The Ark. Laura Nolen Liddell

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СКАЧАТЬ nearing the back of the boat and threw down the lid of the glove compartment, frantically tossing its contents onto the seat. Surely he kept a knife in here somewhere.

      A glint of red the size of my thumb caught my eye. A pocketknife. Brilliant.

      Within seconds I had stripped every wire I had uncovered. I had never hotwired a boat before, but the rules were always the same when there was no computer involved. Find the positive, connect it to the negative, and touch that to the starter wire. Problem was, before the government standardized this stuff, every manufacturer used different colors for the wires.

      My hands did not shake even as the boat pitched backward very slightly, signaling that Trin had reached the back of the boat and was hoisting himself up. I tried combo after combo, steady as a cat. It did not pay to have shaky hands when the game was playing out.

      “Hold it right there.”

      I’ll never know why he didn’t just shoot first. Maybe he had lost the key in the water, and didn’t know how to hotwire the boat without me. Or maybe there was some shred of him that couldn’t shoot another person in cold blood, even drunk. Even when the stakes were as high as they were that night.

      I tried not to wonder which it was.

      But he didn’t shoot. Instead, he said, “Hold it right there,” like we were in a movie, and that was all the time I needed. The motor growled to life, and I pressed the throttle into first position. An instant later, the engine compressed, and it was all over.

      I slammed the throttle fully open. The boat jerked forward, and the sound of his splash was drowned in the roar of the motor.

      I don’t know if he caught in the blades or hit the water clean. I did not look behind me.

       Eight

      I stopped only once, to retrieve the pass from the floor of the boat, and only after I was at least a mile away. As I slid it into my nylons, next to my thigh, I wondered what Meghan would have thought of my leaving Trin in the water and decided not to dwell on that. He’d planned to kill me, and I had done the only thing I could. Hopefully Meghan would have understood that.

      The night was beautiful, and despite its age, the Bandito had a strong light on its prow. I hugged the coast and kept a constant speed, so that I knew how far I had traveled. After sixty miles, I slowed at each cluster of lights along the shoreline, but I needn’t have worried. Saint John was unmistakable.

      The Coast Guard surrounded the harbor, holding the last fifty or so feet of water open. Each official-looking boat had a floodlight and a loudspeaker, and the same message played over and over. “Civilian watercraft must maintain a distance of one hundred miles. Only citizens in possession of OPT passes will be allowed in the harbor. For the safety of law-abiding citizens, those violating orders will be shot. Anyone attempting to board a military vessel will be shot.”

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