“Does it matter who they are? And I found it in Ted’s blanket. We put him in there first thing, because he looked so awful, and then I didn’t see it until today when I was changing his blanket and it fell out.”
“Stan,” I start, and he shoots me a look, and I change the subject pronto. If this gets him talking, this is what we’ll talk about. I turn to speak directly to Emily. “If whoever wrote the note is with the same people who did all of this . . . if it’s the government . . . they could track us. They tracked us before. Bobby told me that I already know where we need to go. Which is nonsense, but . . . if Bobby thought that, then maybe they did too. Maybe they already know exactly where we are at all times and can find us no matter where we go. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean?” Emily says. “We go through all of this, and then suddenly it doesn’t matter?”
“She means that we’re just kids,” Stan says. “We’re not terrorists or revolutionaries. We don’t have military training, and we don’t know how to outsmart the government. We can try. But if trying slows us down from getting wherever Ted and Tara and Callie and Greta need to go? Then why bother?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean that maybe we’re screwed, but we’re alive. Maybe this boat is bugged. Maybe we’ll all die. But right now, we’re here, and we’re not dead. And neither are the Icelings. And it doesn’t matter how smart we are or how much we care, because that won’t keep a boat running forever. But we can try to take it where we need to go.”
“And where’s that, Lorna?” Emily says. “Where do we need to go?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I can tell Emily’s about to jump down my throat, so I do what I can to calm her. “But I’ll know soon. I’m working on it. I’m close.”
EMILY AND STAN leave me alone to finish my turn on watch duty. I lean against the deck, thinking about everything I don’t know, and the world feels like it’s slipping out from under me. I told Emily I was on the brink of a breakthrough, but the truth is I’m so far from the brink that I don’t even know which direction it’s in.
I’m so tired, and all I want to do is sleep, and then, all of a sudden, there is Callie. She’s standing right next to me, somehow having made it over to me silently, and her hand is on my shoulder. She smiles, and I choose to believe she’s smiling at me. She takes my binoculars and leans against the deck next to me, and I lean against her. I lean against her because if I don’t I will collapse. I rest the side of my head against the side of hers, and then I squeeze her around the middle, and then I leave her to take over on watch. I go down below deck and get some sleep. It’s not any good, the sleep. But I get it anyway.
WHILE I WAS sleeping, Stan sketched out a map of the ship and diagrammed the steering board with instructions. He’s opening up a bit again—I hope, at least. He’s still not sleeping, but I guess I can live with that if it means he’s back to talking. I know his talking again is a gesture he’s making for me and Emily, and I’m glad for it.
For a while, I study the diagram, which was beside me in my bunk when I woke up. But after a couple of minutes, I can no longer see or make sense of the images in front of me. All I can see is that bear. How it looked so eager to kill us. And then I see Ted killing it. And I see the soldiers. And their rifles are raised and spitting sparks that are actually bullets at the already-dead pods, just making them more dead than they already were. How did they not know they were already dead? Maybe they didn’t even take the time to notice, because they were there to kill them, and then once they were satisfied that they had, they shot them up until they were literally nothing anymore, and then they burnt them up. Then they died too. They died when those drones spun around each other, like it was a dance, and then collided, everything exploding and on fire. And then I have a terrible thought, which is that all of that happened because Ted, who was so furious that the pods came up dead, flung all that fury at the drones, those instruments of death hovering above us.
Up on the deck, I hear what I think is Stan teaching Emily how to tie knots. And from Stan’s tone and cadence, it sounds like Emily’s a quick learner. I start to make my way up to the deck, and as I go I can hear their conversation more clearly. I guess Emily’s such a quick learner that she’s through talking about knots altogether and is now telling Stan about how she’s seen somewhere between fifty and two hundred dolphins in her lifetime.
“I hope we end up somewhere tropical,” I hear her say. “I’m ready for a complete change of scenery. Cabana boys and everything.”
Right, like a trip like this could ever end with a pi?a colada and cabana boys.
Oh my God.
Cabana boys.
Oh my God.
I know where we’re going.
I run up the stairs as fast as I can. Stan and Emily look up at me, like “Hi, Lorna, did you figure it out?” Guess what, guys, I totally did.