Triton (12 page)

“We’re not going to make it,” she said.

“Just wait,” said Jake. “Just wait. We don’t know that yet.”

The five of them watched in silence. A rock cluster jutted out of nowhere and swept past the bow, slipping out of view under the hull. Brynn tensed, bracing herself for the impact.

It never came. A near miss.

By now, jagged rocks littered the ocean off the port side, trailing wakes of foam into the choppy water. Undaunted, their ship plowed ahead through the minefield.

She waited for the inevitable, hardly breathing.

But miraculously, they didn’t strike anything. And they were still afloat, still turning, still slowing. Gradually, the ever looming cliffs slowed their march across the horizon, and retreated. The bow was clearing the rocks, pointing toward open ocean. They were going to miss the island—

The impact came suddenly.

At first it was subtle. The deck just vibrated under her feet, then increased to a shudder. Then a full on earthquake. The bridge jerked up and down, the instruments blurred.

The bow gave a sickening groan, followed by a screech of rupturing metal that lingered in her bones—rock, tearing into the hull. The ship swayed, and she was thrown forward, slammed into the glass, then knocked flat on her face.

The
Cypress
listed hard to the right, the deck slanting, and through the starboard windows—where a moment ago had been horizon—she saw whitecaps . . . the ocean, about to crash through the side.

All through the bridge, chairs toppled, coffee mugs crashed to the floor. The deck continued to tilt, and Brynn lost her grip and slid to the right, picking up speed, zooming down the length of the bridge.

She screamed and crunched into the starboard window—now horizontal. Her body sprawled across the glass, and she stared in horror at the sea, sloshing a hundred feet below her. And rising.

The
Cypress
was tipping over, thrusting her face first into the sea. Another plop and a shriek announced the arrival of Sky next to her, then Cedar. She closed her eyes, dragged in as deep a breath as she could manage, and braced herself for the impact.

In the chaos, she found Sky’s hand and squeezed.

All at once
the grinding stopped, and Cedar felt himself being pulled upward and tilted back onto his feet. He opened his eyes and saw the ocean leveling out again, retreating.

The
Cypress
was righting herself. With a lurch, the hull slammed back into the ocean, and a vast curtain of water—the splash—rose in slow motion off the port side of the ship, hung in the air for several seconds, then dissolved into mist.

Then all was still on the bridge.

He assessed the casualties. Naomi had managed to hold on to her seat. Jake—through sheer will—had remained standing in the center of the room.

Next to him, Sky and Brynn climbed to their feet, holding hands. Neither looked like they wanted to let go.

That was a first—

Sky took a step and fell to the floor, wincing.

Cedar stooped next to her, and his eyes honed in on her thigh—on a three-inch shard of glass jutting out of her skin. By the looks of it, it went deep . . . possibly to the bone.

Her fall against the window had driven it into her leg.

Sky reached for the glass with trembling fingers.

“No,” he barked, seizing her wrist before she could take it out, his two summers as a lifeguard prompting him to action. “We need something to stop the bleeding.”

If the glass had sliced through major blood vessels, it was also plugging the wound and preventing bleeding.

The others looked on, terrified. Yet Sky didn’t shed a tear; she just nodded and stared blankly at her injury.

Meanwhile, the alarm had cut off. The ship floated past the rocky island, eerily silent—and he realized the ever-present hum of the engines was absent.

At least he could focus.

He rummaged through the nearby debris, which consisted of loose paper, binders, and cracked mugs. Nothing that could double as a bandage.

His T-shirt.

He dragged it off his back and rolled it into a wad, which he poised over her leg. “Jake, I need the rope.”

The rope landed in a coil at his side.

“Sky, look into Brynn’s eyes,” he ordered. “
Don’t
look at what I’m doing.”

She obeyed and tilted her head up to meet his sister’s gaze. Brynn squeezed her hand again.

Cedar wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead, inhaled slowly, and steadied his hand over the wound.

He slid the shard out of her leg.

But the glass just kept coming, no end in sight. Throat tight, he slid inch after inch of it out of her flesh. When he finally reached the tip, he held six inches of bloody glass.

A drop of blood struck the carpet under her thigh, from the exit wound; it had gone all the way through her leg.

The gash pooled with blood, then overflowed, the liquid dribbling into her pajama shorts.

He let it bleed out for a moment, to flush out any bacteria that had gotten shoved in. He wasn’t hopeful, though.

Cuts this deep
always
got infected. Still, the blood trickled rather than gushed, suggesting the glass had missed her femoral artery, thank God. If it hadn’t, she’d be dead in minutes.

He wrapped the shirt around her leg, covering both cuts, and wound the rope tight enough so it would apply constant pressure.

Cedar finished dressing her wound, and not once did she so much as whimper. He collapsed on the floor next to her, exhausted.

She glanced up at him, her face cryptic. “I guess you’re expecting a kiss for that?”

In that moment, staring into her eyes, something stirred in his heart . . . something changed about his impression of her. He couldn’t tell what, though. Maybe it was just plain awe.

He shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to make you lightheaded. You’ve already lost enough blood.”

She smiled weakly.

Together, they hobbled back to the center of the bridge, Sky supported between him and Brynn, to where Naomi and Jake were leaning over a computer monitor, eyebrows knotted.

On the screen, Cedar made out a wireframe display of the ship’s hull. Multiple sections flashed red.

“What’s the status?” he said.

“It’s a breach,” Naomi answered. “We went right over the rock, tore the hull wide open. We’re taking on water fast . . . the bottom deck is already underwater . . .” She glanced up at him. “
But
 . . . the watertight doors closed automatically, like they were supposed to. The flooding is limited to two compartments. The pumps are coming online now.” She exhaled loudly and grinned. “We’re not sinking.”

It took a moment to digest what she had just said. Then all at once they all cheered and high-fived.

Jake—the insufferable killjoy—interrupted their celebrations to give them all orders. Of course.

“Naomi, see if you can find out how to drop the anchor,” he said. “Until we can assess the damage to the ship, I want to stay near this island. Cedar and Brynn, go back to the suite and fetch some blankets—and grab a new shirt, Cedar—we’re sleeping here tonight. Sky, figure out the GPS and tell us where the hell we are. I’m going to hunt down an inflatable raft.”

“We’re not sinking,” said Cedar.

“I know,” he said. “Tomorrow we’re going to see what’s on this island.”

The Island

Jake watched the
morning sun strike the island’s single barren peak, and his hope that it might be inhabited evaporated. They were moored offshore a volcano. Not a plant in sight, just rock and dust.

Jake glanced down the length of the damaged
Cypress
. From the portion of the bridge that cantilevered off the port side, he could see its mangled hull gaping under twenty feet of crystal clear water. The sight gave him a pang of guilt.

Their recklessness the day before was inexcusable. In a single day, they had almost sunk a cruise ship.

Losing the
Cypress
was not an option. Until they had searched each and every one of her three thousand rooms, they had to assume there were eight thousand people still on board. Somewhere.

Because where else could they be?

Naomi, the next one awake, stumbled up next to him, bleary-eyed. “Still no one, huh?”

He nodded. “I sent out another announcement over the captain’s PA system. That was thirty minutes ago. I’m starting to think they’re really gone.”

“Do you miss them?” she said. “Your parents?”

“I don’t even know what to feel,” he said. “It’s just too weird.”

“I don’t think any of us know how to feel,” she said. “None of us believed it at first, but now that we know it’s real, it’s like the window of opportunity to feel something is already gone. Now I just feel numb.”

Jake nodded. “How’s the pumping going?”

“We took in a lot of water, pretty much flooded the entire bottom deck. But those compartments are sealed. It’ll be a few more hours until the pumps are finished.”

“Can she sail?”

“I think we should learn how to drive this thing before we go anywhere. We can’t afford to flood any more compartments or hit anymore islands.”

“Seemed to me like you knew what you were doing,” he said. The noises of the bridge washed over them. The whir of computers, beeping instruments, and the hum of air conditioning.

“I have a theory,” Naomi said, breaking the silence.

“About how to pilot the ship?”

“About what happened. Two nights ago . . .
the vanishing
.”

Jake pulled his gaze from the ocean and faced her, eyebrows raised.

“I’m probably wrong,” she said, “but I just think the timing is too much of a coincidence.”

“The timing of what?”

“Midnight. Exactly at midnight, that’s when everyone vanished, right?”

“We think.”

“That’s when that weird pulse happened. Exactly at midnight.”

“More or less.”

“Midnight, two days ago,” she began, turning her brown eyes up at Jake, “was when those astronauts were supposed to dock with that thing in space.”

Cedar caught the
paddle Jake tossed to him, and together they peered off deck five to the calm, tropical water sixty feet below them.

“Okay, we have the boat,” he said, kicking the inflatable life raft, “And we have the paddles. But how the hell are we supposed to get down?”

“Like this.” Brynn stripped off her shirt and dropped her shorts to the deck, revealing her tiny bikini-clad body. She stepped onto the railing, balancing herself with one hand on the bulkhead.

“Brynn,
no!
” Cedar lunged forward.

She jumped, and his arm closed on air. His hips slammed the railing, but all he could do was watch as his sister plummeted four stories, his heart clamoring up his throat. She didn’t realize how high it was . . . she’d break her legs. She’d be crushed on the rocks, she’d kill herself—

Brynn landed feet first, and the splash almost sprayed back to where he stood. He watched the water, as the seconds ticked by. No Brynn.

“Damnit,” he muttered, ripping off his own shirt. “That little brat.”

He had just clambered onto the railing himself when her head broke the surface. She flicked wet blonde hair out of her eyes and shouted with delight. “The water’s
perfect!
”

“I guess that answers that question,” said Jake with a chuckle. He hoisted the raft and tossed it over the edge, and it parachuted down and landed with a whump in the water next to Brynn.

“Brynn, look out!” Cedar bellowed from the railing. “There’s a shark right behind you!”

Brynn screamed and flailed her arms. “Where . . .
where
?”

“Kidding,” he shouted, but he muttered aside to Jake, “You think there’s sharks?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Maybe if this island is some kind of rookery.”

“How do we know if it’s a rookery?”

“If you see lots of birds or seals.”

Cedar scanned the sky, but not a single feathery speck dotted the horizon. Still, they hadn’t seen the other side. “Brynn, get on the raft,” he said.

“No, I’m swimming to the island.” She dived underwater and came up on the other side of the raft, where she started swimming freestyle toward the beach.

“Brynn, I order you to swim to the island,” he said, attempting reverse psychology.

She ignored him and kept swimming.

Frustrated, Cedar eyed the surface, psyching himself up to chase her down. But the thought of jumping from this dizzying height made fear pool in his stomach.

Well this was just great. His fifteen-year-old sister had the balls to jump, and he didn’t.

After a few more strokes, Brynn stopped to wait for them, treading water. “Aren’t you guys coming?” she shouted. “Or are you too
scared?
”

“I don’t want to jump,” Cedar muttered to Jake.

“You’ve jumped off a high diving platform before, right?” said Jake. “This is just like two of them.”

“Shut up. How else can I get down?”

“Here—” Jake grabbed the nearest lifesaver and flung it overboard. The ring spun down to the water, trailing a thin rope behind it, which was fixed to the bulkhead. “Climb down.”

“Are you crazy?” said Cedar. “That’s a polypropylene line. I’ll slice open my palms.”

“Want me to push you?”

“No, I do not want you to push me,” said Cedar, clinging to the bulkhead.

“Well, I don’t care how you do it.” Jake leapt deftly onto the railing and seized the overhead for balance, his triceps hardening. “Just get it done.” He scoped out a landing, and dived.

Jake soared out into the air, tilted gracefully forward, and cut into the water headfirst without even making a splash. Brynn cheered.

Show off.

“
Just get it done
,” Cedar sneered to himself, mocking Jake’s tone. He wrapped his shirt around his hands and gripped the lifesaver line. Inch by inch, he slid down the side of the boat, probing out footholds with his toes. Finally, three feet above the water, he decided it was safe to jump. He let go of the rope, thrashed wildly, and slapped the water belly first.