The boat kept moving toward the gap. The engine died. The boat lost way.

It drifted and the opening fell slowly away.

Only twenty feet. So close.

Then thirty feet.

Forty.

Caine turned cold eyes on his little crew. He stretched out his hand and Penny rose from her place in the boat. He flung her toward shore. She flew, tumbling and yelling through the air and landed with a splash just feet from the nearest of the tumbled boulders.

No time to see whether she made it. Caine reached and threw Bug, who disappeared halfway through his flight but created a splash so close to the rocks Diana wondered if he had smashed his head.

The boat kept drifting.

What was Caine’s range for throwing a fifty-or seventy-five-or one-hundred-pound person with any accuracy? Diana wondered. That most be close to his limit.

Diana’s eyes met Caine’s.

“Protect your head,” he warned.

Diana locked her fingers together behind her neck and squeezed her arms in tight, covering her temples.

Diana felt a giant, invisible hand squeeze her tight and then she was hurtling through the air.

She didn’t cry out. Not even as the rocks rushed toward her. She would hit them head on, no way would she survive. But then gravity had its way and her straight line became a down-turned arc.

The rocks, the foamy water, all in the same blink of an eye, and the plunge. Deep and cold, the water filled her mouth with salt.

There was a hard sharp pain as her shoulder hit rock. She kicked her legs and her knees scraped against an almost-vertical wet slurry of gravel.

Her clothing weighed her down, wrapped tight around her, seized her arms and legs. Diana struggled, surprised by how hard she struggled, how much she wanted to reach the bright, sunlit surface, which was a hundred million miles away.

She came up, was caught by the soft swell, and tossed like a doll against a lichen-slicked boulder. She scrabbled with both hands as she choked. Fingernails on rock. Feet plowing crumbling pebbles beneath her.

Suddenly she was up and out of the water from the waist up. On a little shelf of rock, gasping for air.

She waited there for a moment, catching her breath. Then, she pushed on, oblivious to scrapes and rips, to a drier spot. She stopped there, all energy spent.

Caine had already reached shore. He slumped, exhausted, wet, but at the same time, triumphant.

Lies, Chapter 31