Page 101 of No One Aboard
They were all up there, wearing life jackets and working together.
Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two...
No one would let anyone go overboard. Rylan concentrated on things that kept him calm. Tia’s laugh. Nico’s warmth. Tiny fish flitting through a tranquil reef. His sister would forgive him. The bomb would not go off. The storm would pass them by.
Rylan’s iron grip on the counter loosened. He breathed in the way Tia had taught him.
It’s just a storm.
And if he had gone back to bed right then without looking up, maybe it would have been just a storm. Maybe he would have woken up on his birthday morning, happy and well rested. Maybe he wouldn’t have seen the first ugly thing the storm had revealed.
But Rylan did look up, and any chance ofmaybes washed away like sand in the surf, rattling against the two halves of a broken shell. He looked up and into the bathroom mirror which held his own frightened face staring back at him.
And his sister’s message:
Save yOurSelf
SOS.Rylan fell back, as if he could physically remove himself from the meaning behind the words. And God... was itblood? What the hell had happened in the time since he’d fallen asleep? Why hadn’t Tia woken him up?
Because she hated him.
Because she wanted him to leave. Alone.
But Rylan didn’t want to believe it because believing it meant leaving the cabin and venturing out into the storm to ready the last-ditch escape. He hadn’t signed up for that on his own, he couldn’t do it on his own, but the message was clear, a sickening edit to their original plan, theirpromise, to leave together.
He had severed any chance oftogetherwhen he told their parents she meant to run. Or maybe it had been even earlier, when he failed to bring her home. He could have prevented her from ever wanting to leave in the first place. He should have fallen to his knees and begged for her forgiveness.
Stupid, stupid, stupid...
Rylan stood paralyzed against the wall. Maybe he would never move and let the world dissolve around him.
Then he heard the scream.
Chapter 50
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Day 10 at Sea
Tia wasn’t alone in the hallway. For half a second, she thought what she was seeing was a ghost, pale white and dripping wet, but it was Lila. Her robe was soaked to the bone, giving her silhouette an eerie skeletal shape, and she was watching the door to the twins’ cabin so intently she hardly noticed when Tia emerged from it.
“Mom?”
Was she humming? What the hell? Tia approached her and shook her by the shoulders. “Mom! What’s going on? Why are you wet?”
Lila touched Tia’s face with cold fingers, and the water droplets that rolled down Tia’s cheek made her shudder. She could hear running water faintly inside her parents’ room. Tia pushed past her mother.
Has she been doing this every night when Dad’s on watch? Is this why the hall floor has been wet?
The bath was running, pouring over the side, and Tia slammed the handle to turn it off.
She ran back to the hallway, glancing behind her at the bed to make sure she hadn’t woken her father.
Only he wasn’t there.
Wasn’t it Alejandro’s watch? Where was Francis?
