‘Please,’ said the voice, sounding weaker now. ‘For God’s sake. Help me!’
The rifle felt warm in her grasp.
‘Please!’
She pushed the Coupé’s door open as silently as possible and slid out, keeping low. She moved with careful steps towards the foyer entrance, ready to duck back into the shadows.
Could be it was another driver, injured after a Kaiju attack—but there was something disturbingly familiar about the voice.
Then she realised who it sounded like.
She came to a halt. It wasn’t possible, and yet, she’d recognise that voice anywhere. And as Nat himself had said, sometimes people found a way to survive on Teijouan, sometimes for years…
She swallowed hard and moved out into the street. Then she saw him: Johnny Lear, crouched low by the entrance to an alley, one leg soaked in blood. He was breathing with difficulty, his face drained of colour.
‘Dutch,’ he said, his voice ragged. ‘I can’t believe it’s you.’
She stared at him. ‘You can’t be here.’ Or alive.
‘I’m hurt.’ He reached a hand towards her. ‘I need your help, Dutch—’
She heard a click from behind her, and in the next moment the side of Johnny’s head exploded.
The air reverberated with the gunshot. She whirled around to see Nat standing outside the 7/11, a rifle raised to his shoulder.
‘What the fuck did you do!’ she screamed.
‘For Christ’s sake, Dutch,’ he yelled. ‘Run!’
She turned back and saw something huge and reptilian crouching where Johnny had been. It dug long claws into the brick wall beside it as it let out a shriek of pain and anger, the side of its long, cruel-looking snout dark with blood.
Nat fired a second shot, and then a third, and the creature—tiny by Kaiju standards, being not much larger than an elephant—slid to the ground and became motionless.
Dutch stared at it, her blood cold and sluggish. ‘What is that thing?’
Nat hurried over to her. ‘A shapeshifter-Kaiju.’
‘I never heard of such a thing.’
‘I guess you were in jail when the first ones appeared. What did you see?’
She turned to look at him. ‘Johnny Lear.’
‘I have no idea who that is,’ said Nat, ‘but what I saw looked like my sister, and she’s been dead fifteen years.’
‘Johnny was my first navigator.’
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back inside the foyer. ‘It’s about dawn. We should get moving in case the shots drew something else’s attention.’
‘But how did that thing know?’
‘All anybody knows is somehow they can dig around inside your brain and show you the people or things you most care about. From that moment, unless you’ve got any idea what you’re dealing with, you’re dead meat.’
‘You’re telling me they can read minds?’
‘It’s no crazier than anything else on this damn island,’ he pointed out. He started to get inside the Coupé and shot her an accusing look. ‘You were looking at the map.’
Shit. ‘So?’
He stared at her. ‘I hope you weren’t thinking of driving off and leaving me here.’
She glared at him. ‘I wanted to see where we were going, is all.’
He swore under his breath and tossed his rifle in the back. ‘Lucky for you the only thing I care about is getting the hell out of here before something else comes sniffing around.’
Sidekick Du Jour
The morning proved to be cool and foggy, with mist clinging close to the ground, and Dutch struggled to see further than a few hundred metres in the dawn light. She drove at a slow crawl, but before long the day got brighter and the road ascended, lifting them above the fog. She glanced to the East, seeing tall mountains towards the centre of Teijouan. The cameras recorded it all.
They came to a halt, seeing the road bridge ahead of them had collapsed into a gorge. ‘That was still standing last time I came this way,’ she said.
‘Looks like it fell down sometime after last year’s race,’ said Nat, looking over the map. ‘We’ll just figure out another route.’
Dutch pushed the door open and got out. Nat kept poring over the map, trying to find a way across or around the gorge. She shielded her eyes with one hand and peered north. Shinchiku’s skyline was about visible, far off on the horizon.
As she watched, a tiny orange star rose from amidst the ruins.
‘Hey!’ She turned and shouted to Nat. ‘Look.’
He got out and joined her. The flare ascended further, then faded. ‘That’s the Countess’s signal.’
Dutch nodded. ‘She’s reached the first rendezvous. We need to move faster.’
‘Once again, we are not here to—’
‘I heard you the first time,’ she snapped. ‘But we still need to refuel before we make the crossing.’
Nat spread the map on top of the Coupé’s roof. ‘Take a look,’ he said, beckoning her over. ‘There’s a river down in that gorge. The map says it’s shallow enough I think it might be possible for us to drive straight across it.’
‘But how do we even get down there?’
His fingers traced a route on the paper. ‘A switchback road leads to the bottom of the gorge and back up the other side. It’ll take time, but any other route takes us too far inland.’
Dutch sucked her teeth. ‘Risky, though. Someone like Vishnevsky can ford a river in that tank of his, but the Coupé’s a different matter.’
‘We might as well check it out. We’d be crazy not to.’
She agreed to his proposal with some reluctance. They took a road off the highway and navigated their way down the switchback road. The road veered back and forth down the slope of the gorge like a madman’s scribble, but they were soon driving past warehouses and shops lining the banks of the river.
Nat turned out to be right; the water didn’t come up much higher than their ankles. ‘It’s been a dry season,’ he noted. ‘No way we’d be able to get across if there’d been rain any time in
