Chapter 31 #2
We ask the animals for faith every day—let the lines hold you, let our hands be the water. I stood in this room with a headset and realized it was my turn to do the animal thing: trust. Trust the net. Trust the plan. Trust the man who left clothes in my drawer and promised he’d come back.
Okay , I told myself.
“Blue team, check in,” Sector said, and a string of strangers said their call signs like proof that at least some people in the world were still where they were supposed to be. Not Jacob.
“Noise floor just went to hell,” a tech murmured. “What is that?”
“Foreign,” someone else said, too quickly, and Langford made a tiny slice with his hand.
“Dominion Hall, Sector,” the speaker said again, voice narrower. “We’re NORDO on Blue-Three, Blue-Four, and Blue-Two. Repeat, no radio contact with boarding stack.”
NORDO. No radios.
“Could be shielding,” McGuire said, half to the admiral, half to the ceiling. “Could be battery dump. Could be?—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t make a list for me.”
She didn’t. Her jaw lifted a millimeter and then returned to its work.
“White-Lead,” Sector again, controlled. “Status.”
“Spiral complete,” White said, and for once I didn’t want to throw something at the tone. It was steadier than mine, which I resented. “Nada. We’ll start again.”
“Start again,” Sector said. It could have been a prayer.
I took three steps away from the table and then came back like I was on a leash I’d tied to my own work. The part of me that knows how to make a body stay alive when it has decided to remember death tried to put a towel across this moment and couldn’t find the right angle.
I put my fingertips on the cool, humming metal of the rack and closed my eyes and did the only thing that has never betrayed me.
“One,” I said under the room’s noise. “Two. Three.”
I pictured the Kogia taking a clean breath—the soft lift, the hush of it—and the memory alone made me stand up straighter, because I am a ridiculous animal and will take that trade forever.
“Sector to all units,” came through, ragged at the edges now. “Hold positions. Blue team presumed NORDO due to interference. Continue search. Do not escalate. I say again—do not escalate without command.”
Marcus’s voice, out of nowhere and everywhere at once. “Copy, Sector.”
“Copy,” came a scatter of replies. Not his again. Not Jacob.
The room realized it had hands and started using them.
A tech’s keyboard clicked. Someone reprinted a map that had been printed five minutes ago and put new dots on it as if rearranging the jewelry would change the neck it lay on.
Langford stepped away to talk into a radio on a private channel whose tone made my chest hurt.
McGuire stood exactly where she had been and became a lighthouse.
I pulled the headset down around my neck, exasperated.
In the quiet, I heard my father’s voice in my mind the way you hear a remembered song— ma fille —not a fix, just a hand on the back.
I pictured my crew where they always are in my head.
I let myself imagine the calf’s blowhole mist catching light—how small things save us until the big ones remember to try.
Get it together , I told myself.
A fresh hiss. A cough of static. “Blue—” and nothing else I could use to build a life on.
I wanted one clean word. Alive. Clear. Anything. Instead I got the kind of silence that teaches you how much a name can weigh.
If I lost him, it would be my fault.
I was the one who’d told him to stay, to liaise, to stand behind me and look like trouble.
I was the one who’d said yes to the helo, yes to Dominion Hall, yes to this whole stupid righteous hunt.
I was the one who’d opened a drawer and made space like I was inviting the universe to test me.
I’d brought him to my porch and let him put a charger behind my nightstand as if future and electricity were the same thing.
Who does that and then lets the ocean have first pick?
I thought of the small domestic proofs that had already started to root—his boots waiting by my back door, the kettle he set on the burner before I’d even decided to stand, the way he says morning, Doctor like a joke he plans to tell me for forty years, Saturday dinner with my parents texted into existence.
If the radio went to ash and stayed there, I would have to carry all of that as a list of things I did wrong. I would have to be the woman who took a man with a new breath in his chest—Lily’s gift—and marched him toward the dark because I needed someone to hold the other end of my anger.
I tried to count and my numbers broke apart like foam.
One. Jacob’s hand on my thigh under the bar.
Two. His shirt in my drawer. Three. His mouth saying my name exactly right.
Four. The way he said we like he meant it.
Five. The ridiculous hope I let live in me about coffee, and a porch, and a man coming back from the water because I asked him to.
None of it was tactical. All of it felt like breath.
If he didn’t come back, I knew the shape of the ruin I’d become.
I’d blame the Navy, and the Russians, but I would save the sharpest knife for myself.
I would replay every yes—helicopter, meeting, corridor—as if I had signed them in blood.
I would sit on the floor of my quiet room and apologize to the animals for thinking I could keep two kinds of life alive at once.
I put my palm to the nearest wall because it was my wall and this was my house and the ocean is not allowed to take the man I decide to love.
“Breathe,” I told the water, which is arrogant. Then I told myself.