Chapter 24

NONE OF UScould sleep. Santana was lying in the bed that had been hers and Dan’s, weeping slowly but steadily into the pillow, a low, tearing moan of grief.

Angel was lying behind her, stroking her back in a soft rhythm, whispering soft words in a French none of us could understand, but which were no less comforting for that.

Joel, I could see was standing outside the villa, leaning on the veranda rail, staring out into the darkness.

And I was lying there, fully awake, feeling the small, hard presence of the object I had found in Dan’s hand, now gripped in my own.

At last, worn out by Santana’s grief, I got up and went outside to join Joel, shutting the door gently behind myself as I did.

Outside I could hear the whine of the mosquitoes and, farther away, the sound of the surf breaking against the coral. Once it had been soothing; now it was a horrible reminder of Dan’s death.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t known Bayer as long, or maybe it was because he had been the one to attack Conor, but somehow, Bayer’s death hadn’t hit me the way Dan’s had. It had almost felt unreal—just another contestant eliminated from the reality of our lives.

Standing there in the clearing tonight though, with the four crosses white in the moonlight, I had been forced to understand something—we were being eliminated—all of us. And by someone who was determined to win this game at any cost. But the prize was no longer fame and money. It was survival.

“Are you okay?” Joel asked as I came over to join him, and I shook my head.

“Not really. You?”

“No. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

“Me neither.”

There was a long silence, and then I said, with the feeling that I was about to step off a precipice, “Joel, listen. I found something.”

I had no idea whether I was about to make a terrible, terrible mistake. I only knew that if I didn’t talk to someone about this, I would go mad—and Joel, for all his ties to Conor, had been kind to me from the very beginning.

“You found something?” Joel turned to me in the moonlight, frowning, and I could tell that he was trying to parse my tone, trying to figure out whether this something was good news or bad, and how he should react.

I nodded, feeling the trepidation ballooning inside me like a sickness. And then I put my hand in my pocket and held it out—the object Dan had been holding in his grip when he washed up on the beach. A vial of Santana’s insulin.

For a moment Joel peered at it as if he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then he made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut, and I knew he had recognized it, and that he knew what he was looking at.

“That’s—that’s—” He stopped. All the color had drained from his face. I finished the sentence for him.

“Santana’s insulin. Yes. It was in Dan’s hand. I found it when we were lowering him into the grave.”

“And what—” He stopped again, as if completely lost for words.

“What does it mean? I don’t know. I don’t think Dan took it, if that’s what you mean. His outrage last night was real. Which means…”

I stopped speaking, let the silence stretch, waiting for Joel to put two and two together and understand what I was saying. If Dan hadn’t taken the vial, then someone must have given it to him, or put it in his hand.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Joel?”

“No,” he said reflexively, but he looked sick. Very sick.

“Joel, you can talk to me,” I said, keeping my voice low. But Joel shook his head. He wouldn’t look at me. He was staring out into the forest as though he was urgently searching for something in the darkness.

“Joel?” I said, and he shook his head.

“Lyla, just— Can you just… leave me alone for a bit, okay? I need to think.”

“Okay,” I said. I turned, opened the veranda door, and slipped inside. Angel was still crooning in French to Santana, who was lying with her head in Angel’s lap, her eyes closed, her face still stained with tears.

The room smelled of sweat, and up in the rafters I heard the scuttle of a gecko, and the whine of a mosquito zipping past my ear. I slid onto my mattress and pulled the thin sheet up over my shoulders. Then I closed my eyes and waited for Joel to decide which side he wanted to be on.

WHEN I OPENEDmy eyes, it was morning, the sun was streaming in through the thin cheesecloth curtains… and Joel’s mattress was empty. I sat up and my gaze went automatically to the door, checking if he was still standing, leaning on the veranda rail, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the villa clearing. He wasn’t in the bathroom. He wasn’t anywhere.

Angel and Santana were still asleep, and I got up, quietly pulled on a T-shirt and flip-flops, and headed out into the forest.

The morning was quiet, and it was early enough that the fierce heat of the day hadn’t yet set in, but I could feel the skin on my nose protesting already when I walked through the sunny clearings. We had started to ration the sun cream along with everything else, trying to cover up when we could, rather than slather on the factor fifty as we had at first.

Now, as I came out into the sunny glare of the cabana, two things hit me. The first was the full force of the morning sun. The second was the fact that Joel wasn’t there.

The uneasy feeling was mounting in my gut as I walked down through the forest to the beach and scanned it. Nothing. No one. Just the marks of our feet from the night before; the long, sickening scrape of sand where we’d tugged and carried Dan’s body up the beach; the smooth stretch below the waterline.

In the distance I could see the water villa. The curtains were closed and there was no one on the veranda. Unless Joel had spent the night with Conor and Zana, which seemed unlikely, he wasn’t there.

Next, I checked the other villas. First Palm Tree Rest, where Bayer and Angel had been sleeping until Angel moved into Forest Retreat with the rest of us. No sign of anyone.

Then up to Ocean Bluff, which was more of a skeleton than a villa since we’d stripped it to provide materials for the bonfire. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Joel up there, staring at the horizon, looking out for ships, but there was no one there, and no sign of any movement since yesterday. Everything was exactly as we’d left it before Dan’s death.

Then, with trepidation, I made my way back into the forest, to Island Dream, the villa where Joel and Romi had spent their first day—the villa Romi had been sleeping in when she died.

I don’t know why, but I felt a kind of superstition about going back there. I hadn’t visited it since the first day after the storm, when we’d retrieved Romi’s body from the rubble and then later, that same day, when we’d rescued Joel’s belongings. Now it had a strange, haunted air, quite different from the other damaged villa. Had Joel gone back there to try to figure out what Romi would have wanted him to do, to try to connect with the person he had been before all this had started?

The answer, when I got there, seemed to be no. The villa was silent and empty, as far as I could make out—just a long brown snake sunning itself on the caved-in roof. At the sound of my footsteps, it uncoiled itself unhurriedly and slithered across the clearing, its strong muscular body writhing sinuously across the shattered palm fronds.

I watched it go, feeling my pulse quicken a little in spite of the logical side of my brain telling me I had little to fear. You’re ten times more likely to die from a mosquito than a snake, a stat I had trotted out many times over the course of my career. But the human brain is bad at evaluating risk, and worse at assessing the true dangers all around us—and I was no exception to that. The scientist in me couldn’t override the little atavistic pulse of adrenaline I experienced as I watched the snake disappear into the bush.

And as I looked around the empty clearing, I realized, it wasn’t just the snake. I had been bad at assessing danger since the day I set foot on Ever After Island. I had trusted the wrong people, made the wrong decisions. I had let my instincts override the evidence in front of me.

If I had learned one thing from my job, it was to accept the truth, no matter how much I wished things might be different. I had a sharp flashback to that day, just a few weeks ago, though it felt like a lifetime, when Nico had told me about One Perfect Couple and I had sat there, distracted, half listening to him talk, but really watching the graph of my results fill out on my laptop. The whole time he was speaking, I’d been willing the dots to make a different pattern, the nice, neat correlation I’d been hoping to see. But they didn’t.

I could have tried to ignore the data. I could have massaged my results, or quietly erased a couple of points to make the pattern I wished was there look more persuasive.

But I hadn’t. I had looked at the information in front of me and accepted what it meant, because that was my job. Because my sole, overriding duty as a scientist was to face up to reality.

And now I had to do the same thing here. I had to look at the facts—and face up to what was happening on Ever After Island. I had to find out the truth.