“The site is already cleared, which helps,” Willa told them. “Ranger prep. What we need to do is build the ring properly and position the setup so that, if we need to put it out quickly, we have two access points on either side. You always want two ways to approach a fire you need to extinguish.”
“Because if one side is blocked,” Grace said, “you still have the other.”
“Correct.” Willa looked at the stones they were setting in a circle. “And we’re keeping it small tonight. We don’t need a bonfire. We need controlled heat and light. There’s a difference.”
Katey was listening carefully. She had that look she got sometimes, that particular quality of attention that reminded Willa of Lucy in her medical mode, the one where she was filing all the information away because she intended to use it.
They went through the emergency packs next, all together. Once the camp was largely set up, the tents were in position, and the gear was stowed. Willa ran them through the satellite phone, theflare kit, the basic first-aid contents, and the location of the cave on the eastern side of the island, which the reserve rangers had mapped and documented as a secondary shelter in the event of severe weather.
“It’s about eight minutes inland from here at a normal walking pace,” Willa told them. “We’ll walk it tomorrow so everyone knows the route. But for tonight, if you hear me or Ace call shelter, that’s where you go. You don’t wait for an explanation. You grab your emergency pack, and you move.”
“What if it’s the middle of the night?” Tyler asked.
“Same answer,” Willa said. “You move. Your emergency packs have flashlights. That’s why they live at the foot of your sleeping bags and not at the bottom of your kit bags.”
He nodded, absorbing it. No dramatics.
Willa liked that about Tyler.
After the briefing, the mood lifted naturally, the way it always did once the practical business was handled, and people had eaten, and the light was still holding. Willa stood just outside the camp perimeter, watching the group settle into the easy sprawl of teenagers who had been given something to do and had done it and were now simply existing together for a little while, and she let herself breathe.
The air still sat heavy.
Willa had been ignoring the feeling for the past two hours, pushing it to the edge of her attention where it couldn’t interfere with what needed to happen, but now that the work had slowed, it came back, more distinctly than before.
The wind had shifted.
It had been coming off the water in the same light, south-westerly direction since they’d arrived. The kind of mild coastal breeze that was essentially background noise on the Nature Coast in summer. Now, standing still enough to notice, Willa felt it coming from a different angle. She turned her face into it and stood quietly.
East-northeast. And heavier than it had been.
She looked out toward the water beyond the tree line.
The sound of it had changed.
It was a subtle thing, and she wasn’t sure how to articulate it to someone who hadn’t spent years in proximity to the ocean in both its calm and its dangerous moods. It wasn’t that it was louder exactly. It was that the quality of the sound had changed in the same way a voice changed when it shifted from light conversation to concern.
“Hey.” Ace appeared beside her, also facing the water, his own attention already tracking what she was tracking. He had always done that, that easy, uncanny habit of ending up in the same place she was in when something mattered.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” Willa said.
He was quiet for a moment. Not dismissing her. Not filling the space.
“I know,” Ace replied. “But there are no official warnings that have come through.”
“I know.” Willa looked at the cloud line over the water. It was lower than it had been an hour ago, and it was not the soft, drifting gray of an ordinary overcast afternoon. There was something in the way it sat. Weighted. Pushed. As if somethingbehind it was shoving it forward. “But that doesn’t mean one isn’t coming.”
“You’re right,” Ace agreed. “It doesn’t.”
They stood together for another moment without speaking. That was not an uncomfortable thing for them. Somewhere along the course of however many years they had been doing this, being in each other’s orbit, she and Ace had arrived at the kind of ease where silence didn’t require filling, and she had stopped questioning it or examining it or putting distance between herself and the fact of it.
“We’ll watch it,” Willa suggested at last.
“Agree, we’ll watch it,” Ace echoed. “Now let’s get these teens active.” He smiled at her. “It will get your mind off the weather.”
They took the group on a nature walk a few minutes later, moving inland along the reserve trail that wound between the saw palmettos and live oaks, the Spanish moss trailing in heavy curtains that the teenagers photographed enthusiastically, despite everything Willa had said about keeping the afternoon low-key. Grace was telling Katey something about the differences between the leaf structures of two plants growing from the same root system. Andy had dropped slightly to the back of the group and was watching a pair of birds move through the canopy overhead with an expression of pure, uncomplicated attention. Tyler was walking beside one of the other boys, and they were talking in that half-murmuring way teenagers talked when they were actually comfortable rather than performing comfort.
Willa was showing the group a section of wild sea oats and explaining how the root system worked to stabilize the dune ecology when the first gust hit.
