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The second thing I realized, and it didn’t take me very long, was that Joel had been sensible to dive under the waves for as long as he had, and that he’d made the swim look far easier than it really was. Swimming in the impact zone, where the waves were beginning to break, was incredibly tiring, and surfing a wave without a board was much harder than Joel had made it seem. Twice I managed to catch the momentum of a cresting wave, only to be forced under when it broke, coming up gasping and disoriented, being sucked back out to sea.
I swam… and I swam… for what felt like a terrifying, insurmountable amount of time. Every time I thought I was getting out of the break zone, another huge wave would crash over my head and its backdraft would pull me back into deep water. My arms were screaming with tiredness, and I was blue with cold, but at last I felt my knees crack into something rough—a piece of coral, probably, and when I put my hands down to try to fend off whatever it was, I realized I was in shallow water.
When I scrambled the last few feet to shore, my knees were skinned and bleeding, and I was shaking with a mix of exhaustion and cold, but Joel was standing there, cheering, and ready to help me to my feet.
“Are you okay?” he said, almost before I’d shaken the water out of my ears. “Can you walk?”
“Yes,” I gasped. I understood his anxiety—he wanted to get inland, check on Romi.
“Are you sure? I can leave you here if you’re tired, but—”
“I understand,” I said. My chest was still heaving, but I was recovering the power of speech. “Go. I’ll catch up.”
Joel nodded, then jogged up the path into the trees. I stood for a moment, catching my breath, then straightened up to follow.
I had barely made my way off the beach and into the trees, when there was a crashing sound from the undergrowth, and a wild-eyed Dan came bursting out from between two banana trees. He was shirtless and covered in dried blood.
“What the fuck!” I blurted out, and he grabbed me like a drowning man gripping a piece of driftwood.
“Lyla! You’re okay! Jesus Christ, you’re okay, thank God you’re okay. We were sure you’d be dead, out there on the water.”
“We’re fine,” I said. “The jetty got swept away, but the villa was okay. But Dan—what’s happened?”
“It’s Santa.” His voice broke. “She’s— Oh fuck, Lyla, I know you’re not a real doctor, but you work in medicine, don’t you?”
“No!” I was getting really alarmed now. “Dan, no, I work on viruses. It’s not the same— What’s happened to her?”
“She went out, into the storm, to try to get help. She got hit by something—metal sheeting, I think. I got her back to the villa, but she’s badly hurt.”
“Oh fuck.” I felt sick to my stomach. I had no idea what to do, but I also had a strong suspicion that totally unqualified as I was, I might still be the most knowledgeable person here. At least my work had given me a solid understanding of pathogen control and microbial reproduction. And I’d got my First Aid badge as a Girl Guide. Good thing it was only twenty years out of date.
“Oh my God,” I heard through the trees. It was Joel, his voice a cry of total horror. “Oh my God, Romi. Romi!”
“Hold that thought,” I said to Dan. “I’m sorry, I will come with you, just—”
“Romi!” I heard from up ahead. Joel’s voice was a scream of desperation. “Romi, Romi! Talk to me!”
Dan shot me a look, and we both ran up the path in the direction of Joel’s cries.
When we came out into the clearing, what we saw made me skid to a halt and my stomach lurch even more sickeningly than it had done hearing about Santana.
In the middle of the clearing was a little villa, the only one Nico and I hadn’t stumbled over yesterday, though it was a carbon copy of the other four land villas. Or rather, it would have been. But sometime during the night, a huge palm tree had fallen clear across it, smashing the roof like an eggshell and crushing the walls to the ground. I could see broken glass scattered across the clearing, shards of polished wood, throw cushions flung into the undergrowth by the force of the impact.
Apart from Joel’s sobbing there was total, absolute silence. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived.
“Maybe she wasn’t in there,” Dan whispered, clearly running through the same thought process as I was. But I’d seen a foot with rose-pink nail polish sticking out from beneath one of the broken chunks of roof, and now I turned away, breathing hard through my nose and trying not to lose it.
“Romi.” Joel had seen the foot too, and he ran forward, tugging at the palm-frond roof. I forced my frozen limbs to move. However unlikely it was, if Romi was alive under there, I had to help Joel get her out. Together, the three of us all heaving at the debris, we cleared away enough to make out Romi’s body. But it was her body. She was very clearly dead—and it must have been nearly instant. While her head and legs were almost untouched, her torso was crushed between the trunk of the palm tree and the mahogany bedframe, crushed in a way that even a child could have told you was not compatible with life. There was surprisingly little blood—but her eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the blue sky, and the pupils were dilated to darkness.
“Romi.” Joel was sobbing, brokenly. He knelt beside her, brushing the palm fronds off her face. There was a fly on her forehead, and a trail of ants moving across her body to the blood, and he swatted them angrily away.
“Oh my God, Joel, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. He gave a groan that sounded like someone was twisting a knife in his side.
“I should have been here.”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” Dan said quietly. “Nobody could. You’d just have died too. I’m so sorry, mate.”
“I could have woken her up,” Joel sobbed. “I could have told her to get out.”
