“I know I have to eat. I’ve been eating. I’ve been eating the same three things every day for God knows how long because none of us have a calendar and I am telling you right now, Quest, if you put another piece of fish in front of me I am going to lose my mind.”
He set the fish down by the fire and looked at me with that patience he’d been wearing like a mask for weeks. The calm, steady, I’m-holding-it-together-for-both-of-us expression that used to comfort me but now made me want to scream because I didn’t want his composure. I wanted him to be as frustrated as I was. I wanted him to admit that this was unbearable instead of acting like it was just another problem he could CEO his way through.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. And his voice was even, measured, controlled, because that’s who Quest was, but I heard the thread underneath it pulling tight. He was tired too. He just wouldn’t say it.
“I want you to be honest with me. Are we going to die here? Because every morning we walk that shoreline andevery morning there’s nothing. No boats. No planes. Nobody is looking for us, Quest. Nobody knows where we are.”
“Justice knows.”
“Justice knows the plane is missing. He doesn’t know where we are. WE don’t know where we are. You told me the GPS was tampered with, which means whoever is searching is searching in the wrong place. We could be a hundred miles from where they think we went down.”
He didn’t respond because he couldn’t argue with math and I was right and we both knew it. He sat down across from me and eyed me up and down.
“I’m going to get you off this island.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to do it.”
“That’s not a plan, Quest. Those are just words.”
His eyes snapped to mine and I saw it. A flash of something raw behind the mask. Frustration or fear or both braided together, and it was the first honest thing I’d seen on his face in days. He opened his mouth, closed it, then stood up and walked toward the tree line without saying anything because apparently that was his version of not snapping back at me.
I felt guilty immediately. This man had killed a boar with a pocket knife for me. He paddled a raft across the ocean with his bare hands. He fished every day, built every fire, carried me when I couldn’t walk, and checked on the baby before he checked on himself every single morning. And I was sitting here calling his promise just words because my hormones were running my mouth faster than my brain could filter it.
“Quest.” I called after him but he kept walking. He didn’t go far, just far enough to make his point, which was that he needed thirty seconds without me testing his patience. I gave him the thirty seconds because I owed him that and about a thousand more.
He came back a few minutes later and sat next to me instead of across from me and put his hand on my belly without speaking. The baby moved against his palm. I leaned into his shoulder and we sat like that for a while, letting the silence do the apologizing because neither of us had the energy to do it with words.
That’s when the birds went quiet.
I noticed it before I understood it. The parrots that lived in the canopy above our camp, the ones that screamed at each other from sunrise to sunset and provided a soundtrack I’d learned to sleep through, just stopped. All of them, at once, like somebody hit a mute button on the entire forest. The silence was so sudden, so complete, that I lifted my head off Quest’s shoulder and looked up. The birds were leaving. Dozens of birds pouring out of the canopy and heading inland, fast, in the same direction, like they’d received instructions I couldn’t hear.
“Quest.”
He was already looking at the sky. The western horizon, the one facing the open ocean, had changed color while we were sitting there. What had been blue an hour ago was now a bruised, swollen wall of grey and green that stretched from the water all the way up into the atmosphere. The clouds were stacked in layers that looked heavy and violent. The wind, which had been a steady warm breeze since we crashed here, suddenly shifted direction and hit us cold.
“We need to move.” He was on his feet before he finished the sentence. “Right now. Inland. We gotta get to higher ground.”
“What about the camp? The raft, the supplies, the?—”
“Leave it. All of it. We need to go.”
That’s what scared me. It wasn’t the sky or the wind. It was the fact that a man who inventoried everything, who tracked every resource on this island like it was a line item on a quarterly report, was telling me to abandon all of it without hesitation.He looked at that sky and calculated the math in under three seconds and the math told him nothing here was worth more than distance.
He grabbed the pocket knife and the first aid kit and nothing else. Took my hand and pulled me toward the tree line and we started moving inland at a pace my body was not built for right now. My belly shifted with every step. The pressure in my pelvis was immediate and sharp, my center of gravity fighting me on every uneven surface. The wind was picking up behind us, pushing through the trees with a sound that started as a whistle and climbed toward a howl.
Ten minutes in, my ankles gave up the negotiation. I stumbled on a root and almost went down. Quest caught me without breaking stride, put his arm under mine, and we kept going but slower now and I could feel him calculating how much of my weight he could carry and still keep moving.
“Get on my back.”
“Quest, I’m almost seven months pregnant, I weigh a ton.”
“Get on my back, Mehar.”
I climbed on. My arms around his neck, my legs around his waist as far as they could go with my belly between us, my face pressed against his shoulder blade. He gripped the backs of my thighs and started walking uphill through thick brush. I could feel every muscle in his body straining. He was thirty pounds lighter than when we crashed, running on fish and fruit and stubbornness. This was costing him more than he would ever admit.
The sky opened before we found shelter. Rain hit us so hard it felt like someone turned a fire hose on the canopy above us. The wind bent the trees sideways and the sound was enormous, a roaring, crashing, tearing noise that swallowed everything, our voices, our breathing, the sound of Quest’s feet on the ground. I couldn’t see past his shoulder. The rain was blindingand horizontal and coming in waves that soaked through us in seconds.
