. The scientist who brought it back insisted there were a lot more where this came from before he died.’
‘So what killed the rest of the expedition? Kaiju?’
Nat shrugged. ‘That’s the assumption.’
‘Who did they take with them?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘A driver,’ she said. ‘Someone experienced with Kaiju. You’re not going to tell me Wu sent those people inland without any kind of backup?’
When Nat didn’t answer, she looked at him.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘You’re kidding me.’
‘There was a concern that if they involved someone from outside, even an
