She did something with her face that kind of resembled a smile. “Yeah, I could use a drink, too.”

“Let’s take a break,” Kletter pronounced. “We’ll have a hot meal and plenty of water once we reach the Villa.”

The Villa. It still sounded silly to Isaac. But the word “break” had never sounded so good, and he figured she could call her place whatever she wanted.

Backpacks slipped off shoulders; bodies collapsed to the ground in exhausted heaps. Isaac wandered a piece—as his mom used to say—and found a thick palm tree, its bark worn from the passage of time. He sat, propped his back against it, closing his eyes. A few seconds later, someone nudged him with a foot and he looked up at Sadina.

“You can have my last sip.” She held out her thermos.

“Really?” The word felt like air blowing across sand.

She unscrewed the cap and held it out again. Isaac gladly took it and drank the sweetest swallow of cold liquid in his life.

“Thanks,” he said with an intake of breath. “I was five minutes from death by dehydration.”

“You’re a softie is what you are. Don’t worry, I am, too. Our parents should’ve trained us better in case we ever returned to live in the apocalypse. Before this trip, when was the last time you were hungry?” She flumped to the ground next to him; he handed the thermos back to her. She tipped it toward the sky and finished it off.

Isaac thought about it. “Sometimes I’d skip breakfast because I was so excited to work at the Forge every morning.”

Sadina didn’t dignify that with a response. Isaac glanced over at Kletter, who sat alone in the middle of the road, legs crossed beneath her, staring at a spot in the distance with no life in her gaze. He’d assumed in the beginning that they’d get to know her inside and out by the time their voyage on the sea came to an end. But the reverse had happened. She was more of an enigma than ever—more than she’d been on the day they’d helped drag her out of the ocean.

“Hey.”

Isaac’s thoughts froze inside his mind. Someone had uttered the word in a harsh whisper from behind his tree. It definitely hadn’t been Sadina. Though fear tiptoed its way into the crevices of his brain, his rational side assumed it was somebody in their group. Casually, he leaned over and peered around the trunk of the ancient palm. No one. A quick look around revealed that everyone was in the road or on the other side. Out of easy earshot, anyway. The small trace of fear suddenly scratched a heavier tune on his heart.

“Did you hear that?’ he whispered to Sadina.