Chapter 34

THAT NIGHT WEslept up at Forest Retreat, Zana taking the mattress Joel had dragged across, Santana on the bed. She had become feverish over the course of the day, and now Zana and I lay, listening worriedly to her ragged breathing, and her voice muttering words we couldn’t fully make out.

Only Angel wasn’t here. She had spent all afternoon over at the staff quarters, hunting in the wreckage of the cabins and the broken-up desalination plant for something, anything she could use to repair the battery, and she had gone back there after supper to eke out the last of the daylight.

“I am not a nurse,” she had said privately to me, taking one look at Santana’s flushed face and glazed eyes. “But this I can do.”

She came back after dark had fallen, her clothes smelling of chemicals, and her shoulders bowed in a way that told me that she hadn’t achieved what she set out to do. When I saw her fumble with the door handle, I got up and opened it for her, putting my finger to my lips to signal that Santana was asleep. But it was me who broke the silence when I saw the burns on Angel’s hands.

“Fuck, Angel, what happened?”

Angel shrugged.

“The acid was still reactive.”

“You opened up the battery?”

“I tried. It is difficult without tools. I will need to try again in daylight.”

From across the room Santana called out, stirring restlessly in her sleep, and we both stilled. When she was calm again, Angel whispered, “She is no better?”

Zana shook her head.

“We’ve been trying to get ibuprofen into her, but she threw up the pills. She’s very hot.”

Angel swore in French, words I didn’t understand but which sounded filthy even in another language, and then sank to her mattress, her head in her hands.

“Fuck, will it never end? Will we never get a break?”

I swallowed against the pain in my throat. I wanted to tell her everything would be okay. But we both knew that was a lie.

Instead, I watched as she lowered her head wearily to the pillow and closed her eyes. She looked exhausted, and the faint snores a few minutes later backed that up.

I should have been equally tired, if not more so. Out of all of us, Angel was the only one who’d had any sleep last night, while I’d spent the intervening hours fighting for my life, first half-strangled, then half-drowned. But I couldn’t seem to let go. I lay there, listening to Angel’s gentle snores and Santana’s shallow, feverish breaths, and then I realized something—only Zana was as quiet and watchful as me. When I raised myself on my elbow to look across at her, I could see her lying there, curled on one side, staring into the darkness. And as I watched, I saw a single tear roll down her cheek, to soak into the mattress.

I opened my mouth to say something—Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?—and then I closed it again. There was nothing I could do. Nothing I could say.

As quietly as I could, I let myself down onto the mattress, and then turned, trying to make it seem as if I was simply tossing in my sleep. Then I closed my eyes and waited for the real thing to come.

WHEN I WOKEthe next morning, there was dawn light streaming through the windows and I saw that Santana and Zana were still out cold, but Angel was awake and up. She had wound a sarong around her hips, twisted her hair into a top knot, and was hunting for her shoes.

I stood up, pulled on the shirt I’d been wearing last night, and whispered, “Can I help?”

Angel looked across at Santana and Zana and shrugged, raising both eyebrows. I knew what she was asking. Was I needed here?

As silently as I could, I tiptoed to the side of the big double bed and touched Santana’s cheek with the backs of my knuckles. Her skin felt cool, after the damp heat of last night, and the hectic flush had gone from her cheekbones.

“I think she’s okay,” I mouthed to Angel, who shrugged again, but this time in an indefinably different way that clearly meant, okay, you do you. She rubbed the last dregs of sun cream into her shoulders, and we set out into the forest.

Somehow, I don’t know why, the staff area always felt like the hottest part of the island, maybe because the trees were fewer and more widely spaced, or maybe because the concrete soaked up the heat of the day in a way that the forest floor didn’t. By the time we broke out of the trees into the staff clearing, both Angel and I were sweating, in spite of the breeze coming off the sea.

I could smell the battery acid even before we had crossed the clearing, and when we got to the shade of the radio hut, I could see what Angel had spent all day yesterday doing—hacking through the thick outer skin of the cell with a mixture of nails, screwdrivers, and a broken kitchen knife. She had managed to get a corner of the top cover almost free, like a partly open sardine tin, and you could just make out the liquid gleam of the acid inside. You could also see where quite a lot of it had spilled out onto the concrete—and presumably onto Angel herself.

“It was not easy,” Angel said unnecessarily, and I nodded. The fumes were overpowering, and every time I breathed in, they caught in my bruised throat, making me want to cough.

“Should we take it outside?” I asked. “I can’t imagine it’s very safe to breathe.”

Angel nodded, and together, carefully, we dragged the battery out of the hut and into the shade of a tree, where Angel began attacking it again with a nail and a makeshift hammer, trying to widen the aperture she’d already made. But her burned hands made her clumsy, and after a few minutes she missed her mark and hit the battery casing, making the acid inside slosh. A few drops sprayed up and landed on her fingers and she winced, sucking in her breath as it stung her raw skin.

“Christ, Angel, stop,” I said, realizing what was happening. “Let me.”

“I am fine,” Angel said through gritted teeth.

“Clearly you’re not. Your hands are already in shreds. Seriously, let me do this part. What are you trying to do?”

“I’m trying to create a hole large enough so I can attack the lead inside,” Angel explained. She showed me the holes she’d already punched along the top of the battery, like perforations in a sheet of stamps. “I am trying to join these. I was using the knife, but it broke. I think if we can get it to there”—she pointed about halfway along the perforations—“we can peel back the metal, you see?”

I nodded.

“And then when it is open, I will try to scrape the sulfate from the lead. If we can expose enough fresh lead, perhaps we can create a little more charge.”

“Okay.” I took the nail and the screwdriver she was using as a hammer and began to try to join up the dots.

It was more difficult than it looked, and I began quickly to see why Angel’s hands were so ragged. First, without a proper hammer it was extremely difficult to hit the nail hard enough without jolting drops of acid everywhere. Second, if you missed, the ragged edge of metal was apt to skin your fingers. Soon my hands were as red and swollen as Angel’s, in spite of rinsing them with seawater, and my mouth was dry and bitter-tasting from inhaling the chemical fumes.

But at last, after what felt like hours of hammering, the jagged cut extended halfway down the side, and I was able to push the screwdriver under the flap of metal and force it back, exposing a good third of the interior of the battery and the lead sheet inside.

“Angel!” I called. She had gone down to the shore, by the wrecked desalination plant, and was soaking her sore hands in the water and gazing out to sea. “Angel, what’s next?”

She turned, shading her eyes against the sun, and then her expression changed, and she got hastily to her feet and came running across the clearing.

“Wow! You have it open!”

“Is it enough?”

“Yes, it’s enough.” She took back the screwdriver and peered into the inner workings of the battery, looking at the pleats and folds of metal inside. “God, I hope this works.” She wiped her brow, and for the first time I saw how exhausted she looked. Of all of us, Angel had always seemed the least defeated by the island, her defiant beauty and regal bearing surviving sunburn, thirst, and despair better than any of us. But now, even her veneer was beginning to crack, the desperation beneath clearly showing through.

I crouched beside her and watched as she began painstakingly scraping at the metal folds inside the battery. It was fiddly work, the lead packed so tight it was hard to get to parts of it without deforming the sheets. The whole point, I realized, was to create as much surface area as possible for the lead to attack, and so crushing the sheets together would be counterproductive. But Angel worked at it deftly and patiently, scraping and scratching until the lead showed shiny through the dulled surface, and then moving onto the next patch.

After a while I realized there wasn’t much I could do to help, so I went back to the villa to check on Santana and Zana. When I arrived, I found Santana still lying on the big bed, Zana crouched beside her, trying to make her drink.

“How is she?” I asked, and Zana’s head came up, her expression changing from surprise to resignation in a moment.

“I don’t know. I can’t get her to properly wake up. Santana.” She slapped Santana’s cheek gently. “Santana, honey, come on. You need to wake up. You need to drink something.”

Santana’s eyes opened for a moment and she slurred something, but then her lids drifted back shut. I looked at Zana, whose expression was close to despair.

“Fuck. What do we do?” she asked. “Do you think it’s a concussion?”

“I have no idea.” I squatted beside Santana and touched her forehead, which was no longer hot, but cold and clammy. The bright, feverish flush had left her cheeks, and she looked pale and bloodless. I picked up her hand. Her fingers were like ice. “I don’t think so. I don’t think a concussion would give you chills like this.” Then I saw the blood sugar monitor on her arm and my heart sank. “Wait, it could be her blood sugar. She barely ate yesterday.”

“Of course.” Zana bit her lip. “You’re right. God, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. What do we do?”

“I have no idea. We should try to take a reading. Where’s her… her reader thing?” I was hunting in the bed, and then I found it—the little digital box I had seen her checking every few hours during the day. The number on the display didn’t mean much to me—I had no idea whether 2.1 was good or bad—but there was no mistaking the little graph at the bottom of the screen. The small digital line had been steadily dropping for the last few hours, until now it was right at the bottom of the chart.

“Fuck. She’s low. I think she might be really, really low. You’re supposed to give hypoglycemic people sugary drinks; juice or Coke, something like that. But we don’t have anything like that.”

“Is there any tinned fruit salad left? That has juice.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t think so.” Then something occurred to me. “She has glucose tablets. I saw her taking them once when she went low. Where would they be?”

I began rummaging through Santana’s belongings, but Zana had gone pale.

“Do they look like sweets? A bit like big versions of those Pez things little kids have?”

I nodded.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry. Conor took them. They’re out at the water villa.”

“I’ll go,” I said, but Zana shook her head.

“No. I have to go. I know where he put everything.” She looked sick.

“Zana, I’ll go. Just tell me where they are.”

“No, I have to do this.” Her face was white, but her expression was set. “Do you understand? I sat by and let him do this. I let him starve you all and take away your water and put Santana’s life in danger. It’s my fault she’s in this situation. I have to make it right.”

I took a deep breath, ready to argue, to snap that Zana had been as trapped as the rest of us by Conor’s actions—and then realized there was no point. Because at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter what I thought. What mattered was what Zana felt. And she felt she had to do this.

“Okay. I understand,” I said at last. “Go. But… be quick.”

Zana nodded.

“I will.”

And then she disappeared.

I don’t know how long it took. I only know that it felt like the longest time of my life, sitting there holding Santana’s icy hand, listening to her shallow, fluttering breathing and wondering if each breath might be the last. I was beginning to despair, to wonder if something had gone wrong, when I heard the sound of feet running on sand, far away but coming closer. The person was running, and I could hear the crack of branches as they swiped them impatiently aside. I gently let Santana’s hand go and stood up.

But it wasn’t Zana who appeared in the clearing, face scarlet and chest heaving. It was Angel.

“Lyla,” she gasped. She bent double, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. “Lyla, I got a signal. I have spoke to someone. There—” She broke off, her breath catching in her throat, making her retch silently into the dirt. “There is a boat.”