CHAPTER 43 #3
Edmund lays me flat on my back and elevates my legs, holding the incline steady. My blood is everywhere, on his arms, in his hair, across his face.
“Ed—” Jack’s voice breaks. “He’s not—he’s not breathing!”
Edmund whips around. A single look at Dickie’s still body folds his face. For one terrible second, he doesn’t move.
Then: “Switch!”
Jack scrambles toward me and grabs my legs, holding them elevated.
Edmund drops to Dickie’s side, plants his hands on his chest, locks his elbows, and starts compressions, counting in a low, cracked whisper. “One, two, three…”
He leans in, tilts Dickie’s head back, pinches his nose, and seals his mouth over Dickie’s. One breath, then another.
“Come on, Dickie.” Edmund’s voice grinds out of him desperately. “Come on.” He pumps again, faster and more frantically.
Around us, the deck crowds with bodies. Charlotte collapses to her knees beside me, sobbing. “I’m so sorry, Lore. I tried to get you with a hoverboat, but Rosamund held me back.”
Irene and Rosamund stand shoulder to shoulder, frozen, their faces bleached with terror.
The sergeant barks into his radio for a helicopter while two Pinkies rush in and smear ointment over my wounds, which hiss and bubble on contact.
A sterile, cloying smell thickens the air as the bleeding slows.
The gashes cinch shut under the clotting agents, and the pain suddenly vanishes, as if cut away.
I glance over at Edmund, who’s still performing chest compressions. “Dickie.” His hands pump rhythmically against Dickie’s sternum. “Dickie. Please.”
He seals his mouth over Dickie’s again and breathes deeply. Dickie’s chest rises once, twice, and then… a cough.
Dickie spasms, vomiting lake water in a violent gush. He gasps, and his body convulses against the deck as if fighting to stay tethered to the world. The first breath he takes is a gulp, dragging in air as if it’s the first time he’s ever tasted it.
The deck goes still. Even Rosamund, who’d begun edging toward the hoverboats, stops in her tracks.
Dickie props himself up on an elbow, still wheezing.
He scrubs water and bile from his lips, blinking until his gaze settles on Edmund’s shell-shocked face.
Edmund’s sandals leak lakewater, and his shirt is torn and plastered to his skin.
His chest heaves, and his eyes, glassy and bloodshot, fix on Dickie in a blank, unseeing stare.
“It’s all right, Ed,” Dickie rasps, reaching to pat his arm.
Edmund flinches at the touch, his jaw tight, as if he’s still underwater, trapped in a different moment when Dickie died.
Dickie waits, then tries again, forcing a crooked grin.
“I’m all right,” he says. “Though I kinda hoped the first time I got puckered up, it’d be by a pretty broad.”
His gaze jumps past Edmund, his eyebrow lifting toward Charlotte.
She lets out a short, breathless laugh that shatters into a sob. Her shoulders fold inward as more tears come.
Edmund shakes himself, snapping out of it slowly, then all at once. He springs forward and pulls Dickie close, his shoulders trembling as his body arcs protectively around him.
Dickie flinches and cries out loud enough to make Edmund twitch back.
Edmund’s eyes drop to Dickie’s shirt, clinging wetly to his ribs and stained with a sickly rust-colored mark.
Edmund peels the fabric away and finds a plug of flesh missing, a clean piranha bite gouged from under Dickie’s ribcage.
Dickie groans as if he’s only now aware of the pain. His body slumps back against the deck, his head lolling sideways until he sees me and what remains of my leg.
“Loredana?” His voice, tinged with horror, is barely a whisper.
I don’t know if he remembers what happened or how close we came to being eaten alive.
Beside me, Charlotte’s grip tightens around my hand.
Her face is a frantic mess of smeared makeup and tears as she shouts at the sergeant, demanding to know where the helicopter is.
She keeps asking if I’m still in pain, but I can’t answer.
I can only stare at Edmund, who’s crouched over me, his eyes dead, as if seeing me broken has broken him too.
Jack kneels beside Dickie and smears ointment over the wound to stanch the bleeding. “What happened, Dickie?” he gasps. “How the fuck did you guys fall in?”
Dickie shakes his head, too dazed to answer.
“Miss Hussey initiated an unlawful death duel challenge against Miss Waldsten,” the sergeant cuts in.
“I intervened and disarmed her. Miss Hussey was being taken into custody when she broke free, struck Miss Waldsten, and kicked her overboard. Mr. Langley was ascending in a hoverboat at the time. Miss Waldsten collided with the vessel mid-rise, causing it to capsize, and both parties entered the water.”
Edmund rises slowly as the sergeant speaks, the kind of slow that makes everyone else go still.
Irene retreats to the railing, her eyes tracking the way his head tilts down and his shoulders drop as he shifts his weight.
With a frantic curse, she springs at one of the Coppers, yanks the plasma pistol from his holster, and trains it on Edmund.
But he still advances, exploding forward in a feral burst that rattles the deck. Irene tugs back the pistol’s charging handle and locks her arm in preparation to fire. Yet when her finger closes on the trigger, it stiffens as if gone numb.
Edmund is already halfway to her before anyone reacts. Jack clears a hot tub in one leap and slams into him from behind, arms locking around his waist. “Not like this, Ed!” he shouts.
The Coppers move to de-escalate the situation, forming a wall in front of Irene, whose finger is still frozen on the pistol’s trigger. Rosamund sobs and ducks behind the bar, nearly tripping over her screeching monkey.
Edmund keeps pushing forward, dragging Jack along until his sandals slip and squeal on the slick deck. His breath tears ragged from his throat, hands clenched into bloodless fists, eyes locked on his target with fierce, blinding rage. He’s yelling, but he’s not thinking. He’s hunting.
Jack clings tighter, straining with everything he has, but Edmund propels forward until he slams against the wall of Coppers. He shoulders past the sergeant, then arcs up with a savage roar and drives his forehead into the muzzle of Irene’s pistol.
I lurch sideways, so stunned I barely register the roar of the helicopter overhead.
Light floods the sky as the helicopter touches down on the yacht’s helipad.
The rotor wash lashes the deck, whipping my hair into my eyes and knocking plates off the bar.
Then the cabin door bursts open, and four Pinkie medics leap out, boots pounding the planks.
The robots shout orders as they move, one team heading for Dickie and the other for me. In seconds, we’re strapped to gurneys. Robotic fingers check our vitals as IV lines click into place and monitors attach to our chests. Charlotte and Jack follow as Dickie and I are rushed toward the helicopter.
Edmund stays behind.
He’s still shouting over the Coppers, ramming his forehead into the muzzle of Irene’s plasma pistol again and again, as if daring her to fire.
Irene stares, open-mouthed and trembling, until Edmund wrenches the pistol from her grip and hurls it into the lake.
Then he turns on her with a final, ferocious shout.
Whatever he says is drowned out by the thunder of rotor blades, but it drains the color from Irene’s face. Her knees buckle, and the sergeant catches her by the waist. Her body folds as the last of her fire spills out of her like blood.
The Pinkies lift me into the helicopter, and the scene outside fades from view. Inside, everything is a blur of flashing lights, electronic voices, and moving hands. Dickie lies on the gurney next to mine, half-conscious, slurring as he complains about losing his airplane in the lake.
“It’s not just a toy, Jack,” he cries, tears streaking his freckled cheeks. “It’s my life. You’ve gotta get it back.”
Jack squeezes Dickie’s shoulder, and as he murmurs reassurances, my hands dart to my swimsuit cover-up. I fumble under the strap, down my side, across every fold of tattered fabric.
It’s gone.
“The brooch,” I choke. “Char—the daffodil. It’s gone.”
Charlotte leans over me, eyes wide. “Shit. The one your dad gave you?”
I nod, a new pain forming deep in my chest. “I lost it. In the water—” My hands claw at my cover-up again, uselessly, as if I can make the brooch reappear by sheer desperation. “It’s gone.”
“We’ll find it, Lore.” She strokes my hair, her voice too calm to be real. “I promise. We’ll figure it out. We’ll get it back.”
The helicopter engine roars louder, and pressure builds in the cabin as the door begins to slide shut.
A shout cuts through the air before Edmund hurls himself through the narrowing gap.
A bloody bruise swells on his forehead where he rammed into the barrel of Irene’s pistol, blood dripping into his eyes as they dart around the cabin until they find me.
I try to sit up and reach for him when I feel the twinge of a needle in my arm. Warmth spreads fast, flooding my limbs and dragging my eyelids closed.
I blink once, and Edmund appears above me, framed by the window, his face lit in bursts as the first Founders Day fireworks explode across the sky. They crackle beyond the glass, white-gold against the black. One after another, violent, blinding, and beautiful, like stars torn apart.
“Loredana, I’m—” Edmund drifts closer, his hand shaking as it hovers over my mangled legs. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I say weakly, barely able to speak. “You heard me, Edmund. And you were fast enough, just like I said you’d be.”
The words make him flinch, his throat tightening in his collar. Slowly, he sinks to his knees beside me and encloses my hands in his. “I’ll fix you,” he says. “I’ll fix all of it.”
My eyes close, and the thoughts in my head darken, but before I go under, I manage a faint, trembling smile.
Because I believe him.