A shout rose from the boathouse as three men were carried out of the building, injured but alive. I ran over. Straddling the fallen beam, men were arguing over whether anyone was left inside. The floorboards had cracked to create a splintering hole in the floor beneath which soughed seawater. An arm appeared, tossing a saw and an axe up into the light. A head appeared, and Vai levered himself up to sit on the edge.
An older man shouted to someone still below. “Kofi-lad! Come up! The flood is coming.”
I pushed through men stowing their gear.
Vai looked up. “I should have known you’d walk straight into danger,” he shouted at me. Then he looked into the hole. “Kofi! You’re the last one. Come up!”
In a wreckage of shattered boards and boats below, Kofi slipped and cursed. “I’s coming. ’Tis just that he is like my uncle.”
“Is someone missing?” I yelled.
Vai said, “The owner is missing. We only found his nephews and the hired boatman.”
Before anyone could stop me, I swung my legs over and dropped. Vai swore, and I had no sooner gotten my balance atop a sliding mass of planks than he hit beside me, the heap shifting. I slid. He caught himself on a hand. A bulb of cold fire cast a glow across the carnage. A wave bubbled up from beneath broken boards. Kofi turned.
“Get out of here, gal!” His contemptuous grimace brought me up short. “Yee’s not impressing any man except Vai.”
With the water coming up, I had no time. “Quiet!”
I balanced across the back of a smashed boat and in a crouch crept up into the nether shadows where the back part of the boathouse had collapsed. I set my hands against one of the ground stilts and leaned there as another wave hissed in, swirling my pagne up to my knees. As the wave subsided, I drew the threads that bind the world into my heart and my ears. And I listened. Nails creaked and groaned as the wind slowly pried at them. Soon the whole edifice would tear loose. Waves slurped beneath the debris. Kofi muttered a complaint, but Vai shushed him.
Human breathing had a distinctive flavor that might flow fast or slowly but that could not be mistaken for a cat’s prim proud air or a dog’s slovenly panting. Another body dwelled here. Blood tainted the air like a sliver of salt. A heart’s erratic pulse cast a fragile line into my hands.
“He is here. Still alive.”
I crawled over the wreckage until I found the spot. I began to pull out boards. The bauble of cold fire drifted down to light my way, for Vai had taken no effort to make it appear like a lamp. Kofi and Vai appeared with an axe and a pry bar. We cleared boards to find another overturned boat beneath, with which we grappled until it became clear it was stuck.
“His head is up under the bow,” I said.
With four powerful swings, Kofi smashed a hole in the half-buried stern, then used the pry bar to clear out the splintered boards. Vai clambered back over the debris to shout up at the remaining men, asking for rope and a net.
“I’ll go,” I said to Kofi. “You’re too big.”
After a hesitation, Kofi stepped back. I squeezed through and crawled up into the marrow of the boat, up beneath the ribs to where a man lay unconscious. I felt along a skinny body to a sunken chest which barely rose and fell. A sticky mat of blood covered his hair, but his skull seemed intact. The ribs of the boat shuddered as Kofi axed a bigger hole in the stern.
“Cat!” he shouted. “Water is rising! Can yee hear me?”
“I’ve got him!” I tugged him through a slime of mud down to the opening. They got hold of his feet, so I shimmied back to cradle his head as they started to pull him out.
A wave poured in, dragging at Kofi and Vai as they braced to hold on to the old man. I lost hold as water surged into the cavity and slammed me into the ribs of the boat.
Then it sucked out. My foot caught and twisted on the rower’s bench above, trapping me under the boat. Spewing and choking, I freed my foot and pushed up to hands and knees. A skin of grime coated my lips. When I breathed in through my nose, a spike of salty water lanced up behind my eyes in a hot knife of pain.
“Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”
I heaved, lungs spasming.
Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.
The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”