But I shake my head.I don’t believe that.I can’t let myself believe it. “We can try,” I beg, just wanting him to release Noah. I won’t watch him die like this. I made a promise, and Cricket’s words hiss in my ear, in my bones. But my own words are there too:I love him.
And I can’t lose him.
My eyes flash out to the sea—the wall of water only a hundred yards out, seventy-five, fifty. It’s taller than the tallest pine, a steep, snarling mountain of water, churning, crashing, violent, as if a surge of anger has been bottled up inside it.
“Please!” I scream over the increasing wind, everything inside me breaking, tears scattering across my cheeks, absorbed with the rain, the sky erupting, sizzling with a darkness that feels like light. Feels like fire. Feels like death.
Feels like the end.
“Vega!” a voice shouts, Noah twisting so his gaze finds mine. “Run!” he says. “Get inside.”
But I won’t. I refuse to leave him—I knew it would come to this, didn’t I? It’s why I didn’t want to let myself love him. Afraid that in the end, I would lose him, one way or another.
I step closer, both of them teetering too far on the edge—my lungs burning, ears shrieking like my eardrums are about to burst. Noah’s eyes widen, seeing something.
Everything slows.
I shift my head, following his gaze, and see…
Noah thrusts his elbow back, into his father’s ribs—the place where the knife tore him open only days earlier—and Holt drops to the ground, nearly slipping off the edge. He’s buckled over, hand to his side, wheezing. But Noah wheels his eyes back to me. “Run, Vega! Now!”
I turn, but it’s too late—the wave slams into the ship, a sudden crack.
My legs give out and I hit the metal surface, palms splayed open. The ship screeches, moans like a monster come alive, the wall of water pushing it across the ocean floor, breaking apart the jagged reef. The vibration passes through my hands, my arms, through my bones.
I try to grab on to something, but the ship is churning with the waves, grating against the seafloor, and the force of it is pushing me farther away from the opening. My eyes flash to the hatch, then behind me, finding Noah climbing to his feet, staggering toward me—away from Holt, who’s clawing at the ship, searching for something to keep him from sliding off the edge.
Noah’s mouth opens and he yells something, but his words are drowned out by the rain, the screaming sky, the ship grinding across the seafloor.
He’s still yelling, pointing to the hatch. And I know I need to move. My body no longer feels like my own, but I stagger upright, take a step, then hit the ground again. My left hand finds a craggy piece of coral grown onto the roof of the ship, and I dig my fingers into it, gasping for air, but my lungs seize against the cold wind, myfingers going numb where they cling to the ship. I glance back and see Noah still inching closer, eyes squinting away from the wind, but Holt has gotten to his feet and is moving toward him.
“Noah!” I scream, but still there is no sound. Everything numbed, edges blurred. The last of the moisture clinging to the air. I try to stand again, but I’m tossed onto my left side, my shoulder slamming down hard against the ship, sending a spike of pain through my chest. Far below, the ocean heaves, no longer moving with the steady rhythm of the tide—it swirls and tosses waves in every direction. Jolting the ship one way and then another, making it impossible to keep my footing. Noah is almost to me, reaching out an arm—like he’s going to hoist me up and haul me to the hatch.
But I see what’s coming before he does.
Holt staggers a moment, blood now visibly soaking through his shirt, dripping to his feet, but he lunges at Noah, and they are both knocked sideways onto the ship.
Father and son. Trying to kill each other.
I try to breathe, but everything spins; every inhale burns. The hatch is only a few paces away, but Noah is being dragged back, both men sliding as the ship lurches one way and then another, Noah with a hand gripped around Holt’s ankle. There is a sudden grinding beneath us as the ship is thrust up onto the shore, moving toward the wall of mountains, the sea still foaming, pushing, colliding.
No time. There’s no time left.
I look up, just as Holt turns and lands a blow against Noah’s face with the heel of his boot. Hard. Noah slumps back, unmoving. “Noah!” I think I yell, or maybe it’s only in my head. All sound, all time, lost now.
Holt drags himself to his feet, bleeding, leaving his son in a heap at the edge of the ship, and he takes a few shaky steps, then starts toward me. Toward the hatch.
No no no.
The air shivers around me, a loudcrackbreaks the atmosphere, a strange cacophony of hums, and I can feel the cold in the air become like ice. Only seconds now. My heart drives against my ribs. I get to my feet, eyes locked on the hatch ahead of me.I have to move.I take a step, fall, then push myself up again. I scramble over the coral and rocks cemented to the ship—a hundred years while it sat beneath the sea—and I’m nearly to the hatch, only a foot away, when I hear a voice—distant, tugged away from a cold, weak throat. “Vega!” Noah’s yelling. “Go!”
I turn, time spun out,stretched out, then snapping back. I feel the spray of the sea on my face, and my eyes find him, as if by memory, as if by fate—eyes seeking the other, needing,meant. The breath in my throat is ice. And Noah looks at me across the thick cloud of moisture and shivering light. He stares at me as he gets to his feet, blood dripping from his nose, and moves toward Holt. But I sense something in his eyes that I don’t like. Words hidden there, words he won’t say aloud. Because it’s too late for that now.
Seconds unwinding. No time.
I blink,blink, blink, and see Noah edging up behind Holt. He’s going to stop him from reaching me, from reaching the ship. He’llprotect me, no matter what. Like he said he would. Even now. Even when the sky turns to watercolors of light. And I want to scream at him, knowing what he’s going to do.
But he reaches Holt and nods at me—the same words in hiseyes, the ones I want to ignore:I’m sorry,they say—just before he yanks an arm around Holt’s throat and drags him back, back… away from me. No sound leaves Holt’s mouth, but his eyes are domes about to burst, unblinking. The air gone from his lungs, like it’s gone from mine.
