Petals

Sipho Ndaba ran security for Lagos Lights, which meant he watched the crowd and not the sky, so he saw the faces change colour before he looked up.

Half a million faces, lit pink from above. Then lit red. He had sixty guards in yellow vests along two kilometres of shore, and from the end of the white awning he could see nine of them, and all nine had turned round to look at the show, which was the first thing he had told them never to do.

"Eyes on the crowd," he said into his radio. "Eyes down. Nobody watches the sky but me."

The lotus had stopped turning. It hung over the black lagoon, red to the heart, and some of the crowd were still cheering. Out on the stage barge Teo Albuquerque stood at the front with the actress, not moving, his glasses lit. Sipho had played capoeira with him twice a year for six years, and had never once seen him stand still.

Under the awning a few steps away the young pilot with the braids was pressing her red key with two fingers, again and again. The Ukrainian woman who had walked off Teo's barge an hour before was bent over her shoulder, reading the screen.

"They're not lost," the Ukrainian woman said, not loudly. "Lost, they fly home. Somebody is flying them."

On the festival channel in Sipho's ear the vendor's operator said, "Land command sent. No acknowledgement. Sending again."

Sipho knew the sound overhead. Five thousand small rotors holding still made a whine so even that after a minute you stopped hearing it, the way you stopped hearing the sea. He had heard it once before, in fog, in 2027, on the Narrows, the strait between Korvane and Sarn. A UN mission had sailed from Fremantle on an Australian frigate to watch two small countries not fight, and one morning twelve men had gone out from the frigate in two boats. Six had come back. Korvane blamed Sarn, Sarn blamed Korvane, the UN wrote nine lines about it, and the world had been busy that year.

The lotus closed.

It did not close like a flower. Every petal folded towards the land at once, and the whole red shape came down out of the sky over the shore, and Sipho was already running.

They did not fall. That was what he would try to make people understand afterwards, and fail.

They came down behind the crowd, over the expressway and the toll plaza, where the exits were, and stopped at the height of a face. It was not a wall. It was a line two kilometres long, one red light every few paces, and it did not need to be a wall. Then the line began to move towards the water, slowly, the way you sweep a floor.

Each one was light enough to hold in one hand, with plastic rotors. A man could knock one out of the air with his arm, and Sipho saw men try, and saw what the rotors did to the arm. After that nobody tried. The back of the crowd pushed away from the red line, and the middle pushed away from the back, and the front, which had not seen anything yet and was still singing, had nowhere to go but the edge.

There was no rail along the water. He had asked for one in July, and again in August, and on Thursday. The festival's insurers had said the drones' exclusion zone was the rail.

"Plaza gates," he said into the radio, and then he saw the plaza, red with hovering lights, and changed it. "Boats. Every boat in the water. Every vest to the edge. Pull them out."

The shore did not slope. It had been built of dredged sand faced with concrete, and two steps from the edge the lagoon was over a tall man's head. The first people went in by the dozen and then by the hundred, pushed by people who could not see what they were pushing. Most of them could not swim.

Sipho went in.

The water was warm as a bath and tasted of diesel, and everyone in it was trying to climb onto everyone else. He got a hand on a woman's collar and kicked her back to the concrete, where two of his vests and a boy with a Tenants badge hauled her up by the arms. One. He went back for a man in a football shirt who had gone under twice. Two. A girl of about ten with a sachet of water still in her fist. Three. On the Narrows the number had been six, and he had not been able to make it go up.

The pilots were in the water, more of them than his own people. The young woman with the braids had left her laptop on the concrete and was lying flat at the edge, reaching down with both arms, and the Ukrainian woman was holding her by the belt.

Overhead the red line had stopped at the waterline and hung there, humming, making sure.

"Are you in charge?"

A small woman was crouched at the edge above him, soaked through, with a shaved undercut and a grey plastic panel in her hands. It was a directional antenna, the kind network engineers carried and almost never used, and she had a phone cable-tied to the back of it with a software radio the size of a thumb plugged into its port: the kit she would have brought to hunt down interference in the festival's uplinks. He had seen her on the control barge on his rounds, arguing with Teo's Dutchman.

"Yes."

"They're not on the vendor's relays." She had to shout. "I pulled the power on all four crates on the barge. Nothing changed. They only listen, and they pass it along to each other. So something out here is talking, low down, close." She swept the panel slowly across the lagoon, watching the phone, and stopped. "There."

He followed the line of her arm. Three hundred metres out, past the second pier of the Link Bridge, a green channel buoy blinked its light.

"A buoy shouldn't be transmitting on their band," she said. "That one is."

He thought he knew the accent. He could not have sworn to it. The last time he had heard anything like it, it had been on a radio in the fog, a coastguard officer telling a UN boat, very politely, to turn round.

"I know what I sound like," she said. "I'm the one who told them not to route it through Sarn. Ayla Torrin. Meridian."

"Their batteries," he said.

"The show was built for thirty-five minutes in the air. They've been up for twenty-one." She looked at the red line over the water, over the people in the water. "Fourteen minutes, if they're not made to work hard. Then they come down wherever they are."

He looked back at the lagoon. There were still people in it. There would be people in it for an hour. Boats were coming now from under the bridge, waterways police and fishermen, and his vests were all along the edge, and the pilots. He could pull out a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, or he could go out to the buoy.

A waterways police jet ski was rocking at the edge, empty, its rider somewhere under the concrete with a child. Sipho pulled himself onto it. He took the radio off the belt of the nearest vest and gave it to her, and gave the shore to his deputy in four words.

"Whatever's on that buoy will be a radio with an antenna," Ayla Torrin said. "Pull whatever joins them. If you can't tell, pull everything. I'll be on your channel."

She did not come with him. She put the antenna on the concrete beside the pilot's laptop, knelt down, and reached into the water with both hands for the next person.

The lagoon had gone flat, the way it went between tides. He ran the jet ski hard under the bridge, under the red lights, past people in the water he did not stop for.

"Their power's falling," Ayla Torrin said on the radio. "They're working harder. Ten minutes."

Close up, the buoy was a green steel can as tall as a man, with a cage on top for the light. Somebody had cable-tied a grey box to the cage, new and clean, with a short black antenna. And there was a head in the water at the foot of it.

A diver, in a black drysuit and hood, with no bubbles rising round the head. A rebreather. One gloved hand held a short steel tool and the other was under the waterline, working at something on the steel. The diver saw him and went down.

He went in after. He got a hand on an ankle a metre under, and the diver let him, and then turned in the water like an animal turning in its own skin and was behind him, one arm across his throat and both legs locked round his chest, and took him down.

It was dark. He could not see the surface. He could feel the buoy's chain against his back and the diver's breath going in and out of the rebreather beside his ear, slow and even, while his own lungs began to burn. He broke the grip once. It came back. He found he was not thinking about anything except how slowly the diver was breathing, as if there were nowhere else to be.

Then the arm let go.

He came up choking, into red light. The diver was on the surface ten metres off, hood pushed back from the mouth, a woman's pale jaw, a whistle between her teeth. She blew it three times, short and hard, the way a rescue swimmer does, and pointed.

Past the buoy, where the current ran out from under the bridge, a boy of about fifteen was going under, tangled in a festival banner that had filled with water and was pulling him down.

When Sipho looked back she was gone. No bubbles. Nothing on the water at all.

He went for the boy. He got him by the hair and then by the shirt and onto the jet ski's footplate, where the boy lay coughing up the lagoon and saying something in Yoruba over and over. His earpiece was gone. The radio on his chest was still talking.

"Diver," he said into it, when he could. "Black drysuit. Rebreather. A woman. She went under the bridge."

For a moment there was nothing on the channel at all.

"Which way under the bridge?" Ayla Torrin said. Her voice had changed. "Towards the sea?"

"Pull it," said the Ukrainian woman's voice, close to hers. "Pull it now."

He held the boy with one hand, reached up the buoy with the other, found the cable that ran from the grey box to the antenna, and pulled it out.

For a second nothing happened. Then, along the whole length of the shore, five thousand red lights turned white. The line lifted off the water all at once, like a flock, and went home: back over his head, over the bridge, over the lagoon, to the four launch barges, where they came down in their rows exactly as they had been designed to. The sound of five thousand of them landing on the steel decks went on for a long time, a hard, small, endless sound, rain on a tin roof. On the stage barge Teo Albuquerque had sat down on the wet boards.

Then it stopped, and he could hear the crowd.

He stayed there a long time, holding the boy and the buoy. When his hands would work again he took the little torch from his vest, put his face to the water and shone it down the side of the buoy, where the diver had been working.

There was a fresh scar in the green paint, just under the waterline, scored clean down to the bright steel. It was a spiral, turning downwards.

Someone had signed it.