Could Alexa have done something to make Finnley disappear? As neat an explanation as that would be, it feels off. Alexa slept straight through the night, never flinched once when I added tinder to our fire. And Finnley was the one who insisted on keeping her distance—not the other way around.
Hope paces in the clearing. She’s been pacing so long the sand has begun to pack under her feet. “She told me she wanted to go look for the temple, but I assumed that would be after we were all awake, not at the crack of dawn.”
“We never did make concrete plans, I guess,” I say. “I thought we were all on the same page, that we’d go together. In broad daylight.”
That’s all it is, I tell myself. She woke up early, she slept through all the noises that set my skin on edge, she wanted to go off on her own without Alexa, without me. I certainly wouldn’t want to explore the jungle alone, in near darkness, but Finnley was clearly upset with us last night. With Alexa and me, anyway. I haven’t mentioned the noises to the others—I can’t change it that I didn’t speak up as soon as the twig snapped last night. How would they look at me if they knew I could have prevented . . . whatever happened?
Nothing happened. Nothing, nothing.
But the noises that set me on edge: I can’t quite put them out of my mind.
I’ve seen things since the war began, heard too many things I wish I could forget, enough to know when something isn’t as it should be.
The girl from the communal bathroom, for example. I saw her every morning, every night. We never spoke, just brushed our teeth with wiry, paste-less brushes—until one morning, she stopped showing up. I asked after her, but no one gave any answers. It was as if she’d vanished from camp altogether.
And the elderly server from the daily oatmeal line: he faithfully dipped his ladle into the steaming black cauldron despite his hands, red and raw and peeling and blistered. They seared him with cattle-prodding irons whenever his line moved too slowly. He didn’t last six months.
Then there was the pastor who wouldn’t divert from his message, whose underground congregation showed up one Sunday morning to find him pierced in the same way his savior had been.
I hoped we’d escaped those who creep in the night, who love to steal, kill, and destroy.
Now I’m not so sure.
We agree to stay at the clearing only as long as it takes for me to whittle three thick sticks into sharp-tipped spears. Even Alexa seems eager to look for Finnley, which surprises me—she doesn’t strike me as the type to care so much—but I decide not to comment. She searches up and down the beach, never going so far that we can’t see her, but eventually returns to our clearing. Alone.
Hope flips through the field guide as I whittle. If Finnley did go off in search of the temple, we reason, she would have based her plan on the information inside my book. She certainly spent enough time studying it on the boat, enough time to memorize the details Dad included. As long as she didn’t ask questions, I’d told her, she could thumb through to sharpen up her survival skills. Now I wish I’d kept it closer to my chest like I’d originally planned.
“I don’t see anything in here other than what we already know,” Hope says. “‘Temples hiding among ferns, structures formed of stones and secrets’—it would have been nice if whoever made this had drawn a map.”
Perhaps Dad hadn’t lived long enough to be so thorough. The thought digs its fingernails into my brain, and I do my best to pry it away. I already told Hope there weren’t any other telling details, but she wanted to scour it anyway. See if she could find any hidden clues for the determined to decipher.
“Finnley thinks there might be a code,” she says, which snaps me straight to attention—I nearly slice my hand with the knife.
“What? What sort of code?” If anyone should have figured out a code, it’s me. I’ve devoted years to learning that book. To learning Dad.
Hope bites her lip. “I tried so hard to pay attention, but I kept falling asleep while she was talking last night—and, really, she was whispering, so that didn’t help. I remember her saying something about the markings?” She sighs. “Sorry, I know that’s not helpful. Everything written in here could be called a marking, technically.”
The markings. The markings?
I reach for the book, and she hands it over without a word. The only markings that come to mind are where Dad kept a tally of how many fish they’d eaten. But maybe that was symbolic? I flip there, and yes, there are definitely two lists—fish caught, fish eaten. Thirty-two marks in each column. Any symbolism I try to impose upon it just feels ridiculous. Sometimes a fish is just a fish.
“I was wondering if maybe these”—Hope holds her hand out for the book, and I pass it back; she flips to Dad’s drawing of the island—“might be Morse code?” She points to the ocean, its rolling waves shaded with lines and dots that cover half the page.
Oh. Oh. I can’t unsee it, now that she’s pointed it out. How have I never noticed so obvious a thing hiding in plain sight? It’s all over the book, too, everywhere his sketches appear.
Alexa hovers behind us, studying the page. “Either of you know how to decipher it?”
“The only bit of it I know is SOS,” I say. “And there’s a whole lot more written here than just that.”
“I don’t even know that much,” Hope says.
Alexa gives a little half laugh. “If there’s one thing a survival guide should have, you’d think it’d be a Morse code cheat sheet.”
My heart sinks. If it were a message meant for me, surely he would have made certain I was equipped to read it. Right? Maybe I’m missing something. And if Finnley knew how to read it, she might know things about Dad that even I don’t know.
She might know things about Dad I don’t want her to know.
Alexa moves around to our supply hole, digs halfheartedly until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a tiny black memo pad, no bigger than her palm, no thicker than a matchbook.
“Where’d that come from?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Found it on the boat. Maybe there’s something helpful in here?”
If I’d been the one to find it, I would have shown everyone immediately. Also, I would already have it memorized. Alexa and I are not so similar.
When she opens it, it becomes clear it’s not a memo pad at all, but a calendar-at-a-glance. “Thought it was worth a shot,” she says. “Anyone want a souvenir to remember the year 2055 by?”
The summer of ’55, maybe. September: not so much. I’m surprised the calendar didn’t start over after Zero Day. That the numbers continue on in bold black, not Birch-blood red, as if the world kept turning as usual.
In reality, it feels more like the world imploded.
SIXTEEN