FIFTEEN

Chloe had told me that the graveyard lay just beyond the runway of the island’s single, derelict airport. I made my way there on foot, passing the police station where Greenbrooke had interrogated me and Nadia and Rozalia, and saw that same fractured moon hanging low in the sky. I wondered if the island had any boats capable of carrying me all the way to the Chilean coast a few thousand kilometres to the east, and what I might find there, and if any of the other Pathfinders had ever tried.

I kept on past the comms tower, stepping over discarded concrete blocks from some unfinished building project, tangled weeds underfoot and the crickets singing loud enough to drown out my thoughts. Eventually I came to a small plot of land surrounded by a low railing, within which stood a small clapboard building with a rusted iron cross mounted above its entrance.

The plot had perhaps a couple of dozen graves in all. The dedications on every headstone but one were written in Spanish. Most looked old, which meant my predecessor’s was easy to find, since it was clearly much more recent than any of the rest.

I stared down at it for a while before turning away, feeling somehow weightless, as if I could drift away on the steady breeze coming in from the ocean. I knew that seeing your own grave was not necessarily a unique experience. People who went missing, returning long after they had been presumed deceased, would certainly have had that experience, as would those who successfully faked their own deaths. Didn’t everybody wonder what it would be like to attend their own funeral?

But I knew none of them had ever been faced with the knowledge that a body identical to their own lay within that grave.

I decided it was an overrated experience and returned home with every intention of getting seriously drunk.

The first time my doorbell rang, I had collapsed half off the couch in my living room. The second time it rang, I realized I wasn’t hearing things. By the third time, I was hunched over the toilet bowl, vomiting up my breakfast and the half-bottle of home-made whisky I’d worked my way through following my return from the graveyard.

I finally made it to the door on the fourth attempt and found Yuichi standing there.

‘You, uh . . . you don’t look so good,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ I croaked, crushing my eyes shut against the light.

‘Something’s up,’ he said. ‘Kip Mayer asked me to round up all the Pathfinders currently on the island and get us all to the Hotel du Mauna Loa by eight this evening. He’s got something to say.’

I swallowed hard. ‘About what?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think it has to do with Nadia.’