Marina pointed at the bag on the ground with shaking hands. “Mag. Magnes. Inside.”
I pulled out the block I had thought was a lighter.
Marina made sawing motions. “S-shave. On tinder.” She gestured weakly.
I peered closer and saw there were little cotton balls inside the baggie. What was she talking about? “This black stuff will light the balls on fire?”
Marina closed her eyes and sank into the coat.
“Marina. Don’t leave me here alone. I need help!”
No response.
“Marina!” I leaned toward her. My heart pounded as I tried to hear hers. Please let her stay alive. I pressed my ear to her nose. I sighed when I felt and heard her breath.
Then I studied the block, turning it over in my hands. It looked like one side had been gouged away by a knife or something, and the other side had a black stripe down it like the matchbox. The cotton balls dropped onto my small pile of sticks when I shook out the bag. They were coated in some kind of goo.
I pulled Marina’s knife from its sheath. When I saw it on the boat, I never would have guessed I’d be using it.
I scraped the knife down the side of the block and little pieces came off that looked like metal shavings. I pushed harder on the knife with the blade facing up, and dragged it along the block toward my foot. More pieces came off. Then I flipped over the block and studied the stripe again.
How did this light a fire? I tapped it with the knife and was surprised when a little spark flared off it.
“Whoa!” I looked at the knife in my hand, then back at the block.
Holding the block up, I struck it with the knife again, harder. This time a shower of bright sparks came off. This was easier than thin, small matches; the knife wasn’t going to snap in my fingers.
After a few tries, I figured out how to aim the sparks onto the shavings. They burst into flames, and then the cotton balls ignited.
I sat back, stunned. “I made a fire!”
I turned to Marina. “Hey, look! I made this!”
I dropped the block and put my hand in front of her nose again. Still breathing.
The flames were starting to die. I put more sticks on top and the flames caught. Pretty soon, the fire was crackling and popping and the heat bounced off the boulder toward us. I held my palms toward it and smiled. But my smile faded as I looked up. Darkness was falling fast.
“Are they going to find us at night, Marina?”
Relief crashed through me when she opened her eyes, but she said nothing. We looked at each other over the smoke of the fire. She looked scared. I remembered how scared I was in the ocean and how her calmness had helped me feel better.
“Don’t worry,” I said, forcing my voice to sound relaxed. “I’m going to make us a shelter. We’re going to survive the night. And then the rescuers will come.” I wasn’t sure about any of it, but it looked like Marina needed to hear it.
I tried to picture what our tent looked like when we set it up in the yard. Back when Stacey used to do cool things like that with me.
“I need a long branch to use as a ridgepole,” I told Marina. “I’ll be right back.”
Racing toward the forest, I searched the ground as I went. I brought all the things I gathered back to the fire and piled them next to Marina. As I worked, I kept talking.
“We have to make sure we don’t set up next to an ant nest. I made that mistake before. Stacey had ants crawling up her legs and biting her inside her pajamas! You should have heard her screaming! It was hilarious. But let’s not do that tonight.”
There was another boulder near the fire that was as high as my chest. We were above the tide line here, and the ground was dry. I propped one end of the long bare branch I’d found against the top of the boulder with the other end on the ground. Then I leaned the board we had brought to shore with us against the branch so it looked like one side of a tent.
I had to stop to add more wood to the fire. “I don’t like the dark,” I told Marina. “Not since I had to sit in a dark room for two whole days. No TV, no computer, no games. It sucked.”
I didn’t tell her the other thing I was even more afraid of than the dark.
For the other side of the shelter, I used pieces of driftwood, and then filled in the spaces between the driftwood with dried seaweed and smaller branches. Once it was done, it looked like a lumpy lean-to, with the opening facing the fire and the ocean. I bent and crawled in. There was enough room to turn and lie down with my feet at the narrow end and my head just inside. Though it looked dry, the ground was uneven and damp.
It was almost too dark to see. Mosquitoes whined in my ears. I brushed them away and raced back to the forest to collect armfuls of leaves. I brought them to the shelter and threw them inside. Then I pulled branches off trees, the kinds with lots of needles on them. Needles and cobwebs and mosquitoes stuck to my neck and face. I swatted at the bugs and ran back toward the light of the campfire.
“This is our mattress,” I told Marina as I arranged the branches on top of the leaves. I could see with the light of the fire. The mosquitoes weren’t as bad around the smoke.
“Come on.” I pulled Marina up and helped her slide in feet first. With the fire in front of us and the walls up, the heat from the fire filled the little shelter. After collecting more firewood, I crawled in next to Marina.
Once I stopped moving, I heard the quiet the waves had left in their wake. Instead of crashing, now they barely made a noise like frying eggs as they hissed up and down the gravel. An owl hooted somewhere behind us and I tensed.
“Marina, are you awake yet?”
She mumbled.
I needed someone to talk to so that bad thoughts wouldn’t come. The noises were scary out here, not at all like our backyard with the porch light on and the sound of the neighbors’ TV and of cars driving by.
Suddenly, I heard a loud spray burst out of the ocean.
“What?” I yelped.
Then I recognized the blowing noise I’d heard on the whale tour boat, and my racing heart calmed. I threw more wood on the fire, and watched the sparks rise into the black toward the stars.
I lay back down. “Tomorrow, rescuers are going to find us—right, Marina?”
No answer.
The sounds of the humpbacks breathing kept me company.