Passenger (Passenger #1) - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,109

him even as he set her down on her feet.

She can look after herself. Etta knew herself well enough to know what she could and couldn’t fight through.

But that, of course, didn’t preclude him wanting to take care of her.

Etta looked around, taking in the knot of green foliage, the way the canopy shielded them from the sun’s glare. “Well…this is different.”

He snorted. “Come, let’s see what we can find in the way of water and food.”

His ears hadn’t failed him—there was a stream nearby, and it moved quickly enough for him to feel mildly comfortable drinking it. Whenever he and Julian had tried to survive in the wild, they’d carried packs stuffed with supplies. Pots for boiling water and cooking. Blankets for freezing nights. There had been matches to start fires, hooks and lines for fishing. It had been Hall who’d taught him how to survive with none of these things.

He had a small knife he’d carried with him from New York. That would have to be enough.

“Wait here a moment,” he said, gesturing toward a stone on the bank of the stream. “I’ll be right back. Shout if you see or hear anything.”

She nodded, distracted by something in the distance. He walked back the way they had come, veering right when he saw a tower of pale green out of the corner of his eye. Bananas—none of them ripe, but food all the same. He sent up a prayer of gratitude to whoever might be listening as he began to pull them from the tree and stow them in the bag. The most pressing issue now was finding some kind of container in which to boil water, and locating wood and brush that were dry enough to strike up a fire.

He ran a hand along the spine of a downed tree, considering. Using his knife, he cut away a section of it and brushed off the dirt and insects. The tree was mostly hollowed out inside, and if he carved it right, it could be used as a small bowl.

Nicholas stripped off his wilted shirt, surprised to find it was already damp with sweat as he stowed it in his bag. The air had taken on the quality of the swamps down south in the colonies, pregnant with the potential for a raging storm. Perhaps they wouldn’t need to boil water at all, only catch it.

His knife chipped and cut away at the tree, and Nicholas lost himself in the good feeling of accomplishment, stopping only to relieve himself in the privacy of the leaves and eat half of a banana. He felt better for all of it, and knew she would too, once he gave her something to fill her stomach.

But when he returned to the small stream, Etta was nowhere to be found.

Disappeared.

He closed his eyes, which was a mistake. All he saw was Julian’s face, how he’d looked just as he was swallowed by mist and distance.

“Etta?” he called, his voice cracking. “Etta!”

Gone. Had she slipped somewhere? Fallen? Drowned? Panic flared in him, white-hot, leaving him dizzy with it. He charged around the clearing, straining his ears for any hint of her footsteps, any sign of her.

He had a feeling Etta hadn’t shown him whatever her true intentions were with the astrolabe—how she wanted to confront Ironwood—but she wouldn’t have just left, would she? Gone on ahead?

She did it before, a cruel part of his mind whispered, in New York.…

The brush behind him rustled and Etta stumbled back out, eyes wide. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

For a moment, the residual terror was enough to choke him, make his heart start pounding in his chest. Her hair was mussed, and there was a streak of dirt across her cheek that matched the bruise and scratch on the other. She straightened the skirt of her dress, and he had a sense of why she had momentarily disappeared.

“I—” he managed to get out. “I told you to stay put!”

Her brow furrowed at his anger, as if she couldn’t possibly understand why wandering off in the middle of a jungle could be dangerous.

“You agreed!” he said, feeling ludicrous, but a fire was blazing in his chest that he couldn’t seem to put out.

“Okay,” she said slowly, “I’m sorry—”

“You’re sorry?” Nicholas knew he should accept it, that he should move on to the business of starting a fire, but he couldn’t bring himself to move past the fear just yet. “What if something had happened? How would I have found