Something Son must have taken from one of the guards after they were killed, when the crew divided their possessions. Something he had kept hidden. A weapon?

No. Eiko had seen one of them in a movie, but never in life. They called it a “portable hole.” A scrambler with a radius of several meters—just enough to mask their heat signatures and flatten the raft’s presence into a shapeless piece of wreckage on the water.

Eiko heard a voice out there, weak on the sea.

“Help. Help us.”

The whirring increased. There was a tik-tik-tik-tik-tik of a silenced gun. The whir low over the water, moving, sweeping over the surface. Eiko felt frozen in place, pinned to the floor of the raft with fear.

“Over here!”

Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik.

Another voice, mumbling something in one of the crew’s many languages. Praying? It sounded, at least, like a prayer.

The whirring changed direction again.

Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik.

The sound was as light as the wings of a grasshopper as it passed near your ear.

Eiko wanted to weep for the other men, all gone now. Murdered, by this plan of Son’s. He wanted to choke Son to death. He had known! He had known most of them would die. Or all of them. And he hadn’t cared. He’d had his desperate plan—his portable hole, which just might be enough to protect him. His revenge, and a chance at getting home.

Had Eiko even mattered to him?

Far off, there was the sound of an alarm. The whirring outside increased, accelerating away, moving off toward that sound.

Eiko looked out through the raft’s triangular door flap. Darkness everywhere on the water. Dark shapes drifting, and lighter shapes as well—death and debris. And he could swear that one of the pieces of debris shifted, and that as it did so, an eye opened in it and looked at him. And that other eyes were watching him. That the water moved.

He collapsed into the bottom of the boat. He wanted to weep, but could not. He was shaking, but not from cold: from terror. He lay on his back in the bottom of the raft, expecting the whirring to return. For how long? It seemed like an hour, but may have been only minutes. Son, too, was silent.

The drones must be gone by now.

But those other things?

Just something his mind had made up. New terrors, as if the world did not have enough of its own.

The water in the raft was cooling. But there was more water, warmer than the rest, that must be coming through a small hole in the raft. For at least another minute, Eiko was silent. Then he turned on his side to face Son.

“You killed them,” he hissed. “All of them. To save yourself.”