Page 29 of Prima
After a brief discussion, she takes his boat—scarily fast and much harder to sail than it looks—retrieves her sub, and berths it near a deserted atoll according to coordinates he gave her. Then she goes back to find that he has dived down and salvaged not only the chains and anchors that weighed down the torpedoes, but the sculptable cord with which she’d lassoed the torpedoes in the first place.
“The sub is seaworthy enough to tow, by the way,” he says, handing over the cord.
“This could have been dangerous.” The torpedoes will bother no one sitting at the bottom of the sea, but to approach them so soon after they sank, and to get so close to the explosives…
He shrugs. “I don’t like the thought of anyone in Dawan getting their hands on that technology.”
She accepts the now-limp cord from him and feeds one end into an opening on her right vambrace. The vambrace sucks up the cord like a kid at a bowl of long-life noodles. When it stops, she feeds the rest to her left vambrace.
“You have nice things,” he murmurs.
“That’s nothing, look at this.” She flexes her hands downward. Metallic-looking plates slide out from the upper edge of her vambraces and cover the tops of her hands. She flicks her wrists again and sharp blades emerge from these new gauntlets at the metacarpophalangeal joints. “Supposedly this makes me look like some manga hero from long ago.”
“I’m beginning to have an idea how your sea cucumbers were so neatly sliced.”
She bursts out laughing, horrified. “I donotuse these for cooking—unless I’m serving up my enemies.”
He takes a step backward, then after thinking about it for a second, another.
She chortles again. “So what are you going to do, now that you have your prize submarine to take back to the powers that be?”
He glances at the sky and the mid-afternoon sun. She imagines him to be calculating times and distances, how fast he could take the submarine to wherever it will do him the most good.
But he says, after a moment, “May I invite you to dinner, if you are free this evening?”
* * *
The desert atoll, which was most likely underwater until the beginning of the current century—sea level has been dropping alongside atmospheric CO2concentration—has never suffered the ravages of Plant Cover. It’s all teal lagoon and white sand, the sort of tropical paradise people in the Before used to dream about, to get away from those concrete jungles that now stand as impossible beacons of progress and sophistication.
While the boy gathers ingredients for their dinner, the girl uses her solar web to charge her raft and seals a minor leak in their captured sub. Then she washes and puts on her prettiest frock. The blush brown fabric, which shimmers in the light, is whisper-soft, whisper-smooth against her skin, a dress that caresses the wearer.
It is, in fact, much too costly to be worn on a beach, but she already treated the boy to her Jasperdew tea and might as well spoil him further.
She walks around the almost perfectly circular atoll twice, leaping across the few places where there are gaps in the beach—entrances into the lagoon—before he emerges, looking like a young god freshly created from the waves. He stills, most gratifyingly, at the sight of her. She spins around for him, her skirt flaring out into a glittery bellflower.
“You look lovely,” he says.
She is astonished. “I thought I’d have to drag the compliment out of you again.”
“I have invited you to dinner. Not the best time for me to say you look only all right.”
She chortles. “Aha, I see.”
He puts a pot of water to boil on a portable stove he brought to the atoll then shucks scallops with an oyster knife. She sits on the collapsible stool he’s set up for her on the sand, feeling very much like a medieval princess who at last has a knight errant sworn to her. Although the way he flicks and twists the knife makes her think more of the stealthily deadly skills of an assassin.
She is turned on either way.
Water bubbles right as he finishes with the scallops. He dices a piece of salted pork from the cold storage on his boat, tosses that into the pot with a bit of ginger, and turns down the heat for everything to simmer.
When he stands up again, she’s surprised to realize that he’s been bare-chested all this time. She’s been so wrapped up in the deft motion of his hands, she forgot to ogle his abs. And his arms. And his muscular thighs!
And strangely enough, when he leaves for his wash, with the soup simmering and the scallops marinating, she doesn’t fasten her eyes to his quads, deltoids, or even the sharply defined channel of his spine. She only stares at the back of his head, at his still damp hair, the strands twisting slightly from that dampness.
And then, at the footsteps he left in the fine white sand.
When he comes back, bathed in the golden light of a westering sun, she is washing her hands.
He looks at the ball of dough she’s made, resting on her folding table that she’s dragged to the beach, and then back at her. “I thought for carbs we were going to do rice rations.”
