Chapter 12

I DON’T KNOWwhen I fell asleep, but it must have been some time shortly before dawn, because I opened bleary eyes to find pink rays of sunshine illuminating the ceiling, and Joel leaning over me, gently shaking my shoulder.

“Lyla?” he was whispering. “Lyla, are you awake?”

“I am now,” I said a little grumpily. I had no idea how many hours sleep I’d managed, but it couldn’t have been more than two or three. As I struggled upright, raking the hair out of my eyes, I saw that the wind had dropped, the clouds had broken, and apart from the fact that there was seawater all over the floor and the patio furniture had all been swept away, the Ever After Villa was miraculously unharmed. We’d made it.

“I’m sorry,” Joel said penitently, “I didn’t want to wake you, but I didn’t want to just disappear without telling you.”

“Disappear?” I rubbed my face, feeling the grittiness of sleep—or maybe dried seawater—on my cheeks, and the welt from where the branch had hit me the night before. “Where are you going?”

“I need to go check on Romi,” Joel said. His expression was worried. “She’ll have been all alone in her villa in that storm, and she’s probably losing her mind about me. I need to make sure she’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry, of course you do.” I sat up properly, swung my legs out of bed onto the damp boards, and looked out at the stretch of water between us and the island. The storm seemed to have passed, but the sea was still a far cry from the clear, tranquil blue it had been when we arrived. It was cloudy gray with stirred up silt, and the huge breakers were still crashing into the shore. The formerly pristine white beach was strewn with debris—broken furniture, branches, coconuts, and brittle chunks of coral flung up from the depths. More than that, the whole shape of the beach itself had changed—a deep channel had been scoured out of the far end of the curve by the surf, while sand had been flung far up, either side, into dunes that hadn’t existed last night. If I squinted, I could make out, even from here, some of the damage that the storm had wrought on the island itself. Dozens of trees had come down, and between the trunks of the remaining ones I could see the white glint of villas that had been previously hidden by forest. As I watched, a huge tumbleweed of something pale and straw-colored cartwheeled across the beach—but it was too large and too irregularly shaped to be an actual tumbleweed. It took me a few minutes to recognize it for what it was—the roof of one of the villas, or at least a good chunk of one. I felt a shiver of apprehension run through me.

“How are we going to get across?” I asked now. Joel bit his lip.

“I’ve been watching the surf and I think I can swim for it.”

“Christ.” I looked out at the crashing breakers. “Are you sure? It’s pretty rough.”

“I think so. The jetty’s basically gone—and it’s probably more unsafe to go wading around all those submerged posts, anyway. Easy way to break a leg. And there’s a rip, but it’s going down the far side.” He pointed at a deceptively smooth streak of water coming off the northern edge of the beach, following the path of the scoured-out channel. “I mean, it’s rough, but I’m a fairly strong swimmer, and I’m used to surf. I think I’ll be okay.”

“And what about sharks?” Even as I said the words they sounded faintly ridiculous, but this was the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t a hyperbolic question to ask. But Joel was shaking his head.

“I asked one of the producers yesterday. He said the big ones can’t get inside the reef. They stick to the deep water. I’ll be all right, I promise.”

I nodded and, pulling the heavy bed away from the French doors, I opened them a few inches and squeezed through. Outside, the surf felt, if anything, more intimidating, but the wind was blowing onshore and I had no reason to disbelieve Joel about the riptide. Joel had followed me, and together we stood shading our eyes and gazing at the shore.

“Are you a surfer, then?” I asked. Joel shrugged. A figure had appeared in the far distance, stumbling along the beach, but I couldn’t see who.

“Not anymore, really, but I guess you could say I was. I grew up in Cornwall. We were always messing around in the sea. You learn the basics.”

“So how do we do this?” I said. The figure had disappeared into the trees.

“We?” Joel raised an eyebrow, and I shrugged.

“Look, I’m not staying here by myself. I’ve never surfed, but I did get my silver swimming badge.”

“Okay,” Joel said mildly. “If you’re sure. Do you want me to go first? Just in case?”

I thought for a moment, and then nodded. There wasn’t really much benefit in us swimming together. If anything, we were less likely to notice the other getting into trouble. Joel was already stripping off his clothes.

“So the thing to do,” he said, as he pulled his T-shirt over his head, “is kind of body surf on the waves as far as possible. It’s not as easy without a board, but the energy of the wave will do the hard work, particularly with an onshore wind. And if you find yourself in a rip, don’t try to swim against it, that’s a fast way to drown. Swim sideways if you can, get out of its pull, or if you can’t, just hang tight and wait for it to exhaust itself. Though that might be a gamble if it carries you out beyond the reef.”

I nodded. Joel was down to his pants, and now he took off his glasses, looking blankly around.

“Shit. What do I do with these? I can’t wear them, they’ll get washed away.”

“Um…” I had a sudden idea, and going back into the villa, I rummaged in the bathroom and came back with my washbag, a simple drawstring bag made of waterproof material. It was the only thing I’d brought across to the water villa, aside from my pajamas. I dumped out my shampoo and deodorant and handed it to Joel.

“Will this do?” I asked. “It’s strong, and you could tie the straps to your wrist.” Joel nodded, tied it tightly around his arm with a double knot, and then shrugged.

“Well, wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” I said. My heart was in my throat as he stepped closer to the edge of the veranda, where the waves were buffeting with a force I could feel shaking the decking. He stood for a moment, inhaling deeply, and then poised himself and dived, with a surprising grace, into the surf.

For a long time, he didn’t surface, and I found I was counting under my breath, watching for his head to come up between the waves. Thirteen elephants… fourteen elephants… when I got to twenty-two elephants, I was beginning to get seriously worried. Had he got caught in some underwater current not visible from the surface?

But then, just when I was beginning to debate if I should wait a little longer, or strip off my own clothes and jump in, and whether that would do any good at all or just result in both of us getting swept out to sea, his head came up between the waves, much farther away than I would have expected, and he caught a wave, and let himself be carried almost halfway to shore.

When he finally scrambled up the beach on his hands and knees, I felt like applauding. But then he turned and waved, and I realized it was my turn.

The thought gave me a jolt. What I’d told Joel was true, I couldn’t stay here all day, and I did have my silver medallion. But it was a long time since I’d done any serious swimming, and what I had done had been pretty much exclusively in swimming pools. Also, the dress I was wearing was woefully unsuitable.

“Just a sec!” I yelled across to Joel, though I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to hear me above the sound of the surf. I turned my back and began pulling the diaphanous maxi dress over my head. Once it was off, I stood for a moment at the edge of the veranda, feeling strangely vulnerable in my bra and knickers, and trying to summon up my courage. Then, knowing that my nerve would fail me if I waited any longer, I jumped, with considerably less grace than Joel, into the waves.

The first thing that shocked me was that it was very cold. Much, much colder than the baby waves I’d paddled in with Nico yesterday, when we first arrived. Colder even than last night, when I’d waded across the jetty to the island. Evidently, the storm had stirred up water from the deep, untouched parts of the sea, the part where even the tropical sun rarely reached. With unpleasant images in my head of giant squid and those weird eyeless fish with glowing antenna, I took a deep breath, and began to strike out for shore.

The second thing I realized, and it didn’t take me very long, was that Joel had been sensible to dive under the waves for as long as he had, and that he’d made the swim look far easier than it really was. Swimming in the impact zone, where the waves were beginning to break, was incredibly tiring, and surfing a wave without a board was much harder than Joel had made it seem. Twice I managed to catch the momentum of a cresting wave, only to be forced under when it broke, coming up gasping and disoriented, being sucked back out to sea.

I swam… and I swam… for what felt like a terrifying, insurmountable amount of time. Every time I thought I was getting out of the break zone, another huge wave would crash over my head and its backdraft would pull me back into deep water. My arms were screaming with tiredness, and I was blue with cold, but at last I felt my knees crack into something rough—a piece of coral, probably, and when I put my hands down to try to fend off whatever it was, I realized I was in shallow water.

When I scrambled the last few feet to shore, my knees were skinned and bleeding, and I was shaking with a mix of exhaustion and cold, but Joel was standing there, cheering, and ready to help me to my feet.

“Are you okay?” he said, almost before I’d shaken the water out of my ears. “Can you walk?”

“Yes,” I gasped. I understood his anxiety—he wanted to get inland, check on Romi.

“Are you sure? I can leave you here if you’re tired, but—”

“I understand,” I said. My chest was still heaving, but I was recovering the power of speech. “Go. I’ll catch up.”

Joel nodded, then jogged up the path into the trees. I stood for a moment, catching my breath, then straightened up to follow.

I had barely made my way off the beach and into the trees, when there was a crashing sound from the undergrowth, and a wild-eyed Dan came bursting out from between two banana trees. He was shirtless and covered in dried blood.

“What the fuck!” I blurted out, and he grabbed me like a drowning man gripping a piece of driftwood.

“Lyla! You’re okay! Jesus Christ, you’re okay, thank God you’re okay. We were sure you’d be dead, out there on the water.”

“We’re fine,” I said. “The jetty got swept away, but the villa was okay. But Dan—what’s happened?”

“It’s Santa.” His voice broke. “She’s— Oh fuck, Lyla, I know you’re not a real doctor, but you work in medicine, don’t you?”

“No!” I was getting really alarmed now. “Dan, no, I work on viruses. It’s not the same— What’s happened to her?”

“She went out, into the storm, to try to get help. She got hit by something—metal sheeting, I think. I got her back to the villa, but she’s badly hurt.”

“Oh fuck.” I felt sick to my stomach. I had no idea what to do, but I also had a strong suspicion that totally unqualified as I was, I might still be the most knowledgeable person here. At least my work had given me a solid understanding of pathogen control and microbial reproduction. And I’d got my First Aid badge as a Girl Guide. Good thing it was only twenty years out of date.

“Oh my God,” I heard through the trees. It was Joel, his voice a cry of total horror. “Oh my God, Romi. Romi!”

“Hold that thought,” I said to Dan. “I’m sorry, I will come with you, just—”

“Romi!” I heard from up ahead. Joel’s voice was a scream of desperation. “Romi, Romi! Talk to me!”

Dan shot me a look, and we both ran up the path in the direction of Joel’s cries.

When we came out into the clearing, what we saw made me skid to a halt and my stomach lurch even more sickeningly than it had done hearing about Santana.

In the middle of the clearing was a little villa, the only one Nico and I hadn’t stumbled over yesterday, though it was a carbon copy of the other four land villas. Or rather, it would have been. But sometime during the night, a huge palm tree had fallen clear across it, smashing the roof like an eggshell and crushing the walls to the ground. I could see broken glass scattered across the clearing, shards of polished wood, throw cushions flung into the undergrowth by the force of the impact.

Apart from Joel’s sobbing there was total, absolute silence. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived.

“Maybe she wasn’t in there,” Dan whispered, clearly running through the same thought process as I was. But I’d seen a foot with rose-pink nail polish sticking out from beneath one of the broken chunks of roof, and now I turned away, breathing hard through my nose and trying not to lose it.

“Romi.” Joel had seen the foot too, and he ran forward, tugging at the palm-frond roof. I forced my frozen limbs to move. However unlikely it was, if Romi was alive under there, I had to help Joel get her out. Together, the three of us all heaving at the debris, we cleared away enough to make out Romi’s body. But it was her body. She was very clearly dead—and it must have been nearly instant. While her head and legs were almost untouched, her torso was crushed between the trunk of the palm tree and the mahogany bedframe, crushed in a way that even a child could have told you was not compatible with life. There was surprisingly little blood—but her eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the blue sky, and the pupils were dilated to darkness.

“Romi.” Joel was sobbing, brokenly. He knelt beside her, brushing the palm fronds off her face. There was a fly on her forehead, and a trail of ants moving across her body to the blood, and he swatted them angrily away.

“Oh my God, Joel, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. He gave a groan that sounded like someone was twisting a knife in his side.

“I should have been here.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Dan said quietly. “Nobody could. You’d just have died too. I’m so sorry, mate.”

“I could have woken her up,” Joel sobbed. “I could have told her to get out.”

“Mate, we tried,” Dan said. “Me and Santa. We tried to get out and it—it didn’t end well.” He glanced at me, and I knew what he was trying to say. We needed to get back to Santana.

“Joel,” I said gently. “Joel, listen to me, Santana’s hurt. Will you be okay here for a few minutes if I go and see what I can do?”

Joel shook his head uncomprehendingly, but I wasn’t sure if he was really listening to me, or just brokenly trying to refute the reality of what was in front of him.

“Joel, listen, I have to go and try to help Santana,” I said, “but I’ll be back, okay? I will come back, so just stay here, all right?”

“All right,” he whispered, but I had no idea if he was just echoing back my own words, or if he’d really taken in what I’d just said.

“Come on,” I said to Dan. “Show me where she is, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Dan nodded, and I followed him away from the wreckage of Joel’s villa and into the trees.

DAN AND SANTANA’Svilla was another hut, like Joel and Romi’s that was buried deep in the trees, but theirs had been luckier. Several trees had come down, including one right across the path, but none had hit it, and the roof was still intact. Whoever had lost the huge chunk of roof that I had seen scudding along the beach this morning, it wasn’t them.

Inside, though, it was a mess. Santana was lying on a pile of pillows against the headboard of the big double bed, her face gray and sweating, and her hair plastered to her forehead. There was blood all over the sheets, and when I arrived, she gave a ghastly rictus smile.

“Hey Doc.”

“I’m not a doctor,” I said, shaking my head, but I could tell she was joking. “Are you okay?”

“Never better, darling,” she said with an effort. “Just this little old… thing.” With a convulsive jerk she pulled back the bloody, wadded sheet covering part of her leg, and I saw that her thigh had been ripped open, a six-inch bloody gaping wound all down the outside.

“Oh Jesus,” I said involuntarily, and Santana gave a sickly grin.

“You’re politer than me. I used the f-word when I saw it. A lot.”

“Oh shit, Santana. This is bad.”

“Right? Lucky me!” She was panting in little shallow gasps.

“What can we do?” Dan asked. He was shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other like an expectant dad in a hospital waiting room, only with a much lower prospect of a happy outcome. “I tried to put pressure on it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“You did right,” I said, though in truth I didn’t really have any idea, but I was pretty sure that pressure would be the correct thing in the short-term. Whatever he’d done, it seemed to have stopped the worst of the bleeding. It had slowed to a trickle, but when I knelt at the side of the bed and looked more closely at the wound, I could see dirt and pieces of rust adhering to the sheet, and more stuck to the raw flesh. I pressed my lips together. This was why I had never wanted to be an actual doctor. And now here I was, stuck with pretending to be one.

“Okay.” I was thinking hard. Given it seemed like Santana wasn’t bleeding out, infection control was going to be the next most crucial thing. It was a long time since I’d properly studied microbiology, but I dimly remembered that some forms of sepsis could set in very fast, possibly even before the Over Easy could get back here to rescue us, and definitely before anyone could airlift Santana to a hospital. It was crucial to stop the wound getting infected. Which meant washing—ideally pressure washing, though I didn’t want to do any additional damage—and covering. “Okay, we need to clean this wound. Any idea when you last had a tetanus shot?”

“Did we have one to come here?” Santana asked Dan.

Dan looked blank.

“God, I honestly don’t remember, we got so many jabs. Was that one of the ones on the list?”

I was racking my brain, trying to remember tetanus vaccine protocols, and the lengthy health forms Nico and I had filled out for the show. I had been up to date on everything—one of the less exciting perks of working in a lab is they’re pretty rigorous about requiring employees to be vaccinated against any pathogens they might come into contact within the course of their work. Nico had required a few boosters, and I had a vague recollection tetanus had been one of them.

“I’m fairly sure that tetanus was on there,” I said. “And from what I can remember, tetanus vaccines take effect pretty fast—in fact you can have them postexposure, so you’re probably fine.”

That was one thing off my mind. There was only sepsis left, and without antibiotics, that was in the lap of the gods. I looked around the room, trying to see if what I needed was here. The answer seemed to be no: the small minibar fridge in the corner of the room was empty apart from a bottle of wine, and a stack of what I guessed must be Santana’s spare insulin, in little boxes.

“I’ll be back,” I said to Santana, shutting the fridge. She nodded, but Dan looked alarmed.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to get supplies. Clean water for one, and bandages if they’ve got any.” I had no idea if the bathroom taps were working, but even if they were, bottled water would be safer, and I was fairly sure I remembered seeing some in the staff kitchen. “I’ll be back, I swear.”

And with Dan looking mournfully after me, I ran down the pebbled path and into the forest.

IT TOOK MUCH longer getting to the staff area than it had last night, in spite of the fact that it was now daylight and I could see my way. Partly because I didn’t know the way from this part of the island and kept getting turned around by the layout of the paths, but partly because so many trees were down, and I kept having to stop and scramble over them or force my way through the undergrowth—not easy in just my underwear.

By the time I made it to the huddle of huts, I was scratched and bruised from forcing my way through bushes and climbing over the rough trunks of fallen palms. I was so busy looking down at my bleeding shins and wondering if I should have detoured past the villa where my clothes were, that I almost didn’t notice the huts until I was upon them.

Or rather, the hut. Because there was only one left, and even that one was barely standing.

The one-to-one booth and the rec room had both simply gone—there was nothing left apart from the rectangular concrete foundation slabs and, far across the clearing, the wicker chair wedged into the leaves of a banana tree, like some surreal fruit.

The kitchen had lost two walls and part of the roof. The remaining walls and roof section had folded in on itself, like a cardboard box that someone had stamped on. All around the clearing were scattered boxes of food, exploded bags of snacks, and big square bottles of water—the five-liter kind. And in the center, a small patch of rust red that had soaked into the sand, and which I didn’t remember from the previous day.

As I stood there, looking at the devastation, a bright green snake leisurely unwound itself from the shade of a box of cookies and slithered unhurriedly across the clearing. I watched it go, fighting back my revulsion, and then forced my attention back to the one hut that was still standing—the radio shack. Part of the roof had been ripped off, and the huge hole in the window, where the coconut had come barrelling through, looked even more shocking than it had last night—but it was still there. I didn’t recall seeing a first aid kit in there, but if it had been stored in one of the other huts, it was probably long gone, so I hurried across the clearing, pushing thoughts of the green snake out of my head, and opened the door.

Inside, everything was covered in splinters of glass and wood from the shattered window, but the radio was still there, and the LED was still gleaming in the dim light. Although I was conscious that Santana and Dan were waiting for me, I picked it up and pressed the button on the receiver.

“Hello?” I said, experimentally. “Hello? Is anyone out there?”

I let go, and just as last night, there was a brief crackle, but no response. I sighed. Fuck. Maybe people were listening but not coming in because they didn’t recognize me. What were you supposed to say in these situations? Mayday? Or was that only for ships? At this point I didn’t really care.

I pressed the button again.

“This is an emergency Mayday call. We are stranded on an island in the Indian Ocean after the storm last night.” Well no shit, anyone listening would be in the Indian Ocean, so that wasn’t exactly very helpful. I tried to think how to describe our position more accurately. “I don’t have any coordinates, but we flew into Jakarta and sailed southwest on a yacht called Over Easy. The yacht is gone and we have no idea what’s happened to it.” What else. Something to make them realize our plight maybe? I had no idea if the others were still alive, but it seemed likely that Santana and Romi weren’t the only casualties after last night. “Several of our group are seriously injured and need medical help. I don’t know how long the battery on this radio will last, but if anyone can hear me, please send help. I repeat, this is an emergency Mayday call for medical assistance.”

I let the button go. Again it crackled, and again, nothing else happened.

“Can anyone hear me?” I said, fighting to keep the desperation out of my voice. I wanted to scream down the receiver—get the fuck out here, people are dying! But screaming wouldn’t bring help any faster, and losing control now would be the worst thing I could do. All my life I had been the logical, analytical person in any group, the one who didn’t shriek at the sight of a maggot in her apple, who didn’t cry when my professor told me my paper wasn’t up to scratch. Even as a little girl I’d been the person who carried the daddy longlegs out of the room when my mum was standing on the sofa with her hands over her hair, holding the fluttering thing gently in my cupped hands and telling myself, it’s fine, it’s just a crane fly, tipula paludosa, they don’t bite or sting and they don’t have any transmissible diseases. No. I was the person who kept it together and sorted everything the fuck out. That was my role. That was who I was. And I was not about to lose it now. “Can anyone help? Over?”

I waited. Nothing. Nothing. Fuck.

Knowing I couldn’t afford to play around with it any longer, I let the receiver drop, and with a last look around the cabin, I went back out into the glare of the sun, which was beginning to feel even hotter than yesterday, in spite of the vestiges of the storm winds, still blowing off the sea.

There was no first aid kit in the kitchen, or not that I could find, but I picked up one of the big water bottles, the package of Oreos that had split, and were attracting a small crowd of excited ants, a roll of janitorial paper—the blue kind that’s used for drying your hands in industrial kitchens—and, almost as an afterthought, a roll of duct tape that I tripped over on my way out of the hut. It wasn’t exactly perfect, but it would do to tape the wound shut until we could get Santana to an actual doctor.

I was almost across the clearing when something attracted my attention. It was the sound of buzzing flies, coming from a thicket of bushes. There was something ominous about the noise, and I was half afraid of what I might find, but I stepped off the path, towards the sound, pushing aside the leaves as I went.

The hum was getting louder, but it wasn’t until I pushed aside the last frond of banana leaves that I saw what was making it—and when I did, I dropped what I was carrying, and covered my nose and mouth, my shocked cry escaping through my fingers.

There was a body lying under the bushes, the flies already swarming, and the face was one that I recognized, though I didn’t know the woman’s name. It was one of the producers from the day before, and her head had been cracked like an egg. There was blood everywhere. She had evidently stumbled through the bushes before collapsing and bleeding out.

So there had been a staff member left on the island, just as Camille had promised. I shut my eyes, counting to ten in my head, trying not to give way to the panic and revulsion that was pulsing through me. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened. She’d been hit by some flying object, maybe a coconut, that much was obvious. But had she been dead before I even arrived at the radio hut? Or had she been stumbling through the storm in the opposite direction, even as I was trying to find her?

It was impossible to know, but thinking back to the rumpled bed and cold mattress I guessed that she’d probably been the first casualty of the storm—dead before I even left the water villa. Perhaps she’d been trying to make it to the radio shack and had been hit by some storm debris, then had stumbled blindly through the clearing and into the undergrowth to die.

I opened my eyes, forced myself to look at her face one more time, making sure that she was really dead, and then I turned. There was nothing I could do for her. It was the living who needed help now, and I had to get back.

BACK AT THE villa, I found Santana lying with her eyes closed and looking even worse, blue-lipped and with her hair stuck to her sweating forehead.

“Thank fuck,” Dan said as soon as I pulled open the door. “What took you so long?”

“I came as fast as I could,” I said. I let the water thud to the floor, followed by the kitchen paper. The face of the dead producer kept flashing in front of my eyes, but now wasn’t the time to bring it up. We had enough to deal with here. “Do you have anything sharp, Dan?”

“Sharp?” Dan looked blank.

“I’ve got some spare syringes,” Santana said. Her voice was croaky and faint, but she opened her eyes and propped herself on her elbow. Then her gaze alighted on the cookies I was holding. “Oh my God, Oreos, can I have some? My blood sugar is really low.”

“Of course.” I pushed them over to her, cursing the fact that I hadn’t looked for soda or anything faster-acting. “I think a syringe will be too small, I was thinking more like a ballpoint pen, or a pocketknife.”

“I’ve got a pen,” Dan volunteered. Digging in his pocket, he brought out a metal-tipped Biro with a fine point. I nodded.

“Okay, well when you’ve got a bit of sugar in your system, come through to the bathroom, Santana, and we’ll make a start. I warn you, it’s going to hurt.”

“I’m ready,” Santana said through a mouthful of crumbs. She swallowed, with an effort. “And it hurts like a bastard now, so I doubt you’ll make it any worse.” She hauled herself upright with a sickly smile and followed me into the bathroom.

Once inside, I made her sit in the shower stall—sit because I was worried about her slipping if the pain got too bad—and stick out her wounded leg. Then I stabbed the tip of the ball point pen into the bottom corner of the big water carrier, aimed the thin jet at the long wound running down Santana’s thigh, and squeezed as hard as I could.

It wasn’t perfect—a proper squeezy bottle would have been better, but at least this was sterile, and it came out with surprising force, blasting away the fragments of rust and dirt sticking to the wound. The jet was so strong in fact that for a moment I stopped squeezing, worried that I was going to disturb the clotted blood and set the wound gushing again, but when the water had drained away, it didn’t seem to be bleeding any more than it was before I started.

Santana spoke, her voice ragged.

“For Christ sake, keep going, I want to get this over with.”

I nodded and squeezed again, and this time she groaned as the jet hit her thigh, but she didn’t move, only bowed her head with her teeth gritted against the pain. I kept sluicing, watching as the pieces of metal and clots of blood disappeared down the drain, until the water ran clear with only a pinkish hint of blood. At last the pressure began to fail, and I stuck the bottle upside down in the sink to save the rest of the water, and helped Santana stand up.

The towels in the bathroom were still clean, and between us, Dan and I dabbed gently at the uncut part of Santana’s leg until her skin was as dry as we could make it. Then, I unwound the catering paper until we got to an untouched part of the roll, tore off a long strip, and wadded it into a makeshift dressing. Pressing the sides of the wound together, I laid the blue wad on top, protecting the broken section of skin, and then taped the whole thing up with duct tape, trying to keep the pressure up as I did, to give the wound the best chance of knitting.

When I was finished, I sat back and examined my handiwork. I had no idea if what I’d done was right, but it would at least stop dirt from getting in the cut, and it would probably do until help arrived. Santana was sweating worse than she had been when we started, but she looked less gray, and she gave me a watery smile.

“Thanks. You’re amazing, Doc.”

“For the last time, I’m not a fucking doctor,” I said, but I was grinning too—more out of relief that it was done, and I hadn’t nicked an artery or anything. “Look, will you be okay? I should go and check on the others—and then I have to get back to Joel.”

“Joel?” Santana was hobbling back to the bed, and now she sank into the pillows with a barely disguised sigh of relief. “What happened to him?”

“Not him.” I glanced at Dan, unsure how to say this. “Romi. She— I mean… she’s—”

“She’s dead, Santa,” Dan said. He said it, not casually, but without preamble, and I realized that it was the only way. There was no way to soften this news, no way to make it less than what it was—a horrific, inescapable truth.

Santana gave a gasp like she’d been punched.

“You’re kidding? How?”

“A massive tree came down over their villa,” I said. “She was crushed. I don’t think she would have known anything. And…” I swallowed, hesitating, but it was probably better to get this all over with at once. “And that’s not all. I found the body of one of the crew—one of the producers, I don’t know her name. She’s down by the staff quarters. She’s—” I stopped, there was no point in inflicting what I’d seen on the others. “Well, she’s dead. Very dead.”

“Oh God.” Santana shut her eyes. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying, whether it was a prayer or just some kind of denial of the situation we were in. “Go,” she said aloud at last. “You should go, and Dan, go with her.”

“Santa—” he began, but she broke in.

“Go! I’m fine. There’s probably others who need you a lot more. I’ve got the rest of the cookies, and water.” She gestured at the quarter-full bottle upturned in the sink. “So go. Do what you need to do.”

I nodded.

“Okay. We’ll be back soon. I promise.”

It was what I had said to Joel. I just hoped we weren’t going to find anything worse.