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“God knows.” Santana didn’t look afraid, more curious.
“Perhaps that is what we should do,” Angel said. She was looking a little better, recovering from the shock of the snake. “Poison him, and pretend it was a snake.”
“I’m sorry.” I spread my hands, incredulous. “Am I hallucinating here? You are officially off your rocker.”
“Poison is a good idea…” Santana said thoughtfully, as if I hadn’t spoken. “We’re not likely to be able to overpower him physically. He was stronger than any of us before this started, and I’m pretty sure he’s not been sticking to the rations he’s been giving us.”
I thought back to Conor’s face, close to mine in the sea, and I had to agree. He was sunburnt and mosquito-bitten like the rest of us—but he didn’t have that sunken, dehydrated look I was beginning to recognize in Angel and Santana, and which I could feel in my own dry and cracking skin and parched lips. But Santana was still speaking.
“We’d have to be careful what we used. It would have to be something organic, something that didn’t show up as suspicious on a postmortem.”
“I have sleeping pills,” Angel said. She looked like she was considering all the options. “They are still in my washbag. But I don’t think I have enough to kill him. I don’t know what is the fatal dose. And I am sure they could be detected after death.”
I was sitting back, watching and listening, and suddenly I was overcome by a strange feeling of detachment. Maybe it was the surreal tone of the conversation, Angel’s matter-of-fact voice as she discussed killing a man like getting a stain out of a favorite top. Maybe it was the dehydration getting the better of me, but the whole situation no longer seemed entirely real.
I felt like I was outside my body, watching the whole scenario—comparing the gaunt, desperate women crouching in a circle on the ground with the fashionable, polished creatures who had first set foot on the island two, three weeks ago. It wasn’t just our chapped lips and torn clothes, it was everything. Santana’s extensions had begun to fall out, giving her strawberry blonde hair a strange lopsided quality. Angel’s acrylic nails had long since broken, and now she had a mix of jagged edges, and one long nail remaining on her little finger. And me… what had happened to me? I had never had their beauty, their sheen, but I had been at least neat and healthy. Now there were cuts on my legs that wouldn’t heal, blisters where the salt had chapped my skin, my shoulders were raw with sunburn, and I tasted blood every time I licked my lips.
The scientist in me wondered what this was doing to my body. Presumably my skin was cracking because my body was pulling water back from my nonessential organs to safeguard my brain, my heart, my kidneys. But that couldn’t last forever. We were operating at a water deficit, I knew that. Every day we lost a little more and drank a little less. Every day our mouths were drier, our urine darker, our lips more ragged.
And every day the scientist in me shrank a little more. I no longer cared about my career. I had barely thought about Professor Bianchi since we got here. I was only one thing now: a survivor. Like Angel. Like Santana.
Like Conor.
“I have an idea,” Santana said, her voice dragging me back to the present. We had fallen silent, exhausted by the building heat, even in the dry shade of the clearing, and now I came to with a jerk and opened eyes that were scratchy with salt. “About Conor. I have an idea.” She sat up straighter, pushing matted hair back from her face. “The insulin. The vial of insulin. It’s poison, if you take too much of it. If a healthy person was injected with that whole bottle… I’m pretty sure it would kill them within a few minutes. And… I don’t know if it would be detectable on a postmortem. Would it?” There was a pause. “Lyla, do you think it would be detectable?”
I started, and realized she was talking to me.
“God, I don’t know. I mean…” I racked my brains, trying to remember everything I had learned about insulin in molecular biology. It felt like a terrifyingly long time ago. And a world away from where we were now. “You probably know more about this than me, Santana, but from what I can remember, synthetic insulin is biologically identical to human insulin. It’s the exact same chemical structure. So it’s not like…” I tried to think of an example. “It’s not like heroin or alcohol, something that would show up on a tox screen. Insulin in the blood… it’s not going to be remarkable. You’re meant to have insulin. You’re just not meant to have that much.”
“So would it be detectable?”
I shook my head.
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe, if a really good pathologist had a hunch, and it hadn’t broken down too much? I don’t know how stable it would be in a dead body.” Then I realized what I was saying. What I was doing. I was collaborating in a murder. “But Santana—”
“It is our best chance,” Angel said. There was steel in her tone.
“There’s just one problem,” Santana said in a low voice. “Well, more than one actually. I mean, we’d have to get it into him, and without it being picked up on the cameras.” She nodded towards the villa, where the camera still sat, pointing out across the room. “But the big problem as far as I’m concerned is that that’s the last of my insulin supply. If Conor’s hidden the rest of the insulin—and he’s not an idiot, I highly doubt he’s left it lying around his villa—and I use up the vial to kill him… I’ll have days left. Maybe hours.”
“We don’t know he took it,” I said. I felt desperate. “What if we’re wrong? What if he didn’t take it after all? What if we’re killing an innocent man?”
“It is true that Joel is missing…” Angel sounded thoughtful. “It would be a terrible irony if we killed Conor and then found out that Joel was alive and had had the insulin all along.”
“Angel, Lyla, focus,” Santana said. She leaned forward, her hands flat on the hot sand. Her face was fierce. “Look at the facts. He killed Bayer. He stole our water. He is beating up Zana. And if Joel is missing, then he’s missing with no water on an island with no water supply, so he’s dying or dead. None of that is speculation. It’s all true. Undeniably true. Conor will kill us if we don’t kill him first.”
“This is true,” Angel said. “I agree. He must be killed.” She sounded matter-of-fact. I couldn’t believe it had come to this.
“I just—” I began, but Santana stood up. There was something terrible in her face, a kind of anger so deep, I knew that for her at least there was no going back.
“Lyla, listen to me. I am dead in two days if we don’t get that insulin. Dead. Do you understand that? It’s him or me. So choose. Choose right now. Because you won’t get a second chance.”
There was a long, long silence.
“I choose you,” I said. But all I felt was a terrible foreboding.
CHAPTER 29
FOR THE REST of the day, we searched for coconuts to slake what was fast becoming an unbearable thirst and discussed how to tackle Conor.
