I don’t know why that makes me laugh, but it does. “I can find a way to stay in touch with you. But I promised your dad that I was gonna get you dinner.”

His arms tighten around me. “Rory was right. He said you sounded like the perfect package, and now that I think about it—”

His voice goes husky, deepens. “Now that I think about it—”

I don’t know what happens next. Only that he feels warmer to the touch. His thumb moves across my shoulder, and something inside me sparks electric at the friction. His face is close. Then he shifts and draws nearer.

“Alon, I—”

I shove at him.

Stunned, he falls over backward, flat on his butt.

“I’m going to go get your dinner,” I say brusquely, marching toward the door. Askal lies back on the rug and huffs.

“Alon wait, I—”

But I’m already outside and into the night, the door slamming behind me.

***

The dinner table is nearly deserted when I arrive. Most of the crew has chosen to retire early, and only a few linger in the mess hall, half-heartedly picking at their plates. Straw Hat is still at his workstation, going through the film footage and trying to make sense of the last few days. Melissa is behind him, studying the screen with a puzzled frown. Hawaiian Shirt is there too, and he gives me a miserable nod when I enter.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this show is as good as dead,” he says. “I don’t care what Hemslock thinks. It’s been nothing but one disaster after another. Lamarr’s looking through what we have—maybe we can scrape together enough for an hour, two-hour feature. Try to salvage something out of this.”

“We still got cameras out there rolling,” Straw Hat says despondently. “Gonna take them down when rescue comes. Still no contact with the Leyte team, but from the reports they sent before communication went down, the storm’s due to clear tomorrow afternoon. A rescue team should be on its way as soon as it lets up. We gotta wing it till then.”

“I’m not getting paid for any of this,” Melissa says miserably. She’s been carrying around a thick piece of driftwood for protection. The others have armed themselves with similar makeshift weapons. She had also taken to carrying her mace “because assholes always turn up at the most unexpected places,” she says, and it sounds like she says this from experience.

Hawaiian Shirt glares at the camera feed trained on the corpse trees by the sinkhole. “I hate that thing,” he says irritably. “That’s the one image we were hoping would sell the rest of this. I despise it. Everything’s been trouble since that sinkhole.”

His voice drops. “I…I…”

I see what stuns him. On the screen, the corpse in the tree slowly moves and stares directly at us through the camera.

Hawaiian Shirt backs away. “Shit,” he keeps saying. “Shit, oh, shit. Oh shit.”