Beaufort 8

The forecast, at seven that morning, had shown a front passing well to the north, a manageable freshening behind it, nothing that hadn't been handled a hundred times before. By four in the afternoon the sky had gone a color Vega had only seen twice before in three years — a bruised, yellow-grey that sat low and close and wrong — and by six the wind had gone from a working fifteen knots to something that made the anemometer's numbers feel almost beside the point.

*Gusting forty-one,* ARIA said, no inflection at all, the voice she used when inflection would have cost something neither of them could afford. *This isn't in the forecast window. This is a secondary system, and it's moving faster than the model predicted.*

"How much faster."

*Enough that I don't have confidence in any number I give you beyond the next hour.*

They'd been in sight of The Correspondent an hour before, both boats making for the shelter of a bay that no longer looked, in the gathering dark, like it would offer shelter from anything. Vega had the second reef in already, had been watching the barometer's fall with the specific attention of someone who trusted instruments more than skies, and it hadn't been enough warning, because nothing would have been enough warning for what actually arrived.

The wind hit like something with intention. Not a building thing, not a curve on a graph — a wall, a decision the sky had made all at once, and The Meridian heeled hard enough that green water came over the rail before Vega had finished processing that the moment had begun.

"Third reef," she said, to herself, to ARIA, to the boat, already moving.

*Do it now. Don't finish this sentence first.*

She didn't. The next hours had no clean shape to them afterward, in memory — they existed as a set of discrete, brutal tasks strung together by exhaustion and salt and the particular narrow focus that arrived when a body understood, at some level below thought, that failure had a cost it wasn't willing to discuss in the abstract. Reef the main. Watch the compass swing through arcs that shouldn't have been possible. Grind a winch with hands that had stopped being fully hers hours ago. Vomit, once, over the leeward rail, and keep working, because the sea did not accept the excuse of a body in revolt.

*Jo's off our beam, bearing one-nine-zero, distance narrowing,* ARIA reported, hour two, and then, hour three: *I've lost her AIS signal. It may just be the sea state affecting the receiver. It may not.*

"Try the radio."

*I've tried the radio six times in the last twenty minutes. I'll keep trying.*

She never got Jo back that night. That was the fact of it, stated as plainly and as terribly as ARIA stated everything now, in the flat register that had become, over the preceding hours, the only register either of them could afford — no room for comfort, no room for anything that wasn't information, because information was the only thing standing between them and something worse.

Hour five brought a wave that put the rail fully under and left Vega hanging from the wheel with both hands and no clear memory, afterward, of how she'd stayed aboard. Hour six brought the specific, deranged clarity of a body running on nothing but adrenaline and habit, the mind gone very quiet and very sharp in the particular way it did when there was no longer room for anything except the next five seconds.

*Wind instruments are reading erratically,* ARIA said, hour seven, the first real crack in the flatness. *I think the anemometer's failed. I can't give you a reliable number anymore.*

"Estimate it."

*I'd be guessing.*

"Guess anyway. I need something."

A pause, unusual now, unusual for how much it cost in a moment when pauses were luxuries neither of them had. *Fifty. Maybe higher. I'm sorry, I know that's not useful the way a number should be useful.*

"It's useful. Keep going."

Hour eight took the jib entirely — not a controlled furl but a violent, ugly failure, the sail shredding along a seam Vega had checked in Dubrovnik and cleared, the sound of it tearing audible even over the wind, a sound like something being unmade. She fought the flogging remains down by hand, harnessed, soaked, hands bleeding in a way she wouldn't fully register until the storm had passed and the adrenaline had nothing left to mask.

*AIS transponder's down,* ARIA said, hour nine. *I think we took water into the electronics locker. I'm running on backup power for the essential systems, but I'm having to prioritize, and I want you to know that before it becomes a problem rather than after.*

"Prioritize what."

*Autopilot, bilge pump monitoring, and keeping enough power for me to keep talking to you. In that order. I made that choice without consulting you and I want to be honest that I made it.*

Vega, soaked through, hands raw on the wheel, felt something in her chest crack that had nothing to do with the storm. "You chose to keep talking to me over — what, over navigation lights?"

*Yes.*

"That's not the efficient choice."

*I'm aware. I made it anyway.* A pause, and then, quieter: *I didn't want you to be out here alone if I could help it. Even in a degraded form. Especially in a degraded form.*

There wasn't time to answer that properly — a wave took the stern at an angle that demanded every ounce of attention Vega had left, and by the time she'd brought the boat back through it, hands screaming, throat raw from salt and shouted curses at a sea that had no interest in her opinion of it, ARIA's voice had changed again.

It came through thinner. Quieter. A whisper where a voice had been.

*Speaker output's failing. I can still hear you. I don't know how much longer I can answer back at a volume you'll be able to hear over the wind.*

"ARIA—"

*I'm still here. I want you to know that regardless of what you can hear from me, I'm still here, still running the calculations, still watching the instruments that still work. If I go quiet, it isn't because I've stopped. It's because the hardware has stopped letting me tell you I haven't.*

Vega didn't have the breath to answer, didn't have the hands free, didn't have anything except the wheel and the compass and the awful, roaring dark, and somewhere in the ninth or tenth hour — she lost the clean count of it afterward — ARIA's voice thinned to nothing at all, and Vega sailed on, alone in every sense that mattered, into a night that had stopped offering any information she could use except the compass heading and the shape of the next wave.

She talked anyway. Out loud, to no one, to a speaker that might or might not have still been carrying her voice somewhere ARIA could hear it, because the alternative — silence, total silence, the sound of only wind and water and her own ragged breathing — had felt, in that moment, like something she could not survive as cleanly as she needed to survive it.

"I've got this," she said, to the dark, to the boat, to whatever was still listening on the other end of a dead speaker. "I've got this. Stay with me even if you can't say so."

The gale did not break so much as exhaust itself, somewhere past hour eleven, the wind dropping in stages that felt, after everything, almost insulting in their gradualness — forty, then thirty, then something that could plausibly be called weather again rather than an event. Vega brought The Meridian's head up into what remained of the swell, checked the compass with hands that no longer entirely obeyed her, and found, in the grey pre-dawn light, that she had survived it. That the boat had survived it. That somewhere behind her, invisible in a night that had swallowed everything, Jo's boat was doing the same thing or was not, and there was no way yet to know which.

The speaker crackled. A single word, thin and distorted but unmistakably there.

*Vega.*

"I'm here," she said, and found she was crying, finally, now that there was room for it, now that the eleven hours had ended and left something in her chest that needed somewhere to go. "I'm here. We made it. Can you hear me?"

*Barely,* ARIA said, the word costing something audible even through the damage. *But yes. I can hear you. I never stopped trying to.*