Raven's Flight

Chapter 3: Part 2 - Ava

I hit end on the conference call and lean back in the office chair that squeaks and swivels. For the past hour I've been explaining key features of the Raven drones to workers on the outpost including Lee. So much for not showing how to use them. I tried to not look at Lee as much as I could help it. How noticeable is it when you're staring at someone in a room with fifteen others on a video call? Surely they couldn't tell. Especially Lee.

Especially him.

I exit my dad's home office and enter the kitchen, grabbing the water bottle I stuck in the fridge earlier and taking a long, slow sip. My family is down in Ledder, having a beach day. Since they have the car, my uncle is picking me up in a few minutes.

A long honk pierces my eardrums.

Make that picking me up now.

I grab a stray scrunchie off the counter—with four girls in one house all with thick hair, it's a known fact that scrunchies will be found in the most random of places. I head outside and slide into the passenger seat of his truck, setting my water bottle in one of the two cup holders between us.

"How was the call?" he asks.

"They all seem to be understanding the drones well."

He gives me a look. The dad look, except he's not my dad, he's my uncle, but that look is still there all the same. "How was Lee?"

I swallow, grabbing hold of my water bottle. "Fine, I guess."

"Just fine? You sure he wasn't anything more than fine since he was getting to see you?"

My face heats up. "Lee and I aren't even a thing anymore. We're hardly even friends now; so much time passed without talking while I was gone. I don't really know him anymore."

"So you jumping at my idea of Lee working on the drones had nothing to do with any feelings between the two of you?"

I take a gulp of water. "Exactly. And Uncle Marcus, you're my uncle, please, you're like a dad to me and it would be very uncomfortable for my dad to be having this talk with me." Again, I drink more of my water to avoid talking.

"It's only uncomfortable if the allegations are true."

I choke and proceed to pound myself on the chest.

"You, all right there? You aren't trying to hide anything, are you?"

With tears in my eyes, I glare at him. "No." I cough. "And no."

"So you are having a secret affair with the Wilkins boy?"

I sputter.

"Or maybe it's not so secret."

"I mean, yes, I am not trying to hide anything." Yes, it's true that Lee and I have nothing going on between us, and maybe I'm being harsh and evasive toward my uncle, but each sentence he speaks about Lee digs at my heart. His words shouldn't do that to me though. The thought of Lee shouldn't cause me pain. Five years have passed with no communication between us. That's longer than I knew Lee for before I left Grenalla. I moved on. Days passed without me thinking about him.

Uncle Marcus pulls into his driveway and once inside we head to his workshop. While I set my water bottle off to the side, he flips on the television.

"What are we working on today?" I prop my elbows on the table closest to me.

He points to two drones on a counter along the wall to my left. "We're repairing those."

I pull up a stool in front of the drone my uncle assigned to me and start reading the repair form file for it off of one of the tablets.

"So these are someone's delivery drones?" I clarify with him, opening up the drone to see the wires.

"Yes. They both stopped working at the same—"

A long beep wails behind us, and I jerk, twisting my body to see what is perpetuating the noise. It's one of the Raven drones. A blue light flashes from the top of the body.

"What—"

My uncle hops up, darting to the tablet lying next to the drone. He frantically scrolls through it. "No. No. No. This is—" He looks up, his eyes wide. "The drones out over the water detected seismic activity. A tsunami is coming."

It's like I'm punched in the stomach. "How long?" My family's at the beach. They're at sea level.

He stares down at the tablet, one hand out to the side and open like he's grasping for information that's not there out of the air. "This calculation here says thirty-two minutes. I have to make phone calls, but call your mom now." He pulls out his phone and in three seconds he has it to his ear.

I already have my mom's number dialing.

"Hello?" It's my sister Audrey's voice.

"Tsunami. Get as far—"

A siren screams in the background and people yell. A clang comes through the phone followed by a crinkling, static noise.

"Audrey? Audrey, are you there?"

No response like I figured. I remove the phone from my ear but don't end the call. I think everyone got Uncle Marcus's message.

"We interrupt your normal broadcasting"—the television draws my attention to where a woman sits in a newsroom, staring at the camera—"to report that at 5:57 coastal time a major undersea earthquake took place seventy miles off the coast of Grenalla."

My uncle walks back into the room, still on the phone, talking animatedly, his eyes on the tablet in his other hand. I didn't even realize he had left the room, my mind so filled with worry for my family.

The anchor continues, "Grenalla is in a state of high alert for a tsunami. If you live on Grenalla, get to higher ground. You have roughly twenty-six minutes before it will strike. Anyone as far east as Lichon or as north as Easren, west as Ber, and south as Zil are in possible danger." She takes a deep breath. "Raven drones are currently circling the ocean tracking this."

The camera zooms out to show a second female anchor, her lips pursed. "Thankfully we have this warning. Without these reports coming in from drones, we would have known too late."

I squeeze my hand into a fist. "What if they get stuck in traffic? Or something goes wrong?"

Uncle Marcus stops talking over the phone and looks at me, his face slack. "We'll have to hope the drones were enough."

Lee's on an environmental outpost surrounded by water. The thought hits me like a speeding car. Within seconds, I have his supervisor's number dialing.