‘I’ll …’ But his voice ended in wordless chattering.

The boat had a little covered wooden-framed front with wildflowers painted on it. Thea wondered why the wildflower person had sold their treasured boat to Delores.

Maybe the wildflower person had been Delores. Once.

‘Here.’ Rory handed her a coat and a blanket. ‘They were all I could find. Take off as many of your wet clothes as you can.’

With fingers that seemed to have doubled in size she wrapped herself in the dry clothes and they both huddled in the front of the boat where the covered wooden frame offered some meagre protection from the cold.

‘Do you know how to work the motor?’ Thea asked as she found gloves in the pocket of the coat.

‘No, but how hard can it be?’

The engine actually proved harder to work out than Rory had thought. But one of the books Thea had read in her wide-awake nights at the Centre had featured just such a boat as this. The engine was an outboard motor, she told him. She lowered the propeller and plugged in the kill switch – the device that would shut off the motor if they were thrown overboard and save them from being chopped up by the propellers. She then looped the cable over her wrist.

Together, they pushed themselves away from the rock and pulled the handle of the motor for the third time, Rory’s mouth a grim line of determination.

‘Can you flood a boat engine?’ Rory asked anxiously. ‘Shouldn’t we just wait a few minutes before you try again?’

He looked like he wanted to kick it, but instead stopped and let go of the handle.

A few minutes was a long time. Especially when Thea was anxiously scanning the cliffs and jumping at every scrape of the boat against the rock. It was also probably the longest time lately that she’d had to just think without reacting to whatever latest horror was unfolding around her.

She thought about her mother, perhaps at this very minute making up placards with Thea’s face on them (hopefully a good shot, not one of her awful passport pictures) ready to storm the Ing Enterprises building. Not that that would do any good – it was just a building, the people within it easily removed to another location at a whim. Anyway, Ing Enterprises itself was owned by Aspire, the bigger parent company calling the actual shots. And Vivian would have no clue how to go about finding them.