Where was Sam?
It hit her full force then, the shocking realization. Was this how Sam felt? Was this how he’d been feeling since the beginning? All eyes on him? Everyone waiting for a decision? Even as people doubted and criticized and attacked?
She wanted to be sick. She had been there for so much of it. But she hadn’t been the one. She hadn’t been the one making those choices.
And now…she was.
“I don’t know what to do,” Astrid said. “I don’t know.”
Diana leaned far out over the side of the boat and dipped her head into the water. She kept her eyes closed at first, intending to come straight back up once her hair was wet.
But the flow of cool water around her ears and scalp was so very pleasant that she wanted to see and wanted to stay there. She opened her eyes. The salt water stung. But the pain was a new pain and she welcomed it.
The water was green foam, swirling down the side of the boat. She wondered idly if Jasmine would come floating up toward her, face bloated, pale…
But no, of course not. That was a long time ago. Hours. Hours like weeks when you’re hungry and sunburned and now thirst is screaming at you to drink, drink the lovely green water like punch, like Mountain Dew, like refreshing mint tea, so cold all around your head.
All she had to do was let go. Slip into the water. She wouldn’t last long. She was too weak to swim very long and then she would slide down into the water like Jasmine had done.
Or maybe she could just hold her head down here and take a deep breath of water. Would that do it? Or would she just end up choking and puking?
Caine wouldn’t let her drown, of course. Then Caine would be all alone. He would raise her up out of the water. She couldn’t drown until Caine was gone, and then she might as well because, as sad as it was to realize, he was all she had.
The two of them. Sick puppies. Twisted, arrogant, cruel and cold, both of them. How could she love someone like that? How could he? Process of elimination? Neither of them could find anyone else?
Even the nastiest, ugliest species found mates. Flies found mates. Worms, well, who knew? Probably. The point being…
Sudden panic! She yanked her head back up and gasped at the air. Choked, gasped, and started crying with her face in her hands, sobbing without tears because you needed something inside you to produce tears. The water running down from her hair felt like tears.
No one noticed. No one cared.
Caine was watching the shore of the island as it passed on their left.
Tyrell was checking the gas gauge nervously every two seconds. “Dude, we’re on empty. I mean, we are way in the red.”
The cliffs were sheer and impossible. The sun beat down on Diana’s head and if someone had magically appeared beside her and said, here, Diana, press this button and…oblivion…
No. No, that’s what was amazing as she thought about it. No. She still wouldn’t. She would still choose to live. Even this life. Even though it meant spending her days and nights with herself.
“Hey!” Penny said. “Look at that. Isn’t that, like, an opening?”
Caine shielded his eyes and stared hard. “Tyrell. In there.”
The boat turned lazily toward the cliff. Diana wondered if they were going to just ram the wall. Maybe. Nothing she could do about it.
But then, she saw it, too, nothing more than a dark space in the buff, sun-blasted rock. An opening.
“Probably just a cave,” Tyrell said.
They weren’t far out from the cliff and it didn’t take long for them to see that what at first looked like a cave was actually a gash in the rock face. At some point a part of the cliff had collapsed in on itself, creating a narrow inlet, no more than twenty feet wide at the base, but five times that wide at the top. But the base of the inlet was choked with rock. There was no sandy beach awaiting them, no place to land the boat.
And yet, if a boat could be landed, a person could climb up the back of that rock slide to the top of the cliff.
The engine caught and missed several strokes, sending a shudder through the hull.
Tyrell cursed furiously and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”
The boat kept moving toward the gap. The engine died. The boat lost way.
It drifted and the opening fell slowly away.
Only twenty feet. So close.
Then thirty feet.
Forty.
Caine turned cold eyes on his little crew. He stretched out his hand and Penny rose from her place in the boat. He flung her toward shore. She flew, tumbling and yelling through the air and landed with a splash just feet from the nearest of the tumbled boulders.
No time to see whether she made it. Caine reached and threw Bug, who disappeared halfway through his flight but created a splash so close to the rocks Diana wondered if he had smashed his head.
The boat kept drifting.
What was Caine’s range for throwing a fifty-or seventy-five-or one-hundred-pound person with any accuracy? Diana wondered. That most be close to his limit.
Diana’s eyes met Caine’s.
“Protect your head,” he warned.
Diana locked her fingers together behind her neck and squeezed her arms in tight, covering her temples.
Diana felt a giant, invisible hand squeeze her tight and then she was hurtling through the air.
She didn’t cry out. Not even as the rocks rushed toward her. She would hit them head on, no way would she survive. But then gravity had its way and her straight line became a down-turned arc.
The rocks, the foamy water, all in the same blink of an eye, and the plunge. Deep and cold, the water filled her mouth with salt.
There was a hard sharp pain as her shoulder hit rock. She kicked her legs and her knees scraped against an almost-vertical wet slurry of gravel.
Her clothing weighed her down, wrapped tight around her, seized her arms and legs. Diana struggled, surprised by how hard she struggled, how much she wanted to reach the bright, sunlit surface, which was a hundred million miles away.
She came up, was caught by the soft swell, and tossed like a doll against a lichen-slicked boulder. She scrabbled with both hands as she choked. Fingernails on rock. Feet plowing crumbling pebbles beneath her.
Suddenly she was up and out of the water from the waist up. On a little shelf of rock, gasping for air.
She waited there for a moment, catching her breath. Then, she pushed on, oblivious to scrapes and rips, to a drier spot. She stopped there, all energy spent.
Caine had already reached shore. He slumped, exhausted, wet, but at the same time, triumphant.
Diana heard voices crying his name.
She blinked water and tried to focus on the boat. It was already so far away. Tyrell and Paint, standing up in it and yelling, “Get me! Get me!”
“Caine, you can’t leave us out here!”
“Can you reach them?” Diana asked in a hoarse croak.
Caine shook his head. “Too far. Anyway…”
Diana knew the “anyway.” Tyrell and Paint had no powers. They would do nothing useful for Caine. They were just two more mouths to feed, two more whiny voices to heed.
“We better start climbing,” Caine said. “I can help at the rough spots. We’ll make it.”
“And there will be food and everything up there?” Penny asked, gazing wistfully up the cliff.
“We had better hope there is,” Diana said. “We have nowhere else to go. And no way to get there.”
THIRTY-TWO
ASTRID HAD GONE to look at the burn zone. Doing the right thing.
Kids had yelled at her. Demanded to know why she had let it happen. Demanded to know where Sam was. Deluged her with complaints and worries and crazy theories until she had retreated.
She’d hidden out after that. She’d refused to answer the door when kids knocked. She had not gone to her office. It would be the same there.
But through the day it had eaten at her. This feeling of uselessness. A feeling of uselessness made so much worse by the growing realization that she needed Sam. Not because they were up against some threat. The threat was mostly past now.