45.
Jamie
Jamie was lagging far behind Sienna when the ship blew up; she’d braced herself against the deck and was on a slow descent, already sending out channels to drive the guns of the guards at the sides of the ship to the deck. She wanted a soft landing, and all the troubles to be wrapped up by the time she got there.
Well, she thought as her channel to the ship disintegrated when the Tirragusk exploded into a geyser of fire, one out of two ain’t bad …
The world bucked around her as Jamie was suddenly left with nothing to steady herself against. The shockwave hit and knocked her head over heels, flipping through the air, the rippling surface of the Atlantic Ocean replaced by the clouded sky as she turned end over end. She caught a glimpse of Sienna as she dropped, insensate, the woman’s t-shirt fluttering in the air as she dropped out of the sky.
Jamie anchored herself to Sienna and turned the power up to full; this was a terrible idea, but it might buy a few seconds, if they were lucky. Sienna’s unconscious form shot right at her, and Jamie loosened the channel’s power once Sienna had achieved full momentum upward. She let the channel extend like a rubber band as she twisted on her fall and Sienna sprang up, like a bungie cord had caught her.
Jamie twisted as she fell, passing Sienna by mere inches, and thrust her hand out as she turned, her eyes on the Verrazano Bridge for only a second—but long enough to establish a channel between it and Sienna.
Jamie activated the channel, turning it on low, and Sienna stopped in midair with a very slight jerk. The channel started to reel her, very slowly, back toward the bridge, arresting her momentum downward, as though she had a winch holding her in place vertically, the strength of the channel holding her aloft.
“Whew,” Jamie said, her own momentum halted by her tether to Sienna. She hung off the woman like a stray piece of string, dangling over the ocean below as the Tirragusk continued to break up, the hull shattered in the middle, any hint of the mini-sub they’d been chasing gone in the wreckage—
“Uh oh,” Jamie said.
Where was the agent—Scott—who they’d been following?
Jamie cut herself loose from Sienna, leaving the slow channel in place to reel her back to the safety of the bridge. The wind hit Jamie in the face as she dove the last hundred feet, sending out eight channels in an attempt to break her fall into the harbor.
It didn’t work. She still belly-flopped, and it hurt, especially along that last, stubborn bit of stomach fat that had dogged her for the last decade and a half since she’d had Kyra.
The water flooded her ears, soaked her costume again—it had just been starting to dry, too—and Jamie opened her eyes to see flames glowing from the wreckage of the ship, lighting up the water beneath the surface like an angry dragon had been loosed below the surface.
Jamie blinked her bleary eyes against the effect of the salty water. It threatened to flood up her nose, held at bay by the air she had kept in her lungs even through the belly flop. She hadn’t dived like that since the time she’d gone to a public pool as a kid, and made an utter fool of herself with a similar maneuver from the top of the high dive.
She cut through the water with powerful strokes. Ahead, she could see the twisted wreckage of the mini-sub sinking through the darkness below the Tirragusk, the big ship’s keel broken right in the middle and starting to list as the fore and aft of the ship began their descent toward the bottom.
Jamie looked for dots, spots, little shadows between her and the flame. He had to be in here somewhere. Probably unconscious, like Sienna, but here somewhere, surely …
Yes! She saw a shadowy figure drifting down, slower than the mini-sub. She thrashed her legs and propelled herself forward, feeling like a shark cutting through the water. Grateful she had decided not to add a cape to her costume, Jamie pushed against the natural drag as she swam toward the cracking underbelly of the Tirragusk as it sank bit by bit.
She drew closer and closer to the dark figure, her lungs starting to feel the strain like she had while diving for the garbage truck earlier. Did all heroing experiences take a turn into the water eventually, she wondered? Because swimming really wasn’t Jamie’s forte. She’d been a fairly weak swimmer before gaining her powers, though her metahuman strength made it easier.
The closer she drew to the figure she was chasing, the more sharply defined he became. His head was down, and he was lazily drifting toward the darkness at the bottom of the ocean. His legs were up in the air, lifeless, and she swam hard toward him, grasping him around the chest, dragging his upper body toward her—
Jamie screamed in shock, the sound muted by the water, bubbles issuing forth explosively out of her mouth. She could see the face of the man she’d grasped in the light of the burning ship, and while half his was missing, half was not, and she could tell that this wasn’t Scott—at least not the one she was looking for.
She pushed off the corpse, letting it continue in its downward path as she felt the hard push against her lungs from the pressure of the water. She looked up and realized she was thirty feet down beneath the surface, no shore in sight, and the broken-up husk of the ship was almost directly overhead now. She looked down and saw nothing but shadows, no visible seabed, though she knew it was surely somewhere below.
A rumble filtered through her water-laden ears, and she looked up to see another explosion, this one finally rending the Tirragusk irreparably in two. The stern end broke off, sinking ahead of her, and the bow rushed through the water at her, no longer held up by the last tenuous connection between the two pieces. Jamie saw the metal hull slipping inexorably toward her, a shadow that blotted out all light of the surface, and as it sank closer her she raised her hands, trying, frantically, to anchor it to something and push it away, but there was nothing—