Chapter 31

THE WIND WASpicking up as we made our way through the trees and down to the beach, and as we walked slowly along the pebbled path, the undergrowth whipping back and forth in the breeze, I had a sharp flashback to the night of the storm, the night I had run out to the radio shack to try to call for help. If only someone had picked up then. If only I had caught the boat before it went out of radio range. How different everything might have been.

Santana was holding the syringe full of insulin clenched in her fist. She had filled it to the brim before we left, sucking up every drop of what was left in the vial.

“Do you think it’ll still work?” I asked, watching her tap the syringe gently, pressing out the air. “I mean, the vial was open. It’s been in the sea.”

Santana just shook her head.

“I don’t know. I just know we have no other option.”

Now, I watched her as we walked, side by side through the swaying trees. She looked like a different woman to the one who had come here just a few weeks ago. Her beautiful hair was matted and ragged where her extensions had been pulled out. Her skin was burnt and peeling, and she had lost more weight than seemed possible in the short time we’d been here—although I suspected most of it was water. Even her face was different, her cheekbones sharper, her eye sockets deeper, her lips cracked—but most of all, it was her expression that was changed. Gone was the lazy, drawling amusement of the girl I had met. Now, all I could see was a grim determination to survive at all costs.

“You okay?” she asked as we rounded the corner of the path and came out onto the beach. She looked at me curiously. “Are you having second thoughts?”

I shook my head. These weren’t second thoughts, they were first thoughts. I had never wanted this plan, had never wanted it to come to this. But I’d accepted that it was Santana’s right to do this, and if it was Santana or Conor, I was going to choose to protect Santana every time.

“No, no second thoughts,” I said. “You have to do this. I understand. I just wish…”

I trailed off. Santana nodded. She didn’t need to finish my sentence. We both knew what I was thinking. I wished it hadn’t come to this. I wished that radio call had gone through. I wished we’d never come to this island, any of us.

And yet, if we hadn’t…

Maybe this was how it was meant to be. Maybe this was the only way it could have ended.

We had reached the jetty now, and I watched as Santana set one foot gingerly onto the planking.

“Christ, this is rickety,” she whispered, and I realized that she’d never been out to the water villa since that first day. I’d gone out a couple of times, and Angel at least once, but Santana, never.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. The thought was turning uneasily in my mind—what if Santana couldn’t make it across? What if I ended up having to administer the insulin? Could I do it? Could I kill someone in cold blood?

But Santana only nodded grimly, and stepped onto the next board.

The waves were lapping against the jetty, not as fiercely as the night of the storm, but with an energy that was closer to it than anything we’d experienced since, and when I set my own foot onto the walkway, I felt the same trepidation I’d seen in Santana’s face. The planks were as unstable as they had been the day I went out to confront Conor, and now they were wet with salt spray as well, the waves just licking up to splash the planks with spume.

Ahead of me I could see Santana edging from plank to plank, almost crouching against the wind, trying to keep her center of gravity low, and I followed her example, bending my knees and shading my eyes against the spray. The one advantage to this weather was that if Conor wasn’t drugged, it would make it harder for him to hear us coming. Our footsteps on the jetty and the sound of the door sliding open would be drowned under the splash of the waves.

When I finally set foot on the veranda, I realized that my teeth were clenched with concentration, and I had to make a conscious effort to breathe and shake out the tension that was locking my shoulders and jaw. Santana caught my eyes and pointed at the door, then did a little thumbs-up, her expression interrogative. The meaning was clear—ready?

I nodded, took a deep breath, and then we walked together towards the Ever After Villa.

Through the big glass window, I could just about make out Zana sprawled on the bed, and beside her Conor, apparently dead to the world. Which one of them was drugged, if either, was impossible to tell. There was a coconut propped in the corner of the room, but there was no way of knowing if it was empty or full, or even the one that Santana had given Conor.

Up against the far side of the room I could see the stacks and stacks of water bottles—and beside it the crushed empties. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but the number of empty containers looked much higher than I thought it should have. We were down to less than one bottle a day, if everyone stuck to their rations, but the number missing looked much higher than that.

On the other side was the food, a much smaller pile, mostly boxes and tins.

And in the corner… I looked automatically up at the place where the camera should have been and let out a shuddering breath.

In the corner there was no camera. Conor had taken it down. Which meant… it meant that we were really going to do this.

Santana was holding the syringe, so as my hands were free, it made sense for me to be the one to open the big double doors—and they weren’t locked. They squeaked a little as I pulled them aside, the runners crunching with sand, but neither Conor nor Zana stirred as we stepped across the threshold, holding our breaths.

Inside, the sound of the waves was muffled, and we could hear only Conor’s gentle snores, and a muffled whimper from Zana as though she was having a bad dream. Silently, I moved to Conor’s head, not touching him, but ready to try to hold him down if he woke and struck back at Santana. If the person who woke was Zana… well, we didn’t really have a plan for that. We’d have to cross that bridge if we came to it.

Gently, very gently, Santana pulled back the sheet, exposing Conor’s long tanned thigh, dappled with blond hair. I remembered her saying that you were supposed to inject insulin into fatty tissue—and Conor’s thigh looked more like a slab of pure muscle. But then, he’d been as lean and hard as they came two weeks ago, and all of us had lost weight since. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him anywhere. His thigh would have to do.

She took a deep breath, holding the syringe up, and I could see that her hand was shaking. It occurred to me that although this was routine for her in a way it wasn’t for most people, it was still probably the first time she’d ever done it to someone else.

We had talked about it in the bathroom before we left. In and out, as fast as you can—like administering an EpiPen. Stab it in, press, and run.

“Ready?” she mouthed, and I nodded. “Three.” She was staring intently down at Conor’s thigh, her lips moving soundlessly. “Two.”

On one, she stabbed the syringe into his thigh.

What happened next was too fast for me to see, too fast for me to react, too fast to make out whether Santana had had time to press the piston.

I heard Conor let out a great bellow, like a wounded boar, and saw him rear up from the bed. Before I could move, let alone restrain him, he struck Santana full across the face, sending her flying backwards onto the tiled floor, where her head hit with a sickening sound. Still, she got up, blood pouring out of a wound on her temple, and began staggering for the door, but Conor was faster. He scrambled off the bed, on all fours like an animal, and grabbed her around one ankle. She went down, slipping on her own blood, and he hit her again, punching her in the back so that she crashed to the floor with a moan of pain. As she lay there, unconscious, he laced his hand into her hair, lifted up her head, and then with a calculated violence, he smacked it deliberately into the floor.

Santana lay still.

For the first couple of seconds, I had been too frozen with surprise to move. But with that last, horrible smack, my limbs seemed to unlock and I launched myself across the room to grab Conor from behind, my arm around his throat.

It was a stupid move. I should have gone for his eyes, or his balls. But I’d never studied self-defense and I suppose I was mimicking what I’d seen in the movies. Conor, on the other hand, was a fighter, a trained one, and my attempt at holding him back didn’t give him more than a few seconds’ pause. Reaching back over his shoulder, he grabbed hold of my hair and then flipped me, bodily, over his shoulder to crash to the floor, half-in and half-out of the water villa.

For a moment I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even breathe. I was so badly shocked and winded it was all I could do to lie there, choking, trying to catch my breath as Conor hauled himself to his feet, kicked Santana in the head, and pulled the syringe out of his thigh. He gave a snarl of fury, then began staggering towards me.

I couldn’t seem to inhale. I couldn’t get any air into my lungs, but somehow, with a huge effort, I rolled over onto my stomach, pulled myself to face the sea, and began dragging myself across the veranda, away from the villa. I’m not sure what I was trying to do, or where I was going. There was no way I could have managed to cross the jetty to the mainland on my hands and knees. I only knew that Conor was going to kill me, kill us both, and I had to get away—even if that meant drowning, I had to get away.

“San—” I managed, my voice strange and strangled. “Santa… you…”

Are you okay, was what I was trying to ask. I was too winded to complete the sentence, but even just a whimper from her would have told me whether she was alive, whether it was worth my while trying to get her out, or whether I could only save myself now.

“Santa—” I tried again.

But before I could get any more words out, I felt Conor’s hand close on my leg.

Desperately, I dug my fingers into the edge of the veranda, trying to pull myself away from him, haul myself to standing, but it was hopeless. I hadn’t even got a knee under myself when he flipped me over and straddled me, one arm crushing my windpipe.

“You little cunt,” he snarled. He was holding the syringe in his free hand, brandishing it close to my face. “What is this? What have you bitches done to me?”

I couldn’t answer. I could only gasp helplessly. His weight was immense, unbearable. It felt like my ribs might crack, my heart was hammering helplessly, hopelessly, desperately trying to get oxygen to my brain, but Conor’s thighs were squeezing all the breath out of lungs, and his forearm was pinning the arteries in my throat so that even if I had been able to breathe, no blood would have been able to make it past.

I could feel my limbs going numb as my body fought to survive, fought to pull back every atom of oxygen to the only thing that mattered—my brain. My vision was splintering into shards of light and dark.

“San—” I tried again. “Sa—”

Was she alive? Or had she already bled out on the villa floor, her body as limp as mine was fast becoming?

Because I was dying. I knew that, with absolute certainty. My thrashing limbs were barely twitching now. My vision was a mist of firework fragments and blurred darkness.

And then, through the scattered motes of blackness, I saw it, over Conor’s shoulder. The dark shape of someone staggering towards him. It was a woman, her arms raised, with something in them. It took me a moment to make out what it was—a water bottle—a big five-liter water bottle, that she was brandishing like a weapon.

“Sa…” I managed, and it came out like a death rattle, like the last gasp of someone with nothing else to give.

But it was only as she swung the bottle down towards us that I realized who was holding it. It wasn’t Santana. It was Zana.