I smile softly up at him, feeling his heart clatter beneath my palm. “Don’t fight them,” I whisper. “Or they’ll kill you.” I think of my promise to Cricket, the vow I made to keep him safe. This is me keeping that promise. When we fled the barn, when Noah touched my skin at the lake, when we kissed beside the bonfire, and he pulled me to him on the floor of our room inside Maybelle’s Hotel, I told myself I couldn’t love him. I told myself it would hurt too bad if I did. But now… it’s too late. And I might love him anyway. The rain spills over us, and for a moment it’s all I hear, raindrops on skin, on hair, on the sand at our feet. I can’t let him die—I won’t let it end like this. “I’ll be right back,” I say, my voice a breeze in my throat, like a spell set loose into the storm. I release my palm from his chest, my insides breaking,shattering open, and turn away—but he reaches out and grabs my hand, pulling me back to him, crushing his lips to mine. His fingertips find the back of my neck, and my palms dig into his collarbone while the blade is still pressed to his shivering throat. And for a half second, it feels like goodbye. Like it’s the last time his skin will touch mine.
“Don’t die,” he says against my mouth, letting his lips linger a moment more.
I nod up at him, making no promises, then slip away from his grasp and turn toward the sea. “I’m ready,” I say to Holt.
I undress down to my underwear, feeling Noah’s eyes on me, knowing the anger churning in his gut, in his chest. He hates that I’m standing in the cold, in the rain, my flesh exposed—skin that he has touched, drawn close, his breath in my ear. He hates that I’m entering the water alone, and there’s nothing he can do to stop me.
That he can’tprotectme. Not this time.
I lift my chin to the sky, feeling the hum along the curves of my skull. A knowing that is marrow-deep.This is what I’m meant to do. It was rooted in me at birth. I would travel to the sea, to this beach. I will finish what the first Astronomer started. This knowing is greater than the fear. Greater than the eyes watching me.
I leave my clothes in a pile on the sand, the air strangely electric—unnatural—a white-hot prick along my flesh, tugging at the hairs of my arms.
The sky is darker than it should be, a smear of inky black. The shadow so close, it’s stealing all light.
But I move toward the water and wade out into the shallows.
Waves break against my shins, my knees, the water swelling up around my torso until I’m forced to swim. My body crashes through the surf, and the man who Holt sent with me is a few yards behind, his thinning, light blond hair slicked across his forehead, doe eyes wider than moons. He’s terrified to be wading into the deep after me, and I think there’s a good chance he won’t survive the swim.
A surge of waves rolls toward me, and I gulp in the damp air before sinking below the water and paddling beneath them—my heartbeat roars, salt water blurring my vision. I take one quick inhalebefore the next series of waves rises over my head, and I duck back beneath the water, kicking hard against the force of the current trying to push me back to shore. It’s nothing like swimming in the river—a steady flow of water dragging me downstream—this is a turbulent storm of water, smashing into me with every stroke.
When I come up for air again, I’ve only made it halfway to the island—my legs and arms already going numb from the cold. Exhausted, I look back to the beach, at the figures standing beneath the clouded sky, watching. If I give up and let the sea carry me back, if I crawl up onto the sand, defeated—Holt will kill Noah.
So I turn back toward the island. I don’t have a choice; I have to keep going. I kick forward, slipping beneath the surface—I hold my breath for as long as I can, knowing I need to stay beneath the waves if I’m going to make it past the surging tide. My lungs strain, desperate for air, the panic starting to beat against my chest, but I force myself to kick even harder, using my arms to pull me forward. And when my lungs begin to burn, I finally rise to the surface, gasping for air… and I’ve made it past the worst of the waves.
But I can hardly feel my feet, my hands white and aching from the cold.
I swim hard, the last few yards, and when I reach the shore of the island, I pull myself free of the ocean and flop onto my back on the slick rocks. I suck in air, blinking up at the gray, gray sky. Relief and adrenaline pumping down my veins.
I made it.
I didn’t drown.
But I think I hear a voice over the waves. Blinking through the film of salt water still in my eyes, I see Holt at the shore, right at theedge of the water, shouting—maybe to see if I’m still alive, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.
The light-haired man is still in the water, but he’s made it past the worst of the waves, and he’s swimming slowly toward the island, eyes wide, hands swinging pathetically over his head, gasping. Like he’s never swum before in his life. I push myself up, bare feet slipping on the wet rocks, my legs like liquid, and start up the rocky slope of the island.
It’s even smaller than it looked from the beach. Only a dot of rocks and sand rising up from the shallow sea. I hurry down to the far shoreline, squinting out to the gray sea, but there’s no ship. Nothing bobbing in the water, rocked by the waves. Nothing half-sunk on the rocks, not even remnants shattered apart long ago and washed ashore—there is only rain and sea and sideways wind. The ground feels odd beneath me, hard to describe, but I stagger over clumps of seaweed and stones, up to the center of the island, turning in a circle, hoping for something. Anything I can give to Holt, prove to him that I tried.
But the island is barren, no hint of the stories my mother told to me.
And I start to wonder, to worry, if it was all lies. If none of it was true.
Or maybe the stories became muddied over the years, distorted by time, until the Astronomer’s tales were knitted together by folklore and fantasy, losing the history of what truly happened. I press my palms to my eyes, holding back the anger and fear. They will kill Noah. Then me. But it won’t matter, because without the ship—we’ll all be dead soon anyway.
I need to find something.
I glance back to the water, the man almost to the shallows, and I start back down toward the far shore. I will circle the island again; I will look for anything left, pieces of a shipwreck to prove it was here. I clamor over the slick rocks, rain streaming over my face, stomping over a strange hollow place in the soil, and almost reach the water’s edge when I pause and look back.
It’s the same hollow spot I felt before. An oddity in the ground.
I climb back up, stomping my foot against the soil until I find it again. An unnatural echo beneath my feet, like I’m standing atop an empty water barrel.
I drop to my knees, quickly brushing away the sand with my palms, clearing the rocks and bits of broken shells,hopingI might find the destroyed remains of something. I lift up a large stone and toss it aside, scraping at the ground, panic swimming through my veins.
There has to be something here. I need there to be.
I pry up more rocks, fingernails packed with wet sand, eyes stinging from the salt water and tears clouding my vision, when my hand touches something smooth.
