by Alice Reeds
“We should go to sleep,” Miles said before I could and stood up, his things gathered in his arms.
“Yeah.”
Luckily, we didn’t have to sleep outside on the sand but instead could stretch out on the seats inside. They were comfortable, though I could already imagine my skin sticking to the pale leather uncomfortably at some point in the night, but I wasn’t about to complain. Besides, Miles was the only one who would be sleeping tonight. One of us had to stay awake and on guard. We already knew there was at least one deadly animal on the island, and I wasn’t interested in waking up to it chewing on my body.
Miles must have been truly exhausted. Only a few minutes had passed when I heard his breathing get deeper, slower. He was asleep.
Would I ever see my home again? My parents and friends? Did they know by now what had happened? They must have. Our plane hadn’t arrived, so they’d know we’d gotten lost somewhere along the way. Crashed.
Were my parents worried? Had my mother cried? I wanted to believe my father would console her. But he’d been so angry when I left. Angry that I’d insisted on going. He’d tell me this was my fault. If I’d never gone, this never would have happened.
I doubted anyone would come looking for a teenage kickboxer, but they wouldn’t give up on Miles. The son of seriously rich parents, someone valuable. His family had the resources to keep searching, no matter how long it took.
A branch snapped in the jungle. I sat up, alert, sleep, for just a moment, not the biggest thing on my mind. But no other sound came. Just the wind. The water. Miles. And the relentless wait for morning.
…
Truth is built on lies.
First with my father sitting with me on the side of the ring. The biggest fight of my career is tomorrow. Losing isn’t an option. Not tomorrow. Not today.
My trainer is in the middle of the ring, waiting for us. He’s older. Wiser. Patient. But this is also his job. My jaw still aches from his punch to my face, like my teeth got knocked loose.
“You get back in there and you beat him,” Dad says. “Do that for me today so I know you’ll do it tomorrow.”
My mouth aches. My hands ache. I won the last fight. And the one before that. And the one before that. I won all of them. But that doesn’t matter. I have to win tomorrow. I know what happens if I don’t win. Punishment. Career over. Grounded. Life over. If I ever want to get out of here, if I ever want something for myself, I have to keep going.
“Okay,” I say, and I start to stand.
But Dad stops me. “I know what you’re doing,” he says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I know you’re not. That’s the problem. You think I can’t see you holding back?” He taps the top of my head. “You think I don’t know what’s going on in there?”
“Hey, maybe we should call it a day,” the trainer says.
My dad glares at him. “What do we pay you for?”
He looks at me with more pain in his eyes than I’ve ever felt in my body. “She’s just a kid, man.”
“She’s my kid.” He shakes his head. “You want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” He removes a pair of gloves from my gym bag. The gloves he brings with him every time but never puts on. And he starts to lace them around his hands.
…
I shot up as though someone had poured freezing water onto me.
Oh no. I’d fallen asleep, let my guard down. Had anything happened? Were we still safe? How could I be so—
“Morning, sunshine,” Miles said. He was sitting a few feet from me, his laptop open and connected to the computer board. His hair was a mess, strands sticking up in odd directions. “Want some breakfast?”
“But what about the beast? What about—”
“Fiona.” He waited for me to meet his eyes. “We’re okay.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed, flopped back into my seat. We were okay. Much as my racing heart insisted otherwise. “Wait,” I said. “You made breakfast?”
“Well…not exactly.” He held out a plastic plate of crackers, cheese, and a soda. “From the serving cart.”
“What, no pancakes and strawberries?”
He paused for a second, then laughed. “What do you think this is? A five-star hotel?”
When I took the plate, a silly warmth spread up my body. I turned away from him in case it showed on my face.
After a few bites, I said, “How’s the computer board coming?”
He tapped away. “Only a few hours of laptop battery life left.” He let that hang there, ominous, before he smiled. “But I’ve almost got it. I brought in our suitcases if you want a change of clothes while you wait.”
Wow. I certainly hadn’t expected that.
“I…thank you.”
In the end, most of my clothes were anything but suitable for an island. But then, we’d been on the way to Germany. Not a tropical hellhole.
The best solution I could come up with was just another band T-shirt—Placebo give me strength—with cutouts on the sides, similar to the one I’d worn for the flight, and some shorts my mom argued I should take with me in case I had free time on a warm day during the internship. They’d be the worst when running through the jungle, but while I was on the beach, at least I wouldn’t feel like I was melting the entire day.
With my clothes, a towel, and my bag of toiletries, I made my way over to the exit, opened the door, and went outside, leaving Miles behind tapping up a storm on his laptop. I dumped my stuff onto the sand near the shore and then took off my pants, throwing them onto my pile as well. The waves weren’t particularly high today, the sun only halfway up toward its zenith, and a light breeze caressed my skin. Bracing myself for the cold, I stepped into the water, one foot after the other. The water was freezing, but I welcomed the sensation. It would wake me up faster than a Red Bull.
Oh, what I’d give for an energy drink and a pair of wings to fly off the island and sue Briola to hell and back.
Before I could change my mind, I took a deep breath and sank into the water until it swallowed me whole. I knew my hair would lose its color more quickly this way—salty ocean water not the dye’s best friend, especially not blue dye—but it was so worth it. It was cold but felt so good. I pulled my old shirt off once I stood again and then used it like a washcloth to get rid of yesterday’s dried sweat and dirt a little more thoroughly.
Turning around, I was just in time to see Miles come out of the plane, his shirt off, stretching his arms high and yawning.
I probably shouldn’t have stared, but I couldn’t help myself. He looked good. Distractingly so. His chest and stomach were toned, and he wore some kind of necklace I’d never noticed before. The silver stood out against his tan skin and reflected the sunlight.
Focusing back on what I’d been doing, I could practically feel Miles’s eyes on me, but I didn’t turn around, and I wouldn’t start playing coy. I’d spent ages in changing rooms across the years, fought competition after competition in revealing kickboxing gear. I didn’t feel ashamed of how I looked. In fact, I knew I looked pretty damn amazing. And if he didn’t think so, whatever.
Besides, bikinis and underwear were practically the same thing. The former sometimes exposing far more skin. So why should I feel fine wearing one in front of people but not the other?
Finally, once I was done, mostly all the sweat gone from my skin and replaced by traces of salt, I turned around and looked at Miles properly this time, his expression something like a mixture of confusion and intrigue.
“Why that face?” I asked, amused by his expression and feeling smug about how he quickly tried to pretend he hadn’t watched me. “Most girls don’t wear Victoria’s Secret on the daily, especially not when there’s no one around they’d want to impress.”
I walked back out of the water, dried myself off and slipped into my new set of clothes. Then I picked up my brush to untangle the nest on my head, but the knots were tight, even worse now that my hair was wet. This
would take all morning.
“Done?” I asked and nodded toward the plane so he’d understand what I meant. Seeing as how he was creeping on me outside instead of working inside, that seemed like the only likely answer.
“Two minutes. It’s pulling the data from the board.”
I gathered my stuff. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get some answers.”
I went with him back into the plane. A loading bar slowly processed on the screen. A minute and a half until completion. We were close. To information. To answers. Hopefully, to escape.
The bar finished, and a blast of text and code came up on the screen.
“Did you do it?” I asked, hopefully, almost desperately, my voice hoarse. I was desperate, no need to pretend I wasn’t. This was our last option, the last straw. If it didn’t work, I had no idea what we’d do.
Miles’s eyes went wide. “Not exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t… This doesn’t make any sense.”
I sat down next to him and looked at the screen. None of the pieces of text or code made sense to me. “Where are we? Can you send a signal?”
“Hang on for a second and just let me look at this. Please?”
I nodded, stunned by his use of the word please. “Fine.” I sat there and watched as he did whatever it was he was doing, more text and code spreading across the screen and then disappearing again.
“I’d love to give you a good-news type of answer to those questions, but, well, I can’t.”
No. “But…?”
Miles turned his head and looked at me, really looked at me for the first time since we got back onto the beach. He was completely serious. Maybe even a bit scared. “Fiona, this plane never actually flew.”
My stomach sank, and I sat up straight. “What?”
“It’s brand new.” He pulled up the relevant information on the screen. “The system isn’t even fully set up and configured. I don’t know how we ended up here, but it wasn’t in this plane.” A certain shade of horror clouded his eyes. Their usual light honey color seemed obscured, darker, and filled with terror. My stomach lurched and ached like someone had pulled the ground away from under my feet.
“But that doesn’t make any sense. I remember the crash.” At least the moments leading up to it.
I slumped back against my seat, my body caving in as though it were a balloon someone let the air out of. I closed my eyes like that could somehow block out reality. What had we done to deserve this? Why this was happening? “I mean, this makes no sense at all. Did you see the outside of this thing? If it never flew, how the hell did it crash?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
My body felt like it was suspended in midair, and every cell of me refused to acknowledge this piece of information. It was too shocking, too crazy, too impossible. I couldn’t breathe. It was as if someone had just cut the connection between my brain and my body and left me hanging like that, unable to understand. I waited for an error message to pop up saying that Fiona.exe crashed and needed to be restarted or something. But how could you restart a human?
“What about sending a signal?” I asked.
“I tried to force the system into finishing the setup process so that we could access the GPS and send for help. But there’s literally no program on the board.”
“Can’t you just plug into the plane and hack something?” I was grasping at any straw I could think of, though those words sounded stupid even to me. At that moment, all I wanted and cared about was a way to escape, but all I got was more hopelessness and a smack across the head with something that couldn’t be true, no way.
“I wish this was an episode of Crime Scenes where I could just yell ‘Enhance!’ and voila, we’re saved! But no. Without the board already tracking, there’s no information to send.”
I had to gather all my strength to not break down in tears. But then I remembered how my father always reminded me that there was no room for failure. Even if there was no way to win.
I forced myself to sit up. I was stronger than this. Burying my head in the sand wouldn’t change anything.
“Why would anyone stage this?” I asked. “I mean, that’s what this is. Just a staged scene with us as involuntary actors.”
“Except that dead pilot.”
True. I still remembered the stench, could barely believe I’d actually buried him just yesterday, that all of that really happened.
In a surprising angry fit, Miles detached the board thing from his laptop and threw it across the plane. It didn’t break, just ricocheted off of the wall and fell to the floor with a quiet, unsatisfying clatter. He didn’t really seem like the person to throw stuff, but the annoyance and anger, disappointment and confusion at our general situation was evident on his face—his brows drawn together, creasing his forehead, his eyes dark.
“Something else is strange.”
“What isn’t strange?” He slouched back in his seat and sighed.
“Think about it. This entire thing is staged, right, so how is it possible that I can remember the moment we started crashing?” When I closed my eyes, I could still see the roof of the plane peeling away, could feel the ice-cold fear gripping my body, but none of that really happened, supposedly. “If that crash never happened, how does you feeling dizzy and stuff after we woke up make any sort of sense?”
“It doesn’t. No matter how you look at it, how you’d try and make sense of it, piece it all together. What use and purpose would it even serve?”
“Whatever reason stands behind this, it means that the island is even more dangerous than we thought.” Chills ran down my spine at that realization. “The beast isn’t our only enemy. It’s the smaller of two evils. Something—someone—bigger must be behind this.”
“Who knows, maybe we’re part of some survival TV show without knowing it,” Miles suggested, in what I assumed was an attempt to be funny, lighten the mood, a futile distraction. “Two teens alone on an island fighting to survive against a beast. Who will win, who will die, call and vote now for a chance to win a brand-new Audi.”
“The ironic thing is that it’s the sort of trash Melany and I would totally watch and then rant about on Twitter.”
“Of course you would,” he said, and looked at me from the corner of his eye, the tiniest of smiles pulling up one corner of his mouth.
“I’ll have you know our Drag Race season finale Twitter commentary was very popular.”
“I know.”
“You don’t follow me, or Melany for that matter.”
“Interesting that you know that,” he pointed out. “It’s true, but if half our class liked or retweeted it, it was bound to show up on my timeline.”
“Anyway,” I said, wanting to lead the conversation back to what actually mattered, though I very much appreciated his comedic relief. Miles had his moments, even I had to admit that, ones in which he wasn’t annoying or awful, but actually kind of a nice person to be around. Who would’ve thought? “We should see what else is on the island. The pilot and plane can’t help us, but maybe there is something else out there. Plus, we should find more food and figure out if this really is an island. Right?”
He sighed a little. “Right.”
I already hated everything about this plan, even if it was the only one that made sense. I didn’t want to think about seeing the beast again, but I liked thinking about who had put us on the island and for what reason even less. A crash was one thing, but knowing that this had nothing to do with an accident, that whoever killed the pilot to make this stage more believable could come back and do the same to us? That was something else entirely.
Chapter Twelve
Berlin
At the airport once more, without our luggage this time—bringing it along would mean checking out of the motel and paying for the room, spending money we couldn’t spare until we knew for sure we had a flight—we waited in line for what seemed like hours. A middle-aged man sto
od behind the counter, his hair combed back and a full moustache under his nose.
“What can I do for you?” he asked with a heavy German accent.
“We need two tickets to Miami,” Miles said.
“Let me check.” He typed something, and his eyes flew over the monitor, up and down. As his face lit up slightly, hope swelled in my chest. “Today must be your lucky day. Just two hours ago, it seems two tickets were returned for a flight later today. Is economy okay?”
“Yes,” I said, probably a little too eagerly. I would’ve even taken a spot in a cage with the dogs if it meant I’d get to go home, and, looking at the smile pulling up the corners of Miles’s mouth, it seemed he shared my notion.
“That’ll be one thousand eight hundred eighty-nine euro for two tickets, one way.”
That was more than we had, if I remembered correctly, at least in cash. We had to pay for public transport and food, and had spent too much. Without a moment of hesitation, Miles pulled out his wallet and handed over his card, a move that looked so natural on him, like it was no big deal to him. I couldn’t even imagine what it felt like to pay that much money for anything all at once, but to him it was normal. His clothes and Instagram posts showed as much, along with the way he carried himself and even how he handed over his card. In a way it was fascinating, and I was grateful that he did it, that he didn’t tell the guy that he’d just take one ticket and leave me behind. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all? Could that be?
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Echo,” the man said, “but your card has been declined.”
“That’s impossible,” Miles said, sounding as though he wanted to call the man a moron. “Try again.”
So he did. The outcome stayed the same. Fuck. We’d taken precautions for a situation like this, taken out as much money as we could to avoid it, but of course it didn’t work out. Nothing worked in our favor; how could I even hope it would? Miles looked furious, his eyes dark and sharp, staring at the man who just handed him back his card and said there was nothing he could do for us. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.
