Except… everything hurts. Nothing is supposed to hurt in a dream. Also, this is bumpier than my usual dream-floating.
I dream I’m being jostled?
Hmmm.
I open my eyes and scream.
I scramble out of the arms of the figure carrying me, spraying sand in every direction, including into my own eyes.
“Ow!” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, pushing the grains of sand in deeper.
“Careful! You’ll make it worse!” Henry’s voice is in my ear.
“What are you doing here?” I demand. “You scared me!”
His fingers brush against my wrist. “Let me help.”
“It hurts!” I flail around until my elbow slams into what can only be Henry’s head.
He hisses in pain. “Hence the help!”
“I can’t see!”
“Get your hands out of your bloody eyes!” he yells in exasperation.
I drop my hands and try again to pry open my eyes, but the sand and my tear ducts have fused together to form an unbreakable bond. “I can’t open them!”
Henry gently circles my wrists with his hands. “Then let me bloody help you!”
“Fine!” I shout. I stop moving, and he leads me toward the sound of the waves lapping against the shore. I kneel in wet sand and tip my head back as he pours handful after handful of briny seawater over my eyes. The water spills down the sides of my cheeks as I blink out painful grains of sand until I can open my eyes again. I wait as my vision adjusts to the dark, and when I can finally see Henry kneeling next to me, I repeat my question. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re welcome, happy to help,” he mutters, rubbing the spot near his temple that my elbow struck.
I stand up and brush myself off. “If you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”
“Such as?”
“I need to finish the raft I started.”
“You mean that?”
He points to a pitiful bundle of sticks and bamboo with a flimsy vine looped loosely around it.
I scan the beach for the rest of my supplies. Thatcan’tbe all I did. It took forever, and it was so hard. When I realize it is, in fact, all I did, my cheeks grow hot. The raft that I thought would save us all is roughly the size of my leg. To further humiliate me, Henry lifts his foot and shoves the “raft” into the water. The vine slips away as the planks quickly fall apart.
I clear the embarrassment from my throat. “It appears we need a new plan.”
“You mean like that one?” He points a little ways up thebeach, where a fire illuminates a giant “SOS” spelled out of tree branches, rocks, and bamboo shoots. Isthatwhat I spent the entire night working on? Am I some sort of survival sleepwalking genius? I was pretty out of it before I fell asleep.
The thought cheers me up and I wander toward the message. “Did I do this?”
“You sound mental,” Victoria says. She’s lying on the sand next to the second S. Her eyes are closed, and light from a flickering fire reveals dark purple shadows under her eyes. She looks sick, but she still sounds like herself, which must be a good sign.
“Where’d you come from?”
“There was a plane in the sky, see, and it crashed—”
“Did you do this?” I gesture to the message.
