Quietly, Dax said, “You’re worried.”
She snorted. “Yes.”
Ree crept closer to her ankles. “Oh.”
“What do we do if it hits?” Dax asked.
“Hold on and hope as hard as you can that the universe still wants to be kind,” Marin said. “Until then… Ree’s right. We should try to outrun it.”
Trybeing the key word.
The storm hit hard and fast. It reached with purple tendrils like elongated fingers, stretching across the robin’s-egg-blue sky. The boiling mass howled after it, chomping up the sea as it crossed the miles in what felt like mere minutes.
There was no outrunning it.
Racing over the deck, Marin shouted instructions to Dax and Ree: seal the hatch and then secure themselves. “Give yourself enough slack to move,” Marin shouted.
Dax lashed Ree to the mast, and he tied a line around his waist.
She eyed the knot he’d used.
“No good. You have to be able to untie it fast if you need to swim.”She crossed to him and quickly tied a better knot. “You pull this to undo it.” She checked on Ree’s knots. “Only untie if we capsize, and it’s swim or drown!” She had to scream to be heard over the winds.
“Understood!” Ree shouted back.
Silverrocked hard in the furious waves, and water sloshed over the deck. Marin stumbled as she made her way back to the helm. With shaking hands, she secured her own knot, keeping enough slack in the line that she’d be able to steer freely.
“Dive deep, Perri!” she shouted with every bit of air in her lungs. She hoped he heard her and hoped extra hard he’d listen.
And then there was no more time for preparation. No more time for words.
The purple clouds enveloped them, and the sea turned black. She aimed toward a flat spot, tacking in the smoothest part of the water. She had to avoid sailing on a reach across the breaking waves—they’d roll the boat over. Gritting her teeth, she concentrated. Every movement mattered. Every choice…
Around them, lightning crackled and danced.
She heard Dax shout and Ree scream and knew why: overhead, the lightning had coalesced into the shape of a white-hot kraken. Its tentacles stretched above them, crackling with electricity, and its howl was the sound of thunder. It rattled her bones so hard that they hurt. But she kept her eyes on the water and the sails.
She thought of her family story and wished she knew how to summon a sea witch, but they were rare and never swam this close to the inner islands. No miracle was going to pop up to save them.I’ve used up all my miracles.She should have known the universe wasn’t going to let it be so easy. Maybe she wasn’t meant to swoop in and save her parents. Maybe she was doomed to keep making the wrong choices, endangering the people and beings she cared about the most.
I should have told Dax how I feel.
Wait, howdoI feel?
I care about him.His sweet innocence. His endless joy. Hiskindness. His passion for music, for seeing new islands, for… her?I care about him a lot.
A wave slammed into her, and she choked as she inhaled seawater. It threw her hard against the helm, and she clung to it as the boat rocked. When it cleared, she spat out the water and spread her legs wide, bracing herself.
Out in the water, she saw Perri, trying to reach them.
“No!” she screamed at him. “Dive!”
He had to stay under the water, keep himself away from the excess magic in the air—he’d sicken. Magic creatures had been known to die from exposure to magic storms.
Another surge, and she lost sight of all three of them—Perri, Dax, Ree.No!
And then, out of the purple electricity-laced darkness, she heard singing, if it could be called that—a howl against the wind, wordless but with a clear melody. Dax, clinging to the mast, was singing as loud as he could.
It wasn’t a spell. There was no magic in his melody. There was nothing in the music that would turn back a storm. But he kept singing pure defiance. She heard wisps of it, between the howl of the wind, the scream of the lightning kraken, and the crash of the waves, and it kept her fighting.
