I push. I put my shoulder into his hip and I heave with everything I have left, and somehow, between his last reserves and mine, he goes up and over the side and collapses into the bottom of the boat with a sound that scares me more than the gunshots did.
I climb in after him, soaked to the knees, my hands shaking so badly I fumble the rope twice before I get it loose from the post it's tied to.
"Do you know how to drive this?" I ask, worried that I’m going to have to figure out on the hoof.
"No," he says.
Crap.
"Fantastic," I say instead, as brightly as I can. I look at the console, at a dashboard of dials and switches that might as well be written in the same Italian I've spent what feels like a decade failing to learn. "Absolutely fantastic. Okay. Okay, It can’t be that different from driving a car."
I turn the key. The engine coughs, catches, roars to life loud enough that I flinch, certain the whole hillside just heard it. There's no time left to care. I push the throttle forward and the little craft lurches away from the shore.
Behind us, shapes appear on the beach, dark against the dark, and one of them raises something to his shoulder. I duck low over the console on instinct, hauling Yakob's head down with myfree hand, and covering his head with my body. The shot that follows goes wide, cracking off into the water somewhere behind us.
I don't slow down. I don't look back again. I keep the throttle open and the bow pointed at the black horizon, at whatever's out there past the edge of what I can see, because it has to be safer than what's behind us.
"Hey." I say, glancing down at where he's slumped against the hull, one hand still pressed to his side, his eyes half open and fixed on me like I'm the only thing left in the world worth looking at. "Stay with me. Do you hear me? You don't get to check out on me now. Not after all that. Not when I don’t even know your name."
"Yakob," he says, and his voice is thinner than it was, but it's there.
"Yakob." I glance between him and the dark water ahead, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, my whole body running on something that isn't quite fear anymore and isn't quite courage either. It’s some third thing I didn’t know I possessed and never needed until now. "Because I did not survive being caged in that cell and hauling your very large, very heavy body out of a vineyard just to lose you to a boat I don't know how to drive."
He makes a sound that might be a laugh, if a laugh could be made entirely of pain and blood loss.
“I don’t even know where we are, or where I’m headed.” Panic has my throat in its fist. Tightening by the millisecond and threatening to cut off my oxygen.
“Sicily,” he says. “Go north, past the first island…harbor…second island…”
“Right, okay, I can do that.” My teeth are chattering, either from the adrenaline wearing off or the mild chill in the night air which is getting chillier the further out to sea we get.
“Jacket,” he says, moving his right arm as if he is trying to shrug out of it.
“I’ll take it when we’re not getting shot at,” I say, thinking he probably needs it more at this rate. “Besides, it has a hole in it now.”
He smirks, if you can call it that, and nods his head.
“Med kit,” he says, gesturing towards the seat behind me.
I fumble around without looking, finding a latch that lifts the seat and dipping my hand into the compartment.
“Pass it,” he says, presumably about the black bag that’s been stowed in there. I quickly do as I’m told and get back to figuring out the boat.
I keep the boat pointed away from the shore, away from the shouting and the shots and the vineyard where I spent days becoming someone I didn't know I had in me. I feel different. There’s no urge to cry or collapse. Instead, a cool kind of calm settles over me as I try to take control of the situation.
There will be time for falling apart later. Right now there's only this. The wheel under my hands. The engine roaring beneath my feet. A bleeding stranger who came for me in the dark, watching me with an expression I can’t quite figure out, out here on the black water, going somewhere neither of us has mapped yet.
Yakob
The pain arrives in waves now, and between them there is a strange, floating quiet, like the inside of my skull has been packed with wool.
I know this pattern. It’s not like I’ve never bled before. I know the stages a body moves through when it starts running out of what it needs. The way awareness narrows and expands and narrows again, the way the mind starts bargaining with things that can’t be bargained with.
I do what I can with the medical supplies from my bag, noting that the bleeding is already slowing down, thankfully.
Iris has the throttle open as far as it goes. Spray comes over the boat in cold sheets, and every time it hits me, I surface a little, blink the black at the edges of my vision back half a step, find her silhouette against what's left of the shoreline lights behind us.
Her hair is wild, her eyes are bright, and she stands there, guiding the boat in her bra and jeans and she’s beautiful. She is talking. She hasn’t stopped talking since the vineyard.
