Page 15 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

He hauls himself up beside me, wincing, and straightens his glasses. My stomach growls, right on cue, into the fog.

“Sorry, but I’m fresh out of muffins,” he says with a half smirk that is way too charming for the situation at hand.

"Don't you dare talk about your delicious muffins.” But it comes out with no edge on it at all, because I'm too tired to sharpen it enough to sound menacing.

He clears his throat.

"How are you feeling? I’m pretty thirsty myself, if I’m being honest.”

And there it is, gift-wrapped, the opening for the conversation I've been dreading since last night. He’s right, though. Water, not food, is what we need the most.

"We need fresh water today. That's the short version." I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them. “But we have an even bigger problem.”

"Okay." He settles. Actually settles, turns and gives me the whole of his attention, the way he did in the wheelhouse. "Hit me."

"Nobody is coming for us.”

The words hang between us like living things.

“They’ll send search and rescue," he says. “People were expecting us at AETHER. They’ll search for us.”

“We’ve drifted for hours. Go figure how far we are from where the Belle sank. We could be stuck here for days, weeks. There are thousands of tiny islands off this coast. It’ll be impossible for the search party to go through all of them.”

I watch him take in what I said.

He rubs both hands down his face, once. Breathes out long through his nose.

"Okay. So we're the mission now."

"...What?"

"That's the operative summary, right?" He looks over, and behind the tiredness and the salt-fogged lenses something in him has already reorganized. “If nobody's coming, then rescue isn't a thing that happens to us, it's a thing we build."

My throat does something tight and sudden that has nothing to do with thirst, and I look away, out at the fog, because my traitor face is not available for viewing at this time.

"Thank you," I say, to the fog.

"For what?"

“Listening to me like an adult."

He laughs, one rough note, and lets it go. And that's when the wind arrives.

Just a breath of it at first, cool on my wet cheek, moving the fog around like someone stirring milk into tea. Then more. The white goes thin, goes ragged, tears open in long slow rents, and then the entire island walks out of it.

It resolves from the top down. First a gray-green suggestion, then shape, then true: spruce forest, dense and dark, rising away from this ruined shore in ranks. Granite everywhere under it, pale bones of it breaking through the green, ledges and shoulders and long tumbled slopes.

The shoreline we wrecked on runs away to either side in black snaggles of rock and white surf, and the land climbs. And there, east and inland, standing up over the treeline with the last fog smoking off it, a bare dome of rock. High ground. The highest thing in sight, a gray bald summit shrugged up out of the forest, catching the first actual sunlight of this entire day.

It's not small, this island. And it's not nothing. It's forest and stone and it goes on for a while. And somewhere on it, statistically, water falls from the sky and has to end up somewhere.

Beside me, Rafe is on his feet.

"There," he says, and points at the dome, which, yes, obviously, but his whole face has changed, the grind gone out of it. This is what he looks like with a project. "Best sightlines on the island, guaranteed. From up there we get the whole picture, coastline, any structures, any boats working offshore, the lay of everything. And elevation means catchment. Rock basins, seeps, drainage lines. If there's standing fresh water anywhere obvious, we see it from there."

"That's a two-mile walk through that forest. Minimum. No trail, no water, no food."

"Then we should stop being on no water as fast as possible, which is the hill's whole argument." He looks down at me, and has the audacity to extend a hand, and the further audacity to grin. "Come on, Neri. Think of it as an adventure.”