“It is,” Reyva agreed. “Don’t you dare tell me I can’t. Just because my body doesn’t behave the way I want it to all the time does not mean that I’m not strong.”
She said those same words to me, Claire remembered.After the cliff.She hadn’t realized until this moment that Reyva had been talking about herself too.
Reyva was waiting for them to speak. Her eyes were still wet, but her glare didn’t falter. She was no longer crying, nor had she wiped her cheeks.
Claire nodded. “Okay.”
“All right.” Reyva’s shoulders sagged as she exhaled. “It’s a plan, then.”
Cheerfully, Mariana said, “Yay! We’ll all be risking our lives in horrible ways. Very bonding.” She then added, “One problem, though, possibly major: we can’t blow up the cave if we can’t find it. I know it’s somewhere in the woods.” She waved her hand at the trees. “As you might have noticed, there’s kind of a lot of woods.”
Reyva scowled at the trees as if they’d caused all of this.
“That’s... not actually a problem,” Claire said. “I can find it.”
“You can?” Mariana asked.
“I counted my steps,” Claire admitted. “Before, when we ran. I was trying not to panic so I counted from the cave exit to the Lake House. I can find the hole again.” She was positive about that. She knew where they’d emerged—at the end of the airstrip—and she knew they’d run straight through the trees. Even if the rain wiped away every trace of their passage, she was confident she could find the cave.
“I bet you never guessed that would turn out to be one of your superpowers,” Reyva said. Her voice was steady again, and her eyes were dry.
Claire smiled. “I did not.”
“Okay then,” Mariana said. “We can do this! Maybe. Yes?” She asked Claire, “Do you think your plan will work?”
Claire hesitated before answering. She turned the plan over in her head, examined it, then considered the fact that it was literally the only plan they had. “Maybe?”
Reyva began to laugh.
Claire stared at her, unsure why she was laughing or what to do about it.
Laughing harder, Reyva doubled over her broken arm, and then Mariana began to snort-laugh too, as if it were contagious. Claire felt her lips curl up at the edges, though she had no idea why she was smiling. There was really nothing to smile about. The odds of success were low, and their plan relied on too many things going right when so many things had already gone wrong. All along, they’d been making assumptions based on their idea of what had happened at the Lake House and what was happening now, and every time, they’d been proved wrong. What if they were wrong again? It could cost their lives. Or their souls. Or both.
But the sun was shining again, and Reyva and Mariana were laughing so hard they were crying. Claire gave in and laugh-cried with them.
They set to work.
First step was to remove the engine from the boat.
Easier said than done.
Mariana got beneath it and called directions to Claire: hold this, steady that, twist this... She disconnected the steering arm and unhooked the shift cables. Disconnected the battery and threaded the connections back out through the boat. All of this had to be done upside down.
“Bit of good news; bit of bad news.” Mariana poked her head out from under the boat to talk to Claire and Reyva. “Good news: this particular outboard motor has an internal fuel tank, and it looks like it still has gas in it. Can’t get a boom without gas.”
“Bad news?” Claire asked.
“It’s bolted to the boat, and we don’t have a wrench.”
Claire ducked under the boat to join Mariana in staring up at the engine. Heavy-duty bolts attached it to the back of the hull.
Mariana pointed. “See, when you install an outboard motor, you clamp it onto the transom—that’s the crosspiece on the stern. Sometimes it’s attached by nice, friendly screws that you can turn by hand. But for the higher horsepower engines like this... bolts.”
Claire gazed at the bolts for a moment, then at the crosspiece that Mariana had called the “transom.” It had deep gashes in it, presumably from the crash. One slash split the fiberglass less than a foot from the motor. “Break it.”
“Not sure you understand how tough bolts are.”
“Not the bolts,” Claire said. “The boat. The transom. See?” She pointed to the deepest gash. “It’s already damaged. The crash weakened it. We don’t need to unbolt the motor; we just need to break the transom enough that the engine’s own weight rips it off the boat.”
