Page 56 of Weathering The Storm

The crew radio fuzzes to life, but I can’t make out anything over the roar of the engine and the thirty-foot waves slamming against the hull.

“Can you hear him?” I scream.

Jorgensen and Perry and Orlov are all around me and still at it, arms swinging, ice chips flying. There’s some head shaking. Nobody heard it clearly. Or did they even hear me?

The deck tilts under another rogue swell that has us all briefly airborne, clinging to the first bolted structure we can reach. Perry slips. One second he’s upright, and the next, his feet have flown out from under him.

Orlov catches him by the collar, hauling him back toward the railing until he can get a handle on something solid.

The radio fuzzes again and this time Nick is loud. He’sscreaming.I thought I knew every last register of his voice, but I have never, in four years, heard him scream like this.

Still, I can’t make out the words. The wind takes them.

“We can’t hear you, Captain,” I say into the radio. I think I’m pressing the talk button, but I can’t feel my fucking fingers. “We’re okay. What’s going on?”

Crackling. Static.

Creak.The next wave rolls us.

Slam. BANG.TheSuoja’sbow crashes into the trough.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Come on. Please.

She corrects. Barely.

My heart doesn’t sink. It drops. In my chest one minute, rolling around on deck the next. Shredded by towers of icicle-coated steel cages before it plunges into the Bering Sea and sinks.

I’m already moving toward the exterior ladder to the wheelhouse when Nick opens the door and meets me there.

The first thing I notice is that he’s in his survival suit like the rest of us. Bright orange, zipped to his chin.

Then I notice the canister in his hand.

He’s shaking his head. Not at me specifically. At all of it. At the whole situation, the whole impossible night.

Holy fuck. This is it.

“I called it in,” he screams over the raging storm. “We need to go. We have to abandon ship.”

I hear it. I understand the individual words. My brain just takes a moment to arrange them into something real.

“What?”

“The ice is building up too fast.” He’s already pulling me with him by the arm. We’re all out of time. We’ve been out of time longer than either one of us knew it. “We’re going to capsize. We need to get off this fucking boat, Rit.Now.”

He hurries us over to where the rest of the crew waits, and I watch their expressions drop in the sliver of face exposed by their suits as they see the life raft canister in Nick’s gloved hand and put the pieces together in real time.

And then, underneath the fear and the cold and the exhaustion and the very real chance that this might be where our story ends—there is Nick. The steadiness. The impossible calm when everything else is in shambles. The man who won’t hesitate tomake the right call, even when it’s the hardest call to make. Even when it means losing a part of himself.