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Outside I could hear the whine of the mosquitoes and, farther away, the sound of the surf breaking against the coral. Once it had been soothing; now it was a horrible reminder of Dan’s death.
Maybe it was because I hadn’t known Bayer as long, or maybe it was because he had been the one to attack Conor, but somehow, Bayer’s death hadn’t hit me the way Dan’s had. It had almost felt unreal—just another contestant eliminated from the reality of our lives.
Standing there in the clearing tonight though, with the four crosses white in the moonlight, I had been forced to understand something—we were being eliminated—all of us. And by someone who was determined to win this game at any cost. But the prize was no longer fame and money. It was survival.
“Are you okay?” Joel asked as I came over to join him, and I shook my head.
“Not really. You?”
“No. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
“Me neither.”
There was a long silence, and then I said, with the feeling that I was about to step off a precipice, “Joel, listen. I found something.”
I had no idea whether I was about to make a terrible, terrible mistake. I only knew that if I didn’t talk to someone about this, I would go mad—and Joel, for all his ties to Conor, had been kind to me from the very beginning.
“You found something?” Joel turned to me in the moonlight, frowning, and I could tell that he was trying to parse my tone, trying to figure out whether this something was good news or bad, and how he should react.
I nodded, feeling the trepidation ballooning inside me like a sickness. And then I put my hand in my pocket and held it out—the object Dan had been holding in his grip when he washed up on the beach. A vial of Santana’s insulin.
For a moment Joel peered at it as if he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then he made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut, and I knew he had recognized it, and that he knew what he was looking at.
“That’s—that’s—” He stopped. All the color had drained from his face. I finished the sentence for him.
“Santana’s insulin. Yes. It was in Dan’s hand. I found it when we were lowering him into the grave.”
“And what—” He stopped again, as if completely lost for words.
“What does it mean? I don’t know. I don’t think Dan took it, if that’s what you mean. His outrage last night was real. Which means…”
I stopped speaking, let the silence stretch, waiting for Joel to put two and two together and understand what I was saying. If Dan hadn’t taken the vial, then someone must have given it to him, or put it in his hand.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Joel?”
“No,” he said reflexively, but he looked sick. Very sick.
“Joel, you can talk to me,” I said, keeping my voice low. But Joel shook his head. He wouldn’t look at me. He was staring out into the forest as though he was urgently searching for something in the darkness.
“Joel?” I said, and he shook his head.
“Lyla, just— Can you just… leave me alone for a bit, okay? I need to think.”
“Okay,” I said. I turned, opened the veranda door, and slipped inside. Angel was still crooning in French to Santana, who was lying with her head in Angel’s lap, her eyes closed, her face still stained with tears.
The room smelled of sweat, and up in the rafters I heard the scuttle of a gecko, and the whine of a mosquito zipping past my ear. I slid onto my mattress and pulled the thin sheet up over my shoulders. Then I closed my eyes and waited for Joel to decide which side he wanted to be on.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, it was morning, the sun was streaming in through the thin cheesecloth curtains… and Joel’s mattress was empty. I sat up and my gaze went automatically to the door, checking if he was still standing, leaning on the veranda rail, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the villa clearing. He wasn’t in the bathroom. He wasn’t anywhere.
Angel and Santana were still asleep, and I got up, quietly pulled on a T-shirt and flip-flops, and headed out into the forest.
The morning was quiet, and it was early enough that the fierce heat of the day hadn’t yet set in, but I could feel the skin on my nose protesting already when I walked through the sunny clearings. We had started to ration the sun cream along with everything else, trying to cover up when we could, rather than slather on the factor fifty as we had at first.
Now, as I came out into the sunny glare of the cabana, two things hit me. The first was the full force of the morning sun. The second was the fact that Joel wasn’t there.
The uneasy feeling was mounting in my gut as I walked down through the forest to the beach and scanned it. Nothing. No one. Just the marks of our feet from the night before; the long, sickening scrape of sand where we’d tugged and carried Dan’s body up the beach; the smooth stretch below the waterline.
In the distance I could see the water villa. The curtains were closed and there was no one on the veranda. Unless Joel had spent the night with Conor and Zana, which seemed unlikely, he wasn’t there.
