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Adina swallowed hard. Anything could have happened to her out here. “We’re going to find her.”
“I want to go back,” Tiara said. “This isn’t fun anymore. I’m scared.”
“What if an animal got to her?” Nicole said in hushed tones.
“We’re not going back. We’re not giving up on her. We’re all we’ve got. Don’t you understand?” Adina was near tears. She was exhausted, so exhausted that she thought she imagined the sound. It was the faint rumble of a car engine, like something remembered from a dream. Something that reminded her of normalcy.
A long, Jeep-like vehicle crested the hill, trampling down bushes as it came. The headlights blinded the girls till they had to put up their arms to block the sudden light. They heard the motor stop. A car door opened.
A man in camouflage and mirrored sunglasses blocked the army transport’s headlights. He stood, hands at his hips. He wore a reassuring smile.
“Well,” he said, “we sure are glad to find you girls.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the back of the transport, the girls talked with the manic quickness of those who’ve been given second chances. “Like, I can’t wait to take a shower and put on clean clothes,” Shanti said.
“I’m going to catch up on Ragnaroknroll, find my guild,” Jennifer said.
“I am going to eat a piece of cake the size of Petra’s head,” Sosie said.
“I hope you’re hungry. My head has a circumference of twenty-four inches,” Petra shouted over the wind, and they all laughed.
It was good. Everything was good — the sun on their faces, the wind drying the sweat on their skin into itchy spots, these people who had come to rescue them, to take them back to civilization and malls and hair removal and Alexandra’s Clandestine Closet45 catalogs. Everything would be like it was before.
The transport carried them to the other side of the island and traveled through a barbed wire fence with No TRESPASSING signs posted on it. Two guards in black shirts opened the gates and waved them in, and for a moment, Adina had an uneasy feeling. She caught Nicole’s eye and they both looked away quickly, as if neither one wanted to ruin the happiness of this rescue with some distant, probably unfounded fear. The transport stopped at the base of the volcano. Here, the land had been cleared and flattened out.
The agent ushered the girls into a plain white tent outfitted with chairs and a desk. Two assistants in black shirts offered sweating bottles of water, which the girls drank down in greedy gulps. It seemed that nothing had ever tasted so good. For a moment, there was a fleeting memory of those shirts, but it was gone with the realization that they had been rescued at last.
“Thank heavens we found you girls,” the agent said, smiling. The mirrored aviators hid his eyes. “We’d just about given up hope when a satellite picked up the plane’s image. You’ve managed to survive for all these weeks on your own? Outstanding!”
“We had to eat bugs!” Tiara said and shuddered.
“No!”
“We did! Jennifer fought a giant snake.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“And Petra had to pee on a pirate,” Brittani added.
“Could you not make that sound like a fetish site please?” Petra complained, but she was still grinning. They all were. At last! A rescue! There would be shampoo and real beds and food.
Adina looked around at the bustling compound. It was hard to believe that it had been here the entire time. If only they had marched farther, gone looking, they might have been rescued much sooner. But the jungle had been too forbidding, and the girls had stayed close to the beach. Except for Taylor. Taylor! She could be seen by a doctor now.
“We lost one of our friends. Mary Lou. Have you seen her?” Nicole asked before Adina could say anything about Taylor.
“We did,” the agent said after a moment’s pause.
“I knew she’d be okay,” Tiara said, clapping.
“Can we see her?” Shanti asked.
“She’s … already headed back home. On a ship. There was a ship here that took her. She’s the one who told us to come looking for you.”
“Why wouldn’t she come looking, too? Doesn’t sound like Mary Lou,” Adina said. Something scratched at the door of Adina’s subconscious, wanting to get in. Female intuition, her stepfather would say. She wasn’t sure of what was on the other side of that door, so she kept it closed.
“People do funny things,” the agent said. “Now, if you’re anything like my daughters, I know you girls must be dying for a shower.”
