“But the experience isn’t over yet. It’s almost showtime! Stay tuned for some live video and behind the scenes content in just a few.”
He tapped the red circle to end the recording and dropped his arm. The filter came off again and he strode back to the tent, all business.
“I don’t need you to make a stupid video for us, James. We’ve already figured out what’s going on. You tried to kill us and failed. We beat you, and it doesn’t matter what you do now, because we won!” Edie shouted. Her head pounded and the world started to tilt at a hard angle, but none of her outrage mattered because James ignored her and zipped the flap without looking at either woman, the tent equivalent of slamming the door in their faces.
Edie took a deep breath and waited for the world to right itself again. “Come on, Cassidy. Let’s go.”
“What about all your stuff? Do you think he has it?”
“I don’t have your shit!” James yelled from behind the canvas.
“No, I’m pretty sure I know where it is,” Edie said.
Just as she expected, all of her things were at Cassidy’s villa. Her suitcase lay open at the foot of the bed and her phone sat dead on the nightstand.
“Apricot’s stuff is gone,” Cassidy said. She sounded far away, like the last of her hope disappeared with Apricot’s affects. She lowered into one of the armchairs and stared into the distance.
Edie sat on the arm of the chair and hugged Cassidy around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I kind of thought that might be the case.”
Cassidy snapped back to reality and pulled away from Edie. “Why? How could you have known that? And what did you mean when you told James we won? Because it doesn’t feel like we’ve won anything.” Every word came faster than the last and pitched her voice higher and higher into a register of hysteria. She stood and ran her fingers through her tangled hair.
Edie went to Cassidy again and embraced her in a full hug. Cassidy smelt of sweat and dirt and the grit on her shoulder pressed into Edie’s arm.
“I promise I will explain everything I know to you, but first we need to shower and eat something because I’m broken.”
Cassidy’s shoulders rose and dropped with a sigh, and she wrapped her arms around Edie’s waist to give a quick squeeze back. “Okay.”
Even though Edie trusted Cassidy at this point, if only because they were all each other had now, a tension hung in the air. Edie never liked Halloween haunted houses with disorienting lights and sounds and people waiting around the corner to jump out and scare her. Being in the villa—or anywhere on the island, really—felt just like that. Neither she nor Cassidy wanted to be out of the other’s earshot. They took showers with the door to the bathroom cracked while the other chatted with them from their bed.
Cassidy, to her credit, avoided asking any more questions about what Edie knew until their food arrived at dinner. As soon as the salt and spices in Edie’s paella hit her tongue, the tension released in her muscles. Cassidy saw her cue then.
“Tell me what is going on.”
People babbled all around them, but Edie didn’t care anymore. She didn’t even set her fork down again and spoke between bites. “James tried to kill us in that tunnel, but we got out because we said we would.”
“You mean, right before the tunnel collapsed and we both almost drowned?” Cassidy asked. She pushed the food around on the plate but didn’t bring any to her lips.
Edie shrugged in assent. “Yes, but wedidn’tdrown. I bet if we went online and looked at all of James’ posts, one of them would say something about us not being here anymore, or it would have before we survived and he made that awful video just now.” She took another huge bite and chased it with ice water. “But we said we would survive, and we did, and so we won. Whatever is going on here, we have the same power James does and we don’t need to post about it online for anything we say to come true. We just have to say it. Watch.”
She patted her mouth and then leaned over and tapped the back of the person seated at the table next to them. He turned, looking her up and down.
“Which side of the island are they filming the Blink-182 music video on tomorrow?”
The man’s face went blank, like Edie hit a factory reset button, before the lights came back on and he answered, “the west side at two.”
“Thank you,” she returned her attention to Cassidy. “See? I say it’s true and so it is.”
The man shook his head and said something to his table that Edie couldn’t hear, but it produced a burble of laughter.
Cassidy’s jaw hung slack. Edie wondered how she could be shocked after everything they’d seen, then tried to give Cassidy some grace. After all, Edie herself denied the facts for far longer than she should have simply because they didn’t match a version of reality she recognized. Edie laid her hand on Cassidy’s side of the table.
“We’re going to get our friends back, and we’re going to get off this island. I promise.”
Cassidy gave a sideways smile and sighed. Edie removed her hand.
“It’s not just me saying that, either. James said so in his video, too.”
“He said we would get off the island, but not that anyone would come back,” Cassidy argued, but she finally took a bite of food.
