A faint buzzing caught Anna's attention above the roar of the wind and water and the squabbling of the boat. She cast around for the source and squinted to see a large ship in the sky, anonymous in its symbols. Without her processor she couldn't identify it but she was confused, this part of the world was notorious for sunken ships and difficulty flying due to winds and currents and various other phenomena she couldn't be bothered to learn about. But she knew enough to know that anything flying here was an unusual occurrence, the drone could only do so because it was stationary. It was high enough to see the island of Canva and zoom in enough to pinpoint combatants and signal home but that was it. It could not move. Suddenly the skyship dipped, its thrusters keeping it level. It must have had a sophisticated system to be able to navigate the harsh air gales. Then screams blared through the air as the skyship blew the drone out. Blackburn reacted immediately, using the keyboard on his arm to try to send for help, as an instructor his processor was not disabled.
"Come on, come ON!" he muttered, typing furiously. "I've got through!" He told the panicked trainees."I've told Spire where we are, they'll come and get us just stay calm." That was when the skyship blasted them. With compressed air. It hit Anna like a physical blow, knocking her into the water. The boat was overturned and stinging, salty seawater filled her eyes, her ears, her mouth as she thrashed to the surface. It was chaos. Trainees were struggling to reach the hull of the overturned boat, or the island of Canva which was roughly half a kilometre away. Luckily all trainees could swim, a requirement of their training, and the currents were not too strong. Anna had somehow ended up near a large shape, a figure swimming with strong strokes away from the boat, towards the open sea. Blackburn. But then the skyship turned around and headed back towards them. It blew its air again and chaos reigned as huge waves formed, crashing down and forcing Anna underwater.

Time and again her mouth breached the surface and she spluttered, sucking in small gasps of oxygen. Then she was under and she couldn't get up, she couldn't. There were waves crashing into her over and over. It was non-stop. There were too many. It was too much. The pressure was too much, she was drowning, she couldn't move, couldn't breathe, blackness fuzzed at her vision, swallowing, consuming it. Bright, imaginary spots spread and sparkled. Everything was crazy, crazy was everything, the volume, the heavy weight on her chest. She thought no more.

Drip, drip, drip. She woke to wetness on her face. Small spots of spray showering her. Her head felt heavy, she could barely move her limbs, why did she feel so hungover? Anna groaned and tried to sit up, the sky spinning as she did so. Suddenly she remembered, glancing in panic at her surroundings unable to believe what she was seeing. Ocean, vast blue, unending ocean surrounded one side of her vision. She was sitting on fine, warm sand, her clothes drenched but drying in the hard sun. There were palm trees behind her, no one in sight, except...
"Faeilr! Faeilr! Are you alright?" Anna's breath caught in her throat as she saw him thundering towards her, calling out her surname. Blackburn.

His hair was ragged and his eyes fierce as he scanned the surroundings. He looked her over in a preliminary check, she flinched as he reached towards her.
"What is it?" he asked, his voice deep, paying no mind to the cuts on his hawkish face.
"No-nothing" the girl stuttered and made to stand up again, for she had fallen over on weak legs.
"What happened? Sir. Where are the others?" She remembered the suffix, the required title for someone in authority as she subconsciously stepped further away from the man she had seen kill.
"That ship knew what it was doing." Blackburn muttered. "It destroyed the boat, spread out the trainees and disabled my processor. I can't get it online, it is as if I never had one." That statement sent chills down Anna's spine. If Blackburn's processor was disabled it wasn't due to the sea. It had been done on purpose. And there was no way to contact anyone, no one knew where they were. This was not Canva, and this was a part of the world rarely travelled.

"Do you know where we are Sir? Where are the others?" rasped Anna. Blackburn shot her a distracted glance.
"I'm sure they are fine. I managed to call for backup near Canva, which means whoever controlled that skyship allowed me to. I don't think the others were the target, I was." Then in the silence that followed, he whispered almost to himself, "they'll think we're dead". That moved Anna to action. She leaped forward, frantically trying to find signs of other humans, racing towards the sea, then the trees.
"No! No! They'll look for us, or we'll activate our processors. They have to! They have to!"
Eventually Blackburn grabbed her by the shoulders, his bulky arms strong enough to force her around without even trying, as he glared into her face and shouted "no Faeilr they won't. They will think we are dead. Our processors have no GPS. We cannot activate them. Not even I can from here. No one knows where we are do you hear me? No one. We have to survive now. Do you have any tools? Any weapons on you?" His harsh voice stopped her panicking. She took deep breaths and grasped the blade she had strapped to her belt, part of the pack they had been given for Canva.
"Yes Sir, I have my pack."
Blackburn nodded, "Good. We will need it." He glared at the sun, its rays silhouetting him, glancing off his shorn, military style hair and angular features. "We'll need shelter for the night. Come on."

They trudged through the jungle, Blackburn seeming rather knowledgeable on survival skills in general which Anna was glad of. She trailed behind him, noticing her instructor was muttering, presumably trying to work out what had happened. This was clearly sabotage. She heard phrases. 'Vengerov', 'think I'm dead' 'out of the picture', 'others survived', 'Raines.' Anna couldn't help it. She had to ask.
"You think Tom Raines had something to do with this Sir?" The shoulders in front of her stiffened and Blackburn turned around.
"Raines didn't cause this Faeilr" he asserted. Anna knew this was not an answer.
"But was he the reason for it Sir? Was this because of him?" Anna immediately knew she had said too much. Blackburn's eyes narrowed and he stepped forward, forcing her to stumble back.
"Why would you say that?" he breathed, deadly, like a snake, poised to strike. She was reminded just how large his chest and biceps were. How his arms could snap her in two, could grab her and not let go. She had never fully appreciated just how much taller, just how big Blackburn really was. Anna faltered, every instinct screaming at her to run.
"I – I heard you mention his name, just now" she muttered fearfully. "Sir."
Blackburn stared at her for a long moment and then said,
"I was simply trying to work out who was on the boat. I believe the rest are safe." They continued, Blackburn forging a path through the trees.

After a long period of silence, broken only by her heavy breaths of excursion –Blackburn wasn't even out of breath- she asked the question that had been puzzling her.
"Sir? If they meant to kill you, how would they know their plan would work? Especially if you think the others are, are alright? I mean it is pure chance we were stranded here, separated from the others right? And it was obviously no accident, I mean that skyship was deliberate enough. If the others are alive they'll be rescued, they can say it was no accident. But how did whoever it was, know you would be the one to get swept off course, away from the boat? And would they not have thought of checking islands nearby?"
Her lecturer continued to pick his way through thick jungle and then glanced at her. He seemed to ponder how to phrase his answer and then said "Thatta girl, that's a good mind you have. The person who did this did not care about witnesses, they are untraceable, a mystery, and they would not want to have lost valuable neural processors by killing the others. They would have made sure I was separated, perhaps by calculating the air pushed at us. It was a machine after all, it could have mathematically worked out the initial attack to make sure I was separated. But after that, the water, the currents, these are not consistent. The machine would then have little control. But it wouldn't matter if we were shot far enough out. I swam a lot of this you know. To this island. But I believe we hit a freak current, you and I. None of this area has been researched, whomever attacked us would not have known it was there. I believe this slipstream helped us cover an awful lot of distance. We are nowhere near Canva."

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