It glared at me, and I gave it some tuna from my stash of groceries and left the back door open so it could leave again.
I went upstairs and put my bed together. Well, I lined up the pieces, couldn’t find my screwdriver, and decided that for now I’d sleep on the mattress on the floor. I put some sheets on it though, and counted that as a win. Then I looked at the rest of my stuff, decided to ignore it, and went back downstairs to sit in the station foyer and look out at the view. I found a sign that said “POLICE” in one of the drawers, with some screws taped to the back. Since I still hadn’t found my screwdriver, I tied a piece of string through the screw holes, then went outside and hung the sign over the doorknob.
It hung slightly askew, which seemed fitting.
When I went back inside to the foyer, the evil-looking cat joined me.
The view was incredible.
The late afternoon sunlight turned the ocean gold. The air tasted like salt. Seagulls squawked—those rasping, discordant calls that should have grated, but somehow sounded perfectly pitched against the endless roll of waves on the beach. I heard a few distant horns at one point, which I thought came from the fishing boats on their way back in—crowded-looking vessels that bristled with rods and poles—but if the horns meant something other than a greeting as they passed one another, I didn’t know what it was.
Okay, so my fantasies of being bothered by a steady stream of curious locals while I tried to unpack hadn’t exactly panned out, but that was okay. I wouldn’t have got anything done if they had, right? So the islanders took a while to warm up to new people. That was fine. They’d come around eventually. They had to, right? Just because I’d been left alone this afternoon in no way meant that they were actively avoiding me. They were being nice, that was all—giving me a chance to settle in before they came to introduce themselves. Anyway, it wasn’t as though they could just freeze me out for the entire three years I was here. That was ridiculous.
I was almost certain of it.
“This is good,” I told myself. “It’s all going to be great.”
The look on the cat’s face told me I was a deluded fucking idiot.
Chapter 2
NATTY
My cousin Button John had got a four pack of pink donuts from Woolworths when he’d done the Wednesday run to the mainland yesterday with Young Harry Barnes. We ate the last two while we sat on the rocks at Mayfair Bay and the sun dried us off after our swim. Mayfair Bay wasn’t the best for sunbathing, given it was more rocks than sand, but it was our beach. Me and Button John had been coming here since we were old enough to walk, let alone swim. We knew every inch of these rocks, all the way down to Young Harry’s sprawling shack and back again.
Young Harry Barnes was our great-uncle. His son, Sea John, worked on my brother Nipper Will’s boat, so me and Button John helped Young Harry out around the place. It was the Dauntless Island way. So were family trees that looked more like knotted wreaths; everyone on the island was related to everyone else, and everyone was a cousin of some variety, but me and Button John were first cousins—his dad Big Johnny Barnes was my mum Susan’s brother. Mum had been a Barnes before she’d married my dad and become a Harper.
Button John finished his donut and stretched, the sunlight glinting off his long, lean body. His dark hair was drying in ways that made it stick out more than normal—and it normally looked like a cross between a rat’s nest and a halo, or like he was a cartoon character that’d stuck his finger in a power point. My hair was longer, and reached below my shoulders when it was wet, but when it dried it’d be just as messy as his.
“I’m going to get a phone next week,” Button John said, licking pink icing off his fingers.
“What for?”
His dark eyes sparkled in the sunlight. “Because Mavis Coldwell heard off Yellow Sarah who heard off Red Joe that we’re getting a phone tower. Well, we’re getting an aerial on the lighthouse, so it won’t be all satellites and shit now—we’re getting 4G.”
“Doesn’t everywhere else have 5G already?”
“I don’t even know what a G is,” Button John said. He wiggled four fingers in my direction. “But at least we’re getting some of them at last.”
I thought of the mobile phone that was stashed away in my bottom drawer. It had been Nipper Will’s before it had been mine. The last time it had worked was when I was at boarding school on the mainland, but I hadn’t even used it much then, because it wasn’t like I could call anyone from home. Wasn’t like I’d had anyone to call, since Button John had been at boarding school with me. Up until my last year, at least, since he was a year older than me.
I’d hated my last year of school.
I’d thought everything would be better when I was back home on Dauntless, but it wasn’t. I was stuck doing odd jobs wherever I could because Nipper Will wouldn’t take me on his boat, and he’d put out the word that nobody else was to take me as well. He wouldn’t even let me go to the mainland once a week with Young Harry to pick up groceries and the occasional tourists who didn’t come by the barge. I was getting sick of hearing “Because I said so, Natty!” every time he opened his mouth. And, whenever I tried to argue: “Because Mum needs help at home.”
That much was true, at least. Days on the boats were long, from dawn until dusk, and Mum couldn’t be left alone for all that time. But if I got a job on a boat, we could pay for someone to keep an eye on her. But Will wouldn’t have a bar of that either. Just, “Because I said so, Natty!”
“You look cranky,” Button John said. “Are you too cranky to eat the rest of your donut?”
I shoved it in my mouth before he could grab it.
Button John picked up a sea-smoothed rock and turned it over and over in his palm. He squinted at me in the sunlight. “Is Will still being a dickhead?”
I snorted. “Yeah. Story of my life.”
“Lucky he doesn’t know about this then,” Button John said, and he wasn’t talking about the donuts.
He was talking about the bag of plastic-wrapped packages behind us, that we’d got this morning from Young Harry Barnes, and we’d be hiding in the cave just as soon as the tide turned.
