“I’ll be damned,” I said, when I realized it. “Your cocktail works, my dude.”
“Well, so far anyway,” Kahurangi said as he wrestled with the pack. “This is actually the second version. The first version was a mess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of everything ignoring you, it just made everything really pissed off. I think I was signaling the kaiju was under attack or something. I barely made it back to the stairs on that one. It was like a tree crab zombie horde.”
“Thank you for not mixing up the canisters,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Kahurangi said. “Just never give me a reason to spray you with it.”
I smiled at this and then looked in the direction of where Bella used to be, just in time to catch a big flash of … something.
“Whoa,” I said.
Kahurangi looked up. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” I connected through my headset to Satie. “Did you just see anything?”
“Other than the two of you moving slow enough to become snacks? No.”
“Keep an eye on the area Bella was in,” I said.
“What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Are you two almost done?”
“We have two other sites to look at,” I said.
“Don’t waste time talking to me,” Satie said, and clicked off.
“Done,” Kahurangi said, then looked in the former direction of Bella. “What are we looking at?”
“I thought I saw a flash.”
“It’s daylight.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I only think I saw it. I might have imagined it.”
“Let’s keep an eye out while we walk,” Kahurangi said.
“You keep an eye out for it,” I said. “I’m going to keep an eye out for things trying to eat us. Just in case your new batch of pheromones stops working.”
The next pack location had only one pack at it, the older one. It was, not surprisingly, smashed and broken.
“Where’s the other one?” Kahurangi asked.
I scanned the area and saw something several meters away. “Come with me,” I said. We walked toward the thing. It was the newer instrument pack. Like the others, it was smashed and broken.
Unlike the others, there was a bullet lodged into the shattered instrument package.
“Hello,” I said, and showed it to Kahurangi, who took one look at it and summed up what we were both feeling into a single word.
“Fuck,” he said.
“You think Riddu Tagaq let anyone out here with something that fired bullets?” I asked.
“No. Shotgun? Yes. Rifle? No. She doesn’t have that much faith in our ability to aim.”
“This means you were right,” I said. “Someone came through. Someone came through and shot this thing.”
Kahurangi nodded. “And probably took down the aerostat. And Chopper One. Fuck.” He looked away, disgusted.
I turned and dropped the shattered instrument pack. As I did, something glimmered in my peripheral vision.
“Shit, I think I just saw that flash you’re talking about,” Kahurangi said.
I turned to look at him. He was looking in the direction opposite of where I saw the glimmer. I went to where I thought I saw it.
“Where are you going?” Kahurangi asked.
“All right, I did see something that time,” Satie said, through my headset. “What the hell was that?”
I ignored both of them and crouched down by a fallen tree. There was an object there, partially obscured by moss and algae. I picked it up.
It was a phone.
A phone that appeared to have been intentionally placed, with its camera in the direction of where Bella had been.
“Hello,” I said again, more quietly this time.
“Jamie?” Kahurangi said, coming up on me.
I turned and showed him the phone.
“What is that doing here?” he said.
“I think it was left here on purpose,” I said. I pressed the power button. Nothing. It was dead. I opened a channel to the helicopter. “Martin,” I said.
“I saw that flash thing,” Satie repeated.
“Okay,” I acknowledged. “Unrelated question. Do you have a phone charger on Chopper Two?”
“What?”
“A phone charger.”
“You planning to make a call or something?”
I looked at the bottom of the phone. “Preferably a charger that has USB-C.”