Even among the elite, there are tiers.
The genuinely wealthy had helicopters. The moment the earthquake hit, they were gone. What was left behind—the people Bella found herself rescuing—were middle management, floor-level employees, and everyone in between. She didn't ask anyone's job title. If there was room aboard and she could reach them, she reached them.
Hobbs Sawyer was doing the same, running a parallel rescue circuit in his own vessel.
By the time they called it, the fleet had grown to twenty-five ships, including one small commercial liner. The total survivor count exceeded sixty thousand. Of those, roughly eight thousand came from Stanford and Silicon Valley—that stretch of coast where Bella had spent the most time, guiding herself by telepathy to find survivors the naked eye never would have caught.
The rest of the city she could only do so much for. She hadn't seen everyone. She knew that. For the ones she'd missed, she told herself what she'd always known: that's fate. She'd done what she could.
"You should rest." Natasha handed her a water bottle as she came back aboard—a single bottle, which counted as a rare commodity on a ship this size right now.
Bella drained it in one go. She was exhausted, bone-deep, from hours of continuous work.
"Seems like you mostly pulled out the high-achievers," Natasha observed, watching a cluster of survivors sprawled across the distant deck like exhausted dogs.
Bella made a sound of agreement. "That crowd—what's it called—ugh, the thing—the light, the light light light—"
Natasha blinked, then laughed and gave her a light shove. "You ridiculous person. It's Intel."
They allowed themselves a brief moment of nonsense—then put it away, and got back to work.
Natasha had fully mastered battlefield trauma care by now. Aboard a makeshift flotilla, that made her more valuable than most of the medical staff they'd rescued. Every survivor who came up the hull got a once-over: injuries triaged, symptoms noted, medications administered where they existed.
San Francisco proper had a population of 880,000. The greater Bay Area topped seven million. A combined earthquake-tsunami event of this scale—the losses would be staggering. Half the population, at minimum. Possibly more.
When she could no longer find vessels nearby to recover, Bella stopped. Keeping her telepathy running at full range for this long had drained her in a way that went beyond the physical.
But she'd reached most of the people she could reach.
Among her cluster of survivors, she counted familiar faces: 006, Heather, Max, Barbara, Sam Winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester, Bumblebee disguised as a compact car, Charlie Watson and her family—the mechanical engineer from the Angels team—Hobbs Sawyer, his ex-wife, and his ex-wife's current boyfriend, Reed Richards.
Stanford faculty and classmates. A long, miscellaneous list of rescued strangers. And, somewhat to her amusement, Dr. Vivienne Graham—the half-aquatic Monarch researcher—who had been plucked from the water purely as a courtesy. The tsunami was never going to kill Vivienne. A few meters of saltwater was a mild inconvenience for someone with her biology. If the city had emptied and left her alone, she'd have surfaced eventually—but in doing so, she'd have had a great deal of explaining to do.
There were also a dozen-odd Weyland employees on the fleet, and two ordinary members of the Assassin Brotherhood. Bella had spotted both and pulled them in without drawing attention to it.
Strays kept arriving on their own as well—survivors on inflatable rafts and rubber dinghies, paddling toward the lights of the fleet. Everyone was welcome. People gathered and held on to each other, waiting.
Inside the liner's bridge, the provisional leadership was in session.
Charlie had emerged as the de facto authority—his background as a police chief, his personal competence, and the quiet force of having two capable daughters and a highly organized wife at his back gave him a gravity the others deferred to. He handled ship-wide coordination.
Bella was the rescue operations lead—best swimmer, best helmsman.
Hobbs Sawyer had rescued a significant portion of the fleet's survivors through his own efforts, and his known connection to the President, combined with his sheer physical presence, gave him informal authority in the room.
Reed Richards had repaired multiple systems aboard the liner and restored communications with Washington, which made him the de facto comms officer.
The rest of the group consisted of two Stanford vice-chancellors, an Intel executive, the FBI's San Francisco field supervisor, a chief of surgery from a city hospital, two San Francisco municipal officials, and several California state legislators.
The officials had survived through good luck alone—every rescue boat that surfaced, they were at the rail waving their arms. Bella hadn't thrown them back. Alive was alive.
At the moment, the Intel executive—disheveled in a way that money couldn't fix, one lens missing from his gold-rimmed glasses, bespoke suit reduced to something a dumpster diver would hesitate over—was losing patience.
"Dr. Richards. Where are the federal rescue teams? They should have been here by now."
He'd been on the liner for thirty minutes. The promised aircraft hadn't materialized.
Years of corporate survival instinct were quietly telling him that the people in this room knew something he didn't. He could read the silence.
Bella exhaled. The situation was too complicated to explain quickly, and she didn't have the energy.
Hobbs Sawyer and Reed Richards exchanged a look. The look was quiet and settled.
"Tell them," Hobbs said.
The executive turned to Reed. So did the other uninformed members of the provisional council.
Whatever came next, they had a right to know.
Reed met their eyes. His voice was steady, but carried significant uncertainty underneath. "I really wish someone were playing a joke on me. They're not." A pause. "Ten minutes ago, over a hundred meteorites came down across global ocean zones simultaneously. Thirty of them hit the California coast. The government and the Pentagon are directing all coastal civilians to move at least ten kilometers inland, because Pentagon drone footage has confirmed..." He hesitated. "...confirmed signs of life inside the meteorites. Armed. This was a coordinated military strike."
The Intel executive, still operating on his previous question, took a moment to catch up.
"You're saying... there's no rescue coming for us?"
Hobbs stood up from his chair. He had access to information most people in this room didn't. "Every Air Force asset is deployed along the coastline in preparation for engagement. Marine leave has been cancelled across the board. National Guard units are being mobilized at emergency speed." He looked at the man. "Do you understand what that means?"
The executive and the legislators exchanged glances. What they saw in each other's faces was fear.
"Then we need to leave. Why are we still sitting here?"
One of the Stanford vice-chancellors answered him calmly. "Leave to where? Back to San Francisco? Or are you suggesting you abandon sixty thousand people and run?" A beat. "Go ahead. We'll give you a boat. No one's stopping you."