{Editing Status: Unedited}

I watch Saige as she paces across the sand, back and forth. My eyes follow her movements. Her head is down, and her lips move as she mutters silently to herself. There's a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Do I trust her? No? Yes?

"Don't you think we should be getting some sleep?" I ask, interrupting her silent muttering.

She lifts up her head and sighs. "There's no way I am closing my eyes on this island. Who knows what's on it?" she says.

"True, but if we're going to look around tomorrow we don't want to pass out from exhaustion."

"I'm not sleeping," she says, her tone final.

"Okay, well, if the plane landed here," I say, looking down at the sand. "Then the people on the plane can't have gone far. And where is the plane anyway, if there was a plane crash? Surely there would be, well, a destroyed plane?"

"No, duh," she sighs. "I don't know, don't ask me. I told you, all I remember is being on the plane with a bunch of teenagers around my age, boys, and girls. I don't remember how I got on the plane. I don't remember anything. There was a storm, a lot of screaming, and now I'm here."

"You don't remember crawling from the wreckage?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "I blacked out when the plane made impact with the ground, and when I woke up I was lying on the sand. No sign of the plane, and no sign of anyone else." She starts to pace again.

"Maybe the others went in there," I say, glancing at the jungle.

"Well, I ain't going in there. We'll walk around the island, but there's no way I'm going in there. We don't know what's on this island. There could be animals."

"Animals? Like?" I ask. "Squirrels and foxes?"

She glares at me. "No, stupid. Panthers, baboons, gorillas, leopards. Animals that live in jungles," she says.

I roll my eyes. "Sorry, Mrs. Know-It-All."

"Common sense," she says.

"Well, I'm going to get some rest and then I'm going to look for them at first light. In there," I say, looking at the jungle. Just looking at it makes me nervous, and makes me doubt my own idea.

Saige stops pacing across the sand and stops to look at the jungle. "I have a funny feeling about this."

"Saige, please," I sigh.

She hesitates before answering. "I...don't...fine. Fine. I'll come with you. But if something happens, I'm blaming you, okay?"

I shrug. "Fair enough."

She falls down next to me and lets out a big sigh. "So what do you think about all of this? Waking up here, I mean."

"I don't know. My head is like mush. I don't know what to think. I just have too many questions."

"Me too. Once we find more survivors, if we do, we need to find a way off here. I don't really know how we're going to do that, but we have too. I don't really plan to stay on here much longer, if you ask me."

I nod. "Yeah. We'll find a way off it. I mean, there has to be a way, right?"

She shrugs and closes her eyes. "Let's pray and hope for the best, I guess."

We don't have anything to shelter us, so we just lie down on the sand, and sleep there. The sand is soft and still warm from the hot sun that is now submerged into the horizon. The gentle sound of the waves breaking onto the sand calms me and I find myself falling asleep easily than I originally expected.

I wake up abruptly, as the bright fingers of light pry my eyelids open. I sit up, immediately wide awake. I look at Saige who is lying beside me, her eyes wide open, staring at the sky. Her eyes are a vivid blue, dazzling in the early morning light, like sapphires.

"Hey," I say, my voice slightly croaky.

She turns her head and smiles. "Hey. You ready to go?" she asks, standing up. She brushes the sand off her pants and combs through her knotty blonde hair with her fingers.

"Yeah," I answer, standing up with her. My body is stiff from lying on the sand. The nerves in my stomach eat away at me.

"So, I think it's fair to say I'm shitting myself," Saige laughs, turning to look at the jungle we are about to enter.

"It does look slightly ominous, doesn't it?" I say.

"Only slightly," she answers, her tone profoundly sarcastic.

I roll my eyes. "Come on," I say, and I start walking. She follows me. When we reach the jungle, I am already out of breath from walking across the sand; my feet seemed to sink into it every time I took a step. I look up at it.

"Remind me why we're going in here again?" Saige mutters from beside me.

I elbow her in the ribs. "To find the other teenagers from the plane," I answer.

"It was a rhetorical question -"

"Saige," I interrupt, and she glances at me. "We'll be fine. I promise."

"You can't promise that."

I shrug. "Just...trust me. I know we've just met and it's going to be hard to trust me, but...trust me."

She sighs, and then she finally nods. "Let's do this," she says, confidently, but I can clearly see she's scared.

That makes two of us.

"In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. In the jungle, the mighty -"

"Saige, if you don't shut up, I'll kill you."

She rolls her eyes.

She'd been muttering that dumb song under her breath for at least ten minutes and it was really starting to piss me off. As if I wasn't scared enough, she has to remind me what might be lurking in the shadows.

"Fine, fine. I'm just trying to lighten the mood."

"Not helping," I say. But that is a lie. Her lightheartedness, although strange, calms my heartbeat slightly, knowing that there is somebody next to me experiencing the same confusion.

Ten minutes into walking, and I can no longer see the beach behind us. The trees are so dense, we have to basically weave in and out of them.

There is no path.

The trees are Triassic-tall with heads as thick as megaflora. They loom over everything, silent and brooding in their leafy reverie. I feel insignificant and inconsequential; an ant looking up at the world.

An amphitheater of sounds follow Saige and I, like a shadow; every squawk and screech from a bird overhead makes my skin crawl. It must have rained on the island recently before I woke up here because I can smell the damp earth.

The smell of rain.

There is a jasmine-and-gingerbread fragrance in the air, a floral fragrance mixed with the loamy must of rotting logs. I'm surprised that rain could even fall through the thick canopy above, but there are weak spots, holes in the canopy, where light pours through, illuminating sections of the jungle like spotlights on a stage. It's beautiful, really.

And that's what scares me.

It's impossible to see anything ahead, through the density of the trees.

"Look," Saige hisses.

I look at where she is pointing, and there is a small monkey sitting on one of the branches on the trees, looking straight at us. Its fur is a strange metallic grey color, and its eyes are pure white. It looks harmless enough, but it's milky eyes make me uneasy.

"Maybe it's blind," Saige mutters.

"Maybe," I mutter back. "Just keep walking. If we don't bother it, then it won't bother us."

"So that's your philosophy, huh?" she asks as we carry on walking.

I can feel it's anomalous eyes on me.

"What is?"

"Leave it alone, and it won't attack us?"

"Well that's usually the deal with animals, isn't it?"

"Not when you've got a predator running at you," she says.

"Well, that was a monkey. And it wasn't running at us."

"Alright, smart arse," she sighs, making me laugh. My laughs are strained, though; humorless.

We walk for about twenty more minutes, and my legs are starting to throb. "I need to rest," I say.

Saige looks at me, her eyebrows raised. "You okay?" she asks.

I nod. "I'm absolutely great," I mutter, sarcastically. I sit down on the soft, mossy floor and she sits beside me.

"If I'm the only survivor from the crash, I'm actually going to be honored," she says.

"You can't have been the only survivor."

She shrugs. "It's not impossible."

"Yeah, but it's highly unlikely that nobody else survived."

"Why would they go in the jungle though? Only an idiot would do that."

"Well," I say. " We're in the jungle."

"But -"

"I rest my case," I shrug.

She glares at me. The gash on her forehead has stopped bleeding, but it is still an open wound, and although it isn't big, it makes me slightly queasy.

"You better do something about that," I say.

"About what?"

"That gash on your forehead."

She brings her hand to it. "Oh, shoot. Yeah." She rips a piece off her shirt and ties it around her head. She stands up. "Let's get moving."

About ten minutes later, the trees open up into a huge clearing, and there is a medium-sized body of water, like a very small lake. Rocks surround a part of the lake, and trees are sparse.

"Oh my God," Saige whispers. "You were right."

My breath catches in my throat when I see what Saige is looking at.

On the far side of the lake, there is someone sitting on the bank. "Hey!" I shout, running over to him.

Saige follows behind me. He stands up when he sees us, his face frozen in shock. When we reach him, my breaths turn heavy.

He looks about Saige's age. He has messy dark brown hair, and light brown eyes, almost hazel. Dirt smears his cheek and neck, and his clothes are torn and slightly damp. He is taller than both Saige and I, and lanky, but well proportioned. He has a small cut above his eyebrow and on his bottom lip. Under the dirt on his face, he is eminently good-looking.

I still don't know whether I should trust them or not, but I don't think I have much of a choice under the circumstances.

"Who are you?" he asks, his voice shaking slightly.

I'm not even sure how to answer that, because who am I? I don't even know my own name. Without a name, you're nobody, really.

"I'm Saige Fischer," Saige says from beside me. "What's your name?"

"Ryan," he says. "Ryan Edwards."

"You were on the plane, right?" Saige asks.

"Um...yeah. You were on it too?"

She nods.

"What do you remember?" I ask him.

He looks at me. "I remember being surrounded by a bunch of teenagers about 19 years old - my age - on a plane, and there was a storm. The plane went down. Then I blacked out."

"You remember your age?" I ask.

He nods.

I look at Saige and she shrugs. "Where did you wake up?"

"Right here," he answers.

"Really? That's weird," I say, looking at Saige. "If the plane crashed on the beach, you should have woken up there. How did you end up here?"

"How should I know?" he says. "Can you please tell me what's going on? What is this place? Why am I here?"

"Trust me, if I knew I'd tell you. We're just as confused as you, Ryan," I say.

Saige kneels down beside the lake, scoops some water in her hands and drinks it.

"What's your name?" Ryan asks me.

"Um, I don't know," I admit.

He frowns. "You don't know what your name is?"

I shake my head. "Weird, right?"

"Weird," he agrees.

I kneel beside Saige and take some water in my hands. "I told you there were other survivors," I mutter, and drink the water.

"Shut it," she mutters.

"I think we should carry on. There might be more people who survived the crash. There's got to be more, right?"

"I'm not going in there," Ryan says, looking at the dark jungle. "I've been hearing weird things."

"Like?" Saige asks, standing up and wiping her hands on her pants.

"Growls. Howling. Snarling. A girl screaming."

"A girl screaming?" I whisper. "Well then we have to go now. It means there's another survivor."

"From the way she was screaming, she's got to be dead by now. It gave me chills."

"Did it sound close?"

He shrugs. "Fairly close."

"Come on then," I say and I start walking away from the lake.

"Are you insane?" Ryan says.

"She is," Saige mutters.

I spin around. "Listen. There's no harm in trying, okay? If she's dead, then she's dead. At least we know we tried. I can't just sit here and wait for death. I don't know about you two, but I actually want to get off this island. Alive, preferably. And the more people we have, the better chance of survival. If there really are dangerous predators out there, which there probably is, then we can't just stay out here in the open. It will make us more vulnerable, sitting in plain sight. We have to keep moving."

Saige rolls her eyes and sighs. "Alright, alright. You've made your point. We're going." She walks up to me.

Ryan, a bewildered expression on his face, follows, and we descend back into the dark, ominous depths of the trees.

A/N

Here's the second chapter for y'all!

I'm so pleased with how it's going so far. I'm sorry for the slow updates, though :( I'm finding it hard to find time to write because I'm so incredibly busy at the moment. But I hoped you liked this chapter!

I'm so excited for this series, ahhhh.

Don't forget to like, comment and share!

Olivia J. Clarke

{GIF: Ryan Edwards - Dylan O'Brien}

© Olivia Clarke 2016

Lost {Book 1 - The Quarantine Series}