Chapter 2

  Jordan Dae held a clenched fist to her stomach, ground her teeth together, squinted into the dark swirling fog. Water sloshed around her bare feet as she forced herself forward, step after step. She knew that she needed to find a door. She knew also that, somehow, she was lost. She feared that it would not matter; she was dying. It seemed ridiculous that an ordinary person with an ordinary gun had put an ordinary bullet through her abdomen. An ordinary death. Nothing special.

  She supposed the wound would be painful if she could feel pain. Instead of pain, she felt her blood and her strength draining away. She saw, with a clear mind, that she would eventually die unless she could find bandages, a first-aid kit, something hot to cauterize, something to stop the bleeding. But there was nothing. Only fog, and the knowledge that her death approached as gradually and unstoppably as the sunrise. She might have preferred the distraction of pain.

  “Y’know, it’s funny,” she said, and paused to spit a mouthful of saliva. But she didn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment she couldn’t think of what, exactly, was funny. Maybe those two kissing each other, Carter and Sheppard, while Jordan Dae lay bleeding out from a point-blank rifle shot five paces away, not knowing she could see them. Maybe that was a little funny. “Maybe ‘Zeke’s got it right...power of love...bullshit.”

  It had been an impressive shot. Or lucky. A large caliber hunting round clean through the liver. An unaugmented human would have passed out and died ten minutes ago.

  The water was almost up to her knees now. Where was it coming from? Where was the lab? She was lost, sure, and that itself was strange, but she couldn’t possibly be so lost that she’d wandered out of the facility and into the lake three kilometers away. She’d been three levels down, and she had climbed no stairs. But there were rocks underfoot, slimy with algae, and the water smelled like the sea. If Shad were here, he’d say something about making assumptions about the genesis mist. “Is certainty wise? Nohow.” Then he’d check his book, puff his pipe, and make the mist do whatever he damn well pleased.

  A dark shape emerged from the fog ahead, a rowboat big enough for a dozen, run aground on a pile of gravel. Jordan sloshed to it. Empty. Oars and benches, nothing else. She looked all around, saw only water and fog. Water lapped at her thighs. It was rising. She stepped into the boat and lay down between the benches, gazing up at the silvery grey mist above. It was dark neutral grey, neither night nor day, but a ghostly twilight somewhere in-between. It made shapes, but she didn’t want to look at them. She closed her eyes. She would rest awhile. And if she awoke, then perhaps she would find that she’d drifted to some other place. And if she never awoke...well. Who would care? Maybe two people. She liked that thought. That was two more than had ever seemed likely.

  She drifted away, but it seemed only moments before she heard a sloshing nearby. The boat heaved, rocked to one side and tilted her awake. A large person rolled over the side with a painful grunt. Wood clattered on wood. Jordan couldn’t quite focus on the newcomer, but it smelled of gunsmoke and cigarettes and blood.

  “Oh,” said a voice, deep and coarse. “Wait.” The boat rocked again as the man shifted his weight. They were almost off the gravel, almost freely afloat in the water. She continued to lie on the floor of the boat. Could she have risen and killed this man? Possibly. Probably, unless he was something like that Alan Sheppard. But...why? That was a question she had not asked very often. That was an Ezekiel question. Maybe a Shadrach question. Not a Jordan question. Her question had always been ‘how.’ How to kill; never why.

  But it was funny...she just didn’t really care.

  Something large pressed down lightly on her stomach. This, she thought, was where she would have ripped the man’s throat out. If she cared. He wasn’t attacking her, though. He was only...

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  “Father,” he said, “heal this woman in the name of Jesus Christ.”

  She chuckled softly. And because she could not feel pain, it took her several moments to realize that his prayer had worked. The bleeding had stopped. And when her fingers searched her stomach for the wound, they could not find it.

  “There,” said the man in his gritty, guttural voice. He sounded pleased. “What’s your name?”

  Jordan continued to lie on the damp planks. The boat rocked slightly as the rising water at last lifted it from its place on the gravel. “Jordan Dae,” she said. Her voice was bland and neutral, but she was thinking: how had that worked? Was she going to live? What would she do next? Kill the guy? Most of all, why did she still not care about any of that?

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the man. “I’m Dwayne Hartman.”

  The name sounded familiar, but she could not at the moment recall where she had heard it. Instead, she remembered something Shad had said, Shadrach the Mystic, about the mist. It had something to do with belief. Reality was malleable, something like that. Jordan had spent no time thinking about that, but now she wondered. If she had believed hard enough, could she have healed herself the way this man just did?

  Oh, and here was a new question: why in the hell had he done that? Didn’t he know she might kill him?

  “Y’know,” she said, “I’m tired.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I expect I’ll get to rest soon.”

  Something splashed out in the water. Jordan’s eyes snapped open, alert, but the big man calmly reached for an oar and extended it overboard toward the sound. “Grab on,” he said.

  A third person tumbled into the boat moments later, dripping all over the prow. Jordan recognized him and sat up, thinking that maybe she would lie back down and rest after she’d snapped his neck.

  Shade coughed and spat the salt water. He wiped pathetically at his expensive suit as though to make himself presentable. He checked his pocket watch, though that had been useless for days even before a dip in the sea.

  Shade mumbled thanks to the larger man, Hartman, and then spotted Jordan watching him from the deck. He froze. He smiled. “Got ‘em, huh? I knew you could. Just thought I’d step out for a bit, you know...” He glanced around. “Guess the deal’s off, though. What the hell do we do now?”

  Jordan’s decision to kill Shade faltered. Again that nagging question she was not used to having to answer: why? What would killing Shade accomplish? She needed Zeke to tell her what to do. Her job was to act, not to make decisions. Shad gets the intel, Zeke figures out what to do with it, Jordan acts on it. That was their system. She needed them.

  “For now,” said the deep voice of Hartman, “we rest.” Jordan finally took a good look at him. Dwayne Hartman wore a battered and faded jacket with jeans and a plaid button-up shirt. It was hard to tell the original color of the shirt because blood stained the entire front. The edges of his great grey beard were beaded with red clots. He was a large man; his hands were huge and strong. But despite this, and his proximity, Jordan felt no caution. Her instincts, which never failed to warn her of danger, remained silent.

  “Fine with me,” said Shade. He combed his hair with his fingers in a doomed attempt to fix it up.

  Jordan relaxed, slowly and with some confusion, back onto the wet deck of the rowboat. Questions danced in the dark before her when she closed her eyes, but at last she slipped down into an uneasy sleep.