Banished! — 4: Collaboration

When the others had all gone back inside, Jada remained, looking out over an ocean she had never seen. Right now, the waters were a chromatic sapphire that you could look through for the top several feet before becoming a darker blue and then black below.

She walked to the left side, then stepped carefully near the edge where the waves lapped gently over the metal. She lay belly down and extended her arms, scooping up water. Jada pulled her hands to her mouth and let the fresh liquid fall upon her lips, then enter her throat. Cold. It tasted very much like the well water from her youth she’d captured by winching a wooden bucket up from an underground river that ran fifty feet below, then gulping down the precious mineral water in a copper cup.

Jada cocked her head as she waited for any negative effects from the new water supply. After a minute, when no unusual consequence occurred, she repeated her actions. She felt refreshed, and her thirst was quenched. She decided that this source of potable water beat anything available from the city she had resided in for the last dozen years after leaving her village as a thirteen-year-old.

As she lay there, she replayed the Captain’s words. Matt. He seemed like a decent man, but Jada was one of a number on board the ship who hadn’t been a member of the Centrist World Party. Jada actually had not felt…