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Earlier, in the Drift Net, she’d known this would finish where it started, out at sea. At that point, she hadn’t known if Lucian was still onshore. He’d certainly been close enough to Skentel to see the house fire on Mortis Point.
Accordingly, she’d agreed to Jake’s suggestion on the phone: that when she climbed aboardHuntsman’s Daughterat the quay, he’d already be inside the cabin.
During Lucian’s speech, Lucy heard Jake slip over the side. And now there he is, the man she betrayed time and again, a crouched shape on theCetus’s stern. Willing, even now, to put his life in danger and help her save her son.
But forty feet of yacht separates him from Lucian. And hardly a whisker separates Lucian from the two sets of ballast on deck.
‘After that tragedy with Billie, Daniel became a lot more pliant,’ Lucian continues. ‘He didn’t want to get in the water, but it didn’t take much persuasion. I can’t imagineyourspirit breaking so easily. Of course, that’s one reason we find ourselves where we are.’
From the cockpit, Jake climbs on to the port-side deck.
He’s barefoot, dressed only in his old wetsuit. Seawater drips from his elbows, his hair. Moving slow and silent, he edges along the side deck, one hand braced against the coachroof.
‘So,’ Lucian says. ‘Here we are at the fracture line. The point that separates the old Lucy Locke from the new. The moment where you have to trust everything you ever taught meabout katharsis, about renewal. I just need a name. One life to sacrifice for another.’
Lucy can’t breathe, sure that if she makes the slightest movement she’ll alert Lucian to what’s happening over his shoulder. She can’t hear the seawater dripping from Jake’s wetsuit, but she can imagine it far too easily.
Lucian’s eyes narrow as he watches her. She needs to say something, keep him engaged. And yet her tongue is welded to the roof of her mouth.
Down in the water, Fin’s eyes are larger than she’s ever seen them. He spits seawater, sculls with his hands and tries to keep his face above the waves. Already, he’s shivering uncontrollably.
When Lucy raises her eyes back to the yacht, she sees that Jake has edged forward another step. But he’s still so far away. And then the unthinkable happens.
Lucian straightens, rolls his neck. His head tilts to the side, as if something invisible has put its lips to his ear and started to talk. He nods, almost imperceptibly. And then he turns and glances back along the boat.
Jake’s still twenty feet away, the yacht’s sloped coachroof between them. He’s in a half-crouch, arms wide, fingers open in a wrestler’s stance.
Disgusted, Lucian shakes his head. He reverses his grip on the boathook, pointing its spiked tip at Jake. ‘Honestly, Lucy. After everything I’ve tried t—’
Jake vaults on to the coachroof and charges him.
Lucian’s faster. He thrusts with his boathook. Its steel spike punches through Jake’s wetsuit just below the sternum. Jake crashes backwards, snags a grab rail and just about saves himself from going over the side.
Lucian pivots, lips skinned back from his teeth. Heplaces his foot against the trio of weightlifting plates and shoves. The ballast hits the water and instantly disappears. The coiled line settles on the surface, unspooling in rapidly decreasing circles.
Lucy screams. She launches herself off the deck, but she’s so far from her son, and that line is unspooling even faster. She hasn’t even hit the water before the last of it disappears. She sees Fin, her star-gazing, card-sorting little bookworm; her weaver of words, her teller of fine tales, her storyteller extraordinaire. And then he’s gone.
3
Lucy plunges beneath the surface. The world dissolves into white. The sea is so cold that her first instinct is to gasp for breath. She takes a mouthful of water before she can seal her lips. Half a second later she bursts free, coughing and choking.
There’s theCetus, rising and falling. But no Fin – and now no Bee. She swims arm over arm towards the point she last saw her son. Already, a handful of seconds have passed since he went under.
Lucy takes a lungful of air, ducks her head below the water. She can’t see anything. When she flings out her arms, blindly searching, she can’tfeelanything either. Breaking the surface, seawater stinging her eyes, she takes another breath, diving deeper this time, and reaches out in vain – because too many seconds have passed and there’s nothing around her except cold. She needs to breathe. And then she’s back above the water, takinganother greedy gulp of air, her fourth since Fin went under.
Earlier, as she closed on Lucian’s yacht, she checked the depth finder onHuntsman’s Daughter’s display. Out here they’re in eighty metres of water – more than forty fathoms of cold ocean. She twists around, unable to accept what just happened. First her daughter. Now her son.
Katharsis, she thinks.Purification through tragedy.
It can’t be. It can’t be.
Lucy casts about, takes her fifth breath. Hopeless now. Still, she refuses to believe it. Up on Lucian’s yacht, she hears sounds of a struggle. She knows Jake’s been wounded, knows Lucian won’t show him any mercy, knows she’s abandoned the man she once loved, yet again, to a fate he doesn’t deserve, but there’s nothing she can do about that, becauseher boy has gone, her beautiful boy, and her head is full of broken glass.
Even as she thinks it, the water boils a few feet away, a fizzing explosion of white. From the heart of it bursts Bee, heaving so desperately for air that her throat squeals with the effort.
She sinks beneath the surface, rises up, shoulders twisting as she kicks her feet to stay afloat. ‘I’ve got him!’ she shrieks. ‘I can’tHOLDhim!’
Bee’s arms are locked, but Fin is entirely beneath the water. Lucy swims hard towards her friend.