Iris
The boat scrapes bottom, and the jolt nearly throws me over the console.
I cut the engine because the noise feels like a scream in the quiet, and the sudden silence is almost worse. The small, dark harbor spreads out in front of us, a handful of fishing boats nodding on their moorings, and somewhere above the rooftops, a single dog barking itself hoarse.
"We're here," I say, mostly to convince myself.
Yakob doesn't answer. His eyes are closed, his head tipped back against the hull, and for one long, awful second, I think I've lost him.
"Hey." I get a hand on his jaw, turn his face toward me. "You promised me solid ground. Don't you dare renege on me now."
His eyes open, and the relief in my chest unclenches so hard it almost hurts.
"Renege," he repeats, like the word amuses him from somewhere very far away.
A laugh startles out of me, entirely inappropriate for the situation. I press my palm flat against his cheek for one second because I need to feel that he's warm, that he's still here, and then I make myself move.
Pulling the boat closer to the wall, I manage to tie it to a post. Getting Yakob out of the boat is its own kind of nightmare.
He can stand, gray-faced and swaying, one arm slung over my shoulders while I brace my legs the way I've watched Killian brace his when he's spotting Liam on the gym equipment at home.
Like my whole body is a wall instead of a person.
We stumble up a narrow stone ramp slick with algae, past the moored boats, into a warren of shuttered buildings that smell like salt and diesel.
I tow him into the shadow of a stacked pile of lobster traps and lower him down against the wall. For a second, I just crouch there, breathing, my hands shaking against my knees.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. New plan."
"You had an old plan?" he asks, one eyebrow raised.
"The old plan was don't die. We're keeping that one.
This is plan is in addition." I peel his hand away from his side to check the wound and immediately wish I hadn't.
The T-shirt I had balled against it is soaked through, black in the low light, and the smell of copper is thick enough to taste.
"Plan two is I find you an actual doctor, because I have officially reached the limit of what I learned from watching my brothers get patched up at the kitchen table. "
"No doctor."
"Yakob."
"A doctor asks questions. Reports gunshot wounds.
Every hospital in Italy will have a description of us within the hour.
" His voice is thready, but the certainty in it doesn't waver, and I hate that I understand the logic even as I hate the logic itself.
"I’ve got a place. Here on Lipari. Isolated.
My contact left us a vehicle somewhere nearby. "
"Tell me about this contact." Because I don’t trust anyone right now, I refrain from adding. I barely trust him.
"Old associate. Doesn't ask questions if he's paid enough not to."
A light flickers on in one of the houses above us.
"Does everyone in your world work strictly on a cash-for-silence basis?" I whisper, looking around to make sure we’re alone.
"Mostly."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It's simple." He tips his head back against the stone wall, eyes half closed, and for a second the exhaustion in his face is so complete it frightens me more than the blood does. "Simple is safe."
"Simple sounds lonely."
He doesn't answer that one. I decide not to push, mostly because I don't trust myself not to keep pushing until something in him breaks open, and this doesn't feel like the place for that.
Not crouched behind lobster traps with his blood drying under my fingernails. Later, maybe. If there is a later.
There has to be a later. I've decided that much already.
I huff a sigh. “Fine, what kind of vehicle am I looking for?”
He opens one eye and looks me over. “One with four wheels.”
I roll my eyes,
“It will have a sticker on the windscreen ‘Stefano’s Volcano Tours.’ The key will be under the back passenger side wheelarch.” He checks his wound as he says this, his face relaxing a little when he sees the bleeding has stopped.
The sky lightens by degrees, the black softening to a deep, bruised blue, as I jog around checking each truck or van I see. The seventh one has the sticker, the key exactly where Yakob said it would be.
I get in and start it up, the engine revving to life like it has been standing abandoned for too long.
Yakob has managed to get to standing without my help this time, and I pull up as close as I can to the lobster pots, noticing the smear of blood he has left behind on the wall.
I leave the engine running as a snatch a bucket, fill it with sea water and then slosh it over the wall, rinsing away as much evidence that we were ever there as possible.
"You're doing better," I tell him once I’m back in the truck, mostly because I need it to be true.
His color still hasn't come back, and his breathing has gone shallow and careful, like even that costs something now.
"You should sleep," I say.
"I don't sleep."
"That's not a personality trait, Yakob, that's a medical emergency."
Something that might almost be a smile moves at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast I could have imagined it. "It's not from lack of trying."
I pull the truck forward onto the empty road and then turn to him expectantly.
“Follow the road. There’s a small house at the end of a track; we’ll have to hike the last mile or so.
The truck rumbles as I change gear, Yakob winces.
“I’m not used to driving stick.” I look over at him again, daring him to criticize my driving, but instead he half shrugs.
Every so often, he offers directions and I take them until the road peters out to nothing but a narrow dirt track. Too narrow for the truck.
“You’ll have to reverse back,” he says. “Park it somewhere less conspicuous.”
“Less conspicuous than the middle of nowhere?” I ask.
“Less conspicuous if people come looking,” he responds as I put the truck into reverse and lift my arm to hold onto his headrest so I can see better over my shoulder. I reverse it as far as an old abandoned house, parking it beside the derelict wall.
Yakob, moving slowly, manages to climb out without my help, giving me time to hunt around for some way of making the truck look like it’s been abandoned too. But once I see it in the light of dawn, I realize I don’t need to do anything, it’s already half eaten with rust.
The sun begins to rise ahead of us, breaking through the trees in streaks of honey-gold light as we begin to walk back up the track, scrubbing out the tire tracks as we go.
"What keeps you up?" I ask, scratching my boot over the dirt.
He's quiet long enough that I think he isn't going to answer, and I've almost talked myself into letting it go when he finally says, "There isn't anything to wake up for. Sleep is just time you lose."
It affects me more than I would expect it to.
I think of every morning I've woken up in that too-big house full of people who love me, sun through the curtains, the smell of Ma's bread already climbing the stairs, and I've never once thought of sleep as something to survive rather than something to have.
I don't know what to do with the fact that he has.
I don't say anything wise. I don't have anything wise to offer a man who just told me, without meaning to, that he's spent years without a single reason to want the sun to come up.
Instead I reach over and take his hand, the one not pressed to his side, and I lace our fingers together the way you'd anchor a boat.
"You have a reason now," I say. "I'm not letting you bleed to death after everything it took to get you off that beach. That would be an enormous waste of my very impressive rescue efforts."
"Extraction," he says, weaker than before, but the correction comes anyway, and I decide that's a good sign, that a man too far gone doesn't have the energy left to argue semantics.
"Extraction," I agree. "Fine. You extracted me. I'm reciprocating. That's just good manners."
His fingers tighten around mine, barely, the smallest pressure, and he doesn't say anything else for a long while as we follow the winding, narrowing path to wherever this safe house is.