“Who says you get the pillows?” Alexa snaps.
“Take mine,” Hope says. “It’s fine.” She swipes one of the vests from Finnley and drops it on Alexa’s spot near the fire. Alexa planted herself there an hour ago, as close as she could get without singeing her mat or her hair.
Hope and Finnley settle themselves just inside the jungle. A thick barrier of foliage and several body lengths separate their mats from our clearing.
My spot is under a big tree, not too close, but not far. The sand is cold and gritty, despite the fire, and my cardigan makes a poor pillow. I opted to go without a mat—better that than someone resenting me for not weaving another one. It’s going to be a long night: not too comfortable, too many bugs.
“I’m not dealing with the fire all night, just so you know,” Alexa says, after another stretch of silence.
No one volunteers. No one says a single word.
With Finnley keeping her distance from Alexa—and Hope keeping Finnley from boiling over—the job falls to me, I guess. “I’ll take care of it,” I say. I don’t really mind. It isn’t like I’ll be able to sleep anytime soon.
I don’t think I’m alone in that, either—the stillness is rigid, not restful. Alexa pretends to sleep, but her muscles look too tense in the firelight. And every now and then, I think I hear Finnley or Hope shift beyond the brush, but the brittle crunch of leaves is too careful, too controlled.
For the past two hours, I’ve been trying to piece together how Finnley ended up on the wrong side of the Wolves’ line. How many others are there, just like her, who I never knew about? I think about the lines that divide us, how we could draw them endlessly, forever, until everyone ends up alone inside their own jagged piece. How some lines are easier to cross than others.
Lines drawn in sand are notoriously fragile. All it takes to erase them is one swift wave, one strong pull of tide. Lines drawn by Wolves, though, are drawn in blood, brutal and based on instinct and assumptions. If we appeared wealthy, if the silk tech implants in our fingerpads weren’t knotted or gnarled—a seamless procedure cost thousands, and it was easy to tell who hadn’t been able to afford one—we were targets. If we went to this private school or lived in that zip code or drove these luxury cars or had our own personal Havenwater cartridges—if any of these, we were put to the wrong side of the line. It was a science of emotion, not of exactness. It was surprisingly accurate.
Finnley’s left fingerpad is a mess of scars. Most implant scars are on the right, since people use their dominant hand to pay for things. Her seamless, smooth right pointer must have given the Wolves the wrong impression. She wasn’t wealthy, only left-handed.
Silk technology has had a way of drawing its own lines.
Like the invisible lines that crisscross the globe: third-world borders shifting to first-world powers, first-world powers falling from grace.
Humanitarian efforts to the third world made a drastic impact on health and welfare. First there were the Havenwater bottles, six thousand flung to the far side of the world. And then, when Envirotech discovered they could mold silk proteins into as many uses as engineers could dream, came the edible, unrefrigerated medication in the form of plastic cards. New families, new cities, began to thrive. Landlocked Africa and Asia look nothing like they did even thirty years ago. Silkworms have stirred the landscape of world powers into something no one predicted.
Silk tech has been good, for them. Here, it’s mostly caused problems, further stratified people who are only trying to survive. No handouts here—it wasn’t bad enough for that until we’d already been overgenerous with our aid, until other parts of the world were on the rise and we’d slipped slightly into decline. There were only those with money, and those without. Those with clean water, with the best medicine, and those without. Those with seamless skin, and those with scars.
We’ve all been sliced into, every single one of us.
It’s just that some of our scars are less obvious than others.
My eyes fly open at the snap of a twig. The sliver of moon is directly above our clearing, and the fire has dwindled to embers: I must have fallen asleep, and for a while. Waves crash against the shore, louder than before, at high tide.
I toss a few fresh branches into the fire, making sure the last lingering flame catches at least one of them. Our supply hole is within reach; I fumble around until I find the flashlight I put inside earlier.
Another twig snaps. At least, I think it’s a twig, and not just shifting supplies.
“Hello?” I whisper.
Nothing.
“Alexa?” I shine the light in the direction of her mat, hoping she’s simply gotten up to relieve herself. No such luck: she’s curled up like a child, serene in her sleep. She doesn’t so much as shift when I whisper her name.
Something crawls across the back of my neck. I shake it off, but it sets me even more on edge than before. “Hope?” I step carefully toward the brush that separates us. “Finnley?” The flashlight’s beam is strong, but not strong enough to shine as far as their mats. A few steps later, I see they’re fast asleep, too.
The fire cracks and pops, devouring its fresh fuel. I sweep the flashlight’s beam over the sand, in all directions. Still nothing, no one. We haven’t seen another soul on this island yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re alone here. Based on Dad’s notes in the field guide, we never expected to be alone—but we also never expected our first encounter with whoever lives here to be in the dead of night.
I creep back toward the tree where I slept, listening for any other sign that things aren’t as they should be.
Leaves rustle, deep in the jungle. A monkey, I tell myself—a strong breeze.
A few more twigs snap, not as loudly as before. I sit at the base of the tree, lean my head back. Stay as still as possible, in case whatever is there turns out to be less than friendly. I listen for what feels like hours, but nothing ever shows itself. Eventually, the noises begin to stumble on top of one another, often enough that I’m convinced it’s just the living, breathing jungle and nothing else.
The last thing I see before succumbing to sleep is the pink-purple sky, dawn unbroken.
The first thing I see, when I’m shaken awake, is Hope.
“It’s Finnley,” she says, her usual serenity stripped from her face. “She’s gone.”
FIFTEEN
“DID SHE MENTION any plans to go exploring?” I ask.
Alexa feigns disinterest as she unwraps one of the few emergency bars we have left—we’ll have to learn to fish with spears soon, I note—but her eyes cut toward us when she thinks we’re not looking.