Savages

28: Nightlife

Sannah pulled her knees closer to her chest and wrapped her arm around her legs, fingers gripping the rough denim of her jeans. Her other hand was still clenched, involuntary and vice-like, around the wooden lat of the boat's perimeter bench, as it had been for the entire time since they'd returned aboard.

The wind tickled her hair, the boat bobbed quietly on the water, and the stars blinked above them in a squid-ink-dark sky. It was objectively beautiful, but Sannah wanted to be anywhere else but here.

It had been a dry-mouthed and tight-chested day's travel.

They'd reluctantly left their little woodland camp at dawn, after three days of rest and eating.

The official line had been that they were lingering to give Sannah time to "heal", but they all knew the unspoken truth. They were terrified of the water, haunted by the storm, and loathe to step back onto that rickety rocking boat  and back into the sea's sucking, destructive churn.

But step back they had to.

Gaen had killed two harts, and was concerned that the animals' microchips, combined with changed behaviours in the other large predators—namely, the wolves (the thought made Sannah shiver, but she'd seen nothing)—might lead the scientists to get suspicious about their little corner of the forest.

So, at dawn on the fourth day, with shaking hands and tight lips, the boat was launched.

Blessedly, the weather held calm, bright and not too cold, the vessel barely perturbed by the rippling waves, though that didn't keep Sannah's heart from beating in her throat.

The spooked trio barely spoke. The indifferent sun had moved from their faces, over their heads to their backs, then finally slipped behind the murmur of land at the horizon, and barely ten words had passed between them.

They were all fearful, and they all knew it. There was nothing else that needed to be said.

And on top of that, there was Gaen's confession.

The boat's engine spluttered out, and Sannah looked up. It had been on so long the absence of its petrol-chug sounded like a noise in itself, filling her ears.

They drifted sideways with the current.

Gaen came out of the wheelhouse, the map in his hands. Deera looked up from her place at the other side of the boat, her hunched repose mirroring Sannah's in tension if not in organisation.

"It's there," Gaen said, standing stiffly behind Deera and pointing over the side of the boat into the darkness. "Calside."

Words eleven to fourteen in the sum total of today's conversation.

Sannah dropped her legs and stood up from the bench, her fingers cramping as she uncurled her iron grip on the lat.

She walked over to their side of the boat, stopping before she reached them, wary of standing too close to Gaen. She felt slightly sick with nerves whenever he was in her eyeline.

Over the water, a streak of clustered lights shone bright in the distance. Their symmetrical pattern was solid above its meridian and twinkled below, the only indicator of the split between reality and the sea's reflection. A haze of light pollution made a blue-green crescent above the town.