Erin Bowman - Stolen

“Do you think she’s really mad?”

“I think she’s hopeful. I think she’s not afraid to believe in things bigger than herself, in things we can’t find explanations for.” Bree looked directly at Ness. It could have been the lighting, or just exhaustion from the surgery, but Ness suddenly looked closer to sixteen, like Bree, than the eighteen years she was approaching. “I think it takes a lot of courage to be hopeful—to be blindly hopeful,” Bree added. “Maybe she’s mad. Maybe she’s brave. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

Ness shoved her hands into her pockets. “That day Heath fell on the spike . . . What I said wasn’t fair. I was angry, and scared. Scared for Heath, and for what would happen to Lock if he lost him.” A pause. “I just wanted to make sense of it all, and blaming you was all I had. It was the only thing that got me through the day.”

Bree half smiled, then nearly laughed at the fact that she had. Lock was dead and Heath was healing, and here she was having a conversation with a girl she’d never exchanged more than a handful of sentences with all her life. A sadness bloomed in her core, and she recognized the bittersweet sting of missed opportunity. Ness could be a friend. Ness could have been a friend years prior, even, had Bree only put down her shield as she had for Lock and Heath.

“Think he’ll make it?” Ness said, tilting her head toward the hut.

“I hope so.”

“‘Hope’ again. It’s like the whole damn world is fueled by it.” A smile. “Just out of curiosity, how long did it take you to learn to fish like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like it was nothing. Like the spear was an extension of your hand.”

Bree flushed. She’d seen Ness along the shore on occasion. Sometimes alone, other times with Maggie. Bree had thought her visits were to gape at Lock, but clearly Ness was observing many things. She’d never considered that Ness might long to do more than mend and sew.

“I could teach you,” Bree offered. “How to fish.” The thought of heading to the shore every morning alone, Lock no longer at her side, was paralyzing.

“Nah.” Ness wrinkled her nose. “There won’t be enough time.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think you’ll be around much longer.” Ness turned to look at Bree, her face conflicted. “Seems like it’s always the toughest girls who get Snatched.”

That evening, Bree made her way to the jetty. It was her harbor, a port for her thoughts, and she had a lot on her mind.

“I wouldn’t stay out long,” Mad Mia said, dropping one of her chants midsentence as Bree passed. “Rain’s coming.”

It did feel vaguely like rain. Bree could taste it on the air, and the afternoon had brought in thick clouds. Even now, forks of heat lightning licked the darkening horizon, but this had happened before. It was summer, after all. The whole purpose of the season was to constantly threaten storms.

“And you’ve delivered this rain, Mia?” Bree said. “It won’t just be a lucky coincidence?”

“Luck is a river. Sometimes it runs dry, but wait long enough and the springs are always restored.” Mia frowned at her. “These are the subtleties of life, the undercurrents of possibility and chance. When they all align with our wishes, it’s almost like magic. Magic Mia ,” she said, mostly to herself. “That would have been so much nicer. Yes, yes. Magic.” She pulled aside the vine curtain of her doorway and disappeared.

On the jetty, as Bree watched the distant heat lightning dance, her thoughts fell on Lock. It was his birthday today. He’d have been eighteen. She looked up at the sky, thick with storm clouds. Somewhere behind them, she knew the stars were winking by the company of the moon.

I’m sorry I yelled at you, she told Lock. I don’t hate you—I could never hate you—but I am angry. That you left, that you’re gone. Sometimes I feel like we might have had a chance, Lock. Somewhere else. In a different life. In a place without all this water. Wherever all those birds go.

It’s possible you were right. There might be nothing for those Snatched—it might be death and decay and the end of all possibilities. But I almost hope to find out. It’s crazy, but I’m ready for whatever you ran from. I hope it comes for me, and I hope it’s something worth seeing.

I’ll let you know.

If I live through it, I’ll let you know what you’re missing.

When Bree stood, she was tired and relieved and surprisingly lighter. She couldn’t remember why, exactly, she’d ever thought it a good idea to stop talking to the night sky. It was absurd, yes, a shout into an endless void. It was her words among a million stars. But to put her thoughts on such a large canvas was like emptying her hurt into the ocean. It could hold all her pain, worries, fears, if she was only willing to unload it.

A fat raindrop hit Bree’s forearm. Another, then another, smacking the rock jetty and stinging her bare skin. Thunder rumbled. The waves roared. And then the sky unloaded like a breached dam. Bree was drenched in a heartbeat.

She stood there on the jetty and stretched her arms to the clouds.

THE EARTH WAS SWOLLEN WITH rainwater the following morning, but Bree’s patchwork on the roof with Lock had held true. The reservoirs were up a few inches, along with the islanders’ spirits. Keeva even planted a kiss on Mad Mia’s leathery cheek.

Bree pulled in her share of fish and then slipped into the woods. Heath would need crutches, because he would get better—just as Lock had promised—and Bree wanted to provide them. She found a fitting piece of wood in time—still slightly green—but not before stumbling upon something that broke her heart: a heron nest, tucked into one of Crest’s lowest ledges alongside the freshwater lake. Inside the nest were the remains of two babies—shriveled by the sun, half eaten by maggots and flies. Bree looked away. She’d killed their mother, and for nothing. Nothing . The heron blood hadn’t helped Heath in the slightest. Or had it? Was it only because it had failed that Bree felt brave enough to take the boy’s leg? Would she have had the courage otherwise?

Bree didn’t bother to make sense of it. Heath was conscious when she returned home, and his bandages were clean. When Sparrow stopped by that evening, she confirmed there was no sign of infection.

As the days passed, the boy grew stronger. He napped less and smiled more. He sat up in bed to hold a conversation. His appetite returned.

Bree carved his crutches in the downtime between her obligations, perfecting their shape, smoothing and sanding. When she wasn’t working on the crutches or her other duties, she was teaching Ness to fish. The girl taught Bree to mend a wardrobe properly in return. Ness could make rips and tears vanish, their scars barely visible. If a spear was an extension of Bree’s arm, a needle was the same for Ness.

By the time Heath was ready for the crutches, summer had faded into fall. By the time he’d relearned how to walk with them, the first frost-tinged mornings of winter were upon Saltwater. With the arrival of December, Bree’s fishing lessons with Ness came to an abrupt halt. The water was frigid and the loons had fled. Bree missed them fiercely. The birds had seemed so sad on the night of Lock’s funeral, but now the days were short, and the nights had never seemed more empty. Even a bittersweet song would have been a comfort.

On the evening before what could potentially be her last, Kent found Bree on the jetty, watching the stars fight to reveal themselves amid the season’s first flurries.

“I never should have said that stuff about Lock,” he said. “That day on the beach.”