Danny Minot reached out for her. He touched her hand. Her fingers closed around his fingers. He reached farther with his other hand, and managed to get his fingers under the sling. He pulled Jenny toward him. Then he felt himself slipping off the rock.

Jenny screamed in pain as he wrenched her broken arm. But she welcomed it. “Don’t let go of me, please!” She reached with her good hand…caught Danny’s shirt.

A drowning person will take you down with them. Danny knew about drowning people. They were very dangerous.

He looked around. Was anybody watching? Then he locked eyes with Jenny Linn. “Sorry,” he said. He opened his hands and let her go. He was going to be pulled into the water and drowned by her, for sure…

Danny turned away. He couldn’t bear that expression on Jen’s face. He had done everything he could to save her. If he hadn’t let her go, she would have pulled him in, certainly…they both would have died…Jenny was doomed anyway. I’m a good person…He huddled on the rock while the water rumbled around it. Nobody had seen what he’d done. Except Jenny. That look in her eyes…

Karen screamed as she saw Danny lose his grip on her. “No! Jenny! No!” They glimpsed Jen’s head bob once more in the current, and she went down, and they didn’t see her again.

Chapter 19

Nanigen Headquarters 29 October, 2:30 p.m.

Vin Drake crossed the parking lot, moving toward Telius and Johnstone, who waited between two cars at the edge of the lot. Better to talk outdoors. Anything you said could be heard, recorded, preserved. He had to keep track of the details. Details are evidence. Evidence could escape. Evidence could fly out into the world; you could lose control of it.

“We’ve had a breach of security,” Drake said to the two men. Telius stood with his shaved head bent, listening, a short, wiry man with fierce, restless eyes that darted over the ground as if he was searching for some small object he’d lost. Johnstone, much taller than Telius, wore sunglasses and stood at ease, with his hands behind his back. A tattoo on Johnstone’s scalp shone through a fade haircut. Drake went on. “We’re dealing with industrial spies. They could destroy Nanigen. We believe these spies are working for a foreign government. As you may know, there are certain classified activities at Nanigen that unfriendly governments would very much like to know about.”

“We don’t know anything about that,” Telius said.

“That’s correct,” Drake said. “You don’t.”

Somebody drove by and parked their car, and Drake paused. He and the two men turned away, and walked along the edge of the parking lot, saying nothing for a few moments, waiting for the person to go inside the building. The trade wind rattled the seed pods of acacia shrubs growing in the empty lot nearby.

Drake turned and gazed at the metal building. “That building doesn’t look like much. But in the near future, the business inside it will be worth at least a hundred billion dollars. A hundred billion dollars.” He paused to let the number sink in. “Incredible wealth will be created for the lucky people who own ground-floor shares in Nanigen.” He squinted into the sunlight, then looked sideways at the two men. “You know what ground-floor shares are, right? The owners of ground-floor shares can sell their shares for a spectacular profit when the company goes public in an IPO.” Did they see where he was going with this? Their faces revealed precisely nothing. No thought, no emotion, nothing to be read or inferred.

Professional faces, he thought.

Drake continued. “I want you to go into the micro-world on a rescue mission to find the spies. I’ll give you a full movement kit. A hexapod and weapons, anything you need. The spies were dropped…are believed to have been lost in an area about twenty-meters radius around Supply Station Echo. So I want you to begin your search at Echo. It’s possible the missing persons are following the micro-trails, looking for supply stations in order to take refuge in them. The supply stations have all been removed-all except for Station Kilo. We couldn’t find Station Kilo. You are to follow the networks of trails, moving from the site of one station to the next, searching for the spies. And…ah…” How to put this clearly, so there would be no mistake? “You will find the missing people. But here’s the point: the rescue will fail. Understand? Despite your best efforts, the spies will not be found. I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. The spies have to disappear, but I don’t want to hear any rumors about what happened to them, either. If no trace of them is found, there will be a…reward.” Drake put his hands in his pockets, and felt the wind kissing his face. “Failure,” he added softly, “is the only option.”

He turned around and looked at the two men. He saw nothing there. The men’s faces held no expression. A small bird whipped past and landed in the acacia bushes.

“If the rescue effort fails, the reward for each of you will be one share of Nanigen ground-floor stock. When Nanigen goes public, a single share will be worth at least a million dollars. Get it?”

The men just looked at him with eyes as flat as the parking lot.

But they got it. He was sure of that.

“You’re venture capitalists now,” Drake said, slapping Telius on the shoulder as he left.

The rain ended as quickly as it had begun. A steamy golden glow filled the forest as the clouds broke, and the water quickly receded as the rivulets emptied, and the rain ran off into the stream that drained the Manoa Valley. They had lost a lot of their gear, scattered by the water. And Jenny had disappeared. They collected themselves together in a group, and when everyone was accounted for, they spread out looking for their gear and, most of all, for Jenny. They went downhill, following the water flow, using the two headset radios to keep in touch.

“Jenny! Are you there? Jenny!” they shouted, but there was no answer and no sign of her.

“I found the harpoon,” Rick said. It hadn’t traveled far. His darts had been in a plastic case inside his duffel bag, and the bag turned up wedged against a stone. Even the chinaberry was found, underneath the edge of a leaf, glowing yellow.

Karen King moved along with a sense of dread as they searched for Jenny Linn. She was shaking; she had seen the look on Jen’s face when she went down that last time.

The worst horrors are the human ones. What had Jenny seen?

Then Karen spotted something pale, soft, draped under a twig. A human hand. She had found Jenny. Her body was pinned under the twig, crushed and oddly twisted, and speckled with mud, with the forsaken look of the drowned, her broken arm flung akimbo and contorted like a wet rag. Jen’s eyes were open, vacant. Her body was covered with spaghetti-like threads, which crisscrossed and draped her like a veil. They were threads of fungus, already beginning to grow.

Karen knelt by the body and pulled a thread from Jen’s face, and closed Jen’s eyes, and wept.

The others gathered around. Rick found himself weeping, and it embarrassed him. He tried to control his tears, but it didn’t work. Peter put his arm around Rick, and Rick shook him off.

“I tried so hard,” Danny said, and cried. “I just couldn’t save her.”

Erika enfolded Danny in her arms. “You are a brave man, Danny. I never realized it until now.”

There was a creaking sound. The veil of fungus threads that covered Jen’s body seemed to twitch.

“What was that?” Erika said…and her eyes widened with horror as she saw a thread of fungus bend and wave, like a crooked finger, and the tip of the thread touched Jen’s skin. It went in through the skin, making a scratchy sound, piercing the body, probing for nutrients. The fungus veil had already begun to consume the body. Erika cringed, and stood up.