Chapter 15
Neri
We run hard along the shore.
Down the beach, over the tide-wrack, up onto the southern ledges where the granite shelves out black and wet. Rafe is a stride ahead at first, because he’s faster on the flat but I’m small and agile and I read rock better, so I gain on him as we rattle down the shelving stone together.
The closer we get, the worse it gets.
The orange box is not sitting on the rocks.
It’s in them, wedged inside a surge gulch, a cleft in the ledges maybe five feet wide and twenty deep.
Every swell funnels into that slot and explodes against the granite.
We hear it before we reach the edge, a boom I feel in my back teeth, then spray erupts above the opening and the water sucks back out in a white torrent.
The case is jammed at the waterline against a chockstone, half-floating. Every cycle lifts it, grinds it against the rock, then drops it back down a little looser. The tide is coming in. Each lift runs higher.
We’re going to run out of time to retrieve it, and fast.
“It’s the Belle’s flare kit.” Rafe’s flat on his belly at the gulch’s edge, head over the drop, and his voice bounces off the walls. “I can see the decal.”
The flare kit. The one thing from the Belle that might actually get us off this island, wedged twenty feet down a granite throat.
Another swell surges into the gulch. The case lifts, twists and drops back against the chockstone. We don’t have long.
“We need a rope,” I say. “The net.”
Rafe nods, his expression stern, his face set in serious lines I’ve never seen on him before. We move.
The run back to the cottage and down again leaves both of us gasping.
We come back with the keeper’s heaviest coiled line and the salvaged headrope from the net.
Rafe chooses the stronger line and knots it every arm-span for grip, his hands flying through bends and hitches.
Then he feeds it around a granite horn several yards back from the edge and leans his whole weight into it, once, twice.
It holds.
Then we have our first fight. It’s short, because we don’t have time for a long one, and it’s quiet, because we’re both out of breath.
“I’m going down,” he says, reaching for the line. “You anchor. If I time the surges—”
“No.”
“Neri, it’s too dangerous and we don’t have time to argue. I’m going.”
“Look at me.” I take the rope out of his hands and I have to jerk it out of his grip. “You’re stronger than me, you can haul me back up. If you go down and get stuck, I can’t do the same for you.”
I point to the side of my neck, at the seams where my gills are.
“If I get dragged under, I can breathe. I’m the only person on this island the sea can’t drown. You helped me recover what I am on a beach three days ago. This is what it’s for.”
His jaw locks. His hands flex once at his sides.
“You can’t drown,” he says, low and harsh, with a fierceness I never suspected in him. “Okay. But that slot can break your arm against the wall. It can open your scalp and knock you unconscious. It can pin your leg under that chockstone and keep pounding you against the rock.”
His hands come up, frame my face for one hard second, and there’s no sunshine or Golden Retriever guy anywhere, just the man under it. And that man cares for me.
“Drowning is the only thing you’re immune to. Don’t act like you’re immune to the rest.”
“I know I’m not. But I know how to read the ocean.”
“Swear it.”
“Sharp eyes, soft body, ride the water, never fight the rock.” The mer proverbs come up out of some sealed vault inside my mind, spoken inside my head with my mother’s voice. “My mom used to say it. Mermaid rules.”
Something shifts in his face. Not a nod, but something lighter. A doubt, just a small one, but I’ll take it.
“I trust you,” I say softly. “You’ll pull me up. I know you will.”
Rafe leans in and places a kiss on my lips, hard and ardent. Then he braces his forehead against mine and nods. He ties me in himself, bowline at my waist, checks it twice. His hands are dead steady and he checks the rope, but his eyes are full of terror. Terror for me.
“Three tugs, coming up.” He sets his boots against the granite horn, wraps the line, and becomes an anchor. “Neri, you come back with or without that box. There are other ways to get rescued. There’s no other you.”
I nod with more assurance than I feel, then I go down the throat of the gulch on the sucked-out cycle, when the water drops and the walls stream white. The rock is every color wet granite gets, black and rose and steel, polished mirror-slick along the waterline. Barnacles above. Dead smooth below.
I keep both hands and one foot on the rock whenever I move.
My heart hammers so hard in my chest that my ribs hurt and the sound of the water crashing against the rock swallows the entire world as I go down, inch by inch.
The rope stays tight above me, Rafe holding just enough tension that I can feel him there.
I feel the next surge before I see it. The rock trembles faintly beneath my palms and the roar builds below me. I wedge myself into a narrow crack and flatten against the granite as the water comes up. It hits my legs, my hips, my shoulders, filling the gulch with white and hauling at my body.
Cold. Cold as the wreck night.
My gills snap open inside the surge. Water punches past my face, fills them, and the panic my body should be having simply... doesn’t.
I can breathe.
The strangest calm settles over me in the middle of all that noise. The sea is trying to kill me and I am equipped. Both halves, working one problem. What a thing.
The water drops. I move down again.
The case is bigger than it looked from above, a hard-shell equipment case with the Belle’s registration stenciled on the lid and a crack running the length of one seam like a lightning strike. It’s wedged nose-down against the chockstone. The next lift shifts it again.
I get a hand on the grab-handle as the water sucks out and pull. Nothing. I plant a foot and pull harder. Still nothing.
The boom of the next surge is already building. I scramble back into the crack and let the water pass over me. It seems that the sea and I are finally, after five years, having an argument directly.
As soon as the water drops, I go back down. I wedge my shoulder beneath the case’s high corner and heave on the out-cycle, letting the retreating water take some of its weight.
The case grinds against the stone. Moves.
I heave again.
It tips free so suddenly I nearly follow it down the slot. I catch the handle, drag the case against my chest and exhale a short, shaky breath. I got it. I have our salvation in my hands.
I start up and the sea breaks the rules.
The next surge comes early and doubled. I have no time to reach the crack.
It hits me hard enough to rip both feet off the rock.
The world goes white, then green, then over.
No up anywhere. The case wrenches at my arms. My shoulder slams into the wall and pain flashes all the way down to my fingertips.
The gulch rolls me. My gills keep working. I can breathe. I still have no idea which way is out. The rope comes taut like a struck string.
A hard haul. Then another.
Rafe is hauling me up.
I stop fighting for up. I crush the case against my chest with one arm, soften my body and let the line tell me where to go. When granite finds my feet, I walk it. When it disappears again, I ride the pull.
Another haul. Green turns white. White turns bright. I break the surface into sunlight and spray. Rafe hauls me the last body-length with a sound I have never heard a human make, and then I’m over the lip and sprawled on warm granite with the case still locked against my chest.
I cough seawater, suck in air and roll onto my back. Alive.
He’s on his knees beside me before I’ve caught my breath, hands moving over my shoulder, my scalp, my ribs, checking everywhere at once. He’s shaking so hard his glasses sit crooked.
“I’m okay.” I cough, hard, spitting out salt water. “Bruised, not broken. Told you.” Another cough. “Can’t drown.”
“You were down so long.”
“Best cardio workout of my life.” I say it snark-flat because he needs it and because I need it, and his forehead drops onto my collarbone. Just for a second.
I put my rope-burned hand in his hair. We’re both shaking now. Beside us, the case drips onto the warm granite, orange as a shout.
Then we open it.
The crack in the seam did its work. When Rafe tilts the case, seawater runs out across the granite. The flare gun sits in its molded cradle, soaked but not visibly damaged. I have no idea if it’s salvageable. We set it aside to dry.
The flares, six of them, are racked in their loops like fat red cartridges, and my heart is already counting before my hands move.
Rafe checks them one at a time. Water seeps from the first casing. The next is swollen. Another has white crust around the primer. One after another, they go onto the granite beside his knee, ruined.
The last flare sits in the top loop, wedged into the driest corner of the case. Rafe pulls it free.
Dry rattle. Sound casing.
One.
For a second neither of us moves. The ruined flares are scattered across the wet rock between us. The good one fits easily in Rafe’s hand.
It will only matter if somebody is close enough to see it when we fire. A boat on the water. Lights in the dark. Somebody looking our way. Otherwise that red streak disappears over an empty ocean and we’re right back where we started.
Hope should feel bigger than this. Instead it’s a little red cylinder Rafe can close his fingers around.
He looks at it, and his whole face changes. His shoulders loosen. The fear that had him shaking over me a minute ago disappears beneath a grin.
“One’s enough. One is plenty. You wait, one night there’ll be lights out there, a dragger, a cruiser, somebody, and we put this right over their bow. Then, we can take a hot shower so long the state of Maine sends someone to check on us.”
He lays the flare carefully on a dry patch of rock and points toward the meadow bluff.
“We take turns watching,” he goes on.
And watching him, the cold arrives from some dark place deep between my ribs. Not the cold from the gulch. This is quieter. It slips in on the words when we’re back, on the grin he can’t contain, on how completely he already believes it.
He’s home in his head before we’ve even left the rock. Hot water. Clean clothes. People who know him. The life that has been waiting for him this whole time. He says when we’re back like he already knows exactly where he belongs.
And me?
I can see the questions waiting for us. The looks. The way people will turn what happened here into a story. Out here, nobody is watching. Nobody gets an opinion.
Back home, they will.
Maybe this only works because the rest of the world isn’t here. Maybe once it comes rushing back, there won’t be room for whatever we became on this island.
Maybe I’m the woman he survived this place with.
Maybe that’s all.
Rafe reaches for the flare gun, then stops when he notices I haven’t moved.
“Hey.” His smile fades a little. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.”
He watches me.
The lie hangs there long enough that I make it worse.
“You know everything changes when we go back, right?”
His head comes up.
“You’re the department Chair,” I say. My voice sounds strange even to me. “I’m one of your postdocs. We can’t pretend like this won’t be a problem.”
I leave out the part where it will be a problem for me. Where I’m the one who will be cast in a bad light.
The mermaid who slept her way to the top.
His expression goes still. Not blank. Just suddenly, completely focused on me.
“Neri, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
I can already see him getting ready to argue, and I can’t bear to hear whatever he’s about to say. Not while the flare is lying between us and he’s still half-smiling about hot showers and home.
“We should get the gun dried out.” I stand before he can say anything else and take the case. My shoulder protests hard enough to catch my breath, but I keep moving. “You’re right about watching from the bluff. We should start tonight.”
I walk up the warm granite toward the cottage with the flare rattling inside the case.
Rafe follows a few steps behind.
I keep my eyes on the cottage and don’t look back.