Page 12 of Leveling

Chapter 8

The electrical portionof the storm moved east, becoming an interesting light show. Flashes of arced light shot from cloud to water and back, dancing on the surface. Luna said, “It’s so beautiful, but I’m incredibly glad not to be out in it.”

“What’s it like to be out on the water in a storm?”

Luna fiddled with the cracker box. The pause was long and her voice small when she answered, “We try not to be.”

She stuffed a cracker in her mouth, chewed, swallowed, and swigged water. “I still don’t know why you’re here—Sam was a lifer. He was here because he didn’t want to leave, yet you don’t seem like someone who wanted to come.” The rain streamed down the windows on all sides. Their nest was cozy, dark, the flashlight dim. “I know! You were in, what do you call it, higher school?”

“High School.”

“That’s literally the same thing.”

“If you’ve never been to High School, perhaps.”

“Okay, so you’re in High School, you fell in love with a beautiful girl, she’s not very smart though, she’s silly and overly worried about her appearances, but it’s your first love and so you don’t think the underneath matters, and you let yourself fall, hard. And then she found someone else. She broke your heart, and she was mean about it too. And none of it made sense to you, though your friends could have told you it was coming, and because you’re in pain you signed up to come to an Outpost to get away from everyone and everything.”

Beckett watched her with squinted eyes. “Not true. Not really. Okay, sort of true, that all did happen, but I was able to get over her before I came out here. How did you know all of that?”

“I have brothers, lots of brothers. It’s the oldest story in the world. I tell them, it’s okay to have a broken heart, take care of yourself, learn from it, next girl make sure you’ve seen below her surface.”

“That’s good advice.”

“My family travels everywhere together day and night, you can’t imagine how terrible it is when an insufferable, fiddly-wink of a person gets added to the group. Theworst.”

“Have you fallen in love?”

Luna fiddled with the zipper. “Yes, he was hot, muscular, handsome. Come to find out his underneath wasn’t mysterious as I believed, he was a shallow butthead.”

“So are you following your own advice now?”

“Well, every male I meet seems to keep secrets from me, so I’m beginning to suspect they’reallshallow buttheads.”

Beckett’s cheeks dimpled with a smile. “Every male, huh? Okay, I’ll tell you.”

Luna guessed he had been hiding those dimples all day to break them out when the light was low for ultimate hotness effect. She had to look away. Seriously, the bedding, the back tattoo, it was all a little impossible to carry on with normal thoughts and actions. She forced herself to focus on his words—

“I’ve been in the service for a few years, mostly building dykes, piling sandbags, bridging, stuff like that, but I wanted to do more. I had always heard about the Nomadic Water Dwellers, I was fascinated, and then I heard they were in—um, trouble, and that there were volunteer positions to save them, and so I volunteered.”

“Wait—you heard that the ‘Nomadic Water Dwellers’ needed rescuing and you volunteered to come save us?”

“Yes.”

Luna laughed a high tinkling laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“From a Nomadic Water Dweller perspective, I own the paddleboard, I’m far more likely to have to rescue you. Do you even like to swim?”

“Nope.”

She looked at him with squinted eyes.

“But I don’t need to swim. I’m trained to tell you to head east to the mainland and give you supplies.”

“And monitor the water levels.”

“I just do that on my own.” He plucked at the piping on his sleeping bag. “They seem higher.”

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