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“I’m trying to create a hole large enough so I can attack the lead inside,” Angel explained. She showed me the holes she’d already punched along the top of the battery, like perforations in a sheet of stamps. “I am trying to join these. I was using the knife, but it broke. I think if we can get it to there”—she pointed about halfway along the perforations—“we can peel back the metal, you see?”
I nodded.
“And then when it is open, I will try to scrape the sulfate from the lead. If we can expose enough fresh lead, perhaps we can create a little more charge.”
“Okay.” I took the nail and the screwdriver she was using as a hammer and began to try to join up the dots.
It was more difficult than it looked, and I began quickly to see why Angel’s hands were so ragged. First, without a proper hammer it was extremely difficult to hit the nail hard enough without jolting drops of acid everywhere. Second, if you missed, the ragged edge of metal was apt to skin your fingers. Soon my hands were as red and swollen as Angel’s, in spite of rinsing them with seawater, and my mouth was dry and bitter-tasting from inhaling the chemical fumes.
But at last, after what felt like hours of hammering, the jagged cut extended halfway down the side, and I was able to push the screwdriver under the flap of metal and force it back, exposing a good third of the interior of the battery and the lead sheet inside.
“Angel!” I called. She had gone down to the shore, by the wrecked desalination plant, and was soaking her sore hands in the water and gazing out to sea. “Angel, what’s next?”
She turned, shading her eyes against the sun, and then her expression changed, and she got hastily to her feet and came running across the clearing.
“Wow! You have it open!”
“Is it enough?”
“Yes, it’s enough.” She took back the screwdriver and peered into the inner workings of the battery, looking at the pleats and folds of metal inside. “God, I hope this works.” She wiped her brow, and for the first time I saw how exhausted she looked. Of all of us, Angel had always seemed the least defeated by the island, her defiant beauty and regal bearing surviving sunburn, thirst, and despair better than any of us. But now, even her veneer was beginning to crack, the desperation beneath clearly showing through.
I crouched beside her and watched as she began painstakingly scraping at the metal folds inside the battery. It was fiddly work, the lead packed so tight it was hard to get to parts of it without deforming the sheets. The whole point, I realized, was to create as much surface area as possible for the lead to attack, and so crushing the sheets together would be counterproductive. But Angel worked at it deftly and patiently, scraping and scratching until the lead showed shiny through the dulled surface, and then moving onto the next patch.
After a while I realized there wasn’t much I could do to help, so I went back to the villa to check on Santana and Zana. When I arrived, I found Santana still lying on the big bed, Zana crouched beside her, trying to make her drink.
“How is she?” I asked, and Zana’s head came up, her expression changing from surprise to resignation in a moment.
“I don’t know. I can’t get her to properly wake up. Santana.” She slapped Santana’s cheek gently. “Santana, honey, come on. You need to wake up. You need to drink something.”
Santana’s eyes opened for a moment and she slurred something, but then her lids drifted back shut. I looked at Zana, whose expression was close to despair.
“Fuck. What do we do?” she asked. “Do you think it’s a concussion?”
“I have no idea.” I squatted beside Santana and touched her forehead, which was no longer hot, but cold and clammy. The bright, feverish flush had left her cheeks, and she looked pale and bloodless. I picked up her hand. Her fingers were like ice. “I don’t think so. I don’t think a concussion would give you chills like this.” Then I saw the blood sugar monitor on her arm and my heart sank. “Wait, it could be her blood sugar. She barely ate yesterday.”
“Of course.” Zana bit her lip. “You’re right. God, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. What do we do?”
“I have no idea. We should try to take a reading. Where’s her… her reader thing?” I was hunting in the bed, and then I found it—the little digital box I had seen her checking every few hours during the day. The number on the display didn’t mean much to me—I had no idea whether 2.1 was good or bad—but there was no mistaking the little graph at the bottom of the screen. The small digital line had been steadily dropping for the last few hours, until now it was right at the bottom of the chart.
“Fuck. She’s low. I think she might be really, really low. You’re supposed to give hypoglycemic people sugary drinks; juice or Coke, something like that. But we don’t have anything like that.”
“Is there any tinned fruit salad left? That has juice.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so.” Then something occurred to me. “She has glucose tablets. I saw her taking them once when she went low. Where would they be?”
I began rummaging through Santana’s belongings, but Zana had gone pale.
“Do they look like sweets? A bit like big versions of those Pez things little kids have?”
I nodded.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. Conor took them. They’re out at the water villa.”
“I’ll go,” I said, but Zana shook her head.
“No. I have to go. I know where he put everything.” She looked sick.
