Triage.

So she found a few off-duty nurses that she could aggrandize into helping her, requisitioned a few choice pieces of equipment from anywhere that looked deserted enough that it wouldn't be a problem, and basically dragged an ICU room worth of medical equipment and personnel up six flights of stairs and into Malik's VTOL.

The dearth of patients helped her rationalize what she was doing; the situation in Akranes at least had seemed to stabilize. Occasionally she could pick up snatches of dialog as they manhandled medical equipment past the nurses' lounge from the television in there which they'd always left on. Often she'd stumble on the Icelandic, but enough of the key words were bastardized English or Polish- augment, Darrow, virus-or names of locations that she could put things together in her head. The Picus channel had deviated from its international bent about fifteen minutes after Malik had found her and from then on it had alternated between a local 'Iceland' version and the more ubiquitous global perspective. Vera took this as a good sign, that things were cooling down enough that Picus was losing viewers when it depicted the global crisis and it had swapped to locally-sourced emotions as a result.

That, and the fact that the sirens were finally dying down.

Malik threw herself into the work hard enough that Vera was surprised she didn't ricochet off of it. Same dour, total focus that Vera could imagine on her face when she was flying the VTOL, or base-jumping. She'd barely said a dozen words to Vera-you're going to need a hardware expert, I know just the guy-before she'd plugged the VTOL's PC jack into the back of her neck and logged out of reality.

Jensen waited it all out with his eyes folded coolly shut. He didn't seem impatient or distraught, and he didn't seem catatonic either. He rode it all out with an impassive calm that even when she'd met him months ago would have been impressive.

Best not to think about what he might have done to earn it.

It was a slow moment between carrying up machinery and booting up hardware, jacking it piece by piece into Jensen's maintenance ports, that she finally found at least some time to catch up with him.

"This one looks waterlogged," she said. "Mr Jensen, I fear you have rusted out." Stainless steel or no, there was a suspiciously reddish occlusion around the silvery metal of the port on the back of his neck that could only have come from salt corrosion.

Jensen answered with a noncommittal grunt.

"How long were you in the water?" asked Vera.

There was a pause over which Vera suspected Jensen was trying to shrug before he remembered. "Don't know. Probably hours. The rebreather worked overtime, I know that."

"The rebreather." She chuckled deep inside her chest as she re-ran the connect protocols between her console and the implant in Jensen's brain stem that fed input into his brain. " I honestly forgot that we even put one in, the sheer amount of hardware that went into you."

"It was the last one. I got running." Adam had to pause to swallow. "Maybe an hour before I lost consciousness."

That brought her to a momentary halt. She found herself tensing.

"You activated it all, then, Adam. Brought everything online."

"Yes." No expression at all. No remorse, no old pain diverting into anger, no eyes darting towards hers, telling we've got a secret with the subtlest of expressions.

She swallowed, said nothing. Plugged the machinery in.

Jensen's head tilted, very slightly, as if he was pondering something floating in front of him, complicated and unfolding into comprehension. "And it came in handy, Vera."

She heard Malik clearing her throat into the silence. The pilot was vividly awake again, with a smirk almost suggestive of a grin. "He's on the server. Just ping him when you're ready."

Vera grimaced.

"Oh, shit, that's right, I forgot. Hang on." Malik rooted through the cockpit and eventually pulled out an earpiece. "Here."

Vera caught it out of the air, slotted it onto herself.

"Say hi to him for me," said Jensen.

"Hello?" said Vera.

The voice on the other end of the line answered with static and a momentary latency that implied a connection across the Atlantic. To Sarif headquarters, naturally.

"Yes, hello? I haven't got all day here." Prissy mannerisms that allowed Vera to tag the speaker as that arrogant bastard Malik had made reference to earlier.

"I take it you are the hardware expert?"

"It so happens that I am," said the stranger. "My name is Frank Pritchard, Dr Marcovic. And how's Adam?"

"He says hello."

"Well, that's a start. Can you get him onto the network? I can do my job much more quickly if I'm plugged in directly rather than working through you. No offense."

Malik snorted laughter. "No offense? Pritch, have you been taking classes or does it just take a PhD or two for you to think someone's on your level?"

"He's plugged in to the VTOL," said Vera, before the two could banter. "He should be on the server."

Pritchard grunted. "All it would take is for a couple of ICs to burn out in that seawater and he'd be unreachable via standard protocols. I'll. Shit."

"Mr Pritchard, is everything all right?"

"Is there a problem?" asked Jensen. Vera could only shrug.

"Malik, there's incoming," said Pritchard. "Get that VTOL in the air. Now."

Whatever digitized channel Malik was on, however her implants parsed Pritchard's voice and wired the semantics out of the mech and into the meat, it was far faster than the obsolete audio channel Vera was on. The VTOL came to life all around her before Pritchard had even halfway finished his sentence, cargo bay lights flickering to life and throwing the entire bay into a dim blood red.

Olga, the one nurse currently on the VTOL with them, looked up at Vera, shaken. "Get off, now," said Vera. The other woman nodded at her once in good-bye, and ran, head down and squatting in approved firefight fashion.

She'd seen action, somewhere. Vera had never found the time to ask where or when. Now she'd never get the chance.

All around her, several hundred tonnes of screaming metal slammed into life. The hatch, slow on hydraulics optimized for load rather than speed, was still curling shut even as the VTOL had begun to pull itself off the ground.

"How will we contact you?" asked Jensen. Vera had to relay the question for him.

"I'll handle that," said Pritchard. "I know a few sat networks that they won't be able to follow you through, and I've got your IP. I'm going to have to go now, I have to assume they can trace this feed. Just try to stay alive, please. "

"We will," said Vera.

"Godspeed, then," said Frank, and the channel went dead.

In the last moments before the hatch shut, above the rain pounding the hull and the safety alarms sounding out warnings before Malik killed them all, Vera looked through the closing slit above the hatch and saw lights on the horizon. They were in the air and flying now, Akranes swaying nauseously as Malik banked and fought the air for immediate elevation.

She thought she saw a light where there should be none, out on the horizon, growing in intensity. Like a falling star.

The hatch went shut, and for a long moment, she and Jensen were encased in darkness.

There was a soft crump, as if the city had burped. Then something hit them, threw the VTOL on its side while all of her scavenged medical equipment danced and charged down the bay and at the hatch as if it was alive. Vera held on to Jensen and the edge of her seat until the shockwave eased and Malik managed to get the ship back under control.

Long silence in the bay.

"Well, they're not taking any chances," Jensen whispered. "Hopefully they won't realize we got away until we're somewhere in the stratosphere."

Vera rested her head on one of Adam's deactivated shoulders. "Mother of God, Adam," she whispered, in Polish. "What did you do?"