Chapter 29: What Karev Chooses to Hunt

The submersible's hull cracked twice as they hit the outer tide-barrier pressure gradient, the sound moving through the chassis and into Karev's sternum before his inner ear processed it as non-structural. He noted it and let it go. Fourteen hours from Ark Penitent to Meridian's outer approach, running dark — no Compact transponder, Sova's charter paperwork listing a research depth survey in the opposite direction, a small and probably temporary deception that would not survive serious scrutiny. They had not needed it to survive serious scrutiny. They had needed it to survive long enough.

He had spent most of the transit in the forward observation seat with his notebook open, not writing in it. Ysolde had slept for four hours in the narrow bunk space aft, which was something a person with her discipline did deliberately rather than from exhaustion, managing herself the way she managed equipment. Pip had not slept at all. She had sat at the secondary console with her recording unit and Casca's fractured relay, harvesting fragments of Meridian transmission across eleven frequencies, assembling a picture of the evacuation in progress from crowd acoustics and official directive broadcasts and the silences between them.

"Lower residential tier is fully cleared," she said, somewhere around the sixth hour, not looking up. "They started on the mid-residential an hour ago. Controlled. Compact officers directing traffic, water-taxi requisition notices, the standard emergency displacement language." A pause. "People are complying. They're scared."