“And she knows what that means?”
Satie looked at me. “Dr. MacDonald sent you here instead of texting. She wants this quiet. She also wants answers. If I tell her I’m borrowing you, it says to her that I am going to give her answers, and anyone looking over her shoulder when she gets that text isn’t going to know there’s a problem. I’m always borrowing someone.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Thought you might.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no idea what happened, that’s why we’re going out there. But if we see that kaiju on the wing, I know exactly what we’re going to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope she doesn’t see us before we get the hell out of there. If she’s up and moving around, something’s really pissed her off. If she sees us, she’ll drive us right into the ground.”
* * *
“Tell me what you see,” Satie said as we circled the site.
Here’s what I saw.
Chopper One, a wreck on the ground, still smoking and burning, near the shore of the lake.
The ground near the kaiju site and the crash, crawling with jungle creatures. If anyone had made it out of the helicopter crash, those creatures had already taken them.
Our friends were dead.
I told this to Satie.
He nodded. “Now,” he said. “Tell me what you don’t see.”
“I don’t see the aerostat,” I said.
“What else?”
“I don’t see the eggs Bella laid.”
“What else?”
“I don’t see Bella.”
She was gone. Her eggs were gone. All her parasites and companion creatures were gone.
Everything was gone.
“This isn’t right,” I said.
“It’s not,” Satie agreed. “Now tell me why.”
This was why: Because when I looked down at where Bella used to be, it didn’t look like Bella had been there and had left.
When I looked down at where Bella used to be, it looked like Bella had never been there at all.
CHAPTER
21
“So, where did she go?” Brynn MacDonald asked. We were in the administration office conference room: Brynn, Jeneba Danso and Aparna, Niamh and Kahurangi, along with Martin Satie and I. Satie and I were there because we’d taken the trip to the site and reported back. My friends were there because they had been the leads on the site data, and because, in the case now of Niamh and Kahurangi, after the apparent deaths of their colleagues in the Chopper One crash, they were nominally in charge of their labs.
It was fair to say we were all still in shock, as were all of our colleagues across the base. MacDonald and Danso informed the Tanaka Base personnel as soon as Satie and I returned about the apparent accident; by that time the rumors were already flying, even with my friends keeping their mouths shut. There was no point in allowing them to continue.
Everyone was grieving. In a base as small as ours, everyone knew everyone, and we had just lost five of us. Those of us in that conference room at least had something to do to keep us busy.
“We don’t know,” Aparna said to MacDonald’s question. She had her laptop casting an image onto the conference room’s larger wall monitor; it was a map of the “local” kaiju, spread out across hundreds of kilometers of the nearby Labrador Peninsula. “Bella was marked and tagged, and even without the aerostat that appears to have gone down at the site, we’re still getting readings from the rest that we know about. We have a small blind spot where the coverage from the downed aerostat isn’t overlapped by the others. So it’s possible she’s in there. But if she is, Martin and Jamie should have been able to see her.”
“We saw nothing,” Satie said, and I nodded. After we had sur veyed the site from the air, recording as we did so, we made a wide circle of the area to see if we could locate Bella. “She isn’t there. And there’s nothing to indicate where she might have gone.”
“She does fly,” Danso noted. “She wouldn’t leave a trail or take a path like some other kaiju do.”
Aparna nodded at this. “She wouldn’t have left a trail, but she would have shown up on our map, whatever direction she’d gone. Even to the southwest, where we have the fewest aerostats, she would have been pinged for least a few minutes.”
“Her tracker could have fallen off,” Kahurangi said. “That happened to the kaiju we saw when we were coming to base the first time.”