Chapter 24 — The Break.138 #3
“Isn’t it glorious,” she was saying, beaming, to the stragglers, to the lost, to a confused girl who had drifted toward the one calm voice in the room.
“Few souls ever get to watch the tide test them like this. He showed us his face tonight so we’d stop needing to see it.
Don’t you understand what a gift that is?
The Deep doesn’t need a face. The Deep was never the face.
This is the truest the tide has ever spoken to us.
We’re so lucky. We’re so lucky. Stay, and I’ll show you. ”
The whole island was on fire behind its own eyes and Coral was already laying the first brick of the next one, and I understood that some people you cannot save because they have decided that drowning is swimming, and I left her to it, because I had finally spotted the only person in that room I had come back for.
Solena was standing where they had crowned her, alone in a circle the panic had drawn around her, the deepwater blue still on her shoulders and the dead microphone still in her hand, looking at nothing.
I went to her. I had braced, the whole way across that deck, for her to look at me the way you look at a man who has just detonated the best night of your life on a global stage. I had earned it. I was ready to be hated.
She crossed the last of it herself.
She came across the gap that had been opening between us since the mat, since the Merging, since the morning of the third day, since the ferry, and she put her face into my neck the way she did asleep, except she was wide awake, and she held onto the front of my shirt with both fists and shook, and the only thing she said, into my collar, over and over, was my actual name.
Not Squid. Not anything they had given either of us. Sean.
“You came back,” she said.
“Course I came back.” My voice did something I will not describe. “You really think I’d let you do your big number without a cameraman?”
She laughed, which is a terrible sound coming out of someone crying that hard, and she hit me once, weakly, in the chest, and then she just held on, and I held on, the influencer and the boy she raised, in the smoking ruin of the thing that had nearly had us both.
“We have to go,” Don said, somewhere near, gentle for once. “While they’re all looking at the sky. Now, ideally.”
We went the way you walk out of a place that no longer has a single lock that means anything, which is to say we walked.
No passports to lift. No ferry to time. The salt room door stood open behind us with everyone’s surrendered lives spilling out of it, because the staff had better things to do than guard a cupboard, and we just went, down the path, toward the water, in a loose stunned little crowd of the newly unconvinced.
Calla was at the dock.
She had a bag. She had her shoes in her hand and a bag over her shoulder and the flat clear face of a woman who had made a decision some hours before the rest of them and simply been waiting for a boat.
When she saw me she didn’t say anything about Fathom and I didn’t ask, and that was its own answer and also not the one I feared, because she had a bag and she had a destination, and people who have given up do not pack.
“He’s in a hospital on the mainland,” she said, before I could not-ask. “Awake for days now. Furious about the bill. I’m going to go and be furious about it with him. And then I think we’re going to talk to some lawyers about what a tide bond actually is.”
“Good,” I said, and meant it more than almost anything I’d said all night.
“You did this.” She looked back up the path, at the glow, at the noise. It wasn’t quite a question.
“The cult did this,” I said. “I just kept the camera on.”
The boat was a small ugly off-island thing some bored cousin of Don’s publisher had sent, and it smelled of diesel and the open sea, and we got on it, all of us, the journalist and the survivor and the boy with three drives in his pocket and his mother under his arm, and it pushed off the Isle of Saltren into the dark, and nobody on the island noticed us go, because they were all still looking up.
Solena stood at the rail with my coat over the deepwater blue and watched the lights of the place that had nearly taken her shrink down to nothing.
“I really thought it was real,” she said, after a while. Quiet. Not asking me to fix it.
“I know.”
“The being chosen part. Not the rest of it. I knew the rest of it was nonsense.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, brand-free, just Deb, out in the wind. “I just wanted the being chosen so badly I let them sell me the nonsense to get it.”
I didn’t tell her she’d been chosen all along by the man standing next to her with seawater coming off the deck. It wasn’t the night for it, and anyway she knew, and anyway there were three weeks and a whole life still to get wrong about it.
So I just stood there with her at the rail, and let the island get smaller, and did not let go of her, and for the first time since a ring light in a kitchen a lifetime ago, neither of us was performing for anyone at all.