Blue lights reach the harbour.
Skylar jumps into the ambulance with Oscar. Which means something I can’t grasp. Then they’re gone and life blurs again. A vehicle that smells of leather and smoke. A driver I can’t focus on enough to identify. The only thing I truly understand is that Mal is right there with me.
We reach the hospital. Mal plants me in a chair, but he can’t sit. Without Skylar to regulate him, he paces in front of me, like Sev did at the harbour, and I’m out of energy to calm anyone down.
We’re in A&E. And we stay there for a lifetime before we’re moved to a relatives’ room. Me and Mal. I don’t know where Sev is. “Is Lisa here?”
Mal’s at the window. He turns to me with a shake of his head. “Sev took one for the team and drove her home. He’s going fetch Fiadh to wait by the phone.”
“What about Dav?”
“He’s not around, remember?”
Mal speaks gently, for him, at least. And it’s enough for me to recall what had Sol sailing into a storm with anger in his veins in the first place.
“I fucking hate him.”
“Good. He deserves it tonight. But if he gets his act together, he’ll come back, and Sol won’t ever turn him away, so maybe work on your resting murder face, eh?”
I don’t know what my face is doing. Just that every ounce of control I possess is currently engaged keeping the terror in my chest at a manageable burn.
It wants to spike, wants to flood me, and a warning hums at the base of my skull, reminding me what’ll happen if I let it.
I clamp it down.
Take Mal’s place at the window and breathe in and out. Contain it while I strip where we are right now into simple facts.
Sol and Oscar aren’t in the water anymore.
They’re not dead.
A truth I cling to like a handhold over a sheer drop, as that terror keeps pressing down on me.They’re so wet and cold.Sol’s laughter fills my head. The words he’s proclaimed so many times.Water isn’t going to hurt me?—
“Jack?”
I turn. A familiar face is right there, but it takes me a moment to place him as Marc Ramsay, a Regiment medic I’ve known longer than I’ve known Skylar.
He’s an NHS doc these days. He stitched my eyebrow when I smashed it open in a seizure. Came to the Joker, so I didn’t have to behere, in this place of death and pain.
He looks tired, favouring one leg like I do sometimes, and it should jog my memory to remember something vital about him. But as ever, nothing happens.
“Have you been with Sol?”
Marc nods. “For a while. My colleague has him now. No other relatives here?”
“No.”
“All right then. Take a seat, Jack.”
No. But I do it anyway, because even I can see that maybe Marc needs the chair he sinks into beside me.
“Sol’s stable,” he says quickly, cutting to the meat of it. “But he was in the water far longer than we’d want him to be when it’s this cold. And he’s got some bruising I’m not happy with. We’re sending him to CT once we’ve cleared the water from his lungs and closed that gash on his head.”
I swallow hard. “Is he awake?”
“Not really, but I wouldn’t expect him to be. It’s been a rough night for him.”
“Is he going to die?”