A long, long moment of hiss.
"Pilot, Line Four." Alcide was breathing hard. "Forward breast line parted. Number two. It came back across the wharf and took out the light pole by the bollard and wrapped around it, tore it half off the base. Right where we were standing. Right where we were all standing, two minutes ago." A pause. "We're all here. Everybody's back of the shed. I got all seven. I'm looking at them. Tommy's here, Dusty's here, Beau's here, everybody. Nobody's hurt."
Wade sat down on the floor of the guard shack.
He did not decide to do it. His knees, both of the bad ones, simply stopped holding him up, and he slid down the wall under the window with the rain blowing in over his head and the radio in his lap, and he sat there on the wet linoleum with his back against the wall, and he put his free hand over his eyes.
Right where we were all standing. Two minutes ago.
Two minutes ago was when she had told them to move. She had told them from her car. She had told them on a radio that he had handed her, through a window, after he'd held her at his gate for ten minutes and called her a joke.
If he had held her for twelve.
He did not finish the thought. He could not. It sat there in his chest like a swallowed stone.
On the bridge of the Corvina Star, eleven decks above the wharf, the world was a dark glass box full of glowing screens and roaring water.
Rania came through the door from the stairwell and the noise hit her first, the rain hammering on the bridge windows so hard it sounded like gravel being poured from a truck, and the wind howling in the rigging of the radar mast overhead with a sound like a jet engine. Through the windows she could see almost nothing, just rain, white and horizontal in the glare of the deck lights, and below it, very dimly, the lit edge of the wharf, which was in the wrong place. It was too far away, and at an angle. The bow had swung off.