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THE MOONLIGHT DRIFTED on the waves, the silver light undulating and shimmering track. Somewhere, at the edges of my mind, there was some ancient myth or legend about a path of moonlight on water. But my brain was too exhausted to reach out and pluck it out of my memory. I just hoped it was a legend about the path leading somewhere good, instead of to our doom, because this one was leading us straight to the island.
When I turned every so often to check our progress, I saw it as a bulky shape rising out of the ocean, a black shadow against the moonlit sky. It was supposed to be uninhabited, and while part of me hoped that was true, and we wouldn’t find trouble, the other half hoped some lawless band with food, water, and clothing had claimed the territory as their own.
I wasn’t usually one to worry. Worry was a waste of time and an exercise in futility—you did what you had to do to the best of your ability, and that was it. You controlled what you could manage and let the rest go. Anything else, and you started flailing in what-ifs and might-bes, finding yourself worrying so much nothing got done. I’d seen it happen to my mother and, as a result, had warned myself off it long ago. You couldn’t do what I did and worry, and my father was living proof of that.
But the woman had lapsed into pensive silence after our conversation, and it had given my tired mind far too much quiet and time to think.
We had no food, water, shelter, or clothes. Yes, my father had drilled survival into us from the moment we’d been born, if not conceived. I could hunt and fish and start a fire and make a shelter. But all of that would only last so long, and I didn't know how long we would be here.
As much as I hated to admit it, and I wouldn’t admit it to the woman, rescue was next to impossible here. No one came near this island—not fishing trawlers, not warships from any country, and certainly no pleasure boats. Those that did would most likely be in as much trouble as we were, which would only make things worse for everyone. Even if no one had officially claimed it, the island was too close to disputed waters and too useless to make it of any concern.
No, the only way we were going to get off the island was by our own power. We would have to survive long enough to make it to the point the heat would be off us from the terrorists. Then, we could reverse this process.
But how long that would be, I had no idea. I didn’t know how long we could survive, either. It was summer now, but summer didn’t last long at these high latitudes, and there was no way we would survive the long, heavy winter.
An odd feeling began creeping over me, and it took me a moment to even isolate and identify it—it was uncertainty.
For once, I was uncertain of the outcome of our situation.
The feeling was unfamiliar to me and unsettling. Very few times in my life had I felt a situation was out of my control or that I had lost control. There were even fewer times when I hadn’t known the following steps, even if that had looked like certain death.
But nothing came to me, and I had no idea what awaited us or how we would get out of this and home alive.
There was a good chance we wouldn’t even get home dead, at that. Chances were, no one would ever find our bodies. My mother would never know what had happened to me, left wondering where I was for the rest of her life.
The thought was dark and brought with it more feelings I wasn’t used to and didn’t want to explore. Instead, I focused on the sound of the oars dipping into the waves, the creak of the oarlocks as they moved, rising with trails of water that cascaded back like a waterfall and returning with a small splash. Dip-rise-splash, dip-rise-splash.
Realizing I’d lost myself in thought, I turned to check our position. We’d only drifted a little, and more pressure on one oar put us back on course.
As I turned back, my gaze caught on the woman sitting across from me in the boat. She was still wrapped in her blanket, hunched against the chill of the night and the sea breezes. But her gaze was far out on the water, the moonlight at her back throwing her face into sharp angles and shadows.
She was an odd companion to have on this disastrous misadventure, but she’d kept up gamely, despite all that had happened. And even now, I couldn’t put the way her body had looked as she’d climbed into the boat out of my mind. The way the fiery light of the sunset had made her skin glow, the settling darkness outlining every soft curve and tight line.
It was probably the exhaustion kicking in, that slightly delirious stage when you’d been awake for too long when too much has happened, and your mind felt everything was game.
She’d fallen silent after I’d led her to the revelation about the terrorists’ suspected goals. But I didn’t know her well enough to see whether she was ruminating on the information, whether it had sobered her, or whether that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back after a traumatic day.
I didn’t know her at all, even though it seemed like multiple days had passed since I’d first seen her in that research building.
A little over half an hour later, we reached the island. I angled the boat towards what looked like a beach, rowing until I felt the hull scrape the sand. The ship rocked as I jumped out, and I saw the woman reach for the sides convulsively.
The weight of my exhaustion hit me like a gale-force wind as soon as the cold water hit muscles warm from rowing. They cramped up almost immediately as I grabbed for the ropes and began to haul it forward. But the pain was nothing compared to the bone-deep exhaustion that barely let me pull the boat through the water, the way my muscles screamed at me and quivered until I felt like I might collapse—something I’d never done in my life. I had to peel my fingers from around the rope as I shifted to pushing it up onto the sand because between that and the oars, the digits felt permanently warped into claws.
Then I couldn’t push any longer, my body ready to give out. I was grateful when I heard a splash, and the woman joined me, driving the craft forward in silence.
We managed to get the boat onto the beach before I couldn’t go any further and sank to my knees on the chill sand. The woman pushed the boat a little further, a living shadow in the moonlight.
“We need water.”
The words took a slow route to my brain, as though riding on molasses instead of synapses.
Water. We needed water.
I was suddenly, forcefully aware of the sandpaper quality of my mouth and tongue, dry as a bone. When was the last time I’d had water? Before the mission. Ages ago. Days ago. Months, even years ago. A human could go three days without water, but that didn’t mean you could survive that long without severe side effects that would make our time on this island even harder to live through. We may not have had food, but at least with water, we would be able to start a search for something.
“Where?” I managed to croak the words.
A shake of the woman’s head meant she didn’t know.
I didn’t know how long we’d stayed like that, myself in the sand as the waves washed up around me, freezing around my skin before departing. My thoughts wouldn’t work, nor would my body.
But a sound gradually made its way into my mind. At first, it was a buzz in the back, a trickle of something. Then, slowly, my tired thoughts grasped onto the sound of water above the sound of the waves on the shore.
A rush of water.
I wasn’t sure how I hauled myself to my feet, nor how I managed to lurch across the small beach towards the sound. Behind several large boulders, we finally found the source; moonlight glinted off a small waterfall, rushing down from one of the low cliffs that enveloped the beach on which we’d landed. It trickled into a pool of brackish water before joining and swirling with the current that would take it out to sea.
The woman and I knelt side-by-side, dipping our hands into the frosty waterfall, then bringing cupped palms to our mouths. With my muscles screaming at me and my mind still full of the terrible hardships of the day, I hadn’t paid attention to my other bodily needs, such as how thirsty I was. Everything had been bent on escaping and survival.
Now, I couldn’t seem to get enough, and I drank greedily, handful after handful of the crystal-clear water. The woman did the same, the water running down her mouth, hands, and arms in rivulets, droplets catching the light of the moon and shimmering on her skin.
Finally sated, we made our way back to the beach and the rowboat. I collapsed back onto the ground, the sand both soft and prickling against my skin. My eyes drifted closed, the lids too heavy to keep open any longer. I was aware of the woman moving around, shuffling through the bottom of the boat. I didn’t know what for because there was nothing in it, but then I heard a shift as she lay one of the blankets on the sand beside me.
Right. Blankets.
I rolled onto my stomach without even opening my eyes. The night was chilly, but I couldn’t even seem to move my arms to draw it up around me.
For the first time since I was a four-year-old, flailing with water closing over my head, I had felt that this was it. I’d really thought I was going to die.
The attack had come so suddenly. If I hadn’t delayed looking more closely at the cables, I would most likely be dead, too. Nothing in any of the intelligence reports had held any warning of an imminent attack. It had been, quite simply, a wrong-place, wrong-time situation.
Our mission had been for reconnaissance, with orders to take out anything we found. But we hadn’t even gotten a chance to carry out the surveillance. Had the terrorists been there already? Had we stumbled into one of their self-appointed missions? Or had they seen the small research station as we had and zeroed in on it?
Then again, the fact that the other members of the woman’s team had died a day before told me they’d been there for longer. Watching. Waiting. But for what? Were they always on the island, their headquarters somewhere around where we had landed? Which meant my plan to wait out the heat and return to the island for rescue wasn’t going to work.
There was no way to know, not right now. Now with my body and mind so fatigued, I felt like stone, unable to lift even a finger. Not with the sight of my dead teammates swimming in front of my eyes.
Everyone talked about the missions, but no one talked about what happened after. Some SEALs could turn it off, could compartmentalize their Navy SEAL life from their life at home. But I had never been one of them, as hard as I’d tried. My father had never been able to drill that one into me. Like Miller had said to me on the trawler, looking out over the ocean, motoring to our fate, I was always on. For some people, that meant being a Navy SEAL always. But for me, it meant there was no separation between this and the rest of my life. I carried those failures with me and remembered faces in my dreams. Maybe that was the part of me that took after my mother.
I’d really thought I was going to die.
We still could.
I didn’t know where we were, beyond an unclaimed territory too far from either Russia or Japan to be of any help. I didn’t know how to get rescued without alerting the enemy, either. Was this island under any flight path? Certainly, not any military planes, and a commercial flight would most likely be too high to see anything. And the only option open to me at the moment was an enormous bonfire, which probably wouldn’t work anyway, and in the process, would alert the terrorists to our exact location.
Pilots and passengers wouldn’t be looking, but the terrorists would.
And how were we going to survive in the meantime?
I knew nothing about this island. It had fresh water, but what else? Was there anything I could make a fire out of, or was it only cropped grass and wind-scoured lichen? I could fish, but fish and water didn’t mean survival.
In the morning, at least, I would make what shelter I could using the rowboat.
But that was all for the morning. Right now, we were alive, and I would have to take that for what it was.
The woman was saying something, but I didn’t hear—my mind was shutting down, and then there was nothing.
I woke up suddenly, the world coming back to me in a rush, the buzzing of night insects, the waves against the shore lapping rhythmically, gently against the beach, the lack of any type of city noise buzzing in my ears. A billion stars spread across the inky black sky above me, the sight so different from even the small town where my parents lived.
Turning my head, I looked beside me, expecting to see the woman asleep on her blanket. But instead of a human-shaped mound, the beach was empty.
I was on my feet instantly, my gaze sweeping the small beach without seeing her anywhere.
Where was she? Had the terrorists found us? Had the day been too much, the reality facing us too much, and she’d walked into the ocean?
It flashed through my mind that I didn’t even know her name to call for her.
My heart hammering in my ears, I searched the beach wildly for her footsteps and found them leading back towards the waterfall. I followed at a fast clip to the waterfall, then past it. It was too dark to see her path through the foliage, but I kept going, pushing branches and leaves out of my way until I suddenly found myself in a clearing.
The woman was standing in the middle of a grove of trees, her hands to her mouth, holding what looked like a piece of fruit. The moon's silver light shimmered over her bare curves, her long torso, her thighs, her long legs, and the swelling curve of her bottom and chest.
As I watched, she took a bite, the juices dribbling down her chin and her arms.
It might have been my exhaustion, it might have been the roller coaster of emotion from the day, but suddenly my heartbeat wasn’t hammering in my ears out of adrenaline.
