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She really should’ve known better than to get her hopes up.
There’s a moment—more than one, really—across their reluctant journey across the ocean, trapped side-by-side on a tiny ship nowhere near big enough to hold them all, where she thinks maybe this could work. Where the group becomes more than just criminals-for-hire tied together out of sheer necessity; where she notices that Ava likes to linger under the sun rather than the shade, where she watches Walker scrounge up a meal out of their limited stores from the island for all of them, where she remembers that Antonia’s just trying to find somewhere steady to land. Where they’re all simply trying to get back to whatever’s waiting for each of them on solid ground, or, likewise, move on before the past manages to catch up to all of them.
It starts with Bob, of course it does. Not because he’s different from the rest of them, like some unlucky landlubber who seems to have never even stepped foot off shore before, but because that quiet he keeps wrapped around him tends to soften people’s egos. Although maybe that only applies to her—as far as Yelena can tell, Walker’s still a little prickly at the edges.
Whatever it is, she sticks close to the person who’d stumbled out into the middle of an imminent gunfight with his hands in the air—at least, she tells herself, until he learns how to walk from bow to stern without tipping over at the first splash of seaspray. It takes him almost a day, but then he sticks close to her anyway, and suddenly she’s found a new shadow she can’t quite seem to mind, even as the sun slips below the waves.
It’s easiest then, to talk—or whatever substitute they’ve forged that works instead. She doesn’t know anything about him, not really, not even like she understands the others; there’s no ledger he’s trying to wipe clean, no trail of bodies left to count in his wake. And yet there’s something haunted in his eyes anyway, drawing her close and closer, if only to see it clearer under the starlight.
She doesn’t pull away, either.
They stay there through the night, tucked away in the crow’s nest, his long limbs spanning the length of the tiny platform, curving in towards her like the trigger of her pistol. Sometimes they don’t speak at all, a single spyglass shared back and forth between them, the wooden scope still warm from his grip. And sometimes they do—or Yelena does, words pouring out like gasoline before letting go of the match, their proximity enough to ward off the chill as the hour gets late. Ava materializes on the deck by sunrise, waving them off as she takes over the watch like clockwork. And still they stay there a little longer.
The first time she’d woken up to find his head resting on her shoulder, she couldn’t quite bring herself to move away. This morning, she let her own head fall until she was leaning back into him, drifting back off into some hazy dream before the sun made it high enough to force them down to the main deck.
That’s when she’d noticed the first seagull, high above them, circling through the clouds—and she’d fallen for it like she was still a child, leaping endlessly at the fireflies as dusk became evening and then even darker. She should’ve known. She does know.
Every time she’d opened her little fists, there’d been nothing left in her palm.
“This is going to be a problem,” she decides, lowering the lens from her eye. The smudge of black creeping along the horizon doesn’t change, stretching in front of the port they should’ve reached days ago. Bob watches her closely from the side, elbows propped across the railing, and she turns to meet his gaze. She shakes her head once, slightly, and he presses his lips into a thin line.
“I don’t get it,” Walker says again, “Why are they just sitting there?”
“They don’t know that it’s us. Not yet, at least.”
“That’s why they made a barricade, obviously,” Ava points out, and he scowls. “Even though we’re just in a beat-up version of their own ships.”
“So, then, maybe they think we’re friendly, and they’ll let us through. We just have to make it back to shore, then we can get away in those woods over there until the next town. Boom.” He spreads his hands. “Problem solved.”
“Val sent us out into the field to kill each other,” Yelena cuts back in, words clipped short before they can linger, “Do you think our new friends have different orders, Walker? They’re not going to invite you on board for lunch if they see you—and they will see you.”
“Well, I’m not hearing any other plans! We can’t sail past them without talking, but we’re in no shape for a fight—plus they’d blow us out of the water the second we tried anything. They’re positioned at the exact place to catch us when the current brings us in, see?” He stabs a finger towards the spot where the waves shift, impatient.
“The rowboat could get us around that,” Antonia calls out suddenly, stuck behind them at the helm. “We should be able to avoid getting pulled in, and we’re close enough to land to make it back that way.”
Ava shakes her head. “Maybe, but it’s too slow. They could catch up as soon as they saw us.”
“We’d need a distraction,” Yelena realizes.
Bob glances over at her again, the beginning of a furrow in his brow. She holds out her spyglass wordlessly and he takes it, brushing a deliberate thumb along the underside of the scope before extending it to the full length. He doesn’t hold it up for longer than a second before he recoils, tensing. The streak of black is getting bigger, solidifying into real ships, full of real enemies, with some very likely real commands to kill them upon identification.
“Time’s up,” Walker grumbles, “We need to make a decision.”
Yelena tilts her head back instead, a few strands of pale hair waving at the edges of her vision. It’s not a bad breeze, soothing in its relief, the assurance of keeping cool.
She has to believe it’ll be enough.
Bob’s hands pull her back before she can get ahead of herself, one wrapping gently around the crook of her elbow as he raises the other into the air, hooking a finger with his question.
“We’re going to let the current pull us in. The wind’ll help,” she explains, “And we can hit them, hard as we can, from the side. I don’t think they can face us in time. Boom,” she adds dryly, sparing a glance over at their navigator, who nods in agreement, scarred hands clasped over the rungs of the wheel. “Distraction. We get the rowboat in the water when the ship gets pulled, and the momentum pushes us ahead. We’re better than them. Once we have some resources, they’ll never find us.”
Walker tips his head to the side, considering it before he nods. Ava’s eyes slide away from him, landing back on her. “You think it’ll work.”
It’s not a question.
“It will,” she says anyway, and she knows she’s not wrong. She also knows somebody will need to steer the ship very carefully to get it right.
Bob turns back to her, and it takes her a moment to understand what’s happening when he reaches for her arm. Her fist unfurls instinctively as it comes up to meet him, and he deposits the telescope solemnly back in her possession, calluses scraping across her skin as he closes her fingers around it. She whips her head up to stare at him, alarm punching open a hole in her stomach as he steps back.
“Bob, no,” she tells him, immediate and horrified, and he gives her a smile—that crooked, warm grin she’s only seen in the secret of night. It’s even brighter in the day, blinding her as he gestures around him, a silent rebuttal of who else could stay behind. Like there’s even a question; as if they haven’t been working better together than anybody’s willing to admit, filling in the cracks for each other until it stopped being an active decision.
“Oh,” Ava says quietly, and Yelena whirls around to face them.
“Go raise a white flag,” she orders, and Walker’s eyebrows nearly fly off his face—though he’s learned to keep his mouth shut by now, spinning to head towards the main mast. She nods over at Ava. “Prep the rowboat.”
She hurries off without complaint, and that’s when she begins to feel like she’s tearing at the seams. Yelena turns back to Bob, tongue heavy behind her teeth, but he nods again, hand rising to her shoulder, a thumb pressing delicately to the joint. She knows this one—remembered the contact from the moment she found him, and memorized its meaning again when she woke up choking from her last nightmare to find his arms around her. It’s okay.
“No, it’s not,” she shoots back, “Nothing about this is okay, Bob. You can’t.”
That makes him narrow his eyes, briefly, playfully, more than clear enough. Can’t I?
“Just because you survived one shipwreck doesn’t mean you can do it again. You don’t even know what happened last time,” she says, steadying her voice—because it’s a good point, and it’s valid, and she can already tell that it doesn’t matter. Bob brings an index finger to his temple, and she shakes her head, harshly. “I haven’t taught you everything you need to know yet. It’s not safe. It’s not even close to safe. These guys, they don’t care. We’re not supposed to care. And—to them, you’re nobody. I’ll have a better chance.”
It’s his turn to shake his head. When he looks up, his expression is already settled, determination bracing the line of his brow with steel, his mouth still quirked in something so familiar it makes a lump form in her throat.
“It’s not fair,” she croaks. “We were supposed to stick together.”
He tilts his head, smile widening faintly. His thumb taps again at her shoulder.
She looks at him, the salt curling in his hair, the sun in his eyes. She can hear the shuffle of the others springing into action behind them, and her heart pounds in her ears. “Bob,” she repeats, softer now.
He nods in reply, in acknowledgement, and she wants to scream at this, the impossibility of their situation and the ticking clock, at how he doesn’t deserve to die, this random stranger she’s been trying so inexplicably hard to save—but no, not random, not anymore. He’s more than someone she’d found alone on a deserted island, broken and weary in a way she could recognize, strewn with the remnants of a shipwreck across the sand. He’s important, he’s her friend, he’s something else entirely. Yelena takes in a breath and holds it, like she can preserve this exact moment if she tries, and keep him with her wherever she goes. Like she can imagine his hand in hers, instead of his ghost.
Then Bob leans in, and the air catches in her lungs as he touches his forehead to hers. He does it the way she’d wanted to, underneath the moon, wooden slats digging into her back as they’d lain side-by-side, when he’d traced the scars lacing deep into her palm and the initials etched by knife right beneath the peephole of Natasha’s old spyglass with the same painstaking precision, as if they deserved the exact same care.
And he pulls away.
It feels, for a second, like she can’t breathe. “You did everything right yesterday, on your own. Remember what we talked about—and take down the sails, okay, it’ll help with steering, but it’s really all about the timing,” she says, desperately. “You know what to do, we got out in the same way. Just like how I showed you.”
He thumps a fist to his chest emphatically, making sure to maintain eye contact—I’m here, and it’s me—before his knuckles skate across the arc of her collarbones, fingers rounding over the curve of her biceps as he places his hands on her shoulders. Stay, he means, eyes flicking purposefully to the others by the rowboat. Bob pushes her there, away—so very gently, and even plainer of a message. It’s a new one, for them. It isn’t difficult to interpret.
Go.
Antonia appears behind her while she’s still struggling to find her response. “I’ve got us bearing in the right direction,” she instructs, chin dipping as she locks eyes with him. “You’ll notice the change right away when we get to shallower waters. That’s when it’s time. Just turn north, and you’ll be on them before they react.”
He exhales through his nose, giving her a nod back. She claps a hand to his shoulder, maybe the first time she’s touched any of them outside of the whole necessity thing. “Thank you.”
“Jump,” Yelena says, surging forward as she catches his hand, voice cracking on the plea. “Before the collision, while you can still see us. We’ll see you too. We’ll wait.”
His eyes flit across her face, wide and blue and a little less sure than before. Bob squeezes her hand, and he lets go.
It’s as Antonia said. There’s a weird, distinct feeling of weightlessness as they pitch hull first into the rougher current, the ship jerking underneath them—though Yelena doubts it’s the reason for the nerves swirling in her gut. Walker’s knife slices through the last rope holding them above the water, and the rowboat hits the ocean with a splash, already gliding away from its bearer, pointed as it is towards safety. She watches him speed ahead, already opening the main sail. He doesn’t look back.
In the not-so-far distance, a black flag goes up in warning. Their own ship only flies faster, easily gathering all the attention as Bob stays the course, barreling on through sloshing whitecaps. By the time he’s close enough for them to see the little rowboat paddling away behind him, the first cannonball is already flying through the air.
Their ship was designed to fight—that much had been clear when they found it. It hadn’t been made to withstand a barrage, and more than just one strike lands its mark, taking out a chunk of the boat with each hit. Their home for such a short amount of time lights up with a blaze, the fire creeping gradually towards where Yelena knows the helm sits. She hears alarm bells ring distantly across the fleet, but it’s too late; the hull crashes into the side of the first ship, splintering, bursting, caving in on itself.
She thinks she sees a shadow dart through the flames, leaping from the upper deck. She doesn’t know if she’s right. All that’s left is fire.
The world fractures as something explodes, not from their crumbling ship, but the one Bob had hit—no longer a ship at all. Whether he’d been guided by luck or instinct or something else, he’d landed right within the enemy’s store of dynamite. Light erupts all around the whole fleet. Then the sound comes too, second, an aftershock broadcast even at their range.
“Boom,” Antonia whispers.
Yelena blinks the spots out of her eyes. Debris bobs above the dragging tide.
Nothing else resurfaces.
“Let’s go,” Ava says, and her tone isn’t unkind, “That’s why he did it.”
Their lifeboat lurches back into movement as Walker and Antonia begin to row in earnest tandem. Yelena leans forward as much as she can, conscious of the weight they’re carrying, anxious to prove herself wrong. She strains to peer through the cloud of smoke hanging heavy over the water—and when the wind shifts or the clouds part or some kind of divine intervention strikes again, she rears back so quickly she almost topples out of her seat.
“Hey!” Walker barks, “Careful.”
Yelena ignores him, fingers clenching around the side of the boat. It’s Ava who gasps. “Is that—”
She can’t say it. Can't believe it.
The smoke scatters enough to reveal a scene out of the stories her sister used to tell her, the remaining ships left seaworthy gliding around after them. A dripping-dark head of hair, streaked with sunlight, stands in between—and she swears she can hear him, low and haunting and beautiful. She can’t make sense of it, the reverberation of a song sinking deep into her bones, rooting her very body into place. The splashing of their oars stops. Everything stops, grinding to an inconceivable halt.
Yelena can’t even breathe.
There, in the wreckage of yet another ship tossed among the waves, he stands unmoving, anchored, irreversible. One arm stretches out, steady, his palm pressed against the front of the ship leading the charge, now stuck in place—red flags flutter uselessly at the top of the mast, figures dressed in dark and leather gathered frozen across the deck. Something flashes through the gulf that the smoke had vacated, the water gone still enough to spot it when it breaks through the surface; fins and shimmering scales, navy-dark and bright, pure gold, the sun and the sea rewritten into reality.
The prow cracks under Bob’s hands.
And when a shot rings out, the silver muzzle of a gun glinting through a porthole, it shatters right through his song. He tumbles back without a single sound, movement stirring through the crowd above like they were waking slowly from a dream. Somebody on board strides up to the railing, head bent to search the spot where he fell. Yelena shoots to her feet too, blocking out the exclamations as the boat rocks beneath the motion, the world spinning out from under her boots as that same figure climbs onto the banister and leaps into the ocean.
Another person takes its place, then another, and another, all vaulting overboard with a second thought. Yelena frees her pistol.
“Hang on,” Walker begins sharply, and she watches uncomprehending as wave after wave of highly trained soldiers aboard three separate ships jump to their potential deaths. “Do you have any idea what just happened?”
“No.” She’s already shrugging off her coat, her boots, her socks. Even her batons come off, given their intended buoyancy, and Walker sputters as she tosses them over to his lap.
“Belova—”
The rest of her guns clatter to the bottom of the boat. “I have to try.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Then get to shore!” she snaps back, shoving her widow bites into Antonia’s hands. She knows what to do with them. “You don’t need me, you know where to go. We can meet you there. Just—give us three more days, if it’s safe. Or leave a note.”
“Yelena,” someone says behind her, and it’s her tone that makes her glance over her shoulder. Ava purses her lips, eyes piercing her through—she doesn't know what face she’s making, but the one she sees reflected back at her feels like a reminder of how they’d ended up trading shifts in the first place. “Here,” she says, holding out her oxygen mask. Yelena exhales, slowly, and she takes it with a nod.
It seals against her skin with a gasping breath, followed by the soft hiss of compression. She dives.
She’s a good swimmer. She had to be, despite her landlocked youth—there were days that they’d be tossed overboard just before sunrise, and only those that managed to survive until the end of the day were allowed back onto the Red Room. She lets the current guide her right into the heart of the storm, shadows deepening in spite of the afternoon sun. It pulls her in easier than it should, and she pauses to wonder for a split second who she is, and what she’s trying to do. Something drops into the water beside her and Yelena startles—she can just barely make out the unmistakable shape, not wooden barrels or canvas sails, but a body, sinking. Bubbles stream up above to the surface as the soldier plummets down to the ocean floor without any semblance of a fight.
It’s not a song she hears this time, but the absence of one, hollow and ringing. She doesn’t think she can hear anything at all.
More bodies plunge into the twilight depths around her and she spins, breath quickening, fighting to pry through the gloom. It’s so cold her fingertips begin to tingle—so dark she can’t even remember what she was trying to see, let alone imagine the possibility of light. Somebody else hurtles down, clove-brown hair wisping into both a halo and a shroud, and Anya flashes behind her eyes. Then Oksana. Ingrid. Natasha. The girls she couldn’t save and the others that she killed and everyone else dying from her blade, her poison, her bullet, her plan. Bodies, more bodies, always bodies as they kicked and flailed, drowning, gasping, dragging her down—not soldiers anymore, just targets, victims, numbers on a chalkboard like it’s a competition. Yelena shudders as she takes in a breath and tastes salt on her lips. She closes her eyes.
She goes deeper.
Even in the silence and the shadows, the visions don’t stop. She can’t stop them. How could she? She’s nothing against this, she’s nobody now that she’s gone, and once the others get to safety they won’t even remember the person who gave her life up for nothing at all. It’s better that way, isn’t it? No one who cared about her was allowed to live.
Only that isn’t entirely true. Maybe the crew would live—because that’s what they’d been, loath as any of them were to admit it—as long as she stayed away, but she could stay here instead. She’d thought she could stay with—
“Bob,” she calls, eyes snapping open, forcing out the name from where it sticks under her tongue. She scans her new surroundings, upright at the bottom of the ocean. Logic tells her it’s not possible to have made it this far, but she knows, somehow, that she swam her way to the end. The bodies have stopped. Something tells her she won’t see them again. “Bob, I just want to talk.”
THERE IS NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT.
Movement. There’s no more gold down here, no navy blue or ocean, just the endless expanse of nothingness, and the thing that hides within it, stirring at her voice. It’s as pretty as an anglerfish, pinprick pupils emerging from the darkness, alluring as long as its teeth are hidden. Shadows pooling and coalesce around its form, more liquid than the water that presses down on them—now, at last, she can see where Bob used to be, an outline filled in with black instead of the person she knew, a tail marked only by the faint shift between the dark and the void.
THERE IS NOTHING LEFT.
A greeting. A goodbye, too.
“That’s not true.” Yelena straightens, throwing back her shoulders. It’d been wrong to leave him behind. She won’t make that mistake again. “I’m here.”
YES. It brushes past her like a whisper, a secret, a promise. The darkness draws closer, spinning to the side at the last second as it circles her like a shark. YOU ARE. BUT HE’S GONE.
“Then give him back,” she dares to say. A laugh twists around her, carried by cold, genuine amusement, and she whirls toward it only to find more of the emptiness. She turns back to find it right in front of her, leaning in close enough to see the features that she thought had been eclipsed—the slope of a nose, the indent of a brow. She wonders whether she’d find a furrow if she pressed her thumb to it.
HE DOESN’T WANT TO COME BACK, LITTLE HERO. Its face splits into a knife-blade grin, familiar in how it’s not the same, bright like silver through the silt. HE IS WEAK, AND HUMAN. NOT BUILT TO SURVIVE. NOT LIKE US.
“You’re wrong.”
HE GAVE UP, he croons. THAT’S WHY I’M HERE TOO.
“That’s not true,” she presses back, “You didn’t do anything wrong, Bob. We’re alive because of you. They’re getting to shore, right now, because of you.”
NOT JUST HIM.
“We’re all survivors, okay? I might not know what this is, but I promise you, it’s going to be okay. We just have to find our way together, and I know how to do that part. I know you, Bob, it’s okay. You can trust me.”
I DO TRUST YOU. I SAVED YOU, it observes, holding out a hand. AND YOU CAME.
She stops. “What?”
It tilts its head as she floats in place, and that, too, is familiar, tugging at her heartstrings. IT’S WHAT YOU SAID. WE’RE ALL ALONE, ALL OF US.
“Well, I was wrong. You showed me that.” She inhales, kicking herself forward towards the outstretched hand, reaching for a pair of shoulders she’d leaned against just this morning. He’s solid as ever, stable underneath the shadows and the mask. He’s still Bob, slight frame and firm muscle, too tall for his own good, tail flicking as she touches him. “You didn’t have to save us, Bob, but you did. And before that, you saved me.”
AND SO YOU CAME TO SAVE HIM. His sigh is soft, even underwater. BUT I AM ALL THAT’S LEFT, SWEETLING. I AM ALL THERE EVER IS. ALL THINGS RETURN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, EVENTUALLY.
“That’s not what you said before,” she points out, and his expression goes even blanker than before. “You’re not nothing if you chose to save me too. Some part of me understands you. That’s what you’re looking for.”
AND YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A GHOST.
“I don’t believe that. He’s still there—Bob, please. I’m right here. I won’t leave without you.”
WOULD YOU STAY HERE, WAITING FOR SOMETHING THAT WILL NOT RETURN? His tail winds around her legs, another question to the first. YOU COULD STAY ANYWAY. YOU MUST BE TIRED, AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE SEEN. BRAVE THING, WEARY SOUL. WHY DON’T YOU LAY IT TO REST?
“And do what?” she asks, “Drag more sailors to their deaths? I’ve had more than enough of that.”
IT’S EASIER THAN GOING UP THERE AND FACING THE LIGHT. At last, a truth. The words hit closer to home than she’d like to admit—it’s one of the few things she couldn’t bring herself to talk about on a ship that no longer existed, with a boy who was right in front of her and also not. IT’S SO BRIGHT UP THERE. IT HURTS.
“It does,” she admits, quietly, and he raises a hand, fingers sweeping gently through the ends of her hair as they float, suspended in the shadows.
STAY HERE WITH ME, he tells her. WE CAN BE ALONE TOGETHER.
Yelena shakes her head. “I’m not here to die,” she says, and for once, she believes it. Her voice doesn’t change, unwavering, clear through the mask that’d been given to her. Because now she’d found people who cared whether or not she made it back to them. “I’m here because he deserves to live, just like the rest of us—they’re waiting for him too. It’s time to let him go.”
The gleam in his eyes—the only light left in this space—narrows at that, shrinking and expanding like ink smearing through paint. THAT IS NOT FOR US TO DECIDE.
Another truth. She swallows, her own decision already made, and brings a fist up to her chest, nails digging into her palm. “Fine.”
ARE YOU STAYING? He looks back at her, deeper. Something unsteady ripples across the darkness, a confusion that she wouldn’t expect from a creature beyond death. Or a longing, maybe, from something that just learned to want. LET ME SEE YOU.
His fingers hook around the edge of Ava’s mask where it fights to cling onto her jaw. She takes in her last breath, and her fingers slip unseeing across the arch of his clavicle, marking out wiry bones and the way they unfurl beneath her touch like wings. Heat blossoms beneath her nails from the contact.
STAY.
He smiles when she meets his gaze—not the wild thing from before, but the one she recognizes, curving askew across his lips. She doesn't know if it’s from hope or victory, but Yelena pulls him close anyway, until her forehead thuds against his. He doesn’t object.
She’d just wanted to see him again, she thinks, the air fleeing from her lungs. She wanted him to know he wasn't alone. Her momentary grace dissipates by the second, a gift, granted, already gone, oxygen soaring up to the surface like they could guide her to where she needed to go. Air. Everything needed air to live. They did, too. She leans forward a little more, hands still bent around Bob’s face. She presses her mouth to his.
Before the world goes dark, she sees light.
Breathe. In. Out.
“Please, Yelena. Stay with me, come on, you’re not done. Breathe.”
She fights her way back into being awake, heaving, choking, half-alive. Water laps at her ribs on both sides of her skin, and her diaphragm spasms again as she coughs, helpless. She spits out the salt in her mouth and tries to refocus her gaze.
Bob’s face looms over hers, eyes wide. “Yelena?”
Her next inhale hitches in her throat, and she reaches out to trace her name on his lips. They quirk up under her touch, slightly.
“Hi,” he says.
She tries to answer him and wheezes instead, the inside of her esophagus scraped raw. He pulls her in tighter, one broad palm smoothing over her back, slow and steady.
“It’s okay,” he repeats, over and over again. And, “I’m here. You’re okay.”
Yelena draws back, just a little, enough to lift her own hand to cup the side of his face. “Hi,” she rasps, and he lets out a breathless kind of laugh, arms tightening around her. That’s when she realizes how quickly they’re moving, carving through the ocean like a knife to silk, the tide itself ripped open to let them pass. And yet she wouldn’t believe it if she wasn’t staring down the approaching shoreline, the glide smoother than even her mother’s engineered ship on a perfect course in easy weather, held safely in Bob’s arms as he swims.
She turns back to look at him—at all of him, broad chest and bared throat and the beads of water still slipping from his hair. Before she can help herself, she strokes her other hand along it all, his arm, his ribs, the tapered line of his waist as it gives way to scales, glimmering underwater like gold flashing in a pan.
“Bob,” she manages to say, fingers hesitating over his tail as she raises her gaze back to his. She sees gold there, too. He flinches and looks away.
“Yeah, so.” Bob swallows. “There’s some stuff we should talk about.”
Because he could talk. Now, they could talk.
“You saved my life,” she says, tilting his face towards hers.
His eyes flutter shut. “Um, kind of? I don’t know how it works, I just—I made a deal. With Valentina, just like the rest of you. I had nothing left, and she knew that, but she—she didn’t hire me for work like you guys. I signed because she said it would make me better. I thought it didn’t work, at first,” he adds, a rueful twist to his mouth. “Then I thought I was dying, and after, I woke up on the island. I figured that was it, and she had no use for me. Then you were there, and I knew it didn’t matter anymore.”
She remembers the look on Valentina’s face before she’d gone out on this quest, dark with thinly veiled frustration. I need that weapon, she’d said. It’s powerful.
I want it back, she knows, now, is what she’d meant.
“I didn’t remember whatever happened in between, but—I don’t know. The shipwreck. I had a feeling, at least.” He exhales, cracking one eye open. “I wanted to ignore it, but I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t speak to any of you to even try and test it out, but I guess now we know.”
“You sing,” she says. “And you’re… you swim?”
He laughs, eyes crinkling with the sound now that he no longer has to hold it in, and she realizes she’s smiling too. She doesn’t know when it started. “Something like that.”
“There’s more, isn’t there,” she asks, but he doesn’t need to nod before she knows the answer.
“I can’t control it. I don’t know how it works or what it does, just that—it’s there, if I try to get to it. And if I open one door, then all the others open up too.” He shrugs, helpless. “I didn’t know what would happen when I let it out. That’s why it had to be me—you were supposed to be safe, Yelena. I promised myself that much.”
“You sounded beautiful,” she says absently, still dazed by each syllable of her name as it tumbles from his tongue, resonant and deep with the slightest bit of a rasp, so wonderfully, honestly human. Whatever she might’ve imagined, it pales utterly in comparison to this—the reality, the truth. “You still do.”
“I’m not using it. I wouldn’t,” he stammers, “Not on you, Yelena, I—”
“I know.” She tries to shrug, the best she can. “That’s how I know I mean it. You’re beautiful, Bob.”
He looks away again, and she follows it this time, finding the shore within reach. She’s almost reluctant to let him go, treading slowly through the low tide until her feet touch solid ground, sand sliding between her toes. She closes her eyes and exhales, the way she always does when she gets back to land.
She’ll be home, soon.
Yelena hauls herself out of the surf one sandy step at a time, nearly crawling by the time she’s gotten far enough to spin around and flop back into the earth’s embrace. The tide sweeps up to her knees, and she glances over at Bob, perched gingerly beside her. There’s too much space to get from him to her.
“I’m sorry,” he says. She frowns.
“For what?”
“For not telling you,” he replies, like it’s obvious. “I wanted to. I didn’t know how to do it, or why, but I wanted to. You told me so much, and I didn’t say a thing.”
She sits up, shaking her head. “You did,” she says, closing the distance between them as she covers his hand with hers. Yelena smiles, and so does he. “You did, Bob. But you can make it up to me, if you like.”
“What do you want to know?” he says.
“Everything.” She says it like it’s obvious too.
Slowly, like he’s unsure of her reaction, he turns his hand over to meet hers, palm to palm, fingers lacing together. As if there was any other choice. “I don’t remember too much. Things get—blurry, sometimes.”
“That’s okay. You can tell me what you know,” she says, “And maybe it’ll come back.”
The corner of his mouth tugs up, wistfully. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll make something new together. We can do that anyway.”
Bob opens his mouth, then closes it. “You still want me to come with you?”
“Yes, Bob. Of course,” she emphasizes, and she squeezes his hand gently. “I thought that was always the plan.”
“And the fish thing?”
She laughs. “We’ll figure that out, too. Just stick with me—that’s what you said, isn’t it? Don’t go somewhere I can’t follow.”
He blinks, once, twice. “Okay,” he says, after a moment. “I won’t. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Okay then,” she echoes, and he squeezes her hand too.
They walk up the shore together.