Page 144 of The Island

Even in that initial deal he’d made, he’d wanted to take Olivia with him and leave Heather with Owen. Olivia was his favorite. If things had gone wrong, at least he would have had her. Is that what he’d been thinking? What dad would think a thing like that?

Tom would.

She knew that now.

All three of them were crying.

Heather hugged Owen as hard as she could. And Olivia hugged him too. They sat there in the grass for fifteen minutes, hugging and crying.

They had a conversation without saying anything.

Heather knew what she had to do.

She wiped their tears and held their hands. She asked them if they were sure.

They were just kids, but they were sure.

They didn’t trust him. They did trust her.

“Go back to the cave. I don’t like any of this,” Heather said.

She sent them off and when they were gone, she crawled through the long grass until she was near the place where the bushfire had burned itself out. A great scorched area of the land, and in the middle of it a charcoal-black snow gum tree. A tree that had evolved with the fire over millions of years and that looked dead but whose slow patient heart was beating still.

She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and saw Tom sitting in a wicker chair underneath a branch in the shade. There was an IV in his arm connected to a bag of saline hanging on a jerry-rigged IV pole.

He had a walkie-talkie in his hand.

But there was something not quite…

He was pale and looked dead, but when she studied him through the binoculars, she saw that he was blinking.

He was alive. It was really him. No Weekend at Bernie’s trickery from the O’Neill clan.

But something was wrong.

She scanned the horizon. All around the tree, the vegetation had been torched, leaving only red dirt. There didn’t seem to be anywhere for the O’Neills to hide, but still, she approached cautiously, on all fours, sniffing the air like a lioness as she reached the edge of the grass.

Heather picked up her walkie-talkie. “Tom, are you there alone?” she whispered.

All she heard back was static.

She crawled closer and tried again. “Tom?”

She tried all the channels and looked again through the binoculars. He was breathing. And those eyes seemed alert enough.

It was just a hundred yards of burned grass from here to Tom.

The O’Neills had kept their word. They were nowhere to be seen.

She had one bullet left.

She quietly loaded a .303 round into the rifle and picked up the walkie-talkie again. “Tom?”

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

“Tom?”

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.