Mike held her eyes for a moment, and she noticed they were a lovely shade of green, with dark blue specks throughout. Then they shifted over her shoulder, to their target. He took a deep breath, exhaled and, without another word, leapt from the rocks.
Eva and Stacy watched Mike sprint across the sand, diving before he reached the lapping surf, slicing into light green shallows.
Manu disappeared from the bow. First, he ran to the anchor, but Mike was coming fast, so he slipped away, hidden from their view. When Mike reached the side of the boat, Manu reappeared with the spear, jabbing downward as if trying to stab a pike from a creek.
Mike yelled once, as if injured, then grabbed the shaft of the spear on Manu’s next strike and jerked it downward, out of the islander’s hands.
“I’m going,” Stacy said, and jumped off the rocks.
Eva studied the woman’s feet as she ran away, saw she wore similar rubber booties as Mike, but that they didn’t cover the tops of her feet as well as Mike’s had.
Before Eva could yell out for her—a warning, a shout of encouragement—Stacy was diving headfirst into the water, cutting through the low waves toward Mike, who had somehow managed to get onto the boat, he and Manu now grappling like cage fighters. Mike got the larger man into a choke hold, and Manu kicked wildly, throwing blind backward punches.
Eva waited on the stones. She watched as Manu broke free and Mike raised the knife, thrusting it at the other man, backing him up until Manu had no choice but to leap from the boat. As he treaded water on the far side, Mike lifted Stacy, clutching the fallen spear, up the other. Once aboard, Stacy threatened Manu with the spear’s sharp point every time he swam near, shrieking like a madwoman. Mike, meanwhile, brought up the anchor, hand-over-hand, until it clambered over the side and dropped into the boat.
He started the engine.
“Hey!” Eva cried, waving both arms like a castaway who’d spotted a plane buzzing overhead, or a distant steamer plowing through the mist, hazy as a ghost.
Mike raised a hand in return as the engines grew louder. Stacy approached him and they argued, the words lost amidst the air-splitting buzzsaw of the engine.
Manu, meanwhile, had swum toward the beach, stopping a few feet short of the sand. He stood in the shallows, the water lapping at the top of his sarong, his back to Eva, his eyes on the boat.
Mike yelled something, hand cupped around his mouth, but it was near-impossible to hear over the engine. To Eva’s horror, it sounded like: “We’ll get help!”
She watched, helpless, as the boat backed away from the beach, slowly rotating until the bow faced the ocean, away from Eva, from the island. If not for the presence of Manu standing in the water, she might have made a mad run for it, risking death for a chance of rescue.
“No!” she screamed. “Mike, please! Don’t leave!”
Minutes later, the boat was pushing out of the harbor, long past earshot of Eva’s protests. It banked left, accelerated and, after a few moments, disappeared from view.
Eva sobbed as the boat vanished. She sat down hard on the warm stones, feeling the heat of the late afternoon sun on her head, back and shoulders. She dared not look at the licorice-limbed corpse of her boyfriend, or the similar corpses of Terry and Karyn that littered the beach a dozen yards away.
Drained of strength, of hope, she whimpered, “No no no ….”
Long after the sound of the boat’s engine had vanished, she lifted her eyes. Manu, still standing in the shallows, watched her.
“Why did you do this?” She knew that she would die here, in this virgin paradise, with only a strange man at her side, a man who wanted to kill her.
“If we wait until dark, they will retreat,” Manu said, his tone implausibly casual as he studied the sky, as if contemplating the remaining daylight. “When night falls, it will be safe, Eva. They don’t like the cold.”
“I don’t believe you!” she screamed, nearly slipping off the rock in her anger. “You tried to fucking kill me! Why did you bring us here!”
But Manu said nothing, only continued to watch the sky.
HOURS PASSED, AND THE BOAT did not return.
No rescue boat appeared.
Ravenous despite everything, Eva found her scuba bag, pulled out the apple she’d brought as a snack, back when this was going to be a quick trip of a few hours. She ate it angrily, staring daggers at Manu, who stood silent in the shallows, not venturing closer, but not swimming away.
“Almost time now,” he said.
Eva looked at the darkening sky—a gorgeous royal blue so clear that she could perceive a smattering of stars sprinkled like diamond dust beyond the earth’s atmosphere, as if she were glimpsing another dimension.
The sun was a red boil on the horizon, split in two by the great ocean, lowering slowly into its depths.
The day was ending.
LATER, WHEN IT WAS FULL dark, and the twilight canopy was bursting with glittering stars and the shimmering powder of galaxies, and the day had split from the night, Manu walked out of the water and onto the beach.
He hesitated a moment, then smiled, his teeth bright in the moonlight.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can come down.”
“No fucking way,” Eva said, wishing she had a weapon. A knife, a gun, a spear … but she had nothing. No clothes, no possessions.
Just fear.
“I won’t hurt you, Eva,” Manu said. “And if you come with me, I’ll show you things you’ve never seen. Things you’ve never imagined.”
He walked boldly up to the stones, magnificent in the moonlight, bare-chested and native as the island itself. Unblemished.
She looked at his exposed feet in the sand.
