Close enough that I can see a woman standing on the deck.
Her long hair is undone and seems to rise from her head as though she floats underwater. Not fighting the wind, but made of it. The shape of her shifts and changes as the rain draws a curtain between us. It feels suddenly, strangely, like our ship has capsized, and I am watching another ship luckier than ours weather the storm while we sink. Like I’m seeing her from beneath the surface of the ocean.
I cannot see her lips move, but I hear my name again, and I know—I know.
Adrian.
The sea is saying my name. This woman is watching me from the deck of a ghost ship, and it feels like she is the ocean. Like she crafted the waves and pulled the tides, this storm her orchestra and she the conductor. Each gale her breath, each raindrop falling in time to the beat of her heart. She is the wind and the water and she is a ghost and not a ghost. She is me and she is not. She is someone I once knew. Someone I still do.
I feel myself leaning toward her, as far over the rail of the ship as I can bend and even then I keep stretching, something inside me reaching out to meet her. My soul hangs from my body like an untucked shirt. I want to climb over the rail and join her, step from our deck to hers. I could swim—her ocean would carry me. I think of my mother slipping off a cliff and into the sea, the persistent grip of the current that pulled her under, the way the sun must have looked from beneath the water as she reached for it. If she reached. Her restless ghost has followed me across the ocean. Chartered a ship from hell itself to find me. Or perhaps she never left.
Hands fasten around my waist, and I’m yanked backward from the rail. I struggle, trying to keep the woman in sight, sure that if I look away, she’ll stop calling for me. She’ll think I’ve forgotten her. She’ll turn back into the ocean. I flail for a handhold—anything to resist. Anything to stay here, to find a way to go to her. “Let me go!” I shout. I can hardly keep my eyes open, they’re burning so badly. “Let go of me!”
“Adrian, stop!”
I manage to grab one of the lines, but it’s so slick I lose my grip at once. The coarse fibers burn my palms, but I still reach for it again, trying to hook my elbow this time, or my knee, or maybe just fling myself overboard and into the water. She’d find me.
“Adrian, stop it! Stop fighting me!”
I’m spun around and find myself face-to-face with Monty. He’s clamped my arms to my sides, trying to keep me from the rail. A sheet of frigid rain blows off the water, and I watch it spatter the side of his face. He hardly flinches.
“She’s there,” I say, gasping like I’ve just surfaced.
“Adrian—”
“She’s calling me! I have to go to her!” I try to lunge for the rope again, but he pins me to his chest, his forearm locked over my rib cage. He may be shorter than I am but he’s broader and has better sea legs. All I can do is shout, trying to make him understand with volume alone. “There’s a ship! She’s on the deck of a ship, just beyond the breakers! Look, she’s there! You’ll see her; just look. Can’t you see the ship?” My throat is raw, and my last words whistle.
“Adrian, look at me. Look at me!” He grabs my face between both of his hands so that I’m forced to turn away from the ocean. “Adrian,” he says. His skin is streaked with rain, and in the wild light of the storm, his face looks ghoulish. “There’s nothing there.”
Whatever thread I was certain tied me to this impossible ship snaps. It’s like waking from a dream to find I have walked in my sleep and entered someone else’s house. The cold strikes me first, then the fear and the sudden realization that I had to be pulled back from throwing myself into the ocean at the behest of a spirit that is not my own, calling to me from inside my own heart.
I may be crying. The storm is too strong to tell. My eyes are burning. Monty still has my face cradled in his hands, keeping me turned from the open ocean. The rain makes a mirror of his skin. He looks afraid.
He’s afraid of you.
My legs go suddenly out from under me and I sag against him. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering. Monty grabs me and lowers me down until we are both kneeling on the deck. “It’s all right,” I hear him say, one hand under my elbow, the other still cupped around my neck. My face is against his shoulder and I can’t stop shaking. “It’s all right, you’re all right.”
“I’m not.”
He squeezes my elbow. “You have to get below. Come on, hold on to me.”
He starts to pull me to my feet, but the ship suddenly tips at a perilous angle, the farthest it’s yet listed. Across the deck, a sailor’s legs go out from under him and he slides until his lifeline catches. One of the ratlines snaps and thrashes like a striking serpent. A swivel gun mounted on the opposite side of the deck flies from its stand and crashes through the railing over my shoulder before tumbling into the ocean. Something creaks, and I look up as one of the longboats tied to the deck snaps its ropes. The canvas stretched across it flies away, leaving the boat a gaping mouth as it careens down the slippery deck, straight toward us.
Before I can move, before I even realize what’s happening, Monty shoves me out of the way. I land flat on my back, my head smacking into the planking as the longboat crashes against the rail where I just was, its keel splintering. The ship rights itself as another wave sweeps beneath us, and what’s left of the longboat rolls weakly onto its side. Toothy shards from its broken beams stud the deck. I sit up, blinking hard.
I look around for Monty and realize with a jolt that he’s still sprawled on the deck, an arm looped around the rail to hold himself in place. One of his legs is twisted below the knee, his foot pointing the wrong direction, and a long spear of white bone has sliced through his flesh. Blood is already beginning to soak his breeches, watery and thin in the rain. I crawl over to him, my hands slipping, knowing full well I don’t have a clue what to do when I reach him and struggling not to vomit.
The pain is evident in the set of his jaw, but when he speaks, his voice is very calm. “Adrian, you have to keep a cool head.”
I have never kept a cool head in my life—I’m not sure it’s actually possible for someone with a brain like mine—and now I’m expected to in the middle of an actual goddamn crisis?
“What do I do?”
“Help me stand.”
“Are you certain—”
“Please, do as I say.”
I throw his arm over my shoulder, and he braces against his good leg to push himself up with my support. His fingers tighten around the collar of my shirt, pulling it backward so I’m nearly strangled, and I feel him go momentarily limp from the pain. In the pale light, his pupils are huge, eyes almost entirely black. Then he pulls himself up again, arms around my neck and mine around his middle. I grab one of the lifelines attached to the mast, wrapping it around my hand.
“The cabin,” he manages, raising a hand feebly across the deck.
It is the longest walk in the history of man. I swear the distance doubles with every step. Twice his weight grows heavy again and I think he must have swooned, but then he drags himself another step. More than once, I misstep or the ship jolts, and he steps on his injured leg or knocks it against something. His nails dig into my shoulder each time, and I apologize, though I’m not sure he hears me.