Chapter 26 Jack
We reach the quay at the same time as the harbour-master. He already has a handheld radio pressed to his ear, trying to raise the Sirona and another vessel that hasn’t come home.
Other fishermen mill around, taking shelter by the new lifeguard base, hoods up to the lashing rain and wind.
I don’t have a coat.
Neither does Mal.
I lose track of Skylar until he presses a jacket on me.
“Put it on.”
He does the same to Mal. Somehow, we obey. But my focus is pinned on the harbour-master. On his unyielding features and the grim set of his mouth as he raises one of the vessels. As his gaze shifts to the empty berth in the cove and he tries to reach the other.
“Sirona. Sirona. This is Porth Luck harbour. Come back.”
Static.
The harbour-master tries again. Then shifts to the emergency channel.
“FV Sirona. FV Sirona. Any station, any station. Respond.”
The storm chews the signal.
Static and silence.
Static and silence.
The skipper of a nearby boat pulls up AIS—automatic identification system—on a plotter in their wheelhouse.
Uninvited, I jump aboard. The screen glows green and sickly in the gloom, but it’s dull enough that I can look at it without squinting. That I can recall a fraction of who I used to be and interpret what I see—
There.
A trail heading out of the bay and west. And then—
Nothing.
The track stops as if it’s been cut off at the neck and that horror in my throat swells another layer.
Mal shoulders his way closer to the screen, voicing the timestamp. Doing the maths in his head, tracing the screen with his fingertip. “They’ll be further out now.”
If they’re still afloat.
A thought that sticks and it shouldn’t. The Sirona is old and stripped bare by Dav’s most recent fuckery. But she’s as stubborn as Sol. Resilient. Strong. She won’t flounder.
She won’t.
Mal says more words, but not to me. I back away from the screen and step off the boat to where Skylar stands in the path of the worst wind, a phone pressed to his ear.
“Who are you calling?”
“Oscar, but it’s still not connecting.”
I don’t remember him or Mal calling Oscar already. Or that it didn’t connect. In my mind, I see only Sol’s phone in the dirt where he threw it, never mind that it’s been in Skylar’s hand since.
Mal hops off the AIS boat. He comes to where we stand. The harbour-master follows close behind him, a satellite phone in one hand, radio in the other.
“They’re calling the coastguard,” Mal says. “And some of the boats here are going to go out as far as they can without getting swamped.”
As he says it, engines kick over, lights flicking on. Vessels that weren’t meant to move today rattling to life as the gravity of what’s happening sinks its claws into me.
“Sev,” I say to no one in particular.
No one answers and we listen as the harbour-master speaks into the radio and the coastguard answers.
Calm.
Measured.
Terrifying.
“RNLI Porth Ewan tasked. All-weather lifeboat launching.”
A fisherman curses. Another nods and it dawns on me that a few weeks ago the Porth Ewan lifeboat wouldn’t have been there.
That we’d have been waiting on a rescue vessel from twenty miles up the coast. Or a chopper that can’t launch in this wind, a fact the first fisherman confirms. “You’d be jeffin’ bonkers to put a bird up in this. ”
He’s not wrong.
But I have nothing, and I turn away, drifting from the crowd, Skylar my silent shadow as rain hits my face sideways. The storm is clipping the harbour for real now, violent gusts rattling the rocks and sending high spray over the wall.
Skylar steers me from that too, but I resist. I need to feel it. I need to see the lightning split low over the water and face the ocean beyond the headland. The wall of white and black that holds my whole heart.
Where are you, Sol?
The lifeboat launches. I hear it over the radio.
Hear Mal telling me and I picture it without a conscious decision to do so.
The tow vehicle hauling her down the slip.
Door sealing, engines roaring. Crew who’d been at their dinner tables ten minutes ago now motoring headlong into Mother Nature’s roar.
“I’m going to Porth Ewan.” I make for the coast road without waiting for Skylar’s response. Set off at a run, cursing the day I took that mortar fire and made myself this helpless flailing thing that can’t drive or think for himself.
Ableist bullshit.
But I’m too flayed to catch it, even as I hear Sol’s gentle admonishment in my head. As I pound the pavement and run and run and run, leaving Porth Luck behind.
Porth Ewan is two miles uphill, the incline one I’m grateful I’ve run with Skylar while Mal was gone. My lungs strain and lactic acid burns my muscles, but I make it knowing I could run to the moon if Sol was there.
The harbour here is bigger than Porth Luck. But Porth Ewan is a fishing town too and the quayside is alive with urgent activity. Coastguard volunteers. Fishermen standing by, ready to go at the slightest break in the storm.
There is none. The rain hammers and the wind is fucking unspeakable. A living hellscape as thunder rolls and booms until I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be quiet.
The lifeboat station is at the end of the quay. I make for it as Mal falls into step beside me, shaking his hair back from his face. “Warn me before you scarper on a mad tab next time, eh?
I ignore him, but as we near the hub of activity in the base, I let him surge ahead.
Let him talk for me.
Listen for me.
Let him take care of everything I can’t.
I don’t even go inside. I go to the wall and scan the horizon.
For the first time in hours, I see lights in the distance, but they’re fading out, not getting closer.
Then they’re gone and it feels like an omen.
Like the end of the world and I think I might die right here in this harbour that isn’t home.
In this storm. In this life that isn’t real without Sol dancing in the rain.
Maybe I am dead and this is hell. A notion that settles until the ear-splitting racket of motorbike engines shatter the air.
Rebel Kings roll up.
Saint Malone.
Folk.
Another I don’t recognise until I remember I saw him kissing Orla O’Brian the night she rescued me from the trickster in the Joker.
This feels like a trick too. Like I’ve drawn the worst cards and there’s no way back. No resolution beyond the bitter end.
My chest hurts.
I rub it as Folk yanks his helmet off and comes to where I stand at the harbour wall.
Malone melts away—I lose track of him the way I have Skylar. The other King heads for where Mal’s cornered the harbour-master, and—
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything except that Sol is gone and he might not ever come back.
Oscar.
Fuck.
“Easy.” Folk takes my arm and guides me a little way along the wall. “What do we know?”
I tell him.
He listens, watching the ocean the same way Sol does as more Kings roll up. River O’Brian and the brawny man I know to be his husband.
Folk glances at the sky.
“Chopper’s grounded,” I say before he can. “They’ve got no pilots mad enough.”
“They don’t know the right pilots then—”
River’s husband calls Folk’s name.
Folk breaks away to talk to him. To move to River and place calming hands on his shoulders and I remember how close Oscar is to this faction of the Rebel Kings. That he lives in River’s house—a man Aras calls uncle too.
Aras.
Fuck. Fuck.
I tear off the coat Skylar’s forced on me and let the rain soak my clothes and pelt my skin. Listen hard to the thunder and wind as if I’ll hear Sol calling me through the storm. As if I’ll feel him. But there’s nothing in my heart but love and fear, so much fear, and I can’t endure it long.
“Jack?”
I open my eyes. Sev is right there, as windswept and soaked as every soul who’s spilled out onto Porth Ewan’s quay.
Every soul who’s made the uphill trek from Porth Luck—and it’s not a small number.
As I retune to this fuckawful reality, I see every fisherman who hasn’t launched their vessel to scour the sea for their missing brethren, and it should warm my heart.
But I’m beyond warmth, even at the news Sev has brought me.
“They found the Merry Anne. She’s coming in.”
The Merry Anne. The other boat not in the harbour. But she’d sailed in the opposite direction to the Sirona and the AIS hadn’t lost her. As glad as I am her crew are okay, it doesn’t fucking mean much.
“My mum’s here.” Sev moves closer. “Some old dear took her into the Sea Bell.”
“Good for her.”
Sev nods, absorbing the flat hostility lacing my tone. Acknowledging the harsh truth that Sol doesn’t care enough about money for himself to sail on Christmas Day. That he did it for his mam and his dad and I swear to god if Dav shows his face I’ll thump him into next week.
He won’t. The Kings took him away, remember?
And they built the lifeboat base too—a thought that’s already occurred to me, but I cling to the repetition, knowing it matters. That it could be what stands between Sol and Oscar and whatever fate the ocean is trying to force on them tonight.
Sev falls quiet, though he’s not still. He’s agitated and pacing, smoking too much, needing his big brother to tell him to stop. Needing me to step up the way Sol always has for Mal.
It’s not hard. I love Sev, sharp edges and all. And I don’t want him to die of lung cancer before Sol makes it home.
I pluck the cigarette box from his busy hands and fire it into a nearby bin. “No more smokes till she comes in.”
The Sirona. Because she will come in. She has to. The earth doesn’t sit right without Sol. For me. For Mal and Skylar as they hover tensely a few feet away. For Sev as he drives the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
I put a stop to that too and drape my soggy arm around him, anchoring him to me. “He’ll be all right. They’ll be all right.”
Sev nods, blowing out a breath that’s all nicotine and stress. “This is so much fucking worse than last time.”
Thunder booms, no longer overhead but rolling back out to sea. “Last time?”
“When he was on Old Pete’s boat for the winter. Got hit beam-on, smashed the wheelhouse and everything in it, and ran adrift all night. Longest twelve hours of my life.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You never knew. It happened when you were deployed.”
“When?”
Sev shrugs. “Ten years ago, maybe? I don’t fucking know.”
Valid. And I guess the specifics don’t matter. The point is Sol’s been missing before and I never knew about it, and that shit burns.
I eye the bin, contemplating who’d stop me if I fished out Sev’s smokes and lit one up. Skylar, maybe. Mal, who seems to read my mind and shifts to block my view of the bin in the same moment Folk calls his name instead of mine.
Mal steps off. Putting enough space between us that I know he’s made the same assessment I have that whatever Folk has to say is something I don’t want to hear.
But there’s no space wide enough that I can’t read him as he listens to Folk without a single overt reaction. That I can’t see how much effort he puts into holding his face so still and know it’s the same reason Folk doesn’t look at me at all.
They part ways. Folk melts away, and the split second it takes my brother to force himself into motion tells me everything without him uttering a fucking word.
Mal reaches me.
I’m already backing up, but he grips my wrist with an unbreakable hold.
“They’ve found her.”
Her. Not him. Not them. The distinction matters and my blood goes cold in a way the wind and rain haven’t managed yet. “Is she whole?”
Mal’s nose flares. “Upturned. Hull’s visible between sets, but they can’t get to her.”
Upturned. The harbour noise flattens, like someone’s thrown a soundproofed shield over me and sucked the air from my lungs. “Any sign of them?”
“Not yet,” Mal says, but the optimism sounds forced and I want to punch him. “And they’re thinking of pulling the lifeboat back. They’re going to come back to us when they’ve made a decision.”
Pull back.
Call off the search.
Start again at first light.
The words don’t need saying. So Mal doesn’t bother. But they hang there anyway, filling the space between Sev’s anguished howl and the utter silence of the rest of us.
Skylar leads Sev away.
Mal stays with me, and the Rebel Kings who venture closer, forming a loose arch behind me, as if they can shield me with dark leather. Protect me from dry land while the ocean threatens to obliterate my entire existence.
Upturned. With no sign of Sol and Oscar. That means they’re either trapped inside or in the water and my heart knows it’s the latter.
Winter water.
Open seas.
They’ve got an hour at best before the cold takes them, and it’s already been too long.
Something inside me screams.
I let Mal steer me to a bench and we sit in the dark as the storm begins to slide east, rain thinning to a hard damp mist. I’m so out of it I swear I hear a phantom chopper in the sky.
That the harbour lights glow brighter as the wind drops.
That it means something as we wait and wait and wait for the end of the world to hit us, our only comfort that the coastguard holds fast and keeps the lifeboat out.
For now.
I reach for my brother. “I’m glad you came home, I ever tell you that?”
Beside me, Mal shifts, wet through and cold in a way he can’t feel yet either. “You don’t need to. I feel it every time you look at me.”
I turn to face him, emotion pressing hard against the numbness I need to survive this. “I love you.”
“I love you too, brother.”
I nod. Once. There’s so much more to say, but a sudden surge of energy in the harbour pulls us apart. A current running through the crowd as heads turn and radios crackle sharper.
I’m on my feet in a second, following the attention of every man in the harbour, gaze drawn to the inky horizon as something cuts through the dark.
Lights.
Low and moving.
Expanding.
“Lifeboat’s coming in.” Mal locks an arm around my waist, steadying me as my heart punches hard and fast, dread and hope pitching a never-ending battle for dominance.
The RNLI vessel forces her way through the harbour entrance, riding heavy, spray blowing off her bow, lights flashing against stone and water.
Men surge forward.
Lines are thrown and she’s hauled in tight, her crew blurred orange as they move across the deck.
And I see it then. Two shapes laid out. Strapped down, covered and unmoving as the boat rocks.
Like weight and nothing more.
Sev is suddenly with me again. Another cry tears out of him, but I’m moving before I think to comfort him. I run, and yet I’m still too far away as they bring the first stretcher to land.
Water streams from it.
I see skin.
Pale.
Still.
And then the second follows, no movement or fight. Another body hauled from the sea on Christmas night. Another sailor who hasn’t come home.