Please, let us get out of this alive and I swear I’ll do whatever Kit says, study anything Kit tells me … .
They ran before the storm, helpless in its grip for hours. Margo couldn’t get to her chronometer, nestled safely in the ATLS bag looped around her torso, but given the changes in the light she guessed the storm drove them down the curving coast for more than twenty hours. She tried to remember what the curve of the coast looked like, wondered if the storm would slam them into the beach or just sweep them on southward past the Cape of Good Hope several hundred miles farther south.
Cape of Good Hope. Hah! Cape of Disasters is more like it ….
She and Kynan drank water sparingly, giving Koot a little when he roused, but there was still no food. Maybe I could rig something to use for a fishing line and hook? When the storm breaks ….
They ran aground without warning in pitch blackness.
Margo was thrown violently clear of the raft. She screamed and landed in stinging salt water. Breakers slammed her into the beach. The force of her landing knocked her breath away and left her floundering in a savage backwash. She crawled forward like a crab scuttling away from the sea, blinded by rain and deafened by the crash of thunder and maddened surf. She finally collapsed above the high water line, drenched to the skin by pounding rain.
Koot … Kynan …
Malcolm …
The last thing to impinge on her awareness was the knowledge that she was an utter failure.
She woke slowly, in pain. Margo heard male voices she didn’t recognize, speaking loudly and angrily somewhere above her. She stirred and moaned. Everything hurt. Someone slapped her, shocking her more fully awake. Margo gasped and focused on dark-haired men with light, olive-toned skin. They were dressed outlandishly in dirty clothes that reminded her of paintings of Christopher Columbus. Many of them wore slashed velvet breeches and leather armor. One wore metal chest and backplates and carried a fancy wheel-lock handgun. Margo’s heart began to pound. She’d been found by sixteenth-century Portuguese from that little settlement on Delagoa Bay.