He and Miyoko had stopped walking at some point, though he didn’t remember doing so. Everything seemed so quiet now—after that short but powerful engine burst. A sound rarely heard in his little world.

“What do we do?” he whispered.

“Quick, over there!”

Miyoko ran toward a last remnant of the peninsula’s rocky landscape, big enough to hide behind. Isaac followed her and they crouched close together to peek around the edge, maybe forty meters away from the sand-docked vessel. He knew the boat’s occupants had already spotted them much earlier, but at least they had cover if someone came out with a horrible weapon intent on killing humans.

“This is so crazy,” Miyoko whispered.

“Tell me about it.” Isaac found it hard to breathe, every one of his bodily systems running at hyper speeds they weren’t used to. He focused on pulling the moist and salty air into his lungs, letting it flow back out his nose.

Seconds passed. Minutes. Felt like months. Nothing moved on the boat. Water lapped in equal strengths against both sides, but the vessel didn’t rock back and forth, not in the least. The forward-most tip of The Maze Cutter angled upward, looming three meters above the surface of the water and twice that much from the sand beneath it. The ship seemed firmly stuck into place.

A loud, metallic echo broke the lull and the silence. Isaac instinctively clutched on to Miyoko, and she did the same to him. They leaned farther out from the edge of their hiding spot, searching for any sign of movement.

There.

Something . . . someone was crawling along the walkway from the cabin to the back deck, where all those dead bodies lay. A woman. She was as frail as any person Isaac had ever seen, her body like a hastily assembled set of bones underneath ratty clothes. She moved with weary, slumping motions, barely able to pull and kick her way across the warped surface of the deck. Her skin was dark, her hair a disheveled mess. Her every movement seemed a monumental effort of sheer will, before she finally made it to the railing closest to where Isaac and Miyoko were hiding, watching.

“That lady needs some help,” Miyoko said in an egregious understatement. “Pretty sure she isn’t going to pull out a machete or gun. Come on.”

“Wait!” Isaac snapped. “Just . . . are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I’m not gonna hide here behind a rock and let that lady die.”

“But what if they have a disease?” Of all the things taught to them by their elders, it was to fear disease.

“They were shot in the head, Isaac. Getting shot in the head is not a virus I’ve heard of.”

The woman was groaning, reaching haplessly for the first rung of the rusty railing.

“I get that, Miyoko, but maybe she shot them to put them out of their misery.”