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Then I felt the hot sun on my back and heard the sound of seagulls calling.
It brought me back to myself. I struggled in his arms, wanting to be put down. Jake eased me down onto the sand, and I sat up and looked around.
We had landed on an empty beach. There was no one—nothing—in sight, apart from the plane. Despite the violence of our landing, it was surprisingly intact-looking—just a bit scraped up.
“Are you all right?” Jake asked me urgently.
I had never seen him look so genuinely upset in all my life.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “But—Jake—where the hell are we?”
Chapter 13
JAKE
Ihadnoideaon Earth where we were.
The only thing I could figure out was that this island was somewhere between Hawaii and California—and there was a whole lot of ocean in that space. I wouldn’t have even begun to know how to figure out where we’d put down.
But right now, I wasn’t thinking about that. What mattered was survival.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” I asked Olivia. She seemed fine, but I was particularly worried about internal bleeding—it had scared me to see her so out of it right after the crash. She looked a lot more together now, and I thought it had probably been the shock of what had happened, but there were some injuries that you could miss at first if you weren’t being vigilant, and I didn’t want to let that happen.
“I’m fine,” she told me.
“Nothing hurts?”
“My ribs are a little sore.”
“Let me feel.”
I thought she’d snap at me, tell me to keep my hands off her the way she usually did, but maybe the fact that we were in a survival situation was responsible for the change in her attitude. She let me run my hands over her torso, feeling for damage, until I’d satisfied myself that she hadn’t broken anything and probably wasn’t bleeding internally.”
“You have to let me know if anything comes up,” I told her firmly. “If you feel any new pain or have any symptoms of injury, you have to let me know right away.”
And again, I thought that she would resist, tell me she didn’t have to do anything and I should stop trying to order her around, but instead, she adopted a worried expression and said, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“But we should check you too.”
“I would know if I was hurt.”
“You might not,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of adrenaline in your system right now, and that can mask pain.”
I wouldn’t have expected her to know that. And in the wake of what we had been through, I wouldn’t have expected her to be thinking so rationally.
She reached over and carefully examined my body the same way I’d done hers. I had to hand it to her. She was doing the same examination I would have done on myself. Either she’d been paying close attention to what I had done as I’d checked her, or else she knew what she was doing. And either way, I was very impressed.
“You seem okay,” she said when she was done. “But you’ve got to make me the same promise I’m promising you, okay? Let me know if anything comes up. I don’t want to find out in a week that you were vomiting blood or something, and you didn’t tell me.”
“What would you do if I was?”
“Take you to the hospital.”
