Csongor was lying on the deck, twisted around in an awkward position. Yuxia was sitting in one corner, holding one hand over a bloody laceration on the side of her head and weeping. Mohammed was lying on the deck surrounded by a lot of blood, still gripping a radio microphone. Its cable, now stretched nearly straight, ran almost vertically up from the microphone to a small box mounted to the top of the ship’s control panel. The box had been perforated by a bullet, and the window above it sported two more bullet holes and a fan of cracks.
The mike slipped out of Mohammed’s relaxing hand and jumped up and bobbed on the end of its cord like a yo-yo.
Csongor did something with the pistol to make it safe, then drew himself back toward a crude bench at the back of the bridge. Something was amiss with his ankles. Stepping over to get a better look, Marlon saw that both had been lashed to the bench’s supporting angle irons by several turns of electrical wire. A reel and a pair of wire cutters rested on the deck nearby.
Marlon fetched the wire cutters and tossed them to Csongor, who went to work snipping himself loose. “I went to sleep,” Csongor said. “He wanted to use the radio—to call his friends, I suppose. But he must have been afraid that I would wake up from the sound of his voice. He couldn’t attack me because he didn’t have any weapons. So he did this. He knew that he would have time to send out a distress call before I could get loose and come stop him. But Yuxia showed up.”
“Did she show up in time?” Marlon asked.
“I don’t know,” Csongor said, “but I think she did.”
Marlon, stepping over a broad ribbon of blood that had found a path across the deck, went to Yuxia. A flashlight was rolling around on the floor with blood on it. Controlling a strong feeling of disgust, Marlon picked this up and turned it on. Yuxia was fully conscious but very upset. “Let me see it,” Marlon said. “Let me see it.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Let me have a look.”
“It’s fine.”
“I want to see.”
He finally understood that she did not care about the wound on her head and just wanted some comfort. He did not feel it was appropriate, just yet, to put his arms around her, or anything like that, and so he reached down with his free hand and rested it on top of her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll get some ice from Batu,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said in a tiny voice, like a child. Not like her.
Marlon got up and passed out through the hatch to the gangway just in time to hear a loud scraping and bumping noise from above. Batu was not down in the galley, where Marlon had left him; he was up on the roof of the bridge. Thumping footsteps suggested he had now gone into rapid motion.
A large white fiberglass capsule rolled and banged down from above, nearly catching Marlon in the head. It splashed down into the sea alongside the ship.
Batu was above him, perched like a cat on the railing. A faded orange life preserver was slung over one shoulder. “There’s more water down in the hold,” he said, “in plastic drums. Use it sparingly. You don’t know how long you’ll be drifting.” And then he sprang from the railing and plummeted about five meters into the water.
The white capsule was bobbing in the ship’s wake now. It had fallen open, and something big and orange was blooming on the water: the life raft, inflating automatically. Batu, belly down on his life preserver, was dog-paddling toward it.
Marlon went back into the bridge and stepped gingerly across a remarkably wide pool of blood to the control panel, where he pulled back on the lever that controlled engine speed. Then he swung the wheel around so that the vessel was pointed due east, toward Taiwan.
“Why did you slow us down?” Yuxia asked.
“To conserve fuel,” Marlon said.
“You think we’re going to run out?” Csongor asked.
“Batu does.”
FINE, SEE YOU AT ELEVEN.
This was the text message that Olivia found on the phone when she turned it on while peeing in a thicket at 6:49 the next morning. It was a response to last night’s HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER.
Actually the whole island was a thicket; she had found an especially dense part of it for this purpose and checked for snakes and bugs before dropping into a squat.
