Chapter 33

WHEN I OPENEDmy eyes, I was on a beach. Our beach. The white sand was soft and warm under my head, and in the sky I could see the first pink rays of dawn beginning to break.

I rolled over and coughed up what felt like a gallon of seawater, but was probably no more than a teaspoon, mixed with phlegm. My lungs felt raw and scoured, my throat hurt every time I coughed from where Conor had strangled me. But I had never felt more alive.

“Lyla?” I heard, breathlessly, from behind me, and as I tried to turn my head, I saw Zana leaning over me, her face anxious. “Lyla, thank God. No, don’t try to sit up—”

But it was too late. I was pulling myself upright, my head thumping with every movement.

“Where’s Santana?” I managed. “Is she okay?”

“She’s alive. Angel’s with her up at the cabana—and she’s got her insulin. She’s pretty banged up, but she’s talking and lucid. I think she’s going to be okay. We were more worried about you, to be honest. You were out for a long time.”

“I’m okay,” I said, but my throat was so mangled the words came out almost comically hoarse and croaky, and Zana gave a little tremulous laugh. Then she began to cry, and I felt my own tears rise up in sympathy, in spite of the pain each sob was giving me. A few minutes later we were holding each other, my face in Zana’s hair.

“You were so brave,” I was saying. “Did you come back for me?”

“Of course,” she sobbed. “Of course I did. Fuck, you saved me, Lyla. If you hadn’t swum out when you did—”

She stopped, but I shook my head. I hadn’t saved her. She had saved herself. She had saved all of us.

“DO. NOT. MOVE.”It was Angel’s voice, peremptory as always, addressing Santana, who had made the mistake of reaching out for the water bottle. “I am telling you, your head is basically held together by that bandage at the moment.” She waved her hand at the strip of bloodied sarong tied around Santana’s head. “If you want something, you ask me and I get. Okay?”

“Okay,” Santana said meekly, and she subsided back onto her pillow as Angel carefully measured out a cup of water from the big bottle.

Somehow, I still had no idea how, Angel and Zana had managed to guide a dazed, bleeding Santana across from the water villa before I woke, and now all four of us were camped out up at the cabana, our mattresses under the shade of the palm umbrellas, trying to work out what to do.

Out of the four of us, Santana looked unquestionably the worst. My throat still felt like I was swallowing razor blades, and I could feel the bruises coming up under the skin, where Conor had tried to strangle me. But Santana looked like a survivor of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, blood streaking her matted red-blond hair, and a giant purple swelling on the side of her head where Conor had struck her.

But it was Zana who looked the most shell-shocked.

After the first burst of energy—getting me out of the water, rescuing Santana from the water villa, dragging us both up the beach to rest at the cabana—she had sunk into herself, and now she sat, hugging her knees to her chest and staring fixedly out to sea with eyes that were both watchful but strangely unseeing. I didn’t know what she was looking for—a boat, maybe? Or something else. Conor’s shape—cutting through the still choppy waves with his powerful crawl. And I didn’t know whether she was hoping, or fearing, for that outcome.

Angel, however, had woken up fully recharged and ready to fight someone, and she was fussing around us like a mother hen, as if somehow her innate bossiness could make everything okay for us all. It was strangely relaxing to have someone telling us what to do. Well, someone who wasn’t Conor. The memory of him shouting out orders gave me a cold feeling, and I shivered in spite of the heat of the sun.

Now, she topped up my water glass alongside Santana’s.

“Drink it!” she said, and I obeyed, thinking, not for the first time since we had made it back to the safety of dry land, that I would never take fresh water for granted ever again. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Santana had her eyes closed as if she wanted to savor every ounce of sensation. Only Zana was sipping hers as if she really wasn’t thirsty, though I knew she must be. When the cup was empty, she set it down in the sand and then got up.

“I’m going to see if I can find any fruit,” she said. “We’re really low on food.”

“Shall I come and help you?” Angel asked, but Zana shook her head.

“No, I’m okay. I’d rather you stayed here with Lyla and Santa.”

The meaning was clear—to look after us, to make sure neither of us did anything stupid, though I didn’t really think we would. But I thought the truth behind Zana’s words was different. She wanted to be alone.

We waited until she was out of sight in the trees and then Angel let out a long sigh.

“I am worried for her. She looks like a zombie.”

“I mean… she’s been through a lot,” Santana said, reasonably. “The poor girl—” She stopped and lowered her voice, though I was fairly sure Zana was too far away to hear and wouldn’t have cared if she could. “The poor girl killed her boyfriend, for God’s sake. That’s a fuck of a lot to process.”

“Her abusive murderous boyfriend,” Angel put in. “Let us not forget.”

“Still though,” I said. “I agree with Santa. How do you cope with something like that? The fact that he was an abusive piece of shit doesn’t change the weight of what happened.”

“Maybe the opposite,” Santana said quietly. She touched the swollen side of her face as if remembering how it had felt when Conor hit her. “I mean… think about how controlling he was. Think about living with that, day in, day out, and suddenly… he’s gone. I think a hole that size… that would be hard to come to terms with.”

“Legally though,” Angel insisted. “Legally it changes things. Legally what she did was self-defense.”

But her words were greeted with silence, and Santana and I exchanged an uneasy look.

It was something none of us had really spoken about—in part because we hadn’t wanted to talk about it in front of Zana. But the question of what would happen when we were rescued, if we were rescued, had started to weigh heavily on my mind, and I knew I couldn’t be the only one. How would we explain Conor’s death? And Bayer’s, and Dan’s? And then there was Joel, whom Angel had found hanging from a palm tree halfway up the coast, a bed sheet tied around his throat. How to explain the dizzying, terrifying sequence of events without implicating all of us? Because the truth was, it hadn’t been self-defense. Not really. Zana had been defending me. And I wasn’t sure where the law stood on that. Not least because I had no idea what legal jurisdiction we were in.

“Well, I hear you, Angel, but we have to get rescued before any of that is even a consideration,” Santana said at last, and Angel nodded.

“I keep thinking about the radio,” she said. “About the battery. Surely there is a way to charge it?”

She was looking at Santana, who in turn looked at me, and I held my hands up.

“Don’t look at me. I’m a virologist. I know fuck all about electricity. That’s physics. Or maybe chemistry. Either way, it’s about as far from what I studied as English Lit.”

“I know I asked this before,” Santana said a little helplessly, “but is there any mileage in trying to warm it up? Do you think that works with car batteries?”

“Have you been in that hut lately?” I asked. “It’s hotter than the seventh circle of hell when the sun is beating down on that tin roof, so no, short of actually combusting the battery, I don’t think we could make it any hotter.”

“Could we combust it?” Santana asked. She sounded almost as if she were pleading. “I mean, we’re fucked now, so is it worth a try? We could make a fire in the sand and then when it dies down, we could bury the battery in the hot sand and see if we could get a tiny bit more charge out of it before it melts.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I mean, you’re right, it could be worth a try. But is this even the same kind of battery? I don’t know if car batteries work the same way as normal AA ones.”

“C’est une batterie au plomb,” Angel said, frowning to herself, and then realized that she had slipped into French and translated for us. “What is the English word—a lead battery. They are filled with acid. The charge comes from the reaction between the lead and the acid, so I imagine if you heated the acid, it could be possible to encourage a little bit more reactivity…. It would depend why it has stopped working. If the lead is covered in sulphate…” She trailed off.

“If the point is the reaction between the acid and the lead…” I said slowly, “is there any way we could get more acid into the battery?”

“It is supposed to be sulfuric acid,” Angel said. She pronounced it like a French word—suul-four-eek, with the stress on the last syllable. “Fin, a mix of sulfuric acid and water. I am not sure where we could find something equivalent on the island.”

“Angel,” Santana said, “how do you know this? Sorry, but you’ve suddenly turned into Bill Nye the Science Guy, and it’s a bit disconcerting.”

“I do not know this Bill, but my father owned a garage,” Angel said. She looked down at her formerly pristine acrylic nails, now snapped to stumps, and sighed. “When I was a little girl, I would help him in the repair shop at weekends. I was obsessed with cars—it was my father’s pride and joy that I could change a tire faster than any of the men he employed.”

I had a sharp flashback to Angel at the meet and greet, telling us that she had wanted to be a Formula One racing driver when she grew up—and how we had all laughed at the incongruous image. Now I understood—and I saw the little girl staring out of Angel’s tear-filled eyes. I reached out and held her hand.

“I’m sure you still are his pride and joy, Angel.”

She shook her head, smiling too, though the tears still glistened on the edges of her lashes.

“Non. My father loved me very much, but he is dead. And I have forgotten almost everything he taught me. But I do remember a little about batteries. And lead batteries, they are not sophisticated. They are designed to make a chemical reaction, then you reverse the reaction with electricity, and repeat. It is not rocket science.”

“Well, look,” I said. “You clearly know more about this than any of us. And if there’s anything Santa and I can do to help you, just say it. But I think this is on you, Angel. You’re our best chance.”

“Dieu,” Angel said. It had been supposed to be a compliment to cheer her up, but it was plain she hadn’t taken it like that. In fact, her face was more somber than ever. “What a terrible thought.”