Chapter 38
Rylan Cameron
Call sign: Minnow
It was Rylan’s turn to hide in the anchor locker. He half hoped someone would find him, that Tia would come and lock her arms
around him and listen to him rant or cry, but she didn’t this time.
He longed for his sketchbook, but his hand still hadn’t recovered from his past few furious drawing sessions, and the last
thing he needed was to walk through the boat and face somebody. Francis’s disgust, Lila’s disappointment, Alejandro’s blank
stare . . . Rylan couldn’t bear any of it. And maybe seeing Tia would be the worst of all. Maybe looking at his sister would
only make him replay the image of her, bloody and angry, a mallet in her hands and something killer in her eyes.
Not for the first time Rylan fantasized about a hole yawning beneath him and dropping him into the sea. His legs would sprout
into a tail, gills would slit along his neck, and he’d be where he had always belonged: underwater. Over the years of plucking
oysters from their shells and hunting shadows on the sandy floor, he would grow so pale and shimmery that humans would no
longer recognize him as one of their own.
He must have been under the sea inside his head for hours.
He invented himself anew, the boy with a tail with iridescent scales like the feathers of a hummingbird.
His name and past would be discarded, cast out with the tide.
The boy with the tail needed none of that.
The boy with the tail only swam and fed and took everything he wanted without a sliver of fear.
Maybe he would swim down instead of out and he’d reach a black world where the water was so cold that time could not surpass
it. In the depths he’d live forever, eyes stretching huge and teeth growing sharp. A fabled monster of the deep. Beautiful,
undefeatable, and most importantly, unafraid.
And one day he might deign to visit the surface, flinch in startlement at the sun. He would peek out from his realm and wonder
at the mysteries of the sky and land in the same way he once had for the sea.
Trancelike, Rylan followed his daydream. He climbed the ladder of the anchor locker. He surfaced on deck and blinked at the
bright light snared in the clouds.
He’d decide then that the upper world indeed held nothing for him. How could it after centuries of living among luminescent
fish and colored reeds? And he’d go back down, this time for the last time, never to be seen again.
Someone caught the hatch before he could close it.
Rylan nearly lost his hold on the ladder.
It was Francis.
“Make some room for your old man,” Francis said with none of the ferocity he’d had earlier that morning with the mallet in
his hand.
Rylan didn’t move. He couldn’t move. Not until a tissue-soft hand skated over his own.
Lila.
“Let us in, lovey,” she said, soft and silken.
Rylan shrank back inside the anchor locker. His parents joined him, crowded inelegantly like Tia and Nico and Rylan had been only days before.
Were they here for an explanation? An apology? How many times did Rylan need to tell them he couldn’t be what they wanted
him to be? He couldn’t pass the tests, he couldn’t endure the trials.
Lila’s slender arm enrobed him, and Rylan found himself hyperventilating.
Francis patted his knee. “Deep breaths, boy.”
“I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,” Rylan dry-sobbed, unable to break out of the horrible loop until his mother pinched his arm.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He spilled open, everything chaotic and slippery, falling into himself even with his
parents positioned to keep him upright.
Francis’s hand rested on the back of Rylan’s neck, forced him to sit up as Lila ran her fingernails through his hair.
“We’re not here to yell,” Lila crooned.
“We’re concerned about Tia,” Francis said, grasp gentle but firm. “She’s been . . .”
“Brazen. And unsteady,” Lila finished for him. “Since she came home. Don’t you agree?”
They weren’t here about him. They weren’t upset. Rylan tried to reclaim his scattered thoughts. This was about Tia. Of course
it was. Tia and her blood-spattered legs. Tia with the mallet raised above her head.
“Sh-she was trying to, she was trying—”
“Tell us what’s been going on,” Francis said. He brought Rylan’s head forward, pressed their foreheads together. Lila traced
swirls on Rylan’s shoulders and upper back.
“I . . . I . . .” Rylan couldn’t focus on anything but his parents’ proximity. Their touch. The anchor locker was a safe place. The horrors with the sailfish were over. The fish was dead, Tia had gone to their room, and his parents were here to comfort him.
“She’s been moody. These outbursts are concerning,” Francis said. Rylan couldn’t see his face, but he felt their skulls crushed
together.
“We just want to know how to help her,” Lila murmured. “Like we always try our best to help you.”
Had that been helping, what they’d asked him to do on deck this morning?
His brain, the part of him that thought like Tia, said no. Hell no. But the rest of him wasn’t so sure. He was the problem
here. He was the reason MJ was dead, the reason the sailfish suffered. Even Tia wanted him to be braver so they could run
away together.
Tia . . . running . . .
Was that what they were getting at? Could they sense their only daughter was ready to leave and never look back?
Francis massaged the back of Rylan’s neck. “Come, now. Do we need to get her help?”
How they were going to do that when they weren’t even returning to Florida was beyond Rylan, but he could hardly think.
Maybe Tia did need help. She was impulsive and aggressive. How long before she did something she was going to regret again?
How long before she left him behind for good? Their plan wasn’t thought out. Nothing Tia did was thought out. What if she was making a terrible mistake? And he was letting her?
Francis leaned back and pinched Rylan’s shoulder firmly. “Tell us what’s—”
“She’s trying to leave,” Rylan whispered, tears slipping through his closed eyelids. “She’s planning to run.”
If Francis and Lila were shocked, Rylan couldn’t read it on them. Francis withdrew his hand. Lila’s swirls became sympathetic back rubs. She kissed his hair and tsked.
“You can’t run from family. It isn’t right,” she said.
“No.” Francis cracked a strange, wide smile. “Family’s who you run with, right, Ry?”
Rylan sobbed. Or maybe he laughed. “Don’t tell her . . . I told you . . . please . . . I don’t want her to go.”
“Don’t worry, my son,” Francis said warmly, and he gathered Rylan into his arms. “She won’t.”