The others are up now, too, all of us panicked and half dressed in the mess. All except Basil.
“I’m going to kill him,” Anik says in this disturbing way that’s a little too convincing.
“What do we do?” Malachai asks in a voice three octaves higher than normal. He’s vibrating with fear. Dae puts a hand on his arm to try to steady him.
I climb the ladder onto the main deck and the others follow me. It’s different here now, it’s flashing lights and a deafening siren, does it really have to be that loud?
Basil looks at us and we look at him. No one says anything but I could suffocate on this silence and I could tear the stubborn look from his face and I think the others feel the same because Anik spits at his feet and Basil finally has the grace to look at least a little ashamed.
It’s Léa who takes my hand and tugs me back, out of the light-drenched sphere and into the dark. Ennis is lowering the rope ladder over the hull and into the water. I realize what they’re doing and do I have the energy for this, to keep running, to find myself lost in a foreign land and scrambling for a new way south? As it turns out, I do. All it takes is the flicker of a prison cell in my mind to make me hurry over the side and down that rope ladder into the dark.
“Go,” Léa says from above and I realize she is talking to Ennis. Ennis who has become as mad as I am. Ennis who thinks he can’t possibly return to his life having failed.
“We’ll meet up with you after we sort this mess,” she tells him. “Go and finish what you started.”
He’s thinking about it. I can see him up there, paused on the precipice.
“Stay,” I argue. “Go home to your children, Ennis.”
But the police are boarding starboard and Ennis moves with instinct, lowering himself down above me. He’s too deep in it to give up now.
Basil’s arguing about something, and so are Daeshim and Anik, too, and then a police voice, louder than the rest, asking for everyone to be quiet, the boat is going to be impounded and will Riley Loach please step forward, she’s a person of interest.
A female voice speaks up, hoping, I suppose, that they haven’t been given a picture. “That’s me.”
Léa.
Shit, that wasn’t part of the deal. Even if this is just her way of giving us a head start, even if they’ll soon work out that she isn’t Riley Loach, and she didn’t stab a guy in the neck, I find that I can’t just leave. I scramble back up the ladder, wriggling up beside Ennis, sure on these ropes after having spent months working with them. Ennis holds on to my waist to stop me from climbing any higher, but it’s all right, from here I can see.
There are several cops. There’s animosity, I think, I don’t know why, but one of them grabs Léa by the arms and pulls her toward the gangplank to their police vessel. “Hey, don’t grab her like that,” Basil says, and Daeshim is trying to help Léa, everyone is sort of reaching for her and she says something, snarls it in French and wrenches her arms out of the cops’ and it’s chaotic then, the policeman shoves at her, trying to force her down the gangway but there’s so much anger in the shove that she stumbles, unprepared for it. Someone tries to catch her, but her head connects dully with the railing. Her body sinks to the deck. She tries to sit up, reaches for something I can’t see, and then she stops moving.
Shouting erupts. Shock and disbelief and her name being said over and over and her body being shaken but it’s still not moving, it’s not waking and I think, No, not again, please not again.
Ennis tries to drag me down but I hold on tight. I must keep my eyes on her because I must make sure she moves, must see her open her eyes.
“Franny,” Ennis says. “Climb.”
It is quiet and still inside me.
“Franny.”
I don’t move. I can’t, how could I?
“Please,” Ennis says.
I look down at him in the shadows of the hull. He says it again, please, and so I climb. Into the water we go, the two of us, sinking down and entangled as though in an embrace, holding each other for the space between heartbeats and then he slips through my hands and I’m alone.
The world above is fierce movement and color and sound. Underneath is calm.
Weightless.
Flight.
A diving cormorant, I strike out for the shore, wings back, feet kicking. Smoothly I carve through the water, breath held to stay beneath, guided by the dark shape in front. Good lungs, he told me once, and it’s true, he stays under a long time, and I have no choice but to try to match him because I will not be the reason we are spotted from above. Too soon we’re up and breathing again but it’s all right; we’ve swum quite a distance and they aren’t looking for us yet, they think we’re on that boat, they think I’m lying motionless on the boards of that deck.
We keep swimming, almost to the shore now. We’re abreast of the scattering of moored boats, unsure where we’re going but knowing we have to get away from here—
I stop.
It is called the Sterna Paradisaea. That’s how I know what to do. Look for the clues, they’re hidden everywhere. This isn’t a clue, it’s a goddamn neon sign.
“Ennis,” I say, and he stops, waits for me to reach him in the dark. He’s panting hard, not used to swimming this far. His eyes look crazed.
There are no lights on in the forty-foot steel yacht. We climb up onto its deck and straight to the covered hull. No keys, either, but we go below and Ennis finds a set. “Always a spare in the pantry,” he grunts.
I go into the cramped bathroom and don’t turn on the light. I look at the silhouette of my reflection, and I slap my cheek, once, twice, wanting it to hurt, wanting it to bleed, and when it doesn’t, when it’s not enough I almost go to smash my forehead against the glass, but Ennis is pulling me away, constricting me, ignoring my struggles and my sobs until I give up, and collapse and weep against him. The second he lets me go I pull away from any comfort because what if she’s dead.
We wait until dawn. Until the Saghani is empty, the police gone.
Ennis stops the yacht beside her and waits for me to board her once more. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” I asked him, but he said he couldn’t. Instead he waits for me to run through the ransacked boat, stripped by the police of most belongings, of anything of interest, including my laptop. But my paranoia about my pack, about the preciousness of the letters it holds, has meant that I always keep it stashed under my bed and with a great stroke of luck I find it still hidden there, waiting for me.
I check the bridge just in case, but as Ennis warned, the steering wheel has been locked in place so even if the boat were seaworthy we wouldn’t be able to sail it anywhere. With a last farewell I climb back down to the yacht and then together Ennis and I sail on past her, a ghost ship in the gray dawn and I think what might have happened to Léa, I think of where she is now, in some hospital room or a morgue and I want to scream, but I hold it inside, I hold it where it burns, because where we’re going I may need it yet.
As we leave the mouth of the cove Ennis meets my eyes and there is a thing unspoken now, something I know he understands. There may be no end to this we can survive. Not with only the two of us, setting out on a stolen boat this small, leaving behind the tracking software and the little red dots, discarding a trail of destruction in our wake like the delicate film of a snake’s shed skin. We didn’t get goodbyes or parting glances. We didn’t get guarantees any of them will find a safe way home, if home exists for them beyond what has been burned to ash with the slip of a foot, the crack of a skull.