The motor behind him groaned as the front of the boat hit the wave. Nick felt himself lifted into the air, Hailey holding on to his arm next to him—but he gripped tight to the controls. Then the boat slammed back down with a wicked thud, and a spray of salt water drenched Adrian, up at the bow, his bicycle jammed in next to him. The professor let out a torrent of curse words, and Nick stifled a grin as they hit the next wave, thankfully smaller than the first. He pushed the rudder slightly to the left, steering from memory. It was getting darker by the minute. The moon was now high in the sky, which was just cloudy enough to cast the harbor in a thick envelope of gray on gray. Still, Nick didn’t need much light to know where he was going—once Adrian had told him the destination. He’d spent his teens and twenties mucking about the docks and piers that jutted out from the various landfills and cargo depots that spotted this section of the harbor.

At the moment, they were circumnavigating the edge of the city, staying as close to land as possible to avoid the bigger boats out in the harbor while staying far enough from the docks to keep themselves shrouded in that enveloping gray. Despite the circumstances, Nick had to admit he was enjoying himself. The spray of water felt good against his skin, and there was now the littlest bit of hope smoldering inside of him—not the conflagration he’d felt when he’d come so close to the biggest score of his life—but something.

He glanced toward Hailey, right up next to him, more for balance than anything else, but still. She noticed his attention, and, he thought, maybe held his arm a little tighter.

“You look pretty comfortable,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Spent a lot of time out on the water when I was a teen.”

She didn’t say anything, and he wasn’t sure what made him continue.

“Maybe it was a way of dealing, when things weren’t working out.”

“That happened a lot,” Hailey guessed.

Nick felt himself smile.

“You get used to things not working out. Before he died—my dad used to say, when things go sideways, you go forward.”

“Your dad sounded smart.”

“My dad was a drunk and an asshole. But he knew a lot of things about going sideways.”

Nick shifted the rudder again, and the skiff curved inward, avoiding the wake of a loud party cruise farther out in the water.

“I don’t think my father could’ve wrapped his head around how sideways this has gone. Paul Revere and a way of turning lead into gold. Using math.”