He just hadn’t bargained on electronic contraptions tumbling from the sky.
If only he hadn’t left his camp across the bay. It was solid and dry, tons of fish. A blue plastic barrel had washed up on his beach after that earthquake three days ago, and he’d used it as a giant bobber, fixing trotlines to it and letting it drift in the currents where trout gathered.
His arms felt heavy, as if weighed down with lead, but he also had the odd sensation that gravity had become a spent force. The ocean had swallowed him up, and he thought perhaps he was drowning. Images of home flitted past his eyes: his parents laughing on their rambling front porch; hiking the trails behind the house with his best friend, Terrell; everyone grilling fresh-caught perch over a fire.
He swam and reached the floating Skym. Tendrils of seaweed grazed his body, and tiredness spread through his limbs. He felt no desire to spend the last of his energy making it back to shore. Maybe he could float for a while, bob along on the waves like the dead Skym.
If he could just rest for a bit, not worry about anything . . .
His mother, in front of a campfire, picking the tiny bones from a perch. She made a face. It wasn’t her favorite fish.
Work it out, River.
It was like when she’d wake him in the morning to mow the lawn.
Leave me alone. I’m tired.
Get over it. Swim.
She was right. He probably shouldn’t die like this. It would piss her off.
He summoned a last reserve of strength, grabbed the Skym, clipped it to his belt, then struck for shore in the distance.
How had he gotten so far out? He swam, arms aching, and when he finally touched ground, he couldn’t take a single step. All that struggle in the water had been for nothing; it’d be just as easy to die here as in the ocean. He was wet and cold, had no fire or dry clothes. Too late to do anything about it now.
He dropped onto the sand, and his last thought was that the tide would pull him back out again and his bones would become coral.
When he opened his eyes, he found he wasn’t dead, so there was that. The sun was too bright, and birds circled overhead. They dove in and out of his line of sight, swooping for fish. The sound of crashing water was distinct from the rushing noise in his head. So the ocean was on his right. The Skym was grounded to his left, green light gleaming and pointed directly at him.
His Skym was recovered and charged. He somehow was still alive. And he was, it seemed, naked. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except for the Skym staring at him.
His next thought was that something was on fire, he was on fire. Smoke cloaked his lungs, and he gasped himself upright. He shivered as a Mylar blanket slipped from his chest. A fire roared in a pit beside him. His jacket, shirt, pants, and socks hung from a nearby branch like a string of dead fish. His boots hung upside down on two stakes pointed toward the fire. It looked comical, as though someone had been buried in the dirt with their feet sticking up.
He shivered again and pulled the blanket around his shoulders, then looked for a clue to what had happened, who had built the fire, who had saved his life.
He hadn’t anticipated what a pain the Skym would be. The producers said he’d get kicked off the show if he couldn’t keep it going, so he’d had to do that, even if it meant taking risks he knew he shouldn’t.
The lady producer had asked, “How comfortable are you with operating the Skym?”
He’d shrugged like it was no big deal, he could handle it.
He remembered the way her eyes had narrowed and she’d jotted a note in her clipboard.
She’d been right to doubt him. The Skym made everything harder in the wild. Lugging the batteries, making sure they stayed charged, the low-grade buzz as it followed him like a giant bug. And now he’d almost died rescuing the thing, and it was all on display for . . . how many people watching? Each one strapped into an overpriced visor, mouth hanging open in a trance? River couldn’t remember the number he’d been told. It’d been in the millions.
Everything else he could deal with, even the lousy weather. That was the easy part of the whole thing: surviving.
It was the show, apparently, that was going to kill him.
He wasn’t dead yet, though, for whatever reason. River checked his clothes, hanging from the branch, damp but warm from the fire. He put them on and crouched close to the flames until he felt like he was being cooked, his skin tightening and tingling with heat.
He retrieved the canteen from his pack and discovered that the dried trout he’d been carrying was missing. Only the neatly wrapped leaves he’d stored it in remained. Now that he didn’t have any food, a pang of hunger clenched his stomach.
Worse than the cold and hunger, he felt lost and confused. His fingers, still stiff, fumbled with the screw-top lid of the canteen until he cursed and threw it into the trees. Even before it hit the ground, he forced himself to take a breath. If he were sitting at home watching himself on the live stream, he’d know that an outburst like that was the first indication of a contestant who wouldn’t last. Not if he couldn’t keep his cool, get his bearings.
A voice behind him said, “Guess you’re awake.”
Out of instinct, River reached to his side for his knife. Of course it wasn’t there, and he immediately felt foolish. What was he going to do with a knife, stab another contestant? He needed to settle down.
The guy was more than a head shorter than River and wore a hoodie that he’d probably filled out better when the show started and he’d weighed a few more pounds. His lank, straw-colored hair fell over his ears, and his pale green eyes darted in every direction. He held two cups, and handed one to River, then poured steaming water from his canteen into each.
“Thanks,” River said, sitting on a log. The water burned his throat, but he took two more sips before stopping to blow on the surface.
“I ate your fish. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
“I figured it was payment for saving your waterlogged self, but to be honest, I was just hungry.”
“I can get more.”
“Oh yeah? So you’re, like, one of the real survivalists? A mountain man or whatever?”
“Not so far.”
The clouds over the mountain now blocked the sun, and the air chilled. It was late afternoon. He’d been out for longer than he realized.
“Right. Well, I totally saved you, didn’t I? I remembered what they said about water, about hypothermia and all that. I fished you out, whipped your clothes off. Sorry about that, too, but it’s what the book said, so I did it. It is what the book says, right?”
River nodded.
The boy gave a lopsided grin and winked. “I like your tattoo. There some kind of special meaning to it?”
River had gotten the star compass on his left shoulder blade last year, the first anniversary of when his parents died. It was based on the Mariner card deck he and Terrell used to pack when they camped. It reminded him of when things were different. When he’d had friends—a best friend, even—and had actually liked spending time with them. That wasn’t the case now. He’d been lousy about answering texts or showing up. He hadn’t talked to Terrell in ages, let alone gone on one of their monthly backpacking trips. He felt bad about it, but he wasn’t good company nowadays. He was too in his head, too lost. The image of the compass was meant to remind him to find his way back again, no matter where he was.