“Fine!”
“Fine!”
Nicholas came running up then, and he slipped an arm around Sophie. “Everything okay? I heard you two shouting.”
“We’re fine!” Jim and Sophie snapped in unison.
“Is this about him?” Jim asked, pointing at Nicholas.
“Hey, buddy,” said Nicholas, “if you’ve got a problem with me—”
“Maybe I do! It was you who put the nails down on the runway, wasn’t it?”
“Jim—” Sophie started, but he ignored her and stepped toward Nicholas, who took a step back.
“What’s your game, man?” Jim asked, spreading his arms. “What do you really want with her?”
“Hey. Come on. I don’t want trouble.” Nicholas brushed his hair behind his ears and swallowed, his eyes darting about nervously.
“Did you do it? Answer me straight! Did you sabotage my plane?”
“Jim, stop!” Sophie yelled. “Leave him alone! This isn’t about him! I made my decision, now just go!”
He turned, his wet hair flinging droplets of water, and for a moment they glared at each other. Then the fight went out of him and his shoulders dropped. “Fine. Whatever. Goodbye, Sophie.”
He turned and walked toward the surf. Sophie stared after him, the anger melting from her eyes as she realized their fight had left a hollow ache in her chest. She didn’t want him to go. She needed him, more than she’d realized. But she also couldn’t let him get hurt, and she knew that letting him go was the right thing to do. She looked away, forcing herself to stay strong and not beg him to turn around. When she did, she caught Nicholas staring at her, his eyes hard.
“Hey,” said Nicholas, calling to Jim. “Wait up.” He dropped to his knees, zipped open his backpack, and fiddled with its contents. Then he ran down the beach, making Jim flinch when he drew close. “Easy. I just—here. Take this. It’s mostly food and stuff, but there are some documents that might help you convince someone out there that this place is real. Information on the project, Corpus, you know.” He shrugged. “Just take it.”
Jim glanced at Sophie, who nodded, and he grabbed the backpack without a word, then he turned and stalked away. Sophie realized she was shaking, and drew a deep breath to calm herself. She watched as he swam out to the plane, then turned and headed back to the boat with Nicholas, her arm throbbing.
The outboard whined as she and Nicholas sped across the channel. Her face burned with shame for debasing Jim the way she had, but she didn’t know of any other way to convince him to go on without her. It’s not like we’re friends anymore, she thought. It’s like I said. That was a long time ago. We’ve both changed. But it didn’t feel that way. She felt as if the ten years they’d been separated had never happened. Sure, at first she’d felt awkward, unsure what to make of this nearly adult version of her old Jim, but that had quickly passed. His friendship was so easy and natural, and gave her a warmth under her skin that she suspected, with some degree of surprise and wonder, went even beyond mere friendship. She did care about Jim— perhaps more deeply than she’d even realized. She wanted to tell him that. She wanted to rearrange reality, make it so that Skin Island and Lux and Nicholas and all of this had never happened, so that she could rediscover Jim properly, focusing all her attention on him and who he had become, somehow making up for the years they had lost.
But now she’d ruined the relationship they had, and likely all potential they’d had of deepening it.
Just let him go, she told herself. You didn’t come here for him. She had to help Nicholas and Lux, and maybe even her mother, if she could.
When Nicholas slid the boat onto the sand and helped her out, Jim was beginning to start up the plane. She could hear the engine cough and then growl to life, even over the surf. The prop begin to spin, faster and faster until it was a blur. She stood on the beach and watched as the lights on the tail and the wingtips blinked on, red and white, and then the plane turned and began taxiing across the water like a jet ski. Then it lifted in a white spray of water and climbed into the sky. She felt a sense of relief; there had been a possibility it wouldn’t fly after their rough landing.
“Finally.” Nicholas’s voice rose above the surf, and she turned to see him rolling his shoulders as if he’d just finished running a race.
“What?”
“I mean that idiot of a pilot is finally out of the way. God, he was grating on my nerves.”
She frowned. “Out of the way? Out of whose way?”
A change swept across Nicholas’s features, a change so uncannily physical that she blinked to see if her eyes were being tricked. All of the imploring, the desperation, the pitifulness drained away like a mask of smoke and in its place spread a look so smug and crafty that he didn’t even look like the same person he’d been ten seconds earlier. A smile, thin and leonine, squirmed across his lips as if drawn with a fine point pen.
“On Skin Island,” said Nicholas, “there is only one way. And it’s mine.”
“What?”
“I almost let him go, you know. I almost did. I could have let him soar off into the blue, and I would have too, if he hadn’t . . . ergh.” He grimaced, stretching his lips outward and down, into an expression that would have been comical if not for the way it made Sophie’s heartbeat accelerate with apprehension. “He just had to go and pick a fight, didn’t he? Well. He who laughs last. Am I right?”
“What are you talking about?” What had happened to him? Who was this strange new Nicholas with these cold eyes and haughty tone? She realized she already knew, and that perhaps she’d known all along, and goose bumps marched up her arms. “Nicholas—”
“Watch. Here it comes.”
Something in his voice made a chill slither down Sophie’s spine. She opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but her throat clogged with dread. She turned around and found the Cessna, no more than a rising shadow in the sky. Jim was leaving, he was safe—wasn’t he? Why, then, did Nicholas’s words strike her heart like a hammer driving in a nail, sending a jolt of apprehension through her?
“Nicholas,” she whispered. “What do you mean?”
He pointed at the plane, his index finger extended and thumb vertical in the shape of a gun. He shut one eye, as if aiming at the Cessna, and then clicked his tongue and lowered his thumb.
Jim’s plane burst into a ball of flame, lighting the sky like a thousand fireworks. Flaming debris shot in every direction, fireballs trailing sparks to land, hissing in the ocean. Like a horrible burning flower the explosion continued to blossom, getting bigger and brighter, casting red light over the palms and the water, the flames reflecting on the undulating surface of the ocean.
Sophie heard a violent scream and realized it came from her own throat. She was on her knees, her hands digging into the sand. “NO!”
Nicholas stood over her, his hands still in his pockets, his eyes glinting orange with the explosion as if the fire burned inside him. And he laughed, a low chuckle of delight, and he all but rubbed his hands together in glee.
“You did this?” she howled, and she lunged at him nails first, going after his eyes, but he caught her wrists and held her off. She screamed wordlessly, kicking and writhing, but he pushed her into the sand onto her back and pinned her down.
“Sh,” he said soothingly. “It’s better this way. You’ll see. He was just getting in my way, always interfering. See? Things are simpler now. Hush. Stop that!”
She twisted beneath him, nearly blacking out from the pain in her shoulder, but he pressed his weight on top of her and grinned, his teeth glowing white.