MythicIsland.com

Chapter 1

It was early December, two-fifteen AM, and the chill of KCA Security's operations center had sunk into Ava Arnett's bones. She stood at the observation window, forty-nine stories above the beach, hands resting in the pockets of a quilted vest—non-regulation, but an essential defense against the room's unchanging climate.

Adapt or die—or find an excuse to get outside again.

Beyond the glass, the night air stewed, sticky and warm, unseasonable weather even for Honolulu—because a monster was on the way. The heavy, humid air, its exhalation.

Behind Ava, a chair creaked in the near-dark. Fingers pattered a faint arrhythmic beat against a computer screen, and the dispatcher softly murmured to an officer on patrol, "Stay strong, Sugar. We're not at the hard part yet. You know it's gonna be crazy-town, the next few days."

An unwanted burst of adrenaline—signature of lurking anxiety—sent Ava's heart into a flurry of shallow beats. Without turning around, she murmured, "That is the understatement of the year."

Out of habit, she conjured a scene in her head: A brief dancing flame, a lit cigarette, its dry feel between her lips and the burning taste of tobacco smoke—a drug that both soothed and sharpened the mind. Ava had never smoked in her life, but the mental exercise stymied the rise of real memories she did not wish to revisit and, like the action heroes in century-old movies, it let her bleed off her anxieties in a long, soft exhale of imagined smoke.

With Hurricane Huko churning ever closer, faithfully following its predicted path, everyone needed some means of coping—especially when the memory of round one remained so raw.

Just nine years ago Hurricane Nolo had come up out of the south. The Category 5 storm had hit the island of O‘ahu like a slow-motion bomb, decimating Honolulu. Its 215 mile-per-hour winds had shredded tens of thousands of family homes and stripped the city's towers, tearing away their glass facings and purging their interiors. The storm surge had washed away coastal neighborhoods, redistributed toxic chemicals, and caused the collapse of highways and underground utility tunnels. But the massive rainfall was worse. As the storm churned north across the island, ridge-top neighborhoods had their foundations washed out from under them, and the densely populated valleys were swept with landslides and apocalyptic floods. Even now, much of the city remained abandoned, inhabited only by ghosts.

But not Waikīkī.

Half a trillion dollars of Chinese capital had gone into reimagining the famous coastline and in restoring it as an economic engine of tourism. Ava's worried gaze wandered protectively over the result: an expanded shore, built on reclaimed land, fortified against the rising sea level, and designed to be resilient in storms. So different from before and yet still beautiful, still capable of rousing her sense of wonder.

All along the former oceanfront, hotels that had survived Nolo had been refurbished, others had been newly built, but they no longer stood at the ocean's edge. Instead, they faced an earthwork reaching eighteen feet above sea level. Grassed over, planted with tropical vegetation, its wide, flat surface served as an esplanade marking the inland edge of Kahanamoku Coastal Park. Footlights illuminated the path in gold and red holiday colors.

Beyond the esplanade, clusters of coconut palms shaded a long, inland beach—a sheltered strip of sand that embraced a chain of artificial lagoons, their waters black and glassy at this hour, undisturbed by swimmers, and reflecting the gleaming lights of the hotel towers.

An embankment of tall dunes stood beyond the lagoons, their slopes stabilized by waist-high, salt-tolerant grasses, silvered by moonlight and nodding in imitation of ocean waves under the stroke of a restless night breeze. Softly lit tiled paths wound between the dunes, and out, to a wide, reconstructed beach, and the open ocean beyond. Ava watched two night surfers, tiny with distance, making their way back to the hotels with boards tucked under their arms.

Sealed as she was within thick glass walls, she could not hear the surf, but the foaming lines of breakers were bright with both reflected moonlight and a white glow generated by the pummeled carcasses of bioluminescent jellyfish.

Equally luminous, but more colorful—pink, green, blue, yellow—sea serpents up to six feet long fed on the doomed jellies, their limbless bodies gliding in sinuous threads just beneath the ocean's surface. By design, the engineered creatures ignored the pod of twenty or so surfers sitting their boards beyond the break. Most of the surfers wore rash guards made to glow like the sea serpents. As a new swell rolled in, three moved to catch the wave.

Farther out, appearing and disappearing between the swells, a tiny but intense green beacon marked the position of DeCoite's patrol boat.

Officer DeCoite, unhappy with his current assignment, insisted on sharing with Ava his heartfelt concerns over his future fertility. His gruff voice reiterated his main point through her earbud: "It's not just debris out of the Pacific garbage patch, Ava. It is ra-di-o-ac-tive." Each syllable pronounced separately to ensure she grasped the true hazard of his situation.

Ocean currents occasionally carried debris from the Mischief Reef incident into Hawaiian waters. KCA Security's ocean patrol existed in part as a last line of defense to ensure none of it ever washed ashore.

"You wearing your hazmat suit?" Ava asked, conscious of the faint pressure of her tactile mic. It lay firmly against her cheek, a thin transparent wand curving from earbud to chin, monitoring the muscular activity of speech, its software mapping that to her audible words.

"You know it," DeCoite affirmed.

"So you're good."

Ava held the rank of shift captain in Kahanamoku Coastal Authority's limited hierarchy. Duties rotated among the four KCA patrol officers she supervised on the nightshift. DeCoite had been in the boat when a buoy alarm went off. So he'd caught the assignment—roping the debris, preventing it from being carried any closer to shore.

"If I gotta wait here any longer," he groused, "I am never going to be a father again."

"The navy is responding, Doug. Current ETA, fourteen minutes." She could see the silhouette of a patrol ship to the west, either the Makani or the Ho‘olua, on its way from Pearl Harbor. "And anyway, you got three kids already."

"Need more than that," he growled, "to make up for what we lost . . . what we're about to lose."

A tightness in her chest. Another flurry of heartbeats. "No, brother. We're ready this time."

She had meant to sound confident, but she wasn't good at faking it.

Hurricane Huko had popped up out of season, spawned from summer's lingering heat just two days before, but winding up rapidly toward Category 5 status. Its predicted track had it taking a turn to the north, with a high probability of a second direct strike against O‘ahu's already-shattered southern shore.

In the sky out over the ocean, a new light came into sight every few minutes. Another passenger jet, come to evacuate the tourist district and to spirit away the handful of island residents who had the money for a last-minute ticket out. Ava's ex had called from Spokane, begging her to get on a plane, "for the girls' sake."

"Not possible," she'd told him. "If I step out on my duty, I won't have a job when I get back." That was true—and a pointed reminder that the money she transferred to him every week kept him, their two daughters, and his new wife in better circumstances than he could afford with universal basic income alone.

An alarm pulsed, soft at first, but louder with each successive beat.

Ava turned to look down past a railing into the operations center's circular well, where screens displayed a curated selection of videos gathered from the park's omnipresent security cameras. At this hour, half the desks were empty. Staff consisted of only Joni, the dispatcher, two communications specialists, and a solitary researcher who sat transfixed, her youthful face illuminated by the subdued light of her screen as she announced, "EP4 at the Ala Wai gate."

Joni whistled softly.

"Another one?" Ava asked in disbelief.

"This is what?" one of the specialists demanded. "The third EP4 in nine days?"

"Number three," Ava confirmed—and all on her watch.

"He just stepped aboard a streetcar," Tammy, the researcher, reported. "And the streetcar is underway. No transit officer at this hour. He's alone. Status is red, on the prowl."

Ava grabbed the rails of a rapid access ladder and slid down into the well, the situation feeling weirdly routine.

Tammy continued to recite details: "Name of Expected Perpetrator is Robert Bell. Age forty-three. Island resident. Former real estate agent. Now basic income only. No current occupation. Estranged from family. Accusations lodged against him include sexual assault, battery, cruelty to animals. No convictions, but a minus twelve social rating in his assigned village."

No doubt Robert had been a nasty piece of work even before Nolo blew his life out from under him.

Ava shed her non-regulation vest, dropping it on her chair at the captain's desk while scrutinizing Robert Bell onscreen. A live feed from one of the streetcar's surveillance cameras showed him standing on the running board, one large hand clenched around a pole as the car rolled silently east past Fort DeRussy Park. A tall man, six two, a little overweight, graying hair neatly trimmed. He'd come dressed in the local standard—aloha shirt, khaki shorts, and leather sandals. Nothing overt in his appearance to suggest a violent nature. Just hints: a slow twitch in his lips, and a sense of tension around eyes obscured by the lens glow of his rimless smart glasses.

"Have we seen him before?" Ava asked. "Maybe as an EP2 or 3?"

Like the FBI, Homeland Security, the US military, and hundreds of local law enforcement agencies including the Honolulu Police Department, KCA Security used the AI-driven HADAFA system to identify Expected Perpetrators. The acronym stood for Human Algorithmic Decryption And Forward Analysis. HADAFA kept a profile on everyone. It used a subject's background, medical history, behavioral quirks, media preferences, social media activity, location data, Chinese social rating, and any other information it could scrape from the cloud to interpret behavior and predict a propensity to commit a crime—both in the immediate future, and over the long term. The baseline EP tag wasn't uncommon. But EP4? That was rare.

Ava knew the names of every EP4 who had ever entered the park, and Robert Bell was not among them—though maybe he'd graduated. A propensity for violence could increase over time.

"We have not seen Mr. Bell before," Tammy reported. "First time in our jurisdiction—but it looks like he knows where he's going."

Just like the other two . . .

Both prior EP4s had quickly closed in on their intended victims: melancholy women lingering in dark, unsurveilled areas among the dunes as if they knew someone would come, as if they'd made an appointment with fate.

Not on my watch.

Ava's officers had moved in quickly, confronting the EPs before they could carry out an assault.

But no crime meant no arrest, no interrogation, no clue what was driving this unsettling new game.

Ava opened a cubby, retrieving her duty belt.

"Joni, I want you to give everyone a heads-up," she instructed the dispatcher. "When he gets off the streetcar, have our two closest officers move in." A moment of hesitation, of reconsideration. "Have them move in, but do not intercept. I want them to stay out of sight. Take no action unless the crime is imminent. I'll be on-scene in a couple of minutes."

"Yes, ma'am," Joni said, a doubtful note in her crisp voice. But she repeated the instructions.

Ava strapped on her duty belt—a lime-green engineering marvel that held a two-round shockgun, four additional rounds, a folding knife, zipties, flashlight, disposable gloves, spray paint, do-not-cross tape, a canister of red smoke, and another of disinfectant. The belt's color suggested fire trucks and heroic first responders. That was the theory. And it made a bold contrast to KCA Security's all-black uniform.

The lightweight uniform was designed for sun protection in hot and humid oceanside conditions. It consisted of a long-sleeve athletic shirt with name, badge, and rank insignia embedded in the textile weave, knee-length cargo shorts, and high-top athletic shoes made of a fine mesh that resisted sand but drained water. All of it black—even the thin rim of the smart glasses she'd pushed up on her head so that they held her short golden-brown hair away from her face—because black stood out among the light colors and bright tropicals most tourists wore.

Ava liked the way the uniform provided camouflage at night.

She spoke to the specialists. "Forward me a list of potential victims in the path of this freak, especially anyone who's disappeared into an unsurveilled area."

"You got it, Ava."

She strode across the well to the open elevator door, where a four-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree stood sentinel, placed there by dayshift only a day before. The soft, steady glow of its LED lights ignited sparks of guilt in her mind. She'd be working through the holidays this year and wouldn't get to see her daughters. But she'd sent their gifts.

Stepping aboard the elevator, Ava pulled her smart glasses down over her eyes, activating them. "DeCoite," she said as the doors closed. The comms system registered the name, automatically linking her to the officer.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Notify me when the navy takes over."

"Oh, you'll be able to tell, Ava. I'll be glowing green as a sea serpent by then."

Chapter 2

Kahanamoku Coastal Authority's security division occupied the forty-eighth and forty-ninth floors of the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower. During standard work hours, visitors could use the hotel's guest elevators to reach KCA's reception desk on the forty-eighth floor. But security personnel had the use of an express service elevator, out of sight of the public eye. It let Ava descend uninterrupted, at ear-popping speed, to KCA's second-floor ready room.

There, glass doors allowed a one-way view outside onto an authorized-personnel-only deck bordered in waist-high planters holding colorful low-growing lantana. A short gated bridge linked the deck to the public esplanade, where a trio of young men wandered by on the tiled path.

Ava eyed them through her smart glasses. HADAFA tagged them as harmless, but she studied them for an extra second anyway, compiling her own profile based on appearance and mannerisms. They were lithe and trim, but not in the taut, coiled, contained manner of young soldiers. No, these were civilians with money to spend, dressed for a night out in voluminous slacks and tight-fitting, subtly glittering tank-tops scaled like reptile skins. Faint lines of luminous paint shone in their hair. Chinese, she guessed. Possibly Korean. They swayed a bit as they ambled on the path, looking like they'd reached the end of their evening.

Harmless, Ava decided, agreeing with HADAFA's assessment.

She moved on to the locker labeled Arnett. A quick biometric scan, and it opened. She retrieved her helmet, strapped it on, then turned to the charging rack where nine small electric motorcycles waited, green-lit. Taking the nearest, she mounted up and switched it on.

"Dispatch, give me an update."

Joni responded immediately: "The EP4 is still alone on the streetcar. Passing the Hotel Taipingyang as we speak."

At this hour, with few passengers to pick up, the streetcar could roll through most of its stops and make good time. Robert Bell had already penetrated deep into the district. Another minute, and he'd pass the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower.

Ava looked forward to meeting him.

She rolled the motorcycle, triggering the glass doors to open. The movement startled one of the glamour boys. He looked back as she exited into air thick with humidity and laden with the crisp scent of salt spray cast up by the roaring surf.

"Hey, cop!" he called out in a whiskey-roughened Chinese accent. "You take good care of this Chinese property, yeah? We have big plans for when we come back after the storm."

By interacting with her, he'd waived his right to privacy. HADAFA responded by whispering to her his identity in the gentle masculine voice she'd chosen for it: "Subject is Zhang Zhengying. Chinese passport, age twenty-eight, materials scientist with Shanghai Industrial Nanosystems, social rating +14."

A high-flying asshole, then. But he wasn't wrong.

After Hurricane Nolo, when the faltering US federal government had failed to release disaster aid, a Chinese consortium stepped in, providing permanent housing for tens of thousands of displaced residents, with mortgage payments not to exceed seventy-five percent of a household's universal basic income—the monthly federal stipend paid out to every legal American citizen. The only requirement: residents had to abide by a good-citizen agreement that enrolled them in the social rating system.

That was the first stage in an ongoing takeover. Stage two had come with the restoration of Waikīkī. And the completion of stage three was imminent. Despite bitter protest, the cabal of oligarchs known as the Venturist party—presently in power in Washington—had pushed a deal to cede the island in a ninety-nine year lease, in exchange for debt relief and the lifting of economic sanctions imposed against the United States.

Venturist propaganda made Ava seethe: We have no choice but to cut our losses and focus on the heartland of real America! Fuckers.

It was of course coincidence—and not divine judgment—that Hurricane Huko had spawned on the opening day of a conference meant to culminate in a signing ceremony that would ratify the handover treaty.

The gate opened for Ava. She crossed the little bridge, stopping just short of the esplanade. Silently, subtly, she mouthed a question: Dispatch, where am I going?

The subvocalized query generated faint neuromuscular signals that her tactile mic picked up and interpreted. A synthesized version of her voice echoed the question in her earbud.

Joni answered, "Stand by."

Got it, Ava acknowledged.

The mic activated when it picked up a trigger word or phrase. Ava could get away with thinking Hurry the hell up, confident the sentiment would not be relayed to the operations center.

Her impatient gaze tracked the trio of young men as they strolled off toward the Hotel Taipingyang. She wondered if Huko's looming presence would delay the signing ceremony. Some small part of her wanted to see the storm strip the value from the pending lease, because maybe then, the Chinese would back out of the deal in a last-minute move to cut their losses.

But that wasn't likely. Not for a people capable of thinking in the long term. And the hardship Huko could cause to everyone still left in and around the city was incalculable.

Joni checked back in. "Our EP4 is on the ground. Disembarked outside the Imperial."

"Got it," Ava said, speaking aloud this time.

On the east side of Waikīkī, the Kalakaua Avenue pedestrian mall had been re-routed to pass behind a string of new hotels—the Imperial Garden among them—a planning decision that had granted them the coveted lagoon-front status.

Ava rolled onto the esplanade with her headlight off. She could do nothing to stop the handover, but she could at least interfere with Robert Bell's night out.

She turned her motorcycle toward Diamond Head, opposite to the direction the young men had taken. On this stretch of coast, the points of the compass were rarely used to give directions. Instead, Diamond Head and Ewa substituted for east and west. Mauka meant toward the mountains, and makai toward the sea.

Ava moved out slowly along the empty path, determined to allow Robert Bell time to reveal his destination. Footlights lit the way with seasonal splashes of red and gold, while overhead, moonlight filtered through the canopies of trees—all regrown from stumps salvaged out of city neighborhoods abandoned after Nolo.

On her left—below the esplanade and just past the Pacific Heritage—lay the sprawling festival grounds, where the famous Duke Kahanamoku statue still stood. Post-Nolo, the statue had been recovered from the debris, refurbished and resurrected so the Duke, native Hawaiian ambassador of the sport of surfing, again welcomed visitors to Waikīkī. On Ava's right-hand side, at hundred-yard intervals, narrow pedestrian ramps angled down to the lagoons. Each ramp served as the start of a path that meandered through the dunes and out to the beach, occasionally intersecting. The paths were named for coastal plant species: Niu, Hala, Pōhuehue . . .

Joni said, "EP has skirted the Imperial. Now entering the public access alley."

From this, Ava surmised that Robert Bell did not mean to hunt on hotel grounds. Through the alley, he could access the coastal park without encountering any questions from hotel staff.

"Who's on scene?" Ava asked.

"Akasha's coming up from the beach. Mike's on foot, a few minutes behind you."

"Good."

Joni said, "Robert Bell is walking like he's late for a date. Crossing the esplanade now."

"Kīpūkai ramp?"

"Looks like. Yes. You better get up there."

Despite Joni's urging, Ava held back. She couldn't arrest Robert Bell because he intended to commit a crime. Even an EP had legal rights.

She mouthed the trigger phrase, Formal request. And then added: Time?

The system answered: "Two thirty-four AM."

A predator in search of elusive prey moves slowly, stealthily. But Robert Bell moved with a swift certainty that assured Ava he knew where he was going, and he knew when he had to be there. A two-thirty meet up? Let the victim arrive first . . .

Ava's own presence on-scene had to be precisely timed.

Now Tammy's voice spoke in Ava's earbud: "I think I've found the EP's target. A solitary female entered UA-34 fourteen minutes ago. She has not exited."

"Thanks, Tammy."

Ava slowed as she approached Kīpūkai ramp. Lingering in the shadow of an arbor draped in broad-leafed hao, she gazed past the lagoon below, to the dune path, looking for Robert Bell, but he was already out of sight.

She moved to follow, speeding down the ramp. At the bottom, she put one booted foot down, pivoting against it to make the hard turn toward Kīpūkai Bridge.

The susurration of the bike's tires shifted as she left the tiled path for the faux-wood planking of the low bridge. Below her, the dark lagoon rippled with the flirtations of a lone couple who reacted to her presence with a sharp gasp and nervous giggles.

A light breeze set palm fronds rattling as she left the bridge, creating a coarse white noise that swiftly transitioned into the sinistrous hiss and rustle of wind-stirred dune grass. In another hour, maintenance bots would emerge to noisily blow spilled sand off the path and reshape the slopes, erasing any evidence of footprints. Now though, she heard only the wind's hiss and the muffled roar of the surf—but in the winding, sound-channeling labyrinth of the dunes that was noise enough to cover even a shrill scream.

Joni spoke, tension in her voice as she said, "The EP has moved off the main path toward UA-34."

Got it.

UA—short for Unsurveilled Area—designated a pocket of privacy, demanded by popular opinion. Even so, "unsurveilled" was a conditional statement. Though no KCA ground cameras or low-flying drones were permitted in the UAs, eyes in the sky remained. Five hundred feet above the tallest antenna on the tallest coastal tower, an autonomous solar-powered surveillance plane flew a continuous patrol, returning to ground only when forced to by storm winds.

"Okay," Joni said. "Mr. Bell has stopped. He's holding a position behind the not-allowed sign. But you need to get in there, Ava, before she gets hurt."

"I'm on it. Is Akasha ready?"

The young officer had earned Ava's trust since her transfer to nightshift less than three months ago. She'd proven herself fearless and reliable, equally capable of persuading a grieving old gentleman to step back from a suicide leap, and of taking down a raging drunk twice her size.

Joni said, "Akasha just reached the intersection."

Ava rounded a curve and saw her, sitting astride a bike. At five-foot eight, Akasha had some height and the muscle to go with it. Her ancestry was mixed, but her round face reflected more of her Asian than her Hawaiian or her European heritage. She wore her long black hair wound tight in a service bun.

Ava rode up beside her, bringing her bike to a hard stop, letting the back tire fish-tail across the sandy path.

Lens-glow from Akasha's smart glasses hid her eyes, but the hard set of her mouth suggested an imminent retribution—an expression that had intimidated many would-be belligerents. "Looks like the target victim is another Chinese princess," she said to Ava.

"Yes, and I want an arrest this time."

"So we let it play out?"

"Just far enough that we can charge him with a crime," Ava said.

A quirked eyebrow. "You think someone's setting up these assaults."

Not a question.

Ava dropped the bike's kickstand and dismounted. "We need to time this perfectly. Let's go."

They loped down the path into the UA, their footfalls soft, stealthy, quieter than the tire noise their bikes would have made. Unsurveilled Areas were cul-de-sacs. One way in, one way out, with a little paved court, two palm-thatched gazebos, and no artificial lighting.

Silence enfolded them as the slopes cut off the wind and the surf's basso roar.

"He's moving again," Joni warned. "Going slow, but he's crossing the court, closing on the gazebo."

"We're right behind him."

Thirty feet in, the path hooked around a stabilizing wall that anchored the dune's sandy slope. Ava raised a hand, signaling Akasha to move into the waist-high grass. Stooped low, they resumed their advance.

Now Ava could see Robert Bell. Her smart glasses tagged him, and projected a blue glow around his tall, heavy-set figure. He stood near the center of the court, gazing up as if to admire the stars, pretending he didn't know anyone else was near. Then he looked down, looked at the gazebo, and moved slowly closer.

A woman's voice broke the silence. "Lokahi, is it you?" she asked doubtfully.

Robert Bell made his move with shocking speed. He darted into the gazebo. A light flashed under the thatched roof: a dropped phone, its display momentarily illuminating two figures. A clunk, as the device hit the gazebo's concrete floor. Darkness again. The woman grunted, gasped. A dull smack! and Robert Bell swore.

Akasha burst first out of the grass, yelling, "Down on the ground! Now!"

Ava came a step behind, flashlight out, the bright beam stabbing past the gazebo's side rail to reveal a dark-haired woman in a short silky dress, scrambling backwards on her ass, and Robert Bell in his shorts and aloha shirt, on his knees, one hand held against his bleeding mouth while he used the other to frantically gesture at a virtual screen Ava could not see.

A faint hum erupted from the dune grass surrounding the little court. Ava closed on the gazebo, with Akasha still ahead, now only two steps from the railing. The woman braced herself on her elbows and kicked out, striking Robert Bell in the nose with her flat-soled sandal. Blood erupted and he squeaked, rearing back. He grabbed at the gazebo's railing, used it to haul himself up. Then he spun around and staggered out the entryway just as Akasha vaulted in over the side rail.

The hum grew louder as Ava angled to intercept Robert Bell. "Down on the ground!" she ordered, her flashlight beam bobbing wildly as she pulled her shockgun from its holster.

The hum peaked. Then something punched a hole in reality, right in front of Ava. A doubled lightning blast of light and sound.

Next she knew, she was down. Cheek pressed against sandy concrete, sand in her mouth, head swimming, ears ringing, eyes dazzled. Shit.

She'd dropped the flashlight. Its beam stabbed across the court. Sparks of light danced in her eyes, impeding her vision, but from what she could see, Bell was not there—which meant he was behind her, readying to kick her skull in.

She rolled—and discovered her shockgun still gripped in her hand. Instinct guided her finger to the trigger, but Bell was not there. He must have run.

"Akasha," she called.

No answer.

Ava holstered the shockgun and forced herself to sit up. She spit sand from her mouth and tried again. "Akasha. Report!"

Past the ringing in her ears, she heard Joni making some incomprehensibly muffled demand.

Shit!

When Joni had reported that Robert Bell was lingering behind the not-allowed sign, Ava had assumed he was taking a moment to gather his courage or to confirm that his prey was alone and vulnerable.

Now she knew: He'd been releasing knock-outs instead. The flak-free chemical concussion grenades, carried on reusable micro-drones, were common in police work, but illegal in civilian hands. No doubt he'd pre-programmed them to crawl into position, where they'd be ready to take flight on command.

Ava holstered the shockgun and got to her feet, swaying a bit, relearning her balance as her vision cleared.

Joni's voice started to make sense again: "Ava. Report! You back with us, yet?"

"Confirm. I'm coming back together." She stooped to pick up the flashlight, then staggered toward the gazebo to check on Akasha and on the young woman who'd been expecting someone else, not Robert Bell. Guilt bit at her conscience. A crime had been committed and Ava now had grounds to make an arrest, but she'd let Robert Bell get too close. The woman could have been seriously hurt in just those few seconds when he'd had her alone.

Debrief later.

Right now, she needed to get Robert Bell in custody.

Wrenching her focus back to the present, she murmured to Joni, "Where's our perp?"

"Legging it back up the ramp to the esplanade. Mike's moving to intercept."

Inside the gazebo, Akasha gripped the railing, hauling herself to her feet. "That was an ambush," she growled.

"No, it was a backup plan."

The civilian sat on the gazebo's concrete floor, her back against a bench, teeth clenched, chest heaving. A trickle of blood stained the side of her face.

HADAFA whispered: "Subject is Ye Xiaoxiao. Chinese passport, age thirty, agricultural geneticist with Jinhua Agricultural Technologies, social rating +24."

Smart and competent, Ava concluded. Akasha could handle her. "Akasha, see to Ms. Ye—"

Akasha started to object. The young woman did too. "I am fine!" she insisted, her lightly accented voice low with fury. "You two go and get him! I will talk to you when the monster is in custody."

"We'll get him, ma'am," Ava assured her. "But we need to take care of you." She met Akasha's resentful gaze. "And that's your job."

Like it or not.

Akasha would rather run down Robert Bell than safeguard his victim, but it wasn't her choice.

Ava turned and took off, running hard, back to the main path, and her motorcycle.

Chapter 3

No way Robert Bell was going to get away. He had to know that. Surveillance was ubiquitous throughout the Waikīkī District, and KCA Security had access to every camera and microphone along the Kalakaua pedestrian mall, in the streetcars, and in the hotel grounds and lobbies. All nearby hotels had been ordered to close their doors against him, and Joni had assigned a micro-drone to track him.

That tracker had audio capabilities, allowing one of the communications specialists to speak to Robert Bell. The stern monologue played in Ava's earbud as she raced her little motorcycle across the Kīpūkai Bridge and up the ramp to the esplanade: Robert Bell, you have been identified. There is nowhere for you to go. You are ordered to stop. Stop now. Lie face down on the ground and you will not be hurt—

Ava crossed the esplanade, then descended to the grounds of the Imperial, following the route Robert Bell had taken, the way marked with a translucent green guideline projected in her virtual display. Her path veered right, past a no-access sign, into a maintenance alley—where a refrigerated van blocked the way.

She braked hard, back wheel fishtailing. The two men working to unload the van looked up, wide-eyed, until they recognized her. Both were familiar faces.

"Eh, Ava, who was that guy?" one asked as she rolled forward, squeezing past the van. "What's going on?"

"Later!" she promised. And then she emerged onto the pedestrian mall.

Coconut palms, imported after Nolo from plantations in the south Pacific, grew in clusters of three all up and down the tiled mall. In between, closed kiosks decorated with holiday garlands alternated with picnic tables, or benches flanked by blooming hibiscus plants growing in concrete containers. The streetcar tracks ran down the mall's center, with stops every three hundred feet.

A glance up and down the mall showed a surprising number of people out, despite the late hour. Ava estimated fifteen bystanders, every one of them looking east.

She turned that way too and glimpsed the tracker drone's red flashing light, just before it disappeared mauka, up Paoakalani Avenue. A black-clad officer, tagged by HADAFA as Mike Ching, came running hard from the Diamond Head end of the strip, rounding the corner seconds behind the drone. More chatter from the communications specialist, warning Robert Bell he had nowhere to go.

Truth, that.

Ava set off again, to the sarcastic cheers of a cluster of American tourists watching from a nearby picnic table.

She sped down the center of the mall, riding between the streetcar tracks. Just before she reached Paoakalani, the communications specialist went silent. Ava smiled to herself, thinking Mike must have gotten him.

She turned up the avenue, to find a posse of hotel staff in matching aloha shirts standing guard at the side entrance of the Kahakai Suites. Across the street, on the Diamond Head corner, a huge drop cloth printed with an idyllic scene of swimming dolphins hid the broken face of a still-shuttered hotel.

Beyond those two buildings, the street ended in the ghost fence: a chain-link barrier fifteen feet high, woven with polyethylene bamboo slats to hide what lay beyond.

Ava had expected to see Robert Bell on the ground, with Mike Ching applying cuffs as the tracker drone recorded the arrest. But the stub of a street was empty.

"Dispatch, give me a direction," Ava demanded.

"End of the street and to the right," Joni said. "There's a gate in the fence behind the construction yard. It unlocked for Mr. Bell."

"What?"

That was not possible. It should not have been possible. All of the district's security gates were networked, monitored, and controlled from the ops center. They did not unlock for random civilians.

"It's still unlocked," Joni added. "Mike's gone through."

◆

The ghost fence divided the living from the dead.

Day and night, the makai side churned with the presence of thousands of visitors at play in a thriving tropical wonderland—an imitation of nature kinder than the real thing, and enhanced by booze, bright colors, luxury suites, imported palm trees, and shoals of carefully tended flowers. The soothing melody of a lone guitar might fill a quiet corner; a crowded bar might quake with thunderous electronic chords. Both suppressed ordinary conversation in favor of a dialog of touch and intimate proximity. And everywhere, the glamour of the beautiful, the wealthy, of glistening bodies wrapped in a heat that burned away caution, because the true lure of the district was the prospect of sex elevated above the ordinary by the amnesiac energy that had forged the place.

Visitors did not come to Waikīkī to be reminded of death and ruin, and of the time before.

But cross over to the mauka side of the fence and memory returned. No way to forget what had been, what had happened, what could happen again.

Ava reached the gate, pulled it open, and rode her bike through. The gate closed on its own behind her, a loud ka-chunk as the electronic lock engaged.

From the ghost fence to the flood walls of the Ala Wai canal, the lesser hotels and the apartment buildings crowding the backstreets of old Waikīkī had been deemed uninhabitable and forcefully evacuated in the months following Nolo. In the years since, a few intrepid residents had defied state edict and moved back. But for the most part, the buildings that still stood were ruined shells, doors and windows boarded up and marked with spray-painted red Xs that served as a shorthand declaring the premises had been searched and all bodies removed. Officially, the fence hid the ruins and kept out the curious. But rumor whispered its real purpose was to keep ten thousand restless ghosts from wandering into the new Waikīkī.

Maybe so, but Ava had never seen a phantom spirit among the ghost blocks and her duties brought her across the fence several times each year to deal with juvenile nuisance trespass, or elderly squatters whose time-shifted minds existed in the halcyon days of a different century.

More and more, the empty streets reminded her of images of Chernobyl taken years after a nuclear accident made the Russian town uninhabitable. There, a slow surge of wilderness had gradually dissolved the neat city blocks. In the tropical heat of Waikīkī, the process ran faster.

After Nolo, but before the decision to abandon the neighborhood, the ghost blocks had been cleaned up. The streets had been bulldozed of debris: fallen trees, furniture, shattered glass, broken asphalt, and thousands of ruined cars gathered up and hauled away. Then the unstable buildings had been cleared out and demolished, their concrete ruins dumped offshore to serve as fill in the foundation of the new shoreline.

Nature had been at work ever since. The shifting climate brought more heat and more humidity every year, but since Nolo, it had also brought an abundance of rainfall. In just nine years, a mixed assault-force of banyans, Alexander palms, and spindly orange-flowered tulip trees had come to fully occupy the vacant lots, with seedling armies spilling out into the streets and across the remaining rooftops. The banyans were the most intrepid. They sprouted from cracks and seams in the sides of the surviving buildings, sending out exploratory roots, like slow-motion tentacles seeking for the earth.

In daylight, the ghost blocks generated a ceaseless soundtrack composed of the coarse calls of raucous mynah birds arguing over territory, the cooing of libidinous doves, the startled flights of pigeon flocks, the cackling and crows of innumerable feral chickens, and the warbling and squawking of green parrots and lovebirds descendant from those liberated by Nolo.

Nights were quieter. Crickets buzzed and trilled, and mosquitos whined. Somewhere, a barn owl screeched, and Ava heard the distant din of cats fighting. For a time, feral dogs had been a hazard, but not anymore.

She switched on her bike's headlight. Its blue beam picked out Mike Ching, running hard. Farther out, a ruby-red point of light glinted between tree branches, marking the position of the tracker, and of Robert Bell, already at the Kuhio Avenue intersection.

Ava accelerated after them, weaving between bushes and bouncing over root-heaved asphalt. She steered well clear of each sinkhole and trench marking the line of the old sewer system, and she held her breath as she passed. Not because of the smell—there was none—but because of what had taken hold down there.

Robert Bell had faced these obstacles too, and he'd successfully negotiated each hazard while running full speed, in the dark. He had to be following a safe path projected by his smart glasses—and that implied he'd planned his escape, and that he believed he could get away.

Not possible, Ava thought. But then, the open gate had been an impossibility, too.

"Behind you, Mike!" she called.

He heard her and ducked aside into the brush. She zoomed past.

The stern voice of the communications specialist reverberated off the hollow shells of the buildings as he resumed his harangue: There is nowhere for you to go, Mr. Bell. Give yourself up before you're hurt.

Ava no longer found his argument convincing, and Robert Bell had never been persuaded at all.

She passed Kuhio Avenue, and a short block later, another street on the right. Then, past the vegetation, she saw Robert Bell at last. He'd made an impressive run, but now he stood spotlighted by the tracker in a cone of flashing red light, halfway up a short flight of stairs that led to the front entrance of an abandoned low-rise condominium. He stood bent at the waist, two hands clutching the stair rail, back and shoulders heaving as he fought to recover his breath.

Ava needed just seconds to close the gap.

She accelerated toward him. He heard the tire noise, looked up—and threw a mocking, triumphant grin in her direction. "I've got a ticket out of here!" he shouted, moving on to the top of the stairs. "You won't see me again."

This made no sense. Robert Bell had nowhere to go. Plywood sheets bearing the ubiquitous red Xs blocked the building's door and windows. He had no way to get inside.

But as Ava brought her bike to a skidding stop at the foot of the stairs, Robert Bell went down on hands and knees in front of the blocked-off entrance.

The communications specialist grew frantic: Stop, Mr. Bell! Stop!

Ava dropped the kickstand on her bike, looked up, and saw a dark hole open in the base of the plywood sheet. with Robert Bell already crawling through it. She bounded up the stairs under the ear-splitting boom of the specialist's voice—Do not enter the building, Mr. Bell!

Too late. Only his hairy legs and his feet in their leather sandals remained outside. He was quickly pulling those in when Ava grabbed his left ankle. For two seconds, it was a tug-of-war, her fingernails digging into his sweat-slicked skin. Then the specialist's voice shifted to a fearful tone: Jesus, Ava! Get away from there. You're risking contamination.

Fuck, he was right.

She rolled away from the sour smell emanating from the hole. Scrambling to her feet, she backed away.

Damn stupid, to let the heat of the chase burn away good judgment.

With the entrance clear, the buzzing tracker bobbed and dipped and then followed Bell inside. For a few seconds, the refracted glow of its red light pulsed from the hole. Then that too disappeared.

Unlike Chernobyl, the hidden hazard in the ghost blocks wasn't radiation. It was an engineered fungus that fed on the bodies of dead things in the moist darkness of sewers and utility tunnels, and in the shells of boarded-up buildings. The fungus's toxic spores had been given the recycled name Angel Dust.

Ava spoke to the communications specialist. "CS, give me the tracker feed on my tablet." She pulled the device from her breast pocket and flipped it open.

The screen lit with the red glow of the tracker's light. Steady now, no longer flashing. The point of view moved at speed down a stairwell. At the bottom, a semi-basement. The red light revealed a fine haze in the air obscuring a row of rusted heaps that might once have been laundry machines. There was a collapsed linoleum counter, a toppled vending machine, a fire extinguisher still in its wall brace, and Robert Bell, wailing in frustration as his fist hammered at the door of what Ava guessed to be a locked utility closet. He raged, "Let me out! Let me out!" But the closet did not open for him.

She looked around at the sound of running steps to see Mike Ching bounding up the stairs to join her, taking them three at a time, sweat gleaming on his youthful face and his broad surfer's shoulders rising and falling as he caught his breath.

"It's over," she told him. "He's gone inside."

"No shit?" Mike took off his smart glasses, using his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his dark eyes. "Does he have an exit on the other side?"

"No. He won't be coming out."

Even as she spoke, Robert Bell's wailing pleas foundered in a fit of coughing. The tracker hovered stationary near the low ceiling, looking down at him, its rotors stirring the dusty air.

Somewhere in that room—Ava hadn't seen it yet—there would be a small body. A rat. A feral cat. Unrecognizable now beneath a white velvety growth. In its reproductive phase, each tiny thread of the fungus would be crowned with a capsule that split when ripe, releasing into the air millions of toxic spores—the Angel Dust. Roaches and other crawling insects, brushing up against the settling dust, could carry it between buildings so that the fungus could crop up anywhere, at any time, in the dank enclosed spaces of the ghost blocks.

Bell had to know that, but he'd gone in anyway. Why? Had he believed this building to be clean? Maybe. But if so, he hadn't checked it out himself or he would have known there was no backdoor out of that basement.

The spores carried a nerve toxin. Inhaled into the lungs, they triggered breathing to shut down—swiftly, if the dose was high enough. But if not, if the infection went untreated, death came slowly, with wracking coughs that could spread the toxin even as a new fungal colony grew and bloomed inside the lung tissue.

Robert Bell had breathed in the concentrated dust of a fresh bloom. Ava watched on the tablet's screen as he collapsed to his knees.

Mike leaned in to look. "Shit," he whispered.

Bell's shoulders rose and fell in short spasmodic jerks. Then he looked up. He looked directly at the tracker, his mouth working. No sound came out, but Ava understood him anyway: Help me. Help.

Too late for that, and he knew it. He gritted his teeth, shook his head, as if he couldn't believe it had come to this. A spasmodic shudder ran through him, and then he pitched forward, pressing his forehead against the moldy concrete.

Mike walked away, but Ava kept watching.

Another minute passed before Bell's body relaxed, subsiding to the ground.

A faction in city government still hoped to someday rehabilitate the surviving buildings in the ghost blocks. Ava closed the tablet and slipped it back into her pocket. She wished that every one of these buildings would be torn down.

"Ava." She startled as DeCoite's voice spoke in her earbud. "Ava, you there?"

Was he still waiting for the navy to come?

"Confirm," she said. "What's your status?"

"Glowing green."

"DeCoite," she warned, in no mood for banter.

"The United States Navy has collected the hot stuff," he conceded. "I'm coming in."

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