Opal steps back, panting with shock, one hand pressed against her cheek where her mother struck her.
“I take it this is not normal for them,” I say to Nysus. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not especially alarming.
Nysus jerks his chin toward the images playing out. “No. Not at all. But it gets…” He swallows. “It gets worse.”
The camera guy seems to realize that this fight is not staged for the audience’s titillation and starts to pull back into the hall.
“No, no,” the producer urges in a gleeful whisper. “Keep rolling.”
An antiquated phrase, but the meaning is still clear.
And the camera operator does, just long enough for him—and for us—to watch Opal straighten her shoulders and then slide her hand in the deep pocket of her bathrobe. She pulls out a large knife, blade gleaming, and holds it up, like a magician’s finishing flourish.
Vi Dunleavy gasps, a sharp, choked sound.
My stomach lurches in anticipation of what we’ll see next, but the screen goes dark.
“Did we find the mother during our search?” Kane asks me in an undertone.
I shake my head. “No.” Which means she’s somewhere else on the ship. Or maybe she was one of the “lucky” ones to reach the temporary safety of an escape pod.
The tablet flashes to life again, the next file starting up.
More jostling, more running, heavy breathing. Only this time, I can’t tell where we are in the ship. The screaming, though, that is unmistakable. Multiple voices raised in outrage, pain, and fear.
The running stops abruptly, and the camera focuses on the floor first. A familiar pale marble. The atrium.
Then the camera sweeps up and it’s too much to take in at once. It’s the atrium in mass chaos. A woman in a midnight blue gown sits on the floor, huddled in a ball, surrounded by her full skirt, rocking back and forth and sobbing. Two men in crew uniforms are splayed out on the ground nearby, bloodied. Dead. Stabbed,if the handle of the golf club sticking out of one’s chest is any indicator.
Across from them, in the distance, apileof people—I don’t have another word to describe this undulating mob of humanity—scramble on top of one another, throwing elbows and crashing fists into faces to get at something or someone I can’t see.
The camera jerks up, and there, at the railing by the staircase to the Platinum Level, a man in what looks like chef’s whites calmly wraps a cord around his neck and then steps over the edge. The cord snaps with his weight, though, and he plunges to the ground below.
I squeeze my eyes shut to avoid seeing him land.
When I open them again, passengers are fleeing from something, running in front of the camera, in singles or small groups.
“Don’t you see it? I saw… I thought I saw…”
“Come back here! I know it was you!”
“Allara, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” That last is from a woman wearing a shimmery bikini beneath a translucent sea-foam green cover-up and dragging her obviously broken left ankle as she limps on.
“What the fuck?” Kane breathes.
I shake my head—I have no words.
The camera shifts abruptly, zeroing in on a section of the atrium, in front of one of the planters. “Leslie?” the cameraman asks, sounding dazed. “What are you doing here?”
The camera operator sets the camera on the ground and walks in front of it, the worn heels of his shoes appearing before us as he moves away. “Leslie. You’re supposed to be at home. I don’t—”
The rest of his words are lost as the camera bobbles and shakes, someone grabbing it up from the floor.
“Mine, mine, mine.” The lens is tipped upward toward the person clutching it to their… his chest. Anthony Lightfoot.
He rushes through the atrium, his rough movement jostling the camera into providing glimpses of his surroundings. The chef sprawled on the ground with his neck at an awkward angle in a growing pool of blood. A man in a pale lavender tuxedo, streakedwith dirt and gore, has his hands wrapped tightly around the slender neck of a woman in a matching dress.
Shit.My hand tenses on the tablet, as if I could reach back in time and stop him.
