I woke to the sound of barking.
“What—?” Marina said. Her voice was hoarse. She’d been puking in the night, but I must’ve fallen back asleep.
I stumbled out of the shelter. It was still too dark to figure out what the weird shadows were on the beach. When my eyes adjusted I saw that the tide had slid up to the rocks.
Bark-bark-bark.
“Hello?” I yelled, hoping there were rescuers with dogs. I started toward the shore but stopped short when I saw what the noise was coming from.
“You found me,” I said. “And you brought your friends.”
“Huh?” Marina said from the shelter, louder.
Two dark, hulking outlines wriggled into the water with a splash. I gazed out at the sleek heads bobbing in the ocean. I was sure I recognized that mottled one with gray specks. She let out a loud bark when she saw me and dove under.
“Seals,” I told her. “Selkie is checking up on us.”
My tongue felt glued to the roof of my mouth. A throbbing pain pulsed at my temples and my throat ached.
Marina rolled over slowly to peer out of the shelter. “Where are the rescuers? They need to find us. I can’t stay here.”
My suit was draped over her like a blanket after she’d taken it off during the night. Her lips were cracked and peeling, and her hair was matted to one side of her head. She looked like she was about to cry.
We both desperately needed water. I looked at all the water in the ocean next to us. All the wet noises from the seals splashing around were making me crazy. But I knew from those salty waves crashing into my face that we couldn’t drink any of it.
“We must be out of the search grid,” Marina wailed. “Remember that island we missed? What if they don’t find us? My arm hurts. I’m so thirsty. If we don’t find water, we’re going to die.”
I stared at her. What had happened to the robot girl from yesterday? Her freak-out was making me freak out. I could feel my pulse speeding up. I needed breakfast. I needed to know where my parents were. I needed to go home.
I saw the blackened fire pit. It reminded me of that feeling I had last night when I lit the fire. I had felt in control. We needed to get warm, and I had done it. If I figured out that problem, I could tackle this one, too.
“We need to stop and think,” I said. “Where would we find water?”
Marina was too busy peeking under the bandanna at her wrist. It was as if I were the older one now. “I’ll go find a stream,” I said.
But after searching the thick forest behind the shelter, all I found were spider webs, an old tire, and a long white balloon, the kind they use to drape over the sides of boats to keep them from banging into things.
I also found a plastic water bottle, but it was empty. I licked my dry lips. The pounding in my head got worse.
When I stepped out of the forest, I noticed that all the grasses were bent over and wet with dew. I licked one, and the moisture felt so good in my mouth. I looked at the empty bottle in my hand and then at the grasses covered in water. If only there was a way to get the dew into the bottle.
I shrugged out of my sweater and tore off my shirtsleeve. Then I used the sleeve as a rag to mop up the dew. I squeezed the rag over the bottle and it began to fill. It took a while, but I managed to collect almost a quarter of a bottle. I brought it carefully back to the shelter. Marina was still huddled under my suit. When she turned and saw me, her eyes went big. “Oh!”
I was proud of the way she looked at me then. Not like I was someone who didn’t know port from starboard.
“How’s your arm?” I asked, handing her the open bottle.
She took a drink, measured how much was left, then took another small sip. “I’m really sick. It’s making me scared.” She wiped her mouth and ducked her head.
“I get scared too,” I said. “I’m the most scared person of anyone I know.”
“About what?” She handed me the rest of the water.
I thought of my parents and sister, of my gut worry over whether they got into the life raft, but couldn’t talk about any of that.
“I was on the gymnastics team.” I started gathering more sticks for a fire. “My friend Chad and I dared each other to do a giant swing on the high bar. You’re not supposed to go on the bar without Coach to spot you, but we snuck in. I landed on my head and got a concussion. For two days I had to sit in a dark room to heal my brain. Since then, my mom treats me like I’m about to fall on my head again any minute.”
“So you’re afraid of gymnastics? Is that why you’re not on the team anymore?”
I stopped scraping the black block with the knife. I’d never told anyone why. “What is this?” I held the block out to her.
“This is magnesium. The scrapings burn quick and hot. You can light fires if you don’t have matches.”
“Yeah,” I said, striking the knife against the block.
I sighed. “I guess I didn’t realize how high the horizontal bar was. I couldn’t do any of it after the accident. Not the rings, not the vault, not even the horse. Floor wasn’t my best event, so I quit. I can hardly climb stairs now. If I go too high, I start to shake and feel all fluttery.”
Marina paused, eyeballing me. Finally she gestured at the fire. “We need green branches.” She looked calmer now, not so freaked. I was relieved to see her eyes focus. It must’ve helped her to hear about other people being scared.
“Green?” I asked.
“Live branches to put on the fire. It makes smoke. We have to be ready to signal when the helicopters come.” She licked her lips. “And we need more water.”
My stomach growled so loud, we both looked around. Our eyes met and she gave me a shaky smile. “Food, too, I guess.”
“My pocket.” I pointed to the immersion suit on the ground next to her. “Animal crackers,” I said as she pulled out the Ziploc bag.
“You thought of everything,” she said.
We both dipped our fingers into the crumbs and licked them off. It didn’t make me any less hungry. Then I looked at the bag I’d left on the ground yesterday. It had a few drops of condensation in it. It reminded me of something Stacey had done in eighth grade.
“Hey, we can use this to make a solar still.”
“A what?”
“My sister had to do a school project for environmental science. Something to do with clean energy. I was surprised she was so smart, but then she told me she had read about it online.”
I laid out the plastic bags we had. One large one from Marina’s pocket and two small ones from mine. “If we fill these bags with plants, something green, and leave them in the sun, they sweat inside. We can make our own water to drink!”
Marina grinned. “That is smart!”
I found clean stones and put one in a corner of each bag with the leaves and then carefully laid them out in the sun. The water would collect at the lowest point, where the stones were, and I could add water to the bottle again.
During the day we waited, ready with the fire. But there were no rescue helicopters overhead. No boats coming to get us. We saw big ships passing through the mouth of the strait, but they were far away.
“How are they going to find us if they don’t come close enough to see our smoke?” I asked.
Marina craned her head to look up. She’d been drinking most of the water we got out of the solar stills, but she was still sick. She needed to go to a hospital.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “In the course I took, they just told us how not to drown. In all the stories, people who didn’t drown got rescued. But they’d better hurry; we can’t live much longer on dew. We can die from dehydration easier than drowning.”
I wished she’d stop talking about dying every two minutes.
An eagle flew over us.
“There’s another one,” Marina said, scanning the tops of the trees. The eagle landed on a branch, the white of its head stark against the backdrop of the forest. It stared down at us. “I wonder if . . .” She perked up. “There! I knew it! We’re saved!”
“What? Is it the helicopter? Where?” I stood up so fast I got dizzy.
“An eagle nest. This is where they set up the new cam. Now I know where we are! Wow, we’re farther up the Cape than I thought. We’ll never be able to walk to town. It’s too far.”
“What are you talking about? What’s a cam?”
“There’s a camera in that tree. The DNR just put it up so people could watch the eagles being born. All you have to do is go up there and signal.”
She looked at me then with dismay because she had just remembered my confession.
My gaze ran up the height of the tree. At the same time, my stomach sank. It was so high.
“I can’t,” I whispered.