Page 8 of Prima (After the End #8)

“Ah… Well, sir, this is…well…”

“No special dispensation? Did you inform your supervisor ahead of time that you would venture beyond the permitted radius?”

The ringleader titters nervously. “We weren’t planning to be this far from shore, sir. You must have seen the raft, right? There’s a girl on the raft, and the guys got a little carried away.”

“A camp follower?” asks the boy, his three words conveying the disapproval of an entire ruling apparatus.

“No, no, sir!” the ringleader squeals. The girl imagines beads of sweat on his forehead. “We wouldn’t dare have camp followers. But six of us here are unmarried and a perfectly good girl passed by all by herself—”

“You were conducting a private wife hunt?” The boy’s voice suddenly drips with ice.

In the middle of a tropical morning, in sun-drenched, aquamarine water, even the girl feels a chill down her back.

“May I remind you, penalties for private wife hunts are higher than those for leaving work camp without permission,” the boy continues, his words clipped, unsparing. “You are looking at another six months of volunteering, at the very least.”

“But we could have been chasing down an escapee…” The ringleader sounds as if he’s about to cry. “Surely that counts for something.”

The boy laughs softly. “Let me tell you something off-record. These days there is a great need for volunteers. Any females you see plying our waters, singly or in small groups, are set loose deliberately to lure men into pursuit. And these men end up donating nearly an extra year of their lives to reclamation efforts.”

Seagulls squawk overhead. Clear wavelets splash gently against the sides of the boats. A breeze whips the sail of the girl’s raft, sending it scudding northward.

And she can almost hear the men in the canoe trembling, the paddles twitching in their shaking hands.

As the silence grows from merely oppressive to downright suffocating, the boy asks gently, “Now, esteemed uncles, what were you doing?”

If she could, the girl would applaud his ironic usage of honorifics.

The ringleader, after some more hemming and hawing, finally makes a false confession. “We were goofing, sir. We just wanted to swan about and do nothing for a bit.”

The boy sounds slightly mollified. “In that case, you’ll get off relatively easily—no more than a slap on the wrist. Row back to your work camp. I’ll follow you.”

The ringleader must have decided to try his luck. “Please, sir, can we just forget that this ever happened?”

Another silence unfurls. The girl enjoys the tickle of its tyranny. What is the boy doing? Staring at the men one by one, tapping his fingertips on the gunwale, or checking the state of his nails? She hopes it’s this last.

“I see you do not appreciate mercy,” he says at last. “I’m beginning to believe it’ll be better for me to report what you were doing in truth.”

“No, no, please don’t, sir,” begs the defeated ringleader. “Please don’t. We are extremely grateful. We really are.”

A chorus of murmured agreement rises among the men.

“Well, then, paddle fast,” orders the boy.

The men paddle with even more frantic energy than they did during their pursuit of the girl and it takes the ringleader a deal of shouting before they settle into a proper rhythm.

The boy, before he follows them, rounds to the girl’s side and frowns down at her in the water.

He’s in a Dawani Coast Watch uniform and she sees why a canoe full of men in their prime dare not contradict his authority—he holds a nerve blaster that could easily incapacitate the whole lot of them and leave them in excruciating pain for the rest of their lives.

She smiles at him.

Without any expression on his face, he points the nerve blaster at her and strides off.

Be still her pounding heart.

* * *

Before his patrol boat is on its way, she’s already thirty meters underwater.

She keeps diving until she reaches the ocean floor—not too deep here, only about seventy-five meters or so—and harvests a few sea cucumbers.

Back at her raft, she drops the sea cucumbers into a bucket, then goes under again and bags two red snappers.

She cleans the sea cucumbers, cuts them into bite-sized pieces, and sets them to braise on her camping stove.

She also scales and cleans the snappers, dividing them into palm-sized fillets for grilling.

When she’s done with most of the food prep, she washes with some desalinated water, covers herself with a flame-colored sarong, and sits down to comb out her shoulder-length hair.

About twenty klicks north-northeast of where they last laid eyes on each other, shortly after she finishes putting up a makeshift canopy using a woven straw mat, The Arrow of Time streaks into view, the boy’s hair flying behind him.

He turns his vessel hard into the wind and then, when it has come nearly to a stop, backs the jib to port and pulls up alongside her raft.

She, sitting at the edge of the raft, her feet in the water, smiles and waves.

The boy, who has taken off his uniform jacket and wears only an olive-green t-shirt with the Dawani Coast Watch’s emblem printed on the chest pocket, does not smile or wave back. “Why aren’t you farther away?”

His voice is as implacable as when he dressed down her would-be kidnappers. But does she hear a note of anticipation as well?

“You intervened on my behalf this morning. It doesn’t feel right to leave before I’ve expressed my gratitude. Will you come for lunch?”

He is silent for a long time. She’s not used to seeing him under a bright sun. The light overhead casts his eyes into shadows and emphasizes the sharply delineated edges of his lips.

“Are you set loose in these parts,” he asks slowly, “not to entrap mobs of civilians, but to catch patrols who aren’t doing their jobs?”

She laughs out loud—she isn’t that prone to laughter, but he does manage to tickle her funny bone. “Too late for you if I am: I’ve already witnessed you granting too much leniency to a passel of unauthorized wife hunters.”

He glances behind his shoulder at the empty sea—the islands have thinned out—before he brings his attention back to her, a swift look that nevertheless makes her heart thump. “In that case, I might as well come for lunch.”

She grins and throws him a line to moor his boat to her raft.

“I hope you have a good knife to cut the line loose in case you need to flee,” he says, tying the knot.

“I do—several, in fact,” she says.

He disappears for a minute and returns having changed into a white tunic.

Then he lowers his sails, takes a running leap, and lands lightly at the stern of her raft.

She admires his lithe and athletic form.

On the other hand, she’ll have a fair bit of trouble should they end up in hand-to-hand combat.

He straightens and offers her a small stoneware jar. “Thank you for the lunch invitation.”

The jar, light green and almost vitreous in appearance, is sealed with beeswax. “This looks like expensive liquor. Are you allowed to carry such contraband aboard while on duty?”

“Of course not. Which is why it is now found aboard your vessel, not mine.”

She chortles. Is this what it feels like to be infatuated, to find everything a boy says and does fascinating and amusing? She places the jar on the low folding table she set up at the center of the raft and indicates a folding stool. “Please, take a seat. Some tea?”

“Why not? Thank you.”

She breaks out the good tea for him, Jasperdew, more costly than its weight in gold. As the tea steeps, he studies the cups she lays out for them, in particular her heavy silver cup.

“I would offer it to you,” she says, “but I’ve been using it since I was a baby.”

He looks up at her. “It’s quite all right. I drink out of cups of gold and jade when I’m home.”

She must look like a loon, grinning nonstop. But humor aside, she has the feeling that he isn’t entirely joking. She’d bet that this boy with his swift, unusual boat has seen a thing or two growing up and perhaps indeed sipped out of chalices made of precious materials.

“Did you also bring my hostess gift from home?” she asks, sitting down on a folding stool opposite him.

His gaze dips down to where her sarong is tied across her chest before meeting hers again. His eyes are as cool as the sea at much greater latitudes yet heat ripples across her skin.

“The liquor? That was a parting present from the men who were spared another six months of ‘volunteering’.”

“Ah,” she murmurs.

“You sound surprised.”

“Only because you sounded extremely upstanding.”

He snorts. “Dawan is rotten from top to bottom. If I’d refused this gift, the men would think that I still mean to report them for unauthorized wife-hunting: At best they’d go to bed dreading my return; at worst they’d organize a much larger party to come after me.

Taking their gift signals to them that I understand the system and can be bought.

They’ll be much more at ease and I won’t have to watch my back with as much trepidation. ”

She pours tea for him. “So you’re at least a little bit corruptible?”

He waits for her to fill her own cup before raising his. The cuff of his tunic is embroidered with a pattern of branching corals, blue on white. “That depends. Who’s looking to corrupt me?”

“Me, of course.”

He lifts one brow. “In what way?”

Her heart beats faster. “In what way are you amenable to corruption?”

His glance slides down her, so briefly it’s barely a flicker.

Is that his answer? Yet as he looks back at her, in that cool, steady way of his, she realizes that maybe she isn’t as fully in control of the situation as she thought she was.

The boy isn’t just beautiful and capable, but dangerous in a way she can’t fully articulate.

She backpedals a bit. “And you’re not worried anymore that I might have been sent by your superiors?”