So I make theories.
Maybe he fell overboard during a storm on his way back home, maybe he was swallowed up by the hungry sea like Kiribati, maybe the others who were with him dragged his bloated body back in with a net. Or perhaps he simply starved on Sanctuary Island and his corpse was too much dead weight to bring all the way home. What would I want with a corpse, anyway?
I cling to these theories when I’m feeling logical. Hopeful.
But then there are days when, after being steered back to barracks by a too-tight grip on my upper arm, I think with my gut instead of my head.
It’s then that I spiral toward the strange, toward the severe.
Maybe he was taken by something mysterious, for example. Something unexpected his team encountered on their mission to subdue the island, something that made him sweat soul and blood.
Or maybe his disappearance wasn’t a mystery at all. Maybe he simply outlived his usefulness to the Wolfpack, and they—*poof*—distilled him into blood and bone. After what was, surely, a grim and cruelly enforced death. Maybe he said yes and yes and yes, until one day he said no, and was shot, swiftly and finally, just like Birch on Zero Day.
And then, like always, I come back around to the only thing I know, for sure, to be true: my father was not a liar. His disappearance doesn’t change that.
Whatever awaits us on the island, if there is even the slightest chance we’ll find the freedom my father wrote about, it has to be better than the cages and clipped wings we’ve left behind.
Following the instructions in the field guide, Alexa and I craft a makeshift compass out of ballpoint pens and rope, using sunlight and shadows and the hands on her watch to guide us. These are actually two different techniques combined, in part rather than in full, since we don’t have everything we need to fully complete one of them as outlined in the book.
When we are back on course and sailing smoothly, I pull our Havenwater bottle and an emergency bar from one of the benches we pried open. It takes effort to ease the bar out without making noise; Alexa isn’t quite so careful. The crinkle of plastic nearly wakes Hope, all the way on the far end of the boat, but she simply stirs and turns over. We devour our bars like heaven-sent milk and honey.
Alexa stares out to sea. She sits on the bench, hunched over with her elbows on her knees, turning the Havenwater bottle around and around in her hands. The salt air tugs at her black hair. She lets it fly, in no rush to tame it.
I work my hair into a long, messy fishtail braid. There are at least twenty different shades of sand in my braid, from bright and sun-bleached to the color of the beach when the tide pulls away to sleep. I loop a thin strand of hair around the tail of the braid to tie it off.
Now would be the perfect time to ask about the missing letters on Alexa’s hand. But the longer we sit in silence, the more difficult it is to imagine breaking it, especially with a question so confrontational.
“Why didn’t you run?” she asks, turning her eyes from the ocean to me. They are black coffee, dark chocolate—bitter but rich. “On the beach back there. You were hiding. Why not run?”
It seems obvious to me, but then again, I was not the one standing over a dead officer when we met. It’s not like I had access to a gun like she did. “Did you kill that officer?”
So much for not being confrontational.
To her credit, she is steady under such a direct question. Steadily simmering, through narrowed eyes, but steady nonetheless.
I am the first to break. “I hid because I thought I could wait it out before I ran for the boat,” I say. “And because I’d been to that boardwalk enough times to know the sand was explosive.”
“Wait it out,” she repeats. Not a question, just a statement. A judgment, maybe.
“I . . .” I bite my lip. “It seemed wise to learn from other people’s mistakes.”
“Let them step on the mines first, you mean.”
It’s obvious that’s exactly what I mean. When she puts it that way, it sounds much worse than I intended. Something black stirs in me, a cloud of octopus ink obscuring my moral compass. It’s not my fault the mines were there, and it’s not like stepping on one would have saved anyone else. Even if I’d stood up and boldly warned the stampede not to step onto the sand, I would have been trampled or shot.
But still. People died, and I am here on this boat, very much alive, because I stepped carefully around their broken, lifeless limbs.
“Then we took the same approach,” she says. “Essentially.”
I don’t follow, and my face must clearly say I don’t follow, because she smirks as if pleased to have made an inside joke with herself. She pours what’s left of the half-full water bottle into her mouth and drinks, drinks, drinks until it’s empty.
“We both used them to set off the mines so we wouldn’t have to,” she says, finally. “So we could escape. Right?”
This is not new information. I nod as if to say, Obviously.
“The difference between us is that you made your plan after it was too late to save anyone,” she says, “while I was the one who set the factory explosions that flushed them out in the first place.”
EIGHT
ONCE UPON A time, the world was full of dreams, despite its heartache, and love, despite its brokenness.
Once upon a time, the world was full of color: the egg-yolk yellow of highway stripes framed by pitch-black tar and a blurred rainbow of wildflowers.
Now the world is being swallowed by the sea—and what’s left is choked in green, weeds of envy and power. And, sometimes, a love for justice taken to painful extremes.
It’s become difficult to tell the weeds from the flowers.
NINE
ALEXA IS A dandelion. She hides her secrets well, as if they are petals on the verge of dissolving into wisps. Even her confession—this huge, glaring, so-honest-it-hurts confession—only raises more questions.
I try to form words. I fail.
“Don’t tell the others,” she says. “It will make things weird.”
Hope and Finnley have a right to know. But then again, things are weird, now that she’s shared her secret. “Why did you tell me?”
She’s watched me for the past few minutes, but something about the way she watches has changed. Her eyes are still sharp, so sharp they cut me, but it’s like looking at a chef’s knife and realizing it’s meant to cut through tomatoes, not human hearts. The sharpness isn’t aimed at me—not anymore.
“Because you know I killed that officer, and you’re not afraid of me.”
I want to tell her she’s wrong. I am afraid: I am terrified, not of her past, but of her ability to talk about it so plainly. Of what other secrets she’s folded and tucked, neatly, out of sight and mind. Of what inspired her to commit these acts.