Out here my name meant nothing. The ocean didn’t care who I was. I was just a man on a raft with the woman he loved, a baby who wasn’t born yet, a pocket knife, a first aid kit, and absolutely nothing else.
• • •
“The baby.” Mehar’s voice cracked when she said it. “Quest, is the baby okay? Is she—can you?—”
I put my hands over hers on her belly. Pressed gently. Waited.
Three seconds. Five. The longest five seconds of my life, and I’d had some long ones. Staring down the barrel of a gun long. Watching the casino doors burst open and the Vipers walk in with weapons long. Sitting in a hospital waiting room while a doctor told me my son’s blood cells were killing him long.
Then I felt it. A kick. Small, definite, real. Our baby pressing against my palm like she was saying I’m here, I’m here, stop panicking, I’m right here.
“She’s good,” I said. I don’t know when I started calling the baby she. Somewhere between the crash and the raft it just came out and it felt true and I wasn’t going to question it. “Feel that? She’s moving. She’s strong. Like her mama.”
Mehar let out a sob that came from somewhere so deep it shook her whole body. Not a cry. A release. I could tell her body had been holding terror inside it like a fist and the fist finally opened. I pulled her against me and held her and let her shake because there was nothing to say. We were alive. The baby was alive. And we were floating on a rubber raft in the middle of the Caribbean Sea with no idea if anyone on earth knew we were here.
I cleaned the gash on her forehead with gauze from the first aid kit. Salt water on an open wound made her wince and pull away. I held her still, told her I was sorry, and kept going because infection would kill her just as sure as the ocean. It’d just take longer. The cut wasn’t deep. It would scar but it would heal. I taped the gauze down and checked her eyes. Pupils responsive. Concussion maybe but she was alert and talking and that was enough for now.
“Somebody did this to us,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Somebody did.”
“The fuel lines…”
“Both of them. At the same time. Somebody tampered with the fuel system. Got to the plane on my property, past my security, and rigged both lines to fail mid-flight. They knew when we were leaving and where we were going.”
She was quiet for a minute. Then: “Who?”
“I don’t know yet. But when I find out, and I will find out, they’re going to wish they’d finished the job. Because the onlything worse than coming for me is coming for my woman and my child.”
She looked at me with blood on her forehead, salt in her hair, her sundress soaked through and clinging to her belly, her engagement ring catching the afternoon sun. The diamond I had custom-made with Peach engraved inside the band. I’d designed that ring sitting in a jeweler’s office in New York imagining the look on her face when I opened the box in Sedona with the canyon behind us and the sunset turning everything gold. I got down on one knee for this woman. I don’t kneel for anybody and I knelt for her because she earned it. Because she was worth every square inch of ground my knees touched.
And now we were here. On a raft. With nothing.
I took inventory because that’s what I do when the world falls apart. I count what’s left. Raft. First aid kit. Folding knife in my right pocket, same one I’d been carrying since I was twenty-two. The clothes on our bodies. Her ring. Her belly.
That was it.
• • •
I paddled for hours.
Bare hands wrapped around the paddle in the water, pulling, reaching, pulling again. No direction except west because the current was taking us that way. I had no instruments, no landmarks, no way to know if west led to land or to more ocean or to the edge of the goddamn earth. The ABCs were supposed to be out here somewhere. Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao. Islands with hospitals and runways and cell towers. But the GPS had been tampered with along with the fuel lines, which meant the coordinates I’d radioed in the mayday were wrong. Whoever was looking for us was looking in the wrong place.
If anybody was looking at all.
The sun moved across the sky and I tracked it the way I used to track shipments back when Prime and I were running transport. You learn to read the sky when your survival depends on knowing what time it is without looking at a watch. The sun was behind us and dropping, which meant I was paddling west, which was the best I could do with what I had.
My hands were raw. The salt was eating into the blisters and the blisters were splitting and I could see pink flesh underneath the skin. It hurt but pain was just information. That information told me I was still alive and still moving. That was all I needed to know.
“Quest.” Mehar’s voice. Tired but present. “You have to rest. You’ve been going for hours.”
“I’m good.”
“You’re not good. I can hear it in your breathing.”
“I said I’m good, Mehar.”
She didn’t push it. She knew when to press me and when to let me be. Right now she was letting me be because she understood that the paddling wasn’t just about moving the raft. It was about control. The only thing I could control out here. If I stopped I would have to sit in the silence and think about every single thing I couldn’t control, and that list was longer than the ocean in front of me.
