"Fuck."
Everyone looked at Wang Lee.
"Why do I have to walk so far?" He was already breathing slightly harder than the situation required, and they hadn't even left the pier yet. "Teacher Hao knows I have too much fat. My belly alone could work as a jumping area for children."
"Then maybe stop eating," Tianxu said, hefting one of the bags from the boat without visible effort.
"That's not how metabolism works."
"I don't know what that word means and I don't think you do either."
"I have a very active metabolism," Wang Lee continued, ignoring him completely. "It just runs on input. Constant input. If I stop providing input the whole system shuts down and I become useless. Is that what you want? You want me useless?"
"You're already—"
"Useless Wang Lee? On a potentially dangerous island? Really? That's the call you want to make?"
Tianxu opened his mouth and closed it. Picked up another bag.
"Sometimes," Tianxu said, to no one in particular, "you explain the virus spreading thing and I think maybe you have a working brain in there. And then this happens."
"Both things can be true," Wang Lee said pleasantly.
I was already on the boat.
---
Mr. Hao had kept it simple. Five students, retrieve the supplies, quick check of the immediate pier area, back before the light changed. The five he'd landed on were me, Minxue, Tianxu, Wang Lee, and a girl named Seo Mirae.
Mirae was from the countable few who'd kept their head when Mr. Hao broke the news. She wasn't loud about it, just stood and listened and nodded once when her name was called, like she'd been expecting it or at least wasn't surprised by it. She was Korean-Chinese, transferred into our class second semester last year, and had the kind of quiet that was different from indifference. More like she processed things internally before they reached her face.
The five of us made a reasonable enough unit. Tianxu for anything requiring force. Wang Lee for reasons that were becoming clearer by accident. Mirae for reasons I hadn't figured out yet but Mr. Hao had apparently. Minxue, that one I had slightly less clarity on, though she was composed and composed counted for something right now.
Me for whatever needed doing.
The motorboat sat at the small pier looking ordinary and unbothered by the day's events. We stepped on and started going through what was packed in the storage compartment and the two supply bags strapped under the bench seats.
It wasn't bad actually.
Five medical kits, the proper kind, not the small plastic boxes with four bandaids and an expired cream. These had gauze, antiseptic, splints, a proper suture kit in one of them. Three basic survival kits, each one packed with four knives of varying sizes, a water filter, matchboxes, a lighter, some cordage, emergency foil blankets, and a few other compressed items. Large water bottles, eight of them, currently full. Some tools, a small hand axe, a folding saw. Canned food that had been meant for cooking activities, about two days worth for the full group if stretched. A hand-crank emergency radio still in its packaging.
I went through each item methodically and set them in two groups, immediate use and stored.
"You're doing that very efficiently," Mirae said, watching from across the boat.
"Habit," I said.
Minxue was helping without being asked, passing items across and checking expiry dates on the medical supplies. She didn't ask what the groups meant or why I was separating things. Just worked alongside the system without needing it explained, which I noted without saying anything about.
Tianxu was doing the heavy lifting, stacking the sorted bags near the pier edge. Wang Lee was doing an inventory check on the canned food with the focus of a professional.
"We have eight cans of braised pork," he reported.
"That's not the priority," Tianxu said.
"It's my priority."
"Wang Lee—"
"Morale, Tianxu. Food is morale. You want thirty-something people with no morale on a potentially dangerous island?"
Tianxu stared at him for a long moment. Then went back to stacking bags.
---
My head was doing its own thing while my hands worked.
The external help situation, I didn't trust it. Not cynically, just realistically. The officer on the phone had said available units in the careful way people say things when they don't want to say we're overwhelmed. The mainland wasn't sending a boat in the next two hours. Maybe not today. The way those videos had looked, the spread, the scale, available units was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Which meant Hulian Island needed to work on its own timeline. Not panic timeline. Not waiting-to-be-rescued timeline.
I thought about my father.
He'd started taking me into the forests when I was around seven. Not the supervised trail-walking kind of outdoors, the actual kind, where you go in with minimal gear and figure out the rest. Every month without fail, right up until I was fourteen and he got transferred for work. We'd built shelters from green wood and broad leaves that held through rain. Caught fish with improvised lines. Identified edible plants by the characteristics he'd made me memorize until I could recite them half-asleep.
It was his version of spending time together and I'd never complained about it because honestly it was the most interesting part of my childhood.
But that was forests. Controlled trips, never more than two of us, duration of a weekend at most.
This was thirty-four people on an island of unknown terrain with unknown variables, indefinite timeline, and the possibility that whatever was happening on the mainland was not going to stay neatly on the mainland.
Different scale entirely.
I knew enough to be useful. I knew enough to not be an idiot about what I didn't know. The second part might've been more important than the first. Experience had a way of making people overconfident in the wrong moments and I'd watched enough videos of experienced outdoorsmen make scale errors, what works for one works differently for ten and breaks completely for thirty, to know that the gap between I know this and I can execute this for a group was a real gap worth respecting.
So. Trust external help; Low, but don't eliminate. Trust my own capabilities; Moderate, but keep the ceiling honest.
Start with what was in front of me.
I picked up one of the knives from the survival kit. Good weight. Decent blade, not excellent. I set it back and picked up the hand axe.
---
"What's that for?" Wang Lee asked, nodding at the axe.
"Probably several things," I said.
He considered this. Nodded. Went back to his inventory.
Tianxu glanced over and then looked at the treeline the way he'd been looking at it every few minutes. He was working something out internally that he hadn't said out loud yet. I figured it'd come out eventually.
Mirae had moved to the edge of the pier and was looking at the water. Not anxiously. More like she was reading it.
"The water's clear," she said quietly.
"Yeah," I said.
"No fish."
I looked. She was right. In the hour or so since I'd been fishing this morning, the surface near the pier had gone still in a specific way. Earlier there had been small movement, the occasional ripple from something below. Now... nothing.
I thought about the fish I'd caught this morning. The way it had twisted toward my hand.
We finished loading the retrieved supplies into two carry bags and a crate that Tianxu lifted by himself without asking for help or acknowledgment, which was very him.
Walking back toward the campsite, the afternoon light long and warm across the ground, supplies accounted for and group intact, it felt briefly normal. Like a school trip. Like the worst thing that had happened today was still the drumstick.
It wasn't, obviously.
But the island was quiet, the trees were just trees, and whatever Hulian was, it was ours for now.
I looked at the treeline properly for the first time. Dense, tall, the ground underneath probably softer than it looked from here. A structure built into that, elevated, with a clear sightline toward the water—
"You're doing it again," Minxue said, falling into step beside me.
I looked at her. "Doing what."
"That thing with your face."
"I have one face."
"You have a normal face and then you have the other one." She kept her eyes forward. "The one that looks like you're already somewhere we haven't been yet."
I didn't say anything.
She didn't seem to need me to.
Behind us Wang Lee tripped slightly on a root and blamed it on his center of gravity and Tianxu told him his center of gravity was the problem in every sense and the evening moved us all forward, toward whatever Hulian was going to ask of us next.