Chapter 9
Neri
I surface from the best sleep I’ve had in five years to three facts, arriving in the worst possible order.
Fact one: I am warm. Genuinely, deeply warm, wrapped around a large heat source like a barnacle with tenure.
Fact two: the heat source is Rafael Vasquez, still asleep, breathing slow, and I am not merely adjacent to him. I have colonized him. My leg is thrown over his. My face is in his neck. I have, at some point in the night, executed a full landing over his body.
Fact three concerns the precise location of my right hand.
My hand is on it. It’s resting on it. There is absolutely no scholarly way to phrase where my hand is, palm-flat, fingers stretched and proprietary.
His crotch. That’s where my hand is. On his crotch, cupping a spectacular erection.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I don’t jerk away. Jerking away wakes people.
What I do is a slow-motion bomb-disposal retreat, one gram of pressure at a time, breath held, while my entire body ignites with a blush I can feel in my ears, in my scalp, possibly in my gills, which would be a new and terrible discovery about mer-biology.
Then I finally extricate myself from my embarrassing and compromising position, just in time.
Rafe makes a low sound and shifts, and I achieve a personal-best distance of three feet in less than a second. I arrange myself into the posture of a woman who has been awake for hours, thinking about geology.
He doesn’t open his eyes immediately. His arm sweeps the needle-floor where I was. Something about that small blind searching does a thing to my sternum that I refuse to look at.
Out. I need out, air, altitude, a task. The summit is right there, one scramble up the last pitch, and the morning haze is already lifting off it, which makes a perfect cover story: someone responsible should assess the view. I leave him sleeping and take my burning face up the rock.
The last stretch is hands-and-feet work, granite still night-cold under my palms, and then the dome rounds off and there’s nothing above me but sky, and I stand up on top of the island into the wind, and the whole world reports for duty.
Ocean. Everywhere, to every horizon, blue-gray and glittering, no mainland.
This is a confirmation of every grim slide in my deck.
But that’s the far field. The near field is the island, laid out below me like something on a bench waiting to be analyzed, and I turn slowly, cataloguing, because this is the first data set I’ve had in days and I am starving in more ways than one.
East, the balds we crossed, rolling silver-gray, the seep crease visible as a green seam.
North, the island’s spine drops off into cliffs, sixty, eighty feet of sheer granite with white surf chewing the bottom of it, the whole seaward side one long wall.
Bad coast. No landings there, ever. And on the far northwestern bluff, out near the island’s west end, something that stops my sweep cold: a ring.
A broken circle of stone, low, tumbled, unmistakably geometric against all this unplanned wilderness.
Not nature. Nature doesn’t do circles at that scale.
Somebody built something out there once, long enough ago that it’s a ruin, and the sight of it rearranges the entire island in one stroke.
People lived here. This rock held humans, held them long enough for them to stack stone in circles, which means it held them alive, which means water and shelter and some way to make it work.
And then I turn southwest, and I see it.
Below the summit the forest runs down the leeward slope and opens, halfway to the sea, into a meadow. An actual meadow, green-gold, tucked into the island’s sheltered armpit, and in it, at the back edge where the land rises, small and gray sits a cottage.
Stone walls. A roof made of dark slate that seems to be holding from the distance.
Below the meadow the land steps down to a crescent of pale beach between two granite headlands, calm as a held breath, the surf there a gentle white lace instead of teeth.
A sheltered cove. A landing. The polar opposite of the murdering coast we washed up on.
This is exactly what we need.
I stand in the wind with my eyes going unaccountably hot.
Shelter. Walls. A roof. The sight of one human roof on this whole green rock hits with a force I didn’t expect. It’s not much, but it’s hope.
“Rafe!” I call as I turn on my heel and scramble down.
I’m down the pitch before I’ve planned the route, ankles be warned, and into the boulder pocket, where Rafe is now sitting and is looking at me with the expression of a man who just woke up on a rock.
“There’s a cottage,” I say, out of breath and bracing my hands on my knees.
I get the entire show. The blink. The refocus. The slow sunrise across the whole face, stubble and salt and all of it, and then he’s up like the boulder ejected him.
“A cottage. A cottage-cottage? Walls? Roof?”
“Yes! Southwest side, in a meadow above a sheltered cove. There’s also a real beach.” I’m talking too fast, enthusiasm is leaking out of my seams. “It looks abandoned, but maybe there are things inside we can use to make a fire.”
“Fire is good.” He’s already radiating enough delight to power a small town, and there’s a stripe of dried salt down his jaw, and his hair has entered a phase unknown to science.
He’s adorable. “Neri, that’s the best news we’ve had on this island.
Maybe we could even fish on that beach. Some meat would do us good. ”
So we leave with our enthusiasm in our back pockets.
The blueberry pocket delivers again, two handfuls each, sharp and dusty-sweet, and Rafe holds up one berry to the light like a jeweler before eating it and pronounces this vintage “cheeky.” I laugh before I can stop myself.
It gets away from me entirely, unbudgeted, and he looks so pleased about it that I don’t have the heart to feel bad.
The descent is the forest again, but it feels somehow kinder, the spruce spaced wider, the ground running in long needle-floored aisles downhill.
We make real time. The sea flashes through the trees ahead in slivers of hammered silver, and the light down here is green and gold and church-quiet.
I’m so excited at the idea of food and shelter that I stop taking the time to look down before placing my next footing.
Which is, of course, when the island collects its toll.
A granite step, needle-drifted, looks exactly like every other granite step I’ve handled today.
I load my left foot and the needles slide on the wet stone underneath as soon as my weight presses on it.
My foot goes out to the side, and my ankle does something wrong, a specific, structural, wrong-angle give.
Pain shoots like a gasp inside my joint, and I’m down on the slope with the forest doing a slow roll around me and a hot wire running up the inside of my leg.
“Neri!” Rafe shouts a few feet above me.
“I’m fine.” It’s out before I’ve assessed anything, and then I touch my ankle and my body files an objection all the way through my teeth. “Okay. Revised finding. I’m not fine.”
He’s already there, kneeling, hands hovering, waiting.
Waiting for permission, even now, and something about that undoes me worse than pain.
I nod. His fingers work down my ankle through the sock, gentle, methodical, watching my face the whole time.
When he hits the spot that makes my breath hiss he stops instantly.
“Sprain, I’d bet, but not a break, you’d be a lot louder.” His voice is calm but his face is grim and his jaw is set. “Can it take weight?”
It can, technically, in the way a grant can technically be resubmitted.
Twenty percent, maybe, with a lean. He gets my arm over his shoulders, takes the rest of me against his side like it’s nothing, like I’m carry-on, and we descend the last of the slope in a slow three-legged rhythm, his hand firm at my waist, my dignity somewhere back up the hill with the pine needles.
“For the record,” I mutter, hopping, “This murder-forest has it out for me.”
He chuckles at that, but he doesn’t answer.
And then the trees end, and we’re in the meadow, wild grass to my knees, sea lavender in drifts of purple-gray, and unbelievably, roses, actual roses gone feral in tangled banks, pink-red and reckless, growing over a stone wall like the island kept a garden as a hostage all these years.
The air is warm here, sheltered, humming with bees, thick with grass-smell.
And there it is.
Up close it’s small and stubborn and perfect: stone walls a foot and a half thick, low and square-shouldered, the slate roof sagging in one corner but holding, two deep-set windows dark as patient eyes, a weathered door still on its hinges.
A keeper’s cottage with nobody left to keep anything, standing in its meadow, waiting.
We stop at the threshold, his arm around me, my arm over him, both of us wrecked and salt-crusted and breathing hard. The door is right there, one push away, and neither of us pushes it yet.
“Home sweet home?” he says.
The word should not fit anywhere on this rock. It goes in like a key.
“Open it before I say something optimistic,” I tell him.
And he does.