Chapter 8
Luna lay curledaround her knees, staring at her arm, at the band of the watch, dazed. How long had she been here? For too many long uncountable hours. She sent the pooled water away with a splash. It filled immediately.
Her ears hurt from the deafening noise, and now her whole head hurt. like it was squeezed, pressure, noise, ache, stress. Her jaw was constantly clenched. She was shivering cold. Her skin hurt because of the wet-cold-clammy everything.
How many hours? She shifted her arm to allow herself a glimpse of Beckett’s grandfather’s watch. It didn’t help. Time had passed, too much and too little, an endless loop of night and day — and she had thought herself found, but no.
She was lost.
She kept thinking about what her brothers would say: she was an idiot. A dying alone, idiot. A couldn’t do anything right, not even the most basic things, deserved what happened to her — because what kind of person ends up like this, alone, terrified, lost, making these kinds of mistakes? Life and death. Bad knots, poor directions, unsafe tent positions. These weren’t just mistakes. These were the kind of things that caused calamity. People could die. Would. Did. And she was a navigator. A part of a nomad family. A paddler. And she was going to die lost, alone, on land. A storm raining down.
A never-ending storm.
Because of never ending mistakes. Bad knots.
And she thought she was going to live with Beckett on a mountainside. Happy.
God, she was an idiot.
She couldn’t even cry anymore, her head hurt too bad, her insides dried and withered, in opposition to her sopping wet outsides.
She wrapped around Beckett’s watch and really did Go Bird. Past thinking, past hoping, past surviving.
