“Well, that’s convenient,” I said, showing the button to the rest of them.
“What are you waiting for?” Niamh asked. “Do it.”
“Give me a second to make sure I’m not missing something,” I said.
“Seems straightforward.”
“Look, do you want to press the button?”
“If you don’t do it this decade, maybe.”
I pressed the Discharge Capacitors button.
A dialogue window popped up: Confirm discharge.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, and confirmed.
Nothing happened.
“Well?” Kahurangi asked.
I shrugged. “It didn’t go.”
“You pressed the button?”
“I pressed the button,” I said. “And I confirmed with the dialogue window.”
“Well, shit.”
There was a knock on the door of the container.
We all jumped, and then stared at the door.
There was another knock.
“In retrospect, maybe one of us should have been a lookout,” Aparna said.
There was another knock, and then someone said, “Last knock before tear gas.”
“Coming,” I answered.
They all looked at me.
“What?” I said. “You want tear gas?”
“We could go out the other side of the container,” Kahurangi said.
“We have the other side of the container covered,” the voice said.
“Stop saying things out loud,” Niamh hissed at Kahurangi.
“Seriously, come out now, before we have to shoot you all,” the voice said.
“We’re really bad at this,” Aparna said. None of us could disagree.
We came out of the container, hands up. Five men with military rifles were waiting for us. They rapidly divested us of weapons and backpacks and put us on our knees, hands behind our backs.
“Which one of you tased Dave?” The one directly in front of us asked.
“That was me,” Niamh said.
“That was mean. He’s new. Barely above an intern.”
“Sorry, you all look like people who murdered my friends to me.”
The man smiled at this. “I’d be murdering you, too, but we were told not to, for now.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“By me,” a voice said, coming up from behind us.
I turned to look.
It was Rob Sanders, because of course it was.
CHAPTER
26
“Just so you know, the plan here is to tie you up and feed you to the kaiju parasites,” Sanders said to us. Our packs and weapons were arrayed in front of him; one of his flunkies had found him a folding chair, and he was sitting in it. Then that flunky and the others returned to training their weapons on us. “We obviously can’t let you live now. But if you answer my questions, we might kill you painlessly instead of letting the parasites eat you while you’re still conscious.”
“Did you practice that?” Niamh said. “It sounds like you practiced that. A lot. In a mirror.”
“Dr. Healy,” Sanders said, regarding Niamh. “I remember you being rude the last time we met. It doesn’t surprise me you’ve kept in character. And no, that was all spontaneous. Also, true. So, first question: How did you manage to come across?”
“Fuel pellets,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Uranium fuel pellets,” I said. “You’ll find mine in my pack.”
Sanders frowned at that and started digging through my pack, eventually finding a couple. “You’re shitting me,” he said, looking at the tiny gray cylinders.
“Ask Dr. Lautagata,” I said.
“I figured there was some sort of field that would be excited by purified actinides,” Kahurangi said. “We brought some, and we were able to come across.”
“And how did that work, exactly?”
“We held them up in a witchy circle,” Niamh said.
Sanders looked over to me for verification. I shrugged. “We all stood closely together, held up our hands with the fuel pellets in them, and we were able to step through.” I didn’t feel the need to tell him that the hole that we stepped through was several meters away from us and activated by Bella blasting nuclear energy out of her throat; that seemed extraneous information.
Sanders looked to Aparna. “You’re the only one here that I don’t remember being a smart-ass,” he said. “Is this accurate?”
Aparna nodded. “It happened like Jamie said.”
“And your bosses agreed to this?”