Then he turned, and Willa heard him talking to the group, calm and matter-of-fact, already redirecting their attention from the water to the trail. The phone crackled, and she could hardly hear, so she moved out a little further onto the dock.
The wind hit Willa full force the moment she stepped farther onto the dock, pushing against her with enough force that she set her feet wider, bent her knees, and moved with care, with a hand on the dock railing. The boards moved under the surge. The rhythm of the water beneath them was nothing like the still afternoon they had arrived in, and every wave that came in hit with a solid, resonant thud that she felt through the soles of her boots.
The quality of the line was still poor, cutting in and out, but it connected, and she spoke clearly and quickly, fighting to keep her voice steady over the sound of the wind and the water.
Willa managed to give the operator the information they required. Who she was, the number in her party, where they were, and where they were heading to find shelter. She froze when the operator told her that the storm had snuck up on them and was hitting hard and fast.
The voice on the other end was patchy but present. Willa caught enough of it to know the call had been received and that search and rescue would be notified.
She lowered the phone and turned to move back along the dock.
The wave came from the east.
Willa heard it before she saw it, a sound like something very large deciding to move all at once. A deep, tonal shift under the wind’s higher register. She turned toward it by instinct.
It was bigger than anything that had come before it, not an enormous wave by oceanic standards, but enormous relative to everything around her, the dock, the boats, the calm afternoon they had arrived in hours ago. It broke against the outer dock piling with a force she felt through the boards under her feet before the wall of white water hit the surface of the dock itself.
Willa grabbed for the railing.
She found nothing. The section of railing she reached for was the gap between two posts, open air where she needed solid wood, and the water hit her sideways with a cold, shocking force that took her feet from under her before she had time to brace.
The phone left Willa’s hand.
The dock tilted, and the water was everywhere, and then there was no dock.
There was only the cold, dark surge of the ocean, and the surface somewhere above Willa, and the roaring, rushing silence of being pulled somewhere she had not chosen to go.
2
ACE
He was ten yards up the trail when Grace screamed.
Not a startled sound. Not the kind that came from seeing something unexpected and frightening. This was the kind of scream that had nothing held back in it, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than the throat, and it hit Ace between the shoulder blades like a hand slamming flat against his back.
He spun around.
Andy was already running back toward the dock, his pack bouncing wildly off one shoulder, his voice ragged and loud over the wind.
“Mom! Mom!”
Grace stood at the tree line, both hands gripping the nearest trunk, her face turned toward the water, every trace of the steadiness she had carried through the entire afternoon stripped away.
“She’s gone!” Grace screamed. “She’s gone, Mom went in, she?—”
Ace was running before Grace finished the sentence.
He cleared the tree line in four strides and hit what was left of the dock at full pace, his boots slamming against the wet boards, the surface shifting under the surge still pulling back from the wave that had broken across it. White foam dragged off the edge in curtains. The outer section of the dock where Willa had been standing was empty in a way that made his stomach drop straight through the boards beneath him.
Ace scanned the water.
The surface was chaotic, broken into short, steep chop driven hard by the wind, with debris moving in the surge. A piece of rope. A clump of sea grass ripped from somewhere. The foam line where the wave had broken. Ace’s eyes moved fast and systematically across all of it, the way they moved across a flight path when something was wrong, looking for what didn’t belong.
There.
Twenty yards out and being pulled east by the current. A flash of dark fabric. An arm breaking the surface for one second and then going under.
“Willa!” Ace yelled, already pulling off his pack and kicking off his boots.
