A Brother's Price

Alissa.
    Alissa’s eyes went wide at the sight of the pistol. “How the hell—put it down!”
    “Get away from her!”
    “Put it down!”
    “Get away from her!”
    Alissa made a sudden motion, one he recognized as the start of throwing her knife, and he pulled the trigger. In the small enclosed space, the tiny gun sounded like a cannon. Blood sprayed the glass behind her. She looked at him, surprised, made a slight mewling sound, then collapsed.
    Suddenly the night seemed too still, too empty. Jerin stood, a wisp of smoke coming from the derringer’s barrel.
    I’ve killed her.
    For several minutes he stood, unable to move, the violence of his action shocking him to his core. Then, desperately, he wanted to go home.
    He glanced about the room, filled with unconscious and dead bodies, guns, knives, and broken ship parts. The wheel spun freely, the boat giving no indication that it connected to anything anymore. If they couldn’t turn to follow the river as it wound its way through the hills, they would crash on the shore.
    Jerin looked out through the pilothouse windows. They were drifting downriver, stern first. The stern lantern marked the back of the boat. The water shimmered black, reflecting faint starlight. A thicker black marked the trees on the right and left banks. The boat rode roughly in the center of the river. Downriver, he could make out nothing but a faint frill of white cutting across the darkness ahead of him.
    He stared at the line for a minute before he realized what he was looking at. It dawned on him that there was no horizon. No hills. No trees. As if the world suddenly ended a mile downstream—and he was rushing toward that edge. Like a sleepwalker, he opened the wheelhouse door and heard the deep endless roar.
    The waterfall!
    He glanced again to his left, downstream this time. Glimmering on the shore like evening stars, the lights of the lock and the town of Hera’s Step shone at once dangerously near and yet unreachably far.
    “Oh, Holy Mothers,” he breathed as the thunder grew louder.
    His mind raced from point to point on a straight line. There was no one in the engine room who could start the paddle wheel turning. The current was taking them downriver. The steering wheel was broken. The ship was going over the falls. He and Cira had to get off the ship.
    He knelt and shook her. “Cira! Cira, get up! Get up!”
    “What is it?” Cira asked groggily, getting to her knees.
    “We’ve got to get off the ship. It’s Hera’s Step! We’re going over the falls!”
    Cira stared out at the lifting spray, and then glanced to the shore. “We’ll never make it in time. The current will take us over before we swim ashore.”
    “We have to try!”
    “It will be safer to go over with the ship.” She caught hold of the whistle cord and pulled. “Find something to weigh this down!” she shouted over the howl. “We need to bleed off steam before we go over, or we might be scalded before we’re drowned!”
    He tugged the coat off of Alissa. tied one sleeve to the dead woman’s wrist, and then stretched the other sleeve up to tie the whistle cord down. Cira gave him an odd look, then nodded. Then they hurried out of the pilothouse to the center of the two-hundred-foot boat, opposite the great side wheel. Cira shouted something, unheard over the endless howl of the steam whistle.
    “What?” Jerin shouted.
    Cira pulled him close and shouted directly at his ear. “It will go stern first, but then it will spin toward the side wheel! Hold tight to the rail, but let go toward the bottom! Don’t let yourself be trapped under the boat as it flips over! Do you understand?” When he nodded, she hugged him fiercely. “Jerin, I love you!”
    And there was no time for anything more. The roar of the waterfall drowned out even the howl of the steam whistle. The spray enveloped them like a cold rain. The stern speared out over the vast empty darkness, and then, as Cira had predicted, the weight of the great paddle wheel slued the boat sideways. The deck canted as the whole ship tipped, and they hung from the railing as if from an overhead tree branch. For a moment, they dangled over the chasm, the foaming water at the foot of the falls hundreds of feet down, and then the ship dropped.
    For almost a minute it seemed they fell, weightless, the river’s roar louder than their own screams. Then, with a brutal smash, they hit the cold darkness. Jerin tumbled over and over in the freezing black