Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
When we return for the next load, I catch sight of Orly talking to himself. He is standing oddly in a corner, and his hands are moving as though he’s explaining something, and then I hear the lifted note of his voice, a kind of plea.
It frightens me.
He sees me and his hands drop.
“Who were you talking to?” I ask him.
“No one.” He walks past me, getting back to work.
Later I catch a snippet of a whispered conversation between father and daughter.
“… it’s a violation. And we are all going down for it.”
“Don’t you worry about that. It’s for me to reckon with.” And then Dom adds, more forcefully, “This is not on you, darlin’.”
Later still I see Fen resting her forehead against a wall. I cross to her, worried.
“Are you okay?”
My voice startles her and she whirls as though caught in the act of something. “I’m fine.” She hurries back to her task, not looking at me.
Outside, I catch Dom’s arm as he is about to climb into the Frog.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“Is something going on?”
“With what?”
“I don’t know.”
He searches my face. I don’t know how to explain the unease or
what to ask him. All I know is that it’s starting to feel distinctly like they are keeping something from me again.
I wake in the night with words playing over in my head and a racing heart. Dom is wrapped around me, his mouth pressed to the line of my collarbone, my hand in his hair, his words in my ear.
We tried. We gathered around, I promise we did. But there was no way to call for help and we were in over our heads and he didn’t want our help.
I stare at the ceiling.
There was no way to call for help.
I sit up.
“You okay,” he mumbles.
“Toilet,” I say, and stumble for the door.
My feet are very cold on the stone steps as I move down to the bathroom and lock the door behind me. Why didn’t I get socks. I sit on the closed lid of the toilet. I don’t look in the mirror. I close my eyes and I will my slow dumb fucking mind to do some proper work.
Dominic told me when I first got here that the communications had all been sabotaged by someone right before leaving with the other researchers on the ship.
He told me Hank left on this boat. Distressed enough to forget his passport. Okay.
He then told me a story about three scientists who did not in fact leave on that boat, but stayed behind to help sort seeds, and who then all died. Because there was no way to contact the mainland, all three have been buried on the island.
Firstly. Why would Hank not have stayed on as part of this exercise? To finish his own work?
Maybe because he was unwell. That stands to reason.
But then.
Dominic said
there was no way to call for help. Which means that when Hank was here, losing his mind, the comms had already been sabotaged.
Which means, if I have this timeline smoothed out correctly in my head, Hank couldn’t have left on the ship with the majority of the researchers. It means he did stay on, with Naija, Tom, and Alex. Somebody broke the radios and then several people died, and Dom is lying to me about it.
I climb the stairs to the boys’ room and creep in quietly. I sit on the side of Raff’s bed and gently touch his shoulder. His eyes open and he looks at me, without any other movement.
“How did Alex die?” I ask him.
Disbelief clouds his face. “What?”
“I’m sorry, kid. But how did he die?”
“Have you lost it, Row?”
“Raff.”
“He hanged himself, alright? What-“
I reach forward and hold him tightly, and he hugs me back, but I am thinking about how that blood in the cabin didn’t belong to Alex after all, it belonged to someone else.
I keep my eyes glued to them. They’re acting sketchy, something has them spooked. Orly keeps going to stand in that same corner. Fen is anxious. She argues with her dad, and they’re being careful not to let me overhear.
I notice what I should have seen weeks ago. That often, when we have carried our last containers out through the tunnel and are loading them onto the boats, Dominic goes back to do a last check of the temperature. I’ve never once questioned it, but today I think it is weird. Why not just check it all before we leave?