Chapter 26
And then there were four.
The hotel’s restaurant was cavernously empty. Quinn, Kyle, Paul, and Geri sat at a single table, alternately exchanging shell-shocked looks and gazing at nothing with unfocused eyes. The absence of the comforting hum of an industrial air conditioner rang in Quinn’s ears as the thick air tangled in his throat and cold sweat trickled down his back.
He was probably going insane, because he swore he could hear the fading echoes of all the noise there’d been the night everyone had arrived. When they’d all been rubbing elbows and drinking amidst a noisy crowd of their entourages. It had been almost comical, how packed a restaurant could get with the peripheral people whose livelihoods each depended on one of a dozen billionaires. Now they were all gone, and so were eight of their employers, and the quietude they’d left behind made Quinn’s skin crawl.
Sipping his warm bourbon, Quinn wondered what those employees would all do now. It occurred to him that they could all be dead. They’d been herded onto a boat and whisked away under the pretense of a day cruise, and they’d allegedly been told their employers were staying behind to participate in a reality show. Had they been taken someplace safe, though? Were they still blissfully unaware that their employers were dead? Were their paychecks still coming?
Somehow, Quinn struggled to believe they’d all been killed or otherwise dispensed. For a moment, he thought that might’ve been because he was too numb and traumatized to work up any anxiety. As his thoughts cleared, though, he realized that for as scary as Rich Price was, he seemed to have a rigid moral compass. He saw himself as fighting for the working class and exterminating the oppressors. It would be severely off-brand for him to dump several dozen innocent people into the sea.
Or maybe Quinn was just too fucked up by recent events to imagine more horrors happening outside his field of vision.
The silence in the restaurant was so pronounced that everyone jumped when Paul pushed his chair back. “I need some air,” he rasped, and he shuffled toward the patio without further comment.
Yeah, that was relatable. The heat inside this building was stickier and stuffier than it was outside, and at least the breeze coming in off the water made it more bearable out there.
Maybe Paul wouldn’t mind some company.
Quinn tapped a knuckle on the table as he pushed his chair back. “I’m going to get some air myself.” He gestured with his vape pen.
For a heartbeat, he thought they might come along, too. Geri smoked, and Kyle had taken it up in recent days.
They stayed seated, though, expressions blank and eyes distant.
He found the patio deserted, which was odd. Hadn’t Paul just come out here? There weren’t any sentries anymore, either. Quinn cynically wondered if they’d all figured out that the remaining competitors’ spirits were too broken to attempt another escape. All four of them were beaten down, sunburned, sleep-deprived, and traumatized. They’d probably be starving, too, but Rich made sure they’d all eaten enough to keep slogging through this hellish “competition.”
Or maybe this was some kind of game. A dare—the hounds itching for a fox to give them something to chase.
Either way, Paul wasn’t in sight, and that worried Quinn. Maybe he’d gone down to the beach. Or maybe he’d—
A distant shout of “Fuck!” echoed off the hotel’s exterior.
Quinn straightened. That was Paul’s voice.
“Shit,” he muttered, and he jogged off the patio in the direction he thought the voice had come from. No one called after him or warned him to come back, so he just kept going.
Another shout—this one wordless and full of anguish—filled the air. Again, the acoustics fooled Quinn into thinking it had come from the beach. Just as he was starting down that path, though, a choked sob sent him back the other direction—up the walkway that led to the top of the cliffs.
Oh. Shit .
He broke into a run, begging his sore, exhausted legs to get him to the top before it was too late. Before Paul did something he couldn’t undo.
To his relief, Paul hadn’t tumbled off the cliff. Instead, he was pacing back and forth along the edge, muttering to himself in between crying out and, well, crying.
“Paul?” Quinn approached cautiously. “Hey, man. You okay?”
Paul jumped and spun around, hands up defensively. When he saw Quinn, he lowered his hands and relaxed his posture, but he didn’t stop crying.
Quinn inched closer. “Hey. You good?”
“No. No, I’m…” Paul raked both hands through his hair as he continued pacing. “I’m so fucked up. Everything is fucked up and it’s my fucking fault .” His face was blotchy and streaked with tears. It made Quinn weirdly wish for the obnoxious version of Paul O’Connor that had annoyed him in the beginning. That utterly spoiled newly rich asshole who couldn’t stop talking about his cars and his houses and every other goddamned thing would’ve been a sight for sore eyes.
The man in his place—God, he was just… broken.
“What do you mean?” Quinn asked. “You didn’t bring us here. You’re not the reason we’re—”
“My tech!” Paul said. “My goddamned tech! They wouldn’t have been able to do this to us—to all of us—without my fucking tech. ”
Quinn stared at him, not sure what to say. It… Well, it was true, to an extent. The absurdly advanced AI tech coming from OysterAI had been a very powerful tool in Rich’s hands. But Quinn didn’t think this was what Paul had intended with his work.
“This isn’t your fault,” he said. “You didn’t know it would—”
“We knew. We all knew.” Paul swiped at his eyes with a shaking hand. “We had these ethicists coming at us from the beginning. They were just fucking relentless, telling us all the ways our tech was going to ruin the world.” His laugh was high-pitched and completely devoid of humor. “They were insufferable.” Face crumpling, he whispered, “They were fucking right , man. They were right! If we hadn’t made our tech, then all this”—he flailed a hand at the hotel—“never would’ve happened!”
“That’s not true.” Quinn tried to sound as calm as possible. “Price still would’ve found a way to—”
“But we made his job a million times easier!” Paul was sobbing now. “We gave him everything he needed to rope us into this reality show bullshit, and—I mean, look at those fakes he made of us!” He shoved both of his hands into his hair as tears ran down his red face. “He’s got videos that could ruin every single one of our lives beyond repair, and he used my tech to do it. ”
Quinn suppressed a shudder. The deep fake he’d watched of himself would haunt his dreams if he ever slept again. Even knowing it was fake, watching it still traumatized the shit out of him, and he was physically ill at the thought of that footage ever leaking to anyone.
But focusing on that wouldn’t help him bring Paul out of this hysteria, so he schooled his expression and voice. “Any tech can be abused, Paul. I invested in an app that transfers money person-to-person.” He waved a hand. “None of us could have predicted it would be used by cartels and human traffickers.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, it isn’t, but—”
“I can’t go back,” Paul sobbed. “I can’t. All that money—all those things I bought with it—it’s all bloody now. How fucking many lives have I fucking ruined?”
“Paul, take a breath. You didn’t ruin anyone’s lives. The tech you created is incredibly powerful, but you couldn’t have known it would—”
“The ethicists told us.” Paul’s shoulders sagged and he made a miserable sound. “They fucking told us, over and over and over, all the ways our tech could destroy people. I didn’t believe them because I was fucking stupid, and I just wanted to make something cool and get fucking rich, and—”
“Paul.” Quinn took a cautious step closer. “Listen to me. You know now. You can modify the tech. Make it harder for people to use it for—”
“No.” Paul’s whisper nearly disappeared into the wind. “It’s too late for that. The genie’s out of the bottle. There’s no going back.” He let his gaze drift toward the cliff’s edge again, and panic surged through Quinn.
“You can use your platform, though,” he pleaded, taking another careful step. “You can become an advocate for ethical use.”
“No.” Paul shook his head, still peering over the edge. “I can’t.”
“You can!” Quinn wanted to lunge forward and grab Paul’s arm, but he was afraid a sudden move would spook him and make him jump or fall. Easing closer, he spoke as soothingly as he could. “You can make a positive difference.”
“I can’t.” To Quinn’s horror, Paul stepped even closer to the cliff’s edge.
“Paul.” Quinn held out his hand. “Come on. Come back over here.”
Paul shook his head. “No. I can’t.” Fresh tears escaped his eyes as his features crumpled. “I made something evil, Quinn.” He turned to him, looking more broken than Quinn had ever seen anyone. “It’s evil. It… God, did you see those things Rich’s people made with it? Those videos? It’s… It’s fucking evil .”
“That doesn’t mean you are.” Quinn beckoned to him. “Come on. Step back away from the—”
“I can’t.” Paul rubbed the back of his neck. “What’s the point, anyway? We’re all dying here, Quinn. All of us. And we’re all going to die horribly.”
Quinn pressed his lips together. Admittedly, he was hard-pressed to argue. He lowered his hand, and he couldn’t help taking a second to debate joining Paul.
But he just wasn’t ready to give up. He wasn’t.
“We can find a way out,” he whispered, though he wasn’t so sure he believed himself. “We can—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Paul stepped away, the toe of his shoe sticking out over the cliff’s edge. “If by some miracle, we get out alive, I have to go back to…” He squeezed his eyes shut and closed his eyes. “I can’t go back to that.”
“Paul, listen. There’s still—”
“I can’t.” The two words were sharp.
And the step was decisive.
“Paul, no!” Quinn scrambled to the edge just in time to see Paul hit the rocks below. The wind and the crashing waves weren’t enough to swallow the crunch of bones. The height of the cliff wasn’t enough to keep Quinn from seeing the twitching and writhing that he hoped—fucking hoped so hard—were just the final spasms of an already lifeless corpse.
Quinn dug his fingers into the earth and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d witnessed so damn much suffering and death since he’d come to this island, but Paul’s shook him to the core. Seeing someone so broken—so absolutely destroyed—that death was the only mercy… He didn’t know how to process that.
Nor did he know how to process the hopelessness whispering in his ear that he should follow Paul onto the rocks. A few seconds of terror. A sudden stop at the end. And then nothing.
It wouldn’t be a pleasant end, but it would be a quick one. Far quicker than anything Rich Price would inflict on him. Why wait around to be tortured when he could just—
“Hey. Hey!” A voice shouted behind him. “Get away from there!”
Quinn scrambled to his feet, but before he could even decide if he really was going to Peter Pan to a merciful end, someone grabbed his arm and his collar. He was hauled away from the edge and slammed onto the ground.
His bruised, sunburned skin was on fire. His exhausted body hurt all over. He couldn’t fight off the men, and they easily overpowered him.
What was the point in fighting?
So he didn’t. He let them yank him to his feet and start frog-marching him down the hill. Somehow his feet stayed under him. Not that it even mattered. So what if the men beat the shit out of him? He might get lucky and they’d kill him like Dan Woolman had killed Charlie Simmons
I should’ve fucking jumped when I had the chance .