Dutch Island We’re going to get caught.
And I am going to die from thirst.
At home Dad has those bottles of Evian in the fridge.
At home.
None of us are going home.
None of us.
Alki Beach Owen folding his arms.
Dad yelling at him. Dad losing his shit the way he used to.
Dad taking Owen by the shoulders and getting real close to his face: It was your mom’s last wish. Don’t you want to honor your mom, you little shit?
Owen crying.
Owen getting in the boat.
Dad pulling the starter on the outboard motor.
The Zodiac leaving the dock.
Dad saying nothing.
Owen still crying.
Dad dumping the urn.
Mom saying nothing.
Mom splintering into a million pieces in the black water of Puget Sound.
A single seagull.
Owen crying.
Dad not crying.
Dad mad as all hell.
Dutch Island Water up to her knees.
Birds on those rocks would have to find somewhere else to rest soon.
The rocks would be underwater in an hour and all those weird birds would have to— Olivia stopped and rubbed her eyes and stared at the line of rocks about twenty feet offshore. They were jagged and funny-looking, and if you imagined a little you could pretend they were the spines of a dinosaur’s back.
A stegosaurus.
She looked at them and nodded and knew what she had to do next.
She turned and ran back the way she’d come as fast as she could.
20
Through the bushes. Through the water. Hard to breathe. Hard to think.
“Look behind us,” Petra whispered.
Heather turned.
Less than a hundred yards back, coming around the bend, a man and a boy, both with guns. With them was a very little girl tagging along like they were going to a birthday party. The pursuers couldn’t see them in this vegetation, but they were certainly going to catch them soon.
Heather had been cooking up a little Hail Mary plan in her head: Hide. Wait. Ambush the kid as he pushed through the bushes. She’d get one go at him with the penknife, but one go was better than none.
But she had no chance against two of them, armed. The man looked like Ivan, the big brute from the ferry.
Shit.
Her against the two of them?
Damn it.
So this was it, was it?
The giving-up place?
She’d always wondered where that would be.
Not after a twenty-hour waitressing shift. Not when that truck rear-ended her and totaled her Honda. Not when she got appendicitis and had to drive five hours to the VA hospital in Tacoma because she knew she couldn’t pay the bill at the Bellevue Clinic.
It was here, on a slip of a beach on an island off the coast of Australia.
What the hell was up with that?
She saw Olivia coming around the bend in the bay as if someone was chasing her. Oh, shit, this really was— Caught between—
But Olivia had an expression of grim satisfaction.
Something was—
Olivia reached them, breathless.
“What?”
“Around the next corner, there’s a line of rocks just offshore, about fifteen yards offshore. We can wade or swim out there and hide and let them get past us,” Olivia said, panting.
Mouth almost too dry to speak, Heather nodded.
Petra nodded too. They would have to move fast. Ivan and the kids were coming up the beach.
“Owen, we’re going to be OK,” Heather said. “Just a little bit farther.”
With renewed vigor, Petra and Heather carried Owen through the mangroves and around the bend. And, yes, just off the coast, there was indeed a line of rocks.
“How will we do this?” Petra asked.
Heather tried to answer but she couldn’t form words. It had to be over a hundred degrees away from the shade of the mangrove trees. They’d be exposed to the full glare of the sun out there on the rocks, but what choice did they have?
She swallowed a few times to get saliva in her mouth. “You go with Olivia. I’ll swim Owen out. Just help me get him into the surf.”
Petra nodded and they manhandled Owen down to the water.
“Go,” Heather said. Petra and Olivia began swimming out to the rocks. Heather flipped Owen onto his back.
“Just relax, Owen. It’s gonna be OK,” Heather whispered into his ear. She crooked one arm around his neck, and, keeping his head raised, she swam into the bay.
The water was cold, but swimming with Owen was easier than she’d expected. She swam on her side, kicking with both her legs and pulling back hard with her right arm. In ten brisk strokes she reached the rocks, big black jagged boulders sticking out of the water.
She swam behind them.
“There’s a little ledge on this rock here, see if you can put him on that,” Olivia said from somewhere.
The ledge was only the size of a bookshelf and it sloped downward at thirty degrees, but the sea had worn it smooth and between the three of them, they managed to get Owen onto it. His eyelids were fluttering and there were white flecks on his lips. Where he wasn’t sunburned, he was pale and his skin was cold to the touch.
Heatstroke, exhaustion, dehydration…
He needed water and food and rest and shade very soon or he was going to die. The rest of them would be dead soon after.
Heather checked his pulse. It felt weak.
“There,” Petra whispered.
Three people were coming around the bend of the beach—Ivan and the teenage boy and the little girl. As they got closer, their conversation drifted across the water.
“Nah, mate, St. Kilda have no chance, they have no depth,” Ivan was saying. “Now, you look at the Bulldogs, that’s a team that’s going places. That’s a team that can get through the ups and downs of a season. You wait and see.”
“What are they talking about?” Olivia whispered.
“I don’t know. The important thing is they’re not talking about us. Their attention has wandered. That’s good,” Heather whispered.
Something nudged her leg.
She peered down into the water but couldn’t see anything.
Dolphins?
No, not dolphins. She knew that for a fact.
Something happened when there was an orca in the water off Goose Island. Some change in the vibe. You could feel the danger through your skin.
She floated there, moving as little as possible.
She tried to see, but the water here was deep and opaque.
Ten feet to her right, a fin rose out of the water for a moment and then slipped beneath the surface again. That was no dolphin. It was an immature blue shark. It was only about four feet long, and blue sharks mostly fed on squid, but they could give you a nasty bite whatever age they were. It was circling to her right.
She wasn’t sure if it had noticed them or not. One way to make a shark notice you was to start thrashing about and panicking.
She looked back at the shore.
Ivan and the children were almost parallel with them.
“I don’t want to go to school,” the boy said.