PoraBora

Chapter Eighteen

Pe rolled out of bed the second the morning hit...or at least as soon as she was aware of it. The storm had passed but left her with little sleep. She shoved her bedding into the center hull, clambered for a banana, and chomped it down as quickly as she could. She tossed the peel over the edge.

The storm had blown her a little off course. Nothing to help it. The alternative was to let the waves crush the manta into splinters.

So she hooked her leg into her tiller and adjusted what her short nap had tried to undo. She'd already passed the frenzy. There had been no sign of it. Pe hadn't expected there would be.

She didn't expect to hear anything other than the water, either. But she did.

A thump. It didn't repeat. At first, she thought it came from the water, but nothing just thumped into a ship. Her second thought was that she was about to find another oil-soaked kid, and she certainly wasn't going to save this one.

But there was no shell piece floating in the water. There wasn't anything, in any direction.

It had come from the starboard side. Pe listened carefully. Maybe it hadn't been a thump, she told herself. Maybe something had just rolled around.

Then it sneezed.

Pe plied the compartment open with her firelock out. "Hands up!"

"Don't shoot!"

Pe almost dropped her gun. "Sharks, Iumili! What in the salting seas are you doing here?"

The eight-year-old had herself wedged between the coolers and copper buckets. She was green in the face. Pe grabbed the girl by the arm with a shout, dragged her out of the hull, and hung her over the boat.

Half of it slapped the hull. Pe groaned.

"S-sorry," said the girl.

"Why—I mean, how—it's--"

"I was playing a game with everybody," said Iumili. "This was my hiding spot?"

"If you're going to make something up, don't make it a question," Pe growled. "What are you doing here?"

"I was worried," she said. "When you were packing up your boat, I heard that you were going to go into the storm alone. I didn't know what you were going to do." Her eyes started to tear up.

"What I'm going to do," Pe said, "Is drop you off. Right here. You'll have to tread water until another boat comes by. It shouldn't be long. The storm's gone, and we're a straight shot from Aiwa."

"You...you can't just leave me," Iumili sniffed. "I'm...."

Pe put her hands on her hips. "Go ahead and cry. I'm not one of the boys who's going to fall for it."

Iumili wiped her face. "Fine," she said. "But what do you think the chief is going to say if he finds out you left me to die in the water? Probably he'll think I was kidnapped. What do you think that will do to our island's security?"

Nothing, thought Pe, but kidnapping a kid and dropping them off in the middle of the ocean were indeed punishable crimes, and seeing how the chief was thinking these days, she didn't trust him to figure out the truth.

"I was worried," Iumili said. "You're my friend. Everybody was so worried about you, and I thought...I thought maybe one of us should do something about it."

"I'm fourteen," said Pe. "You're eight. You're not my friend; you're my responsibility. Now I've got to make sure we've got enough food for two people."