Chapter 32
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Tia lay cocooned in her sheets like a corpse wrapped up for burial at sea. She had gone through the day corpse-like as well,
unsure what to do now that she knew they couldn’t radio out for help. Alejandro had said cutting the cord had been meant to
protect someone. Ourselves. But what did ourselves really mean? Him and Francis? Him and the Cameron family? All seven of them? Or—now—six of them? How would cutting them off
from the outside world protect them? And protect them from what?
Or whom? Did her father have enemies? She supposed plenty of rich men had people who disliked them. There were other yacht companies
that had rivalries with Unwind. Some had gone bankrupt. Maybe someone was jealous, wanted revenge?
Or maybe Lila was the one who’d riled up somebody. Tia’s mother had a habit of attention-seeking that could border on antagonizing.
Once when Tia and Rylan were eleven, Lila’s professionally photographed nudes were leaked all over the press.
That week, there’d been paparazzi hiding on the beach behind their house, following Tia and her friends in the mall, eating casually at their favorite restaurant while snapping pictures of the family from behind a menu.
Tia remembered feeling annoyed, even protective of her mom, but later a classmate had shown her the article that accused Lila of leaking her own nudes. Tia didn’t doubt that for a second.
Lila Logan would do anything to be noticed.
Even if it meant her daughter felt uncomfortable leaving the house. Even if it meant her husband didn’t speak to her for a
week.
Maybe that answered her question, though. If Lila were in danger, she would run right toward it.
Which just led Tia back to Francis.
Tia peeled the sheets off her face, coming to terms with the fact that she would not be falling back asleep. A tall, skeletal
man stood in the dark corner of the bedroom.
Tia slammed her hand over the lamp switch on the bedside table, and her brother’s features snapped into focus.
“Jesus,” she said, heart thrumming. “Why are you standing there like a psychopath? Have you been there all night?”
Rylan blinked. “Sorry.” He stayed where he was. “Couldn’t sleep.”
That was, distinctly, not an answer. Tia checked the time—6:00 a.m.—and loosened the sheets that mummified her lower body.
Over twenty-four hours since they’d found the radio cord cut. “And I’ll never sleep again after that.”
“Sorry,” he repeated.
“What’s wrong?” Tia briefly considered throwing a pillow at his face to reanimate him, but she decided against it. “Was Mom
up?” She knew Lila’s past fits of insomnia often involved waking Rylan up to talk with him at late hours of the night.
Rylan shook his head.
“Dad?”
A nod.
Figures. “Why were you up in the first place?”
He waved his hand at his bed. The sketchbook peered out from underneath the comforter, which had been tossed like a candy
wrapper. He must have gotten out of bed in a hurry.
Maybe he’d had a bad dream. There was enough nightmare fuel to go around. Tia peeled herself from bed and guided Rylan to
sit. He resisted and made his bed neatly before finally relaxing.
“You slept through every alarm I set for the first three years of high school. You think me drawing and shuffling around could
wake you up?” he said.
Tia returned to her own bed. “Oh please, you were in a different room.”
Rylan seemed to be in another world even as he held a conversation with her. It unnerved her.
“A room that shared a vent. And I had the volume on the loudest setting. But no, I had to wake you up myself.”
Tia tossed a pillow into Rylan’s chest, hoping that would hit a switch and snap him out of the cloud that encased him. “My
personal alarm clock.”
Rylan picked the pillow up. He seemed a bit more focused, at least. “What did you do at St. Bernadette’s to get up?”
“I slept in. Then I got a nice, personal wake-up from Sister Mary Sebastian every morning. Trust me, I preferred when you
did it. So . . . tell me what happened.”
Rylan quieted. He fixated on picking at a loose thread in the pillowcase’s stitching. Tia waited.
“Dad was on watch.”
Tia waited for more, but he was agonizingly slow. “And?” she prompted at last.
“And . . . and he’s running away.”
What? Tia got up and plopped down beside him. “What do you mean?”
He recounted, haltingly, his conversation with their father as Tia stared at him, panic rising. Francis hadn’t meant they wouldn’t be going to Florida soon. He meant they wouldn’t be going . . . ever? How could he do that? Why would he do that?
And what the hell made him think he could bring them all along?
“So we are being kidnapped.” She twisted fistfuls of Rylan’s sheets in her hands. “We’ve got to stop him, Ry, we have to turn
around or . . . or . . .”
Of course Francis Cameron would thwart Tia’s plans to run away by running away himself. The thought both amused and infuriated
her.
Rylan snapped the limp thread from the pillowcase and let it fall. It drifted to the floor and coiled like a noose.
“Listen,” she said carefully. “Whatever is going on, we shouldn’t have any part in. He’s maybe trying to protect us, but he’s
also dragging us along without consent. You saw the island, right? In the middle of absolute nowhere?”
Rylan’s voice crawled up an octave. “So we’re going to be trapped? That place can’t have airports. Or other boats. Or people.
What do we do, then?”
“Then we’ll steal The Old Eileen,” Tia said without thinking. She paused to consider the option. Nico wouldn’t want to be trapped on some godforsaken island.
He’d help them escape. He’d come with them. Hell, maybe he’d travel the seas alongside them and teach Tia how to properly
sail. She felt giddy at the idea, her twin brother, a trusty cat, and her . . . crush? All of them could desert the world
and ride waves until the end of time. Tia could be content with a life like that. They’d be pirates! Or outlaws! The whole
world would endeavor to find them, but no one ever would.
“We’ll steal the boat,” Tia repeated, trying not to get too far ahead of herself. “With Nico, the three of us can sail wherever we want to go.”
“How? Dad, Nico, and Alejandro are barely handling the watch rotation without MJ.”
Tia remembered her father’s words when he was arguing with Lila, the night before they left. This ship can be manned by one good sailor alone, Lil. And we’ve got two and a half.
Tia’s mind raced, but she felt hopeful. She could still make her plans work. She scooped up the sketchbook and turned to a
blank page at the end. She uncapped the nearest pen. “Listen to me. We have options. And right here, right now, we’ll make
a backup plan that nobody beside us will know about, okay?”
“A plan . . .” Rylan watched the pen that Tia hovered over the page.
“We’ll have a signal. A distress signal. If anyone else sees it, they’ll think we’re playing around. And it’ll mean . . .”
Tia thought about The Old Eileen. She thought about all the different safety aspects built into the ship. Life jackets, life preservers, inflatable survival
suits. All of those were mere bandages if they were on their own, though. They needed a boat.
“The life raft,” she said. “If one of us gives the signal, we’ll inflate one of the life rafts and run before we get stuck
on the island.” Or if whoever’s hunting Dad catches up to us . . .
“We’d be sitting ducks,” Rylan protested. “We’d just float there and starve.”
“The life rafts come with survival kits. Food, water. And flares. We would be rescued and back home before we knew it. And
in a worst-case scenario, Dad stashed paddles in ours. We could row to . . . I don’t know. Somewhere.”
Tia was becoming more and more fond of the idea. They would figure it out as they went along. That was how adventures worked.
Rylan lay back, pillow held to his chest. “We’d have to be close to another ship. Or to land. Land that isn’t Dad’s island.”
Tia was nodding. “We’re getting close. And there are a bunch of islands in the area. I can figure out the closest inhabited
one, and we can slip away the night of our birthday when everyone’s asleep. That gives us a few more days.”
They would be long gone by the time anyone woke up. They could do it when Nico was on watch. He’d cover for them. Maybe he’d
come with them.
Rylan looked doubtful. “What would the signal even be for all this? Some boat-distress thing like the Titanic people used?”
Tia snapped her fingers and began to write. “That’s exactly what we’ll use, Ry. And when we see this signal the night after
our birthday . . . if we say it, write it, mouth it, sign it . . . it means it’s time to leave. Get out now.”
Rylan licked his dry lips and nodded, grim. “Abandon ship.”
Yes. She knew he would get behind her eventually! This was the push he needed to realize their father did not have their best
interests at heart. So Francis Cameron had something to run from. What he didn’t get was that they had something to run from
too. Him.
Tia held out her pinkie and twisted hers with Rylan’s in a promise. “Together.”
He hesitated then looked her in the eye for the first time since she’d woken up. “Together.”
Tia closed the sketchbook so that anyone who passed through the twins’ room wouldn’t see the black letters emblazoned on the
page, their signal in case of the absolute worst.
SOS.
Save Our Souls.