Page 49 of Final Approach

He’d taken off his cut-off sweatshirt and his defined back muscles drew my gaze repeatedly, bunching and glistening with sweat. I couldn’t stop the tingling heat deep in my abdomen. Nikki wasn’t just attractive. He was hot.

It was the most inappropriate time to lust after my friend, and yet …

He turned when I approached and shot me a suggestive wink behind the one intact lens of his glasses.

“Hey, Cap,” he called, licking his lips with a grin. Did he just flex his muscles? Brat.

I stifled the giggle and swallowed it whole, not giving him the satisfaction. With all we had to do, Nikki’s body and what he could do with it should be the very last thing on my mind.

Survival first, Marley. Then, salivation.

Ambrose fell to his mat and let out a distorted groan through his hands. I bit my tongue. Was I concerned I’d have to redo his bandages? Yes. Did I want him to suffer a bit more before I offered?

Also, yes.

“Umm, Marley?” Tessa waved me over to the rations pile. “So, we did what you asked,” she bit her lip nervously, tucking two strands of messy brunette hair behind her ears. “And it looks like everyone gets two small bottles of water each, four bags of pretzels, two protein bars, a bag of almonds, and a stick of gum.”

“We’re doomed.” Vanessa’s tone was lifeless and her pale green eyes, the color of sea glass, were rimmed in red. She hadn’t stopped crying since her impalement, and I didn’t know how to help her.

“We’re not doomed, Nessie,” Tessa said, resting a soft hand on her shoulder. “This is just like going on a mini cleanse, right? Like we did last year for the lemon juice challenge.”

She met my gaze, then, her bright blue eyes still filled with optimism. “We’re going to be rescued soon, anyway. We’ll just be rescued a little lighter!”

As much as I didn’t agree with the positives of starving, I was at once grateful to have her here still brimming with encouraging energy. Nikki couldn’t be the only one keeping light in the darkness.

I injected as much warmth as I could into my returning smile.

“That’s great, Tessa. Thank you.” I emptied the small bag of avocados into the ration pile. “There are tons of trees in there, and I think I saw mangos growing a little distance away. I promise, we won’t starve.”

We would dehydrate, though, if we weren’t rescued by morning. The emergency crash kit had one 1000-calorie food bar and two 125-ml emergency water packets—enough for one person, for one day. Aileron had purchased the smallest, cheapest kit available, and we would pay the price for it.

Another reason in a list as long as an ancient scroll why I’d never fly for them again after this.

Brooks was already weaving one shelter cover around the wooden posts, and Madman moved around the other side to help them. The pair spoke back and forth in rapid Portuguese while Diaz and Nikki drove more posts into the ground. Diaz appeared calmer after they’d returned from their woods trek, and with the size of the egg on his forehead, I wondered if Nikki had decked him. I’d have to ask him later.

Danny wove another row on the second mat, and Ambrose held a few fronds in front of him, eyeing Danny’s movements archly.

Nine strangers moving in sync, committed to our temporary survival. There was a beauty in its simplicity.

I smelled the first drop of rain before I felt it. The cloying air changed from hot and vegetal, to cool and earthy before the skies opened up and poured.

“Hurry,” I shouted and scrambled to pick up the rations and put them under the first shelter. Tessa and Vanessa followed my lead and scooped up what they could of our minimal haul, dropping it under the roof cover before hiding under it themselves.

The bags were next, most of them emptied, but they would take forever to dry in the damp jungle heat. I grabbed three of them with Nikki and Maddox at my back, following my lead, and deposited them under the newly woven covering. I hadn’t expected our shelters to protect us from rain today, but they were already proving to be useful.

For our stuff, at least.

Streams of hot jungle rain saturated my hair and ran into my eyes. Maddox’s T-shirt clung to my skin like a wetsuit, and the cotton shorts I wore bagged down to my knees.

Rain meant drinking water, and drinking water meant we’d live another day.

Collecting the empty water bottles from a small pile where we’d thrown them, I set them out in a row on a flat part of the soil. There were ten in total—we’d each get another full day’s worth of rations to survive on. We’d have to boil it in the single metal canister Brooks had packed, but it was better than nothing.

The rain immediately absorbed back into the earth at my feet, the ground greedy for the saturation. The rush of sound in a space so eerily quiet this morning was a sensory relief. I stood like a statue in the middle of the riverbed and closed my eyes up to the sky, embracing the feeling of being washed by nature.

I felt Ambrose and Nikki moving closer before I heard them over the rush of the rain. When I cracked open one eye, they stood a few feet in front of me and Nikki squeezed a hotel-sized shampoo bottle into both of their palms.

The diatribe on my lips that shampoo was terrible for the environment died when I considered the fuel from our plane leaking into the earth just a few hundred feet away. That ship had sailed. We were the environmental bad guys, and saving a few ounces of shampoo wouldn’t be our redemption.