I had some ideas, of course, but until we got back to the veterinary complex and I could plug in the microscopes taken from the Lab, I couldn't know for sure. Depending on the exact function of the enlargement process I could wind up giving myself cancer if I tried repeating what the raptor did. Then there was the fact that the healing had seemed to be targeted rather than broad-reaching, had it been stress-induced or something else entirely, how that had functioned I had no idea.
I turned to look at Artur, to gauge his reaction. "So you understand why I might have a vested interest in it?"
Before sighing and lowering the but of his rifle until it rested against the floor. "I want another ounce and you can take watch for the rest of the night."
"...That's it?" He nodded and I snorted. "How very mercenary of you," I said drolly. I was already giving him half of the 'treasure' and he wanted more? Ok. If that was what it took to keep it from becoming a problem. "Fine."
He nodded, sighed, and looked down at the raptor before turning away.
I frowned. I honestly couldn't tell for sure if he was still upset about the whole thing or not. On a whim, I voiced as such to him and half turning he shrugged.
"Does it matter if I am," he said, voice tired, and in a way that was worse than if he had been upset.
Turning away he took a few steps toward his bedroll before stopping and turning back again. "By the way, for something that you control unconsciously, your bugs can be pretty active when you're asleep. I just figured you didn't actually sleep. I'm surprised that it's your imagination I've been seeing and not you." Without elaborating further he walked down the catwalk to the fuel tank and laid down. Though, before he tucked in, I made out the faint rattle of pills hitting plastic; something he hadn't gone to since the first days we'd been working together.
He had definitely gotten better at managing his outward expressions it seemed. That gnawed at me, but even so, his words came back to me: what did he mean by what I've been doing while asleep?
I turned back to the raptor as he settled in for the night.
My swarm was active while I was asleep? What was that supposed to mean?
Well, Passenger?When morning came the velociraptor was long gone. It had taken some coaxing, but once it was gone I'd been left with the rest of the night and a good portion of the early morning to myself. Unfortunately, with little else to do while Artur slept but tick off items on my ever-growing to-do list and spend a bit of time picking through the town, I'd inevitably looked inward.
For good or ill my passenger had never exactly been the most responsive tenant, and that hadn't seemed to have changed despite the brief period we had... overlapped. That my swarm was apparently active enough while I slept that I'd inadvertently given Artur the impression I was consciously controlling it...
In the few times I'd tried 'speaking' to it last night, there had been no response, overt or otherwise. If it had responded though? Then what?
The specter of the conflict-driven thing I'd been reduced to resurfaced whenever my mind turned to the subject.
Opening my eyes I looked out at the repair shop, spied on Artur as he went through his morning workout, watched the coastal fog roll in over the jungle.
Was this only a temporary reprieve? Was whatever had been done to fix me failing, dooming me to a slow decline back into madness and incomprehension?
Glancing to my right I looked down at a Golden Orb Weaver perched on my bulging satchel; working on attaching a simple button and loop fastener to the green-dyed silk.
"You know, if you are listening, now would be a really good time to chime in…"
Nothing. I sighed.
"And here I am talking to myself." Reaching out for the spider I had it perch itself on my raised index finger and raised it up to eye level.
"It's selfish of me, but the worst part is I don't even know if I'd want you to respond, if you could. But if you could and you didn't... " If it didn't that could imply... so many things, very few of them good.
I bit my lip. The idea I was talking to myself had been said in jest, but with how closely connected my passenger and I had been at the end… had there even a difference? Was there a difference?
Whatever Contessa had done before dumping me here had limited my connection back to what it had been. But she couldn't have been able to touch my passenger and we had overlapped to such a degree at the end there hadn't been much of a difference between us. If that hadn't changed on the passenger's end as it had on mine... was it possible that it was still just as much me as I had been it?
-I-
Departing after breakfast went as simply as packing up our things, hitching the trailer to the Oliphaunt, taking our positions in the basket of woven vines atop the beetles back, and leaving; no sudden surprises, no last-minute interruptions.
Beginning our trek down the coast, Artur had begun work on yet another carving project and seeing him begin carving a fresh chunk of wood I'd wondered if he would actually finish this one or if it would end up like the others, discarded into the night's campfire.
It wasn't exactly my place to cast aspersions, though. He had his distractions, I had mine, and with a cutting board set up on a table of vines, I worked on processing seeds from usable plants I'd collected during my watch.
Holding a paring knife with my prosthetic, and picking the other half of the lemon in my other, I extended the prosthetic, resetting it, before pulling the faux muscles and ligaments through what slowly became another addition to the arms range of motions. Practice, and after a while what had originally just been something to do became something meditative
Midway through the second lemon Artur lowered his carving. He looked into the trees encroaching on the road, fingers tracing over the edges of his carving. The lines may have been roughly hewn, the legs still a thick post connecting the body to the flattened base and head little more than an angled block, but the long tail and arching back made it an easily recognizable figure.
Slowly, his head turned back and he stared at me for a long moment until, finally, he took a deep breath and let it out. "Why did you really stop me from shooting last night?"
I glanced up and eyed him. "What makes you think I had any other reason?"
Artur stared back at me, expression contemplative. Then he sighed. "I think you had an alternate reason because you feel like you need to give a reason to be kind. You have power— yet you do not abuse it, more than can be said for most I think. But with what you've told me of your past, I also think you are too used to using fear and reputation to get your way, and too used to having to maintain that reputation. You led with wanting to test your new powers on the velociraptor, but I think you just wanted to help a wounded animal." A smile pulled at his mouth. "You certainly didn't need to help a stranger after he almost got you killed, or keep helping him after he answered your questions."
Making a noncommittal noise I finished chopping the lemon and dropped it into the makeshift juicer I'd formed from a bowl of water.
"Am I close?"
"...Close enough." Besides, of course, the lingering issue that I hadn't been the one to stop him complicating the matter somewhat. Sighing, I sat back against the basket of woven vines mounted on the Oliphaunts shell and stared back at Artur. "And you're right, my explanation about testing the Blue isn't my only reason." Pulling over my canteen I took a sip of lemon water and my thoughts were drawn back to one of the few people I could have called a friend. "Do you remember what I told you about Rachel?"
"The girl with the dogs? Bitch?"
"Her," I confirmed, nodding. "I learned a lot about pack dynamics working with her— paying attention when she interacted with her dogs, and when they were interacting with each other. The general details align pretty well with some of what I read about the raptors."
Artur blinked. "You can't honestly be thinking you can train it."
I snorted. "I appreciate the vote of confidence, but no. What I have in mind is nothing so optimistic. I'm just thinking that the situation isn't as clear cut as the raptors being natural man-eaters. When it was my turn to take watch at the Veterinary complex I read through a few boxes of files left behind. A few things stood out when it came to the Velociraptors— namely whenever issues of safety came up. The common thread was almost always the alpha of the pack and how unfavorable behaviors tended to be exacerbated by an aggressive pack leader. It was pretty much the same situation in a few files I found concerning the raptors on the other island."
Tracing his thumb over his carving's unformed leg his eyes narrowed. "You think that the issues with the aggression lay in the leadership, not the individual?"
"Something along those lines— that was certainly the chief veterinarian and game warden's assessment. It's just…" It took me a moment to gather my thoughts. I'd been honest with him the night before, my motives for helping it weren't wholly altruistic, but all the same… "When I started watching it, after it began following us, the impression I got from it was that of a beaten dog."
"It— That animal is not a dog," Artur replied, taking on a pained expression.
"No, it's not," I conceded. "But it's at least as smart as one and a recurring point in the veterinarian's notes was the raptor's remarkable capacity to learn— everything I've observed while interacting with the raptor has supported that. And beyond that, the raptor you saw last night is still young compared to the others you killed. It's a juvenile, I think. It probably would have been at the bottom of the pecking order. Frankly, all I'm hoping is that with positive associations it can be taught to not associate people with prey so I'm not forced to kill it."
It was a simplistic argument with a lot of 'maybe's'. I was reaching, I knew that, but at the same time I didn't believe what I was attempting was too much of a stretch.
Eventually Artur sighed and shook his head. "Do as you will. I have my doubts but what do I know. Dogs came from wolves and cattle from the auroch." He paused. "There is the issue of wild animals associating humans as food, but I believe it is safe to assume that the Velociraptors are well past that stage. Just… keep it out of sight, ok?"
I nodded. It felt he was throwing me a bone, but I took it. He hadn't exactly put aside his issues with the raptors, but at least he seemed to have resigned himself to tolerating my efforts.
I could work with resigned tolerance though, and when the hydroelectric plant came into range I knew I could buy a lot of tolerance.Inside one of the dam's turbine buildings built just above the riverbed, I leaned back against a damp block wall and watched Artur tear off a duct tape seal and peel open the lid of an orange bucket— the second in just as many minutes. The clean, new, plastic was an incongruous presence in the damp structure and like a flare when my bugs had found them. Some moisture had collected atop lids and had grown green, but otherwise, they couldn't have been here for more than a few years.
That they were here at all still felt like a bad joke. At least this place made more sense than the town; the dam would have even been comparatively simple to reach; someone could probably just anchor off the coast, drive a small boat up the river, unload their cargo, and leave without drawing the attention of the islands' wildlife.
Across the room, Artur dropped the lid and stared down at the jumble of precious metals and shining jewels within. Then he looked to the rest of the buckets and let out a strangled breath. Twenty in total, just as many as had been at the workers' town.
The two buckets we'd found may have been comprehensible to the man, but this?
I remembered an old lunch box filled with bills—earnest thanks for my help, and a trap. But this… I could guess at the wealth represented by those buckets. It was mostly in the abstract for me, even after the amounts of money I'd handled as Skitter. For someone who had grown up in relative poverty?
Definitely something he needed some time to process.
Pushing away from the wall I left Artur to figure things out and stepping out onto the damp slab outside I was hit by the sound of the water gushing out beneath the spillway gate and down the slide not thirty feet away.
No matter the wealth now available to him though, Artur's situation hadn't changed; he was still stuck here. He had all the money he could have ever needed and he couldn't use it for what mattered most to him.
Still. The treasure was a nice enough nest egg.
In the meantime, I had my own business here to attend to. I reached inward and touched the impression of the jungle at the back of my mind, drawing out a streamer of luminescent green smoke that coiled around my prosthetic. Standing in the doorway to the turbine building I panned from left to right, keeping a close watch for any change in the Green, but it seemed there was nothing tripping it up.
I touched the impression of the Lab and Cove. Creation, Change, Possibility; the impressions were conceptual in nature.
The damming of the river had created the lake, and in turn, that water had been used to turn the turbines—things representative of Creation and Change, things that should have resulted in this place becoming a source of Blue.
Or so I'd thought.
It wasn't a clear cut correlation between the impressions and the concepts: one impression had been a time-capsule laboratory, the rest of the building around it crumbling to ruin, and the other a short stretch of coastline with little to note. Half of my information was supposition and guesses based on what I'd observed. Yet…
There should have been something. But watching the Green smoke there was no sign of change; no indication of a local energy being present as when I'd homed in on the Lab and hot springs. Maybe what was here was too simple to have generated the energy, but for such a massive structure like the dam to have done nothing?
I looked up at the dam looming above. All clean lines and symmetrical design, the dam's structure consisted of three basic levels: the upper level, little more than a pair of arches situated above the sluice gates moderating the water flowing from the lake; the middle level—ground level, really—where a single lane road ran from one side to the other; and the lower level, a slab of concrete that rose six feet above the riverbed and supported a pair of concrete buildings that sat on either side of a central spillway.
The hydroelectric-plant was a heavy construction of weather-stained concrete that sat between walls of dark volcanic rock a once-untamed river had cut through over millennia. Some two hundred feet long and sixty feet tall, it was like a concrete barricade dropped in the gulch the river had carved out. In spite of it being built to hold back millions of gallons of water, though, the dam was unobtrusive and well concealed beneath the jungle canopy. Seeing it from overhead, it was invisible from the road and out of sight of the rest of the lake thanks to the shape of the terrain.
No. No, the dam being too simple wasn't the problem. I dismissed that idea.
The dam may have been simple in principle, it was a big thing that regulated the flow of the water, but its construction would've been a complicated affair and ultimately had a significant effect on the river and terrain that had once been 'upstream'.
There was definitely something here. But maybe it was too weak to detect? Too weak to notice until I was closer, as it had been with the Lab? But closer to what?
My feet carried me across the slab to a steel grate spanning the spillway. Water rushed by beneath me as I came to a stop to examine the Green writhing around my fingers.
Lips pursing I looked up at the dam again. Still no change, which meant… which meant what? I thought the river and dam would have fit as a combination of the change and creation concepts that the cove and laboratory had represented. But then the dam wasn't the same as those places, was it?
I turned in place. I took in the river racing along the rocks at the base of the slide, where it turned into a churning wash before settling; the layers of black volcanic rock eroded away to form the gulch; the stark concrete of the dam and the water spilling through the bottom of the gate. Taking it all in I reconsidered what I'd imagined.
At one point the river might have been something similar to the ocean; a microcosmic manifestation of change. Without the dam to hold it back, I could see a rush of water from the seasonal rains carving through the island's rock strata to create the gulch. Then the dam had been built; the river changed, controlled and regulated to create power.
The colors were conceptual. That was something I had to keep in mind. But if the dam wasn't Blue, then what was it? What did the dam represent conceptually?
The taming of nature? Certainly part of the concept, but too... specific.
I looked to the spillway, to the gates regulating the flow of water then back to the turbine buildings. Maybe… I stared down through the grate I stood on into the water rushing down the spillway. Control?
I squinted. Well, nothing would have changed if barriers hadn't been put in place to regulate the rivers flow. Ok. Maybe. Operating on that premise… Green was for Blue, Blue was for Red, so that would mean Red was for… Releasing the Green I pulled at the steaming, sulfurous pool of water in the back of my mind.
After a week of working with it and little to show for my efforts beyond a few sparks and a lighter trick, it was the most difficult of the colored energies I'd found. However, if the dam was controlling the river, then something seemingly anathema to being controlled seemed a more fitting measure for detecting a hypothetical opposite.
Slowly, embers of Red energy flickered into existence around my prosthetic; red light reflecting from golden silk. Like sparks rising from a fire they appeared at random and were short-lived, lasting only seconds as they jerked about before flickering out as more appeared.
I panned my prosthetic and the intangible interface the missing limb had become in one direction, then another. I turned in place. After a few turns I smiled as the slightest of shifts in the embers appeared; a barely noticeable pattern in how they appeared and moved before flickering out.
"There you are."
Following the fractionally more ordered embers I crossed to the other side of the spillway and up the staircase opposite the one Artur and I had descended.
With each step the embers grew more ordered— shifting into a pattern, a grid; reappearing in the same location, flickering in and out on a steady rhythm. Closer.
Tracking the changes I found myself drifting towards the encroaching jungle—making a B-line for a small, squat concrete building almost surrounded by foliage. I came to a stop at a grey metal door with rust bubbling up and deforming its painted exterior. Sending my swarm inside I built a rough mental image of dusty filing cabinets and a wide workstation littered with glass-faced gauges and switches.
The control room. After a moment I nodded to myself. That made sense.
Glancing down at my prosthetic I frowned at the embers that had become increasingly ordered—though still only slightly.
The changes in the Red proved there was an energy here, but it seemed… weak.
Compared to the effects the Lab and Hot Springs had on the bit of energy I'd used to sense them out—it felt like what I was seeing here was little more than background noise. Or would it be more accurate to call compare it to background radiation?
Regardless, its strength—or lack of—didn't stop me. Something was more than nothing and what was here was different, new. A new data point for me to work with to try and figure this stuff out.
Using a bit of water from my prosthetic I got inside, at which point the embers flickering shifted.
Holding my prosthetic out before me I watched the embers as step by step they became a bit more orderly until I stood in the center of the room, the control station on my right. I turned in place, watching flickering embers for any change, any sign of a stronger effect, but there was no new response. Waving my prosthetic toward the controls had no noticeable effect either.
Tentatively, I took a few steps further into the control room and the effect lessened, back to the middle of the room and it strengthened.
"Ok, so it's definitely weaker than the others..." At least compared to the lab and hot springs, which had extinguished the bit of energy I'd used to find them.
I Idly looked around the dusty control center and out at the dam through my swarm. Nonfunctional, inactive and only remaining through the sheer weight of its presence.
I guess this is what the Lab would have been like if it hadn't been sealed.
I only worried over this new bit of information for a few moments before focusing. The weakness of the energy wasn't optimal—it certainly didn't bode well for its usefulness beyond experimentation—but it was an opportunity. There was still energy here acting upon the Red, so why not force a reaction? Reaching for the impression of the hot spring I pulled at it and drew out the energy in a slow bleed. More embers appeared around my prosthetic.
Sweat beaded on my forehead, a combination of the water making up my prosthetic warming and the strain of pulling energy from the hot springs. I ignored the strain and kept watching the rotating pattern. A minute passed, two, three… then, for an instant, the ordered embers lost cohesion, drifted out of place, and in the next instant something shifted in response and— I seized on the thread before it could vanish and a light shone.
For an instant, the specter of something loomed in the blinding white light leaking from my fist: A grand and maddeningly intricate machine, countless pieces whirring and pounding to a single purpose. A vast ant colony, each worker playing its role without complaint or deviation, building towards eternity even as they sacrificed without question. Unity of mind, unity of purpose. An army of blank-faced victims moving as parts of a monstrous whole, striving at the will of an alien intelligence against the golden man who would destroy them all.
Then it was gone and the light intensified as a new impression appeared in the back of my mind, with the flickers of red reorienting as the light's energy mixed with the embers. Becoming regimented and organized, the sparks rearranged into a perfect grid around my prosthetic, all the embers appearing and disappearing in-sync; strobing on, then off, then back on. Neat and orderly.
The cost, though… my stomach churned as I turned and examined the grid. Where before they had been bright, flickering existences, now they were almost dull; something, a brightness, a spark, was just extinguished from them.
Goosebumps broke out across my arm. The energy was weak, the impression of the dam little more than a shadow beside the hot springs, but… what could it do if it were stronger?
My knees felt weak and pulling out a rolling desk chair from the control console I sank into it, staring at the little bead of light in the palm of my hand.
-I-
I was drawn out of my thoughts when Artur left the turbine room and called out for me.
Massing a bit of my swarm I formed a series of arrows directing him to the control room.
I looked up as he came inside and set his pack down. He glanced around the building before his gaze settled on me. "Any luck finding what you were looking for?"
Had I? I'd found something. Another color and another set of powers to discover. But what it was and what it made me remember… I shook my head and sat up. "Just thinking," I told him.
A grunt. "Same." He leaned against the filing cabinets and glanced out the green-tinted window. "So how much do you think those buckets would be worth," he asked without preamble.
Considering him I mulled over the question. "Are you asking for my best guess, or are you being rhetorical," I asked him, saying 'rhetorical' in English for lack of the correct word in Russian.
"Rhetorical?" he asked, carefully repeating my pronunciation.
I waved a hand absently. "Rhetorical in this case means you're making a statement rather than asking for information."
"Ah." Artur paused for a moment before nodding. "Then I'm asking for your best guess."
I nodded and recalled the exchange figures for gold—as best as I could remember them from offhand comments and briefings. "At a very rough estimate?" The two buckets we had from the town had both weighed in at around twenty pounds, assuming the twenty buckets had been filled evenly? Twenty pounds of gold multiplied by twenty buckets… "There could be around ten million dollars down there before laundering. That isn't including the jewels, just the gold, so it could very likely be more."
Artur was quiet—his gaze was on something only he could see.
"What's this about?"
Refocusing on me he spoke slowly. "What if... we use the cartel to get off the island."
The response hung in the air and I stared at Artur. "What did you have in mind?"
Setting down his pack he removed a folded up map from an outer pocket and stepped over. I rolled out of the way for him to lay it out over the control panel. Immediately I noticed it was not the one I had been using as it had a number of holes made by buckshot and been stained somewhat thoroughly by blood.
The map Artur's commander had hadn't exactly come out of the ambush in the best condition.
"It came to me after you left that my employer may have been more interested in these... caches—treasure, whatever you could call them—than the actual hunt," he began. "You see these?"
Artur put his finger to a building at the northern end of the island with a small red dash beside it—something absent from the map we had been using. Then he pointed to another, and another; continuing for several more scattered along or near the coastline. "When preparing for the hunt the commander told me these positions had been designated for secondary pickup. Places with structures that we could take shelter in with enough space in the immediate area for the helicopter to land in case we had injured—to load a litter, you understand," he explained and folded his arms as he stared down at the map. He shook his head. "I didn't argue the issue at the time, but as we had never planned to go beyond the upper valley region these locations simply don't make sense. A few, of course, one can never be sure what will happen—but not all of them, and none so far away from our area of operation. They may not be suitable as evacuation points, but what about as prospective locations to hide a cache?"
Artur shrugged and I turned my attention back to the map. Looking between locations I guesstimated how long it would take to reach them from the interior of the island.
"You're certain they weren't in case you had to leave your hunting area? If you were being pursued?"
His answer was a firm negative. "We had plans in that case. The tunnels and our masks, our tear gas, the feed bunkers—there were better options if we needed somewhere to hold down until pickup came. Perhaps the north dock and town, they aren't too far outside the upper valley, but the others…" Taking a deep breath and exhaling sharply Artur leaned forward to jab a finger at the first building he'd pointed out— a 'field lab' it was labeled —at the northernmost point of the island, and then to an emergency shelter at the opposite end. "If we ran into trouble, there were better options than retreating halfway across the island through rough terrain and around a volcano. There's absolutely no reason for half of these to have been marked as evacuation points."
So if Artur was telling the truth then he hadn't been in the loop, which made sense as he'd been little more than hired help… but had there actually been a plan for them to go to the locations? There would have been easier ways to do it than trek across the island with all their supplies and gear. If his boss had wanted to raid the caches, then why would he have bothered with a hunting rifle like he had? Or even come himself? Or not simply taken the helicopter to each location rather than walking?
I raised those points to Artur and he withdrew for a minute, staring into the distance before shrugging. "I can't say, and they are dead. Maybe the plan was to leave me and the others here after he got his kill, make us check the spots ourselves. It wasn't what I agreed to, but once I was here…" He shook his head and I nodded.
"You'd've been stuck." He had already been brought to the country without his papers, but once on the island, he would have been entirely dependent upon his employer's goodwill. Trapped.
Following the map's coastline my eyes tracked from point to point. If the marks were suspected caches, then if only half of them had something then that was a lot of money. It was a lot of money to leave lying around if you thought someone was poking around.
"So, you think the recent retrieval at the town was brought on by your boss coming here?"
"Right. He was given info about the island as part of some deal he was making with a cartel… they could have given him the information he wanted to not tip him off?"
"Perhaps." Probably. They were likely thinking he'd get himself killed if they had experience with the wildlife... No, no there was no 'if' about it, they almost certainly knew how dangerous the island was if they had been coming to it with any degree of frequency. "So what did you have in mind?"
"I was thinking the cartel may be coming back sometime soon. After losing someone they probably would have wanted to make sure they were better prepared. I thought we could wait a few days and seize control of whatever they're using to get here."
I… Was leaving the island really that simple? The cartel soldiers wouldn't stand much of a chance against my bugs and vines and water, and if they brought a boat then returning to civilization should be as simple as landing on a stretch of beach and then following the first road we found. But now that the possibility seemed so close, I found the idea of leaving oddly daunting.
The radio bunker had been slowly turning into a comfortable bungalow with everything I'd brought back over the past few weeks and the veterinary complex was a close second. I had seeds and samples of crops to keep myself fed with the Green and a wide range of literature from the town to entertain myself in my downtime. I was comfortable, and I had a project to focus on in investigating the spectrum of energies and what they could do. And… it was safe. I was contained. If there was a relapse into insanity I was likely to die before the week was out.
And yet… the opportunity to blend back into society without the responsibilities and restraints of my past was tempting. Very tempting. After two years of having my movements limited or closely monitored by the Protectorate, the freedom of being able to go where I wanted when I wanted was a heady prospect. And really, I wanted to see Artur get home, to succeed. I wanted to see a story have a happy ending, for once.
I sighed.
"There are a few things that come to mind. Assuming the cartel is using a boat—as something like a helicopter or sea-plane would have been overly complicated for them and a problem for us—I could get us out to it and we could probably take control with little issue. The problem is that with the amount of money at stake the cartel will have likely planned for something like this. The people in charge are no doubt going to have safeguards in place." I waved to Artur. "Perhaps to keep you and yours from seizing it—but more likely to keep everything from being disappeared by greedy subordinates. And while they'll almost certainly have a few higher-ranking members with the landing party to keep an eye on things, they'll also have something set up to track the boat if there's a mutiny. Maybe a hidden transponder on the boat, maybe another boat watching the first that only the higher-ups know about. And then they'll have people ready to intercept the boat."
I shook my head. "I'm confident that I can deal with them in a straight-up fight, but there are plenty of potential safeguards that would be just as effective against us as they would be against thieves. Hidden explosives, 'anonymous' calls to law enforcement, armed boats following at a distance… There's a lot that could go wrong."
Leaning back against the filing cabinets he folded his arms across his chest. "That fits with what I thought myself…" He sighed, "So what do you think? You'll be doing the heavy lifting here. Should we just leave the cache to not draw attention and keep working on the turbines?"
I blinked. "Hell no." Shaking my head I stood and twisted, eliciting several pops from my back. "Yes, I'd say we should stick with what we've been doing rather than wait around here on the off chance the cartel comes back sometime soon, but there's no reason we can't take the cache for ourselves. It's too much to take with us right now, but that doesn't mean we can't hide it in the jungle. And it's not a bad idea to have a Plan B. If they do come back sometime soon… maybe we could leave a radio? A note with a channel to contact us? What's the pickup range? Would we even be able to hear them?"
"They will cover the island within reason," he answered immediately, "so long as we are not in the shadow of a mountain. Our radios transmit in the VHF standard frequency range, it won't break up so easily. Short-range, but strong."
"Not strong enough to reach the mainland though."
He made a 'what can you do' gesture.
"Then we leave a radio behind after moving the buckets. I imagine wanting to know where the hell their money went will be enough to eventually prompt a call. When—if they call, I can bring us back using my bathysphere and take the boat by surprise. Worst comes to worst and they have effective countermeasures then…" For a moment I drew a blank before shrugging. "I guess we could use the onboard radio and call the coast guard—or whatever it is Costa Rica has. You could do as I was planning to and claim asylum."
Seeing him frown I turned to look up at him and elaborated. "The working idea I've been mulling over was to declare that I have retrograde amnesia—my handy inoperable brain tumor will help there. You, however…" I cocked my head, "I think the truth would give you the best odds. You could use the fact that your government is likely to throw you into a hole for being coerced into doing what a mafia boss wanted? Fleeing from government persecution is a good enough reason as any. It would also help if you can remember anything about what they were doing with the cartel."
He gave me a dubious look but let out a resigned sigh. "If you say so. Cannot say how long until the cartel returns so I would have no other choice... What about the cache," he asked. "If we capture a boat with crew, they'll talk. Maybe. How do we explain that?"
"Lie. Tell the truth. Whatever works. We can figure that out if it comes to it, but I doubt much if any of it will make its way back to the former owners—I'd rather keep it if that's possible," I said with a shrug. "Keep quiet and play dumb for however long it takes, then rent a boat. There might be people monitoring the island, but clearly people are getting here anyway and I'll figure out an alternative if need be. Maybe we could pay off the crew if they aren't on the cartels' payroll."
He looked uncertain about it all.
It would be a hard choice, by claiming asylum he'd be abandoning his homeland after all. His homeland and his family. Maybe he could send funds home, but to never be able to go back... well, I knew what he was feeling.
"Just think about it," I told him. "Until—if—the cartel comes back this is all academic, and the wind turbines work. So in the meantime…" Looking back to the map I idly tapped one of the red marks. X marks the spot. "...let's keep going with the turbine plan. No need to abandon it just yet and we can check the other locations on the way back rather than going through the interior. And with those caches, if we do call the Costa Rican authorities then we can have something to give them while keeping something in reserve."
I turned to Artur with a slight smile. "So, for now, why don't we go hide our millions and get back on the road." He grinned in return, and with a newfound spring in our steps, we made our way back out into the rich jungle air.
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