Chapter Forty-Five
“I hate to admit it, but being tied up by a man with a British accent isn’t nearly as sexy as I imagined it would be,” Kate said drearily, huddled back-to-back with Juliette and Veeta in the tender boat.
“Let them go, Clayton,” Juliette said desperately as Clayton appeared from belowdecks where he had been making his ominously proclaimed “preparations.”
Clayton crossed over to the yacht, leaving the tender boat deck. “I’m afraid not. You’re all a liability, and I can’t afford those.”
“What are you going to do?” Veeta asked, their voice surprisingly steady. “Not so we can thwart your evil plans or anything.”
“If you insist on knowing the narrative, the three of you stole onto the yacht. When I caught you in the act, you attempted to flee in the tender boat, but unfortunately there was a short and the engine went full throttle, tragically crashing and sinking you to the bottom of the bay.”
“What?” Kate screeched. “That’s psychotic!”
“Do you really think you’re going to get away with another electrical short excuse?” Juliette scoffed.
Clayton held up the controller. “Let’s find out,” he said, before slamming his hand on the red button.
Juliette was frankly disappointed by how quickly her body betrayed her as the boat hit the water. The physical reaction was so swift and overpowering that she barely registered the rumble of the engine beneath their feet. She was too busy lamenting how things couldn’t get any worse.
She couldn’t ignore the scream that Kate unleashed five inches from her ear, however, as the boat lurched forward so hard the three of them knocked heads like the Three Stooges.
Debris from the boat rained down on them as it took off past the dock into the open water.
And now Juliette realized she’d been so terribly wrong; things could in fact get way worse.
“We need to stop the boat!” Veeta shouted as the boat picked up speed, practically jumping out of the water and landing hard as it crested each wave.
The wind screamed around them, turning the edges of Juliette’s hair into needles and driving them relentlessly into her soft, perfectly moisturized skin.
If they survived this—which it was looking increasingly like they would not—she would need a restorative facial to recover.
“The knots are too tight!” Kate cried, jerking the three of them around as she tried to twist herself free.
“We need to cut them!” would have been Juliette’s contribution to the discussion, except every time she opened her mouth a rush of bile rose up the back of her throat instead.
There was no horizon line to focus her attention on, and the earth could have completely reversed polarity and gravity for all she knew as the plummeting waves and speeding trajectory of the boat made it impossible to tell what was up or down.
She was going to be so horribly sick, and then she was going to be dead, and Juniper was probably going to give some mealymouthed speech at their reunion talking about what a tragedy it was to lose one of them so young, and Juliette wouldn’t even be there to casually mention Juniper’s crow’s-feet when she smiled.
“… think I can reach it,” Veeta was shouting. “If you twist toward me, I can make it.”
What if they didn’t even have a memorial for her?
What if she went through all this trouble and no one even knew she’d died?
Was that worse? That definitely felt worse.
At least if they had a memorial, Juniper would have to pretend to care that she was gone.
She’d have to look herself in the mirror and reckon with the bad things she’d done to Juliette the year after Juliette’s parents published their last, disastrous parenting book.
The book that ruined her life and gave Juniper all the ammunition she needed to triumph in their high school rivalry.
“… one more!” Kate was saying, though it was hard to hear anything over the roaring wind and her total-body concentration on not ralphing. A battle she was quickly going to lose if the boat kept jumping waves like a big-headed toddler on a trampoline. “Juliette, can you do it?”
“Do what?” was what Juliette meant to say, but it came out like “Hrrmmnnfffrrrrnnnrr.”
“She’s seasick!” Veeta called out. “We’ve got to get it ourselves!”
“Get what?” Juliette wanted to ask, but they hit a vicious series of waves that rattled her teeth and made her toes curl. How was she even still conscious? It was a punishment, surely, to be in such abject misery and not pass out. She was too strong, that was the problem.
“Got it!” Veeta called out, oddly triumphant for being seconds away from death.
So intense was Juliette’s desire to escape her misery that she could almost feel her limbs going loose, her body curling forward into a protective ball.
The fantasy felt so real that she could sense the cold, damp deck of the boat against her cheek, the intense pressure of the blood flow returning to her hands.
“Where are the controls?” Kate called out. Was Juliette passing out? The deck jerked hard under her cheek, smacking into her face and jarring her back to reality enough to realize she wasn’t imagining it—they actually were free.
“What did you do?” Juliette asked, her voice slow and drunken.
“There was a rope cutter,” Veeta said, helping her sit up. “It fell on us when Clayton started the motor.”
“But now we don’t know how to kill the engine!” Kate called from the steering wheel. “There’s no key, and it’s not responding to the wheel. I don’t know what Clayton did, but we have to figure out how to undo it!”
“Below,” Juliette moaned, crawling toward the hatch. “He did something below.”
The tender boat was no luxury yacht—how complicated could its controls be?
She really had to learn to stop asking questions like that, because the second they got belowdecks and flipped the lights, she figured out just how complicated it could be.
There were wires everywhere, a whole panel of them, in all colors of the rainbow, tangled together and spliced and cut and wound around each other until they looked like some great living wall of tiny vines.
“If we had our phones, we could look up the schematics,” Veeta said, lifting a pale green wire and frowning at it. “Maybe there’s a manual somewhere on board?”
“We don’t have time,” Kate said, shaking her head. “It’s a miracle we haven’t crashed into anything yet, but I don’t think our luck will hold.”
“We could un-splice these here, see what that changes,” Veeta said.
“Unless those were already like that, and we blow the whole panel and get ourselves electrocuted for the trouble,” Kate argued. “What do they always say in the movie? Cut the blue wire? Or the red wire? Or both?”
Kate was right; they were going to crash before either one of them could make a decision.
Once again, Juliette had to do everything herself.
She crawled across the floor as they argued over wire colors—there were an unprecedented seven shades of blue and five shades of red—until she reached the tangle of wires.
Juliette didn’t pay much attention to which ones were which colors as she took the entire bundle in her hands and tore them out with all her might.
The boat plunged into darkness, the motor going still. The sudden change in velocity jostled them around, but Juliette was too far beyond caring to even appreciate the gradual slowing of the roller-coaster sensation. Her inner ear was already irrevocably fucked.
“You stopped the boat,” Veeta said, sounding dumbfounded.
“You’re welcome,” Juliette groaned, finding a cool surface and pressing against it like a lizard on a rock. Somehow the gentler swaying motion was even worse—how was it worse??
“But you stopped the whole boat,” Kate said. “The power, the lights, the radio, everything. How are we going to get back to shore now?”
“Huh,” Juliette said, before puking all over the cables.