EMP (The EMP Journey #2)

Chapter 1

The boat drifted north all night, and neither of them slept.

There was nothing to steer toward. That was the thing Liam kept coming back around to, in the black hours, standing at the rail with the rain running off his chin. A boat was a thing that went somewhere. It had a bow and the bow pointed and you followed it.

But there was nowhere to go, because the only place worth going was back, and back was a marina full of guns, and back was black water that had already given them its answer.

So they drifted.

Isaiah cut the motor sometime after full dark.

He did it without saying why, and Liam did not ask, and it was only later that he worked out the reason.

Fuel. Whatever was in the tank of that stolen boat was all the fuel that existed in the world now, and Isaiah, who could not stop being Isaiah even with his heart broken open, had done the arithmetic in his head and shut the engine down.

The silence after was worse than the noise.

Now there was only the rain on the deck, and the slap of water on the hull, and the long creak of the mast moving against a sky they could not see.

Liam stood at the bow.

He stood there because that was where she had been.

That was the place. His boots were in it, the blood, the last of it, thinned by the rain until it was not blood anymore but a wet dark stain spreading out and going pale, and the rain kept working at it, patient, and would keep working at it until there was nothing there at all.

He crouched down.

He put his hand flat on the deck, over the stain, and he did not know why he did it and he did not stop.

"Liam."

Isaiah's voice, from the stern. Ragged. Wrung out.

"Liam, come back here. You've been up there four hours."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. Neither of us is fine." A long pause, and the rain filled it. "Come sit down. Please."

Liam did not move.

Because if he moved, if he stood up and walked back to the stern and sat down beside his friend on the wet bench, then it was over.

Then it was a thing that had happened. Then Chloe Buck, who had known the ice, who had read the water better than anyone alive, who had put her gloved hand over his in the dark outside her cabin two thousand miles ago and told him that some of us see you right,

was a stain on a deck going pale in the rain.

He was not going to let it be over.

"She could be alive," Liam said.

He said it to the water.

"Liam."

"She could be." He stood up. He turned around, and he could barely see Isaiah in the dark, just a heavier blackness sitting hunched under the boom.

"Isaiah. Listen to me. Listen. She was at the bow and she was hit and she went over. Fine. That's what happened. But hit where. Do you know? Did you see it? Because I didn't see it."

"Liam, there was so much blood, there was—"

"There was some blood." Liam's voice came out harder than he meant.

He made himself slow down. Made himself find the cold clear thing, the way he had found it every time it mattered, at the fire, in the snow with Uebert standing over him, on the broken bridge.

"There was some blood. Not all of it. Not the amount a person leaves when they're finished. I've seen that. So have you. In Ashford, when Calder went down, and the trapper, and the men at the marina. That's not what's on this deck."

Isaiah said nothing.

"She was hit," Liam said. "I'm not arguing that. She got hit and she went into the water. But hit is not the same as killed, and you know it isn't."

"The water's cold." Isaiah's voice cracked all the way through. "Liam, the water is so cold. Even if she was alive when she went in, even if. How long. How long does a person last in that water."

"I don't know."

"Twenty minutes. Thirty. I don't know either but it isn't long, and she was hurt, and it was dark, and we were driving away from her with the motor running while she was in it."

There it was.

That was the thing that had been sitting in the bottom of the boat with them all night, unsaid, and now Isaiah had said it, and Liam felt it go into him like a knife between two ribs.

They had driven away with the motor running while she was in the water.

"That's on me," Liam said.

"It's not."

"It is. I told her to free the lines. I put her at the bow."

"You told her to get down. You told her three times, I heard you, I was right there. She wouldn't get down because she was freeing the line, and she was freeing the line because if she hadn't, that boat would still be tied to that dock and all three of us would be dead on it."

Isaiah's voice was rising, and it was rising because it was the only thing he had left to do with what was in him.

"She saved us. She saved us and she went into the water doing it, and I got the motor running and I drove us away and I did not look at the bow. I did not look. That's mine. That's my part."

"Isaiah."

"I did not look at the bow!"

The words went out flat across the black water and came back with nothing.

Liam crossed the deck.

He sat down beside his friend on the wet bench under the boom, and he put his arm around Isaiah Macklemore's heavy shoulders, and the two of them sat in the dark in the rain and neither of them said anything for a long, long time.

The rain eased sometime before dawn.

It did not stop. It just thinned, went from something falling to something suspended, a wet gray hanging in the air that soaked you slower but soaked you all the same. Fog came up with it, off the cold water, and by the time there was light enough to see by, there was nothing to see.

Gray above. Gray below. A boat sitting in the middle of a gray nothing, with a broken mast stay ticking against the spar.

"Where are we," Liam said.

"North." Isaiah had been at the wheel for an hour, though the wheel was doing nothing. "Somewhere north. That's the best I've got."

"How far north."

"Depends on the current." Isaiah rubbed his face with both hands, hard, like a man trying to wake up from something.

"And the tide, and the wind, and how long we ran the motor before I shut it down, and I don't know any of those numbers, Liam, because I've never sailed a boat in my life and there's nobody here to ask."

"Guess."

"I don't want to guess."

"Guess anyway. You're the only one of us who can."

And Isaiah, God bless him, did what Isaiah always did.

He stopped feeling for a minute, and he started thinking, and Liam watched the fixer come up out of the grief the way a swimmer comes up out of deep water.

"Okay," Isaiah said. "Okay. We ran the motor maybe forty minutes total, and she's a slow boat, so call that three, four miles under power, most of it north and west, out from the marina, out into open water. Then I cut it and we've been drifting."

"Drifting where."

"That's the thing." Isaiah pointed off the starboard rail, at nothing, at gray.

"Pell said the tide moves hard in this country. Big water in, big water out, twice a day, and it runs like a river through the narrow places. So we haven't been sitting still. We've been going somewhere all night whether we liked it or not. And the fact that we haven't run aground,

and we haven't heard surf, means we're in a channel. Deep water. Being carried."

Liam turned that over.

"Carried north," he said. "Into the Sound."

"Or carried back south on the ebb, in which case we could be right back on top of the marina and those twelve men when this fog lifts." Isaiah's jaw worked. "I don't know. That's the honest answer. I'd have to see the shore to know anything, and I can't see the shore."

Liam stood up.

He went to the rail and he looked out at the gray, and he made himself think, and it was the hardest thinking he had ever done in his life, because every part of him wanted to be doing something else. Every part of him wanted to be screaming her name into the water.

But screaming her name into the water was what he had done for six hours in the dark and it had brought him nothing.

So he worked the read.

"Isaiah," he said. "If a thing goes into the water at that marina. Not a person. Just a thing. A log. A crate. Anything that floats. Where does it end up."

Isaiah looked at him.

"What?"

"The current. The tide. You just told me the water in this country moves like a river."

Liam turned around. "So it moves. Fine. That means it takes things with it. Everything that goes in the water goes somewhere, and the somewhere isn't random, is it? It's the same somewhere, every time, because the water always runs the same way."

Isaiah's mouth opened.

Then closed.

Then he stood up so fast he cracked his head on the boom, and did not even seem to notice.

"Drift," he said. "You're talking about drift."

"I'm talking about where the water puts things."

"The water puts things on the lee shore."

Isaiah was moving now, going for the little chart locker under the wheel, hauling out the ruined damp paper he had been collecting for two days, spreading it on the wet bench with hands that were suddenly steady.

"Anything floating, the tide carries it up the channel and the wind pushes it across, and it piles up. It always piles up. On the inside of a bend, in a bay, in a cove, anywhere the current slows down and lets go of what it's holding. That's why beaches have driftwood, Liam, that's exactly why,

the water carries and then the water lets go and it lets go in the same places every single time."

"So there's a place," Liam said. "Somewhere north of the marina. Where the water puts what it takes."

"There's a place." Isaiah looked up from the chart, and there was something on his round face that Liam had not seen since the boat came off the dock. "There's a place. And we've been drifting toward it all night, because we're floating too. We're one of the things it's carrying."

Neither of them said the rest of it out loud.

Because the rest of it was two things at once, and both of them were terrible, and only one of them was survivable.

Either the water had taken Chloe somewhere and let her go, and she had crawled out of it, hurt and freezing and alive.

Or the water had taken Chloe somewhere and let her go, and they were about to find her.

"We look," Liam said.