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“Conor—” The voice was quiet, but it made us all stop, more in surprise than anything. It was Zana. She moved across to where he was standing, uncomfortably close to Angel, and put a hand on his arm. “Conor, maybe… just this once?”
Conor said nothing. His face was impassive, but I had the sudden disquieting impression that he was holding his emotions in check, and only barely.
Then he turned and smiled, but there was nothing about the smile that gave off warmth. It was the coldest, most frightening expression I’d ever seen.
“You’re right. Just this once. Go ahead, Angel.”
“Fuck you,” Angel said. She pushed past him, back to the table, and slammed the plate down, flicking her fingers at it with a contemptuous gesture. “I don’t want your—” She stopped, searching for the English word, and then with a noise that was more expressive than any sentence, she gave a snort of fury and stormed off into the night.
There was a collective exhalation of breath, and we all picked up our plates.
“Should someone go after her?” Dan said, a little uneasily. “I don’t like to think of her all alone in that villa.”
“Leave her,” Conor said. Dan looked across at me and Santana, then shrugged and sat down, and began picking at the fast-cooling octopus.
“This is really good,” Conor said. His voice was almost cheerful, as if he was making an effort to smooth over the altercation that had almost just happened. “Bravo, Joel.”
“Thanks,” Joel mumbled, and we all chorused our thanks, and then began to eat. But the shift from overt tension to faux cheerfulness was unnerving, and I knew I wasn’t the only person whose appetite had disappeared.
Gradually though, as the food hit stomachs, and Conor passed around bottles of beer from the fast-dwindling stash, people began to relax. Dan was asking Joel about the octopus he had caught, and some fish he had seen over by the edge of the reef. Joel was drawing a map in sand on the decking and marking up other places he thought would be worth trying.
“I’m impressed,” Santana whispered under cover of the conversation. I looked up from trying to cut my octopus.
“By Zana?”
“Yeah. She stood up for herself! Go Zana.”
I nodded. But I was looking at Zana, who was sitting, staring miserably over at Angel’s empty plate, without even touching her own food. Her face looked stricken, as if she was wondering what she had done. And I found myself wondering what her outburst might be about to cost her.
Bayer is dead. Oh my God, Bayer is DEAD. I’m sobbing as I write this. It doesn’t seem real.
Part of what makes it so hard to accept is that it was so sudden. He hadn’t been looking great the last day or two, his arm was very swollen, and he kept complaining of a headache. We tried to persuade him to have a bit of extra water allocation, or at least to drink more coconut juice, but he kept refusing—he said it wouldn’t be fair on the rest of us.
But then this morning, as we were all heading up to breakfast, talking about the day, he got halfway up the steps to the cabana and just stopped, kind of swaying back and forth. He took a step up, then another—and then he crashed out full-length.
His head hit the stair with the most awful sound I’ve ever heard—a kind of crunching crack. Angel just screamed. We knew it was bad straightaway, because there was blood, it spattered all over the steps. We all ran over to try to help him up—and that’s when we realized he was dead. Just… dead. He wasn’t breathing, and we couldn’t feel his heart. Lyla pulled back his lids and his eyes were black and unresponsive to light. And just like that, he was gone. His life snuffed out.
I keep running over what happened in my head, trying to figure out what we did wrong, how we could have saved him. Was it heatstroke? Did he need more water than the rest of us? Or was it something to do with his shoulder, some kind of clot maybe, that broke away and travelled to his brain?
Lyla says we’ll never know, that there’s no point in torturing ourselves. Conor is broken by it—Bayer was probably the person he was closest to on the island, after me. He shut himself in the water villa, and I know he was crying, although when I came to find him he pretended he was okay.
Our only hope now is the radio—poor Angel spent the rest of the day down there, trying to find a ship, trying to find a signal. I know she blames herself, thinks that if she’d managed to make contact earlier, someone could have saved Bayer.
Please, God, let someone find us. We are seven people now. Just seven. How long can we hold on?
CHAPTER 19
“GOD I’M THIRSTY.”
It was Dan who spoke into the darkness of the villa where the four of us were lying, sweating, and staring at the shadowed rafters. I heard a sigh from Santana as she rolled over in bed.
“Me too. I’ve had a dehydration headache ever since we started rationing the water. But until it rains, I’m not sure what else we can do.”
“Being in charge of our own supply would help.” Dan’s voice was resentful, and I knew why. The long gap between breakfast and supper had been particularly hard today, and I’d seen Dan down by the sea, rinsing his mouth out with seawater more than once, though I wasn’t sure the harshly salted tropical water would do much to slake anyone’s thirst. The idea of a small gulp of fresh water, even one that had to come out of our supper allowance, had been almost unbearably tempting.
“If we’re not careful, we’re all going to end up like Zana,” Dan said.
“I’m sorry, what?” Joel said. He sounded puzzled. “What the hell has Zana got to do with anything? And what do you mean, end up like her?”
