The plane had exploded, and him nearly with it.
The only thing that had saved him had been his growling stomach. With one hand on the yoke, he’d used the other to open Nicholas’s backpack, curious to see what snacks the Vitro had packed. Instead he’d found an alarm clock bound to large vials of clear liquid, and he didn’t need to look twice to know what it was, or to see that the timer on the clock was within seconds of hitting zero.
He threw open the door to the plane and jumped, hitting the water feet-first and feeling as if he’d dropped into a sheet of concrete. The pain had shattered up his body and he blacked out. How long had he been sinking before he awoke? How much longer did he have before his air ran out and he drowned?
He stopped thinking about it. He was alive and that was all that mattered, though his situation was still pretty dire. The darkness cloaked the island, and he turned in a circle, scanning the horizon for any sign of land.
It was hard to concentrate with his mind pulling in the other direction. Nicholas tried to kill me. He literally handed me a ticking bomb, and like an idiot, I took it. And now Nicholas had Sophie. Whatever he wanted her for, after what Jim had just witnessed, he knew it couldn’t be good.
Well, whatever was happening on Skin Island, all he could do now was swim for his life and hope Sophie could take care of herself for a while. He could wait till morning, conserving his energy, and then hope to spot the island in the daylight. But then he would risk drifting out of sight entirely. He knew this area from the thousand times he’d flown over it; Skin Island was a lonely strip of land in a wide empty sea. Most of the other islands were miles and miles away, too far to offer him any chances. It was Skin Island or it was the ocean. Only one held a chance of survival, however slim.
The longer he stared at the darkness, the better his vision became, as long as he didn’t look directly at the moon. He was shivering; the water was warm enough, but his mind was a riot of memories: the pain as he hit the water, the image of his mother dragging her suitcase down the hall, the sound of his plane exploding above him, the smell of burning lemons.
“You could have said you were sorry,” he whispered. “You could have at least apologized.”
Only the stars were there to listen, and they maintained glittery silence.
Jim dropped his head onto the wing with a clunk. The metal smelled burnt, like used gunpowder. He’d loved that plane, loved it more than anything else he owned, though technically it was his dad’s. It was the Cessna that had taken him above the world when the world had no place for him. Lost in the noise of the engine and the haze of clouds, he could almost forget. It was his one haven, his last sanctuary, and now it was scattered across the Pacific in a million burning bits.
It just wasn’t fair. Jim pounded a fist against the aluminum. If he’d just stuck to his own advice and stayed out of Sophie’s business, he’d be home by now. But no. Oh, no. He just had to entangle himself in problems that had nothing to do with him. Getting involved means getting hurt. He’d tried to mend things between his parents, been naive enough to believe he could fix everything as if they were living some cheesy, feel-good Hallmark Channel flick. And what did he get in return? His mother shut him off, and shortly after, his dad might as well have. He lost himself in drinking and Jim lost himself in the sky.
“You get involved to the point where there’s no getting uninvolved,” Sophie had said. “Because that’s what love is.”
Well, then love was stupid. He had no place for it. Love was treacherous and it cheated and it blocked other people out. It burned bridges that could never be rebuilt. Love was just an excuse people used to get what they wanted. It was the all-powerful so-called virtue that people threw around like an overused trump card, a trick ace played to win the pot and beggar the competition. What good was love if it was so easily abused? What good was love if it could be turned into a weapon?
He should have known better. He should have told Sophie no the moment he saw her.
But now Jim was involved to the point where he couldn’t be uninvolved, just as Sophie had said, though it wasn’t for love. It was because his plane was in more pieces than a Lego kit and his only chance of getting home now was Sophie. He had to find her and her mom and hope he could work out some kind of deal. There was always Lux. . . . No. He wouldn’t go there. He couldn’t abuse his power over her that way—it was sick. Anyway, what could she really do to help him? She was hardly capable of walking on two legs.
None of this would matter if he didn’t find the island. He forced all his attention on finding it, and after consulting the few star patterns he could remember to orient himself, finally settled on a slightly darker smudge of black to the southeast.
Jim began to wearily kick his legs, propelling himself and the wing in the general direction of the shadow he hoped was the island. The waves tossed against him, rolled him along, pushing and pulling. He seemed to be getting nowhere, but he swam anyway, though his limbs were weak and wobbly and about as much good as spaghetti noodles.
Oddly, he kept thinking of some stupid poem he’d had to study in his tenth grade lit class. He couldn’t remember the title, just something about an albatross around a guy’s neck, dragging him down, and one rhythmic line that pounded through his brain in time with his pulse: Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. . . . He found himself mouthing the line as he swam, like an escaped lunatic.
Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. . . .
TWENTY SEVEN SOPHIE
“ Keep up!” Nicholas called, yanking the cord that he’d wrapped around Sophie’s ankles. Her hands were free, but she couldn’t attempt to run or he’d just jerk the cord and bring her crashing to the ground. The knots around her ankles were just loose enough to allow her to walk, but running was out of the question.
She gritted her teeth and said nothing, waddling awkwardly behind him. They wove through thick, rolling groves of bamboo, heading south. Sophie stumbled blindly, too overwhelmed with shock and grief to put up much of a fight. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Jim’s plane breaking apart, shattering in the sky in a ball of hungry flames.
“What do you want with me?” she mumbled. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that the boy she’d pitied, the boy she’d gone out of her way to help, had turned out to be a conscienceless, homicidal psychopath who had played her like a piano. “Why are you doing this?”
He stopped and looked back at her, at the bloody bandage on her shoulder and her skinned knees and her pale cheeks, and he sighed. “We’ll stop for a few minutes.”
They were at the highest point in the bamboo forest. The land dipped on either side of them, though any view of the island below was obscured by darkness. But to the west, the rising moon gave view of the infinite sea. When Sophie looked at it, she felt a cold knot rise in her throat, and she dropped to her knees and vomited bile over the edge of the bluff.
“It’s my fault,” she gasped. “You killed him but I’m just as guilty.”
“Good God, will you stop whining?” He sat on a half-buried rock and crossed his legs, looking intensely bored.
She looked at him over her shoulder, burning with hate. “I was almost in that plane. I would have died with him. If you want me dead so badly, why don’t you just push me off this cliff now and be done with it? Why all of this?” Her voice turned to a snarl and she yanked the cord between them.
“Because,” he said calmly, “I don’t want you dead. Why do you think I begged you to stay? The bomb was meant for him, not you. The pilot did a thing very few people can do— he made me angry, so I had to eliminate him. But you—you and I have plans.”