Page 52 of Leveling

Chapter 34

Luna awoketo a general noisy talking and bustling outside of her tent. Sky was gone. She stretched with a wince. Every muscle ached. She crawled to the door and looked out. People were breaking camp all around her. Strangers, yet it was all so familiar. Most of them looked like her own lost family—dark hair, dark skin, muscular. They were preparing for a long paddle. Doing what her family would do after a night or two on land.

Luna wasn’t sure she was okay with how this family, not her family, someone else’s family, had become hers. It had seemed so sudden. Like instantaneous. Like replacement.

First, she had believed herself dead. Gone, finished, and now she wasn’t. She wasn’t gone. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was.

What if she had known—while she was withBeckett.

Would she have been different? Maybe stayed longer, persuaded him to stay? Told him the truth?

Sky said, “Luna!”

Luna said a quiet, “Good morning.”

Sky announced with the excessively bright smile of someone who was trying to make a Sad Lost Soul more comfortable, “Everyone, this is Luna, Luna,everyone. Obviously you’ll need to learn names, but there’s a whole lot of us. We won’t hold it against you if you just grunt in our direction.”

Luna pulled back into the tent with a grunt, that was all too, too much.

Sky followed and poked her head in the tent. “We’re leaving, we were on a supply run, headed south, but decided last night to return north along the coast, back the way we came because the storm season started early. Also, we don’t have much breakfast.”

Luna hunched cross-legged in the middle of the short tent. “I have food. In my pack, on my board.”

Sky stopped and looked at her for a minute. “You do?”

“I do, it’s enough for everyone.”

“Can I go get it?”

Luna nodded.

About fifteen minutes later, Sky returned with a dehydrated packet for Luna. “Everyone wonders where you got the supplies—after you eat of course.”

Luna ate what tasted like a bacon and egg sandwich the consistency of raisins. She would have loved raisins right now, they were sweet, good fuel. Or chocolate. She closed her eyes, remembering Beckett’s expression when he ran his thumb back and forth on her knee while she ate chocolate and they both wanted to make love.

Sky zipped Luna’s pack, “Who’s Beckett Stanford?”

“What—hmm?”

Sky pointed at his name written large on her pack. And inside the pack. And she had probably seen it on Luna’s water filter, too.

“A friend.”

Sky said, “He wanted you to remember him.”

“Yeah.”

Sky and Luna broke the tent into parts collected into a small, secure, bundle, while Luna looked around. Waterfolk stood in small groups all around, some talking, some taking down other tents, most of them eating. Luna found her paddle and was relieved to lean on it, paddle-end down in the dirt.

They all gathered in a circle. Luna counted twenty-one people, which was a lot for a nomadic group. Everyone held a paddle in some way, leaning on it, holding it over their head in a stretch, twirling, or balancing it in their hand. That was one of the best things about paddles, how they helped move you, but also helped you be still. An older man said, “We’re headed north. I had hoped to have more supplies for trading at this point, but the storms are coming.”

Luna leaned toward Sky and whispered, “Are you planning to head east to the settlements?”

Sky looked nervously to the young man on her right. “No. Never.”

“Oh.”

The older man said, “We’ll convene down at the boards and head out in half an hour, we’ll need to paddle a lot today, and there might be a storm tonight.”

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