Page 17 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

But there's a crease in the rock north of our line, a long seam where two granite backs lean together, and the moss along it isn't scruff, it's plush, it's thriving. And where the seam drops into a shaded pocket the size of a bathtub, the stain on the stone is wet.

Wet on a sunny afternoon means resupply. Wet means the rock is crying it out slowly from somewhere inside the hill.

I get on my knees at the lip of it, and there it is: a basin in shadow, palm-deep, maybe a gallon of clear water over clean granite, cold coming off it like a refrigerator door, and a seep at the back feeding it a patient bead at a time.

My knees make the decision before I do, and I have just enough civilization left in me to yell instead of drink.

"Neri! Water!"

She arrives at a dead run, doesn't slow, drops beside me. She looks at the clear cold contents, then at me, with the wild specific suspicion of a woman being offered a miracle by a known optimist.

"It's a seep." My voice is doing something ridiculous around the edges. Like I’m delirious with relief. Maybe I am. “Fed from inside the hill, filtered through the granite. It's cold, it's moving, it's clean. Best water on this island, I'd stake my degree on it.”

I cup my hands in the water, then bring them up to my cracked, dry lips.

I drink. And okay, it’s cold, stone-flavored and faintly green the way live water is, but right now it feels like pure heaven on my tongue. The first swallow lands in me like a struck bell, and the headache lets go of one entire hemisphere on the spot. I'd put it against any bottle on any shelf on the mainland.

I say something to that effect. Possibly to the water itself.

Her gaze goes from me to the water, then to me again. She purses her lips, then dips her hands in the water and scoops up a handful. She drinks.

I watch her throat move, three swallows, five.

"Oh my god," she says in a voice I've never heard her use.

We take turns at the basin, refill, drink, refill, let the seep catch up. Somewhere in there the relief gets giddy. Both of us. It's chemical, it's blood volume coming back online, I know exactly what it is and it doesn't matter. Because Neri Marsh is sitting on sun-warm granite with water running down her chin and she's laughing.

Laughing. At me, technically, something I said to the seep, thanking it for its service. Her whole face is open and there's color back in her cheeks. Her hair has spent the day escaping her bun in coils of drying teal, and the sun is on her.

She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I say this as a man who has looked at the cosmos itself.

"What," she says, still laughing.

I'm staring. I'm aware I'm staring. She's aware I'm staring. I cough and look away.

"You found water," she says. Quieter. “I can’t believe it. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” It comes out low.

We are much closer together than we were a second ago, and I don't remember either of us moving. Her eyes do a thing, a flick, down and back up, fast. Every system I have comes online at once and points the same direction. The afternoon goes very still and very warm, and the distance between us starts closing at seep-speed, a patient bead at a time, her breath, my breath.

And then, from both of us, from nowhere and from everywhere, exactly simultaneous: retreat.

She turns and gets very interested in her fingernails. I turn and get very interested in the drainage patterns of the eastern balds. Neither of us fools the other. My heart is going like a lab centrifuge, and beside me the water drips with the same steady beat down into the basin.

That’s when I see our salvation.

"Berries," I announce, pointing to the left. "That ground cover. That's lowbush blueberry or I'm a chemist."

“Thank you, Mother Nature.” Her voice is one notch too bright. “Sure, you tried to kill us, but at least you’re giving us food and water.”

We don’t talk much after that. We pick our way onward across the balds, and the ground bush is blueberry, weeks from ripe except one sun-baked pocket where a scattering of berries has turned dusty-blue, tiny and sharp. We strip them like bears with graduate degrees. It's food, technically, a rounding error of food, but it helps anyway.

The light goes long and gold on the granite while we work toward the dome. The scramble to the top is real, hands-and-feet real, and neither of us has a second climb in us tonight. Dusk beats us to the summit push, exactly as advertised.

But below the last pitch, on the eastern shoulder, the rock left us a gift: a jumble of boulders leaned into a pocket, floored with dry needles and old leaves, walls of stone shouldering the wind up and over so it howls above without landing. We wedge in as the color drains out of the sky.

No fire. Everything that burns is soaked, and we don’t even have the energy to try. Tonight's furnace, once again, is us.