Chapter 63: Shoreline Warmth

Rayén

I didn't take his hand.

I looked at Osvaldo's thick, tired fingers, the same fingers that had once tied my shoes when I was four, and I felt Lautaro's weight dragging at my arms, his blood warm against my wrist in the cold. Then I did the only thing I could think of. I let go of the crossbeam.

The tide took us. It was going out, slow and black, and it slid us along the pilings and out under the far edge of the pier, into the fog.

"Niña!" Osvaldo's voice cracked across the water. "Rayén!"

The first shot came a heartbeat later. It splashed wide and left. The second was wider. I kicked with everything I had, one arm hooked under Lautaro's chin to keep his face up, and the dock lamp swung toward us, and I waited for the bullet that would finish it.

It never came.

The lantern went out. I heard a rifle butt hit wood, and Osvaldo's voice roared over the harbor, hoarse and furious.

"Gone! The sea took them! Hold your fire, you fools, you can't hit a ghost!"

I didn't understand. I still don't, entirely. I only knew that a man who had carried me on his shoulders had lied to my mother for me, and that I would never get to thank him.

I don't remember the swim.

I remember cold so deep it stopped being cold and became a kind of noise. I remember counting strokes, a hundred, another hundred, and losing the number. I remember Lautaro's head lolling against my shoulder, his breath rasping, and talking to him the whole way, stupid things. The name of my first horse. The color of my mother's kitchen. The song Conco used to sing off-key.

At some point the water became shallow, and my knees hit sand.

It was a small crescent of beach under a cliff, black rock on both sides and a sliver of gray sky above it. No lights. No road. Only the surf hissing and the smell of kelp. I dragged Lautaro up the slope on my hands and knees, a foot at a time, and when I got him clear of the waterline I collapsed beside him and couldn't make my fingers uncurl.

"Lautaro." My voice was a croak. "Lautaro, wake up."

Nothing.

I got a palm on his chest. It rose. A hair, and then again. Alive.

I don't know how long I lay there before the shaking began. It started in my jaw and spread through every muscle until my whole body convulsed on the stones. My lips had stopped feeling like my own. I knew what it meant. Mamá had taught me that, too, on a hiking trip when I was ten: when you stop shivering, you're in trouble. When you start shaking this hard, you have to get warm now.

"Okay," I told myself. "Okay. Okay."

I stripped off his soaked jacket first, then my own, working numb fingers over buttons that wouldn't give. The ledger was still against my ribs, a swollen brick of wet leather. I laid it on a rock. Then I tore the hem off my sweater with my teeth and pressed it against the wound in his shoulder, hard, with both hands, until he groaned.

"There you are," I whispered. "Stay with me, you stubborn man."

His eyes cracked open. They were glassy and far off. "...Rayén?"

"Don't talk."

"You're alive." A slow smile spread across his face, helpless and sweet. "I thought... I'd lost you in the water."

"You didn't."

"Good." His eyelids drooped. "That was the... only thing I was afraid of."

My throat did something terrible. I pushed it down.

"We have to get warm," I said. "There's no fire. There's no blanket. So you're going to hold me, and I'm going to hold you, and you're going to stop arguing."

"I haven't argued."

"You were about to."

He laughed, and it turned into a cough, and I helped him roll onto his good side. I curled up against the length of him with my back to his chest. His arm came around me, heavy and slow, and drew me in until there was no space left.

Heat. That was the first thing. Not much, just a thin stubborn thread of it coming off his skin, through our wet clothes, into the hollow between my shoulder blades. I pressed back into it like a dying plant toward the sun.

"Better?" he murmured against my hair.

"A little."

"Your teeth are chattering."

"I know."

"I can hear them." His arm tightened. "Come here. Closer."

"There isn't any closer."

"There's always closer."

I should have laughed. I didn't. I lay there in the dark and felt his breath stir the wet strands at my temple, and his heart knocking steadily against my spine, and somewhere under the exhaustion I felt the first slow crack open in something I'd held shut for months. A different kind of shaking began. It wasn't the cold.

"You signed it," I said quietly, to the sea. "That paper."

His whole body went stiff against mine.

"I've been trying not to ask," I said. "I've been trying to wait until we're safe. But I'm tired of being brave, Lautaro. I'm tired of picking which truth to survive on."

For a long time he didn't speak. The waves came in. The waves went out.

"I'll tell you," he said at last, rough. "All of it. But not like this. Not while I'm bleeding and you're half-frozen and neither of us can leave the room if it goes badly." His forehead came down against the nape of my neck. "I want you able to walk away from me, Rayén. I want you to be warm and fed and sure of your own legs. And then I want you to choose."

"Choose what?"

"Whether you still want to stay."

Something stung behind my eyes. "That's not fair."

"No." His voice cracked. "It isn't."

I turned in his arms. It took effort. I ended up facing him, our noses an inch apart, his hand spread on my back, and I could see every shadow on his face. He looked younger. He looked like the boy my mother had fed bread and butter in a kitchen, and I wanted to hit him, and I wanted to be sorry.

"If I leave," I whispered, "it won't be because of a piece of paper."

His breath caught.

"Then what?"

"I don't know yet." I touched the corner of his mouth with two shaking fingers, the lightest brush. "Ask me when it's morning."

He closed his eyes, and I watched him swallow.

I must have slept. When I woke, the sky had gone the color of dishwater, and the cold had eased into an ache. Lautaro was breathing steadily beside me, still holding on.

I slid one hand into my pocket, and my fingers closed on wet paper.

Maitén's note. I drew it out slowly. The ink had bled into a blue smear, every word dissolved. I almost laughed. Almost cried. The sea had done something I hadn't had the courage to do for myself.

Then a stone clattered on the cliff path above us.

I froze. A second stone followed it, and the soft crunch of a boot in gravel. Someone was coming down, carefully, one step at a time, and trying not to be heard.

I eased my hand toward the knife strapped at my calf. Lautaro stirred. "Rayén?"

"Shh."

A figure came out of the mist at the foot of the path. Tall, broad-shouldered, hands held out from his sides. His hair was matted with salt, and a line of dried blood ran down one cheek. In his right hand he carried a set of car keys. In his left, a pistol, held by the barrel.

Carlos.

"I won't ask you to trust me," he said hoarsely. "Beltrán's men are two minutes behind me, and I have a car at the top of the road. One of you gets the keys. One of you gets the gun." He took a long, shaking breath. "Choose, señora. I'm out of time to deserve either."