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Next, I checked the other villas. First Palm Tree Rest, where Bayer and Angel had been sleeping until Angel moved into Forest Retreat with the rest of us. No sign of anyone.
Then up to Ocean Bluff, which was more of a skeleton than a villa since we’d stripped it to provide materials for the bonfire. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Joel up there, staring at the horizon, looking out for ships, but there was no one there, and no sign of any movement since yesterday. Everything was exactly as we’d left it before Dan’s death.
Then, with trepidation, I made my way back into the forest, to Island Dream, the villa where Joel and Romi had spent their first day—the villa Romi had been sleeping in when she died.
I don’t know why, but I felt a kind of superstition about going back there. I hadn’t visited it since the first day after the storm, when we’d retrieved Romi’s body from the rubble and then later, that same day, when we’d rescued Joel’s belongings. Now it had a strange, haunted air, quite different from the other damaged villa. Had Joel gone back there to try to figure out what Romi would have wanted him to do, to try to connect with the person he had been before all this had started?
The answer, when I got there, seemed to be no. The villa was silent and empty, as far as I could make out—just a long brown snake sunning itself on the caved-in roof. At the sound of my footsteps, it uncoiled itself unhurriedly and slithered across the clearing, its strong muscular body writhing sinuously across the shattered palm fronds.
I watched it go, feeling my pulse quicken a little in spite of the logical side of my brain telling me I had little to fear. You’re ten times more likely to die from a mosquito than a snake, a stat I had trotted out many times over the course of my career. But the human brain is bad at evaluating risk, and worse at assessing the true dangers all around us—and I was no exception to that. The scientist in me couldn’t override the little atavistic pulse of adrenaline I experienced as I watched the snake disappear into the bush.
And as I looked around the empty clearing, I realized, it wasn’t just the snake. I had been bad at assessing danger since the day I set foot on Ever After Island. I had trusted the wrong people, made the wrong decisions. I had let my instincts override the evidence in front of me.
If I had learned one thing from my job, it was to accept the truth, no matter how much I wished things might be different. I had a sharp flashback to that day, just a few weeks ago, though it felt like a lifetime, when Nico had told me about One Perfect Couple and I had sat there, distracted, half listening to him talk, but really watching the graph of my results fill out on my laptop. The whole time he was speaking, I’d been willing the dots to make a different pattern, the nice, neat correlation I’d been hoping to see. But they didn’t.
I could have tried to ignore the data. I could have massaged my results, or quietly erased a couple of points to make the pattern I wished was there look more persuasive.
But I hadn’t. I had looked at the information in front of me and accepted what it meant, because that was my job. Because my sole, overriding duty as a scientist was to face up to reality.
And now I had to do the same thing here. I had to look at the facts—and face up to what was happening on Ever After Island. I had to find out the truth.
Dan is dead. I can’t believe it. Another accident—it just goes to show how fragile our lives are out here, how powerless we are when something goes wrong.
And it was such a beautiful day. We were all down at the sea, laughing, swimming, playing in the waves… for a moment I think we’d almost all forgotten the reality of our situation. We were just seven young people, hanging out, having… a kind of fun, really.
We were throwing around a makeshift ball we’d made out of one of the big empty water bottles, and Dan had swum far out, ready to catch it—and then suddenly, he was really, really far out.
Angel called to him to come back, and he seemed to hear, and he turned, and began striking out for shore—but he wasn’t coming any closer. He was swimming and swimming, frantically, towards us, but his shape was getting smaller and smaller. I couldn’t understand it. And then Joel suddenly said, “He’s caught in the rip— He’s in the rip.”
He began yelling and shouting, “Swim sideways! Don’t swim against the current, swim along the shore!” but I don’t know whether Dan could hear. He was so far out, and the wind had picked up. The waves were starting to break over his head.
Conor began to strip off, and Joel said, “No, let me, I’m a stronger swimmer,” and pulled off his T-shirt. He dived into the water, but we could see, even before he had gone more than a few metres, that it was hopeless. And then Dan disappeared.
Joel’s head surfaced above the water, checking his direction, and he stopped.
“Where is he?” he called back to shore. “I can’t see him. Point me to where he is?”
But Dan was gone, so far out to sea that we couldn’t even be sure when we lost sight of him.
Joel was beside himself. So is Santana, of course, she’s absolutely destroyed, but Joel—I think Joel felt responsible. Like he should have noticed earlier, though of course we tried to tell him that wasn’t the case.
“I should have told him about the rip,” he kept saying. “I should have warned him.”
We have lost another person. I keep saying it, aloud, trying to make it real. We’ve lost another person—lovely Dan, who was always laughing and joking and trying to make everyone else feel better.
We have lost him.
CHAPTER 25
“LOOK, I NEED to talk to you.”
We were down at the beach waiting for Conor and Zana to wake up and bring us the morning water ration, but for once, thirsty as I was, I wasn’t counting down the seconds until Conor came across the jetty, water bottle in hand. Because I wanted to speak to Angel and Santana before he got here.
“To me? Or Angel?” Santana turned to me, her face listless and incurious. She was like a different person since Dan’s death, as if all the vitality and laughter had drained out of her.
“To both of you.” I dug in my pocket and held out the vial of insulin I had found in Dan’s hand. “I found this yesterday.”
Angel peered at the tiny bottle, her face uncomprehending, but Santana’s gasp was instant, and she snatched the insulin out of my hand.
