Chapter 1: Blood in the Sand
The world came back in pieces.
First, a high, thin ringing, like a television tuned to a dead channel, wedged deep in both ears. Then, a dull, throbbing ache in his left arm, sharpening when he tried to move it. The taste of copper and salt filled his mouth. He swallowed, and it was worse.
Jamie Walker opened his eyes to a blinding, white-hot sky.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, sand gritting under his palms. His glasses were gone. The world beyond ten feet was a smeared watercolor—vivid blobs of color against blinding white and blue. He blinked, and the shapes resolved, slowly, into a nightmare.
A stretch of pristine, pale sand. Turquoise water so bright it hurt to look at. And strewn across the transition between them, a grotesque scattering of debris. A suitcase, burst open, spewing clothes like colorful entrails. A seat cushion, bobbing in the gentle surf. A jagged piece of silver metal, half-buried.
People. Shapes that were people.
Some were moving, crawling, sitting with their heads in their hands. Others weren’t moving at all. The ringing in his ears began to recede, replaced by a low moan that seemed to come from the air itself, a chorus of pain and confusion. He remembered the weightless lurch, the cabin lights flickering, the oxygen masks swinging like drunken pendulums. He remembered thinking, This isn’t happening on a Tuesday.
He’d been boarding a plane. To the Bahamas. A desperate, self-prescribed escape from the cratered remains of his life in Chicago. He had a paperback in his carry-on. He’d been worrying about a zoning permit.
A wet, choking sound snapped his head to the left.
About twenty feet away, a man in a torn polo shirt was writhing on the sand, his hands clutching at his thigh. Between his fingers, a dark, impossible red pulsed out in rhythmic gushes, staining the sand black.
Standing over him, her own hands already slick and crimson, was a woman. Her dark hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat and something else. She’d stripped off her light jacket, revealing medical scrubs underneath, and was using the fabric to press down hard on the man’s leg. Her movements were swift, precise, utterly focused.
“Look at me,” she commanded, her voice cutting through the low moans. It wasn’t loud, but it was absolute. “Look at my face. What’s your name?”
The man just screamed, a raw, animal sound.
“Your name!” she barked.
“Eric,” he gasped.
“Okay, Eric. You’re going to be okay. But you have to help me. Keep your hands right here. Push. Like this.” She guided his trembling hands over the wad of fabric. “Don’t let up. You let up, you die. You understand me? Nod if you understand.”
Eric nodded, his eyes wide with terror, his own blood coating his arms.
Jamie found himself on his feet, staggering toward them. His body felt loose, unbolted. He had a cut on his forehead, the blood trickling into his eyebrow. His left wrist screamed when he put weight on it. The world tilted slightly, a persistent, dizzying sway.
The woman—the doctor—glanced up as his shadow fell over them. Her eyes were the color of dark earth, sharp and assessing. She took in his unsteady stance, the blood on his face, in a fraction of a second.
“Are you with me?” she asked. “Conscious? Concussed?”
“I’m… here,” Jamie managed. His own voice sounded foreign.
“Good. Hold this.” She grabbed his hand and planted it over Eric’s, on the sodden fabric. The heat and the wetness of it, the feel of the man’s frantic pulse under his palm, sent a jolt of nausea through him. “Push down. Hard. Harder than that. Your strength is the only thing between him and bleeding out in paradise.”
Jamie leaned into it, his vision swimming for a second. The metallic scent of blood was overwhelming.
The doctor—Izzy, he’d heard her snap her name at someone—was already ripping the sleeve off her own scrubs top with a violent tug. She fashioned a crude, tight tourniquet above the wound using the sleeve and a broken piece of plastic from a seatback. Her hands never stopped moving.
“You’re an architect,” she said, not looking at him. It wasn’t a question.
“How…?”
“Your hands. The watch. The way you’re looking at the debris field like you’re calculating load-bearing stress.” She cinched the tourniquet tight. Eric whimpered. “I need a splint. Something straight and rigid. About two feet long.”
Jamie scanned the smeared landscape. His architect’s brain, the part that wasn’t reeling, automatically filtered the chaos. “Aluminum strut. From the luggage bin. Over there.”
“Get it.”
He moved, his body protesting. The sand sucked at his shoes. He retrieved the twisted piece of metal, forcing it straight against a rock. When he handed it to her, their fingers brushed. Hers were steady. His were not.
He went back to putting pressure on Eric’s leg, watching as she worked. The screaming had subsided into ragged sobs. Other survivors were gravitating toward the spot, drawn by the aura of competence. A woman with a broken arm cradled against her chest. A dazed teenager clutching a stuffed animal.
Izzy finished securing the splint with strips of torn fabric from a floral dress found in the burst suitcase. She sat back on her heels, finally taking a full breath. Her scrubs were a horror show of red.
“We need to get him out of the sun,” she said, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist. “We need to find water. And we need to account for everyone. The living first.”
She stood, and Jamie finally got a good look at her. She was shorter than him, compact, with a fierce energy that seemed to vibrate the air around her. Exhaustion was already etching lines beside her eyes, but the eyes themselves were unyielding.
“Jamie,” he said.
“Izzy.”
“I know.”
She gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod. “Welcome to the committee, Jamie. First order of business: we’re not on the vacation itinerary anymore.”
A brittle laugh escaped him. It sounded crazy.
He helped move Eric into the shade of a large piece of fuselage, its torn edges gleaming in the sun. Others followed, the less injured helping the more injured. A strange, quiet efficiency descended, punctuated by cries of pain and murmured reassurances. A man in a pilot’s uniform, his arm clearly broken, began directing people to gather luggage, any intact containers, anything that could hold water.
Izzy moved from person to person, triaging with a terrifying calm. “You’ll live. Keep that arm elevated.” “This needs cleaning. Find any first-aid kits, alcohol, anything.” “Sit down. You’re in shock.”
Jamie found himself organizing. It was what his brain did. He gathered a cluster of able-bodied survivors. “We need to make a line. From the water’s edge to the treeline. Pass anything useful back. Sealed bottles, luggage, clothing, anything metal or plastic.”
People listened. They were desperate for instruction.
As the sun climbed higher, the initial shock began to harden into a grim reality. They built a rough camp in the shade of the palm trees at the edge of the beach, a scattering of the less wounded. A small pyramid of salvaged bottled water and energy bars grew. A pile of luggage. A heap of torn fabric for bandages.
No one had a working phone. No signal. The pilot said the transponder was gone, along with most of the front of the plane, which was somewhere out in the reef. No one knew if a mayday had been sent. No one knew how long they’d be there.
Jamie sat on a toppled suitcase, the adrenaline leaching away, leaving the full, aching weight of his body and the persistent sway in his head. He watched Izzy clean a gash on a little girl’s knee, her voice softening to something gentle. He looked at the collection of strangers—twenty-three of them, they’d counted—huddled together on the sand.
He remembered the last thing he’d worried about before everything went dark: a misplaced decimal point on a structural schematic. It seemed obscenely funny now. The schematic in front of him was written in blood on sand, and he was suddenly, terribly, part of its construction.