The sun came up too soon, even for Rainbow Dash. But the mere fact that the sun did come up on her and Rarity meant that they were still alive. Besides, a quick trot to the shore and a splash in the water woke her up in a minute. That was good; she had a busy day ahead of her.
Rarity was still asleep in the frame of their shelter when Rainbow got back. The unicorn had curled herself into a fuzzy white ball, and she even snored softly, though it came out more as a ladylike squeak with each breath. Rainbow wanted to wake her up, and she was half-tempted to splash cold water on Rarity to do so, but decided against it. That was just mean, and she really didn’t need to waste time apologizing to her friend. She had better things to be doing with that time, and besides, Rarity had been taking all of this much harder than she had. Her friend deserved her sleep.
The fresh water in the pot they’d boiled last night was crisp and refreshing, even if it was warm from the air. She just wished that they had Rarity’s magic and another pot so that they could boil multiple days’ worth of water with one fire. They couldn’t do more with just the single pot, and even if they had another one right now, they had to wait for the fire to die and the pot to cool down before they would be able to move it and set up the next pot. Rainbow had to kick sand over the fire last night to smother it so that it wouldn’t boil away all of their drinking water. It’d been a horrible waste of good wood, but hopefully they wouldn’t need it that much.
But one thing they were going to need more of was nutritious food. Rainbow saw that for herself when she went to get breakfast down by the lake. Between her and Rarity and what they’d eaten over the past few days, they’d already cleared a sizable chunk of the fresh grass that grew around the pond. At the rate they were eating it, it’d probably all be gone in two or three weeks. They’d need to either find new food or ration what they had left—probably both. Maybe if they were lucky, they’d be able to find something they could grow from the Concordia’s kitchen if some of its food stores happened to wash up. Rainbow couldn’t help but think that she was planning too far ahead—help would surely find them before any crops they planted would have time to grow—but it didn’t hurt to be safe. She’d rather forego food in the short term if it meant that they’d have something to eat later if the worst happened and nopony came for them.
In the meanwhile, Rainbow carefully measured out what she ate that morning, stopping as soon as she curbed the worst of her hunger. She knew that come lunch, she was going to be starving, but this little bit would at least give her the energy she needed to go wading through the surf and salvaging what she could. After all, though she could see the morning sun through the clouds overhead, the skies were still pretty cluttered in the aftermath of the hurricane and she didn’t want to rule out the possibility of getting rained on in the near future. It didn’t feel likely today, but there would probably be a follow-up storm tomorrow afternoon, and she wanted to have the roof and walls on their shelter before it hit.
She noticed Rarity stirring when she walked back through their little campsite, so she diverted toward the shelter long enough to gently shake her friend awake. “Morning, Rares!” she sung, deriving some pleasure from Rarity’s tired groans and the feeble rubbing of her eyes. “How was the first night in your new home?”
“Mmmff… Rainbow, what time is it?” Rarity groaned, sitting upright. She rubbed the split end of her horn and winced, and it flickered a few times with blue sparks of raw magic. “My head…”
Rainbow squinted through the canopy of palm trees to try to see the sun. “I dunno, we haven’t found a clock yet, but it’s like, six? Six-thirty?”
“Ughh…” Rarity rolled over on her bed of palms and moss and buried her muzzle into the greenery. “Wake me in two hours,” she moaned, her hooves pulling down on her ears. “I need my beauty sleep.”
Rainbow nudged her again. “There aren’t any ponies with cameras here, Rarity. Nopony’s gonna see you if you look like a mess. Besides, we can only work with the daylight now. Night’s too dark to do anything, so we gotta get everything we can get done, done now.”
“Five more minutes…” Rarity pleaded.
Rainbow groaned. “Fine, whatever. I’ll be on the beach salvaging things.” She started walking away, stopping only to mutter, “Why couldn’t I have been stranded with AJ? She’d at least take the whole survival thing seriously…”
Of course, Rainbow didn’t know how well their competitive natures would have mixed when they only had each other for company. Rarity was at least always interesting to talk to, even if she tended to talk about dresses and other things Rainbow didn’t care about. Still, her time in the Wonderbolts had given her a new appreciation for the public face that Rarity had to maintain at all times and had been maintaining for much longer than Rainbow. Plus it certainly didn’t hurt at all that Rarity was attractive and objectively beautiful in ways that Applejack and her country charm were not, or at least were in a different way. Though of course, Rainbow didn’t want to say that out loud. Rarity had her own ego, too, and saying things like that could make her insufferable.
But Rainbow soon pushed those thoughts out of her mind, because she could already see a growing collection of debris to be salvaged with the receding tides. Pretty soon, she was racing up and down the beach and splashing through the water, trying to drag what she could to the safety of higher shores. Her focus was mainly on anything metal or heavy, and after almost an hour of hard work, she’d collected a small treasure of tools and scrap that they could repurpose into other things. She’d even found an entire chair that’d washed up on its own; if she didn’t know that Rarity would want it to sit on, she would’ve broken the thing apart to try and salvage the nails. As is, however, she’d already found a few floorboards that had some nails in them.
Then Rainbow’s heart skipped a beat. Further down the beach, she spotted an aquamarine body with a blue and white mane lying on its side, halfway up the beach. “Jetstream?” she shouted, galloping across the sand. “Jetstream, are you alright? Jets—!”
She rolled Jetstream over, but the ship’s hostess and captain’s wife didn’t move. Her eyes were bulging and half-lidded, and the sclera was red and bloodshot from the saltwater. Her skin was clammy and cold, even though the sun had dried her coat, and her nostrils were full of sand. When Rainbow pressed down on the mare’s chest, a trickle of water came out of her open mouth, but nothing else.
Rainbow shivered. Jetstream was dead.
She used her wingtip to close Jetstream’s eyes, then briskly trotted away and took a few deep breaths. She’d just touched a dead mare. A mare who wasn’t supposed to be dead. It was a strange thing to think about; she knew that there likely weren’t any other survivors from the Concordia, but she’d held out hope that maybe her and Rarity wouldn’t be alone. But even now, as the seagulls began to wander toward the mare’s corpse behind her, Rainbow knew that she was just kidding herself. Jetstream had drowned, that much was obvious. She didn’t know the details or the reason why a mare who could fly had drowned beneath the waves, but the end result was the same. There were so many good ponies on that ship, and now they were all dead.
It made the tiny island she was standing on feel even more tiny and remote. Her and Rarity might as well have been the two last ponies on the planet, for what it was worth. The sea surrounding the island was a grave, and her and Rarity clung onto the tiny mote of life still floating in it.
“Rainbow! Where did you go?”
Rainbow’s ears twitched at Rarity’s voice, and she spun around. Some part wanted to shelter her friend from seeing Jetstream lying on the beach, but Rarity wandered around the trees before she could even act. “Oh, there you are!” Rarity sung, trotting forward, but a split-second later, her eyes fell on Jetstream’s body. “Jetstream?! Is she—?”
Shaking her head before Rarity could even finish, Rainbow stepped past the concierge’s body. “She drowned, Rares,” Rainbow said, swiftly intercepting Rarity before she could get close enough to see the details in the drowned mare’s face. “It’s… not pretty.”
Rarity looked aghast at the body, then at Rainbow. But, swallowing once, she nodded. “We should bury her,” Rarity said, eying the seagulls sneaking up on the corpse. “She doesn’t deserve to be food.”
“None of them do,” Rainbow murmured, shaking her head. “She could’ve been us. We could’ve ended up like her. We shouldn’t forget that.” She sighed and began looking around the beach. “Help me find a shovel. Let’s do her right.”