I manage a grunt. The pain in my arm is escalating again now that all other threats are gone and I have nothing else to focus on.
“Alright,” I say and sit up, hissing with even the slightest movement of my arm. Blood drips down my fingertips and splatters on the floor.
“We need to move. That needs to be bound until we can get to the infirmary.” She grips my good arm and pulls me up, and we walk. Torches light with our every step as we follow the path, which quickly connects to the Castaway tunnels. Sig recognizes where we are and leads us back in the right direction.
Climbing back up into the lookout is rough, and tears run down my cheeks by the time I flop onto the wooden floor.
Mara threw a knife at my back. More than one. After everything we bonded over, after she saved my life, she forgot it all. I’m the enemy now. A Castaway. Nothing in our shared history or friendship mattered enough to even listen to what I had to say.
The thought makes a pit in my stomach threaten to swallow me whole.
I’m thankful it was just my arm, butfuck,I cannot wait for the healing salve. The bleeding hasn’t slowed, and Sig drops to her knees next to me, urging me to sit up. She rips my sleeve offat the shoulder and ties it around the gash tightly, eliciting an aggravated groan from my lips.
“Fuck, Sig, that hurts,” I growl.
“She got you good. We need to stop the bleeding because I’m not carrying you back to the ship.”
The sleeve is soaked through already, so we rip another strip off the hem of my shirt and tie it tighter, then she uses my other sleeve to make a sling to keep my arm from moving and restarting the bleeding. Once I’m situated, she rolls up her pant leg, and I notice why she was limping as we ran. The vine that had Roley caged must have gotten her when it lashed out. Her pants are covered in blood from a ring of deep gashes all the way to her knee. They’ve mostly stopped bleeding, but she keeps the pants rolled up, letting the wounds breathe.
The air is buzzing. Even though I’m not looking anywhere but at the wooden roof of the lookout, I can feel it. It feels like the island is awake, like it was watching everything that had just happened and is paying attention.
It feels like there’s more coming.
“You could have let her get me,” Sig says, and I drop my head to the side, looking toward her. “Why didn’t you? You would have been free to go back.”
Sig is right. It would have been easy to let Mara take her out and go back to camp without anyone knowing until we didn’t return that night. It would have been easy to return with the news of the healing waters’ location.
That has been my plan since I was captured, to find the right time to get back to the Voyagers.
But it doesn’t feel right anymore.
The thought of Mara harming Sig makes my stomach sink. In that moment, I didn’t think, I just acted, and I don’t regret my decision.
I settle on an easy answer. “You saved me, and now we’re even.”
“I think there’s more to it than that, but I’ll accept it. Thank you.” She looks down at my soaked bandages and winces. “Besides, now it’s your turn. Cap is going to kill you.”
I can’t help but chuckle, remembering what she said after she pulled me from the sinking marsh. It seems like so much time has passed since then, so much has happened.
Because it has.
Everything feels different now, and today proves that.
“I can handle him,” I say with a laugh and look back up to the roof.
“Of that, I have no doubts,” she says quietly.
Voices sound in the distance, and our stares snap to each other instantly.
“They must be hiding near here! I swear, Dane, it was her!”
Mara.
We scramble to our feet, crossing the space to the rail overlooking the main path. Sig grips it tightly next to me and we both peer out, looking for the source of the sound.
“Tell me what happened exactly,” Dane’s voice says, just before they step into view.
Mara, Dane, and Storm all walk along the packed dirt, scanning their surroundings. Mara still has her sword drawn, and Storm has his crossbow loaded, the same way as before, when Weston and I spotted him.
