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“I am worried for her. She looks like a zombie.”
“I mean… she’s been through a lot,” Santana said, reasonably. “The poor girl—” She stopped and lowered her voice, though I was fairly sure Zana was too far away to hear and wouldn’t have cared if she could. “The poor girl killed her boyfriend, for God’s sake. That’s a fuck of a lot to process.”
“Her abusive murderous boyfriend,” Angel put in. “Let us not forget.”
“Still though,” I said. “I agree with Santa. How do you cope with something like that? The fact that he was an abusive piece of shit doesn’t change the weight of what happened.”
“Maybe the opposite,” Santana said quietly. She touched the swollen side of her face as if remembering how it had felt when Conor hit her. “I mean… think about how controlling he was. Think about living with that, day in, day out, and suddenly… he’s gone. I think a hole that size… that would be hard to come to terms with.”
“Legally though,” Angel insisted. “Legally it changes things. Legally what she did was self-defense.”
But her words were greeted with silence, and Santana and I exchanged an uneasy look.
It was something none of us had really spoken about—in part because we hadn’t wanted to talk about it in front of Zana. But the question of what would happen when we were rescued, if we were rescued, had started to weigh heavily on my mind, and I knew I couldn’t be the only one. How would we explain Conor’s death? And Bayer’s, and Dan’s? And then there was Joel, whom Angel had found hanging from a palm tree halfway up the coast, a bed sheet tied around his throat. How to explain the dizzying, terrifying sequence of events without implicating all of us? Because the truth was, it hadn’t been self-defense. Not really. Zana had been defending me. And I wasn’t sure where the law stood on that. Not least because I had no idea what legal jurisdiction we were in.
“Well, I hear you, Angel, but we have to get rescued before any of that is even a consideration,” Santana said at last, and Angel nodded.
“I keep thinking about the radio,” she said. “About the battery. Surely there is a way to charge it?”
She was looking at Santana, who in turn looked at me, and I held my hands up.
“Don’t look at me. I’m a virologist. I know fuck all about electricity. That’s physics. Or maybe chemistry. Either way, it’s about as far from what I studied as English Lit.”
“I know I asked this before,” Santana said a little helplessly, “but is there any mileage in trying to warm it up? Do you think that works with car batteries?”
“Have you been in that hut lately?” I asked. “It’s hotter than the seventh circle of hell when the sun is beating down on that tin roof, so no, short of actually combusting the battery, I don’t think we could make it any hotter.”
“Could we combust it?” Santana asked. She sounded almost as if she were pleading. “I mean, we’re fucked now, so is it worth a try? We could make a fire in the sand and then when it dies down, we could bury the battery in the hot sand and see if we could get a tiny bit more charge out of it before it melts.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I mean, you’re right, it could be worth a try. But is this even the same kind of battery? I don’t know if car batteries work the same way as normal AA ones.”
“C’est une batterie au plomb,” Angel said, frowning to herself, and then realized that she had slipped into French and translated for us. “What is the English word—a lead battery. They are filled with acid. The charge comes from the reaction between the lead and the acid, so I imagine if you heated the acid, it could be possible to encourage a little bit more reactivity…. It would depend why it has stopped working. If the lead is covered in sulphate…” She trailed off.
“If the point is the reaction between the acid and the lead…” I said slowly, “is there any way we could get more acid into the battery?”
“It is supposed to be sulfuric acid,” Angel said. She pronounced it like a French word—suul-four-eek, with the stress on the last syllable. “Fin, a mix of sulfuric acid and water. I am not sure where we could find something equivalent on the island.”
“Angel,” Santana said, “how do you know this? Sorry, but you’ve suddenly turned into Bill Nye the Science Guy, and it’s a bit disconcerting.”
“I do not know this Bill, but my father owned a garage,” Angel said. She looked down at her formerly pristine acrylic nails, now snapped to stumps, and sighed. “When I was a little girl, I would help him in the repair shop at weekends. I was obsessed with cars—it was my father’s pride and joy that I could change a tire faster than any of the men he employed.”
I had a sharp flashback to Angel at the meet and greet, telling us that she had wanted to be a Formula One racing driver when she grew up—and how we had all laughed at the incongruous image. Now I understood—and I saw the little girl staring out of Angel’s tear-filled eyes. I reached out and held her hand.
“I’m sure you still are his pride and joy, Angel.”
She shook her head, smiling too, though the tears still glistened on the edges of her lashes.
“Non. My father loved me very much, but he is dead. And I have forgotten almost everything he taught me. But I do remember a little about batteries. And lead batteries, they are not sophisticated. They are designed to make a chemical reaction, then you reverse the reaction with electricity, and repeat. It is not rocket science.”
“Well, look,” I said. “You clearly know more about this than any of us. And if there’s anything Santa and I can do to help you, just say it. But I think this is on you, Angel. You’re our best chance.”
“Dieu,” Angel said. It had been supposed to be a compliment to cheer her up, but it was plain she hadn’t taken it like that. In fact, her face was more somber than ever. “What a terrible thought.”
CHAPTER 34
THAT NIGHT WE slept up at Forest Retreat, Zana taking the mattress Joel had dragged across, Santana on the bed. She had become feverish over the course of the day, and now Zana and I lay, listening worriedly to her ragged breathing, and her voice muttering words we couldn’t fully make out.
Only Angel wasn’t here. She had spent all afternoon over at the staff quarters, hunting in the wreckage of the cabins and the broken-up desalination plant for something, anything she could use to repair the battery, and she had gone back there after supper to eke out the last of the daylight.
