Her hand drifted to her belly, where another tiny butterfly movement signaled that her baby was still alive, still growing, still oblivious to the chaos around him.
He was Tony's baby as well, she reminded herself. Their future was going to be complicated.
"We've made it," she whispered to the tiny life inside her. "I don't know what comes next, but we made it this far."
The submarine hummed around her, its engines a steady vibration that should have been unsettling but was oddly soothing. They were moving away from the island, away from the Brotherhood's reach, away from the life she'd known for so long she'd nearly forgotten any other existed.
Toward what, she didn't know.
The clan. The village. People who were immortals like her but strangers nonetheless. Even Wonder was a stranger. They would need to learn to be sisters again.
"Can't sleep?"
The whisper came from below. Tony, of course.
"I'm processing," she whispered back.
"Yeah. Me too. About why you drugged me."
"Tony—"
"I'm not angry. I understand why. You thought you were going alone."
The accuracy of it made her chest tight. "We should sleep."
"Yeah." A pause. "Tula? We will figure it out, right?"
Tula didn't answer.
She'd already decided that, had already closed that door in her heart. He deserved better than what she could offer him, but he also deserved to be part of his child's future.
18
LOSHAM
Losham woke three minutes before his alarm clock would have roused him and lay in the darkness of his bedroom trying to identify what felt wrong.
Not wrong, exactly. Different.
The ceiling fan rotated overhead with its familiar whisper. The expensive Egyptian cotton sheets felt the same against his skin. Through the open window, he could hear the usual morning sounds—birds in the tropical gardens, the crash of waves against the island's rocky shore, the distant hum of the generators that powered this corner of Navuh's empire.
Everything was exactly as it should be, and yet he could feel that something fundamental had shifted.
Losham remained still, scanning through the sensations and the sounds, cataloging and comparing. The process took perhaps thirty seconds, and when it was finished, he had his answer.
The pressure was gone.
Whenever he was back on the island, he knew he was home because that pressure in the back of his mind returned. He'd often thought it was the oppressive heat or his father's larger-than-life presence looming over him, but it had become so familiar that he'd stopped noticing it.
Now it was absent, but something else was in the air.
Had he dreamt something that was still affecting him, even though he couldn't remember his dream?
Was it possible that Navuh had left the island and had taken the power of his presence with him? But his father never left the island. He sent others out to do his dirty work for him.
Could he be dead?
Those enhanced soldiers might have gotten free somehow and killed Navuh.
