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She picked up the glucose monitor I’d left next to her pillow and looked at the screen, and then made a face.
“Yikes. God, that was really low. Shit.”
“Is it climbing?” I asked. Santana nodded.
“Yes. Give me the rest of the glucose tablets. I might need more.”
I handed them over and Santana took another swig of the water, and a fourth tablet, then picked up the glucose blood strips from the bedside table.
“Did you hear the news?” Angel demanded as Santana stabbed her finger with a lancet. With the panic over, her eyes were shining again. Santana shook her head, puzzled, and Angel smiled like the cat that got the cream. “The trick with the battery worked. I made contact with a boat. They spoke English. We are going to be rescued.”
There was a long, disbelieving silence. Then Santana’s face broke into a huge grin.
“Are you kidding me? We’re going to be rescued? We’re really going to be rescued?”
“Don’t speak too soon,” I said warningly. I don’t know why, but it felt like tempting fate to be too sure, after everything that had happened. “They’ve got to find another ship, locate the island… I mean, don’t get me wrong, but I won’t believe it until we actually see the rescue boat for ourselves.”
“Did they say how long they would be?” Santana asked. Angel shook her head.
“No. They said they were at least three hours away from their home port. So I suppose it depends on if they manage to radio ahead.”
“And even if they do,” I said, thinking slowly, “that boat will have to travel at least three hours back to where you radioed them, probably, and then locate us from there. We’re probably looking at at least… what… four hours? Five? Maybe more.”
“Five hours,” Santana said. She spoke as if she was savoring the words. “Five hours. We have only five hours left on this fucking island.”
But then Zana spoke, and her voice was like the sound of a stone dropped into a well; hollow, chilly, bleak.
“So I have five hours left.”
“What do you mean?” Angel looked at Zana, and then across at me, puzzled. “Five hours left of what?”
“Five hours left of freedom. I mean, I killed him. I killed my boyfriend. There’s no way around that.”
There was a long silence. Then Santana spoke.
“Zana, as far as we’re concerned…” She swallowed and looked at me and Angel, seeking backup.
“As far as we’re concerned,” I said, “it was an accident. Conor fell into the sea during high winds. We all tried to save him. You and I got swept out to sea and barely made it back alive. Right?”
I turned to Santana and Angel, and they both nodded vigorously.
“Absolutely!” Angel said. “That is what happened.”
But Zana was shaking her head. There were tears in her eyes.
“There are bodies all over this island. Not to mention the massive concussion on the side of Santana’s head. How do we explain all that? How do we talk about what happened—about the water and the hoarding and Santana’s insulin—without them figuring it out? It’s all on camera, for God’s sake!” She waved her hand at the unblinking black eye in the corner of the room. “What, you went out to confront Conor in the one place that doesn’t have CCTV and he just happened to fall in the sea and drown while I stood there and watched? They’re never going to believe that in a million years, not even if we all swore it on the Bible and our mothers’ lives.”
“But doesn’t that make our case for us?” Santana said. “If we explain what he was like—”
“If I tell them what he was like, I’ll be signing my own confession,” Zana said bitterly. “You think some Thai or Indonesian court is going to care whether he hit me? Or that he put spyware on my phone? Or that he cut up my credit cards and made me resign from my job and burned me with spent matches? What I did, it’s still murder!”
We all flinched. Santana looked stricken. Angel looked murderous.
“Look…” I said slowly. “Zana’s right. The problem is that we have a motive to want to harm Conor—not just Zana, we all do. To the point where no one will believe us if we say that we didn’t, even if we back each other up. So that’s what we have to fix. We have to make it so that Conor is a person no one would want to hurt.”
“What do you mean?” Zana said. She looked puzzled.
“We have to create a record of our time here, something that explains everything that happened—Bayer’s death, Dan’s, Joel’s disappearance, all of it—but doesn’t pin it on Conor. Something that explains about the food and the water, but makes it sound like we all agreed. Something that turns him into a man no one would want to kill. And we’ve probably only got six hours to do it in.” I looked up at the sky. The sun was already above the palm trees. “Does anyone have paper? And a pen?”
