Free Close Reach by Jonathan Moore

The man who took it didn’t come back. And I’ve seen a bunch of them when they bring me inside. But I don’t think there’s more than seven.”
    “Counting the ones on our boats?”
    “Yeah.”
    Kelly nodded to herself because now she understood the two radar targets she’d seen coming out of Adelaide. One had been La Araña, but the second had been Lena and Jim’s boat. Arcturus had turned east earlier, not heading into the main channel of the Drake Passage but staying closer to the southern continent.
    “You’ve seen their faces?” Kelly asked.
    “I think they’re Chilean. Military or something. Most of them are older. Forties, fifties. But one is really young. Younger than me.”
    Kelly had been thinking maybe they weren’t even human. Maybe they wore their balaclavas and goggles to hide whatever was wrong with them. But they were just ordinary men.
    “They speak Spanish?”
    Lena nodded, then said, “But one of them, the young one, he speaks English, too.”
    “You speak any Spanish?”
    “Yeah.”
    “There’s only five of them now,” Kelly said. “And three of them are on other boats. So that leaves two with us.”
    “What—why five?”
    “I killed two.”
    Kelly found she could watch the waves for longer periods now without getting that spinning, dizzy feeling. She stared out at them and watched the boat’s progress. In these latitudes it was impossible to tell the direction from the position of the sun unless you knew exactly what time of day it was. They’d taken her watch when they’d taken everything else she wore. But Kelly could tell they were going southeast, because the waves had been going toward the east for days, and the crab boat was cutting through them at an angle that left the starboard quarter facing the crests. If they were going southeast, they weren’t going toward Chile but to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula instead or maybe to the island chain that stretched to the east of it.
    Back across the Drake Passage, where there would be no one.
    Kelly thought about that and thought about the fact that the men had kept Lena alive even though she had no money. They’d given her a blanket when they’d stripped everyone else and left them to die. Their cage sat atop the starboard engine access hatch, so that of all the cages, it was the warmest. That might not have been a coincidence.
    “The pills worked, you know,” Lena said. “Cleared it right up.”
    “That’s great,” Kelly said, barely able to whisper now. “I’m glad.”
    “No, you don’t understand,” Lena whispered back. “I wish they hadn’t worked. It’d be better if they hadn’t.”
    Then Lena slept. Eventually they shifted so that it was Kelly who held Lena, and Kelly who reached out into the freezing air to tug the blankets over their bodies, and Kelly who hid her face in the soft warmth of Lena’s hair and whispered shhhhh into the girl’s ear when she cried in her sleep.

Kelly rose from a daze when a man kicked the trap and banged on the bars with a short-handled fish gaff. He was inches away from her, separated only by the bars of the trap, and she could smell him even through the foul weather gear he wore: a smell at once dangerous and low.
    A tiger’s cage. A bag of snakes.
    Lena woke with a high-pitched cry and scrambled out of the blankets and off Kelly’s lap, moving to the corner of the trap away from the hinged door. She put her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins to become as small as she could get. Kelly was struggling to sit higher, to prepare herself for whatever was about to happen. The man took a set of keys from the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket and tried them one at a time until he found one that turned the padlock’s barrel. He unclasped the lock and hung it by its shackle atop the trap and then stepped back and lifted the door. He reached into the cage with the gaff and tapped Lena’s thigh with the flat side of the hook, then motioned her to come