"Run Jade! Run now! To the ship!" he shouted. She still seemed unsure, and Johnny grabbed her by the arm and propelled her up the beach towards the ship.
Having overcome obstacles no normal thirteen year olds should have to face, Johnny and Jade fin...
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Johnny heard her footsteps on the sand and looked up in pleasure. Jade walked towards him, a coconut cradled in one arm, the other swinging in rhythm to the swaying of her hips. He stared at them in wonder. It did funny things to his stomach and made him feel slightly ill, but he had a hard time tearing his eyes away nonetheless. She smiled at him as she caught his eye, and he grinned back.
'Enjoy your walk, my pretty butterfly?' he asked her playfully.
'I did, my lord,' she said, throwing him a kiss and a wink. It really was incredible what a few months on a secluded beach, miles from anybody else, could do for a person's soul. Day after blissful day they spent swimming, eating, and talking – getting to know each other. Lying in the sun and watching the palm fronds wave in the gentle tropical breeze. Neither of them had ever experienced this kind of life before.
Johnny came from the greys and browns of Johannesburg, and he only knew tarmac roads and a skyline broken by the skyscrapers of the city and the dirty yellow mine dumps that pervaded three of the four Rands, or regions, that surrounded the city. The East, West, and South Rands all had them – only the North Rand, or Northern suburbs, was free of these eyesores.
Jade, on the other hand, had never seen a tarred road in her life, having grown up in the depths of the Brazilian rainforest. Until a few months ago, her life had centred on village culture, where one hunted or fished for food, spent every evening around the communal village bonfire, and retired at the end of the night to a grass hut in the middle of the jungle. Johnny was the first person she had ever met who wasn't from her village, and she still thought of him as a god.
This island setting was new to both of them. White beaches, turquoise sea, blue, blue sky, and a sense of wellbeing that even Jade had never known. They were at peace, but it wasn't always so. Their dramatic departure from Jade's village two months previously had impressed upon both of them the danger and fragility of their situation.
What had Cheryl Parker, the CIA agent who had tracked them down to the deserted village, said?
'You know that there are people out there who will try and stop you, Johnny. A kid flying around in a UFO isn't the kind of thing that makes governments very comfortable.'
And that was the bones of it, really. All Johnny wanted was that they be left alone. He wanted to keep Jade safe, sheltered, and happy, but Cheryl's words were never far from his thoughts and he worried if, or when, her words may turn prophetic.
Jade crossed her legs and sat down in the shade, placing the large coconut on her lap. She started the long process of de-husking it with the viciously sharp knife they had found in the ship's armoury, and Johnny felt a glow of pride at her innocent independence; her unaffected happiness. She had endured terrible trauma – losing the old man that was as a father to her, then captured by the brigands who had decimated her village and beaten her so severely that, had it not been for the technology of the ship, she may have died. Yet now she sat and hummed a simple tune as she stripped the husk from the coconut.
