Chapter 28

“WHERE IS ZANA?”Santana was standing, her hands on her hips, facing up to Conor. Her sarong was bunched up around her waist, and from where I was standing I could see the livid red scar where she’d been slashed in the storm. It should have made me feel better in a way, proof of my first aid ingenuity, and of the human body’s power to survive and heal itself, but it didn’t. The scar was proof of one other thing: how long we had been on this island. Long enough for a cut like that to heal over and scar. And that was increasingly terrifying. How long had it been? Two weeks? Three? All I knew was that I was starting to lose track of time, that things like baths or flushing toilets or hot meals were starting to feel like a distant memory—and that Conor still hadn’t given us our water for today. Now he was standing in front of us with empty hands and an infuriatingly calm expression on his face.

“That’s none of your business,” he said. “She’s fine.”

“Yes, it’s my fucking business!” Santana shouted. “And I don’t believe you!”

She tried to push past Conor to the gangway out to the water villa, but Conor held her back easily with one hand, and I made up my mind. We weren’t going to get past him, so I would go around.

I pulled off my T-shirt, dropped it onto the sand, and waded quietly into the sea behind Conor’s back, breaking into long strokes as soon as the water was halfway up my body.

Conor was so busy arguing with Santana, I was halfway to the water villa before he realized what was happening. I heard the splash as he dived in after me, glanced behind me, and felt my pulse quicken as I saw his dark shape moving through the blinding turquoise water.

“Zana!” I yelled, pushing the wet hair out of my eyes, and I saw a silhouette move in front of the windows of the water villa. “Zana!”

I glanced over my shoulder again. Conor was head down, scything through the water with an easy powerful stroke. I broke out into a crawl, but Conor was faster and more powerful, and as he came up beside me, I felt his hand close on my shoulder, pushing me down into the water.

For a second, I honestly thought he was going to drown me. The sea closed over my head, my nostrils filled with brine, and I thought, this is it. He’s going to kill me like he killed Dan, like he probably killed Joel. Only he’s going to do it right here in front of everyone. But then, just as I was beginning to thrash with panic, I felt a hand in my hair, and he dragged me up and out of the water.

“Let go of me!” I snarled as soon as my face broke the surface, and I twisted myself out of his grip. Conor laughed, derisively.

“I was saving your life, Lyla. Maybe you shouldn’t go out of your depth if you can’t swim.”

He was panting, treading water, and there was a cut on his eyebrow where I must have caught him as I struck out in panic.

“I can swim fine.” I coughed and spat water. “Leave me alone. Where’s Zana? Santana and I aren’t going anywhere until we know she’s okay.”

There was a pause, Conor clearly calculating something, and then he seemed to sigh and make up his mind.

“Zana…” he called. “Zana, come out. Apparently, Lyla’s going to spend all day in the sea unless she sees you.”

There was another movement behind the windows of the water villa, and then the pane slid slowly back, and Zana stepped out onto the veranda.

I gasped, so hard I nearly swallowed seawater again, and had to cough and choke.

Zana had a black eye. A very spectacular one that bloomed halfway down the side of her face. Someone had hit her. Very hard.

From the beach, I heard Santana’s gasp too, a few moments after mine, as she made out what I’d been able to see immediately.

“Get back here!” she called to me. “Lyla, get back to the beach. Now. And Zana, come here.”

But Zana was shaking her head. I stayed, treading water, keeping a wary distance between myself and Conor.

“She’s fine,” Conor called. “Aren’t you, Zana? She just slipped on the jetty last night, hit her face.”

But it didn’t look like a cut from falling. It looked like a punch, from a man’s fist. And from the way she was clutching her dressing gown around herself, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the only bruise.

This was the price Zana had paid for siding with us yesterday, for helping us source the coconuts, and for lighting the bonfire.

“Lyla!” Santana barked, furious with anxiety. “Get back here, now.”

I hesitated. My instinct was to go to Zana, check she was okay, but there wasn’t much I could do, treading water mid-ocean with Conor beside me. I certainly couldn’t pull myself up onto the jetty. It was too high above the waterline, and I was too weak from dehydration.

“Zana,” Santana was calling. “Zana, come over to the mainland. Tell us what happened.”

“I told you what happened,” Conor’s voice was flat, hard, as cold as his extraordinary pale-gray eyes. “She slipped. Didn’t you, Zana?”

Zana nodded, tremulously, and then she turned and disappeared into the water villa. I trod water, staring after her for a while, and then, realizing there was nothing more I could do, I turned and swam back to the shore, feeling Conor’s eyes boring into my back with every stroke.

SANTANA AND Iarrived back at Forest Retreat hot, thirsty and very angry, to find Angel hacking at a green coconut. She looked up as we came into the clearing, and her face fell.

“Where is the water?”

“We didn’t get it.” I flopped onto the sand beside her. The adrenaline of the encounter with Conor was wearing off, and I felt sick and dizzy. “We didn’t get a chance even to discuss it.”

I lay back, feeling my pulse pound in my throat, while Santana filled Angel in on what had happened.

As I could have predicted, she exploded, throwing down the coconut and jumping up to pace the clearing.

“And you still tell me we shouldn’t kill him?” she demanded to me. I shut my eyes, feeling the saltwater stinging at my corneas. The sight of Zana’s bruised, battered face floated in front of my eyes. I didn’t know anymore.

“I have maybe two days left of insulin in my pump,” Santana said softly. “And whatever I can scrounge from that vial, and after that I’m pretty sure he’s going to let me die. You said it yourself, Lyla. He doesn’t want us to survive. He can’t afford us to go public about what he’s done.”

“So what do we do?” I sat up, ran my hands through my salt-stiffened hair. It felt like we weren’t playing at survival anymore. It felt like this was really it. Him or us. But maybe Conor had known that from the very beginning. “Because I can’t kill someone in cold blood, Santa. I can’t. Maybe in self-defense, but—”

“This is self-defense,” Angel broke in angrily. She was over on the far side of the clearing, and her eyes were fierce. She looked like an avenging angel, the kind with a flaming sword. But she had only a piece of bamboo she was slashing at the undergrowth with. Slash. Slash. “It is him or us, Lyla.” Slash. “Stop kidding yourself.” Slash. “He has been in this to win, from day one. It has just taken the rest of us longer to understand the rules of his game.”

“So what are you proposing?” I snapped. “Bludgeon him to death with a piece of bamboo? Drown him, like he did Dan?”

“I don’t know,” Angel said. She hit bad-temperedly at the undergrowth again, and this time there was a sudden commotion in the leaves. Angel jumped back, and we all saw a big brown snake rear up from its nest. For a minute it looked like it was poised to strike, and Angel gave a little shriek. And then it slithered away, into the forest, with shocking speed.

Angel had her hand pressed to her chest. She looked pale, and there was a clammy prickle of sweat on her upper lip.

“Grace à Dieu. Do you think it was poison?”

“God knows.” Santana didn’t look afraid, more curious.

“Perhaps that is what we should do,” Angel said. She was looking a little better, recovering from the shock of the snake. “Poison him, and pretend it was a snake.”

“I’m sorry.” I spread my hands, incredulous. “Am I hallucinating here? You are officially off your rocker.”

“Poison is a good idea…” Santana said thoughtfully, as if I hadn’t spoken. “We’re not likely to be able to overpower him physically. He was stronger than any of us before this started, and I’m pretty sure he’s not been sticking to the rations he’s been giving us.”

I thought back to Conor’s face, close to mine in the sea, and I had to agree. He was sunburnt and mosquito-bitten like the rest of us—but he didn’t have that sunken, dehydrated look I was beginning to recognize in Angel and Santana, and which I could feel in my own dry and cracking skin and parched lips. But Santana was still speaking.

“We’d have to be careful what we used. It would have to be something organic, something that didn’t show up as suspicious on a postmortem.”

“I have sleeping pills,” Angel said. She looked like she was considering all the options. “They are still in my washbag. But I don’t think I have enough to kill him. I don’t know what is the fatal dose. And I am sure they could be detected after death.”

I was sitting back, watching and listening, and suddenly I was overcome by a strange feeling of detachment. Maybe it was the surreal tone of the conversation, Angel’s matter-of-fact voice as she discussed killing a man like getting a stain out of a favorite top. Maybe it was the dehydration getting the better of me, but the whole situation no longer seemed entirely real.

I felt like I was outside my body, watching the whole scenario—comparing the gaunt, desperate women crouching in a circle on the ground with the fashionable, polished creatures who had first set foot on the island two, three weeks ago. It wasn’t just our chapped lips and torn clothes, it was everything. Santana’s extensions had begun to fall out, giving her strawberry blonde hair a strange lopsided quality. Angel’s acrylic nails had long since broken, and now she had a mix of jagged edges, and one long nail remaining on her little finger. And me… what had happened to me? I had never had their beauty, their sheen, but I had been at least neat and healthy. Now there were cuts on my legs that wouldn’t heal, blisters where the salt had chapped my skin, my shoulders were raw with sunburn, and I tasted blood every time I licked my lips.

The scientist in me wondered what this was doing to my body. Presumably my skin was cracking because my body was pulling water back from my nonessential organs to safeguard my brain, my heart, my kidneys. But that couldn’t last forever. We were operating at a water deficit, I knew that. Every day we lost a little more and drank a little less. Every day our mouths were drier, our urine darker, our lips more ragged.

And every day the scientist in me shrank a little more. I no longer cared about my career. I had barely thought about Professor Bianchi since we got here. I was only one thing now: a survivor. Like Angel. Like Santana.

Like Conor.

“I have an idea,” Santana said, her voice dragging me back to the present. We had fallen silent, exhausted by the building heat, even in the dry shade of the clearing, and now I came to with a jerk and opened eyes that were scratchy with salt. “About Conor. I have an idea.” She sat up straighter, pushing matted hair back from her face. “The insulin. The vial of insulin. It’s poison, if you take too much of it. If a healthy person was injected with that whole bottle… I’m pretty sure it would kill them within a few minutes. And… I don’t know if it would be detectable on a postmortem. Would it?” There was a pause. “Lyla, do you think it would be detectable?”

I started, and realized she was talking to me.

“God, I don’t know. I mean…” I racked my brains, trying to remember everything I had learned about insulin in molecular biology. It felt like a terrifyingly long time ago. And a world away from where we were now. “You probably know more about this than me, Santana, but from what I can remember, synthetic insulin is biologically identical to human insulin. It’s the exact same chemical structure. So it’s not like…” I tried to think of an example. “It’s not like heroin or alcohol, something that would show up on a tox screen. Insulin in the blood… it’s not going to be remarkable. You’re meant to have insulin. You’re just not meant to have that much.”

“So would it be detectable?”

I shook my head.

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe, if a really good pathologist had a hunch, and it hadn’t broken down too much? I don’t know how stable it would be in a dead body.” Then I realized what I was saying. What I was doing. I was collaborating in a murder. “But Santana—”

“It is our best chance,” Angel said. There was steel in her tone.

“There’s just one problem,” Santana said in a low voice. “Well, more than one actually. I mean, we’d have to get it into him, and without it being picked up on the cameras.” She nodded towards the villa, where the camera still sat, pointing out across the room. “But the big problem as far as I’m concerned is that that’s the last of my insulin supply. If Conor’s hidden the rest of the insulin—and he’s not an idiot, I highly doubt he’s left it lying around his villa—and I use up the vial to kill him… I’ll have days left. Maybe hours.”

“We don’t know he took it,” I said. I felt desperate. “What if we’re wrong? What if he didn’t take it after all? What if we’re killing an innocent man?”

“It is true that Joel is missing…” Angel sounded thoughtful. “It would be a terrible irony if we killed Conor and then found out that Joel was alive and had had the insulin all along.”

“Angel, Lyla, focus,” Santana said. She leaned forward, her hands flat on the hot sand. Her face was fierce. “Look at the facts. He killed Bayer. He stole our water. He is beating up Zana. And if Joel is missing, then he’s missing with no water on an island with no water supply, so he’s dying or dead. None of that is speculation. It’s all true. Undeniably true. Conor will kill us if we don’t kill him first.”

“This is true,” Angel said. “I agree. He must be killed.” She sounded matter-of-fact. I couldn’t believe it had come to this.

“I just—” I began, but Santana stood up. There was something terrible in her face, a kind of anger so deep, I knew that for her at least there was no going back.

“Lyla, listen to me. I am dead in two days if we don’t get that insulin. Dead. Do you understand that? It’s him or me. So choose. Choose right now. Because you won’t get a second chance.”

There was a long, long silence.

“I choose you,” I said. But all I felt was a terrible foreboding.