Was history her calling? Archaeology? She didn’t want to end up just teaching people about stuff like this, but being one of the first people to touch a piece of the past stirred an interest in learning that she’d never before experienced. Certainly none of her middle-school teachers had inspired that interest, but in a matter of weeks she would leave eighth grade behind forever, and in the fall she would start high school. Maybe high school would be different.
The boat tilted toward the beach.
Emma stumbled, went down hard, and banged her knee. She swore loudly, scraping her hands as she caught herself. Along the corridor, she heard Rashad and Marianna cry out. Rashad groaned.
“My head,” he complained.
Marianna shushed him. “We’re not alone.”
“You’re shushing me? I just smashed my head. I think I’m bleeding.”
The boat tilted back in the other direction, the water that had gathered beneath them cascading side to side in a little wave of its own.
The whole wreck shifted.
Emma held her breath, thinking that it might have been best if she had listened to her mother’s instructions, or gone with her father and Kelsey.
Those dark silhouettes down the corridor played out a strange pantomime as Marianna began to ignore Rashad, peering into the darkness around her. Rashad started climbing to his feet, touching the back of his skull with one hand.
“I’m not kidding,” he said.
“Neither am I.”
The moment the words were out of Marianna’s mouth, the next waved rolled in, taller and more powerful than any she’d felt so far.
“Hey, kid!” Marianna yelled. “I didn’t think you’d really follow this far. Listen, we can’t be responsible if you get hurt in here. No crashers at our party.”
Emma felt anger flare inside her. She hated being told what to do, hated being treated like a little kid—by anyone. It wasn’t like they were talking to Kelsey. They weren’t that much older than she was, college or no college.
“It’s not your fucking property,” she said quietly, her own voice carrying along the tube of the sideways corridor. “We’re all trespassing.”
Rashad laughed. “She’s got you there.”
In the gloom, Emma smiled.
The wave receded, rocking the wreck back out to sea, and Emma stumbled. Both knees hit the floor hard, but this time she kept going. The water sloshed as the ship rolled nearly upright. Emma’s shoulder hit the floor—the actual floor—and water washed around her, deeper than before.
Down the corridor, Rashad and Marianna tried to catch each other and both tumbled over instead, tangled in each other’s limbs. He shouted that she was trying to drown him, sounding only half-joking, and Marianna cussed him out.
Emma felt the wreck lurch and slide and sway, but this was nothing like before. The boat dragged and bobbed, and its weight shifted, and she flushed with alarm. “Rashad!” she called. “We’re moving!”
Marianna laughed at her. “We’ve been moving, honey.”
Emma had started to like Marianna, but now she wanted to throttle her. “You want to drown, have fun,” she said.
As she started back toward the stairs—which were now beneath her the way they ought to be, water pouring down from this level into the next—she heard them arguing behind her.
Rashad could feel it too, the motion of the wreck, but Marianna doubted anything Emma had to say.
Emma reached the steps and started down, even as the wreck began to tilt in the opposite direction. The boat rolled. She smashed her ribs against the railing and started to fall. Emma shot her hands out, grabbed hold, and felt her shoulder wrench, flaring with pain at the same spot where she had smashed into it moments earlier. Crying out, she fell through the space between the railing and the stairs and plunged into the water that had collected there.
Panic seized her. Emma flailed in the water, held her breath as she got her feet under her, and tried to stand. A wave rolled through the wreck as the tide dragged it deeper, for she knew that must have been what happened. The tide had risen and lifted the wreck off the sand, and now the sea had begun to reclaim the ruined half of the lost vessel.
The water knocked her over. She tried to lash out with her arms to right herself, but pain burned in her shoulder and again she tried to get her feet beneath her, stunned to find the water up to her abdomen now, when it had been only to her knees before.
“Are you okay?” Rashad called, as he scrambled through the stairwell opening. He hung from the railing as the boat rocked, and let himself drop into the water with a splash. “Shit, this is deep now.”
“You think?” Emma said. “We’re being dragged out. We’re going to sink.”
Marianna appeared in the stairwell opening now. She moved down more awkwardly, more carefully, partway hanging and partway climbing, like some kind of Spider-Girl.
“Not necessarily,” Marianna told them. “Not immediately, anyway. There’s enough air in here that we’ll float for a bit, but you’re right. Unless we hit a sand bar or someone takes enough interest to tow the wreck back to shore, it’s going down soon.”
Another wave rushed in. Rashad took Emma’s hand to keep her from falling.
“I’m not interested in studying a shipwreck while it sinks,” she said.
Marianna glanced around. “I’m with you.”
Rashad braced his hand on the wall. The ship listed even more. The three of them took hold of one another, working together for the first time, and started wading toward the sunlit opening at the end of the corridor. The opening had narrowed, the hole filling with water, and as they were dragged out farther it might submerge completely—but they would be out by then. Only an idiot would stay inside a sinking ship if she had a choice, Emma knew.
“Do you think the crew survived?” she asked, turning to Marianna, who seemed to know about things like this. “When the boat went down, would they have abandoned ship? Maybe whoever sunk them rescued them from the water.”
“Maybe,” Marianna said. “I’m sure some of them didn’t make it.”
“No underwater skeletons on board,” Rashad said as they stumbled together through the water.
“Not that we found, anyway,” Emma said.
Marianna laughed. They all held one another more firmly, wading, ducking beneath a door that dangled open overhead. Emma made them stop, feeling ahead with her feet for a door or hatch that might be beneath them.
She scooted forward in the water.
Rashad’s hand tightened on her arm. “Stop.”
Emma winced and turned to snap at him, but when she saw Marianna’s expression—frightened eyes, parted lips—she whipped around to follow her gaze. That’s when she saw the shark entering the narrowing opening at the end of the corridor.
A shark. Inside with them, as the wreck began to sink again. Emma’s breath caught in her throat and ice crept through her chest, like frozen spiders crawling on her heart. She shuddered, shaking her head in denial. She squeezed her eyes shut as if the shark might have been her imagination, but when she opened them she saw its fin and the ridge of its back above the water, limned by sunlight.
Out beyond that, she saw another fin.
“Oh my God,” Marianna said at last. “This is … we’re fucking dead.”
Rashad spotted the shark at last—spotted both of them, probably—because he turned and grabbed Emma’s arm. “You’ve got to—”
She shook off his grip and hurled herself through the water, rushed back to the stairwell, and scrambled along the metal steps into the next deck. It should have been above them, but with the ship tilted so hard to one side it was now nearly parallel. Up would have been better, but at least she had a metal floor between herself and the sharks.
Emma ducked her head back through the stairwell opening in time to see Rashad leap up to grab hold of the doorframe above him. The door hung open, and he braced his feet against it as he hauled himself up through the doorway.
Mari
anna stood halfway between the doorway and the stairwell. She seemed frozen by indecision as the first shark glided along the corridor and the second fin entered the wreckage of the ship. Rashad shouted her name, but as frightened as Marianna seemed, Emma could see the swift calculus taking place in her eyes. Going up, through the doorway in what was now the ceiling, might be safer than moving sideways through the stairwell into the next deck, but the doorway was closer to the shark, and if she didn’t make it on the first jump …
She turned and waded toward the stairs.
Emma shouted, urging her on. Marianna lunged and the shark seemed to do the same, as if it sensed what it was about to lose. Rashad called out, urging her on, and Marianna reached the steps. Now that the wreck had tilted, water poured from the lower deck to the upper, and Marianna hurled herself through the opening with that cascade.
The shark struck the submerged portion of the stairwell as it went by. With a metallic shriek, bolts snapped and the steps tore away from their moorings, twisted and bent. Emma had stood aside when Marianna rushed through, but she’d kept her eye on the shark, peeking around the entryway, and now she saw a tiny light blinking red, part of a thin silver band on the left side of its head, only inches back from its eye.
“Oh my God,” Marianna rasped. “Oh, God.”
Emma took her hand. The other girl was older, but fear affected people differently, and for Emma it provided one clear message—stay alive. She glanced up and down the corridor as more water poured in, and she knew they had to find a way to get on top of the newly sinking wreck, and signal someone if they were too far from shore.
“Let’s go,” she said, squeezing Marianna’s hand.
They started down the corridor. Behind them, the sound of shrieking metal came again, as if the shark—either shark—had attacked the ruined steps a second time, trying to pursue them. Trying to get through. Marianna began to pray aloud, glancing around frantically as if she feared she was alone, as if she no longer realized Emma was with her despite the grip of her hand.
Emma squeezed her hand hard and gave it a tug, forcing Marianna to look at her. “Get it together!”
Marianna exhaled sharply and nodded.
The ship rose on a swell, the waves lifting it high. As the swell subsided, the wreck listed hard. Emma and Marianna tumbled together and slammed into what had once been the ceiling of the corridor. Emma struck her injured shoulder and pain stabbed through muscle and bone. Blackness swam at the edges of her vision, and for a moment she lost any sense of self or place. Then she began to choke and cough, and she lurched up from the water pouring down around her, growing deeper by the second.
“Holy shit,” she said, staring at the waterfall rushing down through the opening to the stairwell above. The ship had turned upside down, and all along the corridor, water poured in from above. She felt suffocated already, unable to breathe just knowing they had no way out.
Marianna grabbed her arm, wrenching that injured shoulder again. Emma cried out and used her good arm to shove the girl away, fighting the pain.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Marianna asked.
Down the hall, at the next stairwell, a shark slid over the edge and plunged through the waterfall into the rapidly flooding, upside-down corridor.
Emma twisted around, frantically scanning for an exit that would lead them back up. Up was down, now. The bottom of the ship was now the top, so she wanted some way up into what had once been the keel. But her thoughts would barely coalesce, because she knew the quiet, hungry, persistent monster swam down there with them, that somehow it had spilled through from above.
As she held her breath, the fin surfaced, the shark gliding toward them. Panic burned inside Emma, but she fought the urge to scream. Screaming would keep her from finding a way out.
Without a way out, even if the shark didn’t get them, they were going to drown.
* * *
Corinne stared at her phone. “Jenn, are you seeing this?”
On the sofa, her friend stuck a finger in the paperback she’d been reading and glanced up with a sleepy expression. “I’m not seeing anything except words on a page, and they’re blurring at the moment. I keep nodding off.”
Corinne got up from the chair where she’d been curled up for an hour. “They’ve closed all the beaches. No swimming anywhere in the area, not the islands, not Fort Myers. And there’s a small-craft advisory.”
Jenn folded down the page and put the book aside, a frown creasing her forehead. “What are you talking about? A small-craft advisory is for a storm. The hurricane’s passed. The bad weather in its tail went through in hours.”
“Right?” Corinne replied. She went to the sliding glass door and looked through the ruined porch and the trees at the beach and the Gulf of Mexico gleaming in the sunlight.
Unable to exit through the back, she turned toward the front door. “The story I’m reading doesn’t say anything about why the beaches are closed. I’m going to walk down there. See if anyone has an explanation.”
Jenn slipped on her sandals. “I’m coming. And I’ll try calling Matti. The small-craft advisory is so fucking weird, but it worries me. How big was that sightseeing boat they were taking today?”
“No idea.”
They didn’t bother to lock the house as they went out and down the front steps. The moment Corinne reached the sandy driveway, she spotted the sheriff’s department vehicle parked at the house next door.
“What’s this, now?” Jenn asked.
Corinne didn’t reply. If Deputy Hayes was at the spring-breakers’ rental house, she would have the answers they sought. She picked up her pace, strode between houses and then up the steps next door. As she raised her hand to knock, she thought she heard sobbing inside but it didn’t stop her fist from falling.
“You hear that?” Jenn asked.
Corinne nodded. “I do.”
She knocked again, and a moment later Deputy Hayes opened the door. When they had met before the storm, the woman had seemed relaxed and confident, formidable, and put together. Now she had frayed somewhat. Dark circles underlined her eyes. She looked tired and pale and more than a little sad.
“The neighbors,” Deputy Hayes said. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re wondering…” Corinne began, but she let the words trail off as the sound of a woman crying reached them from the kitchen. They couldn’t see who might be there, but the noise could be mistaken for nothing else.
“The beaches are closed,” Jenn said, taking up for her. “We hoped you could tell us why.”
Deputy Hayes looked more tired than ever. The crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes crinkled as she glanced toward the kitchen, then nodded silently and began to step out to join them on the stoop.
“It’s all right,” a cracked, broken voice said from within. “Let them in.”
Corinne felt uneasy. Her skin prickled and something about the air did not feel right, like the sunshine and calm winds were a lie and there really was another storm on the way. Deputy Hayes swung the door inward, and they could see one of the spring-break girls stepping out from the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hands, warming them on the mug. She wore a neon-blue Captiva Island sweatshirt and bikini bottoms, as if she’d started to change her clothes from the beach and forgotten halfway through.
“There’s been a shark attack,” Deputy Hayes said. “Simone and her friend Nadia were on WaveRunners and encountered multiple sharks. Nadia did not make it back to shore.”
Corinne felt sick. Hollow inside.
“Oh my God,” Jenn said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Corinne asked. “Where are your friends?”
The girl, Simone, shrugged. She tried to speak, but emotion stole her words and she turned her back to them, sipping coffee with shaking hands.
“We’re trying to locate them now,” Deputy Hayes said quietly, using her body to try to diminish the sound. “But we’re shorthanded, as you can imag
ine.”
“They must be on the beach,” Corinne said, her thoughts shifting to her eldest daughter. Emma had been down on the beach alone. She’d wanted to wander and read, and Corinne had thought that would be fine because of course there would be other people there. Not many, but enough.
“WaveRunners,” Jenn said softly. “That’s the reason for the small craft advisory?”
Deputy Hayes glanced at the floor. “Not exactly.”
“So what is it, exactly? Because our husbands and two of our kids are out on a small sightseeing boat and it’d be nice to know if there’s something to be concerned about.”
The deputy steadied her gaze, looked back and forth between them, and seemed to make a decision. “If I were you, I’d contact them and tell them to get back here as soon as possible.”
“You want to explain that?” Corinne asked.
“I do want to, yes, but I’m afraid I can’t.”
Corinne looked at Simone, who stood over in the kitchen staring toward the Gulf, even though their sunroom had been ruined by a fallen tree. She ignored them, as if to her mind they had vanished entirely.
“You’ve got this, Jenn?” Corinne said, stepping back out the door. “I’ve got to find Emma.”
She did not wait for her friend to reply before rushing down the steps. If there was anything she knew she could rely on in the world, it was the determination and utter competence of Jennifer Claire Hautala. She was a woman who accomplished things, who took on a task and made it happen in ways that forced others to recognize just how woefully inadequate they were at getting shit done. Jenn would get in touch with the guys and make sure all was well.
But Emma was Corinne’s responsibility.
She walked between the two houses and hurried along the path that led to the beach, picking up speed with every stride. By the time she emerged from the palms and underbrush onto the open sand, she had nearly broken into a run, but now she skidded to a halt and glanced up and down the shore. There were people to the south, just a handful who dotted the beach, reading under umbrellas or drinking beers. A beer-bellied, bearded man in a sun hat stood in the rippling surf with a fishing rod, looking more content than she ever remembered being.
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