"What! No! Of course not." Ami blew out a tense breath. "She may not have wanted to be rescued, but now that she has been, I don't think she'd want to go back there. Just look at her."
Mamoru glanced at the girl, who was experimenting with the many different ways to hold and eat bread. "She looks like she'd be right at home on the special bus," he quipped.
"We're at least getting her out of the wilderness," her expression brooked no argument.
Mamoru pulled a hand through his hair, remembering the burden of this girl's secret. "Shouldn't we tell Rei and Alejandro?"
"If we can help it, no." Ami chewed her lip. "If we can't, then we play down the impossibility of it. Act like we know why she got her sight back."
Mamoru turned a shrewd eye onto Ami. "What else are you keeping from us?" Ami felt a sudden need to squirm under his scrutiny. She pursed her lips, straightening her spine with her resolve. "Nothing you need to know. Yet. We'll deal with everything after we get her safely out of the jungle."
Noticing the girl was attempting to shove an entire loaf into her mouth at once, Mamoru took the bread from the girl, breaking it into pieces and holding out one chunk at a time to her.
"I think I've had enough surprises for one night. Goodnight, Ami." Turning, he left to go to his own tent. The silver-haired girl turned to watch him go, standing up as if she were about to follow.
Ami grabbed her hand before she could, shaking her head no when the girl gave her a questioning look. Tugging gently, Ami lead her back to her own tent, showing her the interior of the sleeping bag and demonstrating how to secure herself into it. A light of recognition dawned and the girl began rattling off more words in her language, pleased to have figured out that this was the strange cocoon she'd been wrapped in the night before. Ami picked out two words from the barrage that she'd already successfully translated, "night" and "tight."
Ami gave her a tired smile, motioning her to lay down before zipping up the sleeping bag. As Ami stood to go make herself comfortable on the other side of the tent, the girl caught her hand. Ami turned back to her, confused. The girl tugged on Ami's hand, much as Ami had earlier, and curious, Ami acquiesced to laying down beside the girl.
As the girl cuddled Ami from behind, Ami tried not to blush at the intimacy of their position. The girl was few years younger than herself, but clearly whatever culture she came from was a very physically close one. It explained why she'd been pacified after they began holding her hand. While Ami continued to run through the events of the previous two days in her mind, trying in vain to find a feasible interpretation for everything, the girl began snoring softly.
When she woke up the next day, Ami noticed that the girl was no longer in the sleeping bag. Looking around the tent, she saw that a few of her possessions had been shifted around while she was asleep, but everything was still unscathed.
Poking her head out of her tent flap, Ami saw Rei and Alejandro making themselves breakfast. Approaching, she ventured, "Do either of you know where the girl is?"
"I thought she was staying in your tent?" Rei asked.
Ami felt a lump settle in the pit of her stomach. "Wake up Mamoru, we need to find her."
Rei went to Mamoru's tent while Alejandro and Ami put away the food and locked up the cooler again.
After some misanthropic grumblings about the reasons for why they had to find the girl, Mamoru agreed to the idea of a short search.
"We'll split up, cover more ground, and meet back here in an hour," Mamoru said, pointing north. "Ami, you head that way, Rei, you go south, Alejandro, West and I'll take east. If anyone finds her, try not to make her panic, and don't come search for the rest of us. Just bring her back here at the one hour mark."
Everyone set off in various directions, pushing aside the dense blanket of green life as they went.
"HEY! GIRL!" Mamoru called for what felt like the hundredth time, hands cupped to his face. The wind in the trees was his only answer.
"IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, PLEASE ANSWER!" Ami pleaded, searching through the thicket for some sign of human travel. A footprint, a snapped branch, anything to signal that someone had been there recently. When she saw nothing, she stepped a few feet forward, repeating the call at another angle.
"HEEELLLLLOOOO!" Rei bellowed, already losing her patience for this wild hunt. She slapped a mosquito as it attempted to take a bite from her arm. "God, I hate this place." She stepped over some animal droppings, continuing onward.
"SENIORITA!" Alejandro stopped, seeing a rustle of movement up ahead. Approaching with caution, he found the hunched figure of the girl looking up at him with guilt. Behind her, he noticed another small damp patch of soil.
"Ah, ha estas perdido.(You are lost)" He surmised, helping the girl up. "Du nout worreh, I know the path." As he began to lead her back to the camp site, he noticed she wasn't stumbling half as much as she had the previous day. Giving her a backwards glance, he saw that her irises were no longer the same hue either, they were a bright sky blue. One of the bandages on her ankle had come loose as well, exposing nothing but clean flesh beneath. "Sabia que eres especial,(I knew you were special)" he smiled at the girl, a smile that widened as she smiled back and said something in her own language to him in return.
When they reached the camp site, only Rei had returned and she looked like she'd been given an impromptu mud bath. "Oh thank god someone found her," Rei said, sharp violet eyes immediately picking up the changes in the girl's appearance. If she had anything to say, she kept it to herself though. When Alejandro gave her an incredulous look, Rei's eyes darkened while she tried to scrape some of the sludge off her arm. "Don't ask."
"Si, si, eshe wos only off tou let naturre frree," he explained.
They turned towards Mamoru as he entered the camp site. "That's a relief," he admitted, seeing the girl was unharmed. Again, he noted that her eyes had darkened further. He wondered how dark they would be by the end of the journey.
"What's taking Ami?" Even before the sentence was finished, Ami returned, giving a sigh of relief at the sight of the girl.
"If we leave now, we could make it back to the city by nightfall," Rei said, trying in vain to get the mud out of her hair.
"Then what are we hanging around here for?" Mamoru asked, finishing packing up his tent. Mamoru sat down by the cooler with the silver-haired girl while Alejandro disassembled his tent and the others did the same.
"You sure are trouble," Mamoru said with a frown, eyeing the girl. Spotting the untied bandage on her ankle, Mamoru bent down to retie it, forcing himself to keep his eyes strictly downward. However, as he was retying it, he noticed the lack of blood on the cloth. "What are you?" he muttered.
Meanwhile, the girl was bent over searching the ground for something herself. Finding it, she leaned back up, holding the twig out to Mamoru. Taking it from her, he gave her a funny look before dropping it back to the ground. She gave him an angry pout, picking it back up and putting it in his hands. Now, for the first time, Mamoru noticed that she had very nice eyes beneath the filth and gauze covering her.
"What's this for?" He held the stick back out to her, but she pushed his hand closed around it. "Is this your way of apologizing for the other day?" He guessed. She licked her lips, unsure how to answer since she still didn't know the language. "Well, it's good enough, I guess," Mamoru drawled, extending his hand towards her in greeting. "I'm Mamoru," he said. While she searched his hand for some hidden treasure he was trying to give her, he laughed. Pointing at himself, he tried again, "Mamoru."
She seemed to understand the game, because she pointed at the water bottle and declared proudly, "Wa-ter."
"Yes," He said, smiling. He pointed to himself again. "Mamoru."
She looked at him, tasting the name for the first time "Ma-ma-roo."
"Mamoru," he corrected.
"Mamoru," she repeated.
"Very good," he said, enthused. "Now, what is your name?" He pointed a finger at her so she would understand that he was hoping for one of her words this time.
She pointed at herself questioningly, and Mamoru nodded in assurance. "Mamoru." She said.
He shook his head, pointing to the raven-haired ecologist as she struggled to roll her tent small enough to cram into her bag. "Rei."
"Rei," she said, if a bit over-enunciated.
"Ami," he pointed to the blue-haired girl as she finished zipping up her bag.
"Amni."
"No, Ami."
"Amni."
"Close enough "
"Ami," she tried again. He nodded his approval, a faint smile sneaking up on him as she clapped her hands.
"Aleja-well, his name might be a bit too much for you to try right now." Mamoru pulled a hand through his hair, pointing to himself again.
"Mamoru," she said with conviction.
"Good. Now what is your name?" He pointed to her.
She pointed to herself again, waiting for his nod of confirmation. "Serenity."
"No time for breakfast today," Ami announced as she approached them, fully packed. "If we want to reach the city by sundown, we'll need to make up for lost time." She glanced between the two of them. "Has she said any more words from her own language?"
"Her name is Serenity."
"NOW she tells us, AFTER we all go out screaming like idiots for a stranger whose name we don't even know," Rei grumbled as she came over. Her backpack looked even more haphazard than usual, with one of the metal rods of her tent sticking out from where it was crammed into the wrong segment of her bag.
"We should be going." Ami helped the girl up as though she were still injured, much to Rei and Mamoru's amusement, since they'd both already deduced that she was no longer handicapped in any way.
"Yeah." Mamoru waved Alejandro over, as Rei took the girl's hand to pretend guide her while they walked. Ami unclipped her notepad, flipping to a specific segment and beginning the task of decoding the language while they walked.
Mamoru stuck close to Rei and the girl, twisting the twig between his forefinger and thumb while he pondered what exactly Serenity might be. He'd already concluded that she wasn't normal, but to what degree he wasn't sure. He noticed that her hair, which Rei had cut on the first day to brush the tips of her ankles, was again dragging on the ground.
Thinking back to their exchange this morning, he quickly ruled out the possibility of some kind of perfect genius human, she was about as far from perfect as she could be. "What a weirdo," he muttered, twirling the twig between his fingers. But somehow, he couldn't bring himself to throw the twig back down onto the forest floor. AN: Writing Alejandro's lines is even more difficult than reading them, believe it or not. XD I hope everyone is liking the speed at which the mystery of the girl is unravelling, I'm trying very hard to keep it entertaining despite a repetitive day-by-day journey through the jungle.