Chapter 25 Jack
We watch the storm from the highest point inside the Joker. Skylar’s room. He doesn’t spend much time in here. It smells of new carpet. It smells wrong. Everything does. Still.
The wind.
The rain.
Me, since I showered to keep myself occupied and washed Sol from my skin.
We had sex last night.
Thunder roars, rolling in from the sea, lightning forking in the distance.
It’s the evening by now, but the light is strange, the bay a smear of nature’s savage power beyond the harbour.
White water detonates against the rocks and the sea wall, and even from here, we feel the gale force wind battering the old building.
Glass trembles.
Gutters rattle.
And we’re not even in the eye of it.
“It’s over open water,” Skylar says.
He’s standing closer to me than he usually would, trying to level me, but he’s not Sol, so he can’t.
And I don’t need him to tell me how storms work.
I know the line of the coast better than he does.
The currents. The way the wind fights the tide.
I know the monster the ocean becomes when she’s boxed in and trapped.
“They could’ve outrun it.” Mal speaks from where he sits on Skylar’s old bed. “If they pushed west.”
Maybe.
Fishermen do that. Oscar does it. But Sol likes the rain. The wind. The wildness of the elements whatever they throw at him, and the mood he was in when he left…
Thunder hammers again.
Mal rises from the bed and comes to the window. He and Skylar change places, weaving around each other like they were born to do it. I guess they were.
My brother, though. He says nothing. Just folds his arms and narrows his eyes at the devastating horizon as if he’s assessing enemy lines.
Calculating windspeed.
Forward movement.
Same paratrooper brain as mine, if it worked right. Though, I don’t need much fire power in my skull to know this is the most brutal freak squall I’ve seen blow through Porth Luck since I was a boy. And I wasn’t scared then.
Because he was with me.
Sol.
The wind rises again, howling down the chimney like a caged animal—
A ringtone cuts through the dark flat.
I flinch.
Pretty sure Mal does too and I reach for him on instinct as Skylar follows the sound to the living room.
He comes back with Sol’s phone and the name on the screen drops my stomach.
Hanna.
Oscar’s friendly ex.
Aras’s mam.
Why is she calling Sol?
The phone rings and rings in Skylar’s hand, but he doesn’t answer, and eventually, it stops, leaving that awful heavy silence to descend once more. To cloak us in limbo with nothing but thunder and wind, and the sickening churn of our worst fears.
He’s out there.
Sol’s phone beeps. Like an echo.
I blink hard. “Is that her again?”
Skylar scans the screen and his expression changes.
I wrench myself from the window. “What?”
“Oscar’s monitor lost connection.”
The words land slow, and I try to rationalise them.
Try to remember everything I know about the device Oscar wears on his arm.
The small white circle taped to his muscular bicep.
And as sludgy as my brain feels, I know there are a dozen reasons for it to disconnect from Sol’s phone before I get to the shit ones.
Salt water.
Poor signal.
Or maybe he turned the remote sharing off. Maybe he and Sol have had the mother of all rows at sea and that side of their friendship is done.
A ludicrous thought if I ever had one. One the storm answers with the most brutish crack of thunder yet. Makes me jump, but I’m distracted by activity in the harbour below. Car engines. Headlamps. Men moving across the quay in rain macs as harbour lights flick on.
It’s Christmas Day. Boats should be tied fast, fishermen home with their families. But down below, they trickle out into the night.
Checking lines.
Counting vessels.
I watch with building dread as their collective gaze swings to the cove and the empty space where the Sirona should be. As they turn back to the horizon with the same urgency lighting my nerves. The same horror blocking my throat.
Mal.
I find my brother in the dark and he nods.
Let’s go.