Chapter 6 - The Garden of Hope
Perfume
The first thing Cimmy saw when she opened her eyes that morning was an intricate wooden vault, whose ribs intertwined and transformed in spellbinding ways, drawing her attention from one detail to another.
“Are you going to start working or are you going to keep staring at the ceiling? By all means, let your patients stew in their problems until you’re done contemplating the meaning of life.”
‘Patients?’ Cimmy thought. ‘What’s a patient?’
The irony of Bertha’s comment about not keeping the patients waiting didn’t escape her, and she got up to examine the rest of the space.
The room was flooded with light, even at this early hour, and it was stunningly spacious and grand, a far cry from what she was used to.
The structure was built of flexible wooden branches, which were smooth and remarkably uniform. It featured vaults and arched openings that looked out to the sea and the forest.
Its walls were lined with shelves, holding a collection of books and jars filled with dried herbs and potions.
In the middle of the room, on a large table covered in anatomical and botanical drawings, the diseased book ruled supreme.
‘I jumped again,’ was Cimmy’s first thought. She looked around to find Fay, who wasn’t anywhere in sight, and turned towards Bertha, who seemed to have no recollection of the fact Cimmy had ever been banished.
“Where is Fay?” she asked, worried.
“At home, of course. You may be so eccentric as to keep a pet rat, but the rest of us don’t appreciate the danger to health that critter poses. Keeping a rat in the apothecary! That’s precious! Have you finished the readings I gave you last week?”
‘You mean to say this is not where I live? I have another place, just to sleep?'
She remembered having woken up there and asked out loud.
“Did I sleep here?”
“I stopped trying to figure out why you do anything a long time ago,” Bertha went on the offensive. “Maybe the effort of actually moving your from one place to the other didn’t sit well with you today. Thank god that friend of yours remembers to feed your rat when you take leave of reality to go to whatever crazy entices you that day. You seem to have no sense of responsibility. Normal people actually feel guilty when they don’t tend to their duties.”
‘Oh, great,’ Cimmy thought, ignoring the familiar diatribe. ‘Rahima is here too.’
As long as she had her friend and her pet, life was going to be ok.
She got up and picked a tome from the shelf, and noticed it was made of the same whitish substance they had found in the stream, only thicker, smoother and more resilient, and brought the book closer to her face, to examine its details.
“I could swear nothing you do could give me pause anymore, but this is strange, even for you: are you getting confused by paper? I haven’t seen that expression before, except maybe once, on a lemur.”
‘What’s a lemur,’ Cimmy wanted to ask, and then reconsidered, planned to find out all by herself later and put the book back on the shelf.
The day passed slowly, with only a few minor injuries and upset stomachs. This allowed her to dedicate a lot of time to examining the rest of the books. With each one she opened, her excitement grew, eventually bringing her to tears.
In every tome, in exquisite detail, old illnesses and afflictions had elaborate descriptions and cures, explanations for why they happened, diagnostic tools, recipes for medicine.
“Are you admiring your own work?” Rahima mocked her. She was standing in the doorway, holding a little basket of food, and she had brought Fay, who was sitting on her shoulder.
“Fay!” Cimmy turned around, excited.
“Don’t worry, I fed him,” Rahima was taken aback by this strange display of emotion. “I swear, if he tries to get in my hair, I’ll hate you forever. Have you had anything to eat today?”
Cimmy wasn’t hungry, so she assumed she must have, only to be contradicted by Rahima’s firm hand gesture. The latter had put the basket on the table and dragged her there, forcing her to sit down.
One by one, unfamiliar treats came out of the basket, all wrapped in clean linens and smelling delicious.
‘Who in creation ever forgets to eat? Especially when food smells like this,’ Cimmy wondered.
She frowned unconsciously as memories of starvation and the oxalic taste of the bitter roots resurfaced.
“I thought these were your favorites!” Rahima looked offended. “I took a half hour detour just to get them for you.”
“You didn’t make these?” Cimmy wondered.
“Cimmy, I know you have important work to do, but the rest of us don’t sit around twiddling our thumbs, either. I wouldn’t have time to bake, even if I knew how.”
Cimmy wanted to ask Rahima who found the diseased book and when, but knew there was no point in referring to histories unshared, and was sure her friend wouldn’t have any idea what she was talking about.
How curious was it that Rahima’s personality and demeanor kept getting mirrored in all these overwritten versions of life, perfectly recognizable and fundamentally unchanged?
The Rahima who made an extra effort to bring Cimmy her favorite foods was the same Rahima who shared her bitter roots with her, at the risk of starvation.
“How lucky am I to have a friend like you!” Cimmy blurted out, a little embarrassed by the raw display of emotions.
“Yeah, you’re weird.” Rahima examined her with an amused and detached gaze. “Eat! You’ll start seeing things next.”
Cimmy obeyed, surprised at the familiar taste of the food, and wondering if all these overwritten realities which kept her skipping forward by leaps and bounds weren’t all connected somehow, at their core, by a fundamental and unchangeable essence which was the real existence, and for which all the ephemeral transformations were irrelevant details.
“How was your day?” She asked Rahima, with the hope the latter would get chatty about her whereabouts, so Cimmy could orient herself around her friend’s life without having to ask questions that would make the latter worry she’d lost her mind.
Rahima was glad to share the plethora of details, emotions, and surprises of the day, and discussed her projects, lectures, and field trips.
Now that she had discovered her friend's occupation, Cimmy felt encouraged to participate in the conversation.
“Do you like being a teacher?”
“Teacher? I guess I never thought of it like that. I suppose taking care of the art room has some similarities to teaching, yeah, no, not really. Cimmy, are you ok?”
Art caretaker? Could one claim caring for art as a profession now?
“Yes, of course. This is delicious.” She pointed to the baked goods to change the subject. A soft breeze blew through the arched openings and brought with it the scent of flowers. Cimmy couldn’t figure out what flowers those were, but their fragrance was deeply anchored into her memories, a strange thing, really, because none of her pasts had characteristics which would allow for the heavenly fragrance, and she suddenly realized it was a scent from her Garden, roses, she was sure of it, even if she’d never seen roses before. Damasks, she elaborated. Definitely Damasks.
She worried Rahima would think her crazy, but couldn’t help herself.
“That smell! Are those roses?”
“Yes,” Rahima nodded, pleased. “My new perfume, I got it yesterday. Do you like it?”
Cimmy was so perplexed by the idea of her friend smelling like one of her imaginary flowers that she couldn't respond.
“You don’t like it?” Rahima’s face darkened in disappointment.
“No, it’s lovely,” Cimmy rushed to reassure her. “I just didn’t realize one could steal the scent from a flower.”
It did make sense, though: if one could steal the healing essence from a plant, and its color, why not its smell too?
“Ever since they invented perfume,” Rahima mocked her, while grabbing Fay from her own shoulder and placing it in Cimmy’s hands. “Now that you’ve eaten, take your beast and go home. People are coming to see the new paintings, and I don’t want to make them wait.”
“Can I come?”
“Of course,” Rahima hesitated, surprised. “I didn’t think you’d be interested, since when are you excited about art?”
The return of another overwritten past brought back the heartbreaking memory of Cimmy's treasured artifacts fueling a bonfire. What was one to do with all the pasts that had never been, with whom was one to share their weight of nonexistent memories? How could a past that never happened make one sad?
“What, a healer can’t appreciate beautiful things?” Cimmy brushed off the burden of her inexistent past.
“Art is not about beauty,” Rahima started to engage in a sophisticated argument about different forms of expression, but met Cimmy’s tearful gaze and felt guilty for upsetting her friend.
“I’m sorry, Cimmy. I didn’t mean to sound condescending.”
“Can I bring Fay with me?”
Rahima didn’t want to further upset her friend, and reluctantly agreed, all the while wondering what kind of nut brings a rat to an art showing.
“Ah, sure, yes. You can bring Fay.”
“Maybe we should reconsider building that shelter,” she mumbled.
“You think?”
The Thingness of Things
Once one gets seduced by wanderlust, any reason is a doorway to indulge it.
Cimmy remembered that in one of the remote corners of the island, upon which they stumbled earlier in their quest for firewood, there were shallow pools which filled up with the tide and dried slowly at high noon, steaming up in the fiery sun, which turned their water to almost boiling temperature.
Scattered around the pools’ edges, where the scalding water and foul fumes made them inaccessible, were stunning red rocks. Some were translucent, others matte, adorned with beautiful turquoise veins or speckled like plover eggs.
Something about those rocks fired Cimmy’s imagination: she fancied them magical.
She liked to believe they were the holders of happiness and immortality, appropriately guarded by isolation and danger, a quest only fitting for the most daring.
“You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you?” Rahima taunted her, leisurely sipping her lime flower tea and blowing gently to cool it.
“I don’t know about them being able to grant immortality, but what if they truly are special?”
“What’s so special about a rock?”
“Did you ever see any this beautiful before?”
Rahima agreed the deep ruby color of the rocks was indeed unusual, but pointed out the smell of those ponds and the vapors that rose from their depths like bad miasmas were proof enough they ran into some evil realm best left untouched and unknown.
Besides, even assuming one could reach those rocks without getting burned or melted by the ominous gases, what use could one possibly find for a rock, even one as beautiful as that?
“They look poisonous,” Rahima decreed, closing the argument.
“How can you possibly know?”
“I know,” Rahima enumerated. “Colorful mushrooms are poisonous, colorful wild berries are poisonous, ...”
“What does that have to do with rocks?”
“The law of similarity,” Rahima replied, sure of herself. “Everybody knows that.”
“I’m not sure if believe that’s true,” her friend whispered, trying to make sure nobody else heard her.
If Bertha caught wind of even a word of such heresy, Cimmy’s life would immediately become a lot more difficult.
“I don’t know, Cimmy,” Rahima rolled her eyes at the enormity of the statement. “If all the healers swear by it, it’s probably true. You don’t use willow bark to get blue pigment, do you? Indigo flowers are blue, that’s where blue essence is stored: in blue things."
“Willow bark dye is actually pink,” Cimmy pointed out. “Besides, if the essence of a color is stored in everything that dons that color, vegetal, animal or mineral, how do those rocks not embody the essence of red?”
Rahima took a moment to consider, and her friend eagerly seized the chance to transform a partial belief into a complete certainty.
“Think about it: by this time tomorrow you can be the proud owner of a garment as red as a rose. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“I would never wear that garment. I’d worry it would burn my skin off.”
“You didn’t worry about the blue dye.”
“Flax doesn’t grow in poisonous looking, foul smelling, bubbling yellow green swamps!”
“Well, the red rocks are beautiful. Don’t you want to know more about them?”
“You’re still convinced they are magical,” Rahima gave in reluctantly. “If they are, they must be committed to the fire element. We could extrapolate their properties from that.”
“We can burn some and find out,” Cimmy doubled down on the persuasion.
“Rock doesn’t burn.”
“We haven’t seen red rock before. Brown-colored rock doesn’t burn, because it is committed to the earth element,” Cimmy pointed out. “Maybe red-colored rock does.”
It sounded well thought through, and Rahima, who was a stickler for the scientific method, had to yield to the wisdom of her friend’s observation, but then remembered the latter’s taste for adventure and flashed her an ironic smile.
“You’d do anything that requires you to get on a boat, wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Cimmy pointed towards their underwhelming surroundings. Safety and boredom often come bundled together, and one only appreciates the former when the latter is gone.
On the following day, they set foot on the island, equipped with knapsacks for rock collection and wearing multiple layers of sheepskins around their legs to shield them from the noxious fumes of the green-yellow swamp.
Rahima maintained her distance as she watched her friend cautiously venture onto the unsteady rocks, giving her advice on which ones were less slippery and how to maintain her balance.
Eventually she grew frustrated with her friend’s lack of coordination and called her back to show her how it’s done.
She skip-stepped the rocks sprinkled through the green miasma with the agility of a young mountain goat, and once she reached the red rocks, she signaled to her friend not to venture there.
“Which ones do you want?”
“A couple of each should be good. I don’t want you carrying heavy loads and losing your balance."
Rahima dismissed her with an assured hand gesture, filled the knapsack, and confidently jumped back from rock to rock and out of the swamp the same way she went in.
“Let me see,” Cimmy looked in the bag, eager to find out if the rocks were as beautiful up close as they were from a distance.
The red crystals were magnificent, capturing each sunbeam and transforming it into the warmth of a blazing fire.
“I told you they were magical,” she mumbled, filled with emotion.
“How do you figure?”
“Look inside. Look! Don’t you see how they store fire inside?”
“Maybe,” Rahima conceded. “So, what do you want to do with them?”
“We need to find out if they burn.”
“Here?”
“Do you want to try it back in the village, within smelling distance of Bertha and Josepha? We can start a fire on the beach, right there,” Cimmy pointed to a natural hearth made of calcareous rocks, whose raised edges would keep their fire protected from the winds.
The red rocks initially resisted, prompting Rahima to voice numerous protests against the fundamentally absurd concept of burning them. When they eventually ignited, their bursting enthusiasm cracked them open and caused them to melt, releasing a thick glistening mist that transformed into metallic dew upon touching the cold rocks.
Cimmy and Rahima watched in disbelief as a substance that looked like metal slowly flowed down the crevices of the stone, pooling in its shallow depressions and glistening in the bright light of the sun.
The red rocks had been completely consumed by the fire and transformed into black glass.
Cimmy didn’t dare look at Rahima, waiting for the inevitable I told you so, which was delivered with gusto.
“What did I say about the law of similarity? Was it even possible for these rocks not to be evil and poisonous, forming where they did and donning that color? God knows what evil spirits we freed from that rock to make it turn black and cry metal tears! Have you ever seen metal that flows like water, Cimmy?”
“So much more the proof it is magical.”
“And obviously evil! It’s an evil, metal sweating rock!”
“We should find something to carry the liquid metal in.”
“You want to bring this back to the village? You’ll never hear the end of Bertha’s scolding!”
“I’ll hide it. I need to study it. I can’t come here every day for that. What do you think about it?”
“Obviously, this rock exudes metal, as could be expected, since its color commits it to the element of fire, which is also associated with metal,” Rahima started, her scientific curiosity whetted.
“It also seems to have components committed to the element of air, through its vile vapors, and obviously its burned black substance, relieved of its fire and air elements, returned only the essence or earth. It seems to have no water, though. Too hard and glossy to contain water. The aether goes without saying: all things in nature contain aether. You can’t have matter without aether, alive or not.”
“What do you think we could do with it?” Cimmy asked.
“I think we’re better served not to touch it at all: a rock that burns and weeps metal and menacing fumes? I think we should leave it alone, as I said in the first place,” Rahima pouted.
“It would make a good paint pigment.” Cimmy examined one of the non-burned specimens in her bag. “Shouldn’t be that hard to grind."
All the way home, holding on to the little improvised vial containing liquid metal, which she’d made from a large seashell, she pondered on the essence of things, on how matter changed when it interacted with air, water and fire, how its very substance was transformed, in dramatic or subtle ways, but irreversibly.
It was as if things were made from the essence of those things, tiny portions of their thingness, as different from each other as the things themselves, and if one unlocked the secrets of the thingness hidden in the things, reality itself would reveal its mysteries.
Worlds Witin
And did the world provide! When you stop being afraid of it, reality opens up to you to reveal all its beauty and its mysteries, and they are wondrous and strange, and so far from what you can even imagine that the only response you are capable of is awe.
Humans may not be able to understand without limits, but they have an extraordinary capacity for wonder, and their wonder creates its own magical realm of splendid things, a realm where the human spirit as a whole comes alive.
It lives in stories, and in art. It lives in science and discovery. It shines its light on valor and on faith and always yearns for transcendence.
To the human spirit, a beautiful red rock is not an inert detail, it is potential.
Somehow, the spirit secretly knows that the whole of reality is there to nurture its development and provide opportunities to grow.
The philosopher’s stone, they called it in jest; a found magical object, which brought upon them the wrath of Bertha, who saw it as yet another time waster on Cimmy’s long list of useless enterprises, but which was so much more than that.
There is the physical aspect of things, the solid reality of the substance they’re made of, their shape, their color, their properties, their limited footprint in reality, and then there is another aspect, that of what the things represent.
In this aspect, objects are not inert lumps of matter. They always mean something and carry inside them the kernels of becoming more; they embody all their future uses and all the discoveries inherent to their nature and all the feelings they inspire in all of humankind.
In this way, they transcend their mere substance and turn into an endless spectrum of potentiality.
So this amorphous red rock became curiosity, an avid thirst for knowledge, confidence in one’s scientific abilities, and in the mastery of extensive practice.
It sparked the imagination, lead it in directions it couldn’t see before, and allowed hope for a better life.
After all, life is as much about what things mean as it is about what things are, and what the red rock was about was daring to walk past the boundaries of the unknown.
Cimmy’s little shed became so filled with samples and experiments in progress even Josepha stopped dropping in, for fear some of the airhead’s experiments might jump out of dark corners and eat her alive.
“What’s that, Cimmy?” Rahima masked her apprehension while she pointed to a bubbling alembic whose ominous fumes cast a greenish evil aura around it.
“Do you want to see something wonderful?” Cimmy asked, uncovering a table whose contents telegraphed through the sheet thrown over them to conceal them from sight like the ghosts of reality.
“Did that used to be Josepha’s copper pot? Cimmy, if she finds out, you’ll never see the end of her unpleasantness! What were you thinking?”
“I’ll make her another one. Watch this!”
The pot had been painstakingly refashioned to add a soldered lid and spouts in strange places, and the leftovers of the process had been chopped into tiny pieces which Cimmy fed one at a time to a vat of vinegar underneath the alembic like one would offer little morsels to a caged snake.
The vat had copper threads growing like hair from its outer surface, all attached to the monstrous apparatus above.
Two of them accidentally touched, generating an unearthly spark which turned Rahima’s apprehension into pure dread.
The contraption huffed and puffed, creating pressure and steam, distilling and separating, moving the evil vapors through its intricate set of pipes, and finally condensed them by passing them through an ominous looking coiled tube into a viscous liquid which started accumulating, one drop at a time, in the bowl at the end of the still.
“It’s glowing!” Rahima gasped, and took a step back, against her will. “That’s not natural! It can’t be! Please don’t do this! Throw it away before it’s too late. That’s fox fire, Cimmy!"
“Exactly,” Cimmy continued, unperturbed. “But there is more. Do you know that place in the forest where the trees were felled by the storm?”
“Yes,” Rahima regained her wits. “We sometimes go there to pick mushrooms after the rain.”
“Well, last time I went there, I found the glowing ones. There were so many of them, the entire place lit up at dusk.”
“You didn’t!” Rahima burst in outrage. “Gathering devil’s mushrooms! Cimmy, how could you?”
“They’re not devil’s mushrooms.”
“Yes, they are! That’s what people call them.”
“Just because you want to call me a tulip, that doesn’t mean I am one.” Cimmy didn’t falter in her pursuit of logic.
“You boiled devil’s mushrooms in Josepha’s pot! You’re going to poison us all if she doesn’t kill you first!”
“Actually, I don’t think they’re poisonous. I saw Fay gorge himself on them earlier and he’s fit as a fiddle.”
“What could possibly be the use of this evil soup?”
“I’ll think of something if I must. Why does it have to be useful? Why isn’t simply discovering we can do this enough?”
Rahima warmed up to the merits of the scientific process for its own sake, so she picked up the bowl, whose contents had spilled a little on the outside, and stained her fingers as she lifted it off the table.
“Great, now I got demon soup on me. If this ends up killing me, it will be on your head, Cimmy!”
“As I said: not poisonous.”
Rahima did her best to wipe her fingers on her apron, and since the substance didn’t seem to stain, the incident was soon forgotten and they both went about their daily chores.
As dusk arrived, both of their fingers started to glow, faintly at first, but growing brighter the darker it got, stirring Rahima into a full panic.
She rushed back to Cimmy’s shed, and the latter could see her friend approaching from afar. One could make up Rahima’s movements in the dark by the ghostly light of her fluttering apron and the swinging of her glowing hands as she ran.
“It wasn’t hard to find you,” the latter started breathless the moment she was close enough to her friend. “Do you know how brightly your hands glow, Cimmy? I’m surprised nobody noticed yet, but they will, they will…” she started crying, dejected.
“Every problem comes with a solution,” Cimmy reassured her. “Take off that apron and we’ll just wear mittens.”
“And how are we going to explain to Josepha why we’re wearing mittens in July?” Rahima didn’t relent. “Besides, she will have noticed her pot is missing by now, and you’re her usual, nay, her only suspect. You know everything that goes wrong in this village eventually ends up landing in your lap.”
“Excellent point! Do you know how Bertha always preaches proper girls should keep their hands to themselves and out of sight? Here’s a new apron. I’ll wear mine. We’ll both be modeling behavior for the other girls tonight by keeping our hands tucked under our aprons.”
“There isn’t a chance in places that this harebrained plan of yours will work. You know that, right?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Resigned, the two of them started off towards the community bonfire, hands neatly tucked under their aprons and quiet: the picture of propriety and obedience.
They sat very close to the fire, hoping that, if the ominous glow on their fingers showed, it would be dulled and maybe even explained away as the glare from the flames.
An hour in, just when they started breathing easier, a terrifying sight prompted the entire audience into blood-curdling screams: walking slowly across the meadow, Fay approached the fire surrounded by a ghastly green glow, so bright it made him look twice his usual size.
“It’s a demon! Kill it!” Bertha jumped to her feet and started gathering rocks to throw at the poor creature, and in that moment of panic, Cimmy forgot her problem and jumped to protect her friend.
“No! Stop! Stop! It’s Fay!” she beseeched Bertha with her outstretched hands, which were now glowing much brighter than the rat and more intensely green.
“Grab her too! And that gullible friend of hers! We’ve seen enough of this evil, Josepha. I keep telling you people, but nobody ever listens!” She looked around, more annoyed than terrified, maintaining a posture that screamed dignified outrage. “Where’s the demon rat?”
Fay slithered under the thicket of thistles, getting deeper and deeper into it until his bright glow turned into a faint flicker and disappeared.
“Your rat got the better of us again,” Rahima whispered in Cimmy’s ears, annoyed that her epic efforts to conceal her involvement in this drama were foiled by a rodent. “I wish I were born a rat sometimes, you know?”
“Away with them, I say! Begone, demonic spawn!”
“What? Now?” Josepha asked. “In the middle of the night?”
“No! Let’s keep them here till dawn to fulfill their evil plans!”
Once again, Cimmy and Rahima left the village behind to find their way through the fields in the dark by the light of their fingers.
“See? It is useful.” Cimmy commented, and the glow of her hands was bright enough to see the spark of outrage and revolt in her friend’s eyes. The latter was too angry to talk.
“It’s not like we haven’t done this before,” Cimmy argued. “We’ll take the float to the island tomorrow. It’s really nice there, no?”
Rahima’s ire started mellowing in anticipation of her favorite activity, but she kept stubbornly quiet to make her point.
The trip to the beach took over an hour, during which the light on their fingers showed no signs of abating. It was a beautiful night, and they knew the fields well enough by now not to worry about dangers lurking in the shadows.
As they approached the beach, the vegetation started morphing into the wispy sand and salt grasses that grow close to the shore, and once they got to the top of the dunes on the edge of the sea, an enchanting sight welcomed them.
Half of its surface glowed bright blue like a giant spotlight was moving underwater, an ethereal blue so otherworldly Rahima forgot to keep up her outraged wall of silence.
“It comes in blue as well!”
“And it’s even brighter!” Cimmy responded, in awe of the world’s hidden wonders.
They gaped at it in disbelief for a while, their amazement accompanied by the soft lapping of the waves on the shore, until a little green dot started gleaming in the distance, growing larger as it approached.
“Fay found us,” Cimmy breathed, relieved.
“Like there was ever any doubt about it!” Rahima remembered her ire. “That rat is the luckiest creature alive, or he’s magical. Either way, he’s playing a better hand than the both of us.”
The rat stared at them with his innocent eyes, whose dark glossy pebbles took on a bluish cast from the glow of the luminescent sea.
“Oh, come, Rahima!” Cimmy burst out. “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss your chores! You love the island, remember?”
“You mean the one with the demon rocks that sweat metal?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“Well,” she started out slowly. “I have to say I feel awful every time I get shunned, Cimmy. I mean, how many times do people have to tell you that you’re worthless and evil until you start believing it for yourself? But all in all, I wouldn’t have missed this adventure for the world. I already knew how my life was going to unfold by the age of ten, but it turned out not to be like that at all, and I’m grateful.”
She paused to think and restarted, excited.
“Hey! Since we’re doing this anyway and the float finally stopped taking in water, can we sail to the farther island in the distance next? I’m burning to find out what’s out there!”
She pointed a luminous finger into the dark of night, in the general direction of said island.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cimmy dampened her enthusiasm. “We’ll get to our island tomorrow, build shelter, gather provisions, and plan our next steps.”
“Yeah. Maybe find a way not to wake up in a puddle this time,” Rahima griped.
“See how quickly you’re learning? There is no substitute for experience.”