Page 16 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I look at the hand. Scarred across the back, pruned from a night in wet sleeves, steady.

The ocean sits behind me, huge and patient, holding everything it knows about me. Ahead there's a smiling man with a plan and, unbelievably, dimples. Stupidly adorable dimples.

I take the hand. He hauls me up.

"For the record," I say, "if you say 'adventure' again at any point, I'm walking into the sea."

"Noted," he says. "It's a strong hydration strategy, but there's better out there."

We start walking.

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.