There was no depth to the river, but they would be able to lie in it. She undressed, no longer self-conscious. For the Tribals, all that mattered was body function – strength, agility and speed. Emrallie had no tan marks and liked to take off her clothes when it was safe. Sorrel envied Emrallie’s ability to inhabit the present moment completely. She lay back in the water now, her eyes closed behind her dark glasses.

In her time with the Tribals, she’d learned their stories. Caroni’s father was in the Domin Squad, so she’d been taken away from her mother as a baby. She’d grown up in one of the Domin camps and rarely saw her father. She’d seen some of the violence training and other kinds of training – how to find food, make a camp, track and hide. There were other children there. “I guess you could say we raised ourselves,” she’d said without emotion.

“How did you leave?” Sorrel had asked.

“How? Or why?”

“Why, I guess.”

“If you got a period, you were given to a Domin man. I saw those girls; they had nothing in their eyes.”

Emrallie and Rashelope had been alone in the mountains the longest. Emrallie came from a big family and her father and youngest sister had been killed in a hurricane. They lived in a small town in the middle of the island and after the crops died and the roads buckled, there was no food. Her mother had taken them all on the move, looking for a place to settle. She’d learned survival skills at a young age, but there was never enough to eat. Her mother had sacrificed her two youngest children – Emrallie and her brother, Teal. “We were triaged,” she told Sorrel. “We were the weakest and needed the most care. We were a drain on the others. She chose from the bottom up. I don’t blame her for it.”

“What happened to Teal?”

“He died. We found shelter in a ruin – just a pile of square stones, must have been from really long ago. But a feral got him while I was out looking for food. He was six.”

“You found his body?”

“I found the porcine eating him. One of those bigger ones with tusks. I killed it, hacked it up and ate it for a few days, but the flesh went bad really quickly. Kept the tusks as weapons for a long time, but they reminded me, so…”

“Guata, Em, that’s awful. You had to bury your brother…”