'Speaking of being careful,' said Joe, 'we should turn off the environmental controls. Our power supply isn't going to recharge anytime soon.'
'I don't know,' said Rick. 'Maybe we should leave them on a bit longer.'
'Well, I know,' replied Joe. 'We'll need that power. Look, I'm okay now.' On unsteady feet, he made his way to the control panel and turned off the air-conditioning. Then he returned to the rear of the plane.
'What do we do now?'
'Rest,' said Rick.
'We could eat,' said Con, trying not to sound too ea-ger.
Joe cracked a genuine smile. 'Leave it to Con to think of food.'
'It's a good idea,' said Rick. He searched though the pile of supplies and found three leftover breakfast rolls and handed them out.
'Best rolls in the world,' said Joe, trying to sound lighthearted.
'Only rolls in the world,' said Rick.
Con looked at the cinnamon roll in her hand and sa-vored its aroma. She felt so hungry that it hurt, but she forced herself to eat slowly. The roll only whetted her appetite. When she was done, she noticed Joe was watch-ing her.
'I'm not very hungry,' he lied. 'Would you like to finish mine?'
'I couldn't,' said Con.
'Sure you could,' said Joe, forcing his half-eaten roll into Con's hand. 'It shouldn't go to waste.'
'You should save it for later,' she protested.
'And have it go stale?' said Joe. 'What would Pandit say?' Con gave in to Joe's coaxing and her hunger. She bit into the roll as tears welled in her eyes. She swallowed with difficulty. 'Thanks, Joe.'
PANDIT AND SARA searched for James. Roaming the is-land, they discovered that the earthquake and the waves had transformed it. The grove of trees was completely erased, replaced by an expanse of wet sand littered with dead and dying sea creatures. A battered mosasaur lay on the rock pile in front of the stone living quarters. It was huge and frightening even in death. The dining pavilion was gone without a trace, as was the staff compound. The shoreline had changed also. In some places, the beaches had disappeared; in others, they were larger. The pro-tected beach had lost some of its sand and extended far-ther inland. Pandit wondered if the device that protected it still functioned. They found no sign of James. He had utterly vanished.
The mounds of sand and fallen rock altered the look of everything, so Pandit could not be sure if the structure of the island was different. Still, he thought it might be so. The stone rooms seemed more elevated than they were before. Strangely, they were the one feature of the island that had changed the least. Whether by pure luck or amazing engineering, they had survived virtually in-tact. In fact, they appeared to have repaired themselves.
When he and Sara returned to Green's former quarters, the burst pipe no longer sprayed water, and the plumbing and lights functioned as before.
That was their sole piece of good fortune, aside from their survival. All the supplies and the contents of all the rooms were gone. In their entire search, all they had found was a shattered dresser and a single shoe that had belonged to Con. The sea had washed away much of the plaster in the storerooms, revealing that all three quarters had doorways that led deeper into the cliff. Featureless silvery panels solidly sealed all the doorways. Whatever lay behind them was beyond their reach.
Throughout the search for James, Sara's apprehension grew as it became apparent their situation was desperate. There were few material resources to fall back on. She had gone from being the future wife of a billionaire to a woman whose sole possession was a tattered dress. It was a fall from fortune almost too drastic to comprehend. She struggled to get a grasp of her new reality.
The center of that reality was Pandit. When she had kissed him, it had been purely impulse. That morning, he had been a nobody. His attraction to her had been amus-ing and pathetic. He was plump, and his unfashionable face was not particularly handsome, even by natural stan-dards. She had thought that his intense dark eyes—and his cooking—were his only good features.
Now, Pandit was the last man on the world. As they roamed the island, Sara considered her impulsive kiss. She still wondered about its consequences.
