And just like that her swirling world upended and her body felt weightless. The vertiginous feeling was gone, replaced only with a strong sensation of floating.
Had she died? Had the main mast crushed her so thoroughly that she never felt any pain, and was currently on her way to the afterlife?
The answer was a resounding NO as her limp little body crashed back to the deck with something heavy wrapped around her. She rolled over some rope, which burned her shoulders, and a random nail came perilously close to her eyes, but Catalina had no time to register this because it was at that very instant when the mast crashed into the deck with a destructive force a hundred times that of the cannon ball just a few moments ago. It tore into the ship and crashed through the decks on its way through the hull and, eventually, to the very bottom of the ocean. The ship screamed as the structural integrity gave out and the vessel suddenly turned on itself, collapsing inwardly as water surged upwards through the boat with great tenacity and inevitability, causing the ship's screams to turn to groans, almost as if it were aware of its fast-approaching demise and accepted it with little more than sad moans.
"Girl!"
What? What was that?
"Girl! Are you injured?"
Suddenly, Catalina's strained consciousness allowed her to focus on her surroundings once again, and she realized she was wrapped in the protective cover of two masculine arms. She wriggled free and fell to her chin. When she looked up, she stared again into the bluest eyes she had ever seen, the eyes of the first pirate that she'd stomped.
"You!"
He sat up and quickly looked around. Catalina's ship was breaking apart and already the frothy sea was coming up to meet them through the extensive damage of the boat. "Are you injured?" he asked.
"I don't, I don't --"
"Can you walk?"
Again, her mouth betrayed her with unintelligible stutters, "I, I don't --"
The man clenched his jaw beneath his lips and swooped one arm around Catalina's waist as if her were carrying a puppy. He sprinted over flaming wreckage as easily as one might skip across the sidewalk on a lovely spring day, only with a hundred-pound girl on his hip. He got to the remains of the outer rail and put one shiny boot on it. He leaned over and shouted, "McShay! McShay, throw me a line, for the love of God!"
Catalina's dazed state kept her from knowing the precise actions of her savior, but there was a thump as he caught something in his chest. Rope, maybe? Then the weightless feeling returned as the man swung them across to the other boat, the sinister one, whereupon they were pulled from the air by rough hands, one of which found Catalina's breast.
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