I don’t have a coat.
Neither does Mal.
I lose track of Skylar until he presses a jacket on me.
“Put it on.”
He does the same to Mal. Somehow, we obey. But my focus is pinned on the harbour-master. On his unyielding features and the grim set of his mouth as he raises one of the vessels. As his gaze shifts to the empty berth in the cove and he tries to reach the other.
“Sirona.Sirona. This is Porth Luck harbour. Come back.”
Static.
The harbour-master tries again. Then shifts to the emergency channel.
“FV Sirona.FV Sirona. Any station, any station. Respond.”
The storm chews the signal.
Static and silence.
Static and silence.
The skipper of a nearby boat pulls up AIS—automatic identification system—on a plotter in their wheelhouse.
Uninvited, I jump aboard. The screen glows green and sickly in the gloom, but it’s dull enough that I can look at it without squinting. That I can recall a fraction of who I used to be and interpret what I see?—
There.
A trail heading out of the bay and west. And then?—
Nothing.
The track stops as if it’s been cut off at the neck and that horror in my throat swells another layer.
Mal shoulders his way closer to the screen, voicing the timestamp. Doing the maths in his head, tracing the screen with his fingertip. “They’ll be further out now.”
If they’re still afloat.
A thought that sticks and it shouldn’t. TheSironais old and stripped bare by Dav’s most recent fuckery. But she’s as stubborn as Sol. Resilient. Strong. She won’t flounder.
She won’t.
Mal says more words, but not to me. I back away from the screen and step off the boat to where Skylar stands in the path of the worst wind, a phone pressed to his ear.
“Who are you calling?”
“Oscar, but it’s still not connecting.”
I don’t remember him or Mal calling Oscar already. Or that it didn’t connect. In my mind, I see only Sol’s phone in the dirt where he threw it, never mind that it’s been in Skylar’s hand since.
Mal hops off the AIS boat. He comes to where we stand. The harbour-master follows close behind him, a satellite phone in one hand, radio in the other.
“They’re calling the coastguard,” Mal says. “And some of the boats here are going to go out as far as they can without getting swamped.”
As he says it, engines kick over, lights flicking on. Vessels that weren’t meant to move today rattling to life as the gravity of what’s happening sinks its claws into me.
“Sev,” I say to no one in particular.