The wood caught.
The light steadied and pushed back out across the cave floor, reaching the sleeping bags and the still shapes inside them. It hit the rough limestone walls, with their irregular surfaces, breaking the firelight into a hundred overlapping shadows. The sound of it was the most ordinary sound in the cave right now, the soft, persistent crackle of something burning clean and controlled, and he sat back on his rock listening to it for amoment because it was the most reassuring thing available to him.
Outside, the storm was still talking.
It had changed its register since the worst of it, dropping from the furious, directional roar that had driven them off the dock to something lower and more sustained. The rain came in waves. It was no longer the driving, horizontal sheets of earlier, but steady and heavy. Ace could hear it landing on the palmetto outside the entrance with a soft percussion that told him it had no intention of stopping soon.
The adrenaline had been leaving him for the past hour, not all at once but in stages, each wave of it dropping away and leaving something heavier behind. His body was starting to understand what it had put itself through. Ace’s shoulders ached. His arms still burned a bit like they always did after a long swim in difficult water. There was a deep, pulling soreness in the muscle that he knew from experience would be considerably worse by morning. Ace’s left knee had caught something getting over the gunwale of Rad’s boat, and it had stiffened up while he sat still. He’d been straightening it and bending it at intervals to keep it from locking.
But all in all, Ace was fine. And lucky to be so. He glanced around the cave, his eyes landing on Willa, who was breathing evenly as she slept. Ace suppressed a shudder, thinking how much worse today could’ve ended up being.
He looked at the fire and turned his hands over in his lap, breathed slowly, and let the adrenaline keep leaving.
The cave was laid out before him in the low, amber light, like something from a photograph, all stillness and shadow and thecareful order that four tired adults had managed to impose on an emergency. The sleeping bags formed a rough arc nearest the fire, the kids tucked into them in various attitudes of sleep, some deeply under and some in the lighter, frowning sleep of people whose bodies had shut down before their minds were entirely ready.
Grace was nearest the wall with Willa curved around her, her mother’s arm across her, her own hands pulled up to her chest in the way small children slept, even when they were seventeen and would absolutely deny doing it. Grace’s face in sleep was younger than her face awake. She had carried a lot today for a seventeen-year-old, more than he would have asked her to carry, and she had done it anyway because she was her mother’s daughter and that was simply what the women in that family did.
Andy was to her left, one arm flung out sideways in the complete physical abandon of teenage sleep, his chest rising and falling with the deep, unguarded rhythm of someone who had exhausted himself entirely and had nothing left to give the night. He’d fought so hard to stay strong today. Ace had watched him do it on the dock, on the trail, in the cave when they first came through the entrance, that specific and very recognizable struggle of a young man who was frightened and had decided that showing it wasn’t an option because the people around him needed something steadier. He understood that struggle from the inside. Ace had been performing a version of it himself for most of the evening.
Tyler was two sleeping bags over, lying on his back with his arms straight at his sides in an arrangement so precise it looked almost deliberate, as if even in sleep he had decided to take up exactly the amount of space he required and not one inch more.Katey had ended up between the one other teenage girl, Brianna, and Grace.
Rad was against the far wall with Margo settled against his side, both of them in sleeping bags but neither of them quite horizontal, propped at the angle of people who had intended to stay awake for a while and had lost the argument with their own bodies. Rad’s head had tipped back against the rock. His eyes were closed, but the rest of him still carried the alert, braced quality of a man whose body knew it was supposed to be on watch even if his mind had briefly vacated. Margo’s breathing was slow and even, and she had one hand resting on her own sleeping bag in a way that suggested she had been holding something and had let it go as she drifted off.
Ace would wake Rad in two hours so he could get an hour’s sleep.
He looked back at the fire.
The wave sound was what came back to him first when he wasn’t careful about where he let his mind go.
Not the sight of it. The sound. The deep, tonal shift underneath the wind that had been his only warning, that fraction of a second between hearing something change and understanding what the change meant. He had been halfway up the trail when it happened, and he had felt it through the ground before he heard it properly, a vibration in the air that his body had registered as wrong before his ears had caught up.
Then Grace’s scream.
He pressed his hands flat on his thighs and looked at the fire, pushing the moment he’d turned and seen the empty dock instead of Willa standing on it.
Ace had crossed the tree line and seen the empty space where she had been, the foam still pulling back from the wood. There had been one second, one single second of looking at that empty space and understanding what it meant and not being able to make his body do anything at all.
Then he’d moved.
Ace pinched his eyes closed and breathed through the terror that still resounded through him every time the memory replayed in his mind.
He fed the fire another piece of wood and glanced over to Willa, Grace, and Andy. Ace had no children of his own. He’d been an uncle figure to Willa’s kids for years, showing up at birthdays, memorials, graduation ceremonies, and Sunday dinners. Ace had made sure he was present in the way that people who loved a family but were not part of it were present, adjacent, and warm and careful not to overstep. Ace had done what he’d promised his best friend Shaun he’d do if anything had ever happened to him—look after Willa and the kids. Guilt washed over him as his feelings for Willa hit him.
“I’m sorry, Shaun, I never meant to fall so head over heels in love with your wife,” Ace whispered to the cave. “I miss you, buddy.”
Ace sighed, got up, and moved to peek outside once again, and was glad to see the storm was easing. The intervals between the heaviest gusts were lengthening in the way he had learned to read in years of watching weather from a cockpit, and the rain, while still heavy, had lost the driven, horizontal quality that had made the run from the dock genuinely dangerous. Hopefully, a rescue crew could get to them. Although it would probably have to be by air. The tide patterns around Sandy Shore Island were not predictable in storm conditions, and the cave sat at a specificelevation relative to the waterline. In ordinary conditions, it was well above the reach of the tide. In storm surge conditions, with the kind of wave activity they had seen on the dock this evening, Ace was less certain than he would have liked to be.
He wasn’t going to say that out loud. Not yet. Not to anyone who was sleeping and needed to stay sleeping.
While everyone slept, Ace was going to keep watching the entrance.
He moved to his pack, got the satellite phone, then returned to his rock. Ace turned it on and was surprised to see it had a slight signal.
Ace stared at the signal bar for a moment, not quite trusting it, the way you didn’t trust something you’d been waiting for when it finally showed up. Then he dialed the emergency number he’d memorized before they’d left the mainland, the one Lieutenant Reyes had given all the adult leaders at the pre-trip safety briefing.
It rang twice.
Then a voice, patchy but present, came through the speaker.
