Page 129 of Almost Midnight

Nick swallowed.

Part of him wanted to press the point, to get Malek to look harder. Another part wasn’t sure why he had any right to know that, when Wynter herself might not want to know.

He squeezed her tighter against him. He felt a faint grief, even a flicker of shame that he hadn’t been there for her, whatever it had been. He hadn’t been able to save Jem, either. In the end, he’d not been there when it mattered for either of them.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Malek said, his voice a touch reproachful. “I don’t think Ms. James would agree with that at all, Nick.”

Nick grunted a humorless laugh.

He suspected Malek was right, but that didn’t make it untrue.

“It doesn’t make it true, either,” the seer pointed out.

“Right,” Nick said, smiling.

His eyes returned to the port hole.

For a few minutes, he didn’t say anything.

He lost himself in the dense weight of the ocean waves, feeling like the view through that window matched something in him, somehow. The feeling of time passing, of change, of mystery and beauty and the hugeness of everything, and how living inside all of it made him feel incredibly small yet somehow significant anyway.

“It feels true to me,” he admitted. “Everything you said.”

He wiped his eyes, and he and Malek sat in silence for a while, watching the ocean.

It felt good.

Inexplicably, like the ocean itself, it felt right.

CHAPTER29

BAD NEWS

Nick sat across from Tai,who was crashed out on Malek’s lap.

Malek, who also looked dead asleep, lolled back on the recliner opposite Wynter.

Wynter, on the other hand, was awake now, and listening to music. Nick glanced over periodically and watched her sketch images on one of Kit’s tablets.

That’s how the four of them were arranged when Walker approached their facing seats.

“We’ll be near the shores of England soon,” he told Nick.

Forrest glanced at Wynter. He looked away when she didn’t glance up from where she concentrated on her drawing.

“Three hours, they tell me,” he said, again addressing Nick. “We’ll be visible to their perimeter security then, and within range of their defense systems. We’ll start slowing down over the next hour, so I wanted to give you a head’s up. They obviously won’t be shooting at us, not unless things are much worse on land than I was led to believe.”

He said it like he meant it to be a joke, but the comment fell flat.

Nick was still stuck on the reality of them crossing the Atlantic Ocean without taking a rocket plane, or at least one of the underwater tunnels that sent trains barreling from one end of the ocean to the other. He was a little shocked they’d nearly reached their destination.

Forrest just stood there, like he expected Nick to have questions.

“How long have we been out here?” Nick asked finally.

He knew it had been at least a few days. Three? Four?

That was still eerily fast to cross the entire Atlantic in a submarine.

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