"You look like you've had a good day." The Islander smiled as Estelle laid the carcass of a lizard almost her own size by him and the fire he tended. "Better than mine."
"Fish not biting?" Estelle's first three words since dawn.
"Only the little ones." He crossed his thick arms, painted with black in a hundred ritual shapes stretching from rings around his wrists to snakes and birds over his shoulders. "The good ones, they're waiting for a better prize than a speck of bait. Or maybe they know where we fish. Animals are animals; animals are not stupid."
"Makes someone around here, Kui." Estelle patted the quivers strapped to her thighs. "That's why I prefer this. They don't have to bite. I do."
"Huntress." The spark of a smile played over Kui's lips. "I'll take care of dinner." He glanced out at the beautiful tropical paradise splayed out below his chosen vantage point on a ledge halfway to the top of an old volcano. Estelle did the same, drinking in green trees and sparkling waters: crystal clear in the shallow bay below, and trending darker as her gaze passed over the reefs and shoals all but sealing the bay and out into the ocean.
It was a beautiful view. It was an old view: no matter the vista, years of it dulled its shine.
"I'm going to make more arrows." Estelle turned for their cave. "Let me know when the food's ready."
"Sure." Kui was a fairly laid-back fellow. Estelle had never asked about his life prior to the island: an unspoken accord. She didn't ask about his story...and he didn't press for hers.
Estelle left her bow propped against the cut-marked rock where she whittled her stone arrowheads. Careful not to disturb the baker's dozen malformed rocks neatly organized on the far end, she claimed a sitting half-coconut, marred with fingerprints and the odd incision around the rim. Whistling an old tune from the life she'd die pretending she'd never lived, Estelle knelt by the gurgling spring in the back of the cave, rinsing her impromptu bowl before she brought it to her lips.
Something green glinted in the water: something that didn't belong over her shoulder. Two somethings–twin iridescent opaline eyes.
"Estelle."
Her fingers tightened on the shell. Something entirely too fast for words ran through her mind, something she couldn't have explained in a hundred years with ten languages. It was primal, it was instinctual: less a plan and more a twisting, turning emotion, bubbling in her like a sense of animal eclipse.
Not yet.
"Name." It wasn't a request, and Estelle didn't care to make it sound like one.
"Not even a question about how I got past your friend Ku'uaki?" Something brown, too, something in his hand: a matchlock pistol.
"Name." Estelle lowered the bowl as the...hungry eclipse deepened and tightened. "You won't get a third chance."
Amusement glinted in those reflected green eyes. "Jason."
Rock. Knife. Bowl. Spring painted red. Estelle couldn't purge the image and feeling from her veins, and she didn't want to. It was prophetic: it would be real in a moment if she didn't like what this Jason had to say.
His reflection shifted, and weight settled on one of the rocks by the entrance. "I won't kill you if you look at me."
"I wasn't concerned."
"I have a gun."
"I'm me."
"You talk boldly for a woman with neither training nor experience." The first human contact Estelle had run into for years, Kui excepted, just happened to know this much about her?
YOU ARE READING
Midnight
Fantasy"I'm not going to die" was the promise Estelle's cousin demanded...before he shot himself. Because of his sacrifice, she had enough food to get her boat to land, even if on a deserted island. Because of her promise, she learned to survive, enduring...
