Glowly's Arc

Chapter 3 of 16

By the next morning Glowly was back on the water. The second tidal flat was wider than the first. She had cut fresh vines at dawn and bound a new raft, bigger this time. She poled hard across the open water while the sea climbed the drowned rocks behind her. Then she felt the raft shift under her boots. A knot slipped. The green coils spread apart, and cold water pushed up between them. Glowly dropped to her knees and grabbed the loosening vines. The thorns bit her palms again. She pulled the coils tight and lashed them with a length of rope. It held for a moment, then another knot gave. The raft sagged in the middle. Water covered her ankles. The far shore was still too far to swim, and her pack would drag her down if she tried. She poled harder, aiming for a low mud bank ahead. The raft was sinking faster than she could push it. "You're going to lose it!" a voice called. Glowly looked up. A girl crouched on the mud bank ahead, watching her. She was thin, in patched tights and a huge brown coat that hung off her shoulders. Her hands were white with chalk. She had no boat and no gear, only a coil of thin rope looped over one arm. Glowly had thought this coast was empty of people. Everyone who came here died. "Throw me your rope!" the girl shouted. "Now, before it goes under!" Glowly did not know her. She had no reason to trust a stranger on a route no trader survived. But the raft was breaking apart under her feet. She untied her own rope, weighted the end with the broken branch, and threw it. The girl caught it clean. She wrapped it twice around a stump of drowned rock and dug her heels into the mud. "Come on! Walk the vines while they still hold!" Glowly grabbed her pack and crawled forward over the sinking coils. The rope went taut. The girl leaned back with her whole small weight and pulled. Glowly's boots slid on the wet vines, then found mud. She dragged herself onto the bank as the raft folded and slipped under the water behind her. She lay on the mud, breathing hard. Her hands bled onto the ground. The girl coiled the rope and grinned down at her. "Nova," she said. "I've been stuck on this bank since the tide came in. No raft, no way across. You're the first fool I've seen out here." Glowly sat up. Her raft was gone. The next tide would rise before she could cut and bind another. But she was alive, and she was no longer alone. She looked at Nova's coil of rope and the wide water still between them and the southern shore. "Then we're both stuck," Glowly said. "Unless we build one together."