The three of us wade through black water in silence. After my last fall, I put each foot down tentatively in case there’s bottomless water underneath. The thought of being pulled down again is like an icy hand round my heart. The water gets shallower and deeper. More than once, we have to climb over floating debris.
‘Silas’s place was up ahead,’ Pat says. His voice is hollow, sucked into the darkness that surrounds us so that it sounds weak. There is a constant drip-drip-drip that echoes through the deserted corridors in an eerie soundtrack.
I wade into the next stretch of dark water. It comes up to my waist so that I’m walking with my hands in the air. Pat follows after. Nik comes up behind.
‘You seem to know a lot about Silas Cuinn. In his pocket, are you?’ Nik says.
‘Not any more,’ Pat replies. ‘You planning on doing a runner again?’
Nik laughs mirthlessly. ‘Apparently, your friend has a problem with me, Esther.’
‘Too right I do.’
I realize they’ve stopped, and Pat has turned to face Nik. Quietly, I take Pat’s hand and lead him onwards.
‘What’s that stuff all over you?’ I say to Nik.
Pat goes ahead. I can’t be the only one that dreads the awkward conversation that’s ahead of us. I should have stopped speaking the second I realized what Nik was talking about, but it felt impossible. My anger was so strong, my relief at seeing his face again so powerful, it wouldn’t have mattered who was watching. In that moment, it was just me and Nik.
Nik scratches the back of his neck as he walks.
He’s unshaved and stubbly, and I have the urge to run my finger over his jaw.
No. I do not have feelings for Nik Lall. I never had feelings for him. We just went through something monumental together. We shared the pain of losing May. We got caught up in a moment. I’m with Pat, and he’s steady and reliable, and he didn’t run to the other side of the continent the first time we kissed.
‘It’ll wash off,’ Nik says.
It takes an age to find Silas’s cabin. It’s a total wreck. In the centre of the room, slowly spinning in the water, is a big wooden desk. A stream showers from the ceiling, and the water around the desk is mulchy and thick with all the stuff that’s bobbing in it. Pat splashes over to the desk and floats it round. He pulls it closer to me so that I don’t have to get into the chest-high water. My heart breaks a little.
There’s a small drawer in the desk, and that’s where Silas told me I’d find what he needs. A box containing I don’t know what. My breath flurries with apprehension. When I pull on the drawer handle, I find it’s stuck fast.
Nik takes his multitool from his pocket and slides a flat blade in between the drawer and the wooden frame of the desk. There’s a creak and a snap as the lock gives, and he shuffles the drawer open. Inside is the box Silas sent me to get. The wood’s swollen and damp, but it’s not flooded with water. I lift the lid, and my heart sinks. It’s empty.
‘What?’ I say.
My guts crunch with fear. What does this mean? Do I need to look somewhere else? But what was I even looking for? I search through the drawer, but there’s nothing else in there.
‘There was never anything to find,’ Nik says quietly.
‘Why did he send me down here?’
‘To humiliate you would be my guess. To show everyone how strong he is.’
‘I … I don’t know what to do next,’ I say.
There’s nowhere else I can go for help. Meg is going to die in this camp because I broke my promise to get her out.
‘Come on,’ Nik says. ‘There’s somewhere else we need to go.’
I stare down at the door, so familiar it’s like I saw it yesterday, the memory of it so ingrained it’s like a part of me. When the Arcadia toppled into the ocean, our cabin stayed high and dry. It took a lot of climbing to get here, using the ropes and buckles that Pat brought with him to find our way through the wreckage. Every step closer made my chest clench tighter.
Our front window is smashed, and through the shattered glass I can see the curtains hanging down into the cabin. Above my head, the rail is as solid as it ever was, the sky beyond it darkening in the late afternoon.
‘You plan on opening it?’ Pat says with a fraction less compassion than usual.
‘Just give me a minute,’ I say.
‘I can go in first if you want,’ Nik says.
‘What if they’re in there?’
Nik shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. Can’t stand here forever though. You’re on a deadline.’
I crouch. Now that the ship’s on its side, I have to stand on the door frame. The weirdness of it all makes my head spin. I try the handle, and my stomach flips over when the door drops open.
We all look down into the gloom. The far wall, the one that has the doorway through to my bedroom, seems impossibly far away.
Nik attaches a rope to the rail above our heads and lets the end drop through the open door. He holds it out to me.
‘I’ll stay here,’ Pat says, and he takes a few steps away from the door to my cabin.
Nik catches my eye with a look that says, Well, this is awkward.
I shimmy down the rope, each movement snagging the skin on my hands. Finally, my feet touch the wall, my boots crunching on broken glass. I find my footing, and then move out of the way so that Nik can follow me down. The place is destroyed. I’d been holding on to a mental image of the home I grew up in, the place that was mine for almost seventeen years. It still felt real in my memory. I hadn’t seen the destruction, so somehow I could still believe that it existed.
Tears build behind my eyes; my throat aches with the pressure of trying to hold them back. The Federated States flag is still in place on the wall, sagging now and spotted where the rain got in through the broken window. Our sofa – my parents’ bed – is on its side and resting against the wall, the covers crumpled and covered in a fuzz of green mould. But there’s no smell. There’s no buzz of carrion flies.
Nik slaps me on the back. ‘OK?’ he says.
I nod.
‘I’ll take a look in the back.’
He moves on, using the rope to climb further down into the cabin, where he’ll find the room I shared with May. I don’t have the strength for that. I expected to start throwing things into a bag and hauling everything back to the camp with me. But it’s so dead in here. It doesn’t feel like this stuff has any trace of May or my parents in it. The thought of touching the smashed plates or the rotting bedsheets makes me shudder uncontrollably. I don’t want to be in the same room as these things.
The sound of Nik moving around in the next room is strangely comforting.
There’s a creak, and a whine, and the place shifts beneath my feet. It’s just the ship settling, but it makes my stomach lurch and my head spin. The disorientation’s too much. I try to steady myself by taking deep breaths, and I tilt my head to look straight up through the front door. Past the rail, white and like the bars of a cell, to the blue-grey of the sky. I shouldn’t have come here. There’s nothing of my family left. Just ghosts.
Something white flaps in the breeze above my head. A piece of paper, folded in half, taped to the wall above the sink. I snatch it. On the front, in my mum’s handwriting, the word: Esther.
I unfold it to read the lines of frantically scrawled text on the inside. We’re with Mrs Lall’s people. They’re taking us somewhere safe. We love you.
The rope wobbles, and Nik climbs back into the room.
‘We need to go,’ I say. ‘My parents are alive.’