Chapter 22 The Desolate Sea
Sable
“Okay, that’s it, I’m done!” Kittredge pulled her oar from the water with a dramatic huff and laid it across her lap. Then, with an even more dramatic sigh, she laid on her back.
Sable paused mid-stroke, then she hooked her own oar on the side of their boat.
Despite the day-long rowing, she did not welcome this break.
As soon as she stopped moving, the soreness bled into every muscle of her arms and back until her limbs felt little more than leaden weights.
Without the burn of the workout, Sable became uncomfortably aware of the pinpricks of stiffness in her ass and legs, mostly numb from the sheer inability to stretch after days of being stuck in this boat.
She tilted her face up to the night sky, her mind wide awake despite the exhaustion.
The night was already warm, and the sheen of sweat covering her skin made it stifling, but Sable made no move to soothe the heat with the cool seawater, or massage the soreness out of her muscles.
It was good that she was uncomfortable. It kept her distracted.
Small, blinking lights spattered the sky above, and with the lull of the waves below, it made her feel like she was floating in an endless expanse of–
You are growing awfully philosophical in your doomed quest for nothing.
Sable gritted her teeth, but she kept savoring the stars, if only out of spite.
And because soon she would never see the starry sky again, or feel the burn of the sun on her skin.
They were getting close. She felt it like the cloying breath of a corpse against the back of her neck, clinging and crawling and clawing at her awareness, telling her she shouldn’t be in these waters.
That she didn’t belong here. This time, the feeling was wrong, and she used it as a compass, steering where it was strongest.
Soon, she promised herself. It would be over soon.
I know where you’re headed now, the Heart said. You are more foolish than any who came before you.
“So be it,” Sable breathed out in something like relief. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me now.”
“Um, Sable?” Kittredge asked in a small, squeaky voice.
The alarm in Kittredge’s voice tore Sable’s eyes from the sky, and her hand shot instinctively to the machete she still insisted on carrying with her.
There was no one here, though. They were alone.
Sable’s eyebrows raised in question, but Kittredge wasn’t looking at her.
She was staring down at the water in growing horror.
Sable leaned over the boat’s edge. The wood creaked between her fingers as she gripped it for support.
For a moment, she thought she was seeing the stars reflected in the gentle movement of the water. But–they were moving. Approaching. Soon, the softly twinkling lights parted around a fissure of such dark nothingness that Sable could only describe as a lack–of light and warmth and everything alive.
The fissure grew, widened, and Sable realized what it was.
A maw.
A sinking feeling opened up in the pit of her stomach as Sable watched the maw open impossibly wide below them, and she had to lean back. Pry her fingers away from the edge of the boat. Otherwise, she would fall headfirst into that pit of nothingness wide enough to swallow a ship whole.
Her machete clattered against the planks of the boat.
There was no fighting this.
No outrunning it.
Sable dragged a deep, slow breath into her lungs, and let it out. She placed her hands on her knees, and waited, willing her heart to stop thundering in her chest.
Kittredge remained still as a statue as the rim of the leviathan’s maw broke through the surface, seawater dripping off its sharp edge as though it were a waterfall.
Around them, the water sloshed about as if they had suddenly gotten tipped inside a cup.
A stench of death and decay and rotting fish washed over them.
“Sable?” Kittredge asked in a terrified whisper, as if the creature didn’t already know they were here. “What do we do?”
Sable closed her eyes. She exhaled. “Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?! Sable, we’re going to die. This thing is going to eat us!”
Even with her eyes closed, Sable could feel its jaws slowly closing in, the warm humidity of its heavy breath sticking to her skin, powerful as the deepest sea currents. She did not move. A hand gripped her biceps, and Sable opened her eyes to peer right into Kittredge’s wide, blue ones.
“Sable, we need to do something!” The night darkened around them. The stars above their heads disappeared one by one. “You need to use it. The Heart. Get us out of here. Please!”
Yes. I can get you out of here.
“No,” Sable snapped, snatching her arm away from the pleading grip, from the temptation ringing in her head.
“But–”
“I said no,” she said, voice still hard but quieter. “This is what it wants. I’m not playing by its rules.”
“Then I’ll do it. I’ll pay what it asks, just–”
She grabbed Kittredge’s wrist before she could even twitch towards the satchel where the Heart rested. “You will not.”
With a faint click, the jaws closed around them.
They were in complete and utter darkness now, and the stink of the leviathan’s hot breath clung to her tongue, coated her mouth.
The slosh of water and the sounds of Kittredge’s panicked breaths and her own erratic heartbeat echoed in a deafening noise.
The Heart’s voice still pierced through it all. Is this your plan, then? To get yourself eaten?
“If this is what it takes.”
Even if that means she dies, too?
Sable hesitated for only one moment. “Yes.”
“Sable, you’re talking to yourself,” Kittredge whispered, voice trembling.
Sable barely heard her over the angry hiss of the Heart in her head.
Then something shifted.
A sliver of moonlight fell over them from above. As if burned, the creature’s jaws opened again and retreated into the sea with such haste that it nearly toppled their boat over. Sable let go of Kittredge’s wrist to steady them against the wild thrashing of the waters.
And then it was over. Silence settled, heavy and charged, as Kittredge rubbed at her wrist, a lost look in her eye as she stared at the now quiet expanse of sea.
Sable’s gut churned with a flash of nauseating guilt. “I’m sorry.”
Kit chewed on her lip and did not reply. Likely hadn’t even heard her. She still looked to be frozen in panic.
“It will not let us come to harm. It can’t,” she tried again. After a breath, she frowned at a patch of land in the distance. She hadn’t noticed it before. “We’ll stop by that island, and you can stay there. You don’t need to stick around for what happens next.”
Kittredge’s gaze snapped to hers, and she was glaring. “No!”
“Kit–”
“I told you, I’m not letting you do this alone. Whatever this is.”
Sable’s lips twitched in a frown. “You won’t be able to talk me out of it.”
Kittredge just sighed, then she edged closer. “I know,” she said, quiet and sad. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.”
Sable smiled, then. It, too, was sad.