Chapter 11
Hands stretched overhead, the pull along my spine was slow and steady as I grazed the floor with the tips of my fingers. A strained breath slipped out while I counted, gazing at the muddy clumps hardened against my shoes. The stretching seemed to help with the tightness along my muscles, which was surprising given the miserable excuse for a bed I was provided. I guess when you're stuck on an island and the only thing to do is stretch, run, and wander around, you become quite spry, quite quickly. I rarely had the time at home to run anymore, let alone stretch every day. Tight deadlines at work were a constant, pushing priority.
A sudden knock against the door makes me nearly jump out of my skin. Carefully unhooking the latch, I open the door just enough to look outside.
Before me stands the blond man from dinner, with Knox lingering a few steps behind. The blond is lean, his wiry frame poised with a gracefulness I did not expect from a grown man. His features were quite soft, except for piercing, crystal blue eyes that beheld me with an impatience that snapped me back to reality. He cleared his throat, crossing his arms over his chest as he glanced behind me, into the cabin. A gust of wind opened the door wider and he immediately pushed past me, welcoming himself into my cabin. I recoiled to face him, immediately irritated, but the blond man wasted no time.
"So what was that about the other night?" His brows raise, looking at me expectantly, "because I have been here for a long time and King Taro has yet to speak a damn word to me before any meal."
My mind goes completely blank for a moment, and I hold my breath. There is no way to explain the situation because I don't know what the situation is.
"I don't know why he said that", not technically a lie. I continue,
"Our conversations have been brief, either he is showing me the island or he's screaming in my face", I step towards the chair, grabbing Knox's bloody shirt and tossing it to him.
The blond man turns to look at Knox, Knox shrugs.
"What's your name?"
"Eve."
"Well Eve, seems like you're about to stir up the rather eerie, monotonous peace we've had here for a while. I look forward to seeing the chaos."
I tilt my head to the side, "and you are?"
"Finnbar," he said, emphasizing his full name like it was a title, but then he shrugged. "But I go by Finn." The smile that followed was wide and sharp, like he knew he had me fooled. Knox's wide shoulders looked like a winged silhouette from behind Finn. A trained guard dog.
"So Finn", I annunciate his name thoroughly, "how do you define a while?", using air quotes for emphasis.
He pretends to count on his fingers for a moment,
"I've had a few birthdays here."
My jaw drops. Years? He looked to be a few years my senior, perhaps he had been in similar circumstances to me. A young man finding his way through the world before suddenly ending up here with no way out. Knox gestures to me,
"How's the leg?"
Finn's eyebrows shoot up but he says nothing. Straightening my knee, I say, "definitely better than it was".
We sit in silence for a moment, the small shack suddenly feeling crowded. I think back to dinner yesterday, watching Knox pile food onto his plate and then not touch it. I look at him,
"Why didn't you eat the dinner King Taro served?"
He stiffened for a moment, sockets darkening a fraction, "I don't like the way it makes me feel."
I wait for him to continue on, but he doesn't. Finn looks at me expectantly,
"don't you feel it?"
I stare at him, unsure of what he means, as I slowly shake my head. Knox gestures to his face,
"I don't see the way you do. I feel the vibrations. The shifts. That how I understand the space around me. I caught y-".
Finn cuts him off, "his homeland is dark, they all look like that".
Knox hisses at him to stop talking. I suppose that is not something I am supposed to know about, but Knox continues, "When I eat the food from Taro, I have a hard time interpreting as I normally do. Things are muddled. I can't explain it since neither of you can do it, but it's called tactile location… and yes, it is very common where I am from".
I stare into the ashy fireplace as I ask Finn, "can you do anything like that?"
Before looking over at him, his nose scrunches up for a moment before he offers me a wicked smile, "I can see everything under your clothes right now."
I curl my lip up at him, "you pig".
He lets out a hearty laugh, as if that was an insult he'd heard one hundred times before.
"It's a blessing and a curse, Eve. I can always see everything beneath, even if I don't want to, but you get better at focusing as you age. I've gotten so used to it now, I don't even think twice about it anymore. It's just what my life is."
I stare down at myself, imagining what he sees under the dirty clothing, "so what would you call that then?"
"You can call it bio-cognition." He says as I face Knox,
"And how long have you been here?"
"Less time than him", his dark hair sways as he gestures to Finn, "twelve lunar cycles by now."
Finn flops down onto my cot, glancing around the cabin.
"He's only a novice. I'm the real deal here." Knox lets out a long, irritated sigh, clearly not impressed by these antics.
The banter between the two of them was so easy, the familiarity of it made my chest tighten. I hadn't relaxed into that conversational flow in weeks, let alone crack a joke. Their conversation filled the space with a connection that reminded me of everything I was missing from home. Here, in the humid cabin, their words deepened the hollow sensation in my chest of everything I'd left behind.
"So what's your thing then?" Finn asks.
I fan myself, trying to cool my skin. "What do you mean?"
"You know, your thing? I have Bio-Cognition, Knox is blind.", Knox lets out a low grumble at that, but Finn ignores him. "What's your thing? "
I search for the words, "I don't have one."
Perhaps that was not something I should have said to two men with weapons, Finn throws a look at Knox as he shifts against the creaking floorboards.
"Everyone has something."
"Not me", I retort.
"You must be a boring species", Finn says, "like a Lumidrax or a Piltdown."
I shake my head,
"I have literally no idea what those are."
I sigh, rubbing my temples. "Where the hell am I?".
It was Knox who replied, "trust me, Eve. I've been asking myself that from the moment I got here."
—-
I adjusted the pointed stick in my palm before once again slamming it into the bed of the stream as a ripple swam by. As I removed the spear from the water, a disgruntled groan work its way up my throat. After the two men had left, I thought a lot about what Finn had said.
What's your thing?
I was nothing. I didn't have a thing, not a single remarkable thing. Both of them had these seemingly innate abilities that differentiated them, Knox's more visible and tangible, but I still believed Finn. I could almost feel it, the way he saw me. It was a gaze that slipped beyond the surface, seeing far more than I wanted him to. What that ability was meant for was beyond me, but I couldn't help but notice the pattern– both had visual abilities, or perhaps the absence of it.
Replaying the conversation over and over in my mind brought no relief. I kept trying to dissect every single word, but I'd been so caught off guard that most of it had entirely slipped away. Only fragments remained, jumbled and blurry, but I did my best to recount. As I palmed the spear in my hand, the wood splintered against my fingers.
Knox did not eat at dinner. None of them did, and perhaps it was for good reason. The two of them looked to be in good shape, even without King Taro's offerings, meaning that there must be edible things on this island.
I fastened my knife to the carved wood, carefully adjusting the tip. It was janky as hell and I had doubts about my potential success rate, but I was willing to try anything at this point. I'd wandered up along the stream until it began to widen. The water became deeper, going from ankle to waist depth. At home, this would have been an ideal fishing and swimming spot. It would be my little oasis where I would bring Maya, and we would bicker about who should get into the cold water first, before running in hand-in-hand. I could almost imagine her, hear her voice as she'd say:
I'm not getting in there unless you can guarantee I won't lose a nipple to frostbite. You know these piercings aren't cheap.
They weren't cheap, as I'd later found out when I was convinced to go with her to her second appointment, and then wrangled into getting one myself. If only my breast hadn't blown up to twice the size, maybe I could have kept the badass addition.
As the stream widened, I realized that my makeshift spear would likely not be much use to me from the shore, so I removed my shoes and shorts before slowly wading into the water. The cold current nipped against the backs of my thighs, leaving goosebumps in its wake. I sucked in a breath as the water passed my hips, soaking my only pair of underwear, I'd have to hang them to dry later. I didn't even want to imagine what would happen to me if I somehow ended up with an infection, but I was as diligent as I could be given the circumstances.
I stilled in the water and watched. If I wanted to bring something home, I'd have to be patient—this would be a long waiting game. Smaller creatures flitted along the shoreline, but most looked far too small to bother with. One type caught my attention: fish-like, with multiple eyes clustered on a bulbous, rounded head. Its body tapered down like an elongated teardrop, layered in delicate fins. It moved almost like a squid, gliding through the water with surprising grace as its many fins rippled in tandem. I'd seen them earlier, just after I arrived, drawn in by their strange, otherworldly shape. There was something quietly mesmerizing about them.
Something came into blurry vision beneath the surface, and before I could resist, I plunged my spear into the sandy floor. The shadow shot away from me, following the downstream current. The sand breezed around my legs, offering a shadow of sensation before settling once again. I waited and waited until I grew bored. I tried not to think about the sun beating down on the back of my head, heating my neck as my hair was tied atop my head. I undid the knot and let the tangled mess cover my heated skin, strands dropping around my face. I glanced around, ensuring I was alone before carefully removing my clothing. There was a slop onto the shoreline as I tossed the drenched articles onto the dry ground. I walked back into the river and plunged, letting my knees hit the soft shand below. I moved my arms along the surface, imagining myself willing the water to my wishes, imagining it responding to my beck and call. What a dream that would be, to be able to control something so fierce, something capable of life and death. I wondered what the others on the island were capable of. The girl with fiery red hair came to mind, her tall, slender frame beneath the rolling red curls that somehow lay beautifully along her shoulders and torso. I reached up and felt my hair, it was dry and crunchy in my hands. Slowly, the water rose to my chin, then my ears, and then brushed my brow as I tilted my head back into the river, keeping my nose above water. I stayed there for a while, enjoying the cooling sensation, until I decided it was time to dry off.
The only things I carried back with me were exactly what I had arrived with, but when I went to dinner that evening, I didn't touch a single thing I put onto my plate.