Page 101 of The Rising Tide

Billie’s wearing the same clothes she was found in on Penleith Beach: black gym shorts, neon-green T-shirt. Her expression defies belief. There’s fear, yes. But overlaying it is something much more extraordinary: dignity, courage, granite-hard resolve. Here is the girl who would have disrupted the annualgrindadrápdespite her horror. Here is the girl who has made Lucy proud every minute of her life.

Beside Billie stands Fin, grey shorts flapping around his legs. His chest rises and falls like a tiny set of bellows. When he looks up at his older sister, he seems to draw strength.

Lucy is praying again, can’t stop. She isn’t even forming complete words, now. Just sounds of abject misery.

Her children’s ankles are bound.

That, of everything, is the hardest thing to see. Sunday morning, on Penleith Beach, Lucy had noticed the ligature marks on her daughter’s flesh. Now she knows what caused them.

Beside Billie stand three roped-together oxygen tanks. A coiled line connects them to her bound feet. Fin’s line attaches him to a trio of cast-iron weightlifting plates.

So far, the video has played in silence. Now, for the first time, Lucy hears sound – wind, water, the clang of a halyard, the creak of theLazy Susan’s boom.

Behind Billie and Fin, the sea is steadily building its strength. The yacht heaves up through the water, rolls from side to side.

The camera lingers on Lucy’s children a few secondslonger. Then it swings around. For the first time, she sees inside the cockpit. There, staring at her through the lens, is Daniel.

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His wrist is cuffed to theLazy Susan’s starboard winch. He looksgrey, his skin the same shade as the sea. His eyes betray his emotions: terror, impotence, rage.

Lucy hears a voice, then: ‘Choose.’

Daniel stiffens. He glances towards the stern.

‘That’s right,’ the voice continues. ‘You get to save one of them. In a way, Daniel, you get to play God. I know it’s difficult. Big decisions always are. If you choose to do nothing, they both go into the water.’

The camera tracks left and pans around. Now, all three of her family are in shot. ‘Imagine Lucy’s pain if you remained silent, and because of you she lost them both.’

Daniel’s lungs are working as hard as Fin’s. He jerks his tethered wrist, grimacing as the steel cuff bites flesh.

‘Choose.That’s your only option. Tell me who to put in the water. Billie? Or your son.’

Lucy’s gripping the tablet so tightly her forearms start to shake. ‘Oh fuck, Daniel,’ she moans. ‘Oh no, please.’

She doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to see this play out. And yet she can’t look away, has to be there for her daughter’s last moments, even if her daughter’s already gone.

The screen goes black.

Lucy screams.

At first she thinks the batteries have failed, but when she presses the power button the home screen reappears. There’s theLazy Susan, sitting in Skentel’s harbour. The grey thumbnail –TRUTH– has disappeared.

Lucy drops the tablet. Sinks from the sofa to the floor. She’s breathing too fast – as if she’s going into labour. Gritting her teeth, she tries to insert obscenities into the gaps between her breaths.

The curses come haltingly at first. Then faster, more aggressively. By degrees, she turns her wretchedness into rage. She crawls to the bookcase where she left the knife. Closes her fingers around it. For a moment, all she can think of is silencing the creature behind that voice. But first she has to save her son.

Lucy looks around the room, hardly recognizing what she sees. Once, she believed that items in this house gained value as they aged: the scarred furniture, the chipped crockery, the art on the walls.

No longer. The collected ephemera aren’t just worthless but something far worse – a source of agony; a reminder of what was.

As her gaze moves over the framed paintings, that sense returns of something wrong. It’s so outlandish she nearly dismisses it. Becauseeverythingis wrong. Her life – all their lives – has been comprehensively destroyed by whichever ghoul decided to target her.

Still, that feeling of wrongness persists. Lucy takes a steadying breath. She smells woodsmoke, damp soil, the fleshy scent of the succulents. She’s never been one to doubt her gut. She’s not going to start now.

Her vision has started to skip, the result of too much adrenalin. She blinks, shakes her head, tries to throw offthe effects. The savagery of what she just witnessed is impossible to set aside. And yet if she’s to stand any chance of saving Fin, that’s exactly what she must do.

Lucy clenches her fists, screams again.

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