Chapter 38: Taken

She didn't scream. Afterward that was the thing she was proudest of, and the thing she hated most. She didn't scream. She lay for one breath with her hand on the slow cold light under his breastbone and looked up at the dark lamp against the gray sky, and her mind did what it always did. It counted. The lamp's out. The binding holds as far as the light. There's no light. There's no binding. She was out of the cabin before the second breath. The flint was in the box under the stern bench, with the needles and the twine and the little pots of grease. She knew it by feel. She'd lit that lamp every night of her life, in rain, in wind, in the dark with her hands shaking from cold, and she had the flint out and the box open and the steel in her other…