When Alexa doesn’t answer, I glance over. She doesn’t meet my eyes, just absently stirs a patch of leaves around with her stake, looking for animal tracks that aren’t there. “The Wolfpack promised her the whole world, told her they’d have a place waiting for her after the takeover if she wanted to move inland,” she says. “She didn’t make it that long, though. Infection took her out quick.”
“Why didn’t you move inland?” All of us in barracks had questions about this—why some Wolves chose active guard duty over moving into our freshly abandoned mansions, with our sparkling pools and our pristinely manicured lawns. It was obvious, with most of the guards at camp, guards whose definition of a better life translated to more power, a sadistic desire to watch us suffer firsthand.
Alexa wasn’t one of those.
Just like on the boat, when I asked her who she missed, her walls go up. She misses her grandmother, I’m sure, but if her grandmother already passed—and she had a chance to move inland, but didn’t—this thorn in her side has to do with something else. Someone else.
“I thought I could help” is all she gives us.
After that, we’re quiet for a good long while, all of us lost in our own heads. I pause to make notes whenever we pass anything unusual—a tree with a knothole black as tar, a section of sand with sparse foliage cover, some bright blue flowers unlike anything else we’ve seen. At one point, I mistake a particularly serpentine growth of vines for vipers, and Hope has to coax me back from near heart failure.
I should know better by now, though. There’ve been no snakes. No tracks, no swarms, no flocks. There hasn’t been anything promising—we’ve seen absolutely zero sign of life. We’re doing everything right, everything the field guide tells us to do, but it hasn’t yielded a single glimmer of hope.
“Doing okay, Eden?” Hope asks, and I blink. Look up. Lighten the death grip I’ve put on the field guide.
Where are we? Where are we, that a girl can disappear in the night without a trace? That we can walk through the jungle for hours and find nothing at all as it should be—nothing that hints at the life, the freedom, my father wrote about? Where we haven’t seen so much as a bird? So much as a bug?
This . . . is not good.
“Yeah,” I say, for my sake and theirs. What good does it do us, all the way out here, if we let frustration get the best of us? “Let’s keep going.”
We press on, all of us dragging a bit after such a long day, pausing occasionally to eat and rehydrate and sharpen the dull tip of the pencil with our knife. I’ve just started making a fresh batch of notes on the back of tiny, torn-out November ’55 when Hope lightly grasps my elbow.
“Do you guys hear that?” Her voice is quiet, like she’s afraid to scare off whatever it is she heard.
I tuck my notes inside the field guide, snap it shut. Close my eyes. Listen. No longer is the soundscape simply full of rustling leaves, tree limbs creaking in the breeze: after all this searching—finally—we hear it.
“Water?”
She grins. “And not just ocean waves,” she says. “Sounds close, too.”
I could cry, I’m so relieved. It’s exactly the lift we needed after such a dispiriting day. Water sounds (northeast), I note, beside my most recent landmark entry.
Alexa pulls our last full canteen out from the cardigan supply pack and breaks the seal. She guzzles a quarter of it down, more than any of us have dared to drink at once.
“What?” she says, when she notices Hope and I are staring. “We’ll find more soon, right?”
“That isn’t an excuse to be careless,” I say, and wow, is it an unexpected blow to my gut: I sound exactly like my father.
Alexa tightens the lid, but instead of settling it back into the cardigan where it belongs, she holds it out to me. “Want some? Come on, you know you’re thirsty.”
I am—it still feels wrong not to ration properly, though. After a moment’s hesitation, I accept, drink slightly more than I otherwise would have. It’s an act of faith, a determined commitment: we will find water, and we need to find it soon.
“Let’s do this,” I say. We set off with renewed enthusiasm and energy, the sound of water closer with every step. Until we hit a particularly dense bit of foliage, that is, and the noise becomes so muffled we have to strain to hear it.
Hope breaks away from us, rushes ahead on the path. “You guys!” she says, bending down. “Look!” With delicate fingers, she holds up the corner of an emergency-bar wrapper. “Maybe Finnley came this way?”
Adrenaline rushes through me, and I’m hopeful for two glorious seconds—until I see a familiar patch of vines, the very same viper-like vines that nearly gave me a heart attack earlier. I remember, clearly, eating an emergency bar at the time. I’d almost choked on it.
“Guys,” I say, completely deflating, “we’ve passed this spot before.”
EIGHTEEN
THE SEARCH FOR water is like trekking toward a desert mirage, or like trying to find a rainbow’s roots, or like stretching up on tiptoes in hopes of plucking the moon out of the sky: the constant bubbling of a brook is always within earshot, yet when we retrace the path where it’s loudest, we see nothing but more jungle. We walk until the afternoon light becomes thin without seeing so much as a drop.
We’ve gone through most of our water, too. So certain we’d find more, we haven’t been as careful as we were this morning. At least we aren’t thirsty.
I swat at a mosquito, and a little bead of blood rises up on my sweat-sticky arm. A mosquito! We haven’t seen any other insects—maybe this, finally, is a sign that water really is close by and we simply haven’t found it yet. The itching sets in right away, and the redness. But then there’s a stinging, something I’ve never felt from a mosquito bite before, and I realize—it isn’t the bite that’s stinging. It’s my right palm; it’s the backs of both thighs. It’s like eating fresh serranos, the way they bite, then burn, then set your insides on fire.
“Aghhhhhh!” Alexa’s shriek pierces the air.
Hope and I whirl around just in time to see Alexa double over, her hair falling out of its knot and into her face. When she straightens—if you could call it straightening—we get a better look: every inch of her arms and legs appears to have been dipped into a vat of molten sunlight. There are no blisters, just smooth lobster skin instead of her usual cappuccino tan.
“What is it? What happened?” Hope is at Alexa’s side before I can take two steps.
Alexa cuts a glare through the hair that hangs over her eyes. “How should I know? You’ve been in this jungle for exactly as long as I have, so it’s not like I’m the expert.”
Hope rolls her eyes, lets her head loll in a way that says her patience has worn as threadbare as Alexa’s filter. Mine isn’t doing much better.