Galveston, Texas

It started as an unremarkable weather front in Nigeria, and in the following days it slowly moved across western Africa towards the Atlantic Ocean. Once it reached the warm oceanic waters the front intensified into a storm, then vacillated as if unsure what to do, but by the time it reached Cape Verde islands the storm was rapidly growing stronger and it was officially designated as a Tropical Depression Five on June 20. It was unheard of to have had so many tropical depressions that early in the season, but after a lull of a few rather placid hurricane seasons a record-breaking streak had been back for two years now, and seemingly growing worse. The first depression had formed the second week of May, almost a month before the official start of the season, and after that a new one had appeared nearly every week, two of them growing into level 2 and 3 hurricanes which had both made landfall in Northern America, in Florida and South Carolina respectively. One of the storms had stayed over the Atlantic and curved back in on the UK and France, hitting them with wind speeds of a tropical storm. Worse was expected; the year had been extraordinarily warm so far, with a deadly heat wave engulfing the whole of Europe as early as in the first days of June, and the continent´s power plants were churning out electricity for air conditioning at their peak capacity. A year earlier, almost fifteen thousand people had died in August in Italy alone as the country´s electric grid collapsed under massive demand, and in September the government had given emergency licenses for four new nuclear power plants despite an earlier Chernobyl-induced referendum which had banned nuclear energy forever from the country. Another storm had permanently wiped out two thirds of the inhabitable islands of the Maldives and destroyed their tourist industry, and people were abandoning their island nation in droves. It had been a bad year indeed. Not that there weren´t some bright spots; sub-Saharan countries were growing greener at accelerated pace, extending savanna into the former desert, and Siberia had become positively balmy. But obviously no one knew what was going to happen in the long run, and so far this year had been a good example of the meteorological chaos.

The Tropical Depression Five was upgraded to a tropical storm 24 hours later on June 21, and earned the name Evelyn. Two days later, the storm reached hurricane level, and by the time it made it´s first landfall in Cuba on June 27 it was rated a category 3 storm. Having flown over Cuba, losing strength over the land, the hurricane reached the warm waters of the Mexican Gulf and its winds started intensifying once again along a steady course towards Texas. In the early hours of July 2, computer models predicted a landfall between Freeport and Galveston within two days, and the City Manager issued a mandatory evacuation order for the entire island of Galveston.

“This is not the type of July 4 celebration I was looking forward to,” Harry grumbled as we lifted the heavy plywood panel against a window and he brought up the hammer. “I wanted to see the fireworks on my first Independence Day in America. Tell me again why we didn´t rent the house with the hurricane shutters?”

“Because you said it was butt ugly,” I repeated for the third time as he started to hammer in the first nail. “And the palm trees in the patio had fungus all over them.”

“Damn,” he cursed. “I bet the Causeway will already be totally jammed by the time we´re finished with these.”

“We still have a day and a half to get out. We´ll make it.”

“Isn´t there another bridge in the western end of the island?”

I hesitated. “I think so... but as far as I know the Causeway is faster no matter what.”

Muttering to himself, Harry finished hammering and we moved on to the next window. The Victorian style house didn´t exactly stand on stilts, but it was raised to minimize potential storm surge damage as the real estate agent had repeatedly mentioned while we were trying to make up our minds. It was a narrow two-storey building with a reinforced ceiling – hurricane-proof, she had claimed – and the previous owner had even built a comfortable crawlspace in the attic to escape an unusually high storm surge. After the onslaught of Ike and a couple of minor storms after that, Galveston seemed to be a particularly hurricane-conscious place even though very few people still intended to ride out storms. We weren´t in a particularly low-lying area of the city, but a 17-foot storm surge would still top the Seawall and swamp the city and even a lower surge could go around and enter from the unprotected bay side. Evelyn, presently a grade 3 hurricane, had the potential of wrecking the town even worse than Ike which had been only a grade 2 storm at the moment of landfall. For the time being, Galveston wasn´t projected to take a direct hit but in a day and a half the storm could still theoretically divert to almost anywhere and a large slice of the coast was under hurricane watch.

Harry looked up to the perfectly blue sky and shook his head. “I must say that right now I´m missing Midby.”

For a year, I´d been trying to change his mind about joining us, but he kept saying no as firmly as ever. I´d tried to be subtle, and when that didn´t work I made him feel guilty, and then I resorted to reason and logic after a bout of plain unadulterated nagging which I had prolonged only because he was exceptionally hot in bed when angry with me. All in vain. Almost every other male would have succumbed just because of the enlarged dick, but the bastard was already so well hung that I had no leverage there, and the way women went after him he hardly needed any of Engineer´s other tricks to boost his ego.

Note to myself: the next time, find a less attractive boyfriend. However, for the time being, I was quite glad to watch him at work with only a pair of baggy shorts on in the hot afternoon sun and a sheen of sweat covering his muscular torso. After he had taken off his shirt, a couple of cars had already slowed down suspiciously while driving by despite all the hectic craziness of the mandatory evacuation. Our plan was to finish with the hurricane protection, have a leisurely dinner to wind down, and take to the road once the sun had set and the worst heat of the day was gone. Undoubtedly half of the city residents had the same plan, resulting in an interminable gridlock on the way to the Causeway, but we didn´t want to leave the evacuation to the last minute. I had fled from a hurricane once before but then I hadn´t been in a low-lying island almost straight in the path of the storm, and considering that even normal Texan meteorological phenomena was sufficient to astound Harry after the placid Swedish weather he wasn´t looking forward to seeing even a far edge of a hurricane. The surge from Ike had flooded Galveston before a single drop of rain from the storm proper had reached the city.

Once we had all the windows covered, we dragged everything we possibly could from the first to the second floor, and when that was done we collapsed into the bed to catch our breaths. It would be a long night as we´d have to drive all the way to Conroe, past Houston, because we hadn´t found a single free motel room anywhere closer. Even so we consider ourselves lucky since a lot of people would be driving as far as San Antonio and even Dallas.

“If the town takes a direct hit, things will get so bad that we´ll have to move somewhere else,” I said, cuddling up to Harry in the darkened room. “Where would you like to go?”

“The Alps?”

“Ha ha.” I thought about it for a second. “They have avalanches.”

“Tough choice.” He pulled me on top of him and nibbled at my neck. His big hands slowly slid down along my back and cupped my asscheeks. “What do you say if we postpone dinner? We have all the night to get out here.”

“It´s a deal.”

Later, while he was preparing steaks and salads for the dinner, I packed the car with bottled water, sandwiches and all kinds of road food, in addition to our suitcases and laptops. We´d be all right for a 24-hour drive, only having to stop for restroom breaks. The kitchen TV kept us updated on the latest news about Evelyn, and it didn´t look good. The hurricane was speeding up, shortening the time for evacuation, and as if that wasn´t enough projections kept inching the landfall towards north and Galveston. We were halfway through our steaks when there was a deep, low-frequency boom that rattled the windows even behind their plywood shields.

“That wasn´t fireworks,” Harry said, standing up.

My phone rang, but instead of Mauro it was One. I turned the loudspeaker on for Harry´s benefit, and set the phone on the table.

“There has been an explosion in the direction of Tiki Island,” the drone said. “Two is already on its way. I´m staying here to watch over the house.”

We had named the drones One and Two, as it was hard enough to remember that they weren´t sentient even without proper names. Two came on the line just before another explosion rattled the windows.

“It´s the Causeway,” it said. “Two explosions have taken out a sections-”

We heard the third explosion on the phone seconds before the sound wave reached the house.

“A section of the Causeway has collapsed, both directions,” Two came back on line. “I´m playing back my video feed and it seems that at least the last two explosions were caused by boats that ran into abutments and exploded.”

“I ran a simulation of how fast you can get to the West End bridge if you leave now,” One interrupted. “Not fast enough. You´d get stuck in the traffic long before you´d get there.”

Two was back on. “Irrelevant. My sensors just recorded a flash from that direction so that bridge is probably gone, too.”

The drones went quiet as they had nothing new to say.

“I guess we can forget about the Bolivar Ferry as well,” Harry said, eyes bugged out. “Did a lot of cars fall into the bay?”

“Reviewing video,” Two said, and then added, “I have twenty-one on record. Several must have fallen before I gained sufficient altitude.”

”Fucking hell,” Harry growled. ”Who would do something like that?”

Mauro joined the conversation. ”I just heard. You guys OK? I´m in New Zealand so there´s a bit of a delay in the conversation.”

”New Zealand?” I said, suddenly very envious of him.

”We´re already running scenarios,” he reassured us. ”You´ll be all right.”

”Saying that we´ll be all right is different from saying you´ll get us out,” I noted.

I didn´t like one bit what he said next. ”One, start evaluating the building. I want a complete assessment of what it can take. Two, get back to the house.”

”Can´t you come and pick us up?” Harry asked, frowning.

”I miss the old days,” Mauro said. ”When that bumbling fool used to be the president. Now the Air Force will have the airspace locked down in fifteen minutes, long before we can get to you.”

Two announced, ”Less than that. I´m already picking up electronics from two approaching jet fighters.”

“There will be chaos,” I said. “Can you slip a helicopter through?”

“That´s one of the scenarios. We still have almost sixteen hours, we´ll figure this out.”

“Sixteen? But the projections-”

“Are lagging behind. Ours say that you have time until tomorrow afternoon.”

Everyone signed out, and the only sound that remained in the kitchen was the weather update on TV, soon replaced by the breaking news logo. I realized I was gripping the edge of the kitchen counter, knuckles white, and forced myself to let go and turned to Harry.

“If we´re stuck in here and something goes wrong it´s no big deal for me,” I said, my voice shaking. “But you – they can´t bring you back.”

For once, Harry didn´t have a ready answer.

“Do you – do you think there are still people alive in those cars? In air bubbles?” I asked.

“Don´t think about it,” he said, and wrapped his big arms around me. “Don´t think about it.”

There was a faint, fast ticking sound somewhere upstairs as One started recording the structures for analysis using ultrasonography, X-rays and what not. Neither of us spoke, and as there was nothing else we could do we continued our dinner while listening quietly to the shaken voice of the newscaster as the news came in about the collapse of the West End toll bridge as well. There were still approximately fifty thousand people on the island, and improvising an airlift and ferry evacuation was becoming more of a challenge with every hurricane update. Evelyn was still picking up its pace and Galveston would be hit hard, and the cutoff time for the evacuation had been moving earlier and earlier by the hour. The current estimate demanded that everyone leave the island before 3p.m. the following day, just as Mauro had told us.

“Good luck with that,” Harry said, shaking his head.

At first, the newscasts didn´t have images, but they soon started pouring in. Mostly amateur video from cell phones. The gaps in the Causeway bridges looked horrible, with a couple of cars perched right on the edge of broken trusses.

“That could have been us, if we hadn´t -” Harry said quietly.

People were still running along the almost 3-kilometer-long bridges to get out in case there was another explosion. I picked up the phone.

“Two, can you go and make sure that there aren´t any more boats coming at the Causeway? And if so, can you blow them up without revealing yourself?”

“Of course. But I have orders to stay close to the house.”

“One is here. Please.”

“All right.”

Harry pushed his plate away. “Can´t eat this.” He sat back in the chair, looking at me. “What should we do? Should we go to to the harbor to catch a boat when they start coming in?”

I thought about it for a moment. “We have back-ups that others don´t... How about if we wait till tomorrow to see if they can evacuate everyone? Then we can catch the last ferry without stealing a seat from someone who might need it more than us.”

Harry clearly didn´t like the idea, but nodded nevertheless. “Sounds reasonable.”

We finished dinner, and took all the garbage out to make sure it wouldn´t end up floating in the living-room, and only then realized we hadn´t emptied the kitchen cupboards. “I hate hurricanes,” Harry muttered as we carried all the foodstuffs to the second floor. Once everything was ready, we went out to the front yard to see what was going on. The night was hot and the sky was clear, but looking closely there was a dark streak in the eastern horizon. The first clouds of the storm. The streets were an unsettling sight, as if we´d just landed in a war zone in some third world country. Most people had abandoned their cars at home, and were walking towards the harbor dragging huge suitcases and carrying bags and boxes stuffed with their belongings. Among others there was a woman with three cat travel boxes in a shopping cart, followed by a man carrying a koala in his arms, and then an elderly lady who was doing her best to hold up a chandelier to keep it from dragging on the ground. A police car with flashing lights drove slowly by, zigzagging people, with a loudspeaker repeating the mandatory evacuation order.

“That koala is going to bite someone,” Harry said. “I hear they are grumpy beings.”

To our relief, a passing car gave a ride to the old lady with the chandelier. We talked about ferrying people with our car, but came to the conclusion that on our way back after each trip we´d slow more people down than we could help on their way to the harbor. A neighbor walked by, dragging two suitcases, his shirt wet with perspiration in the hot night and revealing a bump at the waist that might have been a gun.

“Aren´t you taking your son off the island?” he asked Harry. “That storm is speeding up.”

“I will,” Harry reassured the man. “Do they have any idea who did it?”

“Some freaking ecoterrorists,” the man huffed. “They just said it on the TV before I left.”

We returned to the house to check on the news, and found out that a group called GreenWar – how original – had claimed responsibility for the attack. They´d crammed motorboats with explosives and driven them to the Causeway bridges by remote control. The motivation: Gaia was angry with humans for wrecking the climate with carbon emissions and, even worse, for trying to counter this malfeasance by expanding nuclear power. The drama in Galveston, seen on live television around the world, would make people rise up against the military-industrial complex which had enslaved both people and the planet. I could sympathize with them about the part with the military-industrial complex but when it came to the rest I would have liked to kick their dumb asses. A more paranoid part of me even wondered if the complex itself had orchestrated the attack to discredit Greens who had gained enormous support during the last two years´ disasters and were poised to become the largest political parties in almost every Western nation.

Mauro called.

“OK, we have a plan,” he started. “You stay put, and the first chance we get we´ll come and pick you up, so be ready. If we can´t, you can ride out the storm in the house, it´s sturdy and tall enough. And if it starts to look like the house can´t take it during the storm we´ll come down with a ground-to-orbit vehicle and fuck the consequences.”

Harry and I looked at each other.

“Basically, that sounds an awful lot like ´the plan is you ride out the storm´,” I said. “Should we try to evacuate?”

“Our projections put the landfall shortly before noon,” Mauro said. “The storm is still speeding up. So I´d stay away from the chaos.”

As if to underline his words, a gust of wind let out a soft wailing sound as it curled around the house.

“Fucking hell,” Harry said, creeped out.

“Don´t worry,” Mauro told him, “our comms won´t go down. We´ll stay in touch through the whole thing.”

“Won´t the storm disrupt cell phone service?” Harry asked.

“If you open the handset it´ll look perfectly normal, to the last detail,” Mauro said. ”But it´s not a cell phone. Then there´s Jonatan´s coin, and One and Two.”

“I see.”

I tried to figure out a way to talk to Mauro alone, but couldn´t. I´d have to come out and ask the question even if Harry was already worried enough.

“Listen... a lot of things can happen during a hurricane,” I said. “You don´t think someone might try to take advantage of the situation to... well, to do something that would look like the hurricane did it?”

Mauro remained silent for a while. “One and Two should be able to take care of anything of that kind.”

“They´re not sentient,” I pointed out. “Losing them would not create a big problem, diplomatically. The Axiom certainly know that.”

Another silence.

“It would take a lot to take them out, believe me,” he said then.

“But it could be done.”

“I´ll talk to some people about it,” Mauro promised thoughtfully, and then added more brightly, “Almost forgot. I have some good news, too. Guess who´s going to be the new President of the European Union, to be announced tomorrow?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed. I hadn´t been very keen on internal EU politics for quite some time.

“Carlo Brambilla. For the last two years his environmental initiatives have made quite a splash in the Science Committee and the media. Isn´t that cool?”

I grinned. “I don´t think he´ll give me the evil eye the next time we run into each other.”

“Neither do I. Talk to you soon.”

Harry was looking at me questioningly. “You know Carlo Brambilla? Where did you meet him?”

“Uh... I...” Why not come out and say it? I wasn´t in the habit of lying to Harry, just keeping certain things from him. “I think I blackmailed him into the Presidency. In a way.”

“I can´t wait to hear that story,” Harry said, shaking his head. “You get around.”

“I´ll tell you all about it when we´re hunkered down in the crawlspace, to make you forget the storm.”

He made a face. “Christ I hate the idea of riding out the storm.” A deep breath. “Listen, I´m really sorry about getting you into trouble.”

Not the kind of person who could just drop everyone in his life and disappear, he´d been keeping in touch with his friends and relatives, and tracing the calls and emails wouldn´t have posed a problem even to a teenage hacker let alone the Axiom. Our safety had depended on the diplomatic pressure Mauro´s superiors could exert, and so far it had worked fine.

“Don´t worry about it. I´m just being paranoid.”

A local TV station had a crew in the harbor, showing the beginnings of the evacuation process. A huge mass of people had gathered under the harsh glaring lights of the waterfront, but the local and federal authorities hadn´t gotten their machinery going yet. Instead, something quite remarkable was happening: it seemed that every single motorboat owner in the area had delayed their own evacuation and was ferrying people across the bay to Interstate 45 where something equally unexpected was taking place. A steady stream of cars was coming in from Houston to pick up refugees walking along the road and then turning back to take them to safety from the open road. A large number of people seemed to be getting across, and the incredulous reporter told us that it wasn´t impossible that the evacuation could be completed if the official evacuation process could also be kicked in high gear in time. As she spoke, a large American Airlines passenger plane roared over the harbor at low altitude, circling the town and getting ready for the final approach to the Scholes Airport. Practically all commercial airlines operated from Houston where they had longer runways, so this had to be a special evacuation flight. Airplanes wouldn´t be able to fly for much longer; gales had already been picking up and the last planes and helicopters would probably be taking off in three or four hours´ time. The evacuation flight was approaching so low and fast that all the china started rattling in the kitchen cupboards. Just a few minutes later a Continental jet followed the same flight path, and then a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737.

Another call from Mauro. “The bureaucrats have closed the airspace from private jets and helicopters. Only airlines and military allowed.”

“Well... it would be kind of embarrassing to find ourselves in the flight path of an Airbus, now wouldn´t it?” I said, with a wary glance at Harry´s direction. He looked like he´d be glad to take the chance.

“There´s that.” He said something to someone else, then returned to the phone. “We can´t even charter a boat, they are all busy already.”

“I guess we´ll just have to ride it out then,” I said, resigned.

“Not so fast,” Mauro answered. “What we could do is come in low with a helicopter to the West End of the island. It´s very risky, though. Even if we have excellent cover up stories something might go wrong if we were caught and there was an investigation.” There was a pause. “You decide.”

I knew I had no real choice. Stealth was always the priority. Except this time it would be Harry who´d pay the price if something went wrong. I looked at him to let him know it hadn´t been much more than a rhetorical question.

“How about this,” I proposed. “You keep a ground-to-orbit flier ready and if the drones think the house can´t take it you come and pick us up.”

“It´s going to be risky to suck you up from the attic with hurricane winds buffeting the craft,” Mauro said. “But we can do it if there´s no other choice.”

“OK. We´ll do that.”

Mauro signed off, with Harry still staring at me. “´Suck us up´?”

I gave him a lopsided smile. “I think they can manipulate those drone force fields pretty well and I´m sure it beats climbing a rope ladder in 200-mile-per-hour wind.”

“Nothing weird had happened for a year and I was already thinking that the worst was over... apparently not.”

“You pick the next town where we move and I´ll keep my mouth shut even if it´s Ulan Bator,” I promised. “Deal?”

“It´s a deal. Now let´s go and get the damn crawlspace ready.”

The owner of the house must have had a close call with a hurricane, as the crawlspace was quite comfortable with a queen sized foam mattress on the floor, battery operated lights and a tool kit with a baby sledgehammer to break through the reinforced ceiling if need arose. It would probably take a category 5 hurricane to fill the attic with water, but the idea still made me jittery. An emergency medical kit and gallons of drinking water finished the picture with the food we had hauled up. It all looked very cozy, and I already had a half an idea of what we´d be doing while the hurricane winds howled outside.

The job finished, we returned downstairs to check the TV news and the live feed from the harbor. The first ragged clouds had appeared, their bellies ominously lit by the city lights as they raced over the island, and the waiting people kept glancing up at them with apprehension in their faces. Every ten minutes or so, the house was shaken by the approach of yet another passenger jet. The number of people waiting for their turn hadn´t discernibly decreased, and I was starting to wonder about the reporter´s optimistic outlook until a large Navy ship appeared from the bay. It could probably take several hundred passengers alone, but how many large ships were out there? Fifty thousand people were a lot to evacuate within the few hours available.

The night dragged on. Around 3a.m. the planes stopped arriving as there was a sharp increase in the wind speed. People in the harbor had been told that the evacuation would stop at 6a.m. when the storm surge was predicted to begin and that they needed to start making alternative plans and to find people whose houses would give them some shelter if they couldn´t get out in time. There were still thousands of people waiting their turn, and there was no chance that we´d find room in the last boat to mainland. The Interstate 45 was another crisis area: despite all the private cars and now school buses from Houston people just couldn´t be evacuated fast enough and out on the road they´d have no protection against the hurricane.

We slept fitfully, getting up once or twice every hour to check on the TV after a particularly strong howl of the wind woke us up. At 6a.m. when the evacuation officially wound down there were approximately three hundred people left on the waterfront, and they slowly made their way back to the city in small apprehensive groups. The reporter walked with them to find out if everyone had a place to go, and it seemed there was no one left to fend for themselves alone. It had been a close call. Only fifteen minutes later, rising water started flooding the Harborside Drive.

At 8a.m. power went down, shortly after our yard was flooded, but it was a tree felled by the wind two blocks away that cut us out. Debris was flying fast enough to make it dangerous to go outside, and we retreated into the house and locked the doors. Without electricity, and the windows shielded, it was dark inside and the sound of the wind was now even more ominous. Harry couldn´t help blanching when water started flowing into the house from under the back door.

“It´s decided. We´re moving,” he said.

I chuckled. “I´m afraid only to the second floor, for the time being.”

Within half an hour the water followed us there, and neither one was any longer in the mood for jokes. I knew my coin was transmitting, but I still asked confirmation from One and Two about them being in contact with Mauro.

“Of course,” they said, rather smugly for non-sentient beings.

We scampered up the ladder to the crawlspace which now felt far less cozy and far more a death trap. The wind was quite loud, howling under the eaves and forcing us to raise our voices to be heard, but at least so far everything had gone according to the plan apart from the entire house trembling slightly during the stronger onslaughts of the wind. The rising water, however, seemed to be literally dampening the effect, as it was leaving less and less of the house exposed to the storm.

One, who had stayed outside, announced, “I think it´s time for some magic.”

Instantly the strength of the wind seemed to diminish, even though not as much as I would have expected. One had to keep the force field attached to the house to prevent it from becoming blatantly visible, but inside there was no such problem. Two expanded a shimmering bubble of air around us which, contrary to my expectations, didn´t look at all reassuring.

“The wind can´t blow the roof away now,” I said to Harry, unnecessarily as One had already told him about the plan, “and no fast-flying debris can get through.”

We were lying on the mattress in each others´ arms, and from the evil eye Harry gave to Two I could tell that he would have been feeling safe enough for some fun if it hadn´t been for Two´s beady eyes following us to make sure no harm came our way. However, now the wind was so loud that I found it distracting, or to tell the truth, downright scary. I suspected that I would have been reduced into quivering jelly without One´s force field. If the storm had blown the roof away, our life expectancy would have been about fifteen seconds.

“The water level seems to have stabilized,” Two told us, turning up its volume. “It´s more or less where we predicted.”

“That prediction came only an hour ago,” I said dryly to the drone. “Not much use when we were deciding whether to stay or not.”

“I´m not a psychic,” Two chirped, clearly annoyed by my lack of faith in his computational powers. “Hurricanes aren´t as predictable as, to give you an example, you.”

“The wretch is irking me,” I turned to Harry. “Do something!”

“I rest my case,” Two announced.

“Stop it, you two,” Harry said half amused, half exasperated.

As impossible as it seemed, the strength of the wind just kept growing. I thought that there was no way the roof could have stayed in its place without One´s force field. Hearing what others were saying become nearly impossible, so there was nothing left to do but to stay as comfortable as possible and wait for the storm to pass.

After what seemed like an eternity, Two jumped closer and said with its audio turned at full volume, “The eye won´t pass over Galveston. It´s fifteen miles south of the West End.”

“Damn,” Harry yelled. “I could have taken a break from this noise.”

“You should know that there is an aircraft hiding in the storm,” Two added.

I felt a chill run down my spine. “Are you saying its not ours?”

“Ours is still on standby, waiting for the call.”

“It´s not one of the NOAA storm chasers, is it?” Harry asked.

“This one has zero ground speed. And it´s very well stealthed, we can barely pick it out.”

“Fuck.” I couldn´t think of anything more eloquent and to the point.

About thirty seconds later, Two looked up. “I just lost contact to One.” A heartbeat later it added, “The base, too.”

“My coin´s not getting through, either?”

“I´m sorry,” Two said.

Harry wrapped his arms around me, real tight.

“They´re always under strict orders not to hurt bystanders,” I said to him. “You´ll be all right. And I´ll be back in two years.”

He didn´t have time to answer before a bright spot of light appeared on the ceiling – it was actually dim daylight, I realized – and, like an ice cream scoop having sauce being poured over it, Two´s spherical force field began to glow in deep but intense blue, right at the edge of the perception of human eyes.

“Their power generator is overwhelming mine,” Two told us. “I can hold on for about fifteen more seconds.”

Harry took my head in his hands and turned me away from the struggle and towards him, to look me deep in the eyes. Without a word, we stared at each other as the blue glow around us intensified and then vanished. Two had ceased to function; it´s force field had been superceded. A strange, choking smell invaded the sphere, making us cough, and lights dimmed and went out.