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Bayer and Zana both said a few words. Then it was my turn.
“I’m so sorry, Romi.” The words seemed to stick in my throat. I was trying to keep my mind on Romi, but the pictures in my head were all of Nico—of the Over Easy, drifting down through deep water, Nico sobbing as he clawed at the little porthole window in his cabin as it filled with water. “What happened… it was so unfair. I wish this hadn’t happened to any of us. I wish you’d had longer. I wish I’d known you better. I wish none of this was happening.”
My throat was closing up, and I knew I was on the verge of tears that had nothing really to do with Romi, and everything to do with Nico, and our own plight here on this fucking island. Why had we come? For fame? For some dream of unearned stardom? What a price we were all paying for that.
I was just wondering what to do, what else to say, when Conor stepped forward. He squeezed my hand briefly, then let go.
“Rest in peace, Romi,” he said, his voice low. “You’ll never be forgotten by any of us.”
“Goodbye, Romi,” Joel said. His voice was thick with tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of this. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better boyfriend, I’m sorry I couldn’t stop this. I love you—”
His voice cracked, and then he pushed an armful of the piled-up sand onto her body and fell to his knees, weeping bitterly.
It was Santana who led him away, while Bayer, Dan, and Conor filled in the grave. Zana had made two little crosses out of driftwood and scratched Romi’s name onto one. Now she laid them over the gently rounded graves, and I saw a single tear slide down her face.
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said, very low, not to me so much as to herself. “I hardly knew them.”
But I knew why she was crying. It was the same reason I was. She was crying for Romi, yes, and for the nameless woman lying beside her in the sand. But she was crying for the rest of us too.
CHAPTER 15
“LOOK, I THINK we need to organize ourselves.”
It was Conor who spoke. We were sitting around the cabana in the early morning cool, listening to the chatter of the birds and the screech of the parrots, and finishing off a breakfast scrounged from the broken boxes down at the staff quarters. We’d had to throw the sandwiches away, but there were croissants, tinned fruit salad, and brioche. I was getting incredibly tired of brioche, and it had only been two days.
“What do you mean?” Dan looked up from his bowl, where he was scooping up the last of the fruit salad with a chunk of muffin. “Organize ourselves for what? Local elections?”
Bayer laughed, but Conor ignored him.
“We need to know what we’re up against. We don’t know how long we’ll be here—” He raised his hand as a protest erupted, voices exclaiming that it couldn’t possibly be that long. “I know, I know, but look, we’re already on day three since the boat left. I think we have to hope for the best, plan for the worst. And the worst-case scenario is, we’re stuck here for a while. So that’s what we have to plan for, even if we hope it doesn’t happen. We need to know how much water we’ve got, how much food, whether we’ve got any means of contacting the mainland. Maybe someone’s left a mobile phone in one of the shacks.”
I raised my hand, and then felt annoyed with my own subservience, put it down, and spoke.
“There’s a radio.”
Conor raised an eyebrow.
“Does it work?”
“It seems to. Though who knows how long the battery will last. But I already tried to broadcast on it; no one came in.”
“Okay, well, let’s finish up here and then head over to the staff quarters and see what’s what. You can show us how the radio works, and then afterwards we can make a proper inventory, see what we’re dealing with. Bayer, are you okay to help?”
Bayer nodded. His arm was black with bruising under the tattoos, but he was moving it all right.
“Santana, you’d better stay here, keep an eye on things.”
“Are you sure?” Santana looked a mixture of relieved and disappointed. “I can walk, you know.”
“I know, but the last thing we need is you opening up that wound. Lyla did a pretty amazing job, all things considered, but let’s not push our luck.”
Further nods. I stood up, feeling the aching muscles in my back and arms stretch. I had been more tense than I knew, clenching my fists against some unspoken dread.
Hope for the best… plan for the worst. The question was… how bad could it get? And the answer, I was beginning to fear, might be pretty bad.
WHAT WE WERE dealing with, it turned out, was a lot and also… not a lot. We had bottled water, a couple of hundred liters at a rough count, though we’d already drunk a good twenty or thirty liters—a worrying amount in just two days. There was also toilet paper and some basic cleaning supplies. And we had some food, though not a great deal. Everything perishable had gone off in the sultry heat—the sandwiches curling into ant-infested mounds, the cheese and cold cuts so rancid that Angel gagged when she opened the refrigerator door and swung it quickly shut again.
What we were left with was dry goods and tins. Which meant chips and pretzels, cookies, and a stack of boxes full of the everlasting pastries and long-life brioche. There was precious little in the way of anything fresh, aside from the tinned fruit salad. We also had a small amount of beer and wine—though not much; evidently, Baz hadn’t trusted us enough to leave most of the alcohol on the island—and the radio.
