Cut Off (29 page)

In the meantime, the display cases held several marine chronometers, a name that sounded fancier than the reality: analog clocks in wooden boxes. After winding them, he discovered two that still worked. The next day, he calculated local noon and reset the clocks.

They began to run low on food. Ness and Sprite tried the jungle east of the marina and returned with wild breadfruit and some kind of citrus that resembled a lemon but tasted like an orange. In their absence, Sebastian had caught five yellow-striped fish, but the alien returned from his swim with something much more valuable than meat: an idea.

He refused to explain, gesturing vaguely about the tests he'd need to run first. Ness rolled his eyes and got back to practicing with his navigational gear. The following morning, as he slept beneath a tarp on the boat's deck, he was jolted awake by the rumble of its engine. He leapt to his feet, feeling the vibration in his soles, and ran to the cabin, where Sebastian was clicking his claws in high amusement.

"What are you doing?" Ness gestured in the darkness; it wasn't yet dawn, but the cabin was illuminated by the glow of readouts and instruments. "You can't put ethanol in this engine!"

"Not ethanol," Sebastian said. "Diesel."

Ness scanned the panels, but there were no obvious red lights, and he supposed the fact it was running was proof enough. "Where'd you find the fuel?"

"Yesterday I fished. To catch the fish, I followed them to the places fish go but humans can't." Sebastian spread his tentacles as if to say voila.

"I have no idea what that means."

"Underwater!" the alien signed. "They hide in the boats that are under the water."

While hunting fish, Sebastian explained, he'd noticed them congregating around sunken vessels. As he contemplated how happy Ness and Sprite would be to have fresh fish, Sebastian had then made an intuitive leap: the sunken boats, out of reach of human efforts, might still have fuel in them. Few did, and what little Sebastian had managed to find turned out to be gasoline, but then he'd remembered another source: the container ships at the industrial port they'd seen from the island.

The previous night, Sebastian had swum to them. Via a process involving his laser and some other business he couldn't explain well enough for Ness to grasp, he had cut into one of the behemoth boats and collected a few gallons of fuel before resealing it. That was what he was using to power the yacht they were presently standing on. Thus all they needed to do was figure out a way to bring up the diesel in quantity.

"Which is not as easy as it sounds," Ness told Sprite after relaying Sebastian's scheme. "No siphoning. Gravity's working against us."

Sprite lifted a derisive eyebrow. "You're forgetting this is a marina. One of those aquatic ones. There's a jillion water pumps around here."

A slow grin spread across Ness' face. "Suppose we can find one that'll run on ethanol?"

Finding one was as simple as searching the warehouse next door. To better the chances it would be able to work so far underwater—according to Sebastian, the submerged fuel tanks were at least twenty feet below the surface—they went with the largest pump they had the strength to move. Sebastian cleaned it up and flipped it on. The engine rumbled across the warehouse. The sound would be a problem. To get an idea of the time frame they'd be operating on, Ness tested the pump on water and discovered it was good for something like thirty gallons per minute.

That was highly promising. He didn't know how much the yacht's tanks held, but it had to be at least two hundred gallons, maybe a few times that much. With the pump operating at full power, they wouldn't have to run it any longer than ten or twenty minutes. Finished with his figures, Ness sat back at the warehouse table, highly pleased with himself, until he realized he was a fucking dunce cap and that it didn't matter how loud the pump would be when it would be muffled by twenty feet of ocean.

The penultimate piece of the puzzle lay in figuring out how to pipe the diesel to the surface. Ness cracked that one by making a trip to the airport and returning with a cart loaded up with one of the lengthy hoses they'd once used to gas up the jets.

All that left was getting the yacht from land into the water. That consumed two complete days by itself, a chain of events that felt like a living Rube Goldberg device. Locate the biggest pickup truck they could find. Push it down to the marina. Replace its corroded battery with one from a garaged car. Rig that battery up to the boat's longer-lasting marine battery for a jump. Hook the truck to the yacht trailer. Finally, lower the trailer down the steep, deepwater ramp.

At that point, with the trailer all but submerged and the boat halfway launched, the truck's brakes had given out with a squeal. Ness was forced to fling himself out the door as the trailer and pickup were sucked into the sea, never to ride again.

After his initial horror dimmed, he started laughing instead. He swam to the boat, climbed its ladder, and joined the others in the cabin. "I don't think we did that right at all!"

Tentacle on the throttle, Sebastian flipped on the engine and backed the boat away from the ramp. Once he'd cleared it from the marina and the bevy of half-sunk ships clogging its waters, he cut the engine while Sprite adjusted the sails. Silently, they made speed into the bay and hove due west toward the giant port.

As they neared the warehouse-crusted docks, Sprite struck the sails. They drifted closer, bleeding speed, and dropped anchor, watching the port for motion while the current finalized their position. They found they weren't directly above the sunken cargo ship, but there was enough length to their jet fuel hose that it didn't matter.

They winched the pump over the side of the boat, then Sebastian slid down the ladder beside it. They disappeared into the water together, the alien guiding the machinery into unseen position while Sprite fed the hose into their fuel tank. Several minutes later, the hose twitched. A stream of diesel gurgled into the tank. The tang of fuel overwhelmed the smell of the sea.

Seven minutes and thirty-two seconds later, according to Ness' chronometer, the first lantern appeared on the dock. The owner adjusted its beam to point directly at the ship.

19

She ran straight to the creek and up into the jungle. Ke sat on the front porch watching the approach. As soon as he saw her, he popped to his feet and jogged down the steps.

"Stop." He lifted his hands to a guard. "And get that look off your face. You don't get to be angry."

For a moment, she wasn't, too confused to have room for anything else. "What are you talking about?"

"You...
threatened
her. Told her you'd eliminate her. I should be the one coming for
you
."

Her face burned, but she refused to lower her eyes from his. "I was angry. That wasn't serious."

"How more serious can you get?"

"If I'd truly believed it, she would never have heard me say it out loud."

His glare lost its hard edges. "I don't know what it says about you that I believe that."

"Don't pretend you're any different." She moved toward the stairs.

Ke didn't move. "He doesn't want to talk to you."

Tristan raised her eyebrows. "He doesn't get a choice."

"What are you going to do, knock me out and drag Alden off by his hair? You can't win this, Tristan. You have to back off. Let him be his own person."

"Says the guy who intended to knock Alden out and drag Robi away when
she
wanted to make her own decisions."

"That helped teach me how dumb I was being." He glanced up at the house, smiling vaguely. "So have the past few weeks. I've never seen her more happy."

"Is he that mad?"

"He's pretty mad. Two people as close as they are, something like this gets them spinning like a bolo."

She clenched her hands. "I can't leave him alone, Ke."

"You won't," he said, touching her upper arm and withdrawing contact quickly. "I'll be here."

Part of her wanted very badly to trample him and storm the steps and kick down the door. Instead, she deflated. Anything she did would only extend the rift between herself and Alden. There was only one route left for her: walk away. Give him time. And watch over him from afar.

She turned back down the path. Once the trees took her, she heard the front door creak open. She slowed, hoping to make out their words, but they spoke too softly for her to pick up.

Back by the sea, the house felt so silent she couldn't stay inside it. She went down to the shore and ran for miles, going barefoot so her mind would be forced to occupy itself finding safe footing. She was gone more than an hour and hardly had the strength to keep going through the final stretch back to the house. It was still hardly ten in the morning by the time she returned and scrubbed herself down. The rest of the day loomed ahead.

She worked on the garden, hacking at weeds, churning dirt, inadvertently scaring lizards into the trees. It was useful work, particularly if Ke had underestimated the amount of extra food he'd need to support a new member of the household. More importantly, it ate up her time as hungrily as a man who's been lost at sea, and left her tired enough to fall asleep as soon as the sun was down.

She woke in the darkness. Once she was awake enough to use it, she got her machete and chopped open a coconut to flavor her poi. She was hiking up the stream to Ke's before the east began to turn the clouds blue. She waited in the woods with binoculars. Morning birds peeped. Wind touched the fronds. A light rain pattered through the leaves. By the time the kids got up to use the latrine, the clouds had dispersed and the sun was up. They returned to the deck to sit in the shade, waking up and eating breakfast. They worked the garden for an hour before walking down the creek to the pools to swim. Tristan followed, easing through the boisterous undergrowth.

Over the next few days of shadowing them, she learned two key truths. First, they were incredibly boring. Most of the time, they sat around with their arms around each other. Sometimes they looked at things. At other times, they talked, usually too softly to hear. When she could make out their words, it was always about their future together: gauzy voices describing the house they would build, the garden they would tend, the animals they would find and husband. There was never any mention of Ke or Tristan in this future.

The second thing she learned was that they were having an incredible amount of sex. It seemed to be able to happen at any moment: whenever one accidentally touched the other the wrong (or right) way, or whenever the silence dragged on for more than a few minutes. Beside the pools. In the jungle. On the beach. Tristan set down her binoculars at these points, but remained in place, not wanting to stir the brush and alert them. She had never felt as much passion for anyone as they flung at each other. Had she never found the right person? Had she been too unwilling to step out of herself and into abandon? Or were
they
the freaks?

Whatever the case, they were in a comfortable routine, engaging in nothing more dangerous than the occasional leap from one pool to the next and far too much unprotected sex. Tristan spent the hours honing her woodsmanship, learning to walk among the fallen leaves, seeds, and nuts with little to no sound, to rub her face with mud and hide behind screens of shrubs.

When she wasn't observing, she took her outrigger canoe into the waves, both to practice its use and to better explore the jungle's coves in search of a more seaworthy vessel. It turned out that the jungles of Hana were rich in life, but miserly in boats. Some canoes and a few small motor boats, but she didn't know how to operate those and did
not
like the idea of relying on something mechanical that required fuel and the steady maintenance of moving parts. Their entire predicament hinged on the idea that disaster could come at any time. They needed something analog. Something that, like the body, was ready to move the instant you needed it.

She kept waiting for a letter to appear under the front door, to hear the scuff of his sandals on the walk. Instead, each day was an emptiness, a new stretch of hours with too little to fill them. She traveled up the road to a former village and scavenged half-empty bottles of rum, vodka, and bourbon. She had plenty of fruit juice from the yard. At first, she waited to drink until late afternoon, when there was nothing to do but sit on the lanai, but soon she drank as she pleased. More than once, she started at breakfast and napped by noon. She always had a good buzz by evening, though, and sometimes stayed up far too late, lost in the numbness, and woke feeling scraped-out, no matter how long she spent sleeping on the lanai.

She knew it couldn't last. Not unless she learned to ferment her own fruit, an idea she toyed with once the neighbors' cabinets began to empty. Then again, everything was temporary. She intended to enjoy herself while it was there.

Most days, she forced herself to get up before they did in order to catch them before they left the house by the creek. The mornings got harder. She sometimes skipped breakfast, gagging as she brushed her teeth with baking soda and water.

Three weeks after the split, as she hid behind a trunk while they sat beside the stream dipping their toes in the water, Alden hunched his bare shoulders and leaned forward. "Do you think I should go talk to her?"

Robi pulled the tie from her hair and swept her locks into a dark ponytail. "Do
you
think you should?"

"I don't know."

"But you're thinking about it."

"I'm thinking about her alone in the house. Worrying about us."

"Let her worry."

"Do you think?"

Robi brushed her nails down his spine. What she said next was too soft for Tristan to hear. Their backs were to her and she rose in silence, cat-stepping across the damp earth. As she neared another trunk, her foot slipped and squelched in the mud, releasing an earthy smell.

Alden whirled, struggling to his feet and reaching for the rifle beside him; a part of Tristan was proud that he kept it with him, ready to act. He got up and stalked from the creek, face resolved. Before he could find her cowering behind a tree, Tristan stood and ambled toward him, as if she'd been on her way to find them.