Except now that it’s over, and I’m starting to come back to myself—remembering where I am, where we are—something like regret is sinking in.
Not so much for betraying Nico, but shit, I like Eliza.
What happens now?
I turn to Jake, about to ask him, but he must sense the question because he just taps the tip of my nose. “Our secret,” he murmurs.
“Sure,” I say, relieved and yet also, inexplicably, disappointed. “Our secret.”
Just one more to add to the pile.
We get dressed, brushing sand off ourselves and each other, and Jake leans in to nuzzle my temple, to kiss my neck, and it makes me smile even as regret keeps settling in heavier and heavier. It’s like the night after Mom’s funeral, the adrenaline wearing off to leave this kind of sick sensation behind, this sense that I walked right up to the edge of a cliff and instead of backing up, I threw myself over.
It’s the island, I tell myself. Nothing is real here. Nothing matters.
“Let’s try to cut through here,” Jake says, leading me off the beach and toward the tree line, and I hang back, looking skeptically up at the jungle.
“Did you hide a machete in those shorts?” I ask, and he flashes me a wink over his shoulder.
“Oh, the quips I could make to that. But no, it’s just not as thick on this side.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, but he’s already heading in, and I follow, relieved to be out of the harsh glare of the sun.
Jake is right—the foliage is thinner in this part, the ground easier to maneuver, and we walk in silence, light filtering through the leaves, the air thick.
Every step I take brings me closer to having to face Eliza, so I’m not exactly in a rush.
Jake doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, either, and when we see a vine of bright pink flowers, he snaps one off, and tucks it behind my ear, making me blush.
When he slips his hand into mine, I take it, letting him lead me deeper and deeper into the jungle.
I hear running water after a minute, and my sense of direction, completely confused by the sameness of everything, wonders if we’ve somehow come across what I’ve started to think of as our pool.
But when the trees part, I see we’ve come to a different clearing, one that’s darker and more secluded than our little oasis. There’s a waterfall here, too, but the water is sluggish, trickling down into a much smaller pool. There’s a heavy, sickly sweet scent hanging in the air.
There’s also something pale at the edge of the pool, and my brain struggles to make sense of the shape at first, thinking almost dazedly, A foot, why does that look like someone’s foot?
It isn’t until I hear Jake mutter, “Fucking asshole,” that I realize what I’m looking at is Robbie’s body.
TWENTY-THREE
I’ve never seen a dead body before, not like this.
I was with Mom when she died, but that was sterile and serene, surrounded by the beep of monitors, the antiseptic smell of the hospital.
This is nothing like that.
I hang back, my hand clapped over my mouth as Jake approaches.
“What happened to him?” I manage to say, and he sighs, ruffling his hair.
“Not sure. He’s facedown in the water. I don’t see anything … obvious. There are a million ways to die out here, though.”
He crouches down, tugging his shirt over his nose, and nudges at something lying there on the ground.
It’s Robbie’s black canvas bag, and when Jake picks it up and starts riffling through it, I hear myself say, “Don’t!”
He looks up, confused. “It just seems wrong,” I say. “Going through his stuff.”
“He’s dead, Lux. He’ll deal,” he replies, and then he makes a noise, a kind of grunt as he pulls something out of the bag.
It’s a knife, a truly terrifying blade like something out of a slasher movie. It’s curved with a jagged edge, the handle made of something that looks like bone, and when it hits the ground just a few feet in front of me, I fight the urge to kick it away.
But then he pulls out something else.
“His passport?” I ask, recognizing the small navy folder.
“No,” he says, flipping through it, then rising to his feet. “Yours.”
I blink, my skin suddenly cold despite the heat.
“What?”
“Yours,” Jake says, opening the cover and slapping it against his palm. “He must’ve taken it when he broke the radios.”
It had never occurred to me to check my things when we discovered the broken radios—it seemed so obvious that Robbie had come aboard for one reason and one reason only. Now I’m realizing that I haven’t opened my purse, which I’d shoved under a cabinet on the Susannah, since we got here. All it held was my cell phone, my passport, and some cash—not exactly things I’d needed the past two weeks. I hadn’t even opened it up when I’d brought it on board the Azure Sky, just tucked it away underneath my berth mattress for safekeeping.