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When Ben slumped utterly spent and unable to lift the piece of wood one more time, they swapped. He slid off, appearing almost grateful to be back in the water. Aleksey was certainly glad to be out of it.
He’d lost any sense of time passing except for the sun.
They both knew what the coming night portended for them.
Directionless, on a vast sea, they had never felt so small.
Sunset wasn’t sudden, a sharp delineation between seeing and complete black, but rather a fading of the light so slow that they continued swimming and paddling for some time before they realised they were hanging in a void of nothingness, with no ability at all to gauge their route.
Ben was taking a turn on the board. He was barely paddling at all, but he stopped anyway, and Aleksey brought his thoughts back from far away when the rhythm that had been with him for so long stopped.
They had lost the sheet of plastic some time ago. A sudden swell, a tip of the board, and they had not had the energy to chase it. Aleksey put a hand to Ben’s ankle and squeezed, then eased himself alongside, running his hand up the prone figure until he found Ben’s neck. A hand in the darkness came up and joined his.
A wave swelled the board, knocking it into Aleksey’s jaw.
Ben tumbled off and went under, until the shock of the tip brought him spluttering to the surface. Aleksey held onto Ben, slippery and invisible in the dark, and the board too was then lost.
They clung to the tiny floating raft of rubbish.
For all Aleksey knew they were now turned completely around and facing back to Les Dents.
He dared not swim either way.
They hung helpless in the viscous, oily water, tossed and roiled until they vomited on nothing and retched, dismayed by the misery of it all.
Aleksey felt himself losing his vast and irrepressible will to go on. He was holding Ben onto their floating lifeline and could feel the tremors of Ben’s muscles under his icy hands. For the last hour or two, Aleksey had barely been able to kick at all—Ben had put everything he had into rowing them along, and he was done for.
Aleksey closed his eyes, and let the currents take them.
* * *
Chapter Fifty-Two
‘Aleksey.
‘Aleksey…
‘Sey. Wake up, min skat.’
Aleksey had been dreaming he was in the dunes. Yellow lupins and bees and Ben’s head in his lap, his eyes the only green in the entire world.
He opened his own eyes. They stung so badly from the salt that he could barely even blink.
Sometime before he’d fallen asleep, he’d tied Ben to the raft and to himself as best he could with fingers that would not obey him and a mind entirely devoid of hope. He could see Ben’s head and he put a swollen hand to his neck and felt a thready pulse of life.
‘Sey…’
He opened his eyes again. It had not been part of his dream. Ben did not call him by his name, but by his brother’s.
‘Mama?’
She was in the water a few yards from them. He could see her unnervingly well, despite the utter black of the Atlantic night. She was in a white shift, some kind of slip which she wore beneath her clothes. Her long blonde hair trailed in the water, sodden. But she was not as she came to him in his visions of her dead, drowned; now she was vital and alive. He assumed he was now passed over, and that in this death he too would be revived thus. She was beautiful, a wild Scandinavian magnificence which her boys had inherited; for good or bad, Aleksey had never been able to decide.
‘I’m sorry, mama. I could not save you.’ She gave him a forgiving smile, bobbing in the ocean, exactly as he had last seen her in Danish waters so many years before. ‘You were too heavy for me.’ He had tried to tow her, his little scrawny ten-year-old body barely able to keep its own head above the water, but impossible with her. He’d let her go, and she had sunk, and he had saved himself instead. He had killed his mother because was he weak, because his ferocious, unrequited love for her had not been enough. And he would kill Ben Rider-Mikkelsen the same way.
‘Aleksey.’
His eyes grated open again filled as if with sand.
