Page 38 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I look back at the horizon while a part of me sits here breathing easier than it has in years.

“When did mermaids get so wise?” I manage.

“I’ve always been wise. You were distracted by the hair.”

Then she shifts closer until her hip presses into mine. I put my arm around her beneath the blanket. Her body is warm from sleep, her hair cool where it brushes my jaw.

She’s right. I’ve been carrying the AETHER telescope project for so long, I’ve forgotten how heavy it was. I’ve never taken a moment to consider how much it cost me. But as much as it cost me, I would do it all over again.

So I let myself miss it.

The ceremony is happening without me. The sentence sits there, and it hurts, and the pain doesn’t drown me.

Because of Neri.

“For what it’s worth,” she murmurs into my collarbone, “when we get back, I’ll crack a bottle of champagne and give my presentation to an empty room if I have to.”

“It won’t be an empty room. I wouldn’t miss it for all the mussels in the world.”

“That’s totally unfair. I bet neither of us will ever eat another mussel for the rest of our lives after we leave this island.”

And the laugh finally comes, rusty and real, dragged up out of me sideways, and I press my face into her salt-and-coconut hair.

That’s when she goes rigid.

“Rafe.” Her voice has changed key entirely. She’s off my shoulder, up straight, eyes locked down the shore to the south where the headland ledges run out black into the water. “Do you see that?”

I follow her gaze. The morning sun is fully up now, hammering the wet rock gold and white, and for a second I see nothing but glare and weed.

Then I see it.

Orange. Safety orange, the color that exists to be found, a hard-cornered case the size of a small suitcase, wedged in the rocks at the tide line where the ledges shelve into the sea. It’s rocking. Every wave that comes in shoulders it, lifts one end, sets it down.

We both know what sits in that orange safety box. Our survival. Our saving grace. Our way back.

We’re both already running.

Chapter 15

Neri

We run hard along the shore.

Down the beach, over the tide-wrack, up onto the southern ledges where the granite shelves out black and wet. Rafe is a stride ahead at first, because he’s faster on the flat but I’m small and agile and I read rock better, so I gain on him as we rattle down the shelving stone together.

The closer we get, the worse it gets.

The orange box is not sitting on the rocks. It’s in them, wedged inside a surge gulch, a cleft in the ledges maybe five feet wide and twenty deep. Every swell funnels into that slot and explodes against the granite. We hear it before we reach the edge, a boom I feel in my back teeth, then spray erupts above the opening and the water sucks back out in a white torrent.

The case is jammed at the waterline against a chockstone, half-floating. Every cycle lifts it, grinds it against the rock, then drops it back down a little looser. The tide is coming in. Each lift runs higher.

We’re going to run out of time to retrieve it, and fast.

“It’s the Belle’s flare kit.” Rafe’s flat on his belly at the gulch’s edge, head over the drop, and his voice bounces off the walls. “I can see the decal.”

The flare kit. The one thing from the Belle that might actually get us off this island, wedged twenty feet down a granite throat.

Another swell surges into the gulch. The case lifts, twists and drops back against the chockstone. We don’t have long.