The San Andreas Fault—a tectonic scar stretching 1,287 kilometers (800 miles) — had long been the defining obsession of American geologists. When that fault ruptured on this scale, the resulting tsunami was inevitable, a surge that reached out to blanket nearly the entire West Coast.
Bella's family had barely gotten aboard when the wave hit.
She'd punched through a gap in the surge by sheer force and timing, then waited for the waters to recede before turning south toward San Francisco.
The city she entered bore no resemblance to the one she knew. It was submerged, alien, and very loud with the sounds of suffering.
Getting into the flooded streets took effort. Along the way, she pulled survivors aboard one by one—and more than a few were people she recognized.
Barbara and her boyfriend, Sam Winchester. Heather's honorary uncle, Hobbs Sawyer. His ex-wife, who happened to be out on a date with her new boyfriend: Reed Richards—the future Mr. Fantastic.
The relationship geometry was admittedly a little tangled. But since everyone involved was at least a passing acquaintance, Bella pulled them all aboard without comment.
At this point in his life, Reed Richards was no superhero. There'd been no space mission, no cosmic rays. He was a contractor who'd been in San Francisco on a job—designing a security system for a client—and he was simply here, working for a paycheck.
Once he was on his feet, he immediately offered to help.
That was perfect timing. With Bella piloting the small rescue boat and diving back into the water to retrieve survivors, managing the helm at the same time wasn't practical. Reed took over without being asked twice.
Reed Richards was genuinely brilliant in a way that went beyond theory. He'd never touched this class of fishing vessel before, but a single glance told him the basics, and watching Bella work the controls for two minutes was all he needed to be fully operational.
Max was the last of Bella's specific people to reach. After that, she'd be heading south toward Stanford.
Looking up at the handful of shell-shocked figures still clinging to the rooftop—in another life, she might have called up to them with some theatrical line about trusting a stranger and jumping. Today, she wasn't in the mood. The body count she'd seen on the way here had stripped the playfulness out of her.
She threw up a rope. They descended to the deck one by one.
It was only then, at the very end, that she caught sight of 006.
Alec Trevelyan looked like something that had been excavated from a coal seam. Dust plastered his face, sweat and blood mingling into a color that would have given a black panther competition. If she hadn't known him personally, she wouldn't have recognized him at all.
Bella didn't react. Out here, she was Bella Swan the bestselling author—she had no business knowing a man traveling under the alias Peter Weyland. They were strangers. She gave him a brief, neutral greeting and pointed him toward a spot on the deck to rest.
The fishing boat swung around. Her people were accounted for. Time for Stanford.
She kept her eyes open on the way. Any survivor she could reach, she reached. Once Reed had the helm, she put Charlie in charge of order aboard the main vessel and took a smaller boat to range further out, with Hobbs Sawyer—a trained rescue specialist and capable helmsman himself—running a parallel search.
The bottleneck was space. The fishing boat could only hold so many people.
"We need every square inch. Everything nonessential goes over the side." Hobbs was the first to say it, and he said it with the certainty of a man who'd run operations like this before.
Charlie, who'd known Hobbs for years through the Swan–Sawyer family connection, raised a practical concern. "Even if we dump everything, we're still at capacity. A lot of the elderly, children, women—they can't handle the sea swells. Half of them are already sick."
In truth, there were almost no elderly survivors at this point. A disaster of this magnitude left no margin for the slow or the unlucky. There were women—Bella had made a habit of prioritizing them—and there was one infant. No elderly.
Hobbs eyed the car occupying the hold and clearly wanted it gone. The Swan family refused, firmly and unanimously. Their reasoning: the infant needed a sealed, stable environment, and the car was the closest thing available. It was borderline, but it held.
Hobbs's position was simple: maximize space, maximize lives. Charlie's counterpoint was more pragmatic—several survivors had been fine when they first came aboard, then spent the next thirty minutes sick over the railing, and if the boat were packed to the walls with people in that condition, the environment would deteriorate fast.
"There's another option." Reed had been studying the water. "The tsunami pushed a lot of vessels through the city. We might be able to recover some of them."
Hobbs thought it over seriously. The idea had merit. The execution was the problem—it required swimming to unknown vessels, potentially finding no keys, finding the boat damaged, or finding a vessel that required more than one person to operate. Too many variables.
"I'll go look for boats," he said.
"I'm coming with you." Bella was already moving.
"Same." Natasha stepped forward.
All three of them were strong swimmers. They spread out, each working their own stretch of flooded city, and before long had found three additional vessels.
The survivor count climbed fast.
Bella pushed further. She had an idea—unconventional, impractical on paper, but exactly right for this situation. Chain the ships together.
Every vessel she recovered, she sailed out to open water and linked to the growing fleet with chains salvaged from the wreckage. Some boats were small—fifty people if they squeezed. Others were large enough to hold over a thousand, between deck and hold.
Speed didn't matter. Navigation didn't matter. What mattered was that the combined structure floated, held together, and kept people out of the water—a floating platform of interconnected hulls, people pressed together and holding each other up, waiting for state and federal rescue.
"Another boat's coming in!"
"Bella's at the helm—get to the rail, ready to receive!"
In disasters of this scale, the worst and best of people surface together. Mostly, the best. The able-bodied stepped up—organized by Charlie, who turned out to have a natural gift for keeping people moving without panic. Whenever Bella brought in a new vessel, hands were ready to help. The sick, the old, the very young went to the larger ships. Surfers and athletic young adults were directed to the smaller craft, where the motion was less forgiving.
Supplies were consolidated—what little there was—and put under Samantha's management. Rations were kept for whoever needed them most. Nobody argued. This wasn't an airplane crash or a shipwreck in open ocean. They were still in California. Federal rescue would come. There was no reason to raid each other for packets of milk and sausage links.
Bella pulled survivors out of Stanford and then swung further into the valley, where she happened upon a cluster of Silicon Valley executives who'd been too slow to escape by air.
She brought them aboard without ceremony. Everyone got a spot.