Chapter Seventeen
“Emmy!” I scream. Her blond hair is plastered against the glass and tangled in the shoulder of her life jacket.
She doesn’t react. Her eyes are open, and she blinks, but she looks straight through me. Her middle knuckle taps against the glass three more times, and then her hand falls.
I rap my knuckles against my side of the glass, and her eyes focus on me for a second before she stares through me again.
“I’ll get you out!” I yell, shoving myself back onto my knees with a much-needed surge of adrenaline. It clears my mind so quickly I no longer care that I’m battered, bruised, and burned.
I need to get Emmy out as fast as possible. There’s no way to know how long this boat will continue to float, and when it sinks, her little pocket of air won’t save her. She’s been in there all night. It’s a miracle she hasn’t passed out from lack of oxygen or drowned yet.
The portholes don’t open, and the hatch over Captain Keith’s bedroom is completely submerged.
Swimming through the main hatch is my only option.
It’s a significantly more dangerous option, but Emmy doesn’t look like she can get herself out of there.
I scramble back through the lifelines and wrap the rope around my waist again with shaking, painful fingers.
The moment the knot pulls tight, I pencil dive back into the water.
The loose skin on my scalp burns so badly, I break the surface with a gasp.
I swim toward the submerged opening of the hatch.
It’s hard to tell how far down I’ll need to swim to get through, but the opening is probably two or three feet underwater.
I don’t have a dive mask. I’ll have to feel my way to the air pocket.
I take several deep breaths, expanding my lungs in case I get turned around. I’m about to dive under when a thought stops me in my tracks.
Where was Jackson when the wave hit?
Ben was still on deck.
Emmy was clearly inside.
But where was Jackson?
Wasn’t he by the hatch? Could he have gotten inside the boat before the wave hit?
Am I about to swim into his dead body?
I think of Emmy’s unseeing gaze and shake the thought away. Whatever I find in there doesn’t matter. I can’t let it matter, or I’ll lose her too. With one last deep breath, I dive under the water.
I kick down and pull myself through the doorframe.
Inside the boat is eerily silent. Only the sound of my arms cutting through the water breaks up the stillness.
The boat leans so far to my left that the little kitchenette is almost entirely below me now, and the destroyed navigation desk is above my head.
The depth of the bow forces me to swim down at almost a thirty-degree angle to get farther inside.
Something bumps into my shoulder, and I hold back a scream.
Images of waterlogged corpses materialize in my mind, but it’s too small to be a person.
Some shapeless possession of Captain Keith’s drifts aimlessly around in the remains of his kitchen.
Emmy’s pocket of air is right by the first porthole, which is now the very top of the inside of the boat. I use the wide flat edge of the counter to drag myself through the rest of the kitchen and shove off it, toward the patch of light above me as my lungs begin to burn.
I spot something in the water that looks a lot like a blurry leg.
My heart thuds painfully in my chest.
Please be Emmy. Please be Emmy. Please be Emmy.
I can’t bring myself to grab onto the ankle in case it’s not. Instead I swim up to the pocket of light, bracing myself for the worst. I break the surface with a gasp and hit my head on the porthole.
Emmy’s wedged into a small triangle of air, her life vest still securely strapped to her chest. Her face and right hand are pressed against the porthole glass. Her pink friendship bracelet is still wrapped tightly around her wrist.
She turns her forehead away from the window, eyes closed, and one side of her mouth tugs up into a smile. “Knew you’d find me.”
I burst into tears and wrap my arms around her. She doesn’t respond, but I cling to her anyway, pressing my face into her salty hair.
“God, I’m so sorry, Emmy. For every single fucking thing.”
“Me too… Thought you were dead,” she mumbles.
“I thought you were dead.” I pull back, trying to inspect her injuries through the water. “Are you hurt? Is anything broken?”
“Where’s Jack?” Emmy whispers.
The pain almost takes my breath away. I’ve purposely ignored the fact that it’s only Emmy and me on this boat, but she’s brought his glaring absence to the front of my mind.
He’s not here.
Jackson didn’t survive the second storm.
Grief slices clean through me until I’m choking back another sob we don’t have time for. I pretend I didn’t hear her and probe her scalp with my fingers, looking for cuts or swollen patches.
“Do you think you can swim out of here?” I ask, my throat thick with tears I won’t let out.
She shrugs one shoulder but doesn’t speak. When I touch the space around her temple, she groans and pulls her head away from my hands. “Stop,” she mumbles.
“Does your head hurt?”
She doesn’t answer me.
I cup her face in my hands. “Seriously, Em, what hurts?”
She pauses for so long, I think she’s passed out. Then, “My arm.”
“Which one?”
She nods toward the shoulder farthest from me.
Grateful for the distraction, I swim around to her other side and carefully pull her arm from the water.
I see the source of the pain before her skin breaks the surface.
The light from the porthole falls across her forearm, illuminating a wrinkled white gash from the back of her wrist to her elbow.
The saltwater has seeped into the edges of the gash, turning the skin almost clear.
Her flayed muscle yawns open all the way to the bone.
As I watch, a bubble of pus the color of earwax seeps from the wound.
“Shit.”
Shit, shit, shit.
It’s deep. I’m not sure how it stopped bleeding on its own, but based on the corpse-like pallor of her face, I’d bet she’s lost a lot of blood.
I visualize the placement of the benches beneath me. There was a first aid kit in there somewhere. And the emergency raft. She’s got her life vest to keep her afloat; if I could leave her here for a few moments, I could find—
The boat lets out a heart-stopping creak.
Nope. Never mind.
Now is not the time. I need to get her the hell out of the cabin. I can come back for the rest. The first aid kit won’t help us if we’re dragged to the bottom of the ocean.
I reach for the buckles of her life vest. “I have to take this off to get you out of here, okay?”
She grunts, and that’s good enough for me.
The snaps all come loose, but right before I shove the vest off her shoulders, I see a strip of coral-colored fabric across her chest. I thumb the material and follow it to a bulge by her hip.
My mesh bag is draped across her body.
“Holy shit. Emmy, is that all the food?”
Her mouth quirks up. “Guess my plans don’t all suck.”
I laugh in surprise. She was stuck inside this little air bubble all night long. That strap had to have dug like hell into her shoulder, and she still kept it safe.
“Emmy, you might have just saved both our lives.”
She smiles, but then her head lolls to the side like she’s too tired to hold it up.
I don’t think she has it in her to swim out on her own.
I’ll have to drag her. The boat creaks around us again, and my blood pressure rises until my heartbeat pounds in my ears.
Moving quickly, I untie the rope from my body and tie it to Emmy instead.
Then I pull my bag over the top of her head and slide it over mine.
I grab the porthole frame for support with one hand and Emmy’s chin with the other. “I know you’re tired, but I need you to do one thing for me, okay?”
She blinks and nods.
“I’m going to drag you out of here by the rope, but I have to swim to the hatch first. When I tug twice, you need to get the vest off and take a deep breath. Okay?”
She nods again.
“I’m going to need more than that, Emmy. I need you to be awake enough to do this. Can you take the vest off the rest of the way?”
“Yes,” she mumbles. “You tug. I vest. Deep breath.”
Uncertainty barrels through me. “I’d be more confident if you could talk in complete sentences.”
She smiles, but says nothing.
I don’t have a choice. Pulling her out is the fastest way. “Okay, I’m going. I mean it: Two tugs, get out of the vest, take a breath. I’ll drag you out as fast as I can. If you can kick to help me, that would be great.”
Her head lolls to the side. “I’ll do my best.”
Thank Poseidon. A full sentence.
I don’t wait; I take a breath and dive under, not wanting to give her the chance to fall asleep or lose consciousness while she’s waiting for me.
The weight of the cans in my bag pull me down, and I let it until I’m level with the hatch opening again.
I grab the counter and propel myself toward it, careful not to touch the rope so she doesn’t mistake it for a tug.
I clear the opening, and when I break the surface, the overhead sun is searing.
I race to toss the bag up over the side of the boat with a groan of pain as my shoulders protest again.
It lands with a loud thunk, and water pours through the mesh bag, but the cans settle and stay put.
Just in case, I loop the strap around a broken piece of the lifeline before I swim back to the hatch.
With my luck, Emmy would go through the trouble of protecting the food all night and it’d end up at the bottom of the ocean five seconds after I got my hands on it.
I swim back to the hatch, pull the rope until it goes taut between me and Emmy, and give it two hard tugs.
I count the seconds, mentally running through the time it would take her to remove the vest and fill her lungs.
When I’m sure she’s had enough time, I dive under, plant a foot on either side of the hatch opening, and pull with everything I have.