Page 10 of Finding Elodie
“What?”
“The watertight doors. Are we sinking? Or was that the guys downstairs?” she asked.
“You aren’t sinking,” Scott told her.
Elodie let out a breath of relief. “Okay.”
“But things are gonna get dicey when they attempt to navigate that strait.”
“Are you still coming?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“Yes. But it’s too dangerous to do so in the daylight.”
“Shit!” Elodie said.
“You’re going to be all right,” Scott told her.
She appreciated him trying to comfort her, but she didn’t feel very reassured right about now. “The engineers cut off the lights too. So it’s really dark in here.”
“We’ll handle it.”
“Okay. Scott?”
“Yeah, Rachel?”
Damn. She’d forgotten again that everyone thought Rachel was her name. “If something happens to me…there’s no one to contact. Just give me a burial at sea and be done with it. Okay?” She wasn’t sure how well her fake identification would hold up…and she didn’t have a family to contact anyway.
“You’re going to be okay,” Scott told her firmly.
“But still—” she started.
“I need you to think positive. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is give up.”
“I’m not giving up,” she told him. “Right now, I’m mad. Pissed that Walter and the others were killed unnecessarily. Many of those guys had wives and kids. This sucks.”
“It does,” Scott agreed.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?” Scott asked.
Elodie knew she should get off the radio. She was risking her life by continuing to talk to him. Besides, he probably had other things he could be doing…like planning how he was going to get onto this ship and kill the bad guys. But she couldn’t bring herself to break the connection. Scott was literally a voice in the darkness, and he made her feel not quite so alone. “Have a wife and kids,” she said.
“No to either.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
“Yeah. Hang in there, Rachel. You’re doing a good job.”
“I hid the knives,” she blurted.
“What?”
“I thought about breaking a bunch of shit and creating obstacles here in the galley, but then I figured they’d know someone was here and would turn everything upside down looking for me. So I decided it was better to keep everything as it was the last time they were here. Maybe then they wouldn’t stay very long and wouldn’t try as hard to search for anyone. But I didn’t want them to get any more weapons, so I hid all the knives.”
“Smart.”
Elodie wasn’t sure about that. “I kept one though. It fits through the belt loop on my pants.”
