Rain. Wind. Thunder. Flashes of vicious lightning illuminating swaths and swathes of nothing.
The horizon is gone.
Darkness settles and it’s all we are.
There is no boat. No land. No light.
We are the vessels.
And we’re drifting alone.
25JACK
We watch the storm from the highest point inside the Joker. Skylar’s room. He doesn’t spend much time in here. It smells of new carpet. It smellswrong. Everything does. Still.
The wind.
The rain.
Me, since I showered to keep myself occupied and washed Sol from my skin.
We had sex last night.
Thunder roars, rolling in from the sea, lightning forking in the distance. It’s the evening by now, but the light is strange, the bay a smear of nature’s savage power beyond the harbour. White water detonates against the rocks and the sea wall, and even from here, we feel the gale force wind battering the old building.
Glass trembles.
Gutters rattle.
And we’re not even in the eye of it.
“It’s over open water,” Skylar says.
He’s standing closer to me than he usually would, trying to level me, but he’s not Sol, so he can’t. And I don’t need him to tell me how storms work. I know the line of the coast better than hedoes. The currents. The way the wind fights the tide. I know the monster the ocean becomes when she’s boxed in and trapped.
“They could’ve outrun it.” Mal speaks from where he sits on Skylar’s old bed. “If they pushed west.”
Maybe.
Fishermen do that. Oscar does it. But Sol likes the rain. The wind. The wildness of the elements whatever they throw at him, and the mood he was in when he left…
Thunder hammers again.
Mal rises from the bed and comes to the window. He and Skylar change places, weaving around each other like they were born to do it. I guess they were.
My brother, though. He says nothing. Just folds his arms and narrows his eyes at the devastating horizon as if he’s assessing enemy lines.
Calculating windspeed.
Forward movement.
Same paratrooper brain as mine, if it worked right. Though, I don’t need much fire power in my skull to know this is the most brutal freak squall I’ve seen blow through Porth Luck since I was a boy. And I wasn’t scared then.
Because he was with me.
Sol.
The wind rises again, howling down the chimney like a caged animal?—
