AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes, it’s February twenty-fifth, by my reckoning. Which means we’ve been here just over ten days.”
“And?”
“And we’ve got through almost half the water. We have to face facts, in another ten days, we could be looking at single-digit liters.”
“But wait—” I put out a hand. “There were eight of us when we calculated the water ration. There’s only six now.” Maybe five if Joel was gone, though I wasn’t ready to say that out loud. “That gives us an extra twenty-five percent leeway.”
“Okay, then.” Conor spoke impatiently. “An extra twelve days. What does it matter? The point is, we’re running out of water. We’re all going to have to work a bit harder for our liquid allowance.”
“What does that mean?” Santana looked at him through narrowed eyes. I saw that her shoulders were peeling viciously where the sun had caught them yesterday.
“It means that in order to qualify for liquid allowance, everyone is going to have to bring two green coconuts to the table each morning.”
“What?” It was Angel who exploded with the question we were all suppressing. “C’est quoi, ces conneries? You know perfectly that there are no green coconuts left. We searched all the island for them—all the fallen are dry.”
“Then you’ll have to climb the trees,” Conor said pleasantly.
“Climb the trees? Are you insane? We climbed everything possible. The ones left are forty meters high!”
“Or knock the coconuts down. I don’t care how you do it—that’s your business. But if you don’t contribute, you don’t drink.”
“And what about you?” Santana demanded. “Where are your coconuts?”
“I’ll be fishing. Assuming you want to eat.”
“Conor, look,” I put in, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. My throat was suddenly very dry—drier even than it had been a few minutes ago. I swallowed painfully. “We take your point—we need to find other sources of liquid. But give us our allowance now, and we can go out and figure out how to get the coconuts down.”
“I don’t think so,” Conor said. “I find most people work better with a little bit of incentivization.”
“Conor…” The soft voice came from behind him, and we all turned, surprised to see Zana padding along the beach. She looked pale and even thinner than when she had first come to the island, but there was a kind of resolve about her. “Conor… I think Lyla has a point.”
“Oh you do, do you?” Conor said. His voice was mild, but there was a kind of underlying menace in it. Zana took a step back, and then seemed to catch herself and stood up taller, nodding.
“Yes, I do. Give everyone their water now, and they can earn the supper allowance.”
“Come here,” Conor said with a smile. He held out his hand. Zana looked puzzled, but she put her hand in his, and he drew her closer. For a moment I thought he was bringing her in for a hug and remembered the way Zana had stood up for Angel over the food, after Bayer’s death, and the way Conor had backed down. But then, Zana began to squirm, and then she gave a cry, and then a full-on whimper of pain. At first I didn’t understand, and then I realized she was trying to pull her hand away from Conor. I looked down, and I saw that Conor had her hand in his and was digging his nail into the white half-moon at the base of Zana’s thumbnail, so hard that she was literally buckling at the knees with pain.
I had a sharp, agonizing flashback to a time when I had been pinning up the hem of Nico’s trousers for an alteration and he had taken a step back and trodden, in his dress shoes, on the flat of my thumbnail. He hadn’t stamped hard, just shifted his weight, but it had all rested on exactly the place where Conor was pressing into Zana’s nail. It had been—no exaggeration—one of the most painful things I had ever experienced. I had screamed, and Nico had startled, fallen off the stool, and afterwards he had accused me of being a drama queen. “There’s not even a mark!” he’d said, although that wasn’t totally true. Later on a faint purplish bruise had spread across the base of my nail.
But the white-hot pain of it had stayed with me ever since, and now the thought of Conor doing that to Zana deliberately, holding her while she twisted and tried to get away, while her knees gave way with the pain…
“What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, and Conor let go of Zana’s hand and turned around on me, and for a moment his cold calm was gone, and his face was full of an anger that made me step back.
“Holding my girlfriend’s hand, what are you doing?” he snarled.
“You were hurting her.” My heart was thudding, and my hand was drawn back, although to do what, I could not have said. I didn’t think my punch would do more than irritate Conor.
“She’s fine,” Conor ground out. “Aren’t you?”
But Zana was curled over, cradling her hand, and didn’t answer.
“Get back to the villa,” he said now, but I moved to stand in between them, and now I found Angel and Santana were there too, side by side with me.
“Leave her alone,” Angel said. She said the words very quietly, but each one was spat out like something poisonous. For a long moment Conor stood there, towering over Angel, the muscles in his shoulders standing out like a bull about to charge—and then he smiled.
“I’ll be fishing. If you need me, Zana. And remember… two coconuts each, ladies. If you want to drink.”
“Oh, we’ll remember,” Angel said. Her voice was shaking with rage. Conor turned on his heel with a little wave and walked back to the water villa, presumably to get his fishing spear. Beside me, I heard Santana’s shaky exhalation of breath, and I realized that I was trembling, my muscles quivering like someone who’s tried to hold a yoga pose too long.
