Offshore
Episode 22: Home Run
Aaaand the teams on their way back to Wulien! This is it!
The wind was howling by their ears. This was a strong broad reach for the northeastern coast of Helfi, and out of the water, the wind propelled them through the air at twenty-two knots, unhindered by the choppiness below.
Here and there, through the storm of Jinai’s thoughts, places of familiarity were lighting sparks of memory. The zigzag of the coastline. The two headlands jutting at the end of a straight stretch of coast. The beach of broken rocks.
The chase went on without concession, both sailors shouting across the deck and heaving every wheel and rope of the sailboat with their hearts booming in their ears when their control crew weren't relaying information.
Ever since the cape, Zera and Xye had handled the twists and turns flawlessly. Despite the slow crescendo of familiarity with the coastline, the Cloudlander was forced—in the absence of valuable puffs—to keep up, to play catch, taking every turn half a minute behind.
“Should I get the spinnaker?” Jinai shouted as they ducked around a rock in the sea. Everything was moving too fast, yet too slow. The air held them back.
“No spinnakers on a broad reach!” Telaki answered firmly in her ear. “Downwind will take you straight into a cliff!”
She shook herself, every gasp whistling, but her hands continued to play listlessly over the mainsheet. A sound like a sob escaped her. “I’m panicking,” she said, and then said no more.
Anqien felt her laboured voice hit them like an arrow through the ribcage. “Jinai,” they said, tapping on her forearm with eyes aflame with terror and voice somehow, impossibly calm. She continued to grip the mainsheet steady, but only just. “Jinai, it’s fine. Second place would be amazing. Wouldn’t it?”
“I can’t be second again. How will I face anyone if I end my career like that?”
“You don’t have to face anyone. Everyone already thinks you’re one of the best in the world. I think you’re the best in the world! But, more importantly, I want to finish this race with you, and be able to say we both did our absolute best. Could we do that?”
Jinai drew a breath through her teeth, held it, and let it out. She repeated this twice more. When she next met her teammate’s gaze, an odd new vigour—fatalistic, yet forgiving—had awakened in her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s do it—both of us.”
Without a word, she rose, at ready by the mainsheet, and it seemed that the rest of the world beyond the strait fell away from her.
Far off, the distant blue shape of Canlan Island rose from behind the horizon. It was coming. The split where they would have to make that decision—one that would make or break this run.
The Mirage was not going to lose any ground in a straight chase. Jinai watched as they began to gybe to port, and the boat veered leftward on a sure path around the outer coast of Canlan Island. The easy split.
At this point, it seemed a foregone conclusion which way they would go: there was no way they would win if they followed the Mirage now. The only way past them was through.
It took only a singular firm look, exchanged between Jinai and Anqien, and a call of ready to gybe! They turned to starboard, and onto the course through the Sunken City.
This was a stretch of sea that Jinai and Anqien had sailed an uncountable number of times in the last three years. A hundred miles of coast down the Canlan Strait, it was speckled with towns whose names they knew—Meiyen, Helun, Tong’an—all pointing the way back to Wulien.
But the city they did not know—the ancient clifftop seaport of Gumeiyen, hubris incarnate, which had once tumbled from the clifftops and shattered on the seafloor in the centuries before written history—eluded them, and perhaps forever would.
As they hurtled towards the millennium-old debris, towards the ghosts of hidden towers, Jinai and Anqien locked eyes once. “It’s the last time,” she said. “May as well fly or die trying.”
“No dying on my watch,” Anqien answered, one hand ready on the helm. “Let’s focus.”
Jinai began to ease the sails. The boat slowed till the wind was just below whistling. She grasped the mainsheet and adjusted her grip. “Gybing to starboard!” Anqien shouted, as the first zigzag of this treacherous course began.
Jinai heaved the sail and Anqien tweaked the helm to port to ease the curve. They arced around the first row of hidden roofs and shot into clear water—then again gybed to port, right on the back of the last, wind driving them relentlessly forth. They strung both gybes together in an S-curve through the two underwater streets, and righted themselves again for the next sequence on their slalom course.
They were re-entering the City again, as in so many nightmares before—a meteoric barrage of calculations, consternations, near-misses and gybes. They bounced back and forth between the cliff faces of Wulien and Canlan Island, at times dangerously close to grazing a rock—they barely felt their legs as they swerved around steeples and sideways eaves.
This time, something seemed to click.
All those months and years of practice—the failed runs in the rain, in the sunset—lined up in their heads, like a jigsaw, and suddenly Jinai found she wasn't trying to solve. As the onslaught of dark, tangled shapes hit her eyes, her hands moved to answer, spurred by instinct.
She called out, “Twenty degrees to starboard!” As if a signal had been fired between them, Anqien tensioned the Threads with their left hand as she gybed, and corrected with the rudder with their right. Always, their eye was on her—keeping up, holding fast—and every gybe and shift of weight over the hull was answered with an instantaneous reaction: one mind strung together by a peerless trust.
They cleared the steeple, its old bell that had seen no rest chiming their passage. They were inching towards the place where they had toppled into the sea last year.
A memory replaying, they closed in on the crush of ruins that had gathered tidepools within themselves, floorplans exposed to the open air and the ocean’s scavenging beasts. They saw their own shadow, twisted awry in the crossfire of wind and water. She saw Josa in the doorway of that nameless shop, disappearing for good into the night.
“How far do we have to go?” Anqien asked.
“Where are we, Iki? We just passed the bell.” Jinai could see where they would enter the maze of roofs.
“Wait up, I got you,” Iki replied. “You’re through two-thirds of the strait. Coming up on the real chaos, hang in there!”
“You're doing amazing!” Telaki shouted.
They gybed into a diagonal, hull briefly bumping something, and both cried out as they dragged the yacht around again. Jinai pointed the clearest path through the buildings littered along next hundred yards—another diagonal almost to the far cliff.
The wind had shifted, coming ever so slightly over their right shoulders. “Duck!” Jinai shouted, cursing as her stomach roiling and they hurtled into another gybe. But seeming to know her intent even before hearing the creak of the sail, Anqien had already ducked, and the boom swung sharply over their head.
“Oh shit!” Jinai spat, eyes snapping to three rock islands that were suddenly half as far as they had been before. In three seconds, they would...
“Port! To port!” Anqien yelled as they snapped a bundle of Threads to starboard, gesticulating wildly to heel the Cloudlander in the other direction.
As the yacht swung clumsily into the port gybe away from the rocks, they flung their bodies to port, a desperate bid to sharpen the turn.
But as she did, something gave between her foot and the deck.
Before she even felt her centre of gravity swing beyond her control, she started to scream.
The slanting rails were no longer in front of her. Panic wrenched her heart from her chest as her body hurtled over the white edge of the hull, towards the rocks beneath—
“Jinai!” In the blur of the sea-spray and flashing lights she felt her right foot hook the stanchion wires with a twang and a crack of steel. Fingers clamped around her other ankle as her shin hit the edge of the bulwark.
Torso hanging over the sharp rocks, she shrieked in the wind, using all her core strength to hold herself above the hull. She watched the waters glimmer below, an inch from tears. Glancing shakily backward, she saw Anqien's hand wound tight around her ankle. Her teammate’s shouting and pleading turned to a tearful cry of, “Gods! I got you!”
“Get me back in!” she cried.
In a concerted backswing, Anqien dragged Jinai leg-first onto the deck. Once the deck was again within reach, she shoved herself the last distance back, to land on shaky feet. “Fucking damn it!” she shouted, flinging her trembling arms around her teammate. “That could have been so much worse!”
“What? What just happened?” was Lujang’s flustered shout in their earpieces.
“I broke a stanchion,” Jinai replied. “Let’s get back to work.” Then they flew back to their positions, hands firm upon the rope and the helm.
They were lucky that the sea had been clear since the near accident. Now a handful of jutting rocks, each larger than a house, formed a channel ahead. There was a quick back and forth between them—we can take this one!
With the gentlest of gybes, even with the wind in their backs, the lofting Cloudlander threaded itself through the eye of the needle between the last monoliths.
The last straggling structure of the Sunken City—a fallen watchtower leaning against a submerged cliff—hurtled past on their port side. Then, silence. Up ahead, the strait continued unbroken.
“We…we’re through,” Jinai murmured. “That was it.”
The sailors looked at each other, catching their breaths. In their ears, the crew was shouting every blessing and curse on written record. They grinned at each other, then laughed, as Jinai dove to the bow to unstow the spinnaker.
“I’m so proud of you,” Telaki said, the jubilation in her voice smoothed over by a layer of caution. “It’s not over yet. Lock it in.”
“Where is the Mirage?” Jinai said.
“We don’t know yet,” Telaki replied. “But you’re on a run till you reach the harbour. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
The spinnaker billowed as she hoisted it, filled with the northwesterly wind that roared down the strait. It lifted them through the waves like a kite on an updraft. Their hydrofoil sliced the water.
Jinai had never felt wind like this, on the racecourse or off it. The last wind of her last race, blue skies streaked by red-white limestone cliffs. It was sweet with saltwater, and she knew its whistle by heart.
“Do you think…we could…” Anqien breathed.
Before they knew it, they had come back into view of Wulien—home and hell, the place of so many dreams and delusions. It was dressed in milk-white sand and barnacled rocks, glass storefronts and concrete piers.
She remembered setting foot here on a jetty eight years ago, ready to make the world hers.
The finish marks, fluttering surely and steadily in orange, were bright against the wharves and piers, gleaming off the water. Even from here, two miles out, the roar of the crowd was audible over the sea, and the glitter and flash of the coastline betrayed the teeming of onlookers.
From the other side of the bay, too, they saw a blue-green sail clear the southern tip of Canlan. The Mirage looked almost the same distance away from the marks—no doubt they had made full use of that downwind run.
But the wind was in the rivals’ faces now, and the Cloudlander was sailing home on a stiff tailwind.
Jinai did not allow herself any celebration, even at this juncture. She’d been burned too many times to be lured into a sense of safety, even now, as they crossed the edge of the port and soared close enough to the promenades to see the heads of the spectators. Each one watched, waved, or snapped photographs—a ripple of faces and arms lifted in their wake.
The two sailboats closed in on the finish line in a V, the Mirage from the east and the Cloudlander from the northwest. The sunlight beamed from over their shoulders, illuminating the marks like twin flames that left bright streaks in their vision.
“Little bit to starboard?” Anqien called out.
“Ready to gybe!” Jinai hauled out the mainsail to starboard. As they began to arc towards the finish, Anqien wove Threads through the starboard rails, easing their turn till they were in a sure, unshakeable trajectory towards the finish.
They flew into the bay, the AmaShiru Mirage behind their left shoulder. The sun was in her teammate’s hair, the wind whipping it over their shoulder and against their cheek.
“You got this—you got this!” Telaki screamed.
She forgot who she was for moments, light and shadow, bollards and leaves, camera flashes and clouds, swinging past in turns, as they descended towards the finish line, their hull skimming the surface once more.
Screaming and crying