May Charles read the sky and knew she was out of time. Dark clouds pushed in off the water, low and fast. She had washed up on this island days ago with salt in her gold hair and a bad call behind her. Now she had four days of surviving to lose. The storm would take her rainwater and soak the dry patch of sand where she slept. If she wanted to make it home, she had to build a wall between herself and the rain. She checked the time on her watch. The strap was worn soft, the face scratched, but the second hand still ticked. Someone back home had watched her wear it a hundred times, and did not yet know she was gone. She meant to make it back to them. She snapped the watch shut against her wrist and got to work. May ran the tree line and gathered what the island gave her. She dragged three long branches to a rock face and leaned them against it like ribs. Wind ripped the first two loose. She wedged them deeper, packing sand around the ends until they held. Her hands shook from hunger and effort. She kept going. The first rain hit while she layered broad leaves across the branches. Each leaf was the kind that had saved her life once, holding water when her throat was closing. Now she used them to hold the water out. She weighted the roof with stones. Water ran off the edge instead of onto her. Then the wind changed. A gust drove under the open side and threw rain across her small hollow of dry sand. Her collected rainwater tipped and spilled into the wet ground. May cursed and threw her body against the branches to keep the shelter standing. It held. But her drinking water was gone. She crawled inside and pressed her back to the rock. The storm hammered the leaf roof. Wind found the gaps and chilled her wet clothes, but the branches did not fall. Above her the roof sagged and dripped, and still it stood. She had a wall between herself and the rain. That was more than she'd had an hour ago. May checked her watch again out of habit. The face had fogged under the glass from the wet, the numbers dim. She wiped it against her arm and it cleared. The second hand ticked on, steady in the noise. She pulled her knees to her chest and listened to the water she could no longer drink pour down all around her. The shelter would keep her dry through the night. But she'd traded her only water to get it. When the storm passed, she would be under a roof with nothing left to drink. She closed her hand over the watch and waited for morning.

Morning came, but the rain did not stop. May watched water sheet off the leaf roof and pool in the sand. She had no dry wood. Every branch she touched left her hand wet. Without fire she could not cook, and she could not boil the runoff into something safe to drink. Her stomach cramped from empty days. She checked her watch out of habit. The second hand still ticked. She closed her hand over the smooth glass and told herself to move. She crawled out and dragged fallen branches under the roof to dry. They stayed soaked. She struck a stone against her knife and got nothing but a wet spark that died. Rain ran down her neck. Her teeth clicked together. By afternoon a cough sat deep in her chest, and each breath scraped. She was colder than the storm should make her. She knew the shivering meant her body was losing. May drank the pooled rainwater because she had no other choice. It tasted of leaf and grit. An hour later her gut twisted and she brought it back up. She wiped her mouth and stayed on her knees in the mud, too tired to stand. The island had beaten her plan again. She needed food, water, and heat, and the rain had taken all three. That was when she saw them. Two footprints pressed into the soft mud past the tree line. Toes, heel, the arch between. Human. Fresh enough that the rain had not yet washed them flat. May stared. Someone else walked this island. Someone had passed close while she lay in her shelter, sick and blind to it. Fear cut through the cold. She did not know if the footprints meant rescue or something worse. She had no strength to run and no strength to hide. She pushed her palms against the ground and tried to rise. Her arms shook and folded. She dropped back into the mud, her cheek near the prints, her breath loud and ragged. She wanted to follow them. She wanted to call out. She did neither. Her body would not answer. She lay there and watched the rain fill the toe marks with water, softening their edges, blurring the shape of whoever had made them. She never saw who. She never learned which way they had gone. May pressed the watch to her chest. Someone at home was still waiting, still not knowing. She had proof now that she was not alone on this island. But she could not stand, and she could not chase it. When the shivering eased into something heavier,she grabbed a long and sturdy stick to keep her balanced then she walked trying to figure out who was on the island with her then there was a shake then she said an earthquake then another shake this one harder and louder it made her lose her balance and she fell and hit her head on a tree she was standing by then she went unconscious

May woke on her back, warm. That was wrong. The last thing she knew was mud and rain and the tree that met her head. Now a wool blanket lay over her legs. A bandage wrapped her forehead. She touched it and felt the cloth pull at her skin. She turned her head slow. She lay on a cot inside a small house, wood walls and a red door shut against the light. She pushed up on her elbows. The room tilted, then held. A pot sat on a stove across from her. Steam curled off it, and the smell of cooked fish reached her. Somewhere outside a chicken clucked, then another. Wood creaked as something moved past the wall. Someone lived here. Someone had carried her in, cleaned her head, lit that fire. "I'm lucky to be alive," she said out loud, to no one. Her voice cracked. She had drunk bad water, gone hungry, fallen. She should be dead in the trees. Instead she was dry and bandaged in a stranger's home. She did not know whose. She did not know what part of the island this was. The red door opened. A young man ducked under the frame with an armful of split wood. Dark skin, dark eyes, a torn shirt buttoned to his chest. He was near her age and moved like the house was his and always had been. He saw her sitting up and stopped. He did not smile or speak. He set the wood down by the stove. "You're awake," he said. That was all. "You brought me here." It was not a question. "You fixed my head." He crossed to the pot and stirred it. "You were bleeding. Storm did that, or you did." He nodded at the bandage. "Sit. Eat when it's done." May watched him. He would not look at her long. "Where am I? Whose house is this?" "Mine." He ladled fish into a bowl and held it out. His hands were steady, calloused, sure. "Eat." She took the bowl. The warmth of it went straight through her fingers. "What's your name?" He turned back to the stove. "Doesn't matter." "It does to me. You saved my life." He was quiet. He fed a stick to the fire and shut the little iron door on it. "Eat while it's hot," he said. "Then we'll talk about you leaving." May ate. The fish was hot and clean and the first real food in days. Her body took it and steadied. She was not going to die on the beach or in the mud. She was safe, fed, dry, healing. But she was in a locked room with a man who would not give her his name, on a part of the island she had never seen, and he had already said the word leaving. She did not know if that meant a way home or a way out the door and back into the trees alone.