“You,” I say. “It was you I saw with Nico. It was you—”
“It was so easy to get him to go with me,” she says, and somehow, her hazel eyes seem sad. “He didn’t even resist when I kissed him. Not for Amma, certainly not for you. And you deserve better. I knew you were never going to be free, not really, until he was gone. For good.”
Brittany. Sweet, funny Brittany with her big smiles and easy hugs, hefting a machete, smashing the back of Nico’s skull.
“We’d laced the hash,” she goes on, “so he was pretty out of it. He didn’t suffer, I promise.”
Was that true? I’d never know. Just like I’d never know if she’d killed Nico for me, or because it was another thing to take from Amma—just as Amma had, in Brittany’s mind, taken from her.
“And the boat?” I ask, trying to fill the remaining gaps. “How did you—”
“Jake,” Eliza supplies.
Jake. Where is he now? Is he out there, on the Azure Sky?
“Simple story, really. I told him Nico was asking about the drugs, how much we had, what we were doing with it. That he got freaked out, aggressive with Brittany, and she took care of things. Jake agreed with us that it was easier if you thought Nico had just fucked off rather than to tell you the truth, so he moved the Susannah for us.”
It’s almost too much to believe, how much these people lied to me, the secrets they’d been hiding this entire time. I had missed it all. I lean over, dry-heaving in the sand, my stomach cramping.
Stepping forward, still holding the gun, Eliza looks at me intently. “I know it feels hard now,” she says, “but Brittany is right. You had to be free of him before he pulled you down.”
I shake my head, thoughts spinning. “I don’t want any part of this.”
“But you do,” she insists. “I see you, Lux. I see a woman who cleaned up other people’s shit, literally, so that her rich boyfriend could cosplay as a sailor. A woman whose father abandoned her not once, but twice. I see a woman who deserves some kind of happiness, some kind of freedom in this world. The world took Brittany’s family. It took yours. It took mine. So, I’ll say it again: we deserve to take it back.”
There’s a crashing sound and suddenly Jake emerges from the trees, and everything that comes next happens so fast.
Eliza swings her arm in his direction, Brittany is moving toward him, and there’s a gunshot, so loud that I scream, my hands going up to my ears as I stare at Jake, waiting to see him crumple on the sand.
But instead, it’s Brittany who falls.
TWENTY-NINE
Brittany’s blood spills into the sand, turning it from white to dark red, but overhead, the sky is still just as blue, the water just as clear.
It still looks like paradise, but I know now that it’s hell.
Robbie, Amma, Nico, now Brittany … all dead, their blood seeping into Meroe’s hungry sand. After the echoing gunshot, there’s nothing but silence.
“Oh fuck,” Eliza says to herself, her eyes wide, her hands at the side of her head. “Oh fuck, oh fuck—” She’s whispering, moving toward Brittany’s body.
“Eliza, what the fuck—” Jake starts, and then, before I have time to register it, she turns toward him.
The crack of the shot is loud, but it doesn’t make me jump as much this time, even as Jake screams, clutching at his calf as he falls to the sand.
His blood, too, my muddled mind thinks. Now Meroe has tasted all of us except Eliza.
“This is your fault!” she shouts at him. “If you hadn’t startled me, Brittany wouldn’t be dead.”
“She wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t shot her, you bitch!” Jake seethes, clutching his bleeding leg. “You fucking cunt.”
It’s a clean shot, two neat holes piercing the meat of his calf, and his blood bubbles over his fingers as he desperately applies pressure to it.
“Isn’t it crazy?” Eliza says to me, looking at Jake as he rocks there on the beach. “Men. They worship us, but the second we do something they don’t like, we’re bitches and cunts.”
“To be fair, if you shoot me, I’m going to call you a cunt, too,” I reply evenly, and that makes her smile a little, though her expression falters when she looks back at Brittany.
“It will be okay,” she says, and I get the sense she’s talking to herself again. “We can still do this. You and me,” she says, searching my face. “That’ll be okay, won’t it?”