Amy didn't know how long she'd been sobbing, sitting in the sand, her arms wrapped around her shins, her face pressed against her knees. A new sound broke through the barrier of sorrow she'd enclosed herself in, demanding attention.

Before she'd identified the sound as the pattering of rain against leaves behind her, the rain began pelting her, immediately establishing streams down her back and arms. It was a rain with a density she rarely saw at home, making the shoreline, just ten yards away, nearly invisible.

She cried harder, still more miserable, unable to conceive of taking shelter, until a more important thought broke through: that's water! Water I can drink!

She looked up and opened her mouth. Quickly she put her hands over her eyes -- so hard was the rain falling that it was hurting her eyelids. Tilting her head forward just enough to stop the water from streaming into her nose, she swallowed as quickly as the water filled her mouth, taking it in in great gulps.

Soon she felt almost euphoric, her most desperate need fulfilled, and she looked around herself. I need to get under those trees, she told herself.

Standing once more, she took a step towards them, and stopped. Able to think critically again, she examined the question that had been buzzing, like a pesky fly, at the back of her mind -- what was Andrew getting out of this? He wasn't in the van, and couldn't have been in the boat that had brought her here... Amy realized now that the swaying she'd felt during the second half of her trip represented the tossing of a boat. It took me an entire day to get here, she told herself. He couldn't have just abandoned both his job and Dad in the hospital for that length of time without raising suspicions. He has to have stayed in town, and spent time with Dad. How can he even be sure I'm here now?

Amy looked both ways, along the beach, for what she knew must be there... there! About twenty feet from her, to her right, propped almost invisibly against a rock. In small steps limited by the hobble chain, made still more awkward by the loose sand over which she was walking, she moved to the object, picked it up. She nodded to herself. Satellite phone. Able to work here where a cell phone wouldn't. Its camera aimed directly at the place she had first awakened.

Amy laughed suddenly. That idiot! He wanted so much to see me wake up here, to see my first reaction when I realized where I was, that he left me a communication device! I can call for help with this!

Not wanting to get the phone any more wet than it already was while she fiddled with it, she turned and took a first running step towards the bluff, behind which the trees towered. In mid-step her stride was cut short by the momentarily-forgotten hobble chain and she sprawled on the sand. Getting up again and walking more carefully, she climbed over the three-foot erosion barrier and scuttled under the nearest trees.

It did not, she discovered, help much. The rain, though slowed by striking against leaves on its way down, still had to reach the ground eventually, and anywhere Amy stood she was showered by several mini-waterfalls, less forceful but no less wet than what she'd experienced in the open.

Sighing, she examined the phone. It had a normal-looking keypad. She wasn't sufficiently familiar with this type of phone to know whether she could reach an ordinary phone with it, but she knew she could reach and talk to someone, somewhere.

She tentatively touched one of the keys, and jerked her finger back. She'd felt a mild shock, more surprising than painful. Seconds later, she smelled a strong stink of burning insulation. No! she thought. NO!!

The power light, illuminated before, was out. The small display screen had gone dead. She could see the smoke curling out of a small hole in the side of the phone. She tried pressing keys again for several minutes, but it was obvious the thing was wrecked. It had been tricked up to self-destruct if anyone attempted to use it.

Furious, she heaved the phone as far as she could, watching it splash into the surf. Andrew, she thought, has what he wanted. He has video of me waking up on Purity Island. He can happily fantasize everything that happens after.

Amy remembered that family dinner well. Dad, in his continuing attempt to establish a homey family life, was hosting the once-a-week ritual in the dining room. Amy, searching for a topic of conversation to interrupt the bonding going on between Dad and Andrew through business talk, had launched into her current subject of fascination, the plight of the slaves on Purity Island, and the school report she'd just finished typing about it.

Andrew, showing a rare amount of interest in anything Amy had to say as she described the naked, chained slavegirls on the island, seemed to be positively glowing when Amy related the story of Sherry Patton, the college girl trapped and abandoned to a lifetime of slavery.

"She probably spent twenty years there, you said?" Andrew's eyes were wide.

Amy nodded. "Of course, the farmers don't keep records about how long they've kept any one slave, but the sociologists have seen the women in the places where they're skinned and cooked, and they look about forty or so. Same age they'd be snuffed here. It's possible all the hard work might make them look prematurely older."

To Amy's irritation, Andrew laughed. "That is so cool! Not exactly what she expected when she signed up for the trip, was it?"

Amy slapped her fork down on the table. "It is not cool. She had her whole life in front of her and it got taken away from her!"

Andrew laughed again. "Sounds like she had just as long a life there."

Amy knew her face was red. Her fists were clenching. "She was going to be a teacher! She lost everything she was working for!"

Andrew just grinned. "Did they say if she was really cute?"

Amy stood abruptly, her chair skidding back behind her. "Dad, may I be excused?" Without waiting for a reply, she stalked off to her room.

Andrew must have realized he could never keep me with him in that dungeon, Amy decided. Too dangerous. With everybody out looking for the first-ever stolen Hanging Girl, he had to know they'd figure it out sometime. So he switched to plan B. Another long-time fantasy of his, one that entailed no danger to him but just as much satisfaction. He knows I'm here, Amy said to herself. He got to see me wake up, got to see my reaction when I realized where I was. Permanently recorded on video he'll watch many times, no doubt. From now on he can just imagine my day-to-day life. He'll go to work in the mornings with a smile on his face, go to bed at night with that same smile.

Amy wondered for a moment why Andrew hadn't just arranged to hand her over to the first available farmers on the island. But her own internal feelings answered the question for her. He wants me to go through the terror first. The fretting about how long I can stay free. The fear of what will happen when I finally get caught.

A sudden insight told her why she had those three links of chain hanging down from her collar. She smiled bitterly. An artistic touch, she admitted to herself. It looks like I was secured by the chain and it broke, and that's how I got away. I'm not just an available woman. I've already got the metal cuffs, the collar, the hobble chain. I'm sure they're authentic, from the same company that supplies them to the island. To all appearances, I'm not a newcomer, I'm an escaped slave. I've read, she reminded herself with an audible moan, about the punishment for escaping. Or for major insubordination, or any other "crime." Not execution and consumption. Slavegirls are too valuable to throw away before they're used up. Instead, the punishment would involve a lot of pain.

A chill swept through Amy's body, and she squatted and folded her arms across her chest, shivering. It was still quite warm despite the rain. The chill was purely internal, driven by a sudden intense focus on how alone she was. I can't possibly get home on my own, she told herself. There's two hundred miles of water between here and there. Nobody who wants to find me, or even wishes me well, has any idea where I am, and there's no reason they would ever think to look here. The only people here who have the power to affect my fate are going to force me into a lifetime of misery on sight.

And the slave tracker, she knew, was useless here. Its signal could be picked up by any of the receiving towers around the city -- but only if the slave was within fifty miles of one. Amy was far out of range of any tower in the network.

This is worse than anything I imagined Andrew doing to me. And I don't think he even hates me, she marveled, not really. It's not about that. It's all just a game to him, to play with my future. A game of wrecking my life. And he's won.

No!! she screamed to herself. Damn it, no! He hasn't won yet. I won't let him!

Wait! she thought suddenly. Traders! From the mainland! They come here! Amy had no idea how often, but she knew they came to the small towns along the eastern shore. If she could hide out until she saw a trade ship, could rush out of cover and beg them for help...

Her suddenly lifted spirits fell just as quickly. They'd probably take me as a slave of their own, she wailed to herself. A shipboard slave. Kept in chains belowdecks, for sex, not work.

But they'd know what a Hanging Girl is! I can identify myself, and even if they haven't heard of me, they'll know I'm more valuable to them than any ordinary slave. They'd know there's a big reward involved in returning me, and I can promise to put on a free, non-fatal show for them after they take me back. A private party, including bedroom service. Yes!! That will work! If they can have the sex and the money too, they'll know they're better off turning me in.

I am on the east side, right?

The roller coaster of her emotions hit a downslope again. Despite the fact that taking her to the far side of the island would have required the boat to go dozens of miles out of its way, Amy was sure Andrew had insisted on that. In that case there would be the entire width of the island, including a small mountain range, between Amy and help. With the cloud cover, Amy had no idea where the sun was, had no way to distinguish east from west. But she felt strongly she must be on the west side. The wrong side.

Amy squeezed her eyes shut, trying to take herself off the roller coaster. Worry about that later, she told herself. First, I have to eat.

The ground beneath her feet was partly bare, partly covered with an ivy-like growth, and mostly covered in puddles and tiny running streamlets. Stepping carefully, lifting her feet high to keep the hobble chain from dragging through the ivy and tripping her, avoiding stepping on visible rocks and, when the chain allowed her, stepping across puddles rather than into them, looking up after every few steps for any signs of a trading town or other settlement, pausing to listen frequently for human sounds, Amy began walking slowly through the trees parallel to the shoreline.

As she walked, she felt the constant tickling of rainwater streaming down her bare skin, felt the weight of her cuffs and collar, and heard, between crashing waves and over the steady hiss of the rain, the tinkling of the padlocks at her ankles, wrists, and neck, and the clinking of the hobble chain and the few links hanging down from her collar. That's good, she decided tentatively. It keeps reminding me. I don't want to forget the situation and let my guard down.

Perhaps half an hour into her walk, she heard the sound of rushing water, different from the noise of the waves. Looking ahead through the trees, she saw a river across her path, emptying into the ocean.

Her shoulders slumped. I can't cross that, she told herself. The river was about thirty feet wide. There was no way to tell how deep it was, but probably anything more than knee deep would sweep her out into the ocean, and she wasn't sure how well she could swim with all the hardware she was wearing.

She hated the idea of turning back, and knew she'd probably soon run across another river behind her.

To her right, the sky was lightening over the ocean. At least, she thought with a sigh, maybe I'll be out of this rain before long.

She blinked as a sudden thought struck her. I'm not on the mainland, she reminded herself, I'm on a small island! Continental rivers might be hundreds, even thousands of miles long, carrying the water from all of the many storms constantly dumping water into their drainage valleys. But no river here could possibly be longer than about ten miles. As soon as it stops raining on the island, the river will drain out within hours!

Amy was way too hungry to find it easy to decide to wait out the storm. But she wasn't sure what other choice she had.

She took the opportunity to do something she had been putting off -- pee. At least, she reminded herself, I don't have to lay in it for hours afterward, like in that box. She squatted where she was and relieved herself of at least this one need. I hope, she told herself, I don't get so much into this habit that I just spontaneously pee wherever I'm standing when I get back home.

She moved a few paces ahead, away from her puddle of urine, and sat on the soggy ground, her back against a tree.

She shifted uncomfortably, finding herself sitting on a stone. She idly examined the offending rock, and gasped as she saw she'd misidentified it, and may indeed have been missing a lot of these on the way -- it was a nutshell! About an inch and a half in diameter, with an equatorial ridge, looking a lot like a walnut. There were dozens on the ground around her, and more hanging from the tree above her.

Her stomach rumbling with need, Amy tried cracking the shell with her thumbs, then her teeth. She set in on a stone and smacked it with her wrist cuff, and at last, grabbing a fist-sized rock and pounding the shell with it, succeeded. Inside, she fumbled with the gnarled nut and slapped it into her mouth with her palm, as she reached out for another shell with her other hand.

She lost count of the number she ate, sitting back at last with a sigh in a litter of cracked shells. A feeling of relief covered her like a soft blanket. I can eat here! she crowed to herself. She knew there would also be peaches somewhere, one of the island's main exports, but she suspected those might all be nearer to human habitations. But these nuts, she thought, they're probably everywhere.

To her surprise, she saw the rain had stopped while she was eating, and over the ocean, patches of blue sky showed through puffy, gray-white clouds. The river was still rushing by in front of her, but its lifetime as a roadblock to her was now limited.

The air was quickly warming again, and sweat was beginning to mix with rainwater on her skin. At last the sun shone through a break in the cloud cover. Amy bit her lip, trying to decide what its position was telling her. It was now, she believed, late morning, the sun nearly overhead. She'd have to wait longer to determine which way it was going.

An idea occurred to her, and she reached out and retrieved a nearby stick, thrusting it upright into the dirt. She scraped away the ivy over the stick's abbreviated shadow, and scraped a mark in the mud at the end of the stick's shadow.

Minutes later, the shadow end had moved towards her, away from the ocean. She closed her eyes, sighed, and gritted her teeth. I knew it, she moaned to herself. I'm on the west side of the island. I might as well have just assumed that to start with. Andrew wanted the whole width of the island, and more to the point, the whole dangerous population of the island, between me and any possible safety.

She stood and looked inland. There was nothing to be seen other than trees. No way to tell how far away the island's central ridge was. Her memory told her it should be about eight miles away. Normally she might have walked there in a couple of hours, but the way she was travelling, in small, careful steps, pausing to listen every few paces, it might be, she decided, more like twelve hours. Not something she could finish today. She'd have to spend the night in the middle of this forest.

And all that time was just to get to the halfway point. Under the best of circumstances, she'd need two days, maybe three, to get across to the eastern shore.

And there are a lot more people in the eastern half, she reminded herself. I need to be even more careful when I get there.

She looked back at the ocean, feeling an odd reluctance to leave the shoreline, though there was nothing there that could help her. Maybe I don't want to leave the food, she speculated. Stupid, she told herself. These nuts will be everywhere. And peaches, when I find them.

Slapping her butt to get herself going, she set off into the forest, upstream near the riverbank.

Amy tried to decide, as she walked, whether she'd overlooked anything that might spell early rescue. There is, she said to herself, at least one person to whom the police will talk who does know where I am -- Andrew.

Sighing, she admitted to herself that that really wasn't much help. Even in view of his conversation with Steffi, there was no physical evidence that proved he had anything to do with Amy's abduction. They'll search his dungeon and won't find me, her inner voice told her. He'll be cooperative up to a point, then coldly tell them he'd sue if they continued harassing him without cause.

Amy momentarily perked up at the thought that the absence of her tracking signal might, by itself, point to this island as a possible location, so conveniently out of range of the tracking system. As she examined the idea further, her spirits crashed once more. Everybody looking for me, she realized, will have their minds set on dungeons, the perfect signal-blockers. After they find I'm not in Andrew's, they'll still assume I must be in one somewhere. They'll go through records of recently-built dungeons, maybe search some, will check to see if any of them have a connection with Andrew. There are so many places I could be hidden away underground. The idea I could be on Purity Island won't occur to anyone. The only people who would know any reason why I might be abandoned here are myself, Andrew, and maybe Dad. I can't tell anybody. Andrew won't. Dad probably won't remember that school paper or the dinner.

Amy groaned as she suddenly remembered how close she had come to leaving behind a connection between herself and Purity Island. That day in the caf, she reminded herself, when Julia came in thinking, based on misinformation, that there were Purity peaches available. I almost launched into the whole story of where Purity peaches come from and why they're called that. And about the horrible lives slavegirls live here. I might, she thought, even have told her about Andrew's reaction to the subject. But even without that, there would have been that link. Julia would have an Amy/Purity Island connection in her head. When she heard that Amy had disappeared from electronic tracking, might Julia have thought of Purity Island and asked, "Say, have they checked there?"

Not at all likely, Amy decided. But impossible now. I never had that conversation with Julia. There wasn't time.

When they follow Andrew around and he never leads them to me, they'll have growing doubt that my kidnapping has anything to do with him. They'll start looking for other leads.

After a few weeks of dead ends, she groaned, they'll probably suspend the search. Pending new information.

There!! Amy thought excitedly. I found some!

Amy had to restrain herself from grabbing the nearest peach, the Purity peach for which, in addition to its leather products, the island was mainly known. The color doesn't look quite right, she decided, not like the ones she'd seen in the grocery. But there, that one! She reached for it, barely touching it before it fell into her hand. She bit into it eagerly, closing her eyes and sighing, the peach's sweetness and juiciness making her mouth tingle. A feeling of pleasure nearly orgasmic in intensity washed over her.

She ate three of them, then knelt by the river to chase the fruit down with a long drink of water.

There was no sign of any farm around, so apparently the things did grow wild. Obviously, she thought, I can survive here as long as it takes, if I can just avoid getting caught. I've got the nuts, peaches, water...

She frowned. Eventually, she reminded herself, I'll need girlmeat.

She knew she could stay healthy for a certain amount of time without it, but, like vitamins, the human body did require girlmeat occasionally. The gynemones in girlmeat couldn't be found in any other food.

She shook her head at the irony. The island, she reminded herself, was full of women, in a higher proportion of the total population than even on the mainland. There was plenty of girlmeat around, but Amy wasn't sure how she could get any. It wasn't like she could drop by the local deli here and order a sandwich.

Her train of thought was interrupted by another human need suddenly putting in an appearance. Amy had also known a bowel movement was going to be required eventually, but had avoided dwelling on it. Her body now insisted on it.

Her initial instinct was to drop her feces in the river, but she remembered it was her drinking supply. She left it at the base of a tree instead, using a handful of ivy leaves to wipe herself afterward as well as she could. Okay, she thought, wrinkling her nose, I've gone through the entire cycle of life now. Let's move on.

LATE AFTERNOON

Amy trembled, her heart pounding, as she breathed rapidly in and out with her mouth wide open, for quiet. She'd nearly walked right into it.

Moments earlier she had frozen, between one step and the next, on hearing the sound. She had dropped quickly to the ground, and now lay on her stomach between two peach trees and behind another, mostly surrounded by a small bush to which she had crawled, from which she was now unable to move without risking exposure. Given sufficient quiet, she would have heard it sooner, but the constant screeching of some type of cricket made the interior parts of the island no less noisy than the pounding surf had been by the beach.

I guess I'm still lucky, she thought, for having all that noise. Without it, they probably could have heard me coming.

She was on the outskirts of a farm, probably one of the outlying parcels forming part of a co-op.

In front of her, in an open field, two slavegirls toiled, preparing the field for planting. To Amy's amazement, each was working with something like a scythe, dragging it along the ground to make a single furrow in the soil. It's going to take them days just to finish this one field, Amy thought.

To Amy's left, two more girls were digging with shovels at the base of a tree. At an adjacent tree, already with a trench dug around it, another girl was cutting through the trunk, below ground level, with a saw. They're expanding the field, Amy realized. All of the farms, Amy guessed, had probably started in small natural clearings, made bigger over the years by removing trees from the periphery.

The settlers, as Amy had read, didn't have much interest in labor-saving devices. There was no hurry to life on the island, no motivation to speed things up, and the farms could be operated with methods so labor-intensive because the farmers had all the labor they needed. And the slavegirls didn't have a say in how things were done.

To Amy's right was a situation causing her the greatest immediate concern: two more slavegirls were picking peaches, in the very same orchard in which Amy lay hidden. Each peach picked was dropped into a wide basket. As Amy watched, one of the girls lifted her now-full basket by its handles, with an effort, and staggered across the field with it.

Amy knew it wasn't long before sundown, luckily enough. Watching the peach-pickers' rate of progress through the orchard, they weren't going to reach Amy's position by the end of the day. Assuming they continued as they were.

As advertised, every one of the girls in view was naked, each adorned the same way Amy was: the same cuffs, same collars, same hobble chains. Their bodies were shiny with sweat, streaming down their stomachs, backs, legs, dripping from their breasts. There was one girl whose job seemed to be simply pulling a wagon through the fields laden with a water barrel, from which the other slavegirls drank when it came by.

All of the girls, not surprisingly, had fit, strong-looking bodies, their muscles well-defined. Like mine, Amy thought with a shudder. Another reason I'm a convincing escaped slave.

Amy saw one thing she hadn't expected. All of the girls Amy could see had their hair cropped very short, barely an inch long -- and a little haphazardly, shorter in some patches at random, as if it were done very quickly with scissors by someone not especially skilled at it. Okay, thought Amy, my hair won't look right to them. But, she realized, it could easily be explained by the theory that Amy had been running loose, avoiding apprehension, for several months.

The girl pulling the water wagon, Amy could see, was pregnant, her bulging tummy overlaid with large breasts, their areolae dark. About seven months along, Amy judged, possibly more. Maybe, Amy thought, that's why she has a job that doesn't require a lot of bending over.

Near the girls cutting down the trees was the source of the sound Amy had heard -- her best piece of luck of all, since without the noise, she might have continued walking until she'd blundered right into the middle of the field. Within sort of an open-sided shed -- really just an overhead wooden canopy supported by poles at its corners -- was a woodcutting operation, and here Amy saw her first Purity Island male. He looked young, perhaps mid-twenties. Bearded, with shoulder-length hair, he was dressed in skins, in the form of a sleeveless vest and shorts, with a floppy leather hat and leather shoes, in a moccasin design, secured by drawstrings at his ankles. All of it girlskin, Amy knew. The leather shone in a way that suggested it was waterproofed, using girlfat -- another example of Purity Island putting the female body to a greater variety of uses besides food than the mainland did.

The man was expertly cutting logs from felled trees into two-by-fours, with a circular saw making, as it operated, a lot more noise than the girl working at cutting down the tree. Three slavegirls on stationary bicycles, facing almost in Amy's direction, were giving the blade its power, their legs pumping the pedals without a break for as long as Amy had been watching. Two of the three, it appeared, were veterans on the job, judging from their well-muscled legs. They worked with blank expressions, their job something that simply had to be done to get through the day. The third slavegirl looked as though she might be new. Her legs, though strong-looking, weren't developed in the same way as the others. She looked hardly older than eighteen, very likely pressed into slavery after a very recent release from the breeding farm pen in which she'd spent her childhood. She would, Amy thought, have been very pretty at rest, but not now, with her exhausted look, and with her lower lip thrust out and held stiffly to keep from crying.

All of the slaves Amy could see had whip marks on their skin, in most cases old and mostly faded. The new girl's marks were much fresher, redder, and in fact, as Amy watched, when the girl seemed to slow her pedaling, the woodworker, an irritated look on his face, picked up a whip and gave the girl a couple of quick slashes with it. She cried out and began pedaling faster.

Amy choked back a cry as a movement across the clearing startled her. She now saw her first doggirls. She spotted two of them now, trotting vigilantly around the periphery of the field, each on her four shortened limbs. They weren't easily seen at first against the darkness within the forest beyond the clearing -- the same dimness that had probably protected Amy from being seen. They wore something like leather booties covering the ends of their four legs. Amy suspected the booties had to be replaced fairly often. The doggirls were watching each group of work slaves intently, though not especially belligerently, as no slave at the moment was departing her assigned station.

Watching the doggirls, Amy had to blink to believe what she was seeing. She had seen puppygirls before, remembering one particularly cheerful one, with long blonde curls, who had licked Amy's hand while Amy waited in line at the mall for movie tickets, the girl wagging her surgically implanted tail and grinning up at Amy. The girl's mistress had given her a tug on her leash and a light swat on her behind, as she reminded the girl not to get fresh with strangers. Amy had told the woman she really didn't mind, and received a friendly smile in reply.

But these girls... in the context they were in, with the job they were doing, somehow one expected them to be actual dogs, and it was disconcerting to see their modified bodies, utterly human female, breasts swaying underneath, and see their genuinely girlish faces as they patrolled the field.

Amy looked to her right, suspecting that... yes, there she was, a third doggirl, this one in the peach orchard, near the slavegirls picking peaches, focusing all her attention on them. As close as these slaves were to the boundaries of the farm, they would need to be watched closely. Amy could hear a low growl from the doggirl as one of the slaves stepped away from the tree farther than she needed to. Amy started trembling again, a trickle of urine emerging between her legs. That doggirl might, thought Amy, come this way even if the slavegirls don't. She wasn't more than forty feet away from Amy right now. Or if the other two came to join her, they could easily pass right in front of Amy along the way, too near for Amy's cover to be effective. Petrified, Amy feared that the doggirl might catch her scent if the wind blew that way, as a real dog would.

Amy had stumbled into the farm in late afternoon, and the colors of sunset were now beginning to take over the sky. At the sound of a whistle, all of the girls stopped their work and began converging on another shed, larger than the woodcutting shed, at the end of the field opposite Amy. Trotting behind the last of the slavegirls, the doggirls followed, one of them barking at the youngest slavegirl, from the woodcutting shed, who was staggering on exhausted legs. The girl let out a sob and moved a little faster, tripping over her hobble chain but immediately scrambling back to her feet.

It was too far away for Amy to make out exactly what was going on, but it looked as though a meal was in progress. Amy's mouth watered -- she could smell girlmeat from where she was.

As the slaves completed their meal, Amy could see two men walking among them, rounding the slaves up and securing them around the upright poles supporting the shed. One of the men was the woodcutter. The other appeared older, heavier -- likely the father of the younger one, Amy decided. She wondered which one was the father of the pregnant girl's baby. They were putting the slavegirls away for the night, and Amy realized that the shed, really, was the only home the slaves had. It was, like the woodcutting shed, open at the sides, but at least, thought Amy, they have a roof. They won't be rained on in their sleep. Amy wished she could say that about herself.

As darkness fell, Amy could see lights through the trees, and in the dimness could just make out the outlines of what appeared to be a cabin. Where the men live, she decided.

When the darkness was complete, Amy emerged from the bush, turned away from the farm and crawled away from it, on two knees and one hand, awkwardly reaching back to hold her hobble chain off the ground so it wouldn't make noise. Her progress was slow enough that she could blunder into trees without harm and carefully steer around them afterward. She crawled at least half an hour before stopping.

She looked up at the sky in astonishment. A city girl all her life, she had never seen the stars so clearly, in the absence of city lights that competed with the stars to light the sky and overwhelmed them. She gawked at them for an endless time before she finally patted the ground around her, felt around for a reasonably soft spot, lay down and curled up on her side. Soon, surprisingly considering the tumult of thoughts and images cascading through her head, she fell asleep.

Amy dreamed she was taking a long, warm shower with Megan, soaping the soft lips between Megan's legs, licking Megan's breast. Amy sighed in contentment, feeling the familiar tingling between her legs in anticipation of a long session of lovemaking...

She was suddenly seized in a coughing fit, and sat up, her right hand pressed to her chest, in total darkness. Sat up? In the shower? She croaked out between coughs, "Honey, turn the water off."

Her other hand felt rough ground beneath two inches of water. She could feel the water flowing along her legs, and her wrist, pushing against them. From above, the stream from the shower continued striking her head, her shoulders. She swept her right arm around in front of her. "Megan? The lights went out. Honey? You there?"

Memories reassembled themselves slowly. Shit. Shit. Shit. Megan's not here. Megan is dead. I'm on the island. It's raining again.

The water level around her continued rising, pushing harder against her. I'm in a streambed! she shouted to herself. I've got to get out of here!

The blackness was complete. Rainclouds had banished the stars, the moon if any.

Amy quickly rolled to her hands and knees, her heart pounding. Which way?

The water was flowing from behind her now, her ankles and calf muscles underneath its surface, as it splashed against the backs of her knees. Flipping a mental coin, she shuffled sideways a few feet. Not that way! The water was halfway up her thigh now. Quickly she scrambled the other way, and the water gradually ran more shallow. At last she crawled onto... not dry land, but at least land that wasn't underwater.

Not yet feeling safe, she felt ahead to see whether the ground continued rising. It seemed to, so she continued crawling that direction, one hand held in front of her to feel for trees.

She stopped between trees, suspecting their presence meant that the water rarely rose this high. Leaning back against one, she drew her knees up and hugged them, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. She felt a stronger sense of utter aloneness than at any time on the island so far, sitting naked in the blackness, no light switch to flip on, in a shower she couldn't turn off, on an island hundreds of miles from home, where the entire population wanted to enslave her and the elements wanted to kill her.