Two days ago, Jordan Black boarded a cruise ship with six friends to celebrate graduation. Now he stood alone on a strange beach, screaming their names at empty water. The ship had rolled over in the night. He remembered the cold, the shouting, then nothing until the sand woke him. His friends could be anywhere along this coast. They could be dead. He had no boat, no map, no way to look. He kept walking the shoreline, checking every dark shape in the surf. Each one was a rock or a broken crate. Never a person. By noon his throat was raw. The beach curved into cliffs he couldn't climb. Past them, the coast stretched for miles he had no way to reach. He sat down and pressed his palms into his eyes. That was when he heard footsteps in the sand behind him. A girl about his age stood a few feet away. Long black hair. A shell bracelet on one wrist. She held a coconut and studied him like he might bolt. A small brown puppy circled her ankles, sniffing toward Jordan. "You washed up too," she said. Not a question. "I found the others. Some of them." Jordan stood so fast his head spun. "Others? My friends? Where—" "Slow down." She held up a hand. "I'm Leilani. I live here. I found three people down the beach at dawn. That way, past the rocks." She pointed the direction he couldn't climb. "Three," Jordan said. His chest tightened. "There were seven of us. Are they okay? Who are they?" "Two boys, one girl. Breathing. Cut up, tired, but alive." Leilani watched his face. "I couldn't carry them far. I made them rest in an old hut and came looking for anyone else." Jordan grabbed her arm without thinking. "Take me." She didn't pull away. She looked at his hand, then at him. "There's a trail through the trees. The cliffs are the only fast way, and you can't climb those." The puppy barked once, sharp, and trotted toward the treeline. They followed it. The trail cut inland through thick brush, then dropped back toward the water. A weathered wooden hut sat in a clearing, its red roof faded, its door hanging open. Jordan ran the last stretch and shoved inside. Three figures lay on woven mats. He knew all three faces. Not the four he wanted most, but three he loved. One girl opened her eyes and whispered his name. Jordan dropped to his knees and gripped her hand. Then the counting hit him. Three here. Seven on the ship. Four still missing, somewhere he couldn't reach on foot. Leilani leaned in the doorway. "Whoever else is out there, the current pulls south. Toward the far coast." She paused. "That's the King's land. And he doesn't like strangers washing up on it."

The cliffs could wait for morning. Jordan and his three friends agreed on that inside the old hut. No one could climb rock in the dark, and the missing four were south, past reach for now. But their stomachs growled, and the water was gone. So Jordan and Matt stepped back into the trees to hunt for food. Matt led. He always did in the wild. His parents were survival guides, and he read the forest the way Jordan read a crowd. His dreads swung as he crouched over broken ferns. "Water runs downhill," he said. "Follow the green." They walked until the ground went soft. A thin stream cut through the roots. Matt cupped his hands and drank, then nodded. "Clean." Jordan looked up and stopped. A tree stood over the stream, thick with fruit in colors that made no sense. Blue spikes. Pink swirls. A purple one shaped like a fist. "Tell me those won't kill us," Jordan said. Matt broke one open. He smelled it, then rubbed juice on his wrist and waited. "No burn. No bad smell." He touched a drop to his tongue and held still. "Sweet. It's safe." They filled their shirts with fruit and carried it back. Trina met them at the door. She was Jordan's friend, though barely — the rich girl who paid her way onto the trip and kept trying to prove she belonged. Her pink sneakers were caked with mud now. She stared at the fruit. "That looks fake," she said. "I'm starving. I hate that I don't care." Matt built a fire while Jordan cleaned two small silver fish they'd pulled from the stream. Soon a neat ring of stones held glowing embers and fish on sticks. They ate the fish first. Then Jordan bit into a blue fruit. It tasted like nothing he knew — cold, then warm going down. Trina ate a pink one. Her eyes went wide. "I can hear the fire," she said. "I mean, I can hear it move. Every crack." She wasn't joking. She named the sound of a bug landing across the clearing. Jordan stood and felt it hit him. The dark stopped being dark. He saw the treeline sharp, every leaf edged, like someone turned up the light behind his eyes. He reached for a coconut Matt had missed and crushed it in one hand. The shell burst like paper. Matt looked at his own hands, then vaulted over the fire in a single easy jump. He landed light. "That's not me," he said. "That's the fruit." They stood in the firelight, breathing hard, changed. The fruit had done something to their bodies. Jordan flexed his fingers and thought of the cliffs waiting at dawn — the rock he couldn't climb before. "We eat more before we go up," he said. "Whatever this is, it just made the mountain possible."