And Oscar. But I’m out of energy. I pass out for a bit and when I’m awake next, Mal’s not in the mood to talk.
Truth be told, I don’t mind the company of a proper Gallagher mood. Makes me miss Jack more, but the sense of normalcy keeps me warm. I feel like I’m drowning all over again when Mal tells me he’s leaving to go check on Oscar, Jack, and Skylar—if he can get close enough.
I let him go without comment. Pretend to be mostly asleep. But my eyes snap open the second he’s gone and despite the bone-aching fatigue tying me to the bed, I’m wide awake—like I have a fever, though I know I’m too cold for that.
The room feels huge without him.
Bright. Loud.
Monitors tick and beep beside me, reminding me of a time when sounds like that felt like a clock running down, and it gets to me. I long for the sea and look for it in the ceiling above me. Rippling white that seems to shift and tilt like a rising swell under the hull of theSirona?—
Static plugs my ears. A flashback I have no hope of stopping slams into me and I see everything I’ve pushed aside for however long it’s taken me not to die in this bed. The angle of her. The sick tilt. The moment she couldn’t right herself and the waves took her under.
Gone in one roll.
My throat closes. I swallow hard, but nausea flares anyway. Pain in every nerve and bone as I feel Oscar slipping from my grip, hear the murderous rain that turned everything black.
The beeping beside me gets faster.
Air doesn’t sit right in my lungs and I rip the oxygen tubes from my nose as theSironasinks a thousand times in my aching head.
A nurse pops up, mid-conversation with someone behind her. Then she sees me and stops. “You all right there, duck?”
I nod, but she sees the lie and comes closer, glancing at the screens.
“Heartrate’s a bit tachy there. Running away with you, eh?”
She pats my hand and tells me to breathe. I try—but it’s impossible. Breathing is involuntary. How can I choose not to do it?
“Sol?”
Skylar.His voice cuts through everything and he claims my focus with a solid grip on my shoulder.
“Easy,” he murmurs in the same tone he uses on Jack when he’s trying to bring him back from a seizure. “You’re not in the water anymore.”
“I watched her sink.”
The Sirona.
“I know, but you didn’t go down with her, and that matters. To all of us. And don’t even start blaming yourself for any of it. That storm was an act of god.”
“You don’t believe in any gods.”
I hear myself speak. My voice doesn’t sound like mine, but I latch onto it anyway. Follow the trail back to the bed I feel like I’m levitating above and let Skylar’s pewter-grey eyes take me hostage.
“There you are.” He slides his palm down my bare arm and takes my hand, like a nurse to a patient. Because that’s what he is in this place. An overtired, overworked, underpaid nurse who’s too busy looking after everyone else to bother with himself.
That feels normal too. “You haven’t been home either, have you?”
Skylar shakes his head, frowning at the stitched wound in my scalp. “Later. And I’m bullying Jack into coming with me, so you need to get a grip.”
“Nice.”
“I mean it with love.”
“I know.” A rattly sigh escapes me and Skylar whips the stethoscope from around his neck and presses it to my chest.
It’s cold.