Alexa rolls her eyes and sprawls out on one of the larger stones, which is long and flat and bedlike. “We’re marking our path,” she says. “It’ll be fine.”
I have a dull pencil—another of Alexa’s surprise storage compartment finds—but there’s no space for me to write in the field guide. The pages are completely covered in Dad’s neat blue ink. “We’ll run out of fabric soon,” I say, flipping through to make doubly sure there are no empty corners. “It’s a good idea.” Instead, I rip September from the pocket calendar Alexa found on the boat. I could fit a tiny map on the back, and maybe even a few notes.
Hope, who’s been carrying my cardigan full of our supplies, twists the Havenwater lid open and pours a small trickle down her throat. She paces the clearing from one end to the other.
I take a seat, begin jotting descriptions of the landmarks we’ve passed so far. “Want to sit, Hope? I can move over.”
She considers the moss and makes a face. “I’m good. Thanks, though.”
The moss is slick under my thighs, slimy and cool. I don’t know how Alexa can relax like she is, stretched out with so much of her skin in direct contact with it. I write as quickly as possible, just so I can stand up again, even though my muscles are enjoying the rest. We’ve been walking on a subtle incline all morning.
From the corner of my eye, I see Hope pinch the bridge of her nose, squeeze her eyes shut. She looks a little pale. The sip of water she takes is so tiny I’d be surprised if she felt it go down at all.
“You sure you’re okay?” I ask. “You don’t look so great.”
“I was a little dizzy for a second, but the water’s helping.” She takes another tiny sip. “I’ve been trying not to drink more than my share, but . . . I think I’m getting a little dehydrated, maybe?”
I have a vague memory of this happening to my mother, once, when I was very young—we’d spent all day in the sun, sailing, and she’d spent all her energy tending to me instead of herself. We ended up staying the night in the emergency room, waiting as a mess of tubes replenished what she’d lost.
“Drink what you need,” I say. “We’ll just have to find more.”
But this is a problem. Do we keep prioritizing Finnley? Or do we turn our focus fully to a water search for now, so that we’re able to keep looking for Finnley?
I know which way I’m leaning.
I lay out our options. “I vote water,” Alexa’s quick to say. Not a surprise, really.
“Hope?” I ask.
She’s quiet for a minute, but finally, she meets my eyes. Hers are heavy. “I vote water, too,” she says. “I don’t want to, but that’s my vote.” She knows what Alexa and I do: we could wander around the jungle for the rest of the day and still never find Finnley.
“We’re not abandoning her, okay?” I say. “We’re just . . . making ourselves stronger so we can search harder.”
Hope swallows, nods. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, okay.” She looks a lot better already, now that she’s had a bit more to drink and has torn into an emergency bar. She reaches a hand out to help Alexa up from her bed of stone. “Ready?”
Alexa gives an exaggerated sigh and waves Hope’s hand away. “Go on without me,” she says. “Come back and let me know when you find water.”
I bite down on my cheek, hard, before anything I regret saying fights its way out. Too late, I see a shift in Hope’s eyes, a fierceness none of us has seen in her before.
“You are not a princess, Alexa. And we are not your slaves.”
Alexa bolts upright, stunned. And Hope isn’t finished yet.
“Eden and I have been nothing but patient with you, ever since we were so unlucky as to end up on that boat together. And you? You’ve been nothing but ungrateful, nothing but unhelpful.” Hope’s eyes are bright; her cheeks are flushed. “I defended you to Finnley last night, did you know that? I have a high tolerance for people I don’t understand—there’s always more going on than I know, so I try to give the benefit of the doubt. But I have just about had it with the way you sit around letting us do all the work. You are every bit as stranded here as the rest of us, and you are going to pull your weight from now on, because I am done.”
The rustle of leaves in the trees becomes as still as these old stones, for one eternal second.
And then the silence is broken by Hope’s footsteps, by her deep, shaky breaths. She makes her way slowly into one of the canopy tunnels, walks far down the path without a single glance back.
I give Alexa a pointed look before turning to follow, let it linger. Her eyes are empty, unreadable, but it isn’t long before her footsteps fall in with mine.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN ALEXA AND I have caught up to Hope, I pull the field guide out and flip to page fourteen. “‘How to find water,’” I read. I skim the page, trying to pick the printed text out from my dad’s notes. “There are a lot of clues we can watch out for, according to the book—animal tracks, swarming insects, bird flight paths. Things like that.”
I wonder if my father used this exact section of the book when he was here: if he, too, wandered for hours with his team, looking for a water source. If they ever found one.
A thought occurs to me. “You know, searching for water might actually help us find Finnley,” I say. “Wherever the temple is, they probably built it next to a water source, right? So if we can find water—when we find it,” I amend, “we can stick close to the banks, follow it around while we look for the temple.”
Hope straightens, everything about her a little brighter. She hasn’t said as much, but I’m positive she feels guilty for being dehydrated—like if only her body could keep up, we wouldn’t have had to shift our focus from Finnley.
“If we find any mud, there might be some groundwater available.” Alexa looks almost embarrassed to have spoken. “It’s a trick my grandmother taught me during the floods, when all the public water was contaminated and we didn’t have access to a Havenwater—if there’s mud, you can dig a hole about a foot deep to see if any water fills it up. You can strain the mud out with cloth.”
“Alexa, that’s . . . really brilliant,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Still good to use the Havenwater,” she says flatly. “Never know if what you dig up will make you sick.”
The way she says it makes it sound like she has personal experience with this, more than she’d like. I think back to camp, how she was every bit as alone as I was. “Is that what happened to your grandmother?”