Chapter 8
Rafe
Two miles. On a map, two miles is nothing. Two miles is a pleasant jog with a podcast about a murder.
Two miles of pathless Maine spruce forest, on a day of no water and a night of no sleep, is a land war.
The trees closed over us twenty minutes in, and the island stopped being scenery and became an opponent.
There's no walking here, not really. There's climbing over deadfall, and squeezing between trunks that grow in each other's armpits, and finding out that the nice flat green stretch ahead is a moss-covered boulder field designed by whoever engineers ankle injuries.
The granite comes up through the ground everywhere, slick with yesterday's rain, and the spruce needles hold the wet and slip as you pass.
So we're soaked again, but productively, which is what I keep telling myself. Productively soaked.
And my mouth. I stopped having saliva in any meaningful quantity an hour ago, about the same time a headache showed up behind my brows and started pounding in my skull from the inside.
"Talk to me about anything," I say, ducking a dead limb. "If I think about water I'm going to start monologuing about it, and neither of us wants that."
"Your funding model," she says, from somewhere behind and to the left. "Explain to me how you got a hundred and forty million dollars out of eleven governments, because I have been trying to get one job out of one field for two years."
"Bake sales. It's all bake sales. That's the secret shame of big astronomy."
"I knew it."
Here's what I've learned about Dr. Nerissa Marsh in three hours of land war. She doesn’t complain. She grumbles, she huffs and puffs. She scoffs plenty. But she doesn’t complain. She grits her teeth and pushes on.
The teamwork snuck up on her, I’m pretty sure. I go over the deadfall first and take her weight coming down; she spots my footing from behind, calls "left one's rotten" a half-second before my boot finds out the hard way. It works and we make good ground.
When we hit the cairns, waist-high stone stacks marching through the trees in a line only a crazy person or a lighthouse keeper would have laid, half of them collapsed into rubble, we fell into rebuilding the toppled ones as we passed.
Flag the trail behind us. Obvious. Neither of us said it out loud. Both of us just did it.
"Stop that," she says now, breathing hard, as I haul her up a granite step the size of a chest freezer.
"Stop what?"
"Being useful in a way I'd have to acknowledge."
"I would never." I hold the next spruce branch back so it doesn't take her eye out. "Tell me about your instrument time. Whose data are you stealing when we get back?"
And she's off, terse and vivid between breaths, about archival spectra and a survey nobody's mined right.
This is my other list, the one I'm not admitting to: she talks about her science the way the ocean sounded last night.
Big. Moving. Something underneath the whole time.
I ask one good question and she takes off for a full minute, fluent, hands sketching in the air even while she's scrambling one-handed up a rock.
We break out of the trees in the early afternoon, and the balds open up around us. The island shows us its bones: long rolling backs of bare granite, silver-gray, patched with lichen in continents, stunted spruce in the cracks and low mats of some ground-hugging berry bush spread out for acres.
The summit dome stands up ahead, closer now, a long walk and one honest scramble away. The sky's cleared to a rinsed pale blue and the sun is out. It would be beautiful, all of it, if my tongue didn't feel like a boot insole.
Thirst, at this stage, is loud. It's a full-time job with mandatory overtime.
But here's the thing about bald granite, and I know this not from astronomy but from a childhood spent hiking every trail in New England while listening to my father's opinions on the landscape: bare rock is a watershed with nothing to hide.
Rain lands, rain runs, rain collects, and it does it the same way every storm.
And it rained hard for half of yesterday.
The whole surface up here is a map of drainage if you read the stains.
Dark streaks where water runs. Green-black beards of moss where it lingers.
Most of the hollows I check are dead pools, sun-warmed, scummed, tadpole real estate. Drink that and lose the day to your stomach.
But there's a crease in the rock north of our line, a long seam where two granite backs lean together, and the moss along it isn't scruff, it's plush, it's thriving. And where the seam drops into a shaded pocket the size of a bathtub, the stain on the stone is wet.
Wet on a sunny afternoon means resupply. Wet means the rock is crying it out slowly from somewhere inside the hill.
I get on my knees at the lip of it, and there it is: a basin in shadow, palm-deep, maybe a gallon of clear water over clean granite, cold coming off it like a refrigerator door, and a seep at the back feeding it a patient bead at a time.
My knees make the decision before I do, and I have just enough civilization left in me to yell instead of drink.
"Neri! Water!"
She arrives at a dead run, doesn't slow, drops beside me. She looks at the clear cold contents, then at me, with the wild specific suspicion of a woman being offered a miracle by a known optimist.
"It's a seep." My voice is doing something ridiculous around the edges. Like I’m delirious with relief. Maybe I am. “Fed from inside the hill, filtered through the granite. It's cold, it's moving, it's clean. Best water on this island, I'd stake my degree on it.”
I cup my hands in the water, then bring them up to my cracked, dry lips.
I drink. And okay, it’s cold, stone-flavored and faintly green the way live water is, but right now it feels like pure heaven on my tongue.
The first swallow lands in me like a struck bell, and the headache lets go of one entire hemisphere on the spot.
I'd put it against any bottle on any shelf on the mainland.
I say something to that effect. Possibly to the water itself.
Her gaze goes from me to the water, then to me again. She purses her lips, then dips her hands in the water and scoops up a handful. She drinks.
I watch her throat move, three swallows, five.
"Oh my god," she says in a voice I've never heard her use.
We take turns at the basin, refill, drink, refill, let the seep catch up.
Somewhere in there the relief gets giddy.
Both of us. It's chemical, it's blood volume coming back online, I know exactly what it is and it doesn't matter.
Because Neri Marsh is sitting on sun-warm granite with water running down her chin and she's laughing.
Laughing. At me, technically, something I said to the seep, thanking it for its service. Her whole face is open and there's color back in her cheeks. Her hair has spent the day escaping her bun in coils of drying teal, and the sun is on her.
She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I say this as a man who has looked at the cosmos itself.
"What," she says, still laughing.
I'm staring. I'm aware I'm staring. She's aware I'm staring. I cough and look away.
"You found water," she says. Quieter. “I can’t believe it. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” It comes out low.
We are much closer together than we were a second ago, and I don't remember either of us moving.
Her eyes do a thing, a flick, down and back up, fast. Every system I have comes online at once and points the same direction.
The afternoon goes very still and very warm, and the distance between us starts closing at seep-speed, a patient bead at a time, her breath, my breath.
And then, from both of us, from nowhere and from everywhere, exactly simultaneous: retreat.
She turns and gets very interested in her fingernails. I turn and get very interested in the drainage patterns of the eastern balds. Neither of us fools the other. My heart is going like a lab centrifuge, and beside me the water drips with the same steady beat down into the basin.
That’s when I see our salvation.
"Berries," I announce, pointing to the left. "That ground cover. That's lowbush blueberry or I'm a chemist."
“Thank you, Mother Nature.” Her voice is one notch too bright. “Sure, you tried to kill us, but at least you’re giving us food and water.”
We don’t talk much after that. We pick our way onward across the balds, and the ground bush is blueberry, weeks from ripe except one sun-baked pocket where a scattering of berries has turned dusty-blue, tiny and sharp.
We strip them like bears with graduate degrees.
It's food, technically, a rounding error of food, but it helps anyway.
The light goes long and gold on the granite while we work toward the dome. The scramble to the top is real, hands-and-feet real, and neither of us has a second climb in us tonight. Dusk beats us to the summit push, exactly as advertised.
But below the last pitch, on the eastern shoulder, the rock left us a gift: a jumble of boulders leaned into a pocket, floored with dry needles and old leaves, walls of stone shouldering the wind up and over so it howls above without landing. We wedge in as the color drains out of the sky.
No fire. Everything that burns is soaked, and we don’t even have the energy to try. Tonight's furnace, once again, is us.
Last night the cold made the decision and we obeyed it.
Tonight she pauses, one second, visible in the gloom.
And then she chooses it, turns her back and fits herself against me and pulls my arm over her like a blanket.
I hold very still, the way you hold still when something wild sits down next to you on purpose.
Her hair smells like salt and rain and, underneath, improbably, faintly sweet, like coconut, like sunscreen in the summer.
"Your heart's loud," she says, half-asleep already.
"It's had a big day," I answer.
A tiny chuckle escapes through her nose.
The stone gives back its stored sun for an hour and then quits. The wind talks itself hoarse overhead. Somewhere below, all around, the sea keeps the island like a moat, and tomorrow there's a summit and whatever the summit shows us. None of that is what's keeping me awake.
What's keeping me awake is the way her gaze went down to my lips when we stood so close to each other, all I had to do to kiss her was lean in.
I'm in so much trouble.