LAUREN

“How is he this morning?” I ask as I enter Marisol and T’chai’s stone hut. It’s early and while the others are out starting the day, I’m not allowed to leave camp because I don’t have the protective camouflage the others do. I spend most of the day near the hut so I can be with Mari if she needs anything, and to help out with T’chai or N’dek and the baby. I don’t mind because I’m around to oversee the raft building or for people to ask questions, but some days it’s hard.

Like today. Mari’s got a dull look in her eyes and T’chai’s hand is clasped limply in her own. He sleeps, his skin flushed with fever. If it’s possible, he looks worse now than he did when he was injured. At least then, he was strong. Now it seems as if he’s wasting away to nothing, and he doesn’t even have the strength to fight anymore. The hand clasped in Mari’s grip is bony and thin. Some days he’s better, laughing and smiling at his mate from his bed. But then the next day, he’ll be listless and ill once more, all his energy gone, and it becomes clearer than ever that he’s not getting better. On these days, it’s hard to be cheerful and pretend like everything will be okay.

I don’t know that it will be. I don’t know how to comfort when there’s no good answer. But I try anyhow, because it beats sitting around and wringing my hands. I bend down next to Mari, keeping the authoritative look on my face as if that’ll help things.

She shrugs, her movement as limp as the man in his bed. “Bad day.” Her voice is dull.

“Tomorrow will be a good one, then.”

“Or it won’t be,” she says softly, stroking his hand. “And then he’ll just keep sliding away from me.” Her mouth trembles as she gazes down at him. “You know, his cootie’s stopped resonating.”

I get a sick knot in my stomach. “Maybe it’s just gone quiet for the moment. Preserving its strength and all that.”

“Or it’s given up.” She gazes down at his hand, tracing the prominent veins that stretch between his knuckles. “It knows he doesn’t have the strength to mate and now it’s just one sided. The song in mine changed, too. It’s like…remember that news article about the blue whale that sings at a different frequency than all the other whales? It’s lonely because it’ll never find anyone. Maybe my cootie’s like that. It’s like the blue whale, singing alone, because it knows that its mate isn’t out there anymore.”

“You spent way too much time on the internet back at home,” I tell her brightly, and give her shoulder a squeeze. “You can’t give up.”

Her slumped shoulders and lack of response tell me she already has.

Since I’m the one that tries to make everything better, I give her shoulder another squeeze. “We’re going to be going back to the others soon, Mari. Very soon.”

“And then what?” she asks, a bitter note in her voice. “He can die on the frozen shore instead of the warm one?”

I want to protest that. I want to tell her that it’ll be all right. That maybe the others kept some of the ship’s medical technology and they can whip something together that can fix whatever is wrong with T’chai. But I’m not even sure I believe that myself. If his cootie, which is supposed to speed up healing, can’t fix him, what makes me think that a few scrapped parts from a now-destroyed spaceship are going to do the job?

“Soon,” I promise her again. And because I know I’m not being helpful to her, I leave, so I can at least be helpful somewhere else. Maybe I can talk to K’thar. Being at his side always makes me feel better, even if it’s only to see him smile and feel his hand on my hair.

I’m shallow, I know. Sometimes I just like to be petted by my favorite guy.

The moment I go outside, though, I see that K’thar is far down the beach, directing M’tok and J’shel as they tie down a pontoon on the side of one of the rafts. No cuddling for me, I guess. I pause to admire his backside, covered in the leafy kilt thing he’s got working. I can’t see his buns—which is a shame, because they’re great buns—but I recognize the twitch of his tail as he stands there, instructing the others. I sigh dreamily when he flexes his shoulders. Maybe I can get him to steal away for a few hours this afternoon under the guise of fruit or egg hunting.

The guy makes me positively insatiable. I always thought I was a bit too level-headed to be one of those “nympho for your man” types, but I guess I was wrong about that. Just thinking about running off into the trees with him for a little while makes my pulse beat a little harder between my thighs in the most intoxicating way. I’m obsessed with him. He’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, and he’s the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. Even the language barrier between us seems to fall a bit more every day. I’m learning him from his smiles and the way he holds himself, the sigh he makes when he’s frustrated…and the growl low in his throat when he’s turned on.

I shiver just thinking about that growl.

The guys on the beach look too busy for me to drag him away, though. This raft is the last one that needs to be finished. There are three large ones—one for each tribe—and the plan is to rope them all together so no matter if the current takes us off course, wherever we land, we’ll be together. It’s taken some time to figure out how to make such big rafts float properly. I thought all we’d have to do is tie some wood together and we’d be good to go, but our early attempts flipped over a lot and I’m terrified of the thought of that cold open water full of slithering things and having a raft flip. N’dek won’t be able to swim, nor T’chai, or the baby. We have to be as secure as possible, so it took a few more attempts to figure things out. Now, the rafts have extra logs crossing underneath to add more buoyancy, and we’ve added pontoons on each side to help with stability. N’dek’s whittled enough oars for each person to have their own, and we’ve been tanning hides for days so we’ll have warm clothes. The egg baskets are mostly full. Extra fish have been dried and smoked so we’ll have something to eat as we journey. We’re almost ready.

The thought is terrifying.

For weeks now, I’ve been banging the drum, insisting that we leave for the far shore that I’ve reassured them is there. That there are more people waiting, more females, more game, more everything. I’m supposed to guide them to the shore, because that’s where I came from. Thing is, now that the time to leave is almost here, I’m afraid. What if the distant shapes I see aren’t land after all? What if Mari and I strayed way, way off the path and I can’t lead K’thar’s people back to Harlow and Liz and the others? What if I screw this up and lead everyone to their deaths?

“No pressure, Lo,” I whisper to myself. “This is when you do your best, when everyone needs you. So suck it the fuck up and get to work.”

Strangely enough, bullying myself seems to do the job. A reminder that people are counting on me is all that my brain requires to kick into gear. Like I have for so many mornings, I scan the skies, looking for the gigantic predator birds. When I don’t see any, I move to the cliffs and begin to climb, heading for the highest vantage point. The cliffs here are made of a soft sort of rock that crumbles easily, which means that grooved steps have been carved into the side of the cliff by constant use, and that makes it so that even a graceless human like myself can climb to the top.

I make it to the peak, scan the sky again for danger, and then straighten. Up here, the breeze is stiff, the tops of the trees rustling below. This is one of the tallest places left on the island, I think, and it’s a good spot to eyeball our journey. I move a rock that’s holding down a curled bit of papery bark that I left up here yesterday. Without a lens, I don’t know if my “telescope” is just more than a tube to look through, but I feel like it helps my vision regardless. I sit down on the rock and use my bark spyglass to study the waters.

It’s very distant, but I’m positive I see mountains of some kind. Maybe not specific mountains that I recognize, but I remember there being mountains. That’s good enough for me. It means there’s land, and I can’t imagine that Mari and I got that far off course. I imagine I would have woken up, wouldn’t I? The last thing I remember is Marisol hauling me out of the water into the floating pod, and then nothing. I don’t think I’d have slept for days, so it must be less than a day’s journey back to the other side.

Which must be those mountains.

I hope.

God, please let me not be wrong. I know my eyes are better now with the cootie. I can see really long distances, but even I’m not sure just how far that land is from here. It’s a mere sliver of color, a smudge against the backdrop of endless green ocean water. But the land has to be somewhere close nearby. It makes no sense otherwise. I sigh and drop my bark telescope, a little frustrated. If I could see just a little bit farther…

A shadow drifts into my field of vision overhead.

I’ve seen enough skyclaw in the last few weeks to know what a danger they are. Heart hammering, I drop to my knees and quickly crawl under the nearest fern, breathing hard. My hands and knees are scraped up, but it doesn’t matter. If that thing sees me…

But the shadow drifts overhead and keeps on going. It doesn’t stop. I wait, utterly silent, and watch the thing fly off in the distant skies. It’s heading for those mountains. That just confirms my suspicion that there’s something there at least. I’ll deal with the skyclaw problem later. One issue at a time.

As I watch it glide away, to my surprise, I see a second form. Another skyclaw. A third joins it.

That’s…odd.

Other than that first day on the beach, we’ve never seen more than one at a time. The two on the beach at once were a mated pair, but most of the time, I’m told, they hunt alone. Three together seems very, very strange. My skin prickles with awareness as another skyclaw joins the others.

It’s like the entire sky is full of them.

What is going on?

“L’ren!” K’thar bellows nearby. “L’ren? ANSWER!”

I can hear the terror in his voice. He’s seen them, too. “I’m up here,” I call back. “On top of the cliff!” I don’t know all those words in his language yet, but he can follow the sound of my voice. I’m not getting out from under the bushes until I know it’s safe.

I pick thorns from my palms and watch the fleet of skyclaw in the muddy-looking sky. I’ve only been here a month, of course, so maybe this is normal, but it seems frightening to me. What could cause so many of the big predators to up and leave their hunting grounds?

Of course, the moment the thought crosses my mind, the earth begins to shake.

I bite back the scream building in my throat. Not again.

I close my eyes and hug my knees to my chest, waiting for the earth to stop trembling. Each earthquake is terrifying to me. I can’t ignore them like the others do, though I try hard to pretend I’m not freaking out every time one happens. They happen more often than we eat, and yet I can’t sit back and pretend they’re not happening, that the earth isn’t shaking. That we’re not perched atop the remains of an active volcano and that’s why we’re living in a steamy island paradise in the middle of iceberg country. Each earthquake never lasts long, though. I always brace myself, waiting for this to be the “one,” but it never is. The world trembles for a moment or two, and then goes still.

Until today. It shivers and I count off the seconds. One. Two. Five. Ten. Eleven before it stops. Then it starts again, almost immediately. This one lasts for five seconds. A third tremor falls right behind, and then the world goes still once more.

It’s so quiet I can hear my heart thudding painfully loud in my chest. That’s too many earthquakes in too short a period. Something’s wrong.

“L’ren,” K’thar calls, and I scramble out from under the bushes and fling myself into his arms. I hug his neck tightly, and when I can finally choke down a breath, I point up at the sky, where the skyclaw are all retreating. “Look!”

He nods, a grim look on his face. “They go.”

My alien sounds far too calm, and I shake my head at him. “You don’t get it. They’re fleeing. They’re all fleeing this place! We need to go, too!” As if to punctuate my words, the earth shakes again in another quick tremor.

At that, K’thar gives me a grim look and nods. “We go.”

Thank god. Finally, we’re getting out of this place.