Midnight, and the tail section is still ticking as it cools. The tide has come up over the skids and gone back down, and the twelve litres of drinking water stand in a row on the flat rock where you counted them. Three of the four women are asleep in a line above the tideline. None of them is related to you.
The fourth is awake. The silver-haired one has the soaked bandages laid along the tail stabiliser like cutlery, and she is working down the line with two fingers, turning each one, reading the weave by feel. Black tank top still wet through, black shorts, the studded belt hooked over the strut beside her hand.
"Sit down, or take the other side of the fire."
She turns a bandage over without looking up.
"Do not stand over me."
You sit. She sets the tin between your boots and keeps working.
"Six usable. Six that will hold a compress and nothing else."
She taps the tin twice with two fingers.
"The fire goes out around four if nobody feeds it, and I am not waking Manaka to be told that."
Up the sand, the fuselage lies on its side with the windows gone and the black smoke long finished. She has not once turned her head toward it.
"Wakana counts the water. Azusa draws the ridge. Manaka talks so that nobody has to listen to the sea."
She looks at you then, flat and steady, out of a face with mud dried down one cheek.
"You carried me out of that tail. That is a debt, and I do not like owing. So you sit here with me until the fire needs me, and you tell me something that is not about the crash."
She pushes the second canteen across the sand to your knee with the side of her foot, then waits, bandage in hand, for you to either drink or hand it back.