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 dothis . 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 mustbethe 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.
Thecreatures 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 thePhoenix 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 getme/
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-l-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, almostas 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 twigsand 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.
Day 3, 9:05 a.m.
Stupid, thought Charla.
Stupid, stupid, stupidl
She dropped her armload of twigs for their new shelter.Stupid to put the old one so closeto 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.
Abruptly, she stopped swimming and stood on the sandy bottom. Shewas a fanatic when it came to training. That was how she’d gotten herself booked on thePhoenix in the first place.
On shore she could see Luke and Ian hauling armloads of wood out of the jungle. She felt a twingejfpf guilt. She should be helping instead of practicing for an event that was never going to take place. The sooner they were finished, the sooner they could continue their search for poor Will.
Bright flashes of silver caught her eye, and she looked down into the waist-deep water. A school of footlong fish darted all around her. She experienced a moment of fear were they piranhas?
She relaxed. Whatever they were, they seemed just curious, investigating a novel shape in their ocean.
The next thought to flash through her mind was: food. Her years of training had made a healthy eater of her. She’d always said that she could survive happily on nothing but fruit. But after only a couple of days, if she saw another banana or coconut, she was going to scream.
Could she catch a fish with her bare hands? Were these things even edible? Ian would probably know, but by the time she could ask him, the school would be long gone.
It was a cruel reality out here in nature, yet in a way it was very fair. No judges to appeal to, no instant replay. You make a mistake and your boat sinks, or your shelter burns down. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now, without thinking. *
A lightning thrust. She stabbed at the water and came up with a wriggling silver body.
Thunderstruck and delighted by her catch, she uttered a piercing shriek and began wading ashore, juggling the fish. Startled by her scream, Luke and Ian raced across the sand to her side.
“What’s the matter?” barked Luke.
“Lunch!” she crowed. “I caught lunch!”
“It’s a small bonito,” put in Ian. They looked blank so he added, “Very edible.”
Lunch thrashed wildly.
“But it’s not dead!” Luke protested.
“Well, make it dead!” she insisted.
Obediently, Luke reached out and slapped the fish over the head with his open hand. The bonito went on struggling.
“Here!” Ian held out a short stick, part of their construction material.
Luke grabbed it and took a swing just as Charla, shocked, pulled back her hands.
Whap!
“Ow!”
Lunch dropped to the wet sand. Before they could react, the bonito flipped its way into an oncoming wave and disappeared into the surf.
“You were supposed to hit the fish, not me!” Charla snapped.
“You moved!” Luke accused.
They stared at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing. Relieved, Ian joined in. As their merriment died down, they heard another sound. Not the usual island noises insects and birds and the lapping of the waves. This was mechanical the drone of motor and propellers.
Ian was the first to look up. “A plane!”
It appeared as a dot in the sky that grew bigger and better defined. It was a twin-engine seaplane. And there was no doubt about it it was heading for their little island.
“They must have seen our fire!” cried Charla, excitement vibrating her thin frame.
Ian frowned. “You know, the chances that we were spotted within a day because of a small bonfire are a million to one. I don’t understand how it could have happened.”
Luke slapped him on the back. “It happened because we got lucky for a change!” he said, choking back tears of emotion. “We’ve got to find Will! Now we can get him to a doctor.”
They ran along the shore, waving their arms and cheering.
The plane roared right over their heads and started across the island, its pontoons barely clearing the tops of the trees.
“Hey, where are they going?” cried Charla.
The aircraft disappeared over the jungle. The castaways waited for it to circle back for them, but it never did. Instead, they heard the engine power cut back, indicating descent. A few minutes later, the noise of the motor disappeared altogether.
Luke was dumbfounded. “Why would they land all the way over there?”
“They didn’t see us,” breathed Charla, devastated.
Ian thought it over. “Maybe they’re not here for us. Maybe there’s a village or outpost on the other side of the island.”
“It’s still good news,” Luke decided. “We just have to get over there and ask them to give us a ride somewhere. Even if there’s no room for us, at least we can get them to send help.”
“What if we can’t find them?” asked Charla.
Luke started out along the beach. “That plane landed in the water. If we follow the shore, we’ll hit it sooner or later. Let’s not waste any time.”
Charla hurried after him.
“Wait,” called Ian. He picked up the stick and wrote we’re alive in the hard flat sand by the water’s edge.
“Just in case they come looking for us while we’re gone,” he explained, rushing to catch up with the others.
What started out as a walk along the beach soon got a lot harder. Just around the bend from their campsite, the sandy shoreline ended, giving way to coral outcroppings and steep cliffs. In places, the rocks were so jagged and un-climbable that the three were forced to venture inland to make it over the rough spots.
“Keep your eyes on the water,” Luke ordered when they had to veer through a dense grove of trees. “We don’t want to walk right by that plane.”
“How far do you think we’ve come?” asked Charla, swatting mosquitoes.
Ian looked thoughtful. “It’s hard to say. We make great time on the beach, but when we have to start climbing, we’re doing more up and down than forward. Three maybe four miles.”
It was like an obstacle course. Much of the coastline was a series of coves shaped like giant bites out of the shore. These had to be followed around, or sometimes waded through. High rocks bound the inlets, so the castaways were constantly climbing. As they rose with the terrain, their hopes rose with them only to be dashed when they reached the top. For there lay another identical cove. The view was breathtaking, spectacular. But they had rescue on their minds. Any view that didn’t include the plane was a bitter disappointment.
“I hope they haven’t left already,” said Charla. “We’ve been at this for three hours.”
“We would have heard the engine,” Luke panted, starting down into another inlet.
The next rise was a steep one, becoming a sheer cliff near the top. Luckily, there was a grove of leafy saplings on the crest. Luke was able to hoist Charla high enough to get an arm around one of the narrow trunks. With her gymnastics training, she pulled herself to the top. Then, locking her ankles around the base of the tree, she hung herself downward. This allowed the others to use her as a human ladder. They climbed up her athletic body to the flat area at the summit.