“You’re crazy!” exclaimed Will.
“No, really,” Charla pleaded. “You were so sick on the raft! You were unconscious for days — ”
“That’s a lie! What have you done with my sister?”
Luke stepped forward and put a comforting hand on Will’s shoulder.
Wild with panic, Will shook him off and staggered back.
“Will, don’t!” Charla cried. “We can help you!”
Like a hunted animal, Will stared from face to face. They were lying, all three of them. They were trying to trick him into — what?
He had no way of knowing. He was lost — so lost. But whatever was going on, these three were mixed up in it somehow. He was in trouble, and who knew what had happened to Lyssa!
Animal instinct took over. With an inarticulate cry, he wheeled on the sand and sprinted down the beach.
He stole a quick glance over his shoulder. They were gaining on him! The girl ran like a cheetah. “Leave me alone!” he yelled. Desperately he made a right turn and disappeared into the jungle. Charla was hot on his heels.
“No!” cried Ian. “If we get lost in there, we won’t even find one another!”
Charla stopped just inside the trees. “We can’t just leave him!”
“We can’t help him if we’re worse off than he is,” Luke argued. “We’ve got to stay cool.”
“But — ” She began to cry. “It starts bad and just gets worse and worse! Losing the captain was terrible enough. I keep seeing it in my sleep. Then Lyssa and J.J. And now Will — ”
“We haven’t lost him,” soothed Luke. “Maybe the bugs will drive him out of there. They did it to us.”
“And maybe they won’t!” she sobbed. “He could trip and break a leg. He could fall unconscious again. There are wild boars out there!”
“They’re not hunters,” Ian put in. “The Discovery Channel did a show on them once. They can be nasty, but they won’t hunt a fellow animal for food.”
Charla was bitter. “Will’s not an animal; he’s our friend.”
“In the jungle, we’re all animals,” Ian said seriously. “We have to hunt and forage to survive.”
Luke eased himself down on the soft sand. “A wild pig means only one thing to me,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “Bacon.”
Charla sat beside him. “We can’t even open a coconut. You expect to track a boar, kill it, skin it, and cook it? We don’t even have a fire.”
“That should be job one,” Ian said positively. “A big bonfire would signal ships and planes that we’re here. Then we could get Will to a doctor.”
Charla looked out into the great blackness of the sea. “Do you really think we have a chance of being rescued from this place?”
Luke considered the problem. “The whole CNC thing is about isolation. They start you in Guam, which is nowhere, and they take you out to nowhere squared. And this” — he gazed around the beach — “this has to be even farther than that.”
“But they’ll definitely look for us,” Ian argued. “I mean, they send in half the army when some balloonist or mountain climber gets lost. They’ll search for us when we don’t show up back in Guam.”
“Searching and finding are two different things,” Luke pointed out. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a really big ocean with thousands of islands that look exactly like this one. Who knows how long it could take to track us down?”
“Months,” Charla predicted mournfully. “Years. Never, maybe.”
Her words seemed to hang there for a long time, underscored by the steady pounding of the ocean.
It was Ian who finally broke the gloomy silence. “It’s not impossible, you know. There are thousands of stories of survival in places like this.”
“Maybe so,” Luke said grimly. “But I’ll bet there were even more that didn’t get told because the people were never rescued. Remember, the Discovery Channel can’t interview you when you’ve vanished off the face of the earth.”
A single ray of tropical sunlight caught the left half of Ian Sikorsky’s glasses. Carefully, the boy angled the lens to reflect the intensified beam onto the pile of leaves on the sand in front of him.
There was a breathless silence. Then —
“It’s not burning,” Charla observed, worried.
“The leaves are still a little damp.” Ian’s eyes never wavered from the tiny dot of light concentrated on the brush.
“No, they aren’t,” she said. “We’ve been drying them out on the beach for three hours.”
“You’ve seen how it rains here. They’re wet.” A tiny but clear note of exasperation — Ian had little patience for people who disputed what was obvious.
There was an almost inaudible sizzle, and a tiny curl of smoke rose from the pile. And then — a newborn flame.
Charla let out a sigh of relief and realized she’d been holding her breath.
Luke was hard at work using vines to tie together a framework of branches for a lean-to shelter. He ran over to help Charla and Ian arrange kindling in a pyramid around the pile of burning leaves. Soon the fire was going strong. Larger and thicker pieces were added and the flames grew.
“How big does it have to be?” asked Charla.
“Big enough to be spotted from a distance at night,” replied Ian.
“It’ll be harder to see during the day,” Luke pointed out.
“True,” agreed Ian. “But if we notice a plane or boat, we can pile on wet leaves. That’ll make a lot of smoke.”
Wood gathering was a problem. Since they had no cutting tools, their fire had to be fueled by fallen branches and other deadwood. Stumps and thick logs were rare. Thinner twigs were plentiful, but they burned quickly. That meant a huge amount of wood had to be stockpiled to keep the fire going.
The three castaways made dozens of trips into the jungle that afternoon, returning with armload after armload of wood. It was backbreaking work. The sun was searingly hot, and the crushing humidity weighed them down as if they were wearing hundred-pound packs on their backs.
Luke was amazed they were able to do it all. Just yesterday, they had washed up on this island, more dead than alive. It showed what a long drink of water and some solid food could do.
In that area, things were improving. Just down the beach, a single spike of coral stuck out of the sand. Charla gave it its name: the can opener. Coconuts, tough, round, and stubborn, broke like eggs when smashed against it. That morning, she had shown why she was one of the country’s top young athletes. She had shinnied up a thirty-foot palm tree as easily as she strolled the beach. From there, she sent a dozen coconuts plummeting to her friends on the ground. After durians, coconut meat seemed as delicious and substantial as a twelve-course meal. The sweet milk tasted better than any triple-chocolate shake Luke could remember.
They had also discovered banana trees. Finger bananas, Charla called them, because they were small — about as long as an index finger. They were light and sweet and plentiful. It was starting to look like starvation would be the least of their worries.
But that was only because they had a lot of worries, Luke reminded himself. Will …
He shook his head to clear it. Will was probably okay. They had to look after their own survival first. Then they could search for Will.
By midafternoon, the shelter was complete. The three were as proud as if they had just built a skyscraper. It definitely wasn’t beautiful, but it was a very functional structure. The framework of branches and vines was propped and tied against two trees at the edge of the jungle. Into it, they had tightly woven palm fronds to create an angled roof.
“It won’t keep out the rain,” Luke had said to Ian, who was the lean-to’s designer.
“We’ll put pieces of tree bark on top,” Ian decided. “If you pile them thick enough, it’s perfect for waterproofing.”
Luke grinned at the boy. Ian had been sent on this trip because his parents were worried that he had no friends and spent all his time watching TV and surfin
g the Internet. But now, those hundreds of hours in front of the Learning Channel and National Geographic Explorer were starting to pay off. Without Ian’s know-how, Luke reflected, they would all probably be dead.
Luke and Charla took the raft that had carried them to the island and propped it against one open end of their new home. The opposite side, which was going to serve as the entrance, they draped with a large, slightly charred piece of sail from the Phoenix. This had been saved by Ian from the burning boat and used as sun protection on the raft.
That left just the back end — the space between the two trees. There, Luke and Charla placed another framework of branches, with palm fronds basket-woven through the twigs.
“It’s not exactly the Hilton,” Luke said with a shrug, “but it’ll keep us dry. The sand should be comfortable for sleeping.”
They had been working nonstop since the sunrise had awoken them ten hours earlier. Now the castaways allowed themselves a thirty-second period of relaxation.
They were exhausted from their labors, and still weary from their ordeal on the raft, but when their eyes locked, there was perfect understanding and agreement among the three.
“Let’s go get him,” said Ian as they headed into the woods to search for Will.
At that moment, the three might not have recognized Will even if they’d found him. In a single night, their friend had changed. His face had been bruised by branches and scratched by the sharp edges of palm fronds during his frantic escape in the pitch-black. He couldn’t believe how thick the foliage was here. At one point he had stumbled into a stand of ferns so dense that he’d been thrown back as if the plants themselves had pushed him away.
What was left of his body after that went to the mosquitoes — clouds of them, coming in waves like the Air Force on a bombing run. He’d tried slapping them away at first. But there were far too many — and too much of his skin left uncovered. Eventually, hundreds of bite-bumps grew together into a horrible shell of puffy red mottled skin. His face felt expanded, deformed. His eyelids were swollen partway shut. The discomfort was unbelievable — far more than itch. His entire body crawled with a churning irritation that scratching only made worse.
Sleep? — Hah! Who could sleep in a state like that? Curled into a miserable ball on the ground, roots digging into his side, ants parading over him, mosquitoes …
Ugh, mosquitoes.
He had broken down during the night, screaming, “How could you do this to me?!” At that moment, he didn’t care who heard him or even what happened to him. It was all so useless! He didn’t even know who he was yelling at.
His parents? They had sent their son and daughter halfway around the world for a boat trip, but this couldn’t have been their fault. Lyssa? She was rotten, sure, but not rotten enough to do this. Probably she was a victim just like he was.
Those kids? Luke, Charla, and that little guy — Ian?
Will peered out from behind a leafy fern and watched them disappear into the jungle, calling for him.
How did they know his name?
They had to be in on it somehow. They talked about Charting a New Course. And Lyssa …
Of course they could have gotten Lyssa’s name from him. If only he could think straight!
It must be the mosquitoes ….
He stepped out onto the beach. A tiny droplet of blood hit the sand, and he quickly buried it with his tattered sneaker. He didn’t want them to know he was watching them. He’d woken up with a leech clamped onto his cheek. It didn’t hurt much — he barely noticed it, in fact, over all that itch. But the bite wouldn’t stop bleeding.
The creatures they had here in Guam! Leeches, bugs, lizards, some kind of hairy wild pigs.
Frowning, he squinted at the crude shelter and the bonfire roaring beside it. If those kids were in on this, why were they living like cave people?
The shipwreck story, of course. Their whole lie was that the Phoenix had sunk, and they were marooned here. So they had to act like castaways. Only — why bother playing the game in the first place? Will was alone, stranded, defenseless. What threat did he pose to them?
His head pounded as he struggled to reason it out. Even though it was daylight, he still saw everything through the same silver-gray mist. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky! Maybe it was sun glare acting on eyes that were little more than slits.
A fresh blast of fear stiffened his body. They were after him! It was the only explanation. They needed him for something, and they couldn’t leave until they had him.
Well, they won’t get me!
He took a few steps back toward the jungle and froze.
This campsite was primitive, but it had fire, which was a lot more than he could say for his own sleeping arrangements. Although this was a hot climate, last night had been damp and chilly.
He rummaged through the woodpile and came up with a sturdy twig, which he held to the flame. In a moment he was wielding a torch. Tonight he would have his own fire.
His swollen eyes fell on the cabin top propped against the side of the shelter. He read the letters: N-I-X.
N-i-x … Phoenix?
He had a sudden fleeting vision of a tall ship. A schooner — two masts, her white sails gleaming in the sun as she glided through the harbor.
No, impossible. He mustn’t let himself be duped.
He examined the sheet covering the entrance to the structure. It was canvas, with brown charring around one edge.
His fevered mind traveled back to Luke’s words from the night before: There was a storm and then an explosion ….
An explosion.
“No,” he said aloud. “You’re trying to trick me ….”
He was about to bolt, to run for the trees, when he saw it. Just inside the shelter — two big bunches of finger bananas.
Food.
He set his torch down in the fire and attacked the meal with a ferocity that alarmed him. It was over in minutes, and he was still hungry, almost as if eating had unleashed his full appetite. And now dozens of peels lay on the sand, evidence of his presence there. He could get rid of them, but that wouldn’t explain what happened to all those bananas ….
He stood up, mind racing. He couldn’t let those kids know he was spying on them. He retrieved his torch and held it to the shelter. The dry twigs and bark went up like a tinderbox.
There, that should destroy the evidence. Except for footprints. And Will’s looked no different than the hundreds made by those three kids. No way would they be able to tell they’d had a visitor. They’d have to blame the fire on the wind.
By the time he’d reached the trees, the entire lean-to was engulfed in flames.
Stupid, thought Charla.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
She dropped her armload of twigs for their new shelter. Stupid to put the old one so close to the fire. “What a waste of time,” she complained.
Luke appeared, hauling a thin log that would be one of the main posts. “We’re marooned on a deserted island,” he reminded her. “Time is the one thing we’ve got lots of.”
“Big joke,” she muttered.
He awarded her an encouraging slap on the shoulder. “We were dumb. We’ll know better next time. We won’t put the lean-to where the wind can blow the fire into it.”
She winced at the memory. By the time they’d returned from looking for Will, there had been nothing left but a pile of ash. Only their raft had been spared — the second blaze the cabin top had survived, although it was badly burned. The half name, NIX, was barely visible under the brown scorching.
“Come on,” said Luke. “We need more vines.”
In the jungle, they found Ian snapping branches off a large tree that had fallen over. “Jackpot,” he called. “I’ll bet there are enough sticks to fill in the whole roof and front.”
Soon a huge pile of twigs sat on the soft ground beside them. Charla gathered up as many as she could carry and started back for the beach.
Suddenly, a long thin shape dropped
from a treetop. It landed on Charla’s shoulders and quickly wrapped itself around her neck.
Ian made the identification. “Snake!”
Charla tried to wrench it away, but the harder she pulled, the tighter the long body coiled around her.
“Yeow!” Needlelike teeth sunk into the skin just above her wrist.
Ian picked up a rock and smacked the snake on its squarish head. Dazed, it loosened its grip, and Luke managed to yank it off Charla.
“Get rid of it!” she commanded.
Luke threw. The snake was whirled away in a whiplike motion. It hit the ground and recovered with lightning quickness, lifting itself nearly vertical.
“Look at that muscle control,” breathed Ian. “It’s balanced on no more than a few inches of its tail.”
“You know about these things?” Luke panted.
Ian threw his rock, missing the snake by inches. In a flash, it darted up a palm trunk and disappeared. “It’s a brown tree snake,” he explained. “We have to be more careful. There are zillions of them on Pacific islands like this.”
“Never mind that,” snapped Charla, holding her bleeding wrist. “Is it poisonous?”
The younger boy shook his head. “But you don’t want the bite to get infected. You should soak it in salt water in the ocean.”
“Good idea,” agreed Luke. He turned to Charla. “Take a swim. We’ll carry this stuff to the beach.”
* * *
With long, powerful strokes, Charla cut through the waves. Her wounded wrist stung a little from the salt, but she was fine. Better than fine. She was amazed at how quickly her training had asserted itself. She could almost see the Olympic-sized pool at the Y. Breaststroke, butterfly, backstroke, freestyle — how many lengths had she done in that thing? A thousand? Ten thousand? At least. All of them timed by her father and his ever-present stopwatch.
She tried to judge her present pace, deducting time for wave motion and current. A breaker caught her in the face and brought her back to reality. Was she crazy? What did it matter if this swim took three seconds or three hours? She was shipwrecked in a primitive wilderness. She might never again see civilization, much less any swim team. Only a fanatic would continue training now.