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“You’re wasting your time.”
    “There might be spare batteries,” I said.
    Frank snorted. “And spare matches?”
    “Why not?” I backed out from the under the bed. “If the guy had a stove, he must have had matches.”
    “Look in the spare room,” said Frank.
    Well, of course there was no other room. Frank was just trying to annoy me again, and he was getting pretty good at it. But I believed there had to be a box of matches somewhere, and probably another battery. So I set the rickety chair on the bed and peered over the edge of the shelf.
    “There’s
something
up here,” I said. “There’s a couple of things, I think.”
    The first was a book, an old paperback with pages coming loose.
Kaetil the Raven Hunter,
a novel by Daniel J. Chesterson. On the cover was an unbelievably muscular man wearing animal skins, and on his shoulder perched a raven with a black hood, its talons tipped with silver spikes.
    I read the blurb on the back aloud.
Left as a baby to die on a mountainside, Kaetil was rescued by ravens. Taught to hunt like a raptor, to think like a bird of prey, he grew up with one ambition: to find the man with yellow eyes. The man who’d killed his father.
    “That sounds pretty good,” said Frank. “What else is up there?”
    I looked again. At the very back of the shelf was a box made of orange plastic. Frank snatched it from my hands and flicked the little latches. “A bunch of junk,” he said, and dropped it on the mattress.
    I got down and picked up the box again. Inside was a whole survival kit: a space blanket made of shiny foil; a whistle with a tiny compass fitted into the tip; a small mirror with a clear hole in the middle. There was a metal tube the size of a pen that I held up for Frank to see.
    “Yeah, so
what
?” he said.
    “It’s a flare gun,” I told him.
    “You think I don’t know that?” He was so angry that he looked ugly. “There’s
nothing
you know that I don’t know.”
    “But there’s a flare too.” I held it up, a little red cylinder.
    Frank’s voice broke into a squeak. “Who
cares
?” He swept his hand across the mattress, sending the whistle flying. “You moron. You think you can go out there and shoot off a flare and somebody’s going to come and save us?”
    “Why not?” I said.
    “Because
NOBODY’S THERE
!”
    I tried not to let him bother me. “The world’s not all that empty,” I said. “There’s ships and planes and stuff, and somebody’s going to come by. They’re probably searching for us already.”
    “Don’t be stupid,” said Frank. “It’ll be weeks before they even know the boat’s missing. They won’t have a clue where to look. There are thousands of miles, and they can’t search every inch. It would take forever.”
    “So what do you want to do?” I asked.
    “So whaddya wanna do?”
he said, mocking my voice. “I want you to die, that’s what I want.”
    That made me feel cold and small and awful inside. I was standing there like a butler, holding the flare and the little gun, and I didn’t think I could take much more of Frank. I dropped the things on the bed and went outside.
    The raven shouted at me.
    He had dragged the dead bird from the bushes and was hunched over it now. Stuck in his beak were tiny black feathers. He thrust out his head, puffed his wings and shrieked at me.
    He seemed a cruel thing, a little cannibal busily chewing away at his dead companion. He had covered the ground with bits of red insulation pulled from the wire. It was obvious that he was telling me to keep away, so I held up my hands as I stepped around him. “Okay,” I said. He swiveled his head to watch me with his black eyes.
    To my left was the trail coming up from the beach. To my right, another path led into the bushes. The branches on either side nearly met in the middle, but I could see that the trail had been used many times. There was a rut worn into the ground.
    I took that trail through the forest. Twisting between the