An Introvert's Guide for Island Domination novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Hi, I'm Not Going to Do This Long
Katja wakes hurt on a floating island with the only spring for miles and spends her day's three conversations before nine a.m. on nine strangers; she decides to run the island herself by written rule, and Dot says a hundred and thirty more are crossing by dark.
The sun was in Katja Ostrow's eyes, and that was wrong, because her tent had faced west.
She lay still and made her list, the way she always did before she moved.
Her left forearm was torn open from wrist to elbow.
Her ribs on that side hurt every time she breathed in.
Her tent was gone.
Her camera sat in the dirt a foot from her head, and its little red light was still on.
Katja turned the lens toward her own face and said what she said at the start of every video.
"Hi. I'm not going to do this long."
She sat up slowly.
The ground under her was gravel and pine needles, and it was tilted a little.
She crawled twenty feet to where the ground stopped.
There was no canyon below her.
There was a flat white floor of cloud, a long way down, with the sun lying on it.
Pieces of her canyon hung in the air all around.
Slabs of red rock with trees on top drifted past each other very slowly, and some had smoke coming off them.
Katja looked at that for a while.
Then she crawled back from the edge and checked her pack.
It was under a pine, still zipped.
Water filter, hatchet, tarp, four freeze-dried dinners, laminated cards, a marker, a solar panel, her tablet.
And the tally clicker in the side pocket, the little metal counter she had once used for a bird survey.
She used it for people now.
Three conversations a day, one click each, and when she hit three she was done until morning.
The clicker read zero, so it was a good morning so far.
She bound her arm with a tarp strap and woke the tablet.
There was no signal, but her channel page was still saved on the screen.
Her last upload sat at the top, and under it was the same comment that sat under every video she had ever posted.
quietbear: Stay off the edge, Katja. I mean it.
She tapped the thumbs-up, because she always did.
It did nothing without a signal.
She tapped it anyway.
"Hello?"
The voice came from the north end of the island, and it was a woman's, and it was loud.
"Hello! Is anybody on this one?"
Katja put the tablet down and stood behind a boulder without a sound.
A long gray plank lay across the gap between her island and a bigger one.
Nine people were on it in single file, each holding the shirt of the one ahead.
The woman at the front was around sixty-five, broad and unhurried, in an apron with a gravy stain on it.
"I can see your tripod, hon," the woman called. "And your arm's bleeding."
Katja stepped out. "Hello."
That was the first click, and she made it with her thumb inside her pocket.
"Dot Hendry," the woman said. "School cafeteria, thirty years. Do you have water?"
"I have a spring. It's mine."
"Of course it is. Can we have some?"
"No."
Dot looked at her kindly.
She had plainly said no to ten thousand fourth graders reaching for a second dessert.
"Honey, I'll be honest, that wasn't a real answer."
"Goodbye," Katja said.
She walked away.
Behind her, nine people stepped off the plank and onto her island.
She got as far as the pines before a skinny young man in a Redfork Rapids T-shirt ran up beside her with both hands out.
"You're Katja Alone," he said. "You're Katja Alone! I've seen every episode. I'm Teddy."
"Okay."
"Can I carry that for you?"
He pointed at her pack.
He was nineteen, maybe, and he was shaking.
"I'm fine. Goodbye."
"Right. Sure. Goodbye."
That was two, and it was not even eight o'clock.
She heard the water before she got there.
When she came around the rocks, six people were kneeling at her spring and drinking out of their hands.
Dot stood over them with a ladle she had carried across the plank.
"Slow," Dot said. "Small sips. Nobody throws up in the lady's water."
A man with a sunburned scalp looked up at Katja.
His face was wet and he was crying.
"Thank you," he said.
Katja had been alone in the backcountry for three days on purpose.
She knew exactly what to do about a rattlesnake and nothing at all about this.
"You're welcome," she said.
She did not say goodbye, because she did not want it to be the third.
He kept thanking her, and it became the third anyway.
The clicker ticked in her pocket.
Her thumb had done it without being asked.
That was every conversation she had for the day, and the day was just starting.
Nine people sat at her spring, and they were not leaving.
She took out her marker and a laminated card and wrote on it in block letters.
RULE 1. NO TALKING TO THE LADY BEFORE NOON.
She looked at it.
It was not enough.
People needed rules, she thought, a lot of them, written down, so nobody ever had to ask her anything again.
Katja decided she would run this island herself.
"That's a good sign," Dot said, reading over her shoulder. "A person who makes signs is a person who stays."
"I'm not staying. I live here."
"Mm-hm."
Dot took the card out of her hand and held it up to the sun.
"And hon, you should know. There's a hundred and thirty more behind us. They're crossing by dark."
The clicker said four.
Katja did not remember pressing it.
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