Serena's POV
Abel Thorne's lobster boat is called the Marguerite, and she is, by any sane measure, an old woman.
Tonight, Abel says, she's going to do twenty-two.
"How?" shouts Dominic, over the engine.
"I got a bigger engine." Abel doesn't turn his head. He's standing at the wheel with his cap pulled down and his jaw set, a small bent man in a yellow oilskin, utterly calm. "Put it in after the wife died. Didn't have much else to do." He eases the throttle forward. "Hold on."
The Marguerite leaps.
There's no other word for it. She lifts her bow out of the black water like a horse over a fence, and comes down in a smother of spray, and then she's running, flat out, with the whole hull drumming under my boots.
I grip the rail.
Marcus is beside me with a rifle, a big black thing he took from the van. Dominic stands at my other shoulder, soaked to the bone, with his hair plastered to his skull and a pair of binoculars at his eyes.
"There," he says.
I look.
"Rusk's driving," says Dominic. "He's got the old man in the stern."
"How far?"
"Half a mile."
"We'll lose them."
"No," says Abel.
He's looking at the chart plotter, a small green screen glowing beside the wheel. A thin line runs across it, the coast, the channels, the ledges. He taps a finger on a crooked patch of blue.
"Owls Head Thorofare," he says.
"What about it?"
"Draws three feet."
"Ayuh."
"Abel," says Dominic slowly. "That's the cove."
"Ayuh."
"That's where..."
"I know where it is."
I close my eyes.
The cove off Owls Head. The black water, the long cold ledges, the wreck of a yacht lying quietly under thirty feet of tide. A place where, three years ago tonight, give or take a week, I woke up face down in a bit of floating wood with my skin on fire.
"Go through," I say.
"Serena..."
"Go through, Abel."
He looks at me.
The old blue eyes, in the dim green light, are very kind.
"It'll be rough."
"I know."
"You sure?"
"I'm quite sure."
"All right, girl." He spins the wheel.
***
The gut is a nightmare.
It's a black corridor between two walls of rock, each as high as a house, with the sea thundering in it like a mill-race. The Marguerite goes through with her engine screaming. Spray comes over the bow in sheets. I can't see. I can hear only the roar of the water and the grind of the hull, and Abel's voice, steady, saying left a bit, left, steady, there she goes.
Then we're through.
We shoot out into open water like a cork from a bottle.
And the speedboat is right there.
It's fifty yards ahead and a little to port, a sleek white thing with twin engines and a bank of lights along the cockpit. Its wake is a seething ribbon of foam. We're coming up on it from the side, out of the dark, with the full weight of an engine that was never meant for this.
"They haven't seen us," says Marcus.
"They have now."
A flash.
A bang, flat and sharp, from the stern of the speedboat. Something goes zip over my head. The wheelhouse window blows out in a spray of glass.
"Down!" yells Dominic.
This is where it ends.
"Marcus!"
"I see him!"
The rifle cracks.
On the speedboat, a man in a dark jacket spins and drops. The other, at the wheel, hunches lower and swerves, hard, so the whole boat slews round in a spume of white water.
Rusk.
I see his face for a moment, big and pale in the cockpit lights, mouth open.
And in the stern, standing quite straight, with a rug over his shoulders and a hand on the rail, I see an old man in a camel coat.
He isn't hiding.
He's looking back.
He's looking directly at me.
"Serena," says Dominic, in my ear. His hand is on my arm. He's pressed something cold into my palm. "Marcus says the man at the wheel's the only one with a gun now."
I look down.
It's a pistol.
A small, black, heavy thing, from the van. I've never held one in my life.
"You could end it," says Abel, behind us, without turning his head.
I stare at him.
"He's thirty yards off. Steady deck. A woman with a good eye." The old man's voice is entirely neutral. "One shot. No trial. No jury. No years. No more lawyers."
I look at the gun.
I think of a pier. A recording. A man in a cardigan saying Augustus, I've brought it. I think of three years of mirrors. Six surgeries. Eleven weeks in a bed, dreaming of a name.
I think: I could do it.
I think: I'd be so glad.
I raise the pistol.
It's very heavy.
I hold it with both hands. I settle the sights on a camel coat in a spray of light. His face is right there, small and grey and gentle, with its white hair blown back and its watery eyes lifted calmly to mine.
He smiles.
It's the same smile.
The warm one. The patient one. The smile that says: Of course you will. It's what I'd have done.
My finger tightens.
And I hear, as clear as if he were beside me, a man's voice on a dock.
Never mind, Birdie. Whatever the water does, it does. And we'll still be here.
I lower the gun.
"What are you doing?" says Marcus.
"I'm not going to kill him."
"Ma'am..."
"I want him alive." My voice shakes. "I want him in a courtroom. I want him to sit in a chair and hear twelve ordinary people say what he is."
"That's very noble," says Abel.
"It isn't noble."
"What is it?"
"It's revenge." I put the pistol on the deck. "The real kind. The slow kind."
Dominic's hand finds mine.
He doesn't say a word.
Out on the dark water, thirty yards away, the smile on the old man's face wavers, and goes.
Something changes.
I see it in his shoulders, in the set of his head. A slow, terrible realisation, as of a man who has played a very long game, and has only just understood that he's lost.
He turns.
He says something to the man at the wheel.
Rusk shouts. I can't hear. I only see the speedboat veer, violently, away from us, toward the black humped line of the ledge that guards the cove.
"He's heading for the rocks," says Dominic.
"He'll wreck."
"He knows."
"Why?"
"There were cans," says Marcus slowly. "I saw them. In the stern. Gasoline. Eight of them, strapped down under a tarp."
My blood stops.
"Abel! Turn! Turn!"
The old man throws the wheel over.
The Marguerite heels, hard, in a smother of spray. I'm thrown against the rail. I hear Dominic shout my name.
The speedboat hits the ledge.
It doesn't make a sound at first. Only a long, low, grinding whisper, like a knife drawn over stone. The white hull rears, tilts, hangs for a second in the air.
Then a bloom of orange, silent and enormous, unfolds out of the stern.
It's beautiful.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It's a flower the size of a house, with a heart of white and a rim of gold, opening slowly across the black sea. Every wave is lit. Every rock. Every face on the deck of the Marguerite, turned up, open-mouthed, like a child's at fireworks.
And then the sound arrives.
It hits like a hammer.
The deck rears under my feet. The air goes solid. A wall of heat slams into my chest and picks me up and throws me, spinning, through the wheelhouse window and out over the rail.
I hit the water.
It's cold.
It's so cold that my whole body screams. I go down, and down, in the roaring dark, with the burning sky above me turning to a fan of gold on the surface. I try to kick. I can't tell which way is up. My lungs are fire.
And on the surface, above me, in a spreading ring, the sea itself is burning.
Gasoline.
A sheet of it, a hundred yards wide, blazing across the water. Orange. Yellow. A roof of flame between me and the air.
I think of a night three years ago.
I think: No.
I think: Not again. Not the fire.
I think: Dom.
And the light goes out.