When the Sri Lankan Coast Guard arrived at the island in response to the distress call Marty had made from the Oannes, they established a crime scene around the bodies of Pip and the two merfolk, and then whisked Marty and Elsa into custody aboard their two-hundred-plus-foot cutter. Senior officers interrogated them for an hour before they were flown by helicopter to a navy base in Tangalla, a large town on the southern coast of the country. They were held in separate rooms and grilled once again by a slew of high-ranking military officials. This continued throughout the night, causing Marty to object that the circumstances of the detainment felt more like a de facto arrest, and if they were going to charge him with a crime, charge him. When they didn’t do so by noon the following day, he refused to cooperate any further without an attorney present. An hour later they released both he and Elsa on the provision that they hand over their passports to the police when they returned to Colombo, and that they would not attempt to leave the country for the foreseeable future.

Marty spent the next two days organizing to have the Oannes piloted back to Colombo, while also trying to find out where Rad and Jacky were being held, as neither of them were answering their phones. Frustratingly, all the people he spoke with insisted they didn’t know anything about their whereabouts. Then he received a call from a nurse at a Colombo hospital who informed him that Rad had been admitted into the ER with significant orthopedic injuries. When he arrived at the hospital, he wasn’t permitted to see her, as she was undergoing emergency surgery. Twelve hours later the head surgeon explained to him where and how she had been discovered on Demon Island, he’d inserted rods into both her tibias, as well as a combination of screws and pins in the bones of her feet and ankles…and he wasn’t sure whether she would walk again.

Marty visited her in the ICU the next morning. She was awake but barely responsive due to whatever concoction of drugs she was being fed through the IV drip. Aside from the injuries to her legs, which were bandaged and stabilized in splints, she was missing most of her visible teeth. He had her transferred to a private room on an upper floor, and he spent every day at her side while she recovered.