I’m sweating bullets in the heat, but a nice stack of wood sits by the door when she comes running outside.
“Cy!”
I look at her in surprise. “You okay?”
“Yes, yes,” she says, waving a hand impatiently. “I’m fine. I was just thinking… whoever it is, whoever put the cameras out, they put them in prominent places, right? The cave. The waterfall. Places where they knew we’d be. And we had a hard time finding the last two because they were camouflaged, right?”
“Right,” I say, nodding.
“Where else do we go every day?” she asks.
I frown. “The beach?”
She shakes her head. “Not every day, we don’t.” She’s right. Sometimes it’s too hot, and sometimes we have enough food to last us a day or so.
“The watering hole?” she says pointedly.
I nod. Yeah, she’s right. We go there every day for fresh water to drink. I’m adamant we stay hydrated, and it’s too warm here for us to keep standing water for very long, so we fill up reserves daily. But we haven’t neglected that area.
“Babe, we already checked for a camera down there. Remember? It was the first place we looked.”
She nods. “I know, I know, but now that we know they’re camouflaged, we need to look again. I mean, obviously the camera’s got to be somewhere we already looked.”
I look up at the sky. The sun’s setting, and we don’t have enough daylight to look tonight.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her. “We need more daylight for a proper search.”
She shakes her head. “No way. We could go now,” she insists. “There’s enough sunlight if we hurry—”
I shake my head. “Harper, no. You know how quickly it gets dark here. There’s no point in going now.”
“I’ll go alone, then,” she says. Stubborn girl. She gets one idea in her head, and off she goes. Impulsive and headstrong, I know now why back at home she was so successful. She won’t settle for anything less. And it drives her crazy how I’m usually more methodical and deliberate before I make a decision, but we balance each other out.
She looks at me pleadingly. “We have to go now. You’re being overly cautious. It isn’t too dark!”
“It will be soon, and you know it.”
“Cy,” she says, taking a step in the direction of our water source. God, this woman’s stubborn. “I know it’s there. I feel it in my bones.”
Oh, no, she doesn’t. “I’ll tell you what you’ll feel in your ass, if you to traipsing down there when it’s dark out.” I walk over and stand in front of her with my arms crossed on my chest, daring her to go. I’ll put her right over my knee, and doesn’t she know it. Hell, she likes it, usually, but this time she knows I’m serious.
Glaring, she stands facing me with her hands on her hips. “You’re so—so—” sputtering, she’s at a loss for words.
“Stubborn? Bossy? Arrogant? Go on,” I say patiently, still waiting with my arms crossed. “Heard it all before. And you know I’m bigger than you and you can’t outrun me.”
“You are unbearable,” she says, waving an irate finger at me.
“And you’re a brat.”
“Am not!”
I raise a brow at her with undisguised disdain. “Babe, you expect me to say ‘are, too?’ You’re well on your way to finding my hand across your pretty ass at this point even if you stay put.”
She opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it abruptly, sighs, and walks away back toward the shelter. I follow behind her and give her ass a good hard smack anyway, for good measure.
“Cy!”
She rubs her butt adorably and glares at me. I wrap an arm around her shoulders and walk her back into the shelter.
“Harper, you’re brilliant, baby. I know you’re onto something. But I also know we can’t get so eager we don’t think straight.”
Sighing, she nods. “You’re right, I know it. I mean, it’s almost dark out already. But Cy...” Her voice wavers a little, and it knifes straight to my heart.
I squeeze her again. “Yeah, baby?”
“What if… what if we find the camera and we don’t get off the island? Like… what if they’re not connected to anything anymore? What if… we find the cameras, and they just give up on us?”
I shake my head. “I pulled that thing apart, and I’ve seen this type before in the Navy. They’re wireless, somehow connected to a WiFi signal. Big bucks to last this long.”
She clenches her fists. “WiFi? And here we are, connected to no one. Completely torn away from—” She closes her eyes and clamps her lips together, then shakes her head. I know what the helplessness feels like. It isn’t pretty. But we’ve faced it so many times now, it’s getting easier to overcome.
“Listen, Harper. It’s not gonna happen, babe,” I tell her. “We find that last camera, and they have no more reason to watch us. They’ll come. You’ll see.” It makes logical sense to me, but I know I sound more optimistic than I feel. When you’re left helpless for so long with no autonomy, a sort of desperation becomes the norm.