Chapter 13
Abby
For the record, I did not go quietly. I went loudly. There’s a difference, and it was strategic, and also I had no other options in inventory.
When the two men came through my kitchen door—fast, gloved, one with a neck tattoo of an anchor, which, the irony—I did three things in the four seconds available.
I screamed loud enough to curdle tea. I threw the mug, which connected, which I regret nothing about.
And I grabbed my field bag off the chair, because my field bag is where my beacon lives, disguised inside a datalogger housing, exactly the way a paranoid wall of a man designed it his first week while I teased him about it the entire time.
If I’d known, when they zip-tied my wrists and walked me down my own beach path to a waiting inflatable, that the teasing was going to be the thing I owed him my life for, I’d have—no, I’d have teased him anyway. He’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t.
The inflatable ride is the worst part, and I want that documented, because everyone assumes it’ll be the boat full of criminals, and no.
It’s the eleven minutes of gray rubber slamming through the chop in the dark, spray in my face, wrists sizzling, some stranger’s knee in my back, watching the lights of my town get smaller.
Watching the specific porch light—reddish, dim, mine, ours—drop below the swell line and not come back up.
That’s when the fear got fully aboard. Somewhere in those eleven minutes I stopped being indignant in the main and started being scared with indignant trim, and I made myself do the thing Noah does, because it was the only equipment I had: inventory.
Two men in the boat. Anchor Tattoo driving, badly, quartering the waves like a man who learned boats from a cousin.
The other one holding my field bag on his lap like a purse, having already pawed through it once and dismissed everything in it as science junk.
Including the datalogger that isn’t a datalogger. He’d held it. Turned it over. Put it back.
I spent the rest of the ride not looking at the bag the way you’d not look at a winning lottery ticket, and building, methodically, the persona that was going to keep me alive: the world’s most exhausting witness.
So now I’m in the salon of a fishing charter called the Mariposa—I clocked the name coming aboard, plus the registration, plus the fact that somebody’s peeled the hull number decals half off, amateurs—sitting on a bench seat with my hands tied in front of me, cataloging, because it’s that or the fear, and the fear is enormous.
It’s sitting in my chest like a wet anchor.
I just refuse to let it run the meeting.
There are four of them. Anchor Tattoo, glowering, holding a bag of frozen peas to his mug-related injury.
A wiry older one they call Sid, who smells like cigarettes and bilgewater and is clearly in charge of exactly nothing.
A big silent one at the helm. And the young one—twenty-two, maybe, dressed like he learned henchman from a streaming series, who keeps not looking at me, which I’m choosing to read as a conscience in its larval stage.
And a phone on the table, on speaker, with a voice on it. Calm, no accent I can place, the only person in this operation using complete sentences. The voice is the actual problem. Everything else on this boat is just weather.
My field bag sits by the helm, tossed there like luggage.
Inside it, disguised as a datalogger, a little green light is doing the most important blinking of my life.
I make a point of never looking at it, which requires the same muscles as not looking at your own reflection over someone’s shoulder, and I put those muscles to work and turn back to the phone.
“Dr. Marlowe.” Patient. Horribly polite. “This can be brief. The footage you provided the Coast Guard—was that the entirety of what you filmed? And what, precisely, have their investigators asked you since?”
Here’s the thing about being kidnapped by people who need information: they’ve handed you the one thing hostages never get, which is leverage in the shape of time. Every minute I’m answering is a minute I’m valuable. So I do what I was put on this earth to do.
I talk. God help them, I talk like the fate of the reef depends on it, because mine does.
“Great questions, both, and I want to give you a complete answer, so let’s establish the methodology,” I say.
“My dive protocol runs forty-plus minutes per site. What you saw is a curated clip—curated for the blog, which has different pacing needs than raw data, obviously—so to answer ’the entirety,’ we’d need to define whether we’re talking published footage, archived footage, or cloud-synced footage, which are three different populations—”
“Which cloud service?” says the voice, too smooth.
“—and honestly the bigger issue for you gentlemen is where you dumped it, because that reef shelf is a protected recovery site, and I don’t think you understand what you’ve actually done.
Three years of staghorn regrowth. Do you know what the survival rate on transplanted staghorn fragments even is?
Because I do, to the decimal, and when the sediment from your little cargo locker smothers—”
“Ma’am,” Sid says, pained, in the voice of a man who has heard about consequences before, at length, from a judge.
“—an entire recruitment class of juvenile corals, that’s not a fine, that’s federal, that’s NOAA, and NOAA does not fatigue, gentlemen, NOAA is eternal—”
“Ma’am.”
“—so really the question isn’t what I told the Coast Guard, it’s what your exit strategy is from being the four guys holding the bag for whoever that is on the phone, who you’ll notice is not on this boat—”
The phone goes quiet in a new way. Anchor Tattoo stops adjusting his peas.
The kid looks at me for the first time, quick, sideways, like a man checking an exit sign, and I file it, the way a large careful man taught me all summer without either of us calling it training.
Read the room. Know your exits. The scared one is the dangerous one, but he’s also the persuadable one.
“She’s stalling,” the voice says, mildly. “Sid. Make the timeline clear to her.”
Sid produces a knife with the theatrical reluctance of a man who’s mostly used it on fishing line, and the wet anchor in my chest drops another fathom, and this is the part I won’t be joking about later, the part where the salon goes airless and small and I understand that I am on dark water with frightened men and a voice that does short-term math.
“Sid,” the kid says. First word he’s spoken. It comes out cracked.
“Shut up, Bryce,” says Anchor Tattoo, which—Bryce. His henchman name is Bryce. Under the terror, some incorrigible corner of my brain files it next to the peeled hull decals under this organization is in decline.
“I’m just saying she’s a witness,” Bryce says, to the room, to the phone, to nobody. “Federal. That’s a whole different—Marco said this was moving boxes—”
“Bryce.”
The voice on the phone lets the little mutiny die out on its own, which is somehow scarier than shouting would have been.
Patient people are the dangerous ones. Noah taught me that without meaning to, the same way he taught me everything without meaning to, and I hold his lessons against my chest like a flotation device and keep my eyes on the knife and my mouth ahead of the fear.
So I look at the knife, and I think about Noah’s hands steady on a coffee mug at 4:50 in the morning. You’re allowed to be scared. Scared’s rational.
Okay. Rational, then. Rational says: the beacon’s been live for over an hour. Rational says: the whole net knows, and there’s a man out there in the dark for whom this exact ocean is a first language.
Rational says: keep them managing your mouth.
“Timeline, sure, let’s talk timeline,” I say, and my voice only shakes on the first word. “Here’s mine. Loggerhead nests take sixty days. You have maybe eleven minutes.”
Sid blinks, knife drooping a degree. “What?”
“That’s my professional estimate. You took a federal witness off a beach that was under active protection. You know that thing where you drop cargo and mark the coordinates and come back later? They do that too, except the cargo is me, and the retrieval team is—”
The engine note changes. The big one at the helm says something low and sharp. Every head turns to the stern, where the running lights show absolutely nothing, just black water and blacker sky.
Then the black water stands up and comes over the transom.
Here’s my honest sworn testimony about the next ninety seconds: it’s the only time all summer I ever saw Noah Vance the way the file must read.
He comes out of the dark already moving, wet to the waist, and the world goes very fast and very specific.
Anchor Tattoo makes it half off the bench before he’s down—I don’t fully see how, it’s like watching weather happen to a person, a front moving through.
Sid’s knife hand gets caught mid-air and redirected somewhere anatomy doesn’t recommend, and Sid makes a noise like a gull and joins his peas on the deck.
The big one turns from the helm into a flashbang of white light and shouting as the task force boat comes up the port side out of nowhere, floodlights slamming on, FEDERAL AGENTS, HANDS, HANDS—and the kid, my larval-conscience kid, takes one look at all of it and sits down on the deck with his fingers laced behind his head like he’s been rehearsing.
And then it’s over. That’s the thing nobody tells you about the loudest minute of your life.
It just—stops. Boots on deck, zip ties going onto other people’s wrists for a change, the voice on the phone long gone but the phone itself bagged as evidence, some federal agent already saying chain of custody in the pleased tone of a man whose eighteen months just paid off.
Noah cuts my hands free himself. His face, in the floodlight wash, is something I’ve never seen—the cold thing and the drowning thing occupying the same water, and both of them going out of him all at once as his hands close around my wrists, over the marks, gentle as a nest check.
“Hey, Doc.” Wrecked. Barely a voice at all. His thumbs move once across the marks on my wrists, back and forth, a man confirming a reading he doesn’t like. “Status.”
“Well,” I say, “I lectured them about staghorn recruitment until an armed maritime professional boarded the vessel, so, you know. Standard Tuesday.”
“Abby.”
“Eleven minutes. I told them eleven minutes, and you did it in nine, which is going to be a problem for my credibility as a—”
“Abby.”
“I’m okay.” And then, because it’s him, because the floodlights are turning everything white and my hands won’t stop now that they’ve started, the rest of it comes out shaking.
“I’m—they had a knife, Noah, and I kept doing the math on the swim and I couldn’t make it work, and I’m—I’m okay, I’m okay, I just really need you to—”
He’s already doing it. He folds me into his chest right there in front of the entire federal government, one hand cradling the back of my head like I’m cargo beyond price, and I stop performing okay-ness into his soaked shirt and just shake, and he holds on, and the deck fills with agents stepping around us like we’re load-bearing.
“I’ve got you,” he says into my hair. Once. Twice. However many times it takes, in the voice with all the briefing gone out of it, only the man left. “I’ve got you. You held the mile.”
“We held it,” I manage, into the wet shirt, because credit matters even now. Especially now.
They wrap me in one of those foil blankets on the SHS boat—I look like a baked potato with a beacon, and no one will let me hold anything but Gatorade—and Noah runs us home slow, one hand on the wheel, one arm around his potato, my cheek against his chest where I can hear the engine of him running steady.
The radio’s a party line the whole way in.
Rafi confirming Delgado’s awake and demanding a status report on me before he’ll accept a CT scan, the stubborn beautiful idiot.
A federal agent asking Noah, in the careful tone of a man completing paperwork he doesn’t want to think too hard about, to characterize his “survey methodology.” Marnie, who is somehow on the SHS frequency, a mystery no one will ever solve or prosecute, announcing that the Salty Bean is open whenever we land, and that there’s a pot of the good chowder on, and that if anyone lets Abby see the state of her cottage before it’s been tidied, she will be speaking to that person personally.
“Copy that last,” Noah says into the radio, and I feel the words rumble under my ear.
“Was that a joke? Did you make a radio joke?”
“It was an operational acknowledgment.”
“It was chowder logistics, Noah. You did comms about chowder.” I burrow deeper into his side, foil crinkling like applause. “The town’s going to eat you alive, you know. You boarded a smuggling vessel alone for the turtle lady. Gus is going to have it painted on the water tower.”
“Rafi’s already drafting the incident report title.” His chin comes down to rest on top of my head, and I feel the exhale go all the way through him, the long one, the one he’s maybe been holding since a cottage door stood open on an empty room. “I proposed ’Marine Survey, Extended Scope.’”
The stars are ridiculous out here. The whole channel is strobing blue and red behind us, the Mariposa lit up like a crime-themed carnival, and ahead the shore lights of Sunbreak Harbor sit low and warm on the waterline, the whole silly beloved town of it waiting.
“So,” I say, muffled, into his sternum. “Was it the beacon or the lecture that saved me? Be honest. I need to know which skill to invest in.”
His chest moves under my ear. It takes me a second to identify the phenomenon, because I’ve never heard it from inside before.
Laughing. He’s laughing.
“Both,” Noah says, and kisses the top of my foil-wrapped head, and steers us home.