Fly held the course anyway, working the boat back and forth across the line where the rogue wave had struck, the search pattern shrinking with every minute the storm tightened its grip on the bay.
The water gave them nothing. Only rain and rising wind.
“Mei!” Joss shouted, voice tearing loose. “Mei!”
Fly didn’t tell him to stop. Sound carried. Sometimes it mattered.
He turned Valor across the drift line again, eyes burning from rain and salt as he searched every trough between waves.
“Mei!” Bridge shouted into the wind.
Nothing.
He brought the boat around and ran the line a second time, slower now, Joss counting the spaces between waves while Than scanned the gray water with wide, desperate eyes.
Still nothing.
They ran the pattern again and again.
The seconds stretched into long, grinding minutes. Long enough for hope to flare, falter, and begin quietly dying in their chests.
Fly adjusted course by inches, watching the water the way he always had, reading seams and shadows, places where something might surface. He felt the bay sliding past the hull, felt Valor answering, still honest, still fighting.
Still nothing.
The Coast Guard Cutter appeared at the edge of his vision, a helo overhead. Radios crackled with updates, coordinates passed clean and fast. Fly listened, processed, redirected when he needed to.
He never stopped looking.
The water gave nothing back.
Time lengthened, losing its edges. The bay rolled on, indifferent, carrying flotsam, carrying echoes, carrying nothing that looked like Mei.
Fly felt the shift before it had a name. The way the search stopped feeling forward moving and started feeling circular. The way the water closed ranks, smoothing over the violence like it had never happened.
He kept them searching anyway. A little longer. Then a little more.
Eventually, there was nothing left to adjust and they had been fighting the storm for nearly an hour.
Fly held Valor steady and stared at the empty water where hope had been moments ago, his chest tight, his hands steady on the tiller.
He didn’t say it as another hour passed.
Rain ran in steady streams off the boom and down the rigging, the wind driving it sideways across the bay until the water and sky blurred together. Valor rose and slammed through the confused chop again and again, every correction dragging harder on Fly’s shoulders.
His hands were numb on the tiller. Every muscle in his arms burned from holding the boat into the wind for another grueling hour.
Behind him the crew moved slower now, voices rough from shouting Mei’s name into rain that swallowed the sound almost as soon as it left their mouths.
The bay had already answered, but they ran the line again anyway.
Bridge leaned out over the rail, scanning the boiling gray water. Joss counted the troughs between waves, searching each one as it rose. Than stood rigid and silent, staring so hard at the water it hurt.
Nothing surfaced, nothing moved. They widened the pattern once, then again.
But the storm kept tightening, pushing Valor sideways, stealing distance faster than they could search it.
Eventually there was nothing left to adjust.
