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“What did you say?”
“I said, I don’t think they’ve sold the show,” I repeated more loudly. The others turned to look at me, their expressions ranging from skeptical to perplexed. “Something Baz said in our interview, about everyday contestants like me and…” I looked around the circle, trying to assess who wouldn’t mind being described as everyday. “… and, um, Joel, being what would sell it to the networks. Ari—that’s Nico’s agent—he made it sound like a done deal, but I haven’t seen a single bit of evidence that Real TV is actually on board. Have you?”
There was a quiet murmur from around the table as everyone assessed this idea. Dan spoke first.
“It would fit with there being no presenter. I mean, they’re not going to get a big name for a show that hasn’t sold… are they?”
“And it’d make sense of why the budget is so tight,” Santana said slowly. “If Baz is doing this out of his own pocket, hoping to sell it on spec. Shit, do you think it’s true?”
“If it is true, I will fucking kill him,” Conor said. His voice was low but full of menace, and turning to him, I realized it was the first time he had spoken. He looked extremely contained, but in the way a bomb might—a sealed package full of volatile material. “I’ll strangle Baz with my bare hands, and then I’ll fly back to the UK and do the same to my agent. If they’ve dragged me halfway around the world to some show that hasn’t even sold to a network—”
He broke off. Zana’s eyes were fixed on him and she was biting her lips, looking almost as pale as Santana.
“Look, I have to get some food,” Santana said at last into the strained silence. “Or I’m going to go hypo. Does anyone want to come down to the staff quarters with me to see what we can fix up? They must have some kind of supplies—and presumably there’s a kitchen.”
The others nodded with varying degrees of resignation and exhaustion, and then began making their way down the pebbled path towards the staff area.
As they did, almost unconsciously, they paired off, two by two, into their original couples, leaving me trailing in their wake, a lone singleton. It felt… I don’t know. Symbolic, maybe. Was I single now? Had Nico and I just broken up? I wondered what he was doing, whether he was having some kind of debrief on board the Over Easy right now, spewing his resentment to the camera. Or maybe he was sitting in his cabin, head in hands, as shell-shocked as me, wondering how it had all unraveled so fast. He had spent longer on the flight from the UK than he had on Ever After Island. If he caught a flight out tomorrow, which was the fifteenth, he could be back at his barista job by Monday—the whole thing like a distant dream. Except that when he woke up, I wouldn’t be there.
As I walked down the path in the wake of the others, I realized something: if tomorrow was the fifteenth, today must be Valentine’s Day. No one else had mentioned it, perhaps because we were all disoriented by the time zone changes and endless flights, and perhaps too because when the show aired it would seem weird to have contestants celebrating something that had happened months ago.
But today was the fourteenth of February—and the anniversary of the day Nico and I had made out at my friend’s Valentine’s Day Massacre party. If our relationship had just ended, live on camera, and I still wasn’t sure if that was the case, then maybe it was oddly fitting that we had stumbled from one horror show to another. Because, no matter how you spun it, this was a horror show—or at least a pretty far cry from what either of us had intended. And now I was alone on a tiny island, thousands of miles from home, wondering what on earth I’d let myself in for. I supposed I was about to find out.
02/24—07:47 p.m.
Listen to me, if anyone is listening to this, you need to get here now. Now, do you understand me? Because this is not a game. It’s not a joke. This is life or death, and we are stuck on this fucking island with a murderer. We are— Shit.
Hello—hello? Hello?
Fuck, it’s dead.
PART TWO THE STORM
My name is Zana Robertson. Today is Monday, 26 February. At least I think that’s right. My head aches. It’s hard to remember.
What follows are the pages of a diary I’ve been keeping since the storm. I don’t know why—I’ve never written a diary before. I told myself that it was because I was frightened of losing track of the days. But I think it was more than that.
Maybe it was so that if we were found, I’d have some kind of record of what happened, some way of remembering that this totally unreal experience was actually real.
Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe I began to write this because even in those first early days I knew… we might not be found. The boat might not come back. Or not until it was too late.
It’s taken me a long time to face that possibility. And even now, there’s a voice in the back of my head that insists that we will be found. We HAVE to be found. Someone must be out there looking for us. Someone knows what happened. We just have to hold on.
But we are almost two weeks in now. The water is starting to run low, and there is no boat in sight, and I have to admit… I have to admit, this could be it. This could be how it ends.
So maybe that’s why I started writing this. Because I want people to know how hard we tried, how long we fought, how tenaciously we took care of each other. If you’ve found this, if it’s too late… just know that we tried. We really, really tried.
CHAPTER 10
“ARE YOU OKAY?”
Joel spoke the words into the pitch-black, and I rolled over, facing him across the wide expanse of bed. In spite of the uncurtained windows, the room was incredibly dark. Clouds had covered the sky, blocking out the moon and stars, and the Ever After Villa faced out to sea, so we couldn’t even see the shapes of the other villas. The only illumination was the unblinking red LED of the camera mounted in the corner of the room, and the faint reflection of the lights from the island, bouncing back at us from the sea. In their dim glow, I couldn’t see Joel’s expression, or even really his face, just the outline of his body beneath the white sheets. He was huddled as far away from my side of the bed as it was possible to get—quite far, given I had done the same.
“Yes, I’m okay,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”
“Me either. I think it’s the wind.”
It had picked up after the camera crew had left, and now it wailed through the palm trees with a long, low urgency, making it hard to sleep. The sea had roughened too, and I could hear it slap-slap-slapping against the veranda with a kind of contained violence. Presumably this was the storm the crew member had mentioned back on the mainland. Clearly it had arrived ahead of schedule.
