Chen managed to walk without help by the time the first search group reached the western tree line, but each step sent a dull ache through his shin. Wang Lan kept glancing at the swelling below his trouser leg. She wanted to ask him why he’d provoked Kael, yet whenever she opened her mouth, the sight of his bruised face stopped her.
“He could have broken your leg,” she said at last.
“He might have.” Chen picked his way around a patch of exposed roots. “That doesn’t make him right.”
“It doesn’t make you safe, either.”
He didn’t answer. Their marriage had weathered years of arguments about work, money and the jobs he never seemed to get promoted into. On the mainland, Wang Lan had usually been the one to tell him when to swallow his pride. Here, swallowing it had not stopped Kael’s boot.
Zhang Tao walked a few paces behind them, carrying a broken plastic tub. He pretended to be interested in the ground but never let Chen get more than a few steps ahead. Every so often, he looked up the slope toward the cave Kai had claimed. Chen noticed, but he didn’t confront him. The last thing he needed was a fight that would leave him alone in the trees with no water and a leg that was getting harder to use.
They searched a shallow depression where rainwater might have gathered, then followed a narrow animal trail into thicker brush. The ground was dry beneath the leaves. Chen found a muddy hollow with a few insects hovering over it, crouched to examine the water and immediately stood again.
“Don’t drink it,” he told Zhang Tao, who had been eyeing the puddle. “It’s stagnant. We’d need to boil it, and we haven’t got a clean container or enough fuel to waste.”
Zhang Tao straightened, embarrassed at being caught. “I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a job and a wife who worries about you. Some of us haven’t had a proper drink since yesterday.”
Chen looked at him. “I haven’t either.”
Zhang Tao looked away and kicked at a clump of leaves. For a few minutes, the only sound was the rustle of their feet through the undergrowth. They found no stream, no spring, and no sign of fresh water. By late morning, Chen’s shirt was sticking to his back, and his injured leg had begun to tremble when he put weight on it.
The second search team had no better luck. They came back with a handful of branches, most of them green or slick from the sea air, and one cracked storage box that held nothing but soaked paper and a broken glass. When Chen pointed out that the wood would smoke rather than burn, Kael called him over to the central rock.
“Then find better wood,” Kael said. “That’s what you’re here for.”
“I’ve been looking for it all morning. The lower branches are damp, and the deadfall near the shore has been soaked. We need to search farther inland or find a place where wood has stayed under cover.”
Kael tapped the list he held. “You were sent to find water first.”
“And you sent Zhang Tao to watch me instead of help.”
Zhang Tao, who had just arrived, became intensely interested in the box at his feet.
Kael stepped closer. “Watch your tone.”
Chen glanced at Wang Lan. She was looking at him as if she could already see the next kick coming. He forced himself to lower his voice. “We’ve found nothing. I’m telling you what the terrain is like. If we keep searching the same stretch, we’ll keep finding the same rubbish.”
“Then change the route. I don’t need a lecture.” Kael turned away, but not before Chen saw him look toward Elara for approval.
Elara had been trying to turn the recovered debris into a system. She had a list of the people still able to walk, another of those who needed treatment, and a rough inventory of the handful of items worth keeping. It gave her something to do with her hands while the search parties failed. When Chen reported their lack of progress, she listened, asking two questions about the terrain before deciding to send a group farther east after lunch.
“Can you keep looking for water?” she asked him. “We need something reliable, not a puddle.”
“I can keep looking. I can’t promise there’s a source nearby.”
“I know that.” Her tone suggested she didn’t appreciate being reminded. “Just report what you find. We can’t afford people going off on their own.”
Chen almost told her that people could also die by obeying instructions that made no sense. Instead, he nodded and left to look for dry fuel.
On the way back, he stopped beside a woman from the public-relations team who had cut her palm on a strip of metal. He helped her rinse the wound with a little clean water from a bottle that had been recovered that morning, then wrapped it with a strip of cloth. It wasn’t much, but at least it was a problem he could solve.
“Thank you,” she said, watching him tie the knot. “Do you think we’ll get out?”
Chen took a moment before answering. “I think we’ll have a better chance if we prepare for another night instead of counting on a helicopter.”
She lowered her eyes. “Ms. Voss says it’s coming.”
“I hope she’s right.” He finished the bandage and returned the bottle. “But hope doesn’t keep a fire going.”
He knew someone had heard him because he saw the woman glance toward Kael. When he looked up, Zhang Tao was pretending to inspect the torn sleeve of his shirt.
By late afternoon, the camp had gathered more debris but gained little in the way of food or water. The survivors were irritable and tired, and the promise of compensation was already losing its shine. Elara assembled them near the central rock and spoke about staying organized, searching methodically, and keeping recovered supplies together. She repeated that the response team would be working to locate them, though she stopped short of naming a time.
Kai watched from the rise above the beach. Through the system, the situation was easy enough to read: Elara still controlled decisions, Kael enforced her instructions, and Chen was being watched while doing the work no one else knew how to do. The search parties had returned nearly empty-handed. The camp had no dependable source of water and no dry fuel stockpile.
Sora was waiting near the cave entrance when Kai turned from the beach. Her face had tightened at the sight of Chen’s limp.
“They’re going to break him before they ever find anything,” she said.
“Kicking a man doesn’t make him better at finding water.” Kai checked the straps on the small bundle he planned to carry. “But it may keep everyone else from arguing with them.”
“You could help him.”
“I could,” he said. “Then Elara would send the whole camp up here and call it a common supply.”
Sora didn’t like the answer, and he could see it. He didn’t blame her. She still wanted there to be a fair way through this, one where people could admit they were wrong and then act better. Kai had no such expectation left for Kael, and less every hour for Elara.
“I’m going east tomorrow,” he told her. “The tide pushed wreckage toward the black rocks. There may be sealed containers there that nobody’s checked.”
“Let me come.”
“You can barely walk.”
“I can walk far enough.”
He looked at her injured knee. The scrape was clean but swollen, and she had been limping since the night outside the cave. “Then we go slowly, and you do exactly what I tell you on the rocks. If the tide turns or you get dizzy, we come back. I’m not carrying you home because you’re too stubborn to say you’re hurt.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to carry me.”
“Good. Saves us both an argument.”
She gave him a look that might have been the start of a smile, but the moment passed when she glanced back toward the beach. Below them, Elara was speaking to a few survivors near the remains of the fire. Kael stood close enough to hear every word, his eyes moving over the group as if he were counting who might cause trouble.
“Do you think they’ll look for us?” Sora asked as they started down the slope. “Elara, I mean. If she notices I’m gone.”
“She’ll notice. You’re one more person who might know where the useful supplies are.”
“That’s a horrible way to put it.”
“It’s a horrible situation.” Kai waited while she negotiated a steep step with her good leg, then offered his hand without comment. She took it to steady herself and let go as soon as she was sure of her footing.
The island was giving them very little room to make mistakes. Kai intended to spend the next day looking for supplies, not fixing the camp’s politics.