Chapter 36
“Zanta?” A gentle voice caressed her ears where there used to be snapping timbers, screams, and the rage of the storm. Now, only an eerie silence and that familiar voice reached her. The voice, usually brash and laughing, now soft.
“Zanta.” Fingers against hers, prying them from their death grip on the wheel. “It’s over.”
Zanta blinked, blisters ripping as her hands separated from the wooden spokes.
“Gods, your hands are freezing!” Finally, Zanta’s gaze focused on Nia. Disheveled, bruised, but alive and warm. She took Zanta’s freezing hands between hers, thumbs rubbing across her skin. Behind her, the sky blushed as if embarrassed for its tantrum, the sea calm as a sleeping child beneath it.
Her mind snapped into focus. They’d sailed through the storm. They were alive.
“Colm, Laurent, are they…How many dead?” Her voice came out harsh with salt.
Nia’s bright green eyes were dim, exhausted. “Colm and Laurent are alive. I don’t know how many crew…I…” Her gaze drifted past Zanta.
“What?” The storm still raged in the distance, lightning forking down like a cage. But Zanta paid no attention to it. Three crew members were hauling up a rope that still dragged behind the ship.
“It’s the last lifeline,” Nia said quietly. “It’s…”
But Zanta knew who it was. The only person it could be. Because if Sabriye was alive, she would’ve already been by Zanta’s side.
She broke away from Nia as they finally pulled the body onto the deck. Zanta froze in her tracks, unable to approach as they turned the body over to face the now gentle sky.
Sabriye’s face had a pale, bloodless cast to it.
Her dark hair sticking to it like wounds.
Brown eyes open and staring, reflecting the strange pink light.
She’d drowned before bruises could form, but her hands—those hands that had worked beside Zanta for years, that had patted her back and wiped her tears and punched her arm when she made a bad joke—were clawed like a hawk’s talons, every finger broken from the impact of the wheel spokes when she’d tried to get the ship under control.
Zanta knew it was her, but it didn’t look like her. It looked like a drowned corpse. Not Sabriye at all. Not her best friend.
All at once the horror of the last hours caught up with her, and her legs gave out, knees hitting the deck and shooting bone-deep pain up her legs.
Nia was by her side in a second, but Zanta couldn’t look away from those sightless eyes.
The crew members gently turned Sabriye on her side, as if she was sleeping.
Seawater dribbled from her open mouth, and her eyes stared directly at Zanta, no longer filled with the light of the sky. Just empty.
Zanta was underwater again. No breath left in her lungs. All sounds muffled. She felt her vocal cords straining and knew grief was pouring out of her like coughed up seawater. Nia held her, trying to comfort her. The others dealt with the bodies while all Zanta could do was scream.