NOOR DOES NOT consider herself a master manipulator, but she did manage to convince her best friend Prem into illegally hitching a first-class plane ride to Miami and stealing a yacht to take out on a joy-ride through the Caribbean using only half a bag of Taki's, a car wash coupon worth slightly less than $20, and her unrelenting charm.

It is not worth mentioning that, in order to do so, she'd had to tie him up and gag him. It is also not worth mentioning that Noor may or may not have given Prem sleeping pills that resulted in him being unconscious for the entire voyage. It is, however, very worth mentioning that he'd had a brief period of consciousness in Miami before promptly passing out again, where he'd thought he'd died and been reborn and went around telling everyone he saw that Jesus was a drag queen in go-go boots and ripped fishnets.

(Noor hadn't understood that particular claim of his. Prem was Hindu and had thought Jesus was a real person and the current Pope until he was twelve.)

Thinking back on this accomplishment with pride, Noor glides her brown hand through the warm breeze floating off the water. It's peaceful here, the moonlight dripping into her skin like warm candle-wax, the sea breeze rustling her hijab, the faint smell of fresh sea salt melting into her tongue. The endless deep turquoise waves. The quiet of the still summer air. The stars reflecting above them like the lights of the city. Growing up in Manhattan, Noor never got to see the sea as pure as this. She never got to see the world as pure as this, as gentle and as dark. She feels like it's only her and Prem alone in the universe, alone in this vast moonlit universe. She almost likes it better this way.

The boat they're on is a small but expensive-looking white yacht, and the deck they occupy is one on the bow of the ship that the owners must have used to sun themselves on. Above them, the windows of it turned to black mirrors reflecting the night back out at them, towers the bridge.

Prem's just starting to wake up. He keeps twitching in his sleep, shifting uncomfortably, his face contorted somewhere between pain and anger as if he knows he has to get up soon. He looks uncomfortable and hot in his tie-dye hoodie and Nike track pants, sweat beading down his neck and into his dark tufts of hair; it'd been cold and rainy in New York when they'd left. Large drops of salt spray are freckled against his glasses, and his dark skin's already begun to turn red from the sun earlier in the day. Noor's always wondered how he manages to get so sunburnt, the kid's so brown.

The two of them had been best friends since second grade , when Noor'd side-tackled Prem 'cause he'd had a silly-band she'd wanted, one in the shape of a unicorn. Only after Noor had beat the crap out of the poor boy had their art teacher managed to pull her off of him. Prem had then lied that he'd stolen the silly-band that had prompted the fight, resulting in the lessening of Noor's punishment. They'd been inseparable ever since. Really, he was all she'd ever wanted: a partner-in-crime that would lie straight through his teeth to keep her out of trouble, even if it meant getting punished himself.

Current-day-Noor shakes Prem's shoulder. He jolts awake, his eyes bursting open like a water ballon full of rich melted chocolate.

"Noor!" Prem screeches. "This is not the subway!"

"Well, obviously it isn't. It's the Caribbean."

"What are we doing in the Caribbean? Are we running from the feds again?" Prem asks, looking slightly panicked. "Noor, what did you do this time?

Noor spins her necklace, a golden locket in the shape of a cartoonish crow, around her pointer finger. It'd been a gift from her parents for her sixteenth birthday. Her dad, who was an engineer and pretty darn brilliant, had worked together with his friend, a jeweler, to it for her. The crow was meant to symbolize her mom's airplane; she always told the story of how, the first time she ever flew, they found a stowaway crow hiding in the luggage compartment after they landed. It updated in real-time to tell her her mom's exact coordinates, so she'd always know where she was. He'd made her mom one that gave her Noor's coordinates, one in the shape of the Empire State Building. It was meant to symbolize both her home and her daughter's love of architecture.

The reasoning behind the necklace was simple: as all women of color can, Noor's mom, a pilot, could do anything she set her mind to. For an inexplicable reason, what she'd set her mind to was having a daughter so terrified of flying, the only reason she'd survived the flight to Miami was because she'd listened to Determinate from Lemonade Mouth on repeat for the entire three hour flight.

At the time, Noor'd thought of the gift as being sweet, and she'd started up the habit of wearing it everyday. She'd never thought that her mom's life would be depending on it.

"We're going to find my mom," Noor explains.

"Your mom?" Prem's expression falters. "Noor--"

She knows what he's going to tell her. She knows that he's going to scream at her for bringing him out all this way, for doing all the shit she did to him, in bounding and gagging and drugging him and illegally flying out to Miami and stealing a literal yacht from a literal millionaire, all to come out and find her dead mother. She doesn't want to hear it.

Prem understands a lot of things about her that other people can't, but this is one thing she doesn't think even he will understand. Because a boy like him that floated through life without a worry in the world could never begin to understand the desperate, primitive fear of a girl that has had to fight tooth-and-nail for everything she has and everything she is. He could never understand her fear of losing something, anything. Because for him, losing something is a minor set-back. For her, losing something means losing everything.

"She's not dead. Her plane crashed. Just because they couldn't find the wreck doesn't mean there weren't survivors. There had to have been a survivor. She had to have survived." Her voice breaking, she slips her locket over her head and thrusts it into Prem's hands. "I have her coordinates."

Prem flips the locket open with his thumbnail. "Thirty degrees north, seventy-five degrees west," he reads. "The Bermuda Triangle."

Noor nods. She hadn't thought of it like that, but she guesses that it would make sense. Her mom had been flying out of Miami and heading towards San Juan. She'd had to have crashed somewhere between the two. "If she was deeper than 10 meters, the locket wouldn't be telling me anything. Either she sunk in shallow water, in which case someone would have found the wreckage, or she's still alive."

"And where are we?"

"I found a website that shows me my exact coordinates," Noor explains, pulling her phone out of her bag and clicking Safari open. "We're a little north of her. Just gotta keep heading south."

Prem nods and gestures up at the boat with a spread of his arms. "How much did a ride on this ol' boy cost ya?"

"It was free," Noor casually replies. "I stole it."

"You stole a yacht?" asks Prem incredulously.

"I didn't steal it. I borrowed it."

"You literally just told me you stole it."

"I totally meant that I borrowed it."

"Oh. Yep. Definitely. Right. You borrowed this boat. And I'm a European."

"Even if I did steal it, which I did not, who are you to judge me, Mr. Socialist? I would have stole it from some rich businessman, right? I'd be dismantling capitalism from its very core, Prem! You of all people should be proud of me."

Prem simply shakes his head and looks up at the stars, his black hair falling back from his face, curling into gravity like the dark waves the boat stirs up. A cloud traces over the moon like fog settling over a tangle of Spanish moss. "Do you even know how to sail?" he asks.

Noor shakes her head. "The boat's got an autopilot setting. I simply typed my mom's coordinates in and it's navigating us there. It should only take another hour or so."

Prem turns to look at her. The moon reflecting in his glasses make his eyes look like giant milk-white pools. "Noor Tawfiq, you just might be the stupidest person I've ever met. And my dad defends the second amendment."

Noor shoves him, both of them bursting out in a fit of gleeful laughter. "Prem Ranjit, you have no idea how much I want to shove this whole ass boat up your butt. And there were even bigger things in the marina--"

"If you're flirting with me," Prem interrupts, "I'd like to remind you that I'm actively a homosexual and actively dating another man."

"And I'd like to remind you, Mr. Homosexual, that I'm a lesbian. I was just going to tell you that your ego is bigger than any yacht I saw."

It is at that moment that things begin to go horribly wrong.

The boat shudders to a halt, the engine making a sound like a teenaged boy after eating at Taco Bell. The lights inside of it burst out in an explosion of sparks, casting the duo in darkness. A thick, dark liquid, darker than the water, starts to spill out from underneath the boat into the waves. Prem screams and grabs onto Noor like she's a life-preserver.

"It's the aliens!" Prem screeches in Noor's ear. "We're being abducted! Oh, Jesus, I knew this was going to happen! It's that damn Bermuda Triangle! Next time, /I/ get to pick where your mom crash-lands. And I'm picking somewhere that doesn't have an infamous history of alien abductions and deaths. How does Greenland sound? What about Norway? Ooh, we should go to Indiana!"

Somehow, Noor manages to pry him off of her. He settles on simply grabbing onto her hand for dear life, which she isn't all that upset about. Even she feels a little scared at the prospect of being stuck out at sea. "Shut up! I hear something!"

"It's the aliens," Prem sobs.

Noor pulls herself (and Prem, who's still stuck to her side like a particularly unpleasant leech) up. She begins to pad forwards on light feet. She can hear something, the sound stark against the silence of the night--a slight ticking noise, a wound clock. A husky voice whispering words on a language she doesn't understand. The grinding of the engine halting against something.

"Noor," Prem pleads. "Noor, please. Let's not go investigate the scary noise. Please. Let's just lay here on this nice deck and accept our fates. Maybe the aliens will take kindly to us."

Something glides across the water, the dark tail of a large fish. Noor's own choppy breathing echoes back to her on the wind.

"Oh, woman up," Noor tells him, trying to act tougher than she feels. "Something probably just malfunctioned."

"UFO's don't 'just malfunction,' " Prem argues, air quoting her.

Noor feels the boat start to shake, the floor beneath her rattling like the tail of a diamondback.

"Aliens are perfect beings and I love them!" Prem screeches into the dark water as if he's praying. "I'm a huge fan! Please take kindly on my soul!"

The lights suddenly flick back on, illuminating Prem's panic-stricken face as he grips Noor's arm for dear life. The boat resumes its gradual crawl forwards, smoothly cutting through the water like a knife through warm butter. Standing there together on the bow of the ship, now with the lights reflecting on the water, it seems silly to have been so afraid.

"You absolute loser." Noor laughs, throwing her arms around Prem's shoulders in relief. "I thought I was going to die with only you as my company."

"The aliens definitely would have killed you first," he replies, happily returning the hug.

Only then, with the lights back in working order, can Noor step to the railing of the boat to look back down at the water to see what had spilled out of the boat when the engine stopped. She see a rust-colored stain bubbling at the surface of the dark water like a thick glob of red paint on black paper. She feels her heart slow at the realization: they didn't pollute the ocean with oil, but with blood.

A crow is perched on the bow of the ship, staring directly at Noor with its beady little eyes. When she looks back at it, it lets out an annoyed caw and takes flight, instantly disappearing in the inky night.

She doesn't even get a chance to wonder where, exactly, the blood came from, before the boat catches a sudden burst of speed, shooting forwards at the same time that a large object, some sort of fish easily bigger than the boat, leaps out of the water just in front of them.

Noor screams, instinctively grabbing onto Prem. They hit the fish so hard the boat begins to spin. Prem and Noor hit the deck, holding tight to each other, sobbing into each other's chests. A wave conjured from the impact slams into the boat with the force of a football tackle, blood-laden saltwater sloshing onto the deck, into Noor's sneakers. She mumbles a panicked prayer to Allah under her breath. Prem appears to have passed out from fear.

"Prem!" Noor screams, shaking him so hard she's worried she might break his spine. His head lolls around on his neck like a rag-doll, but he doesn't wake. "Prem, you big idiot, you can't do this to me! I can't lose you, too! Please wake up! Please! You're my--you're my best friend, Prem, please. I don't know how I'd manage to survive a world without you in it. Please, Prem, please. Please don't leave me. I can't do this without you."

Prem remains silent. The salt of Noor's tears dripping down her cheeks mix with the salty spray of the sea. She knows he's alive, can feel his pulse slamming against his chest in a rhythm almost as frantic as she is. She just worries something else might happen and he might not be able to save himself if he's unconscious for it.

She also knows that if anything happens to him, it'll be all her fault. Her best friend might die and the blood will be on her hands.

Panic overwhelming her, Noor slaps Prem as hard as she possibly can. He still doesn't wake. Her tears blurring her vision, she slaps him again and again and again. Each plea for him to wake up turns more frantic than the last.

It's then that the fish jumps out of the water again, slamming directly into the boat. The impact's hard enough to knock the vessel on its side. Noor grabs onto the handrail of the deck, clinging to it for dear life, up to her shoulders in water.

She watches Prem's still body slide into the water.

"Prem!" Noor screeches, fear turning her blood to ice. Every regard for her own safety flies out the window. She lets go of the handrail, her foot digging into the side of the boat to push off. She belly-flops into the dark water.

Salt burns her eyes. She holds her breath and plugs her nose, but the gritty taste of saltwater still washes down her throat like cheap vodka. Frothy bubbles float out around her body. Even with her eyes wide open, it's hard to see. She thrashes around, frantic to find Prem. She can't let him die.

A voice suddenly cuts through the heavy silence of the sea, something inhuman, something accusatory, something poured directly into her mind like wet cement.

"MURDERER."

Panic bites its way into Noor's chest. Something brushes against her ankle, maybe seaweed. She stifles a scream in the back of her throat. Where's Prem?

"MURDERER," the voice is insisting. "YOUR KIND ARE MURDERERS."

My kind? Noor thinks, all the fear built up inside of her turning into righteous anger. What, she wonders, is the seaweed Islamaphobic? Racist? She'll throw hands.

A vision suddenly flashes through her head, hitting her like a brick wall. Oil spills. Dolphins getting tangled up in fishing nets. Sharks getting shot by harpoons. A turtle eating a Target bag it thought was a jellyfish. Seagulls suffocating in plastic soda containers. Human pollution destroying marine wildlife. The ocean isn't a bigot. The ocean is seeking justice.

She sees the Hudson River, sees New York Harbor. Sees Clearwater Beach where her family always goes on vacation, sees the litter cluttering the white sand. Sees the pet goldfish she killed in sixth grade when she overfed it. Sees the body of a whale hit by a boat and drained of its blood.

Only then does she realize it. The boat initially stopped because they hit--and killed--a whale.

The large fish she'd seen earlier swirls around her, creating a tiny whirlpool in the water. It's so close she could reach out and touch it.

"MURDERER," the voice is chanting. "NO HUMAN IS INNOCENT."

Something grabs her foot and drags her down into the depths. She watches as her golden locket, her mom's golden crow, slides over her head and floats to the surface.