The second bright light in the sky grew rapidly, eclipsing the sun. Eva shielded her eyes. She heard Visitor cry out, and she thought desperately of how she could get a life preserver to him. Several lay next to the one she’d retrieved. She clung to it.
Then the bright light exploded.
Eva felt herself and the boat being picked up in the air, and she was aware of being lifted high above the sails. She squeezed her eyes shut as light blasted her and heat seared her skin, and she was helpless.
But not entirely.
She realized she was going to hit water, and she got her legs stretched out under her and held her breath. The water slapped her as she entered, but its coolness relieved the heat from the blast. Underwater, everything sounded muted, but she thought she heard a blast.
Still clinging to the yellow life vest, she bobbed to the surface and heard a second explosion. She ducked back under to avoid the second shockwave and thought about ditching the life vest so she could go further under. Fear of not being able to find it again kept her from letting go.
Waves pushed her around, and as she surfaced another wave smacked her in the face and she swallowed seawater. She gasped, coughed, and turned so her back faced the direction the wave came from. She tried to clear her one good eye with her hand without losing the vest. She couldn’t. She had to put the vest on.
Her eye stinging from saltwater, waves lifting her up and dropping her, she struggled with the alien buckles on the yellow life vest. She couldn’t figure out how to open them. She finally took a breath, put the life vest over her head, allowed herself to sink into the water, and put her arms up through the opening, wrenching her left shoulder as she tried to worm into the vest. As it came down over her and she was able to push her head through the top, it reminded her of when she had squirmed out of the nightdress the Lord Admiral had held during a drunken stupor. Escaping from him, she’d thought she was saving her life at the time.
Squirming into this vest might be saving her life right now.
Her hands free from clinging to the preserver, she cleared her eye and used her arms and legs to turn about in the water.
The boat wasn’t far, no more than twenty feet from her. She must not have been thrown as far as it felt, or else the boat had been thrown with her. If the boat had been thrown as far as she had, at least it hadn’t landed on her.
It lay on its side, the mast still attached and pointing toward Eva. The sails lay on the water surface.
She swam, awkwardly with the life vest on, to the mast and grabbed it.
The boat looked less damaged than she’d expected. There was no sign of Visitor on it.
As she put her weight on the mast, it sank, and water rushed over the top of the sails.
“No, no, no, no,” she cried as the delicate equilibrium that had kept the boat on its side disappeared and it rolled slowly over. She swam away desperately, feeling water pull her toward the capsizing vessel until it pushed her away instead, and the boat completed its turn with a large splash.
She shook her head at the now upside down vessel, its large keel fin sticking straight up in the air making the boat look like a bloated, beached shark.
Visitor was going to kill her for capsizing his boat.
Visitor!
Where was he?
He hadn’t had a life jacket like her. He must have clung to the deck. Was he underwater now? Had he been inside the cabin when the sailboat went over?
She quickly recreated the effects of the initial explosion and decided he would have been thrown clear like she was. He couldn’t be in the cabin below deck because she’d been in the way. He had been more exposed on the deck than she’d been and he could have been thrown farther away.
“Visitor!” she cried, turning away from the boat in the direction she’d been thrown. “Visitor!”
She felt stupid calling him Visitor. She remembered an acquaintance with a name that didn’t match its spelling. People who didn’t know him could never pronounce it. Whenever he ordered food in a crowded bar, he always gave the name ‘Joe’, but he didn’t always remember that he was supposed to be Joe when the waitress yelled his name with his order.
She could yell ‘Visitor’ all day, but the man she’d been sailing with might not remember that that’s what he was supposed to answer to. If the stupid Hrwang would just start using names, life would be so much easier.
“Visitor!”
She swam tentatively. The life vest made it challenging, but this far out in the ocean, she didn’t want to be without it. It kept her from having to work to keep her head above water.
Visitor hadn’t had one.
“Visitor!”
She almost switched to yelling, “Moron!” She’d yelled that at him when she’d been locked up and she felt like yelling that at him now. But even if he didn’t understand the English word, it didn’t seem right. He wasn’t a moron. He’d eventually helped her, and now if he died, she’d be responsible. She hadn’t given him a life vest.
She had to find him.
“Visitor!”
She didn’t hear any more explosions behind her, but waves continued pushing her up and down, making it difficult to see a floating body anywhere. If the water were still, she’d be able to see him.
“Visitor!” she cried as loud as she could. He couldn’t be that far. If he hadn’t heard this time, he was never going to hear her. She needed to focus on where he was and get to him as quickly as possible.
She turned to estimate how far she’d swum and she couldn’t tell. She decided the boat looked about the same size, or a little smaller, than it had when she began swimming toward it, so she must be about the same distance away as she’d been thrown. But it should have been easier to figure out the distance. Everything looked flat and the same distance away.
Focus Eva, she told herself.
She began swimming in an arc around the boat, hoping she’d picked the correct direction. Waves continued to toss her about, making every stroke a challenge. Sometimes she felt she wasn’t even moving. If she hadn’t been wearing the life vest, the ocean would have exhausted her strength.
Visitor was probably dying, if not already dead. She had to get to him.
“Visitor!” she cried again, uselessly.
The ocean had been calm as they’d sailed. The blast must have stirred up the water. It must have been huge.
A meteor.
She decided as she swam that what she’d seen had been a meteor. Just like the Hrwang had struck the Earth with meteors, someone had struck Hrwang with a meteor. Had Earth counterattacked?
Not possible, she thought. Not this quickly. There was no way they could have learned to harness the alien technology in time. Even though she’d traveled two and a half years, any counterattacking force would also be required to travel two and a half years to get here. That meant they would have had to develop the ability during the same period of time as she’d been here.
She had no idea how long that had been.
“Visitor!” she yelled. It was useless. She was never going to find him. Choppy waves picked her up and slapped her face, blinding her one good eye, pushing her around and keeping her from making progress. She couldn’t tell if she swam in a proper arc. He couldn’t be far, but she couldn’t search quickly enough.
“Visitor!” she screamed.
She’d gotten too far from the boat. It looked too small now, so she began swimming back.
“Stupid idiot,” she grumbled to herself in English. It felt good to speak aloud in her native language. “Stupid idiot should have been wearing a life vest. Everyone’s supposed to wear a vest on a boat, right?”
Her arms tired. She kicked with her legs.
Her once strong arms, muscular and trained, were now thin twigs. She’d lost much of her muscle mass in prison and she hated it. She wanted to go on a training r
egime and get back into shape. She was useless and weak now, and she despised feeling that way.
She struggled through the water.
Another wave picked her up and pushed her sideways and she collided with the body before she saw it.
“No!” she cried, and she grabbed the figure, turning him over. He flopped onto his back.
“No!”
In a panic, she tried to recall everything she’d been taught about rescue breathing. She kicked herself up in the water and put her face over his, but remembered she had to clear his airway first. If he had something blocking it, like water, she’d just force it down into his lungs.
She tried to get under him and push with her legs, forcing him upright. She held him from behind and her arms squeezed him as she fought the water to move him.
He threw up.
Then he groaned.
Eva cried out in relief.
“You’re breathing, right? If you can make a noise, you’re breathing. Right?”
He threw up again.
Feeling lighter, feeling some hope, she towed him away from the mess he’d made. A wave pushed them back into it.
“You’re alive, right?”
She wiped his face with her hand and tried to feel his breath. He was heavy in the water, and even with the life vest on, he pushed her down and she had to kick to keep her mouth above the surface.
Grateful that he wore the ridiculous, 1800’s style swimsuit, she could hold on to the fabric easier than she could have held on to his slick body. He moaned and mumbled something in Est.
He was alive.
She focused now on getting him to the boat. She couldn’t stay out here in the water forever, holding on to him and trying to keep them both from sinking.
The boat seemed forever away, but she had to get there.
Towing was difficult. When she kicked her legs to swim, she kicked his useless legs hanging in the water, and she got nowhere.
She maneuvered to get beside him, her left arm over his chest, cradling him close to her vest to keep his head out of the water, and she began to swim a side stroke.
Each stroke gained little headway, but after a few minutes she seemed little closer to the capsized sailboat. She stopped to rest, panting in Visitor’s face.
“Still with me, buddy?” she asked in English. Speaking a foreign language was too much at the moment.
She comforted him in English as she towed, stopping to rest and check on him often. He still breathed but was unconscious. She thought she heard a rattle in his breath, but the turbulent ocean still pushed and pulled and slapped her, making it difficult for her to listen properly.
As they drew nearer to the boat, the ocean calmed, and Eva made better progress. She lay on her back, her hand balled up in the collar of Visitor’s swimsuit, towing him on his back also. When she stopped to rest, she looked around to make sure she still swam in the right direction. She didn’t want to overshoot the boat. She didn’t have the strength to waste a single minute swimming the wrong way.
They reached the boat.
The hull of the capsized sailboat was too steep to crawl up. There wasn’t anything to hold on to. She made her way around to the stern. With relief, she grabbed a rail that extended down from the deck.
“We made it,” she said, her voice choked. “We made it.” She knew he probably didn’t understand her English, but she didn’t care. She needed to talk to him.
“Okay. Now we wait to be rescued. You guys have a Coast Guard, right?” What if they didn’t? What if the Hrwang didn’t have a Coast Guard? There’d only been four boats in the marina. Were four boats worth a Coast Guard?
A wave rocked them. The boat rocked with it and Eva’s hand cramped as she struggled to keep a hold on Visitor. He still floated on his back. She couldn’t hold him forever that way. She needed to get a life vest on him.
“There’s a, uh, life vest, in the cabin on the ship. If I swam under to go get it, you wouldn’t go anywhere, would you?”
She pictured how she could tie him to the rail, but nothing worked. Nothing guaranteed his head would stay above the water when the boat rocked. She had to put a life vest on him now.
She only had one. Hers.
She looked up at the sky.
“Why is this stuff never easy?” she complained. Her arms had no strength, her hands hurt, one from holding his collar and the other from holding the railing, and she couldn’t catch her breath. She was exhausted.
Just this morning, she’d lain in a soft bed with a comfortable blanket and a servant had prepared breakfast for her. A breakfast of the only edible food in the house, food she quickly grew tired of, but food nonetheless.
Or was that yesterday?
She’d had cold water, too.
She didn’t have any now.
She needed water.
She pulled Visitor close to the rail. Pulling his stretched out collar up to the railing, she pulled it through and hung on to the end of it with one hand. It kept his head out of the water, acted like a little pulley to make it easier to hang on to him, and also kept her holding on.
And it freed one hand.
She studied the buckles on the Hrwang life vest. The same buckles that had defeated her when she’d been away from the boat and desperate to put the yellow preserver on.
Assess. Plan. Act.
She breathed deeply a few times, made sure Visitor was okay, switched hands so she held his collar through the railing with her left, and inspected the alien buckles.
There was nothing to squeeze on them. Nothing on the side. Nothing on the top. She could see where one side inserted to the other, but nothing she tugged or pushed moved.
Think.
Three buckles held the vest closed, and the one in the middle was the easiest for her to pull away from the vest and examine. She stared at it, stared at the harness that went into each side of it and around the vest, and she knew it had to open.
How would an alien think?
It had to open quickly, but not too easily. That was the purpose behind a squeeze release. It could latch easily into place, but you had to squeeze it from both sides for it to open. But when you did, it just popped.
Wouldn’t this be just as simple?
She punched the water.
“Morons!” she screamed at the inhabitants of the alien world. “Stupid idiot morons!” Why couldn’t they just design a stupid buckle like a human? Why did they have to be so stupidly alien? Why couldn’t they just do things normally?
Breathe.
She calmed down and pulled the buckle up again where she could see it. If she had a knife, she might be able to stick it into the mechanism and trigger the clasp to release. Or break it.
Surely even the stupid Hrwang were smart enough not to require that.
One thing looked like it should be pushed on, and Eva pushed on it in vain. It had to be the release for the latch. But it didn’t push.
She tried pushing it in, she tried sideways, she tried back, and she tried pushing it forward.
It moved.
It didn’t push, but it turned, and she realized she needed to roll it.
The latch opened.
Stupid aliens.
With the latch open, it was simple to loosen the buckle so it would fit around Visitor.
Assess. Plan. Act.
She could loosen the buckles, get one of his arms through one side, attach the bottom harness around him in case she dropped him, and run the top harness through the railing. That way he wouldn’t float away.
“You with me, buddy?”
He didn’t respond, but he still breathed.
“This is how it’s going to go down.” She explained everything aloud, and her plan made sense. His head would smack into the side of the boat when it was rocked by waves, but at least he wouldn?
??t float away while she looked for another life vest.
She reviewed the plan again and hoped it was worth it. She hoped she could find a second life vest for herself. And she had to find water. Hopefully the flask he brought was still inside. Food was too much to ask for. They probably lost what was left of their lunch when the boat capsized. She’d find what she could.
And a flare!
If there was a flare gun on board, she could fire it and get someone’s attention. Someone from the island, there were enough people who lived there, would have to see it.
She looked toward the island, Visitor’s home. The boat had rotated and now she could see it.
And Eva knew help wouldn’t be coming from there.
The entire island burned.
11