You're really not helping,he thought, groping through the dark, water-filled space.
As well as failing to take the darkness into account, he hadn't considered that the boat was full of floating objects. He had a moment of panic as he nearly got tangled in a drifting bedsheet. His chest felt like it was going to burst.
It's too much! Let me!
Ignoring his orca, he managed to find with his groping fingertips what felt like the edges of a built-in sleeping berth. Under the berth, she had said. He groped his way down and found himself confronted with some sort of latch.
This was the closest he came to giving up. He was running out of air; pinwheels and sparks exploded in his vision. But the latch yielded easily to his half-numb fingers, and there was a rush of water that somehow felt warmer than the absolute chill around him.
A few smaller items came tumbling out with it, bumping off his bare arms and legs. He barely felt them, which made him aware of how little time he had before the lethal cold would steal too much of his strength to get out.
But the rush of water also helped move a larger object. His thoughts were becoming fuzzy, but this had to be it, and if it wasn't, it surely contained things she would be happy to have; it was a large, rugged plastic crate with handles on each end. The water, at last, was a help more than a hindrance. The locker came as easily as if it was on wheels.
His main concern now was getting out. He could no longer feel the handle under his numb fingers, and had only a vague sense that his hand was locked around it. Dizzy, his senses failing, he tumbled out of the cabin into the open water and shifted.
He had almost left it too long. His human body was out of air, and so was his whale body. The orca thrashed weakly, almost helplessly, until it managed to gather its last burst of strength and launched itself to the surface.
Dane breached the waves and gasped helplessly. Part of the nature of a shifter was that injuries in one form transferred to the other, so his orca was also oxygen-starved and hypothermic. After the first gasp it sank under the waves, and he barely managed to avoid inhaling a lungful of seawater. He delivered another weak thrust of his tail and pushed his head up again, and then he floated limply at the surface, gulping air until finally his body's instinctive suffocation panic began to subside.
And then a new fear began to shove itself in from the sidelines.
The water was vibrating around him in a strange way. He hadn't noticed it earlier because his human body couldn't feel vibrations and then he had been too busy trying to breathe, but his orca was highly sensitive to all kinds of echoes, and there was something weird happening around him.An engine?It was the kind of rhythmic vibration that came from some sort of large vehicle, shivering the water and the air alike. There was something familiar about it, but he was too dazed to place it until his orca suddenly erupted in fresh panic in the back of his mind.
Mira is in trouble!
And then he realized what that sound was, and why it seemed familiar. It was a sound straight out of his past, and out of his nightmares.
It was a helicopter.
MIRA
Mira was awakenedfrom restless dreams by a sound so completely out of place that for a moment, she still seemed to be dreaming.
She was back in the desert during her last tour of duty. Everything was harshly bright under the noonday desert sun. The rough chop-chop-chop of helicopter rotors beat the air above her, and sand blew in her face. Looking down at her hands, she saw that she was gripping a scrap of fabric. At first it looked like a piece of a camouflage uniform, but then it blew in the wind and she saw she was holding her nightgown, soaked with salt water.
"Wait, I'm dreaming," she said out loud, and then she woke with a start.
To her confusion, some of the dream followed her back into reality. There was a rapid chopping sound above her, and bright light dancing crazily across the walls of the cabin.
Mira sat up. The fog of sleep was rapidly clearing from her mind, and as impossible as it seemed, she realized that she hadn't been wrong.
From the sound, there was a helicopter hovering above the cabin, and the white light roaming across the walls was the stabbing light of a searchlight.
"Dane—" she began, reaching up to pat at the bed above her, but her hand met only bare mattress and a folded blanket. Both were cold, without the faintest hint of body heat.
Now true alarm shot through her, sweeping away the last of the dreamy cobwebs. The cabin felt like it was vibrating with the noise of the helicopter. She could feel it pounding in her chest.
"Keep your undies on, guys," she muttered. She scrambled to her feet and reached for her jeans.
Whowasthis? She had the abrupt thought that she had never even wondered whether anyone had gotten her distress call. She just assumed it hadn't gotten out. But what if there had been a search and rescue going on for her for days?
But that made no sense, she thought, hopping on one foot as she tried to get her shoes on. If there were helicopters out searching for her, she and Dane would certainly have heard them flying around. And why would they be hovering over the island at night? Standard search and rescue procedure definitely was not hovering above random people's house and bothering them after dark!
A thread of worry twisted in the back of her mind. Dane had thought someone from his old mercenary unit might come looking for him. And a mercenary company might have helicopters ...
It seemed absurd. Paranoid.
But there had been no sign of anything but sincerity on Dane's face when he had told her about it. She didn't believe that he would lie to her, and she saw no evidence that he was entertaining delusions.
