Fog E-Book

Annelie Wendeberg

• Herausgeber: Annelie Wendeberg
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The 1/2986 Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Sixteen-year-old Micka never signed up to be a hero. Yet, here she is — at the front lines of humanity's desperate struggle for survival. Alone with Runner, she's about to march into battle against a terrorist organisation that vowed to wipe humanity off the planet. Or what’s left of it.

Micka mastered the grim art of killing. Now, she must learn the true cost of survival in a world gone mad.

Award-winning author Annelie Wendeberg delivers a dark dystopian series that brims with fast-paced action and suspense. Based on climate science, Micka’s world gives a terrifying glimpse into our possible future.

Warning: Contains themes of war, trauma, physical abuse, violence, and other content which may be triggering to some readers.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games but is much better and more realistic.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have yet to read anything by this contemporary author I did not love; she never disappoints!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This second book is just more of everything from the first book. More intense, action-packed scenarios. It's just as fast-paced and equally thrilling.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ a most captivating and deeply human drama in a future set with death, fear, and hope.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reminds me of a more grown-up and realistic Hunger Games.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Best book I've ever read in a long time!SO AMAZINGLY WRITTEN!! Perfection at its best!

Leseprobe

FOG

1/2986 - Book 2

ANNELIE WENDEBERG

Copyright 2015 by Annelie Wendeberg

eBook Edition

This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and names in this book are products of the author’s imagination. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN: 978-91-989004-5-3

Interior design by Annelie Wendeberg

Cover design by Alisha Moore (Damonza.com)

Contents

All you need to know…

I. Itbayat

Kill Zone

Itbayat

Visuals

Swamp

Taiwan

Observatory

Diving

Return

Pretend

The Camp

Cacho Calls

Secret Message

Going In

II. Taiwan

First Night

Long Way Up

Crest

Edge of Sunrise

In the Crosshairs

Foxhole

Fireball

Mending

Friends’ Descend

Before the Tempest

III. Tempest

The Fog

Newborn

Clay

Scars

Going Down

Erik

Epilogue

Ice

Anna Kronberg Mysteries

Arlington & McCurley Mysteries

Keeper of Pleas Mysteries

More…

Extras

Acknowledgments

All you need to know…

…is here:

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BookBub

— to the girls from workshop 106 —

PARTI

Itbayat

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence the world

Rainer Maria Rilke

Kill Zone

My breathing is calm. My lungs know what to do before my finger pulls the trigger. Long breath out. Long breath in. Hold. Release.

Fire.

But not yet. Not quite.

My cheek brushes the stock of my rifle. The crisscross patterns carved into it feel rough against my skin. My index finger rests against the trigger guard, ready to squeeze off a round at Runner’s chest.

The hunt began three days ago and I’ve spent much of that time in trees. He prefers to dig himself a hole in the ground, disappear and wait for his targets to walk past. I have a hunch he’s expecting me to do the same. But maybe he’s expecting me to do the exact opposite, in which case, I’ll be screwed.

The circular view of my finder shows the forest in crisp shades of grey and green, with crosshairs and mil-dots stamped on it. The night-eye fastened to my scope works perfectly, but my vision doesn't. Until last night, my brain compensated for the monocular vision — my one eye receiving the combined signals of image intensification and active shortwave infrared through the scope, my other eye seeing nothing but pitch black, and both combined to a neat picture in my head.

Now, it’s all jumbled. No matter how hard I stare, the world is drifting in and out of focus, the circular view flickers this way and that. If I shut my eyes for a few seconds, I would fall asleep and out of the tree. The muck a few metres below wouldn’t soften the drop much.

My limbs tremble. Whether from being cold or exhausted, I’m not sure. Probably both. I’m not even sure if my soaked clothes help at all. My skin temperature is about 32°C, the outside temperature is 19°C. That’s 13°C difference. Enough to show up in Runner’s night-eye, even with the ghillie — a sniper’s fuzzy camouflage suit — blurring my outline. Every now and then, I climb down, shed my ghillie, roll in water or muck to lower my skin temperature by unknown degrees, and then pull the ghillie back on to blur whatever thermal signature is left. I have no way of knowing how well this works, since I can’t look through my own night-eye and check how much I glow in the infrared channel.

I think I slept for a total of four hours, a few minutes each time I couldn’t hold myself upright any longer. Four hours in a total of seventy. It’s stupid to sleep, but it’s even stupider to aim a highly accurized rifle when the one aiming has lost her sense of what’s up and what’s down. I could just as well be drunk. Same difference.

The food problem hasn’t been a problem, really. There is enough to forage, although mostly low-calorie stuff like fruits and small nuts. I don’t dare eat the mushrooms since I don’t know them all yet and a poisonous one might slip my notice. If I lit a fire, Runner would find me in a flash. That’d be awkward. Hey dude, hold your fire, I have this extra delicious thingy I want to gobble up first.

Anyway.

No wild goat or crab meat for me, although they are all over the island. I don’t dare kill a goat. It’s too large an animal to cleanly get rid of blood and guts and excess meat I wouldn’t be able fit into my stomach. The carcass would attract attention and that’s the opposite of what I want. Raw crab tastes like snot. I tried it and almost barfed. I had raw lizard, though. It’s tolerable as long as one doesn’t think about taste and consistency. But the thing was tiny and not one of its buddies was willing to cross my path after they’d seen what I did to lizard number one.

I’m lucky, though. Runner hasn’t gotten a glimpse of me in three days and nights, and I’m uninjured, healthy, and strong enough to go for another six to twelve hours without toppling over. My rifle feels like a third arm, third eye, and second heartbeat to me. My trap is set. Despite the rain earlier tonight, my footprints are laid out clearly — from my far left all the way to my far right, before elaborately snaking back to the tree I chose as my hideout.

I shift my weight and flex my fingers.

The hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle. Cicadas are clicking. Birds are hooting. All is as it should be. And yet…

I’m not cold anymore. I move my head a fraction and scan the perimeter. The waning moon cuts leafy shadows across the forest floor. Fog begins to rise in silvery tendrils. And there! A movement to my right, subtle and easy to miss.

Shit, he’s good. His thermal signature is nonexistent. His movements are exceedingly slow and most of his body is hidden behind a thick tree. I can’t get a clean shot. I’ll have to wait until he steps away from the trunk. From the little I can see, he seems to be wearing a mask under the hood of his ghillie.

He doesn’t look up. I’ll be the first to know when he does. He moves forward a fraction. The barrel is pointed to the ground. He doesn’t seem to know I’m here.

I inhale slowly, exhale, and hold. My index finger increases the pressure on the trigger. Just a little bit more. Come, Runner. Just one step farther. Put your centre mass in my kill zone.

He takes that step and, in a move too fast for me to comprehend, he lifts his rifle and points the muzzle in my direction.

I hear the plop at the same moment the pain spreads through my ribcage, slamming all air from my lungs. Shocked, I rear back, slide, and lose my grip. My hands flail, trying to catch the branch that now quickly evades my reach. Pieces of moss shred off the bark and fall with me.

The shortest moment of wind in my hair.

Then, the forest floor hits me hard on my back. I gulp. My lungs are a frozen clump of agony. My eyes burn. The singing in my ears drones out the soft noise of approaching footfalls. But I can see him, his weapon at the ready, eyes glittering in the moonlight.

Fuck.

He slips off his mask. ‘What did you put on your face?’ He bends down and dips a finger at my cheek. ‘Mud. Hmm. The thermal imager picked it up. Good hiding spot, though. Why did you wait? You could have shot me.’

‘Hhhhh,’ is all I can answer.

‘You okay?’

The asshole hasn’t asked me how I’m feeling since we arrived here. He has his toughen-up-Micka project going. As if I needed any of that. On my second day of training — after he was done chasing me through the surf for twenty-four hours and sand had rubbed my skin raw, especially the private places — I decided that whatever pain he dishes out, I’ll take it and ask for more.

As usual, I show him my middle finger.

‘Excellent. Debriefing at sunrise, land-navigation training at oh nine hundred. You have two hours. Get patched up.’

Yeah, sure. As if I have the habit of asking anyone to bandage my ouchies. I touch my side where the marker hit. My fingers find the slimy paint. I bring my hand to my face, but can’t identify the colour. Last time he used a purple so intense and sticky, I couldn’t get it off me for hours.

I blink and turn my head to watch him leave. Slowly, the world drifts into focus.

Runner’s gone.

* * *

It took me twenty minutes to reach our camp. Kat was already up and about. She saw me limping past, raised an eyebrow and told me to follow her into the comm tent. Knowing that a physical would entail getting undressed, I shook my head. Besides, I don’t trust her. There’s something off with Kat. She’s tough as nails, efficient, and rarely expresses any emotions. But that’s just the obvious. It’s as though she has this space around her, a bubble of harshness that keeps people away. When you dare step into this bubble, her pupils contract and her eyes grow cold.

She’s a communications specialist — not someone you’d find in the first line of defence, but I could swear she knows from experience how to kill. And something tells me there’s no soft core underneath all her rough layers.

So when she grabbed me by my arm and stopped me half-way to my tent to examine me for injuries, I automatically switched to counter-attack mode. It’s as if someone has flicked a switch in my brain. There’s never fear. My skin heats and the flavours of cold brass and iron spread at the back of my tongue. Time slows and I know where precisely I have to hit and kick to cause a shitload of damage.

But when her fingers pushed and probed through my shirt, I wasn’t so sure anymore what to do first: pass out from the stabbing pain, or punch her throat. She told me that fractures of the ribs are unlikely — seeing that it doesn’t seem to be hurting much — but should I experience breathing difficulties, I’m to let her know at once and Ben will fly me to a physician on the mainland. A pneumothorax isn’t fun.

Haha.

As if flying with Ben is any more fun. He would probably pull one of his loops while I’m trying to hold on to dear life, puking all over his airplane.

I wasted another thirty minutes on peeling my body out of mud and clothes (splattered with lovely pale-green marker slime), wiping the sweat and dirt off my skin, and replacing a few items in my rucksack. There’ll be no sleeping until we are finished with debriefing and land navigation training and whatever else Runner comes up with today. But I’ll not worry about it until I topple over. He can either leave me snoring wherever I plop down, or ask Ben to carry me to my bunk. Ben would be delighted, I’m sure.

Right now, I’m wolfing down a bowl of Yi-Ting’s delicious crab soup. I love the spices she’s using. They come in all colours, aromas, and strengths. From the yellow flower petals that add the barest hint of sweetness, to the ground hotness of small red seed capsules that had once scorched my thoughts for hours. I couldn’t even hear properly. Not to speak of all the spilled snot and tears. I’ll never try those again.

A hand touches my shoulder. ‘Micka? Wake up,’ she says in her sing-song dialect.

My butt slides off the chair. My legs react quickly and counteract the fall.

Yi-Ting’s slender fingers pinch my nose. I have yet to find a fruit or flower that does full justice to the flavours of her name. Yi tastes a bit like the little green plums that grow here. Ting is close enough to one of those impossibly quick fish from the ocean nearby. But not quite. I think they are called “tuna.” I’ll ask her next time she cuts one up and serves it raw with this salty brown sauce and that hot green paste she grates fresh off a rhizome. There are so many new words to learn and so many new flavours attached to them and to the food they describe. Sometimes, the word-flavour and the food-flavour collide so strongly I cannot remember which is which.

My mouth tugs itself to a silly smile when I push my emptied bowl towards her. ‘Thank you. You can revive the dead with your soups.’

She snatches the dish gracefully and plops it into a bucket with soap water. Everything about this girl is delicate: her neck, her hands, her feet. My gaze drops down to where her shirt touches her waistband. I can’t help it. I love it when her pants slide down a bit. They won’t do me the favour today, but once in a while they do and when she re-ties the strings holding her pants up on her hips, they sag another tiny fraction just before she hikes them back up. And there, right above the wing of her hipbone is this shadow of a ledge, or groove, or gentle valley that would divert the warm rain, maybe, if it doesn’t fall too hard, and lead it a little sideways to where her thighs meet.

Whenever I think of the smooth skin above her hips, my lips want to rest there. Exhaling a sigh, I lower my chin into my palm. Yi-Ting turns and catches my eyes (I’m probably at the idiotic end of the sheepishness spectrum now), then her gaze strays away and over my right shoulder. She smiles a lovely, heart-warming smile. I can’t keep my head from turning. Behind me, I spot Runner, hands in pockets, head lowered. He turns away and I can see the heat in his cheeks and the smile that only reluctantly dares to show.

My first thought is to snatch Yi-Ting’s hand and run far away with her. On the way past Runner, I’d kick his balls. At least I know now why he’s been shaving the scruff off his cheeks every morning for the past weeks.

My second thought is to collapse on my bunk and punch my pillow.

But all I do is stretch my aching limbs and make my way to debriefing. I know I fucked up the heat signature cloaking. He’s shown me how to do it, but I thought I knew better.

Itbayat

At noon, I dropped into my bunk, not once imagining Yi-Ting in my arms. Unbelievable!

I was half-dead. That’s how it felt. I slept until nine o’clock this morning when Runner rapped his knuckles against my skull. Now, I’m following his orders yet again. There’s no time for breaks. The Brothers and Sisters of the Apocalypse don’t wait for my sorry arse to be ready. Truth be told, they are only the Brothers of the Apocalypse. Don’t know if there have ever been any “sisters.” To the BSA, women are the birthplace of all that is evil, useful only as slaves in the kitchen and the bunks.

I call them the Bullshit Army.

The hollow, gas-filled pearl sitting on my tongue is a constant reminder of what the BSA is capable of. Runner’s one condition to take me as his apprentice was that I get a toxic implant I can crack with my teeth if the BSA captures me. I can take one or two men with me when I exhale the gas into their faces. That won’t be too hard, for they’ll be very close then — between my legs, raping me.

I shudder, trying to push the thought away. Women have inherited the shitty end of war. Not only do we get killed, we get raped until we beg to die. Sometimes, I hate humans and I can relate to the BSA’s motives to get rid of us all. But then I have to remind myself that it’s only the BSA who acts like that.

Well, mostly.

I’m an irregularity. Runner has never had a female apprentice, and neither he nor his fellow Sequencers think it was a particularly good idea to take me in. Since the night he told me exactly what he does, I think he and his friends might have a point. Not that I regret my decision. I love it and hate it at the same time. I’ve never been more alive than I am now.

Should I survive my apprenticeship, I’ll be a Sequencer and join the ranks of the guardians of humankind. Sequencers have existed ever since the Great Pandemic snuffed out three billion lives, and the remaining seven billion took up weapons and murdered each other — sometimes in hand-to-hand combat, sometimes by pushing a button, dropping a bomb, and ripping apart thousands while radioactively contaminating vast stretches of land.

The pandemics aren’t gone yet and I doubt they ever will be. Tuberculosis has had a grip on humankind ever since we began crawling around on this planet. The disease kept spreading until antibiotics were discovered, then it slowed down for a while until tuberculosis bacteria learned to neutralise the drugs. After all, it was microorganisms that invented antibiotics, so why shouldn’t they invent countermeasures? Sadly, humans were slow to realise this. And now, with multiple drug-resistance genes in all kinds of pathogens, many diseases cannot be cured. The cholera pandemic — the seventh in human history — hit some time in the 1960s. I can’t even imagine how the people lived back then. Cars, a moving-picture-thing they called “movies,” and food in such abundance that vast amounts were thrown away every day. I grew up with a donkey cart being the fastest way to travel, and with turbines and solar paint as the only means of energy production, besides wood from the surrounding forests to heat our houses. Even if we’d had “movies,” we never had the time to be idle.

School was somewhat of a luxury for kids from well-to-do parents — although I never considered it as such. To me, school was torture. Kids from poor parents had to work in the fields from dawn to dusk to put enough food on the table. When winter came, it often wasn’t enough anyway.

I think of the first day of my apprenticeship and almost stumble over my own feet. What a shock it was when Runner led me to an aircraft the size of…of…heck, I don’t even have a comparison. The thing was at least fifty metres long and produced so much noise that my ears screeched for minutes after I climbed into its belly. When it took off, I thought I would die from terror. And all Runner did was to calmly place his rifle on the floor and show me how to aim, how to hold the stock steady, and how to exhale and pull the trigger.

I’ll have to shoot people soon. I know it’s going to be men of the BSA — a bunch of sickos with the goal of eradicating all humans. They believe that God (or whoever wants us all gone) sent the Great Pandemic to get rid of us, because apparently he believes his latest job — the creation of humans — has turned out to be sort of unsatisfactory. Since the course of the Great Pandemic was unsatisfactory as well, considering three million of us survived the disease and the ensuing wars, the BSA feels compelled to help God bring an end to all human life. I don’t know what they think God will do after that. Start from scratch and have another unsatisfactory result?

So…to save lives I’ll have to take lives, and that’s what Runner teaches me. I don’t want to think of my first time. I really don’t. But I can’t help it. He’s told me that his custom-built suppressed .50 calibre rifle doesn’t just plop holes into people — it rips them apart at a maximum range of two-thousand five-hundred metres and a muzzle velocity of one thousand metres per second.

My own rifle is a suppressed .357 calibre highly accurized rifle with a maximum range of one-thousand five hundred metres. The thing can punch voids into folks. A shot to the head would tear half the skull off. I don’t know how I’ll keep my eyes open when a man is in my finder and I squeeze the trigger.

Although my rifle is much lighter than Runner’s, the thing weighs heavy in my hand now. My pack carries fifteen kilograms, and half of that is a bag of the rice Yi-Ting packed with a grin. No, I’m not attempting to suffocate my enemies with grass seeds. I’m exercising. Endurance, Runner calls it. Fuck it. I can endure a lot of shit. I’ve starved every third or fourth winter. I’ve seen people die from bloody coughs and infected wounds no matter how much I helped our physician with infusions, cold wraps, and broth. I’ve had my hands in blood up to my elbows when I saved Runner’s life. And I saw my brother die.

I wipe the last thought away and focus on running. He wants me to run a certain distance in a certain time. No idea which numbers he mentioned precisely and I don’t really care. I give my best and that’s all there is. He knows that, anyway.

I’m not complaining. I had a whole night’s sleep and the sweetest girl on the island is with me. She thinks Runner is treating me too harshly. He can treat me much harsher if it makes Yi-Ting run with me.

Her bare feet tread lightly in the sand. I stare at the swing of her narrow hips. Her long black hair ripples behind her. It’s so shiny one would think it’s bathed in oil.

I hope she doesn’t know I’m watching her.

As long as the ground isn’t freezing, I prefer to be barefooted. Here in the subtropics, there’s no reason for me to squeeze into footwear. Boots make my toes useless for balancing and my footfalls get loud and clunky. But in moments such as this, I’m reminded of how much more vulnerable naked feet are — I have to watch out not to break my ankles. The dark-grey rocks are round and slippery. The sea washes over them, allowing algae to grow on the surface and mussels in the cracks between. I’m pretty slow and can’t focus on anything but my feet and where to place them. Once I reach soft sand, I increase my speed and let my mind wander.

So here I am, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, chasing a beautiful girl while carrying combat paraphernalia on my back, a sniper rifle in my hand, a .40 calibre pistol strapped to my thigh, and a large knife at my hip. Yi-Ting wears her loose cotton pants and shirt, she’s unarmed, smiles a lot, and is as fast as a deer. The two of us must make for a curious sight.

‘Are you okay climbing this?’ I huff when we reach the cliffs.

‘Are you kidding me?’ She rolls her eyes.

I love the lilt of her voice and how her words taste. Sometimes, I beg her to speak her wild mix of languages for me, and when she does, it makes my tongue prickle. The dominant Min dialect tastes of a handful of berries tumbling through a wooden bowl — round, soft, and quick, with a tardy sweetness and a slight rasping across my palate. The Japanese fragments mixed into it are softer, strewn with grating dshee sounds that spread flavours of unripe plums in my mouth. When she speaks English, her linguistic flavour seeps through and I find myself adopting her speaking patterns just to taste her from a distance.

I dig my fingers into the rock and begin pulling myself up. I’m not allowed to sling my rifle over my shoulder, Runner said. If not for the weapon and the weight on my back, I’d be up there in a flash. But one-handed and with a shitty centre of gravity, the wind could probably blow me off the cliffs.

I climb and kick very inelegantly, scraping a chunk of skin off the side of my right hand, until finally I scramble over the edge.

Yi-Ting stands with her hand on her hip, her pants showing a pale gap between waistband and shirt. My heart pounds a double beat. I long to see more of her smooth skin but right now I’m dirty, sweaty, and ridiculously red-faced. She’s too pretty, anyway. She’ll never let me kiss her, even if I polish myself.

I inhale a deep breath and tackle the final stretch of the run. Only two kilometres on flat terrain left: stupid muscle-producing exercise. After that, sharp shooting. Runner wants me to be exhausted, trembling, and hypoglycaemic to see how my aim is under simulated battle conditions. I’ll probably plop my bullets into some poor gull high up in the sky instead of the targets on the ground.

After half of the final distance, my legs and lungs burn, but I don’t slow down. I’m probably too slow anyway. Yi-Ting moves like a dancer. She doesn’t appear the slightest bit winded.

‘Yi-Ting?’ I manage through elaborate breathing. ‘Tell me about your flights. I need a distraction.’

She chuckles and slows until we run next to each other. ‘I’m both Ben’s and Kat’s apprentice and in my third year.’

She always begins her stories like this. You can tell she’s proud having two mentors. She keeps them both busy and happy with her performance.

‘I switch back and forth between the two, but this is the first time the three of us are working together. Kat teaches me everything about communication and intelligence. It’s exciting but too much sitting on my bum for my taste. With Ben it’s much much more fun.’ She grins. ‘I love flying.’ Then, the corners of her mouth pull down. ‘Only…the bombs.’

The bombs. I still can’t wrap my head around this gentle girl throwing huge packs of explosives down at BSA camps. Or Ben! Compared to the serious Kat, he’s a fun guy. I’ve never seen him angry or sad, and the mop of tight blonde curls make him look like a small boy, harmless and funny.

Ben and Yi-Ting pull off all kinds of dangerous things with his small solar aircraft. The machine is so quiet you hear it only when it’s about to slam right into you. I once saw her fly a loop while Ben cheered from the ground. My stomach was about to blow lunch just from watching.

‘What about the cooking?’ I grunt. I need a break and probably shouldn’t spend the little air I’ve got left on chatting.

‘My dad is a cook. I was raised in his kitchen and soaked up all his secret recipes.’ She shows me her white teeth. ‘Cooking is second best to flying. Besides, someone has to feed you crazy people.’

On my first day, I mistook her for the kitchen help until she smacked the towel at Ben’s butt and made him do the dishes. Then I thought there was something going on between the two, but soon Ben started flirting with me for some bizarre reason, and Yi-Ting didn’t seem affronted. We are only three women on the island, me, Yi-Ting, and Kat. I’m guessing Ben tried his luck with his apprentice and she told him off. And no one in his right mind is going to mess with Kat. So that leaves only me and the ants and bees.

The wind is whipping salty air into my face. I can see Runner far ahead. He stands unmoving and watches my progress. Am I late? I pump my legs and spend the last bit of energy I didn’t know I had. Puffing and grunting, I run up to him, and drop my ruck next to his rifle.

‘No, you’ll be fifty metres to my left. Put your earbud in. Move.’

‘See you later,’ Yi-Ting calls and I’m not sure if she means only Runner, or both of us. I pick up my stuff and make my legs run a bit farther. Then I drop my ruck, take the earbud from my pocket, plug it in, and make myself comfortable on the ground.

‘We’ll practice synchronised sniping,’ sounds in my left ear.

Okay, so we’ll be aiming at the same target, alternating shots, calling out corrections, and acting as each other’s spotter to make sure the target is very very dead.

‘We begin on the far left,’ Runner says. ‘Total of four shots per target. I get the first shot.’

I gaze through my scope, blink in confusion, and check the set angle. ‘Runner? Did you fiddle with my scope?’

‘I might have bumped against it.’

‘Asshole,’ I growl.

‘It’s your responsibility to never let your rifle out of your sight and to check its functionality before you even think of walking into battle,’ he reminds me.

‘No shit.’

‘Distance and windage?’ he demands.

I assess the distance to the first target. The grass bends sharply to the right. ‘Eight hundred and fifty metres, stiff west wind. No cross winds.’

Runner fires and I see a spray coming off the wooden target’s left shoulder. ‘Favour right,’ he tells me and I aim and shoot. Spray flares up at the target’s centre.

‘Favour right,’ I say and he fires, hitting the target’s left shoulder.

‘Wind is settling. Hold left,’ I hear in my earpiece. I aim and shoot, the bullet hits the left side, a little too low, but if that had been a man, he’d now have both shoulders taken off, a huge hole in his chest and his guts flying every which way.

We work our way through the other three targets, each one hundred to one hundred and fifty metres farther away than the previous one, pushing my rifle’s range to its limit. I’m good at this, out of breath or rested. But what makes me itch all over is when people are shooting at me when I’m trying to aim. Runner had me crawling across our range every day for a whole week. I had to hit the targets’ centre mass while he fired right over my head. On the first day, half of my bullets didn’t even make it to their targets. Although I knew he wouldn’t shoot me, I was shaking with terror when the bullets zipped past my ears. When we were done a few hours later, it felt as if I’d let Runner down. He tried to hide his disappointment, but it was painted all over his face and posture.

‘Grab lunch and meet me for camouflage at thirteen hundred,’ he speaks through my earbud.

‘Where?’

‘Find me here, if you can.’

Yeah, shit. I’ll most likely be in his crosshairs for half an hour before I even see a trace of him. Humping my pack and my rifle, I make for my tent.

* * *

I take a large sip of whatever Ben has brewed. It burns nicely down my throat. As I roll my tongue around in my mouth the pearl clicks against my teeth. It irritates Runner when I do this, but I don’t give a damn. He wanted me to have it, so he can deal with my clicking.

I’m the one who has to learn to deal with it. The pearl evokes images of violence, even in my sleep. Blinking, I focus on the aromas of fruits and flowers and the sea — the air is thick with them.

Itbayat is a tiny splotch in the South China Sea. We are the only humans here. Everybody else, some three thousand people, were overrun by fleeing Chinese, who then found themselves facing a bunch of desperate Japanese. The battle was short, if one can believe the reports of the few survivors who left the blood-soaked island to itself. The torn remains of villages and small cities with their houses built of neat round stones still bear witness to the violence that swept the island clean of the human species.

Sometimes I wonder what the people planted in their gardens, what livestock they kept in their meadows and in which trees they carved their short messages to loved ones. They must have kept many goats, because their progeny are populating the island in great numbers. Their meat is deliciously mild, yet dark like game. I’ve yet to find birches and lime trees, but maybe there aren’t any in this region. There are short cycas, tall tree ferns, wild pear trees with sweet round fruit that are less gritty than our mountain pears at home, and the countless old trees with trunks so thick one needs three people or more holding on to each other’s hands to span their girth. This island is saturated with noises and life, the clicking of cicadas or crickets, buzzing of beetles, soft hooting and screeching and singing of birds of the strangest colours and shapes — all of them changing with the appearance and disappearance of the sun, with the gusts of wind and rain.

I peer up at the canopy of red cypresses, follow their wind-battered trunks with my gaze, and shut my eyes.

‘Want another one?’ Ben asks me. His voice pulls me back to our small unit sitting among a group of trees. I open my eyes and look down at the sea. The sun is cut in half by the ocean, bleeding dark orange across the rippling dark blue.

Ben steps in my view. ‘Earth to Micka.’ He waves a hand in front of my nose.

‘You are not earth, Ben. Not yet, anyway.’

He snorts. He’s as pale as the sand down at the beach. His short curly hair is the colour of straw, his eyes are light blue. He’s a nice guy and I like him, but he’s flirting with too much desperation for my taste. Everything about him screams, I need sex.

‘If I have another one, I might do things I’ll regret tomorrow morning,’ I answer.

‘Such as?’

‘Barf.’

Kat clears her throat (she never laughs) and rocks her chair far back, so far, I’m afraid she’ll tip and bonk her head. But she doesn’t drink, so she’s probably in complete control of chair and gravity and all.

‘I thought you might mean some other…activity,’ Ben says.

Okay, here he goes again. I sit up straight deciding to amuse him a little.

‘You should be careful with alcohol,’ Kat tells me. ‘Last time you passed out after your second drink. I don’t think your system tolerates it.’

‘It will adapt,’ I retort just as Yi-Ting arrives. I never hear her approach. She treads so softly her bare feet don’t make a noise. She places a large bowl with rice and strips of vegetables on the table, takes the offered glass from Ben’s hand, and sits down on a fallen tree next to Runner.

Shit. I should have put my ass there instead, and she’d be sitting next to me and not him.

I notice my own irritation and let some of it leak out. ‘Such as?’ I dare Ben.

He puffs up his cheeks, wiggles his eyebrows, and smiles some kind of can’t you guess smile at me.

‘What?’ I huff, faking naiveté. ‘What do you mean?’

The corners of Runner’s mouth pull up a little. The sunset reflects in his black eyes. He doesn’t buy it. He knows me well enough.

Ben clears his throat. He’s about to say something, but I’m faster. ‘Okay, Ben. Give me another one of…whatever that stuff is.’

‘It’s a cocktail,’ Kat informs me coolly.

This woman is a machine. There’s not one smile inside her soul. She says weird things and the corners of her mouth don’t even twitch a fraction.

‘Doesn’t look like a cock’s tail at all. Looks like juice to me.’ And down goes the first half of the stuff. Wow. I feel much better already. I decide it’s time to flirt with Yi-Ting, but a hand sneaks into mine. It’s attached to Ben’s arm. He’s sitting next to me.

‘Um…Ben?’

‘Yes?’ he says and scoots his chair closer. His arm is touching mine. I can feel the soft fuzz of blonde hair tickling my wrist.

‘I’m…’

‘Overwhelmed?’ he whispers into my ear. His breath runs down my neck when his lips touch my earlobe.

I burst out laughing. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. ‘Oh, oh…No, I’m…Shit, I can’t even remember the word for it. There’s a word for it, dammit. Gimme a second.’ And I’m still laughing and holding my stomach and I know it’s cruel, but how can he believe he’s overwhelming in any way?

I can’t remember the word that’s used for women like me, so I splutter, ‘I fuck girls, Ben.’ The hand disappears and a squeaky ‘Oh,’ comes out of his mouth.

‘Sorry, should have warned you earlier.’ I don’t dare look at Yi-Ting now that she knows I’m into women. Would she feel repelled? Shocked? Or relieved? Enticed, even?

The word “overwhelmed” plays back in my head, over and over again.

‘So…girls, huh? Exclusively?’ That’s Ben. He’s pathologically over-convinced of himself and nothing really shocks him much.

‘Never thought about it,’ I say truthfully and without thinking. The only person I had sex with was Sandra, and it was lovely until she spilled her guts about Runner. ‘I could have sex with a lot of men and women as long as they don’t talk much.’

Did I just say this? I clap my hand to my mouth. I feel queasy all of a sudden. ‘I need to…’ I manage to stand and stumble to a nearby shrub. Ben’s cock’s tail or whatever it’s called shoots from my stomach and hits the ground.

Visuals

‘Get your ass into the comm tent.’

‘Morning, Kat.’ I pick up my breakfast, and follow her. Runner is already there, nursing a cup of tea, his straight black hair resting on broad shoulders. ‘How’s the head?’ he asks without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘Attached,’ I croak. And ringing, but he doesn’t need to know that. I settle in a chair and gingerly shovel rice and fruit into my mouth. I don’t want to upset my stomach any further.

Kat nods to a screen. It shows a live-stream of the small camera attached to the belly of Ben’s airplane. ‘They just flew over the observatory. It appears untouched.’

Puzzled, I look at Runner. ‘Didn’t the BSA attack it, kill everyone, and cut off our contact to the island?’

‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he says.

Ben and Yi-Ting have been taking high-resolution images of Taiwan since we arrived at Itbayat. They’ve now scanned more than sixty percent of the southern half of the island. The northern half is so contaminated with radioactivity that little but moss, ferns, microorganisms, and insects thrive there now. Taiwan used to have four nuclear power plants, three at the island’s northern tip and one at the southern tip. The southern plant was modern enough to be equipped with a fail-safe mechanism that forced it to shut down slowly without human assistance. The other three wreaked havoc.