It was hard to prevent myself from cackling like a mad scientist as I watched my creature burn and burn.
“Det er et skikkelig bra bål!” ‘That’s a fucking good fire!’ Oskar exclaimed as he watched it burn with his hands on his hips, like a middle-aged Dad.
I sketched a short little curtsey and then a bow, as the guys laughed and clapped.
There was nothing much to do as the hours ticked by. I prodded the fire this way and that. The boys occasionally ran off to grab bigger and bigger pieces to burn, which escalated until Oskar brought me a medium-sized tree.
As it hit around three, I began to lose hope. I was too optimistic when I started this plan. They probably weren’t even looking out into the ocean for smoke; all of the lookouts and scientists were probably in their homes with their families, avoiding the still-bad air quality. The island only had enough wood for maybe two more days of burning, and then we would have to stop or be left without any fuel for fires at night. We would be stuck.
It hit about four, the sun only about four fingers up from the horizon. I sat on a rock next to the bonfire, smelling like smoke, even more ash than usual on my face. I combed my fingers through Bartosz's hair as he sat on the ground in front of me, his eyes closed. I was very occupied with braiding tiny little braids into his hair and very decidedlynotworrying about what would happen if this bonfire didn’t work, while Jin Woo and Ettore argued about what was the best plane beverage.
“Champagne or a light white is perfect, they are not too heavy, soothing, and just get you a little drunk,” Ettore insisted.
Jin Woo shook his head.
“No, you want to get tipsy as quickly as possible. Give me a double vodka on the rocks, and I’m set; make it a vodka soda if I’m pretending to be civilized.”
“Heathen,” Ettore said fondly.
Oskar stood up from where he was sitting and pressed a finger against his lips. Ettore and Jin Woo stopped squabbling, and all of us listened, trying to hear whatever Oskar was hearing.
Finally, he pointed to the south and announced, as if it wasn’t a huge fucking deal,
“A helicopter.”
I sprang up and began to dance around, skipping and pulling Bartosz to swing around joyfully with me. Oskar punched the air, and Jin Woo beat his chest. Ettore just smiled up into the sky.
“Come on, guys, come on!” Jin Woo encouraged me.
As the helicopter came closer, we waved our jackets that we had attached to sticks in the air, shouting and yelling when the helicopter appeared overhead after it made a slow circle around the island.
The helicopter was an odd color, an almost metallic blue-purple that stood out starkly after days of only natural colors.
“Do any of you need urgent medical attention? Wave your arms if you do.” Blared a voice artificially magnified by a speakerphone or something like it. After a moment where we were still, the speaker continued.
“There doesn’t seem to be enough flat terrain for us to land, so we will send a boat in a few hours to pick you all up. We’ll be landing on the eastern side of the island.”
And then the voice cut off, and the helicopter rose in the air and began to move quickly away from the island.
I bounced on my toes, imagining a hot bath, some warm soup with spices, a soft bed, but Bartosz and Jin Woo were on edge.
“They didn’t announce themselves,” Bartosz said quickly.
“They didn’t have Norwegian accents, and the helicopter color…”
Oskar seemed to understand where they were going with the line of logic, even if I didn’t.
“They are Renai,” Oskar said for my benefit.
“So what!” I shrugged my shoulders; their being gloomy couldn’t dampen my mood.
Ettore was the one who fully laid it out.
“They are Renai and part of the Rats, the elite force deployed by the Renai governing body to take care of dirty problems. They are the ones deployed to eliminate humans who may be aware of our existence if we don’t think they’ll keep quiet about it. They probably are gambling that to survive, and for so many to survive, we must have shared our secret, and there is probably one human that survived along with us. There has been a spate of close calls with humans who inadvertently learned about us, threatening to or almost revealing us to the public, so because of that, the Rats have been much more brutal recently.”
I felt a shiver go down my spine. I would be seen as a threat, immediately. The way that Ettore was speaking of them, it didn’t seem like they would allow me to explain that I wouldn’t cause the guys any harm, that I cared about them deeply. No, I would be eliminated before I even got a word out.
“And the leader of the Rats now, Constantine, he is a dick, and a huge piece of shit,” Bartosz said with more than a little venom in his voice.
