He crossed an ocean for a woman he had only ever met on a screen. He landed four days before the water came.
Hal Rivera spent most of a year’s leave on one trip. Twenty-two hours from Atlanta to Manila, a duffel bag, and eleven months of late-night video calls with a woman he is certain about and a country he knows nothing about.
Mina Hermosa is waiting at the arrivals gate with three hundred fans and a wall of cameras.
She hosts the biggest lunchtime variety show in the Philippines.
She has eleven films and a laugh the whole country knows.
She is also, quietly, the best field operative the Global Integrity Taskforce has in Southeast Asia, and she has just cloned a government official’s phone in a dressing room between costume changes.
What she finds on it is three numbers.
Somebody edited the control settings on three municipal pumping stations in January and then waited. Now a typhoon is coming, the tide is the highest of the year, and forty thousand people in a coastal barangay are about to lose everything they own to a flood that will look exactly like weather.
Hal cannot fight. He routes freight for a living. But he can read a tide table, and he can plan a route through a drowning city, and when the boats come out he is the one holding the manifest.
A romantic action thriller about disaster capitalism, artificial intelligence, and the specific courage of ordinary competence.
