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“You had to keep digging, didn’t you?” Her glistening lips pulsed with anger.

“That’s what Sarge said before he tried to shoot me,” I said.

She sneered at me. Nice try, liar. But her eyes rested on my face a beat too long. Did she suspect I was telling the truth?

I clung to that anxious glance as if it were rope and I was dangling from the helicopter.

Sarge had been acting on his own when he hunted me down.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, except they weren’t working in tandem.

But is it CeeCee he’s been protecting? I had to do what I hated doing—be patient, wait for an opening.

Why was she even keeping me alive? She could have punched open my door, released my seat belt, and tipped me five thousand feet toward the ocean.

I gripped the sides of my seat like it was a life raft, my knuckles shaking and white.

Slamming the lever, she swept us around the island, swooping down. The black beach shot into view.

We landed with a thump. Should I make a break for it, bolt to the other side of the island? And do what? Wait until the island blew or the wave swamped me? Because now we were here, the air boiling and acid-yellow with sulfur, the predictions we’d all ignored seemed real.

CeeCee whipped a pistol from the backpack at her side and aimed it at me.

“Out,” she ordered.

Thrusting open the door, I retched. “Oh God.”

The black beach. It wasn’t black. It was a stinking, rotting beached whale covered in flies.

“The old sulfur mine,” she said. She jabbed her gun toward the far corner of the beach, where the smoke had obliterated our view.

The sand was steaming hot. Charging across the beach, I screamed and slapped at the swarms of flies biting every inch of my exposed skin until I found the opening of the mine.

Headlamp on, CeeCee sprinted to me and ordered me into the shaft, a horizontal tunnel into the earth.

I took a few paces into the darkness, bashing my limbs, my skin still crawling with flies, the ceiling crumbling into my hair and face.

My toe caught on something, and I tripped.

I reached down. It was the size and shape of a shoebox, covered in plastic.

Behind me, CeeCee gave a satisfied cry and nudged me out of the way with her gun. Still aiming it at me, she grabbed a knife from her backpack, cut away the outer plastic, and keyed in a code.

The top sprang open. She rifled through the contents: three packets of white powder, each about the size of my hand.

She sorted through it again as if she’d been expecting more.

At the bottom was a clear plastic tube. Inside was a poppy, propped up with what looked like tiny bubble wrap.

Instructions were written along the tube in black: “Place inside wine box marked No. 10. ”

CeeCee turned it around in her fingers. It was an ordinary-looking poppy—green stem, red petals, black seeds—but preserved like something uniquely precious. She didn’t look curious or alarmed, as if she’d seen similar poppies in previous shipments.

She ordered me to check the end of the mine.

Bent, shuffling, shaking with a sick, cold dread, I forced myself to use those precious seconds to make some quick calculations, using what I’d learned from Declan about heroin prices.

This shipment seemed about three pounds in weight, worth about $750,000.

With Snow earning maybe ten percent as the middle person, he would only make $75,000. Not worth risking decades in prison.

I hit a boarded-up hole about twenty feet in.

The end of the mine shaft. Tipping my head up as if it were a snow globe, I waited for the flickering flakes in my mind to settle.

Settling… settling… aah. And there it was—the reason this was the final shipment.

It was because of this single, seemingly ordinary poppy.

I shuffled back to the opening. “Nothing else in there,” I said dully.

CeeCee thrust the box under one arm. Her gun made a thud against my temple, cold and heavy. “Stay here.” She paced back to the helicopter and half-turned, the gun still aimed at me.

I waited until she was inside the helicopter, so she felt safe. Waving my arms like I’d found something new, I raced to the helicopter and knocked at the window.

“They will kill you as soon as you send this poppy,” I yelled.

“What? Why?”

“They’re after the poppy, not the heroin. Once they have that, they don’t need you anymore. Surely they’ll kill you? I’m not sure it’s pure heroin you’ve got there or even if it’s heroin at all. Go on—taste it.”

Declan had told me pure heroin tasted like nothing. Laced or fake heroin was bitter or sweet.

CeeCee opened the bag, jabbed in her finger, dotted it on her tongue—and squirmed.

She leaned over and punched my door open. “Get in,” she spat out. “Talk.”

I tried to catch a breath. “The flower is a super poppy.” My veins jittered with nerves, but I forced my words out slowly because they were the only thing that could save me. “It might be the most precious poppy in the world.”

Her face tumbled down a sheer staircase, through a scoffing laugh, a grimace, and landing on a blank stare.

I told her about SW5 Research, the synthetic heroin company in London that we suspected was running the operation, and how this poppy likely contained the DNA to make the clean, superstrength White Cloud 1.

0. The helicopter’s floor felt like it was searing through my soles, as if the earth were on fire.

“They’ve kept you out of the loop,” I said. “But still, you know too much. Once you’ve sent this poppy—why would they let you live? You need protection, and you need me. I’ll help you find a lawyer and stay by your side.”

Gas and ash-laden smoke suffocated the helicopter, clogging my throat and swamping me with nausea. As if we were in a snowstorm, I couldn’t tell up or down. Shoving my door open, I vomited into the whiteness. I wiped my mouth, and craving something cold, I pressed my face against the window.

Her eyes narrowed. “Why the fuck would you help me?”

My journalist’s brain scrambled for a believable answer. “ The real villains are the suppliers and the buyers. They’re the ones the police and Interpol want.”

She shoved her face closer, challenging me. “You know… I took Janey’s place with those girls, learned all her nasty tricks.”

I went rigid, taken aback by the change in subject. “I wish I understood why, though.” I was talking fast, hoping CeeCee would make the decision to take off. “Why do that to me?”

“Why? Because of what you did to Snow. I couldn’t have people think it was him. And those girls… they wanted a leader.” And all along, I’d thought it was the girls. They’d been keen, but not the main offender. Shit.

“And in ōhope, days ago?” I asked. “Did you cut up my clothes?”

She laughed, and it sounded almost maniacal. This whole conversation was so weird.

“Why the hell not? Add in my fear of Snow… you’re so gullible.”

So it seems.

“And the diary?” I asked. It felt almost farcical that we were talking about how she and Sarge had pulled this off. She’s going to kill me. I tried to breathe, but that thought had punctured my lungs.

“Had to get you out of the way. When Sarge told me you had my diary, I saw the opportunity to throw it all back at you. Thought that was completely fair, given how you were still poking your ‘investigative’ stick at Snow.”

“I’m beginning to understand that.” I’ve been a fool, like Kingi suggested. What the hell could I do with any of this information now?

“So why would you help me ? I don’t want some bullshit journalist answer. ”

She shrank from me, and her face shut down. Was that a deep, sorrowful loneliness that bored through her face?

You. Me. Had she wanted me to answer her like a… friend?

I saw it now. I’d tried to outwit her, using all my techniques, knowledge, and training to show her I was stronger.

The way I’d judged people, defined them in black and white, like the clothes I’d worn every single day.

That suited my newspaper career, made for bolder headlines and a story easily summed up in the first paragraph.

The inverted triangle that put all the news at the top and made an article compelling.

But trapped in this death cage of a helicopter, on this island of festering whale flesh, suffocating heat, and sulfur that threatened to burn our insides, I felt something of what it was like to be CeeCee, back against the wall.

Judging her was easy. What she needed was empathy.

“Why would I help you , CeeCee?” I repeated her question.

“I’ve been there. God, nothing as awful as what you’ve been through, nothing like the burden of what you’ve been carrying around for two decades trying to keep your secret safe.

You were just a child and you had no one.

” I rubbed my aching chest. “But I do know what it’s like to feel totally alone.

I do know what it’s like to carry something heavy and painful around for years, and how it can tear you apart inside.

To still feel like a frightened fourteen-year-old girl who longs for someone to trust.” I turned to her.

“If you’ll let me, I’d like to be that someone, that person you trust. I want to support you, whatever happens.

” I held her gaze, but she was still cagey.

I didn’t want to lie to her that I could fix this.

All I could offer was to be by her side. “ Whatever happens, okay?”

Something changed in her face. The wary sharpness was washed away and replaced by the softening of relief.

Maybe because I’d acknowledged that it could go badly for her when she got back.

I leaned closer and held out my hand to her.

She brought her hand to touch mine and squeezed it, softly at first and then with more certainty.

BANG!

The helicopter slammed to one side, whacking both of us against the opposite window.

“CeeCee, the ash is going to flatten us.” The heroin and the poppy were on the seat beside us. I packed them into the basket under her seat. “This island is going to blow, and if we wait one minute longer, this helicopter won’t be able to fly. Let’s get off this island now. We’re going home.”