The Ark. Laura Nolen Liddell

transport. They’re gonna know you’re over forty.”

      “We’ll see about that,” he said, in a tone that implied that he usually got what he wanted. “Give it here. Your bags, too.” Up close, his hands were enormous. His fingers were thicker than the barrel of the gun. They stretched toward my face like wooden stumps.

      I drew a ragged breath and pretended to fumble for the pass. “Please don’t do this.” My breath came a little harder, and shorter.

      He was unmoved. “Now.”

      “Okay. Okay, I’m just—here.” I let my voice shake and held the pass toward him. His red-rimmed eyes were totally focused on that shiny blue card. When those wooden fingers were inches away, I dropped the pass and yanked them, using his weight to swing myself up to a standing position.

      He fell forward, and I shoved my body against the side of the boat. The gun went off, and my heart squeezed. Did the bullet hit the motor behind me?

      His right elbow slammed into my face with unexpected force, and my field of vision swung upward, toward the stars. It occurred to me, too late, that he’d probably had combat training for half the movies he’d starred in. I found myself leaning backward over the side of the boat, jerking my head away from the choppy surface of the water.

      I grabbed the back of his neck just as he cocked the gun a second time, a fact I barely registered before my mouth connected to his skin. I bit down, suppressing the urge to gag. He crumpled, but only for an instant.

      It was all I needed. I hit him in the side of the head as hard as I could, then reached for his pistol arm. Using every ounce of strength I possessed, I flung him into the side of the boat.

      He tottered for a sickening moment, and I ducked and reached for his ankles. Above me, the gun went off a second time. I pulled his legs up while simultaneously shoving my head into his sternum, and Trin Lector went over the side of the boat.

      With the boat key still in his pocket.

      I figured I had less than a minute before he got back on board, gun in hand. Although his boat was old school, the gun was a more recent design. It would fire despite being wet.

      Luckily for me, I didn’t need that much time. I yanked the cover off the keyswitch and grappled for the wires in the darkness. I threw the switch for the dash lights and studied the wad of wires in my hand. Then I reached for a razor blade.

      Blast.

      My razor blades. I’d left them in Meghan’s bathroom. Not good, Char. Not good.

      I forced myself to block out the sound of the splashing nearing the back of the boat and threw down the lid of the glove compartment, frantically tossing its contents onto the seat. Surely he kept a knife in here somewhere.

      A glint of red the size of my thumb caught my eye. A pocketknife. Brilliant.

      Within seconds I had stripped every wire I had uncovered. I had never hotwired a boat before, but the rules were always the same when there was no computer involved. Find the positive, connect it to the negative, and touch that to the starter wire. Problem was, before the government standardized this stuff, every manufacturer used different colors for the wires.

      My hands did not shake even as the boat pitched backward very slightly, signaling that Trin had reached the back of the boat and was hoisting himself up. I tried combo after combo, steady as a cat. It did not pay to have shaky hands when the game was playing out.

      “Hold it right there.”

      I’ll never know why he didn’t just shoot first. Maybe he had lost the key in the water, and didn’t know how to hotwire the boat without me. Or maybe there was some shred of him that couldn’t shoot another person in cold blood, even drunk. Even when the stakes were as high as they were that night.

      I tried not to wonder which it was.

      But he didn’t shoot. Instead, he said, “Hold it right there,” like we were in a movie, and that was all the time I needed. The motor growled to life, and I pressed the throttle into first position. An instant later, the engine compressed, and it was all over.

      I slammed the throttle fully open. The boat jerked forward, and the sound of his splash was drowned in the roar of the motor.

      I don’t know if he caught in the blades or hit the water clean. I did not look behind me.

       Eight

      I stopped only once, to retrieve the pass from the floor of the boat, and only after I was at least a mile away. As I slid it into my nylons, next to my thigh, I wondered what Meghan would have thought of my leaving Trin in the water and decided not to dwell on that. He’d planned to kill me, and I had done the only thing I could. Hopefully Meghan would have understood that.

      The night was beautiful, and despite its age, the Bandito had a strong light on its prow. I hugged the coast and kept a constant speed, so that I knew how far I had traveled. After sixty miles, I slowed at each cluster of lights along the shoreline, but I needn’t have worried. Saint John was unmistakable.

      The Coast Guard surrounded the harbor, holding the last fifty or so feet of water open. Each official-looking boat had a floodlight and a loudspeaker, and the same message played over and over. “Civilian watercraft must maintain a distance of one hundred miles. Only citizens in possession of OPT passes will be allowed in the harbor. For the safety of law-abiding citizens, those violating orders will be shot. Anyone attempting to board a military vessel will be shot.”