Perhaps it’s this she sees—how I want to dig beneath her skin, to search her secrets until I understand them. Perhaps empathy outshines my fear.
I should get my questions out now, take advantage while I have her ear. I’ll have to build up to confronting her on her ink, though. Break her walls down first.
“Do you regret it?” I ask.
“Regret what?” She bites absently at her thumbnail. “Killing him, or telling you?”
I wait her out, because I shouldn’t have to specify.
She doesn’t answer. I guess that is my answer.
“I was going to run,” I say. “I could have done it, too. I really think I could have made it.”
Without the explosions.
Without the death.
“I’d’ve been dead in a heartbeat,” she says. Her eyes flicker toward mine, just for an instant, before looking back out to sea. “We all do what we have to, right?”
That’s when I see it: Alexa is every bit as alone as I am. She had no one at camp—she couldn’t have, not if she set off all those explosions. There would be five people on this boat, not four, if she’d wanted anyone to make it out alive.
If Finnley and Hope were trying to go back home to Santa Monica, maybe Alexa was trying to get to someone, too. “Who is he?” I ask. “Who is it that you miss?”
Just like that, her walls go up again.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “He’s gone.”
She puts ten thousand volts into the word gone, and I’m not about to touch it.
I extend an olive branch instead. “I know exactly how you fee—”
Alexa holds up an abrupt hand, startling me silent. Her eyes cut over my shoulder to the other girls.
I glance behind me. Both Finnley and Hope are awake now, staring at something out to sea. Neither seems to have heard my conversation with Alexa. What caught their attention? I scan the ocean, but only see sunlight glinting on the water. Endless, in all directions.
“Eden?” Finnley says. “Is that it?”
Alexa and I exchange a look. At least I’m not alone in my confusion.
“Is . . . what . . . what?” It’s possible my perfect vision isn’t as perfect as I assume it is—that it’s taken a turn toward old-lady-blind since my last visit to the optometrist, half a year before Zero Day—but every line I see is crisp, every color vivid. There just isn’t anything other than water and sky to see.
“The drawing in your book, of the island,” Finnley says. “It looks a lot like it, don’t you think?”
There’s only one book she could mean, and only one drawing that looks like an island. I flip open to the pages, which once—from what I can tell—held a wealth of knowledge about how to catch fish. But Dad completely obscured all the printed text with an ink-blue drawing, lines of varying widths shaded with cross-hatching and tiny dots. A beach stretches from edge to edge: behind it looms a tight thicket of trees, and before it are curling, frothing waves. And then, at the left, there is an intricate sketch of a tall, unmistakable totem pole that juts skyward where sand meets trees. The ink at the pages’ rims bleeds together from the swim the book took across the soaked deck this morning, but even so, it is a clear picture of what we’re looking for.
Which would be helpful if there were anything but water to see.
“Can I take a look at it again?” Finnley stretches her hand toward me, but her gaze is undeniably fixed on something. “The drawing, I mean?”
I cross to their end of the boat, field guide in hand.
But the book falls to the deck before I can pass it to Finnley. I nearly fall right along with it. After only three steps, and no squinting whatsoever, the horizon has a new shape.
“Alexa,” I say, “you’re going to want to see this.”
TEN
MY FATHER WAS a meticulous man. His grammar was impeccable, his face was always baby-smooth and smelled of mint, and he couldn’t stand dirt under his fingernails. His eye for specificity, for perfection, stretched across every facet of his life. I see it in every dot, every line, and every curve of the drawing—they match every dot, line, and curve of the island before us.
Which is why it makes no sense that we’ve arrived early, according to his meticulously outlined instructions on how to find it.
Not to mention the way he neglected to write a single word about this baffling trick of nature. How is it possible for an entire island to be seen from one half of a boat while, at the same time, remaining hidden from the other?
But it is, unquestionably, Sanctuary Island. I am a vane in the wind, oscillating from joy to fear and back again at everything this means—all it proves. Sanctuary Island exists! Whether we will find sanctuary there is another mystery altogether. Now, at least, I know it is possible.
Hope and I work together to adjust the sails, turning our boat until we can see the island from every angle on deck. When it’s clear we’ve passed whatever barrier made it elusive to us, we sail toward it.
At first, it seems close, like it will take us less than an hour to reach its shore. And it looks small: an hour’s run around the perimeter. Too small to be a haven for refugees.
But though we slice easily through the water at a respectable pace, it takes the rest of the afternoon to reach sand. When we do, it’s obvious the island is much vaster than it first appeared.
As we pull into the shallow water, which is sparkling and crystal blue, we are dwarfed by our surroundings. Trees stretch four times the height of our sail, an intimidating force behind the naked beach. Farther down the strip of sand, nine enormous blocks of stone form the totem pole, its many sides chiseled with shadowed, exaggerated faces. The only thing that looks small here is the sky, a thin stretch of blue mostly obscured by the swaying green leaves of the treetops. The breeze allows shards of sunlight to pierce the otherwise impenetrably thick canopy of foliage.
I hoist myself up and over the side of the boat as Hope lowers the sails. The water is inviting, calm and cool as it tugs at my calves. Finnley joins me in the water, and together, we guide the boat up onto the sand.
Our progress slows as we meet resistance; without the ocean to help us carry the boat, it is a heavy beast. Alexa and Hope climb out into the ankle-deep tide. With one firm push, we’re moving again, inch by inch until the boat is just out of water’s reach.
Alexa is the first to abandon us. Her feet make neat prints in the smooth, wet sand, the only sign of life on this island other than the stone tower. “It’s good enough,” she calls over her shoulder. “Shouldn’t wash away from there.”
I’m not entirely sure I agree, and in fact I’m pretty sure I disagree, but dragging it even this far has made my entire body ache. I feel eyes on me, Hope’s and Finnley’s, their hands still on the boat as if they’re ready to push for another hour if I say we should. Hope’s face is flushed, and her limbs are so thin I’m surprised they haven’t snapped. Finnley is a little sturdier, but not much.