Page 33 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

Her voice. Cadenced. Lecturing.

I can’t make out the words, but I don’t need to; I’ve had the best seat for that show all summer. Somewhere on that dark boat, armed men are learning about staghorn recruitment against their will, and the relief that goes through me is so total, so physical, that I have to grip the console until it passes. Alive. Talking. Running the meeting.

Then the relief racks itself away, and what’s left is the work, and the work is very, very simple.

I kill my engine and let the black water carry me down on her, silent, patient, every light in me at intervals.

Whoever’s aboard that boat is between me and the loudest, brightest thing in my life.

They’d have better odds with the storm.

Chapter 13

Abby

For the record, I did not go quietly. I went loudly. There’s a difference, and it was strategic, and also I had no other options in inventory.

When the two men came through my kitchen door—fast, gloved, one with a neck tattoo of an anchor, which, theirony—I did three things in the four seconds available. I screamed loud enough to curdle tea. I threw the mug, which connected, which I regret nothing about. And I grabbed my field bag off the chair, because my field bag is where my beacon lives, disguised inside a datalogger housing, exactly the way a paranoid wall of a man designed it his first week while I teased him about it the entire time.

If I’d known, when they zip-tied my wrists and walked me down my own beach path to a waiting inflatable, that the teasing was going to be the thing I owed him my life for, I’d have—no, I’d have teased him anyway. He’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t.

The inflatable ride is the worst part, and I want that documented, because everyone assumes it’ll be the boat full of criminals, and no. It’s the eleven minutes of gray rubber slamming through the chop in the dark, spray in my face, wrists sizzling, some stranger’s knee in my back, watching the lights ofmy town get smaller. Watching the specific porch light—reddish, dim, mine, ours—drop below the swell line and not come back up.

That’s when the fear got fully aboard. Somewhere in those eleven minutes I stopped being indignant in the main and started being scared with indignant trim, and I made myself do the thing Noah does, because it was the only equipment I had: inventory. Two men in the boat. Anchor Tattoo driving, badly, quartering the waves like a man who learned boats from a cousin. The other one holding my field bag on his lap like a purse, having already pawed through it once and dismissed everything in it as science junk.

Including the datalogger that isn’t a datalogger. He’d held it. Turned it over. Put it back.

I spent the rest of the ride not looking at the bag the way you’d not look at a winning lottery ticket, and building, methodically, the persona that was going to keep me alive: the world’s most exhausting witness.

So now I’m in the salon of a fishing charter called theMariposa—I clocked the name coming aboard, plus the registration, plus the fact that somebody’s peeled the hull number decals half off, amateurs—sitting on a bench seat with my hands tied in front of me, cataloging, because it’s that or the fear, and the fear is enormous. It’s sitting in my chest like a wet anchor. I just refuse to let it run the meeting.

There are four of them. Anchor Tattoo, glowering, holding a bag of frozen peas to his mug-related injury. A wiry older one they call Sid, who smells like cigarettes and bilgewater and is clearly in charge of exactly nothing. A big silent one at the helm. And the young one—twenty-two, maybe, dressed like he learnedhenchmanfrom a streaming series, who keeps not looking at me, which I’m choosing to read as a conscience in its larval stage.

And a phone on the table, on speaker, with a voice on it. Calm, no accent I can place, the only person in this operation using complete sentences. The voice is the actual problem. Everything else on this boat is just weather.

My field bag sits by the helm, tossed there like luggage. Inside it, disguised as a datalogger, a little green light is doing the most important blinking of my life. I make a point of never looking at it, which requires the same muscles as not looking at your own reflection over someone’s shoulder, and I put those muscles to work and turn back to the phone.

“Dr. Marlowe.” Patient. Horribly polite. “This can be brief. The footage you provided the Coast Guard—was that the entirety of what you filmed? And what, precisely, have their investigators asked you since?”

Here’s the thing about being kidnapped by people who need information: they’ve handed you the one thing hostages never get, which is leverage in the shape of time. Every minute I’m answering is a minute I’m valuable. So I do what I was put on this earth to do.

I talk. God help them, I talk like the fate of the reef depends on it, because mine does.

“Great questions, both, and I want to give you a complete answer, so let’s establish the methodology,” I say. “My dive protocol runs forty-plus minutes per site. What you saw is a curated clip—curated for theblog, which has different pacing needs than raw data, obviously—so to answer ’the entirety,’ we’d need to define whether we’re talking published footage, archived footage, or cloud-synced footage, which are three different populations?—”

“Which cloud service?” says the voice, too smooth.

“—and honestly the bigger issue for you gentlemen is where you dumped it, because that reef shelf is a protected recovery site, and I don’t think you understand what you’ve actuallydone. Three years of staghorn regrowth. Do you know what the survival rate on transplanted staghorn fragments even is? Because I do, to the decimal, and when the sediment from your little cargo locker smothers?—”

“Ma’am,” Sid says, pained, in the voice of a man who has heard about consequences before, at length, from a judge.

“—an entire recruitment class of juvenile corals, that’s not a fine, that’sfederal, that’s NOAA, and NOAA does not fatigue, gentlemen, NOAA iseternal?—”

“Ma’am.”

“—so really the question isn’t what I told the Coast Guard, it’s what your exit strategy is from being the four guys holding the bag for whoever that is on the phone, who you’ll notice is not on this boat?—”

The phone goes quiet in a new way. Anchor Tattoo stops adjusting his peas. The kid looks at me for the first time, quick, sideways, like a man checking an exit sign, and I file it, the way a large careful man taught me all summer without either of us calling it training.Read the room. Know your exits. The scared one is the dangerous one, but he’s also the persuadable one.