Chapter 4 - Escape - Jordan

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"This sucks."

"It's not that bad."

"It is that bad. Sitting here on this rock dangling my feet in the water can't be the most exciting thing I've done all week. And yet, it is. I'd give my left leg for Internet access."

"Did you know that the water you're dangling your feet in comes from a hot spring under our mountain?"

"Don't care."

"Jordan, it's cool. It's created its own ecosystem with more species of microorganisms and insects just in this little pool alone than most of the rest of New Mexico altogether. Diving beetles, isopods, mollusks, millipedes–"

"Yuck, Jinho. Don't make me want to take my feet out. I just told you it's the most exciting thing I've done all week." She reached over and turned a knob on a small radio providing a tinny musical backdrop. Scratchy speakers did nothing to improve the grating country music that spewed forth. Without an antenna, they had two choices, country music or country music, and they both faded in and out depending on the weather. Neither choice was a genre Jordan would pick if there were any other available options. She was more into EDM and had fallen hard for dubstep just before they moved into this godforsaken silence.

"Beggars can't be choosers," Jordan thought.

A yellow canary perched next to Jordan on the flat outcropping overlooking the pool where she and Jinho sat side by side. A delicate gold chain looped around one claw. Conditioned to believe it could not fly away while the chain was attached, the tiny bird hopped around peeping happily and pecking at anything that looked like a bug. To Jordan's delight, it shook itself and fluffed out its feathers until it was a poof of softness. She tried to reach over to touch it, but it flitted away from her fingers.

Jinho killed a water bug and laid it on the flat rock. He blew it toward the golden fluff. The canary tilted its head to watch the bug skitter by and hopped over to snap it up with its beak.

Jordan leaned forward, her long black hair draping either side of her pixie-like face. Her straight hair had been dyed to a jet-black sheen, but she could see the lighter brown roots in her reflection. She gazed into the water looking past the ripples bisecting their shins. The clean, cool water lay over a rocky bottom. The silver bellies of minnows flashed around her feet.

"Have you seen the crayfish in here?" Jinho slid off the ledge into the knee-high pool of water and flipped rocks beneath the surface.

"The what?"

"Orconectes causeyi. Crayfish. Those little crabby looking things with the pincers?" He pushed his black, large-rimmed glasses up on his nose and opened and closed his fingers as if they were pincers. She slapped his hands away.

"There aren't any crayfish in here. Just minnows."

"There are crayfish. They eat the minnows. All part of that ecosystem I was talking about. I'll show you."

Jordan hopped down off the ledge and together they waited for the ripples to settle. Jinho squatted down and moved aside a larger rock. A tiny crayfish squirted away in the cloud he had created. "Grab it!"

"I'm not grabbing it! It has pinchers!" Jordan danced away from where the crayfish had disappeared and scooched back up onto the ledge.

"They won't hurt you. He's just a little guy. Can hardly pinch at all yet."

He splashed into the water with both hands and came up empty. He waited for the subaqueous clouds to settle and poked around moving other stones, slower this time, so the rocky bottom would not kick up dust under the water.

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