Then Let Go

Chapter 02 - The Water

The impact took the breath out of her before the cold did, which surprised her, in the strange, sideways way small surprises persist even during catastrophe.

Charlotte had grown up around water. She'd learned to sail before she'd learned to read a full sentence, had spent childhood summers diving from the Meridian's lower platforms into water so warm it barely registered as an element separate from the air. She had never once, in thirty-two years of loving the ocean, imagined it as something that might close over her son's head and simply keep him.

She kicked upward, Henry's small body a dead weight of pure terror against her, both of them tangled in green silk and pale linen, the ocean's cold pressing in from every direction at once like a hand deciding whether to hold or release.

They broke the surface together, Henry gasping, coughing, alive, and Charlotte spent whatever strength she had left simply keeping both their faces above the swell, treading water in a gown never designed for anything but standing still and being admired.

Above them, the Meridian's hull rose into the dark like a cliff face made of light, seven stories of illuminated windows receding upward toward a railing she could no longer see clearly, could no longer be certain held anyone at all.

She heard shouting. She heard, distantly, an alarm she didn't recognize, some automated system built for exactly this failure and rarely, in the ship's twelve years of service, ever actually needed.

A spotlight found them before she'd fully processed that a spotlight was searching.

"Hold on!" The voice belonged to a young man leaning so far over the lower platform's railing that his own safety line had gone taut behind him. Miguel Torres, third officer, twenty-six years old, four months into a maritime career he'd chosen specifically because he liked the idea of a job where the water was the only thing you had to respect. "I've got you! Hold on to him, I'm coming down!"

Charlotte would not remember the details of the next four minutes clearly. She would remember Henry's fingers locked into the fabric at her collarbone hard enough to leave marks. She would remember the specific, bottomless relief of a life ring striking the water beside her, orange and absurd and exactly what she needed.

She would remember, most of all, looking up one final time before the crew hauled them both from the water, and seeing, twenty-six meters above her, a tiny silver-haired figure still standing at the railing, unmoving, watching.