Chapter 30

IT WAS ALMOSTnightfall when we finally made our way down to the cabana, Santana and I carrying two coconuts each, and Angel holding one. We had already punched holes into them, and Angel had spent a long time grinding the pills into a fine powder we hoped would be undetectable and poking it through the small aperture. Angel was holding Conor’s. Santana was holding her own and the one meant for Zana.

My heart was thumping in my chest so hard that when I looked down I could see the pink laces on my bikini top trembling with each beat—but I was no longer sure if that was fear of Conor, trepidation at what we were about to do, or just the physical side effects of extreme dehydration. We were all light-headed with it, sick and dizzy with lack of food and water, and Santana’s blood-glucose monitor had been going haywire all day, with spiking highs her pump no longer seemed to control, and lows that even glucose tablets didn’t seem to affect.

When we came into the cabana clearing the sun was several inches past the water palm, and Conor was already there, resting nonchalantly against the table as if he didn’t have a care in the world, holding a jug of water. It was all I could do not to fall on him and tear the container out of his hands, but we stood there, almost shaking with anticipation, while he measured it carefully out into the three cups. He set them on the table, and we gulped the liquid down. The water stung the bloody cracks on my lips and smelled of flat plastic from the container, but nothing had ever tasted so good. When it was gone, it took everything I had to push the cup away and not plead with him for more.

“We brought coconuts,” Santana said, her voice hoarse. She picked up the one that Angel had set down in the sand while she drank her water. “Only five I’m afraid, the last one split. But this is for you.”

Conor nodded, but he didn’t snatch at the coconut the way we had done at the water. Seeing him in the flesh, up close, it was more abundantly clear than ever that he was not holding himself to the same water rations he was giving us. Where Santana and Angel looked dangerously dehydrated, their lips cracked and dry, their skin clinging to their muscles, their veins standing out like cords, Conor looked sunburnt but relatively fresh.

Instead, he took the coconut and wedged it back in the sand, beside the others, then reached into the pockets of his board shorts and pulled out some packets of pretzels, a bag of cookies, and three bananas.

“Pretzels?” Santana said despairingly. “Are you serious? They’re full of salt. We can’t risk even more dehydration.”

Conor shrugged.

“They’re all that’s left. And the fish weren’t cooperating. I spent four hours baking under the sun earlier today, but if you want to try catching some, be my guest.” He waved at the dark ocean, its turquoise hue turning deeper as the sun sank below the horizon. For the first time in a long time I saw there were clouds there, turned to flame by the sunset.

Santana shut her eyes. I thought if she’d had the moisture in her body, there would have been tears pricking there.

“Where is Zana?” Angel said, and now I realized something—if Zana wasn’t here, we had no way of controlling which of the two drugged coconuts she would end up with.

“She’s not feeling well,” Conor said. “Headache, from when she fell and banged her face.” Contradict me, his expression said, and see how far it gets you.

I saw Angel open her mouth and I knew, suddenly, that I couldn’t let her finish what she was about to say. That if she said what she truly thought of Conor, of what he’d done to Zana, that might be the end of it, the end of her.

“Listen,” I said hurriedly. “Thank you for the water, Conor. And for all the fish you’ve caught so far. I appreciate it’s not an easy task. And I know— I know today hasn’t been easy. For any of us. But we’re only going to survive this if we stick together. So… cheers.”

I picked up a coconut, one of the ones I had been carrying. I recognized the little chip on the lip.

“Here’s to cooperation.”

Santana looked at me, startled, and then realized what I was doing and why. If we didn’t get Conor to drink his coconut now, we would never be sure that Zana wouldn’t end up with both of them.

“To cooperation,” she echoed, and gave Angel a look that was almost a death glare. For a moment I thought Angel was going to tell us all to fuck ourselves, that she would never raise a toast with Conor, let alone to something as poisonously ironic.

But then, suddenly, something seemed to click, and she nodded.

“Very well. To cooperation,” she said stiffly, and reached out and took a coconut. “Conor?”

There was a long pause. Then Conor’s mouth split in a wide grin, so close to the smile he’d worn in the headshot on that handout we’d received that first day on the boat, that my stomach twisted. When I had seen that headshot, when I’d met him for the first time, I had thought what a nice smile he had—how open he seemed, how sincere. But now, that wide, warm smile that didn’t reach his extraordinary ice-cold eyes, it seemed the most frightening thing in the world.

“To cooperation,” he said. He picked up the two remaining coconuts, the one intended for him, and the one we’d meant for Zana, tucked one under his arm, and tipped the other back. The movement, in the dying light, was so quick that I wasn’t sure which one had ended up under his arm. I was 90 percent certain that he had drunk the right one, but I wasn’t sure, and now I found I was staring, mesmerized, as the muscles in his throat worked, draining the thin, sickly liquid. I saw that Santana was staring with the same intensity, and knew that she was trying to figure out the same thing and probably wishing, like I was, that we had drugged both of them to the same level.

Conor wiped his mouth, set down the coconut, and grinned.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better head back to Zana.”

He turned and began walking back towards the jetty, his silhouette dark against the lemon-yellow remnants of the sunset that still stained the sky.

We watched him as he stepped from plank to plank, nimble as a goat.

We watched him as he stepped onto the veranda of the water villa, opened the door, and closed it behind him.

And then we turned and made our way back to Forest Retreat, the bananas and pretzels in our hands, and a feeling of foreboding in our guts.

IT WAS MAYBEan hour later, and we were getting ready for bed, shaking out sheets that were now sweat-soaked and dank, and chasing the last mosquitoes out of the room, when I realized something—I had forgotten to fill up the bucket of seawater for sluicing the toilet. And Angel was in the bathroom. In fact, she’d been in there for a long time. A really long time.

“Angel?” I said. I knocked on the door, and when there was no reply, I tried again. “Angel, are you okay? I forgot to fill up the seawater bucket earlier. Do you want me to do it now?”

There was no answer. Just the sound of the wind outside. It had been picking up all day, and now I could hear it rustling in the trees.

I looked at Santana, who frowned, clearly making the same calculations I had over the length of time Angel had been in there.

“Angel?” she said, coming across to stand by me. “Angel? Can you hear me? Can you say something?”

No reply. I was getting seriously concerned now. Had Angel passed out from dehydration? Hit her head?

“Angel,” I said. “Angel, we’re coming in. If you don’t want us to, say now.”

There was still no answer, but I did hear something from behind the door… a strange kind of rattle that made my stomach flutter uneasily.

Santana looked at me and nodded, and I set my hand to the knob.

The door was locked, but the latch was flimsy and it took only a shove from my shoulder to displace it. We were inside within a few moments, but it took our eyes longer to adjust to the darkness, which was even deeper than the main room.

When they did, I saw Angel sitting, slumped on the toilet, her head lolling on her chest.

I gave a choking cry, ran across to her and began shaking her by the shoulders. She fell slowly forward, slithering down in my arms to land on the floor. I only just managed to catch her head, stop her hitting it on the hard tiles.

“Angel!” A feeling of panic was rising up to engulf me. I shook her shoulder again, harder this time. “Angel, are you okay?”

Stupid question. Of course she wasn’t.

“Oh my God,” Santana was gasping. She was standing in the doorway, her hands clasped over her mouth. “Oh my God, Lyla, is she dead? Please tell me she isn’t dead.”

But when I put my fingers to her neck, I realized she wasn’t dead. And more than that, with the next slow, shuddering breath she drew, I realized what the sound was that I’d heard from outside the bathroom. It was a snore.

“She’s—she’s asleep,” I said, looking up at Santana. Her expression changed instantly to one as confused as I felt.

“Asleep? Has she passed out?”

“I have no idea. Angel!” I pulled her half-upright and slapped her gently on the cheek. “Angel.”

“Laisse-moi tranquille…” Angel said, though her voice was slurred so that I could hardly make out the words. “J’suis fatiguée…”

When I let go of her shoulders, she slumped back down and curled herself into a ball, clearly intent on going back to sleep.

“What the fuck?” I turned to Santana. “What on earth is going on?”

“I have no idea,” Santana said. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “Oh bloody hell, Lyla… you don’t think… you don’t think she took the wrong coconut? The one meant for him?”

There was a long silence as I processed this suggestion. Angel had been carrying Conor’s coconut—she had insisted on it. There was no way she could have drunk that one, it was the one coconut we had all been fixated on, and Angel of all of us was the person in the best position to notice where it ended up. But it was just possible that she could have drunk Zana’s.

“I don’t think she could have taken his,” I said at last. “But you were carrying Zana’s—and we were all so focused on forcing him to pick up the drugged one, I think maybe… maybe she wasn’t paying attention when you and I set ours down. Fuck, we should have made sure we each had one of the safe ones, so we could be sure of where they were.”

“So does that mean Conor might be wide awake when I go out to the villa?”

“It’s possible,” I said. I shut my eyes, trying desperately to visualize the moment when Conor had picked up the two coconuts, slipping one under his arm. My fear had been that he’d drunk the less drugged one. But what if it hadn’t been drugged at all? “I honestly don’t know. I think he drank the one he was supposed to, but it was so quick, and the light was so bad—did you see?”

“Not enough to be sure. And we clearly fucked up one, didn’t we? So it’s fifty-fifty we screwed the pooch entirely.”

“Shit.” My voice sounded tremulous. “So what do we do?”

“We have to go ahead with the plan, surely?” Santana said. “I mean—we don’t have any more sleeping pills, so it’s now or never. And if even one of them is asleep, it’s better than the alternative.”

I nodded slowly. I knew she was right. But I also knew that she could no longer do this alone.

“You’re right. We should go tonight.”

“We? I thought the plan was for me to go alone.”

“Not anymore. I’m coming with you.”

“Lyla, darling, I know you didn’t want to do this. And what about Angel?”

“I’m coming,” I said, with more firmness than I really felt. “Angel will be fine. But if Conor’s not drugged, there’s a good chance he’ll wake up, and I’m not sending you out there alone to deal with that possibility. No, we both go, or neither of us.”

There was a long silence. Then Santana nodded.

“Okay. So how do we handle this? What do we do with her?” She jerked her head at Angel, still snoring on the floor. “Is it safe to leave her? Should we try to make her throw up?”

I considered the question and then shook my head.

“I think it’s too risky. The pills are already in her system, so chances are they’ve already been mostly absorbed. And in the state she’s in, there’s a good chance she’d choke on her own vomit if we tried to stick something down her throat.”

“But can we just leave her?” Santana said doubtfully. “Is it safe?”

“We pull our sheets into the bathroom,” I said. “We tuck her up to try to make sure she’s lying in the recovery position, doesn’t choke on her own vomit or anything. And then we climb out through there.” I nodded at the bathroom window. “In a way, this is a good alibi. If anyone checks the cameras, all they’ll see is us heading into the bathroom to check on Angel, and then spending the night in there to keep an eye on her. We can say she was sick or something. It fits with the dodgy fish story.”

“But won’t the cameras see us climbing out of the bathroom window?” Santana asked. “That’ll look worse than just walking out the door, won’t it?”

I shook my head.

“There’s no cameras in the bathroom, Camille told me. And if we skirt around the back of the villa, the bedroom camera won’t catch us going past the window. If we stick to our story—that we both spent the night nursing Angel in the bathroom—I can’t see how anyone can disprove that.”

“If Conor’s asleep,” Santana said. “And if he disabled the camera in the water villa. That’s a lot of ifs.”

I nodded soberly. It was a lot of ifs. But there was nothing we could do about most of them except hope.

Working quickly now, we stripped the beds and dragged the sheets into the bathroom, where we tucked them around Angel, trying to wedge her on her side so that if she threw up while we were out, she wouldn’t suffocate. As we worked, I kept trying to talk myself down from my fear that we’d come back and find her dead. A double dose for someone young and healthy—it surely couldn’t be that big of a deal. Medicines with such a narrow gap between the toxic and therapeutic dose were rare for obvious reasons. But Zana, on the other hand… the speed at which Angel had passed out had rattled my confidence in our calculations, and if Zana had drunk the coconut meant for Conor, then a quadruple dose, for someone of her body weight…

I swallowed, my throat dry. Our actions suddenly felt grossly irresponsible, and I tried not to imagine what would happen if we went out to the villa and found her lying dead beside Conor.

When Angel was as safe as we could make her, I bent down and shook her shoulder.

“Angel,” I whispered. “Angel, we’re going out. Try—” I stopped. I’d been going to say, try not to fall asleep, but she was already snoring. “Try to stay safe,” I said instead. “Okay?”

“Shh…” Angel said. Her voice was slurred and she shrugged her shoulder, trying to shake off my hand. “Je dors.”

I sighed. At least she was still able to talk. That seemed like a good sign. I just had to hope she wouldn’t slip any deeper.

“Come on,” Santana said. “I think we should get going. If Conor is drugged, then we don’t know how long it’ll last. And the sooner we get this over, the sooner we can get back to Angel.”

I nodded, and we climbed out of the bathroom window and made our way into the forest.