Her tone makes me uneasy, rose petals spiked with thorns. I decide to take her at her word rather than take the bait—the last thing we need is a fight.
“Thanks for working on that,” I say instead. “Looks a lot better.” She’s done a remarkable job of getting the water out. Only a thin layer remains on the deck, too shallow to do anything about and not deep enough to be a problem.
A flash of yellow catches my eye at the front of our boat, close to Finnley’s feet.
No.
“I tried to hold on to it,” I hear Hope say as I rush toward it. “It fell when I was trying to fix the sail.”
Dad’s field guide floats, facedown, on what little bit of water is left. I kneel to inspect it. While it’s not bloated or drowning, the tattered cover wilts under my touch. It will be fine, I tell myself. It will be crispy and dry by noon, as long as the sun comes out.
“I’m sorry,” Hope says. “Eden? I’m sorry, I’m so—”
“It’s fine,” I snap. She was trying to help, she was only trying to help.
It isn’t something I’m used to anymore, help.
Water swirls around my knees, between my toes. I peel the book open and am grateful to see it was crafted, well, to survive. Its pages are heavy; though saturated, they hardly curl at all. And while water drips from the limbs of every t and k, and pools in every curve, the printed text is no more melted than a girl climbing from sea to sand.
Dad’s inky words are fuzzy, as if they’ve sprouted mold, but are still legible in most places. Only along the outside edges of the pages do they blur together. The map is still intact—for now, that’s all we need. Hopefully the hopeless bits were nonessential.
I make my way back to the other girls and find them looking like death. Hope is pale with exhaustion, her cheeks no longer pink. Finnley’s hair is at once limp and wild, some unruly strands trying to fly away and others weary from the trying; her face is haunted with shadows.
“You two should get some sleep,” I say, even though it means putting myself on duty with Alexa, who is still curled into herself at the base of the mast. I’m strong enough to sail without her help, but none of us is strong enough to stay awake and alert indefinitely.
Finnley shoots a sharp glance at Alexa, who stares blankly at the side of the boat. “Are you sure? I could make it another hour or two, I think.”
“You’ve already been up all night. We’ve got this.” If Alexa feels our eyes on her, she doesn’t show it. “Give Alexa the compass. It’ll be fine.”
Finnley pulls the compass from her pocket and holds it out. “You do know how to read a compass, don’t you, Alexa?”
Alexa twists, not enough to make eye contact. “Of course I know how to read a compass. I’m not an idiot.” She extends her hand and waits, like a spoiled child asking for candy.
To Finnley’s credit, the look on her face doesn’t find its way into speech. She plunks the compass into Alexa’s hand and retreats to the port side, where Hope has already curled up to sleep, using one of the bright orange life vests as a pillow.
“Wake us if you need us,” Finnley says, resting her head on her arms. They’re both out in less than a minute.
The sailing is smooth for a good long while. Alexa and I stay quiet, mostly, hide in our own heads. I think of Birch, of Dad. How I’d much rather be confined to this boat with people I love, people I trust. How I’d give anything for them to be here to help me navigate—the water and everything else.
A couple of hours in, Alexa shifts toward me on our bench. “Um,” she says, “is the arrow supposed to be jumping around like this?” The compass rests, open, in her palm.
I bend over to take a look. The compass needle is frenetic, oscillating from NW to NE, with an occasional detour to S.
“That’s . . . not normal,” I say. The needle jumps from due west to due east in the time it takes my gaze to catch on the purple ink on her pinky. The purple ink, which, just yesterday, clearly read A-L-E-X-A.
Today, half the X is missing and the E is completely gone.
SEVEN
ALEXA TILTS THE compass, watches the arrow. “What does it mean?”
I want to ask her the same question.
I can’t stop looking over at her finger, triple-checking to make sure it wasn’t a trick of light—it wasn’t—but I decide to curb my curiosity until after we deal with the more pressing issue of our faulty compass. We are trapped on a boat together, after all, until we reach Sanctuary. There will be time.
“Something’s interfering with it. You’re not wearing anything magnetic, are you?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ve been on the boat the whole time. Wouldn’t I have thrown it off earlier if the problem was me?”
She makes a good point.
“In that case, your guess is as good as mine.” Not entirely the truth, but I’m not sure enough of my thoughts to present them as a viable answer. “Could be a geomagnetic anomaly, maybe?” I leave it at that.
But by could be, I am fairly certain I mean it is.
“Huh,” she says, turning the compass around and around in her hands.
From what I remember, Dad’s notes in the field guide never mention the Triangle by name. But on his hand-drawn map, Sanctuary Island is inside an enormous scalene, three uneven sides made of blue-ink dots and dashes. His notes aren’t so much explicit about the odd experiences he had as they are permeated with evidence of them.
Gingerly, I peel the already-drying pages away from one another and find the one that keeps coming to mind. In bold text, at the top left of the page, the heading reads HOW TO NAVIGATE WITHOUT A COMPASS.
It is the most deeply dog-eared page in the entire book. In the margin, Dad made a column of times, with a second column of notes to its right. One paragraph of printed text has a neat blue asterisk beside it. I skim it and find it rich with information we can use.
The fact that this page is covered in information we can use brings at once both reassurance and dread. Reassurance, that we will likely not be lost at sea—at least, not because of a failed compass. Reassurance, that some of Dad’s team crossed the westernmost side of the Triangle and returned to shore in one piece, well enough to deliver his remains.
His remains: that is where the dread comes in.
I’ve never lingered on what might have reduced Dad to a vial of blood and teeth, and the officers who delivered him to me in that form didn’t volunteer the information. This is not to say I’ve never slipped into that cesspool of tragic thought at all—only that I’ve always pulled myself out before I drowned.
I don’t have much to go on, not really, but I believe he’s dead. It isn’t so much the vial that’s convinced me, as chilling as it is—it’s the ring. If there’s anything he loved more than me, anyone, it was Mom. I am one thousand percent certain he wouldn’t have parted with his wedding band unless someone pried it from his cold, dead hand.