by Leslie Lutz
“How old are you?” I asked.
The question seemed to throw him. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. “Seaman First-Class Graham Fitch, serial number twenty-eight—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. But you gotta know none of what’s going on here is normal, right?”
Graham didn’t answer.
“Have you seen the show?” I asked.
Smoke blew over both of us and he blinked, his eyes watering.
“Ben and I saw it last night. A ship out there.” I nodded toward the sea, toward the west where the sun was making its way down. “Explosions. The ship sinking.”
Steph got up from her rock, her face a mask of confusion. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Because Ben doesn’t know what it means,” I said, “and he’s been trying to work it out. But I’ve figured it out.”
Ben side-eyed me. “No, you haven’t.” I got the feeling he liked to be the first one to decipher the math problem, the answer to the bonus question.
I turned back to the boy pretending to be a man. “Did you see it happening, over and over, like it was on a loop?”
Our prisoner’s expression went dark, and young, like he couldn’t keep his mask on any longer.
“Yes.”
“And what do you think it means?”
“I got no idea.”
His accent pegged him as a southerner. Maybe Texas. Alabama.
“One more question, Graham.”
He looked up at me suspiciously.
“What year is it?”
Steph started to laugh behind me, and I raised a hand to shut her up.
“Not that it matters,” Graham said, “but June. I think. Maybe July. And it’s 1943.”
ENTRY 18
I DIDN’T ASK SEAMAN Graham Fitch any more questions. Instead I pulled Ben and Steph down the beach to talk, and told Felix to tend the crab.
And I gave them my theory, nuts and all.
On this island, and in the waters surrounding it, time had become elastic, fluid. Time had become one big bowl of water sloshing about. It explained the light show the night before, that ship exploding again and again. It explained what I’d just seen out in the reef—our two charters, which should be either wrecked on the ocean floor or lying useless on the beach, somehow miraculously functional and floating side by side, just as they had been three days ago.
It was impossible.
But it was happening.
It was as if God had pressed rewind on the world, again and again, like a child replaying her favorite scene in a movie. And we got to see all that death played out again and again—a sick sort of Groundhog Day for sailors.
During my speech, Steph stared at her feet, concentrating. When I finished, she turned to Ben and said, “I think we should tie her up with Graham.”
Ben ignored her. He scratched at his beard shadow. “It would explain the birds,” he said.
“Would you stop it with the stupid birds?” Steph said.
“What about them?” I asked.
“The terns,” he said, nodding to the flock congregating a little ways down the beach. “There are four of them. Always four, every day. In the same spot.”
Steph threw up her hands in frustration. “So? It’s a flock. And they like that spot.”
He gave Steph a harsh look and moved close to me and pointed. “The one with the black spot on his wing, see that one?”
The terns made their way up from the surf and wandered into dry sand. The one with the black spot on its wing pecked something at its feet, the breeze from the surf ruffling its feathers.
“Keep your eye that one, Sia,” Ben said, still pointing. “He’s about to let go of that dead fiddler crab and attack the bird next to him, the one with the missing toe.” He put his hand on my arm. “Watch,” he finished in a soft, awed voice.
I waited and watched my feathered friend from my first day here anticipating his turn for grub. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how good it felt to have Ben’s hand on my arm, how calm I felt with him next to me.
Ben leaned in and whispered. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Sure enough, the tern with the black spot attacked the one next to it. The other tern hopped a few steps, opened its beak, and let out an angry squawk.
“There, you see that?” He smiled at Steph triumphantly.
Steph looked from me to him, confused. “So you’re psychic now?”
“No. It happens exactly that way a couple of times a day.”
She stared blankly at him, and he let out a heavy sigh, his eyes closed.
“They hunt in the surf for exactly four and a half minutes—I’ve counted—and then they go up there on the sand, circle that dead fiddler, and the fight breaks out between those two. Then the one with the missing toe flies off above the palm forest.”
Steph turned to stand next to us as we all watched and waited. I could feel her holding her breath. Then it played out exactly as Ben said. The tern with the missing toe took off and flew above the tops of the palms. The others stayed on the beach, fighting over the fiddler crab.
“See?” Ben said.
Steph shook her head and walked away, like she did that first night after I’d brought up her cousin. I waited for her to admit we were onto something, that we were right. Instead she turned, rubbing her arms, suddenly cold. She glanced at the ocean and then up and down the beach. Looking for rescue again.
“Can we eat now?” she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she rotated to walk toward the fire.
I shook my head, watching her clomp her way through the sand to the fire circle. She walked like a city girl, like the world was supposed to be smoothed out for her. A sudden image hit me, of Ben and Steph making out by his locker, and I felt a little sick.
“I really can’t see you two together,” I said.
“Why?”
I swallowed a few petty reasons before I settled on one. “She’s so closed-minded.”
“She’s practical.”
“She’s useless.”
“She’s making us a shelter. I would call that useful.”
“It’ll probably fall apart and kill us all.”
“She’s actually the president of the engineering club.”
I avoided his stare by examining my cuticles. Just out of earshot, Steph kneeled next to Felix, who was drawing in the sand. Trying to keep his mind off the crab dying in the fire behind them. She said something the wind whipped away before I could hear. Felix responded with his big belly laugh, something I hadn’t heard in so long.
“Oh yeah,” Ben said, nodding in Steph’s direction. “I see your point. Completely evil.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“Just because she doesn’t like you doesn’t mean she’s a terrible person.” He nudged me with an elbow. “Maybe you should give her a chance to get to know you. And you realize you can’t really blame her for not wanting to listen to our theories. Time loops aren’t supposed to be real. She’s freaking out.”
I looked out into the water, where I’d seen the past come together with the now, watched the waves beat at the shore over and over. “She’s not the only one.”
I haven’t had a chance to write for a few days, because Ben has been hogging my notebook. He’s filled several pages with diagrams that look like traps. They all suck. Mine weren’t any better, but I still didn’t like him crossing them out. If you were here, we’d already be cooking bits of that thing over the campfire.
You may have your faults, but at least you know how to end something.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that. I guess I’m just tired. And like I said, I don’t have an eraser.
We needed supplies—food, mostly—so I decided to go exploring. Alone. Ben didn’t like the idea. Next thing I know, Steph signed up.
At sunrise, Ben dropped a couple of water bottles into Steph’s makeshift net—which was only big enough to serve as a bag at this point—and took off his shirt to mak
e a cloth handle—which I appreciated for several reasons—and slipped the whole thing over my shoulder. I caught his eyes lingering over what I’d chosen to wear for the expedition. Since I was nice enough to let pale-as-a-delicate-lily Steph wear my rash guard for the day, I wore nothing but the string bikini. Steph had fashioned part of a beach towel into a headdress to protect her face. The rest of the towel was tied around her waist to shield her pale legs.
She looked ridiculous. And I didn’t. Which was, I have to admit, gratifying.
“Keep your eye out for anything we can use in the trap,” Ben said.
“We heard you the first six times,” Steph said, tying her ragged beach towel tighter around her waist.
Graham, who sat against a boulder, tied hands resting in his lap, cracked a smile. I frowned at him and he tried to hide it, checking out the knots around his wrists as if he’d just noticed they were there.
“You sure I can’t come?” Felix asked, his voice full of pleading. “I’m good at finding stuff.” He was right. At least half the converters had been built from his finds.
“You need to stay here and take care of Ben,” I told him. “He needs help fetching things.”
“You could untie the guy,” Felix said. “He can help.”
Graham raised an eyebrow at me.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Your brother’s right,” Graham said. “I can help.”
I ignored Graham and kneeled in front of Felix. “We’ll talk about it when I get back, okay?”
Felix nodded sullenly, and I wiped some dirt from his cheek. Then Felix threw his arms around my waist and hugged me so tight I felt my throat constrict. “You’re gonna find Mom. I just know it,” he said before he let me go.
Steph and I set off down the beach into the brightening dawn.
Our first hour was spent in blessed silence. The sun rose steadily before us, a ball of molten glass, hot and red, spreading out over the water. The glow turned orange, then faded until the strip of beach ahead lit up bright white, like an endless path to nowhere. The surf to our left crashed and surged. To the right, the palm forest loomed. Its darkness looked cool, and I wanted to feel it on my skin, press the bottoms of my feet into something other than sand.
But the thought of going back into that place, into the root cellar smell, made my insides twist. Though it wasn’t really the smell that got to me. It was that odd, intense déjà vu washing over me in a sickening wave. I know it sounds strange, but the Sense, it courses under the skin sometimes. Curdling me from the inside out.
We rounded a bend and discovered a small cove the size of a basketball court. My heart leapt, because at first I thought I’d found a place too shallow for that thing to hunt me. I could fish in peace, bring up everything we needed to survive. Lobster. Crab. Sea urchin. A whole sushi buffet.
As we got closer, a second look at the color of the water—a dusky blue—proved I was wrong. It was deep enough.
I could almost hear the island laughing at us, its throat full of broken glass, promising us a safe haven before taking it away.
When Steph finally spoke, I was so focused on the nooks and crannies of the rocks, wondering how much time I’d have to search, that I’d almost forgotten she was there.
“Okay, I’m game.”
I turned, startled. Steph walked briskly alongside me, squinting into the sun, her towel hat flapping in the stiff breeze coming off the crashing surf.
“Game for what?” I asked.
“Let’s say you and Ben are right.” She held up a hand to stop me before I could interrupt. “Just for argument’s sake. The weird time loop thing. How did it happen?”
“You believe us?”
“No.”
“Then why even ask?”
“Look, if you two are so sure, then you should have a theory or something.”
I thought about it for a few wave cycles, walking closer to the water so that sea-foam brushed over the tops of my feet. Steph stepped away from it. Made of sugar, you would say. Afraid to melt. The water surged, swirled, and turned into chaos before it rushed the shore again.
“Okay then,” I said. “Time, which should be going forward, is all mixed-up because of solar flares and . . . changes in the earth’s magnetic field.”
“Mixed-up?”
“You know, time soup.”
“Your seven-year-old brother would come up with something better than that.”
I hate to admit it, but her comment actually bothered me. “You got a better idea?”
Steph’s sigh was so dramatic I heard it over the waves. “It’s like a . . .” She paused. “Like a Klein bottle.”
“A what?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“A bottle where the outside and the inside are the same. Not time soup. A Klein bottle.”
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“You could google it.”
“I could google mermaids too,” I said. “If I had a phone.”
“It’s a real thing. Trust me. At least that’s what Ben was saying last night. Not that I didn’t already know about them.”
Steph left it at that, leaving me to stew in the silence.
“You tossed around a bunch of theories with Ben about time loops because you don’t believe any of it?” I asked. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“I like to hear Ben talk,” she said. “He’s so pretty.”
“You do remember you’re not together anymore, right?”
She stopped walking. So did I.
“No, we’re not together,” Steph said. “But he’s my friend. And that means I talk some sense into him when he’s on the wrong track.”
“You mean . . .”
“He’s wasting his time.”
“With . . .”
She paused long enough for her gaze to become razor sharp. “Some things will never work, no matter how much effort you put into them.”
“Are we still talking about our trap?”
The small smile touched the corner of her mouth as she turned away to continue walking. “We need to focus on signaling the Coast Guard, not killing a squid. Thing. Whatever it is. That’s all I meant.”
A bit of you rose in me then.
“Waste of time, huh?”
“Yeah,” she called over her shoulder.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her around. She stumbled, her expression startled.
“What the—”
“I’m not going to bother trying to defend myself and who I am, because that’s a colossal waste of time. And it doesn’t really matter. But you can’t ignore what Ben and I saw two nights ago. Or what I saw yesterday morning, out in the water. Or the . . .” I trailed off as sudden déjà vu slid under my skin.
A collection of images.
A memory.
Steph and me brawling it out on the beach, pulling at each other’s hair, old-school girl fight. The sunlight glinted like teeth on the water, blinding me. My knee in her stomach. A mouth full of sand. Her nails down my cheeks.
My hand dropped from her shoulder. I touched my face where the marks would have been. I blinked into the sunlight and the beach lurched. The images faded.
“Whatever, Sia,” Steph said, stepping back from me, and the look in her eyes made me think she felt it too. Saw it even. “Make up whatever theories you want.”
I stood still, staring at her, my stomach reeling as she backed away from me.
“You know what we do?” Steph said. “I say we finish the SOS message on the beach—your little brother is a genius, by the way. I don’t know why the rest of us didn’t think of it—and then the Coast Guard comes. We won’t need the net. We won’t need that useless plan you and Ben keep talking about. Because there’s no Klein bottle. No time loop. And we’re going to get off this island. Ben and I are going to go back to our world, and you’ll go somewhere else.”
I was about to argue with her, but something over her shoulder stopped me. In the forest, just beyond the shadows. Mov
ement—a flash of it, like someone slipping behind a trunk. And with it came a sudden tumble of images in my mind and an overwhelming nausea.
Steph turned to follow my gaze. “What are you looking at?”
I blinked, waiting for the flash of movement again, but it didn’t come. Then I noticed a dark circle, an inky hole punched into the forest. Perfectly round and nestled within something green.
I made my way across the sand and stepped into the shadows between the trees. The relief from the sun was instant, a cool salve to my skin. The sand gave way to crisp palm fronds under my feet that crunched in the stillness.
I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the shadows. The fist-sized hole was ringed with dark, thick metal and directed at me, peeking from under a heap of fallen fronds and a ratty-looking cloth tarp. The boxy shape underneath the tarp was as big as a small car.
I walked around it, searching the shadows in the nearby trees for a hint of motion. The feeling I was being watched welled up again, like it had that first day. A pinprick of fear piercing my mind, bringing up a bead of blood.
“Hello?” I called into the forest.
“Sia, there’s nobody here,” Steph said, her attention on the tarp. She stepped to the side and pulled. It fell in a heap at her feet, revealing the shape underneath.
“What. The heck. Is that?”
I put my hand over my mouth. I’d seen something like this before. And it made no sense that it was here, on an island twenty miles from mainland Florida.
You and me, walking through a field behind a museum. At age five, the name of the place went right over my head, but I remembered the sunshine, the mowed grass, and the glint of brass plaques. We stopped in the shadow of a huge machine. You let me climb up onto its wheel, throw my arm around the long black tube, and hang from it. I remember hooking my ankles around the sun-warmed metal and dangling upside down, you laughing. Then the park attendant started yelling. I don’t remember his name, or the argument that followed, just his angry face, and yours. And I remember what you called it.
“It’s a howitzer,” I said.
“A what?”
“I’m guessing they used it to blow boats out of the water. It’s a little different than the one I saw before, though.”