Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
He woke up cold.
Colder than before. A different kind of cold—one that had gotten into him during the unconscious hours and settled there without asking permission.
His jaw ached from it. His hands, when he tried to move them, responded slowly, the zip ties biting differently than he remembered, his fingers stiff in a way they hadn’t been before.
A different floor. Not concrete—wood, old and uneven, the grain rough under his palms. Different smell.
The saltwater was gone. In its place, something dry and closed—sawdust and old machinery and the staleness of a space that had been sealed for a long time before someone opened it quickly and put him in it.
He lay still and let his eyes adjust.
No light under a door. That was the first thing he noticed, and it took him longer than it should have because he’d built his whole orientation around that line of gray at the base of the door, and its absence was more than merely physically disorienting.
He searched the darkness around him—ceiling, walls, floor—until he found it.
Not under the door but above it. A crack between the door’s top edge and the frame, thin as a thread, with light shining beyond it.
Different door. Different configuration. Different everything.
He sat up slowly and waited for his vision to stabilize.
The note was gone.
He knew it before he checked. There was something about the feel of his jacket, the absence of what had been pressed against his chest. But he checked anyway, both bound hands moving over the inside pocket with the methodical thoroughness of a man who needed to be certain.
Empty. They’d taken it when they moved him, the reasoning unclear.
He pressed his back against the nearest wall.
The note had been his. The only thing in the space that was his.
He’d held it for three days, turning it over in his mind until the words wore grooves—believed it, doubted it, believing it again—because the alternative was to stop believing, and he hadn’t been willing to.
Someone will find you. Words he’d carried as if they were weight-bearing.
Words that had given him hope. Perhaps he had misunderstood it from the start.
Perhaps it meant he was handed off to someone else who thought him useful for whatever they deemed worthy.
The words were gone and he had nothing to replace them with.
He checked his jacket again—instinct rather than expectation. His hands found the inside pocket. Empty. Then he felt along the floor near him. Something small and hard pressed against his palm. He worked it into his hands.
A button. Not his. Off a dark colored coat or a jacket, four holes. Left behind by whoever had been in this space before him—or fallen from whoever had put him here. It was a meaningless object, yet he held it between his bound hands and looked at it in the thin light coming from above the door.
At least it was something to hold. Like a penny you pick up and hold onto for luck.
He had no idea what day it was. That was the thing that affected him differently here.
Not the darkness or the cold or the missing note, but the absence of his count.
Eleven cycles he’d tracked in the other place, eleven mornings of gray light under the door marking time he could hold onto.
The drug had taken that from him as surely as anything else.
There had been light at some point—real light.
And footsteps. And a door giving way, but he’d had no voice and no legs and no way to hold onto any of it.
He’d woken up here in the dark with no reference point.
No light cycling to count. No sense of how much time the transfer had cost him.
He could estimate. He tried. His beard had grown. His throat was rawer than before. His stomach had moved past hunger into the quieter territory beyond it, where the body had adjusted to what it wasn’t getting.
Two days since they moved him. Maybe three. He didn’t know.
He stopped trying to calculate. Calculation required data, and he had none.
This was the part of himself he’d relied on most—the part that took what was available and built a structure from it, that found the number hiding inside the problem and extracted it.
That part had nothing to work with here.
He breathed.
He heard it just after what he’d decided was midday—or decided was midday because the thread of light above the door had brightened and he needed to call it something.
A boat horn.
Low and long, the note of a working vessel signaling its position. It came from somewhere to his left, not far, muffled by walls and distance but unmistakable to a man who had grown up on the Weyport waterfront and spent his working life reading that sound the way other people read the newspaper.
He recognized that horn.
Not the specific vessel—he couldn’t identify it that precisely—but the register of it.
The frequency, the way it bounced off water and waterfront buildings before reaching whatever room he was in.
That was the Weyport harbor—the working harbor, the one the fleet used, the one he’d stood beside every morning of his working life watching the boats head out.
He was still in Weyport.
He pressed his back harder against the wall, held the button between his bound hands, and breathed.
Still here. Still close. Whatever they’d done with him, wherever they’d put him, he was still inside the town he knew—still inside the reach of people who were looking.
He had to believe they were looking.
Please, he sent into the dark the same single word, the same stripped prayer. Let someone be close.
Then from somewhere—not the direction of the boat horn, but the other side, the land side of whatever building he was in—he heard something else.
A vehicle. Engine running. Then voices, low and indistinct, at least two of them. Not the routine single tread he’d learned to recognize. Multiple people.
Moving closer.