I’m one hundred percent sure this is a kidnapping, but I’m zero percent sure why. As I was abducted, Mom said “I love you” softly, reassuringly, the way she used to when carrying me to bed after I fell asleep in front of Doctor Who. Bubbling acid rises in my stomach with a panicked realization: Mom wanted this. Wanted me kidnapped. Wanted me handcuffed to a boat. The black van with its black windows—a PredatorMobile—lurked around my house all evening, so Mom must have arranged the abduction before dinner. Maybe even during her shift. Why? Because I needed toughening up? And what does any of this have to do with Ricky Hannigan? Mom and Ricky never met each other.
“You—you know R-R-Ricky Hannigan?” I ask, my jaw trembling from the cold.
“Who?” Molly asks, retaking her seat.
“Nothing.” I bite the inside of my cheek to stop the tears already pooling. Crying would be easy—so easy—but it won’t help me escape. It was a long shot hoping Molly knew anything about the dead man I delivered meals to, but there has to be a connection between her situation and mine. One of the last things Ricky ever did was scribble the word Nightlight in messy, urgent letters. The name on this boat.
Overhead, a corner of the canopy flaps open in the wind, sending in more aggressive weather. I fold my legs together on the bench as seawater floods over Molly’s feet. She whines—strained, like a dog left alone too long—and pulls against the handcuffs trapping her to the pipe. Except neither of us are going anywhere. Poor Molly—it’s as if we’re in one of those water rafting rides where there’s always that one person in the group who gets the most drenched.
“Of course there’s a storm,” Molly mutters, wiping rain from her mouth, her arm tremoring inside the tightened bracelet. Molly’s eyes are my eyes. We’re two trapped animals. Heavy footsteps scatter back and forth above us on the deck. The storm must be stressing out our kidnappers because they haven’t stopped scuttling around since we shoved off. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You tried to warn me. Why all of a sudden? What happened?”
I blow out sharp breaths—in through your nose, out through your mouth—and tell the story of my deliveries to Ricky Hannigan, his death, his Nightlight warning, and how after traveling to Costa Rica…here Nightlight is, printed on the side of our boat. “But I live in Tucson and don’t know any Ricky Hannigan,” Molly says, her eyes narrowing with calculation. My story—and all of its disquieting incompleteness—has plucked her nerves. “My dad’s the one who hired these people…” Her shoulders fall, defeated by her next thought: “Our families wanted us gone.”
A thick ache moans in my chest. Mom and I have been fighting so much since my junior year ended, but I never thought she could do something like this to me. The whole idea is unbelievable—poor white trash Marcia Major, working night shifts and paying for her son’s kidnapping with her overtime checks. “I dunno,” I say. “Wherever we’re going, it’s not a boot camp.”
“It might be a boot camp. Just a little extra boot—”
Rain floods our cabin as the canopy tears completely away from its hooks. A heaving splash ricochets off the floor, soaking my hoodie with tons of seawater. It was my turn to get drenched anyhow, but Molly didn’t escape clean either: her pink party dress clings to every corner of her scrawny frame. I can almost hear her thinking, Why did I turn down Briggs’s coat?
As the floodwaters settle above Molly’s ankles, footsteps grow louder at the top of the stairs. Where the canopy used to be, Briggs looms overhead, floodlights silhouetting his dripping, body-built shadow. His blue eyes still shimmer, but they’re darker—riskier—like ice over blacktop.
He descends the stairs shaking a key ring…
Once Briggs unshackles Molly and me, we’re brought above deck to join the other kidnappers: blurry, faceless men in the storm-darkened afternoon. They hustle past us, their strained breathing like a whisper in my ears: these men are freaking out about something. My flip-flops squish through inch-deep water along the upper deck, and I crane my neck to the sky as the downpour hits my dry lips like nectar. I open wide to hydrate my even drier gullet, and although it does nothing to clear my mental fog, the rain does absorb the frustration that has grown around it.
As wave after wave spills over onto the deck, kidnappers grab plastic buckets and chuck the sea back into itself a gallon at a time. “Do not lose us out here,” Briggs shouts at the captain—an older, stooping man gripping the boat’s helm. “This’ll only get worse as the night tears on!”
“I’ve done this before,” the captain replies. “I kept the bearing.”
Splashing thunderously, Briggs clomps across the deck, snatches a rounded handle at the base of the bow’s floodlight, and scans it over the rollicking sea. In Ambrose, we use floodlights on winter nights to avoid colliding with deer. What is Briggs afraid we could collide with out here? A whale? A shark? A reef?
“They don’t know where we are,” Molly whispers, her whole body shaking. I wrap my arm around her shoulder to warm her, but she smacks me away with a stinging jolt. I mumble an apology as she throws me a jittery glare. It’s not like I was trying to feel her up.
“Out there, do you see it?” Briggs hollers.
“I don’t see a thing but open water,” replies the captain.
Same, old man. There isn’t even a horizon line. Endless black sea merges with a thunderhead-choked sky; we’re in a rickety vessel flying through a void. I’m nowhere near home. Thousands of miles gone from my mom and Ario. He doesn’t even know what happened to me. Or that I’m gone at all.
I have to get away from these people.
Then a greenish glob—only a speck at first—pierces the obsidian sea. A chorus of other kidnappers begin to speak up about how they’ve spotted land, and Briggs cries into the rain: “Do you see what happens when you BELIEVE?!”
Molly and I find each other’s eyes at the same time. We don’t need to say our fears out loud because we seem to instantly think the same thing: that was quite a churchy outburst from the man abducting us.
As we approach our unknown destination, white flashes of lightning play peek-a-boo with the newly visible horizon. Flash! Peek-a-boo. The outline of an island. Then darkness. Lightning comes again. Flash! Peek-a-boo. Dense jungle and a high rock cliff.
No lights. No life.
My stomach lurches as our boat slows into the island’s mouth, a crescent-shaped bay eager to swallow us whole. “Look sharp, lads,” Briggs orders. “Coming ashore.” My soggy feet twitch on the edge of the dock as a shitty idea takes over me: we aren’t handcuffed anymore. I hook Molly’s spindly arm inside mine. There’s no time for her to jerk away or even ask “What are you doing?” before I fling both of us into the water.