Quest #2
I cleaned the gash on her forehead with gauze from the first aid kit.
Salt water on an open wound made her wince and pull away.
I held her still, told her I was sorry, and kept going because infection would kill her just as sure as the ocean.
It’d just take longer. The cut wasn’t deep.
It would scar but it would heal. I taped the gauze down and checked her eyes.
Pupils responsive. Concussion maybe but she was alert and talking and that was enough for now.
“Somebody did this to us,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Somebody did.”
“The fuel lines…”
“Both of them. At the same time. Somebody tampered with the fuel system. Got to the plane on my property, past my security, and rigged both lines to fail mid-flight. They knew when we were leaving and where we were going.”
She was quiet for a minute. Then: “Who?”
“I don’t know yet. But when I find out, and I will find out, they’re going to wish they’d finished the job. Because the only thing worse than coming for me is coming for my woman and my child.”
She looked at me with blood on her forehead, salt in her hair, her sundress soaked through and clinging to her belly, her engagement ring catching the afternoon sun.
The diamond I had custom-made with Peach engraved inside the band.
I’d designed that ring sitting in a jeweler’s office in New York imagining the look on her face when I opened the box in Sedona with the canyon behind us and the sunset turning everything gold.
I got down on one knee for this woman. I don’t kneel for anybody and I knelt for her because she earned it.
Because she was worth every square inch of ground my knees touched.
And now we were here. On a raft. With nothing.
I took inventory because that’s what I do when the world falls apart. I count what’s left. Raft. First aid kit. Folding knife in my right pocket, same one I’d been carrying since I was twenty-two. The clothes on our bodies. Her ring. Her belly.
That was it.
· · ·
I paddled for hours.
Bare hands wrapped around the paddle in the water, pulling, reaching, pulling again.
No direction except west because the current was taking us that way.
I had no instruments, no landmarks, no way to know if west led to land or to more ocean or to the edge of the goddamn earth.
The ABCs were supposed to be out here somewhere.
Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao. Islands with hospitals and runways and cell towers.
But the GPS had been tampered with along with the fuel lines, which meant the coordinates I’d radioed in the mayday were wrong.
Whoever was looking for us was looking in the wrong place.
If anybody was looking at all.
The sun moved across the sky and I tracked it the way I used to track shipments back when Prime and I were running transport.
You learn to read the sky when your survival depends on knowing what time it is without looking at a watch.
The sun was behind us and dropping, which meant I was paddling west, which was the best I could do with what I had.
My hands were raw. The salt was eating into the blisters and the blisters were splitting and I could see pink flesh underneath the skin. It hurt but pain was just information. That information told me I was still alive and still moving. That was all I needed to know.
“Quest.” Mehar’s voice. Tired but present. “You have to rest. You’ve been going for hours.”
“I’m good.”
“You’re not good. I can hear it in your breathing.”
“I said I’m good, Mehar.”
She didn’t push it. She knew when to press me and when to let me be.
Right now she was letting me be because she understood that the paddling wasn’t just about moving the raft.
It was about control. The only thing I could control out here.
If I stopped I would have to sit in the silence and think about every single thing I couldn’t control, and that list was longer than the ocean in front of me.
The sun dropped lower. The sky turned colors that would’ve been beautiful if I wasn’t terrified. Orange and pink and deep purple bleeding into each other the same way they did in Sedona when I proposed.
Mehar’s eyes were closing. Her head dropped against my shoulder and I felt her weight settle into me as her breathing slowed. I knew she was going under. Sleep or exhaustion or the concussion pulling her down. Her hands were still on her belly. Even fading out she wouldn’t let go of our baby.
I kept paddling.
One arm at a time. Right hand in the water, pull, lift, reach, pull again.
My body was doing it without permission from my brain.
Muscle memory from a life spent refusing to quit.
The sun touched the water. Half the sky went dark.
Stars came out one by one like they’d been waiting backstage.
I scanned the horizon one more time, left to right, slow, the way I’d been doing every few minutes for hours.
And there it was.
Dead ahead. Maybe two miles out. Maybe three.
A dark shape breaking the flat line where sky met water.
Low, uneven, and wrong. Wrong because it didn’t move like water.
Didn’t rise and fall with the waves. It just sat there.
Solid. Still. Trees maybe. A ridge. Something that existed outside of the ocean and outside of the nightmare I’d been living in for the last five hours.
Thank God it was land.
I stared at it until my eyes burned from the salt. Blinked. Looked again. Still there. Getting clearer the longer I watched, darker against the dying sky, more defined with every second that passed.
I didn’t wake Mehar. Not yet. Not until I was sure my mind wasn’t showing me what I wanted to see instead of what was real.
I paddled harder. Both arms. Pulling through the water with whatever was left in my body after five hours of fighting the ocean with my bare hands.
The shape got bigger. Trees. I could see trees.
A shoreline. Something solid and real and close enough to reach if I didn’t stop.
I wasn’t stopping.
Mehar shifted against my shoulder. Murmured something I couldn’t hear.
I kept paddling toward an island I couldn’t name, on a map I didn’t have, in an ocean I couldn’t navigate.
Nothing but raw hands, a pocket knife, a baby on the way, and the kind of stubbornness my grandmother called foolish and my brothers called Banks.
The island got closer with every stroke.