Chapter Thirty-Two
Cillian
The mechanical beeps grow too irritating to ignore.
I peel my eyes open, squinting as I adjust to the light.
The hospital room is white and uniform, a squat window letting in twilight.
Seán, in all his scraggly island glory, looks wildly out of place.
His stained sling has been replaced with a clean, navy-blue one.
He’s wearing fresh clothes, but his face is burnt and weather-beaten. How did I not notice that before?
I follow his gaze to a boxy TV mounted in the corner of the room. Our faces are on it, alongside a video of our island ablaze.
“Holy shit.”
Seán’s head snaps towards me.
The volume is muted, and the subtitles are all in Thai, but the visuals are more than enough for me to understand the situation.
The entire island is burning, a black cloud of smoke rising high into the air.
It cuts to a map of the Thai island, a blue dotted line marking out our original course and a red circle marking the island we ended up on.
No wonder rescuers couldn’t find us; we were wildly off route.
The screen cuts back to the burning island.
“What the hell happened?”
“That last snake did you in.” Seán studies the monitors surrounding my bed.
“They gave you a polyvalent antivenom for the region since we didn’t know what snake it was, and you responded well to it.
How are you feeling? Coherent? You’ve been in and out of it the last day.
You only stopped thrashing a few hours ago. ”
My mouth is painfully dry, and my arm feels like I slammed it in a car door.
“I wasn’t asking about me. I’m asking about—let me guess. Jules. I went down, and he figured out how to get us a rescue.” He took the bonfire suggestion at the top of the hill and turned it up by a thousand degrees. “Am I right?”
Seán nods. “I didn’t even know what was going on. Mathieu rocked up, told us all to get upwind on the beach, and as soon as he got you as far as the shore, he was off before I could get a word in. An hour later, the hill’s on fire. It was one hell of a smoke signal.”
I’m not going to throw a fit about smoke inhalation. Or how dangerous it was to burn down our only food source. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they were both involved. The TV is still showing the island. Even the sister island went up in flames.
“Stop making a face,” Seán chides. “You would have died. And look—it worked. A fishing boat spotted the fire and picked us all up. You’re recovering, Mary’s ankle is scheduled for treatment, Jules is out of surgery—”
I whip toward him. “Surgery? What do you mean surgery?”
Seán winces. “He broke his arm. He’s all taken care of now—you’re not allowed out of bed.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and firmly pushes me back down. I’m stronger than Seán. Always have been. Until now. “You need to rest.”
He releases me and sits back in his chair. He gives me a look that says if I try to get up, we’ll have the exact same discussion again, and I’ll lose. I accept the temporary restriction with dignity.
“Asshole.”
“Mom and Dad are on the way. They’d be here already, but the island they’re on has no boats running until the morning.
Charles’s family is here, Yasop’s sister too, and Willow’s dad.
” Seán’s head tilts to the side as he lists everyone.
“There are six people crowded into Mathieu’s room, and they all look somewhat like him, so I’m guessing they’re aunts and uncles and siblings.
Darren’s parents grabbed him, and they’re gone already.
I suppose he wants to get out of here before there’s trouble. ”
“Jules?” But even as I ask, I know that he doesn’t have family. He doesn’t have that person who’d be combing the Thai islands trying to find him.
“I didn’t see anyone. He’s only down the end of the hall, and I’ve been checking in on him.
He’s unconscious. The doctors said he won’t wake up for hours yet.
” Seán yawns. “Sorry. Tired. I’ve had to talk to a million people, and it’s so noisy.
I mean, the insects were noisy as hell on the island, but this feels like chaos. ”
“That’s how I feel whenever we get back from a long camping trip.”
Seán snorts in agreement. “Right.”
Seán fills me in on Mary’s ankle. As we’d both suspected when it failed to get better, there was a break that had begun to heal in the wrong position.
It now has to be re-broken and set, something that will happen in Ireland.
Seán’s eyes droop. I prompt him with questions until his head finally lolls to the side and his face goes slack.
I wait long enough to be sure he’s asleep, and then I ease the drip needle out of my arm and fold back the blankets.
I’m wearing a beige hospital gown, which is an improvement from my tattered shorts and shirt.
When I stand, my head gets fuzzy. I hold the edge of the bed until the dizziness passes.
The hall is deserted, and all the rooms have solid doors. I start at the far end and open first a closet, then the door to Yasop’s room. He’s passed out in bed, watched by a petite woman with similar features. She directs me across the hall when I tell her who I’m looking for, and I find Jules.
The door clicks softly shut behind me, and I venture in.
The room is the same as mine, with an empty chair at Jules’s bedside.
He’s not as sun-beaten as Seán, skin tanned but not burnt.
His collection of face creams and sunscreens that we rescued from the yacht before it went down worked better than whatever Seán and I had stashed.
I pull the chair up next to him, as close as I can without interfering with the wires hooked up to him. His arm is encased in a bulky dressing with a black splint locking the elbow in place. It’s wrapped from midway down his upper arm all the way to his wrist. There must be damage to the joint.
There are dressings on his hands too, fingers wrapped in white gauze.
The clear plastic mask he’s wearing fogs with each exhale.
My chest hurts. It’s like I’ve gone back in time to our first night on the island, when Jules was unconscious on the ground, and I had nothing to count on but hope that he was going to wake up.
Not yet realising that his being out of it was the only way to get him to sit still for longer than two minutes at a time…
I hesitate before standing. I hate the idea of leaving him alone when he looks so vulnerable, but I force myself out the door.
Finding Mathieu is easier. I hear French leaking out from beneath the door, voices raised in argument.
I open the door and discover Mathieu is the one arguing, talking a mile a minute in furious French.
It’s directed at the two men who each have a hold of his shoulder and won’t let him out of bed.
There’s an older couple sitting on a couch, and two women of a similar age to the men sitting on cushions on the floor.
They’re conversing normally, as if this is an everyday occurrence.
The glint in Mathieu’s eyes reminds me of the defiance he throws my way.
Except seeing it from an outside perspective, I’m not sure how I managed to get the upper hand on him.
“Ow!” The man on the far side of Mathieu withdraws his hand, shaking it. It’s decorated with a perfect half moon of teeth marks. Mathieu twists towards the remaining man. I don’t see what he does to him, but it draws a similar cry of alarm and a release.
Mathieu leaps to his feet—eyes ablaze—but his escape stops dead. “Cillian!”
Everyone turns towards me. Mathieu gets to me in half a second, looking first at the dressing on my forearm, hiding the snakebite, and then into my eyes. “Are you supposed to be out of bed?”
“Are you okay?” I scan him, but I don’t find anything amiss. If the way he was moving on the bed isn’t an indicator of good physical health, then I don’t know what is.
“Perfectly fine! I tried to see you earlier, but my family”—Mathieu shoots a glare over his shoulder—“wouldn’t let me. Have you got an update on Jules? Last I heard he was just out of surgery, but that was hours ago.”
“I just checked on him. I’m going to sit with him, but I wanted to see you first.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mathieu says.
Six pairs of eyes study me with open curiosity. I wish I was dressed like Mathieu. A shirt and trousers, and not this hospital get-up. “You don’t need to rest?” I ask.
“If someone should still be in bed, it’s you.” Mathieu’s eyes glint, inviting me to argue with him.
Not wanting to get bitten, I nod. “Fair point.”
Mathieu turns on his heel, addressing his family in boisterous French.
I hear my name at one point, and a chorus of bonjours comes my way.
I answer, “Hello.” Mathieu ushers me out of the room and stops long enough to drag a bench from the hallway across the doorway behind us.
The doors open in, so it’s not going to trap anyone. Still.
I stare at Mathieu.
“Yes?” he prompts.
“You’re spoiled,” I realise.
Mathieu looks unfazed. “I’m the youngest.”
He loops his arm in mine and leads me back to Jules, where he has me take the seat while he fetches a second one from a nearby room. If I learn later that he went back to his parents and took one of their chairs right out from under them, I won’t be surprised.
“What?” Mathieu asks, noticing that I’m still looking at him.
“Everything is making sense.” Even his forwardness that first night at the club. No wonder he was so confident coming on to Jules. Mathieu is used to getting his way.
When Mathieu smiles, his eyes dazzling, dimples flashing, I feel as though I’m being sized up.
Like I’m a challenge that’s proven more difficult than he’s used to, and he’s figuring out how to crack me.
My sore, drained body wakes up. “You think that’s going to go any differently just because we’re on dry land? ”
“I know it will.”
I grin. “I’ll look forward to the attempts.”