“That’d be right. What do we do now?” Mal asks.
I take the laptop up to the bridge. I haven’t been in here before, have only spied from a distance and wondered at the decisions made within. Ennis sits alone at the helm, gazing out to where sea meets sky. This room is higher than anywhere else on the boat, save for the crow’s nest, and I’m struck for a moment by the sight of the world spread before us. Sunrise has cast both sea and sky a startling red.
“I’ve never seen a sunrise that color,” I murmur.
“Bodes a storm,” Ennis says. Then without looking at me, “How can I help you, Franny Lynch?” There is a crispness to his tone, his posture. Something in him mistrusts me, resents me, even dislikes me a little. I don’t exactly know why, but I can feel it.
“The terns have left Greenland.”
I place the computer on the big round desk at the center of the bridge. Ennis joins me and we peer at the dots. “See how they’re diverging?” Two of the trackers have headed east, while the solitary tracker has veered west.
“Is that unusual?” he asks.
“No. It happens. They usually take one of two paths. They’ll either travel alone or in small groups, and some will go east, down the coast of Africa. Some west along America. But never straight. They curve in big S shapes.”
“Why travel farther than they have to?”
“They follow wind and food, as you follow the currents.”
“The hot spots you mentioned.”
“Aye.”
“Can you predict where they’ll go this time?”
“I’ve got old maps of where they once flew, but the data’s outdated. There were fish then. It’ll be different now, with an ocean nearly empty.”
“What are you telling me to do, Franny?”
“I think we should follow the two birds along Africa. Better odds.”
He thinks for a long time, watching the screen.
My heart beats a little too quickly when I follow his gaze and see where that path might take the birds first. To Ireland, or just past it.
Ennis shakes his head. “We’ll follow the one traveling west. I know the waters better.”
“It’s a bigger risk,” I warn. “Half the likelihood it’ll find fish.”
“I’m not following red dots on a wild-goose chase to the other side of the Atlantic.”
Rather than reminding him that this is the whole point of what we’re doing, I bite my tongue. “You’re the boss.”
“Leave that with me, will you.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell him the software won’t be leaving my side, then realize how foolish this is. He can’t follow the bird without seeing it. With a last look at the dots, I relinquish the laptop and head for the door.
“Tell me,” he says, staying me. “I have the trackers, so why do I need you?”
I turn around and meet his eyes. It’s the first time he’s looked at me since we left Greenland. There’s a challenge in him, bristling to his surface. He wants to take me back to shore, I can see it, and it stirs my ferocity. I want to snarl at him, dare him to try to leave me behind, tell him the truth that I’d burn this fucking boat to ash before I let it follow the birds without me. I’ve come too far, survived too damn much.
But I’ve a calmer heart, too, living alongside the savage one. Its voice often sounds a lot like my husband’s, and it counsels caution, it warns me that there is a very long way yet to travel and that cunning will serve me better than fury.
I clear my throat and say, “You don’t. But I need you. And I guess you gotta work out what your conscience will allow.”
Ennis’s gaze drops away, grip returning to the helm. “How are your hands?”
I don’t bother replying. He knows how my hands are. And I won’t play at beholden any more than I have to.
The skipper dismisses me.
* * *
“Why’s he so pissed at me?” I ask around the mess table tonight.
The crew look up at me from their hand of poker. Léa rolls her eyes, returns her attention to her cards.
“He’s not pissed—” Samuel starts.
“Is anyone going to tell me the truth? What exactly have I done?”
“It’s not what you’ve done,” Mal says uncomfortably.
“It’s what you are,” Anik says bluntly.
I look at him, at the blank expression I’m never able to read. “And what am I?”
“Untrained,” he says. “Dangerous. Too wild for a boat.”
Words dissolve on my tongue.
There’s an airless silence.
“It’s not your fault,” Dae says gently.
But it is, of course it is.
* * *
I’m not meant to, but I return to the bridge twice a day to check on the terns. Their red lights blink steadily, busily tracking their journeys. The bird we’re following is guiding us south and west toward the coast of Canada. Ennis is charting a course he thinks will intercept the tern, as long as it holds fast to its trajectory. He doesn’t speak to me of anything else, and he doesn’t much look at me, but it doesn’t matter; with each visit to the bridge I grow fonder of the little red dot, more concerned for it, more in love.
* * *
This afternoon is calm, the sky cloudless. We’re moving slowly through flat glassy water.
I’m tying knots. Surprise, surprise.
“Show me a rolling hitch,” Anik says.
I loop the smaller rope around the thicker one, make another coil, a half hitch, and then finish the rolling hitch by pulling it tight.
Anik looks unimpressed. “What’s it for?”
“When you need to pull something lengthwise. Or slacken a tensioned sail line if the winch gets jammed.”
He watches my face. “Do you have any idea what that means?”
“No.”
I think he almost smiles. Then the bastard tells me to do fifty more before I switch back to sheet bends.
When Anik’s out of sight I lower the ropes, tilt my face back, and enjoy the sun. The deck beneath me is warm and the air is still cold but for the first time I’m not wearing fifty layers. Thoughts drift to Niall, always. I wonder how he would take to this life, to the physicality of it. His mind, always working so swiftly, seeking answers to unanswerable questions, would probably be numb with boredom, but I think it might be good for him to have a break from so much thinking. It would be good for him to live more in his body than in his head. His hands, though. They are smooth and slender and unblemished. They are upon me now as vividly as anything I’ve felt, tracing my sun-warmed skin, my dry lips, tired eyelids, massaging my aching scalp in just the way they do. I’d hate to see them suffer the punishment mine have.
A voice floats down from the sky.
I squint up at Dae in the crow’s nest. He’s laughing and pointing.
The ropes fall from my hands, forgotten. My feet hurry to the railing, heart swelling. And I see them, white shapes in the distance, flying ever closer.
6
When I was six years old my mother used to sit with me in our back garden to watch the crows perch in the huge willow tree. In winter months the long hanging leaves would turn white like the snow on the ground, or like the wispy whiskers of an ancient man, and the crows hiding among them were stark spots of coal. To me they were the presence of something profound, though at six I didn’t know what. Something like loneliness, or its opposite. They were time, and the world; they were the distances they could fly and the places to which I could never follow.