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The platform looked bigger and more imposing out here in the open sea. It was at least 500 feet long and probably half as wide, though she couldn’t be sure of the latter since she was looking at it from the front. It stood well over a hundred feet above the water and rested on four massive foundations made of solid concrete, the heavy gray color marred by bright yellow stripes.

“How many people are onboard?” she asked Faith, shouting over the roar of the engine to be heard.

“The
Ocean Star
,” Faith said.

“What?”

“That’s what it’s called. The
Ocean Star
.”

“They have names?”

“I don’t know if all of them do, but this one does. It was designed for about 150 crewmen.”

“
Are
there 150 people onboard?”

“Not exactly,” Faith said.

From what she could see, the rig consisted of four levels, including the top platform. The lower three were a tangled web of beams and tubing, with rows of yellow guardrails and stairs crisscrossing all four sections from end to end and top to bottom. She paid special attention to the massive crane towering over everything like some kind of metal tentacle rising out of the ocean. She expected to see the snipers that she knew were somewhere up there, but even closer now she still couldn’t spot them. Either they were very well hidden, or Riley had taken them down. Maybe that also explained the lack of visible people moving around on the platforms.

“You live here?” Lara asked.

Faith nodded. “We all do.”

“I noticed you’re not wearing a uniform.”

“We’re not soldiers,” Faith said. She had on khaki cargo pants and a long-sleeve plaid shirt underneath a thick winter coat. Long, stringy black hair poked out from under a hoodie and blew against the cold wind. Unlike Hart and the five with him, the young woman looked nothing like a soldier.

Faith was also not armed when she showed up, and Lara’s cursory inspection of the boat—made easier because she was standing at the stern behind Faith—had revealed no weapons, though of course Faith could have hidden something inside the compartment under the vessel’s middle console. Lara wore her gun belt, but she hadn’t bothered bringing a rifle. If Riley was setting her up for an ambush at the oil rig, whether she came with one M4 or ten wasn’t going to make a bit of difference. The logic behind her decision was a no-brainer, but the emotional part was less easy to swallow.

“Don’t go onto the bad man’s oil rig, Lara,”
she imagined her mother telling her.

“Listen to your mother,”
her dad would say.

She crossed her arms over her chest for warmth. It might have been her imagination, but she swore it had gotten noticeably colder since she climbed onto the small boat and began her trek to the oil platform.

“Why did he send you?” she asked the girl.

“I don’t know; he didn’t tell me why,” Faith said. “He asked if I would come get you, and I agreed.”

“He asked you,” Lara said. It wasn’t a question.

“I told you, we’re not soldiers, Lara.”

Then what are you?
she wanted to ask, but didn’t. She said instead, “You’re survivors.”

“Yes.” Then, as if sensing her hesitation, the girl said, “Riley’s not trying to trick you, Lara. He wouldn’t do anything to risk Hart and the others.”

“He took plenty of risks when he sent them to take my boat last night.”

Faith seemed to hesitate, but Lara couldn’t see her face, so she didn’t know what the younger woman was thinking.

Finally, Faith said, “He regrets that. I don’t think he got any sleep at all last night.”

That makes two of us.

The girl slowed down the vessel as the
Ocean Star
loomed in front of them before finally killing the motor completely. She expertly used the boat’s forward momentum to ease it underneath the structure until they were alongside one of the docks. Riley may not have needed to order Faith to come get her, but it was pretty obvious the young woman knew her way around a boat.

Two men, both unarmed (at least as far as she could see without telling them to strip off their thick coats), were waiting for them underneath the platform.

“Riley’s orders,” Faith said, finally looking back at her for the first time since they started away from the
Trident.

“What’s that?” Lara said.

“No one you meet on your way up to see him will be armed, but you’re free to keep your weapons on you at all times.”

“That’s awfully considerate of him.”

“He’s trying to make up for last night. Please let him, Lara.”

The plea caught her by surprise, and Lara didn’t answer right away.

Finally, she nodded. “Lead the way.”

Faith took her up along the winding stairs while the two men worked to secure the boat behind them. There were a dozen vessels of various models already in the water when they arrived, including a couple of fast boats. She didn’t see anything bigger than a fifteen-footer tied to any of the docks and had to wonder if that was the reason they were so desperate to get their hands on the
Trident
—it was easily many times bigger than all the vehicles they had combined.

“Can I ask?” Faith said hesitantly.

“Depends on what you’re going to ask,” Lara said.

“Our guys. Are they okay?”

“They’re all alive, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I meant…” She paused, then, “I meant, was there any shooting last night? During the siege?”

“There was no siege. We took them prisoner before they even climbed aboard.”

“Oh.”

“What did Riley tell you?”

“Not a lot, but I thought something bad might have happened—” She stopped short and shook her head, then glanced over her shoulder with an almost apologetic look. “So there was no shooting? No violence?”

Depends on what you mean by “violence,”
Lara thought, but said, “No. We took them prisoner and put them in a room all night.” She saw the relieved look on the girl’s face and said, “Who are you worried about?”

“What do you mean? I’m worried about all of them.”

“But there’s one in particular, right?”

Faith might have blushed. “My boyfriend. James. Do you know if he’s okay?”

“I don’t remember talking to anyone named James, but if he’s part of the crew, then he’s fine. Like I said, we didn’t hurt anyone. They were smart and surrendered when we caught them trying to sneak onboard.”

“Oh, thank God.”

God had nothing to do with it
, Lara thought, remembering how close she had come to giving the order to open fire. If Hart hadn’t seen how badly out-positioned he had been and told his men to stand down, things might have gotten bad. The six-men-dead-in-the-water kind of bad.

“I guess everyone here knows what happened,” Lara said.

Faith nodded. “It’s not a very big place and Riley doesn’t hide many things from us, especially something this big.”

Lara was startled by a flock of birds that appeared out of nowhere and glided in for a landing along the railing next to her. They were small and purple, and she got the feeling she was more wary of them than they were of her. That is, if they noticed her presence at all.

“Oil rigs are magnets for birds,” Faith said, smiling back at her. “We get every kind.”

Faith wasn’t lying. Lara had seen flocks in the air as they were coming in. At first she thought they were going to swerve around the human-made monstrosity squatting in the middle of the ocean, but instead they honed in on it, landing all along the multiple levels.

“Where do they come from?” Lara asked.

“Everywhere,” Faith said. “By the time they reach us out here, they’ve been flying for so long they just crash. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Then, with a look that Lara wasn’t sure was a joke, Faith added, “Bird stew used to be on the menu until we realized how awful it tasted.”

They went up another set of stairs before finally reaching the top platform. As they climbed up, she took the opportunity to sneak a look at the ocean behind her before settling on the familiar white shape of the
Trident
about a mile away. From out here, the luxury yacht looked absolutely lonely surrounded by vast open ocean, which was exactly what she was hoping to see. It was going to take a lot
(a miracle)
to sneak up on the yacht’s crew. Anything other than a submarine was going to get shredded by gunfire before they even got close.

Seeing the solitary boat in the distance eased her mind tremendously. Even if everything went bad and Riley turned out to be the snake in the grass that a part of her expected him to be, at least she could say everyone onboard would be safe. Most of all, she could count on Blaine to put the
Trident
in gear and get out of there at the first sign of trouble. He wouldn’t want to do it and there would be all kinds of internal and external conflict, but Blaine would do the right thing. She had made damn sure of that before she left.

“That clearheaded rush you just got?” Faith said in front of her. “That’s the altitude. It’ll clear up any sinus problems you have. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s friggin’ cold up here, so keep your jacket on at all times or you’ll end up in sickbay.”

When she turned around again, the first thing she saw—because it was simply impossible to miss—was the giant derrick in the center. It was red and white and looked like a shrunken version of the Eiffel Tower. The only thing taller than the drill was the massive crane to her right. She spent a few seconds looking it up and down but like all the other times, she couldn’t make out any figures perched along its many sections. Even so, she didn’t believe it was empty for a second. It was simply too perfect a location to not have someone up there, and if her civilian mind knew that, someone like Hart and Riley would, too.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

“To answer your question, no; we haven’t turned the drill back on,” a voice said.

She looked over as a tall man walked toward her. He was wearing green cargo pants and, like Faith, wasn’t armed in any way that she could see. His jacket’s collar stood up against the sides of his neck to protect him from the cold.

“I’m Riley,” the man said, sticking out his hand.

“Lara.”

“I know,” he smiled.

She didn’t return it. “Nice place you got here.”

“It’s got a great view and the rent’s cheap,” he said before nodding at Faith. “I’ll take her from here, Faith; thanks.”

“I’ll go wait with the boat,” Faith said. To Lara: “Please listen to what he has to say.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Lara said. She couldn’t decide if she was annoyed or genuinely touched by the girl’s earnestness.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“I know,” the younger woman said before heading back down the stairs.

Lara turned back to Riley and caught him looking her over.

He recovered quickly and said, “Come on; let’s go inside. I should have worn my thermal socks.”

“I can’t stay long.”

“One hour?”

She nodded. “One hour.”

“That’s more than enough time.”

He turned around and started off and she followed, leaving just enough space between them that she could still see every inch of him and the spaces around them at the same time. She had done it unconsciously, and recognizing it, thought,
Is this what it’s like to be you all the time, Will? Always on 24/7?

“I’ll be perfectly frank with you, Lara. I’m surprised you came,” Riley was saying.

So you agree this is a stupid idea, too?

“But I’m glad you did,” he continued. “I know it took a lot of guts after everything that happened. But I wouldn’t have expected anything else from
the
Lara.”

He had glanced over his shoulder when he said that last part, and she gave him a wry look back.

“When did you figure it out?” she asked.

“That you’re the same Lara who sent out those messages over the radio? Not right away. I had to listen to our conversation a few times before it clicked.”

“You recorded our conversation?”

“The rig has a pretty impressive comm system. I had our talk recorded just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. A lot’s riding on this—six lives, for one—and I didn’t want to fuck it up the way I did last night.”

She smiled to herself because she knew he couldn’t see. “It takes a big man to admit when he fucks something up.”

“Thank you for not harming Hart and the others.”

“How can you be so sure that I didn’t?”

“You said you hadn’t.”

“I might have been lying.”

“Are you?”

She didn’t answer him.

He looked over his shoulder again. “Are you?”

“No,” she said finally.

“So my thank you stands.”

“People have gotten killed running around out here believing everything a stranger tells them.”

“But you’re not just any stranger, Lara. You’re
Lara.
”

She wasn’t entirely sure how to take that. The radio messages were therapy as much as they were an attempt to reach out to other survivors. She had only added her name to it with the second broadcast because, deep down, she still expected Will to be listening. It was stupid and desperate, but at the time she didn’t have anything to lose.

Riley led her through the platform and around the large drilling devices that occupied a good portion of the rig. They stepped over pipes of various shapes and sizes, a hard hat that someone had left behind, and passed a bright orange vessel hanging off the side. She guessed it was some kind of emergency raft. They entered a maze of pumps and tanks circling the derrick like army ants, each with their own command unit. She wasn’t paying attention to where she was going and almost stumbled into a group of heavy machinery but managed to swerve around them at the last second.

The remnants of spilled liquids—chemicals, additives, and fuel used to keep this place churning night and day back when it was still in operation—filled her nostrils. She could only imagine how loud it would be up here when everything was up and running. Right now she might as well be zigzagging through a museum, a showcase of how mankind once bled the earth for resources.