14
“GRACE! WAKE UP!”
I groan, rolling to my side, hoping that this has all just been a dream and I will wake up on the yacht, still holidaying with my team.
“Grace!”
Aggie’s voice is persistent, so I let my eyes flutter open.
I don’t know what time it is, or if it’s light or dark outside.
I passed out around lunchtime, exhausted from the night before.
We are all exhausted. Someone watches Tati at all times, and we take turns.
Adrian just keeps working until he can’t work no more, then he rests.
His words, not mine.
“What is it?” I say, forcing myself to sit up, even though all I want to do is go back to sleep.
“Adrian has got the radio making noises, like crackling noises. I think it is working. This could be it!”
There is an excitement in her voice that makes me think she is holding every ounce of hope left in her that this will work.
We all are.
I throw off the one thin sheet and drag myself out of bed.
Aggie rushes out into the hall, and I follow.
She is clutching a mug of something steaming, her hair wild and eyes impossibly wide.
She doesn’t say anything else, just turns on her heel and speed-walks for the stairs leading up to the captain’s station.
As we near, I hear it—a low, variable crackle that isn’t part of this ship’s usual sounds.
I follow Aggie and the noise right to Adrian’s little workstation.
Inside, every available body is crammed around the main console.
Adrian is hunched over the radio, elbows planted on an old desk, one crutch propped precariously against the wall beside him.
Wires snake out from the panel and across timber, some joined by twisted bits of foil.
Kellen and Zeke stand close behind, and Ace and Kaylee hover over Adrian’s shoulders, staring at the radio like they could will it to work.
“It’s working?” I breathe, stepping into the room.
Adrian looks up. “It’s so close...”
Zeke scans the horizon through the front windows, the muscles along his jaw clenched tight. He looks back at Adrian. “If there’s anyone out there, what’s the plan?”
Adrian shrugs, still fiddling with a dial. “We find their position, try and see where we are, anything is better than nothing. I’ll get someone on the line, just give me a—shit. Listen. Hear that?”
It’s faint, but underneath the static, I catch a voice—a real voice, not our own, not a hallucination. It’s masculine, muttering something about “weather northwest” and “fish on deck.” I freeze, afraid that if I breathe too loud it’ll scare the voice away.
“Did you hear that?” Aggie screeches, so loudly we all flinch.
“Oh my god!” I gasp.
“Is it working?” Kaylee says, her hand over her mouth.
Adrian leans in, fiddles around frantically, twisting dials and jiggling wires. “Can anyone hear me?”
“Just be careful who answers, we don’t want any more pirates,” Zeke points out.
Adrian nods and keeps going. “Can anyone hear me? Please. Can anyone hear me?”
Over and over he repeats it, twisting the dials a quarter turn at a time, jiggling the connection where the foil is wedged in, then starting over.
“Can anyone hear—”
The static breaks. A voice comes back, louder now, still warped by bursts of noise. “I can hear you.”
“Oh my god,” Aggie screams, so loudly we all flinch. “Oh my god.”
Adrian stays calm, but I can see his hands shaking as he leans into the mouthpiece. “We are stranded with an injured person on board. We need help.”
“Say again your vessel name.”
“I don’t know. We have been stranded on an island and have been picked up by this ship.”
Static. Then, “Copy. How many souls on board?”
“Nine,” Adrian says. “Nine of us.”
“Who is injured, and how?”
“A young woman, impaled by wood. We are doing everything we can, we need medical help, urgently.”
Silence.
Strong, broken silence.
The crackle thins out to nothing—just a flat hiss, like the radio has gone dead.
“Are they gone?” Kaylee gasps. “Did we lose them?”
Adrian slaps the side of the unit. Twists the dial back and forth through the same range he just worked for ten minutes.
“Come on,” Zeke says under his breath. “Come on, come on.”
Nothing.
“They’re gone,” Kaylee says again, softer this time.
Ace reaches past Adrian and raps his knuckles against the panel, once, hard.
The static surges back—loud, wrong—and then clears like someone wiped a window.
“What is your location?” The voice is back.
Definitely male.
“We don’t know,” Adrian goes on. “We have no idea where we are. We were stranded for a while.”
“How long is a long while?”
Adrian looks around at us. Nobody answers him.
“Months, maybe. We lost count.”
A long moment passes.
I forget how to breathe.
My hands are clenched so tightly by my sides, my fingers ache.
“We have a doctor on board, but we are a long way out from land. It might be the only chance you’ve got.”
They have a doctor on board. I could scream, because it truly feels like a miracle.
“Do you have GPS?” the man goes on. “Any navigation equipment at all?”
“Nothing works,” Adrian says. “The ship is old and broken, but it is enough to have gotten us off the island.”
We aren’t about to tell them we hijacked a pirate ship after murdering everyone on board.
Another pause. “Alright. You got any maps?”
“Yes,” Adrian continues. “Paper, but yes.”
“Anything else? Anything at all you can use?”
Adrian shakes his head, as if the man can see. “No, but we have an old compass we have been using to take us in one direction in hopes we find land.”
“This radio only picks up signal from other ships less than fifty miles away, so you are close to our location. Head north, north-east, and we will wait in our current location. If you keep coming in that direction, you will run into us. I will give you our coordinates, too.”
The man lists off some coordinates, and Adrian frantically scribbles them down.
“I will check in if I can,” the man says. “We are in this location for twenty-four hours. If you’re not here before then, we can’t help you. Over.”
The line goes dead.
For a moment, the whole room is silent except for the crackle of the line, as if no one dares to say what we all feel—disbelief, giddy relief, the tingle of hope flooding through all the cracks left by weeks of dread.
I look at Aggie; she is shaking so hard the tea spills over the side of her mug, dripping down her wrist. She doesn’t even seem to notice. I want to hug her, but instead, we both just start to laugh—high, ugly, kind of deranged.
It’s desperate, but it’s all we have. It feels like we have finally been granted our miracle.
“I’m going to tell Tati,” I breathe.
The others stay glued to the radio, Zeke and Kellen watching the horizon through binoculars. Ace and Adrian lean over the controls, rolling the maps out and lining up the compass. I drift out, down the corridor toward Tati’s room. The door is half-closed, and inside, everything is quiet.
I step in.
Tati is awake, staring at the ceiling, her skin grey and shiny with sweat.
“Guess what,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “We got the radio to work, and contacted a ship. We are heading there now. They have a doctor on board.”
Tati makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You’re not fucking with me?”
I shake my head, and then, because there’s nothing left to do but wait for our rescue, I sit on the floor, lean my back against the bulkhead, and finally, finally let myself hope that I might get to see what happens next.
IT TAKES US SIX HOURS to find them. It is the longest six hours of my life.
We all pace, taking turns watching Tati and staring out at the horizon, just waiting for a ship to appear.
Finally, we see it. It starts as nothing more than a shadow in the distance, but slowly, we move closer and closer.
It is old, but large. Probably twice the size of the ship we’re in.
Kellen did his best to remove any traces of proof that this was a pirate ship, just in case.
We are so close, we can’t have them turning on us now.
“Do you think they’re good people?” Rachel asks, standing at the front windows, staring out through the binoculars. “It doesn’t look like a pirate ship, more like a fishing boat of some sort.”
That makes sense.
“We can only hope,” I say, hopping from one foot to another with excess energy.
Needing to move, I walk up onto the deck and just watch as we get closer and closer to the ship.
I can see two men standing, watching us with binoculars, too.
Adrian has been keeping as much communication going as possible, telling them we can see them, we’re unarmed.
We can only do so much to hide that this is a pirate ship, and we can only hope that we will get the chance to tell our story before they react.
My fingers curl around the railing as I just watch, closer and closer we drift, until eventually I can see the two men clearly.
The ship makes ours look small, but if you were to put it next to a cargo ship, or any kind of cruise ship, it would be nothing more than a blip.
It is old, the outside run down from weather and sea water.
The bow of the other ship rises and falls, blunt as a battering ram, and everything about it feels heavier, more serious and somehow less real than our own patched-together escape pod.
The rails are slick with sea spray and rust, and the two men up top do not wave or call out.
They just watch us through those glinting lenses, stone-faced.
It’s almost a comfort, how unwilling they are to fake any friendliness.
At some unspoken cue, everyone gathers on deck.
Kellen and Zeke help Adrian up the stairs, which he grumbles about but accepts.
I stand next to Ace, arms folded tight around my middle, and try not to shake.
We keep drifting closer to the fishing boat.
Now I can see the men’s faces. The one on the left is older, with a salt-and-pepper beard and deep-set blue eyes that look like they’ve spent decades squinting into crosswinds.