Lies

let her drown, of course. Then Cainewould be all alone. He would raise her up out of the water. She couldn’t drown until Caine was gone, and then she might as well because, as sad as it was to realize, he was all she had.
    The two of them. Sick puppies. Twisted, arrogant, cruel and cold, both of them. How could she love someone like that? How could he? Process of elimination? Neither of them could find anyone else?
    Even the nastiest, ugliest species found mates. Flies found mates. Worms, well, who knew? Probably. The point being…
    Sudden panic! She yanked her head back up and gasped at the air. Choked, gasped, and started crying with her face in her hands, sobbing without tears because you needed something inside you to produce tears. The water running down from her hair felt like tears.
    No one noticed. No one cared.
    Caine was watching the shore of the island as it passed on their left.
    Tyrell was checking the gas gauge nervously every two seconds. “Dude, we’re on empty. I mean, we are way in the red.”
    The cliffs were sheer and impossible. The sun beat down on Diana’s head and if someone had magically appeared beside her and said, here, Diana, press this button and…oblivion…
    No. No, that’s what was amazing as she thought about it. No. She still wouldn’t. She would still choose to live. Even this life. Even though it meant spending her days and nights with herself.
    “Hey!” Penny said. “Look at that. Isn’t that, like, an opening?”
    Caine shielded his eyes and stared hard. “Tyrell. In there.”
    The boat turned lazily toward the cliff. Diana wondered if they were going to just ram the wall. Maybe. Nothing she could do about it.
    But then, she saw it, too, nothing more than a dark space in the buff, sun-blasted rock. An opening.
    “Probably just a cave,” Tyrell said.
    They weren’t far out from the cliff and it didn’t take long for them to see that what at first looked like a cave was actually a gash in the rock face. At some point a part of the cliff had collapsed in on itself, creating a narrow inlet, no more than twenty feet wide at the base, but five times that wide at the top. But the base of the inlet was choked with rock. There was no sandy beach awaiting them, no place to land the boat.
    And yet, if a boat could be landed, a person could climb up the back of that rock slide to the top of the cliff.
    The engine caught and missed several strokes, sending a shudder through the hull.
    Tyrell cursed furiously and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”
    The boat kept moving toward the gap. The engine died. The boat lost way.
    It drifted and the opening fell slowly away.
    Only twenty feet. So close.
    Then thirty feet.
    Forty.
    Caine turned cold eyes on his little crew. He stretched out his hand and Penny rose from her place in the boat. He flung her toward shore. She flew, tumbling and yelling through the air and landed with a splash just feet from the nearest of the tumbled boulders.
    No time to see whether she made it. Caine reached and threw Bug, who disappeared halfway through his flight but created a splash so close to the rocks Diana wondered if he had smashed his head.
    The boat kept drifting.
    What was Caine’s range for throwing a fifty-or seventy-five-or one-hundred-pound person with any accuracy? Diana wondered. That most be close to his limit.
    Diana’s eyes met Caine’s.
    “Protect your head,” he warned.
    Diana locked her fingers together behind her neck and squeezed her arms in tight, covering her temples.
    Diana felt a giant, invisible hand squeeze her tight and then she was hurtling through the air.
    She didn’t cry out. Not even as the rocks rushed toward her. She would hit them head on, no way would she survive. But then gravity had its way and her straight line became a down-turned arc.
    The rocks, the foamy water, all in the same blink of an eye, and the plunge. Deep and cold, the water filled her mouth with salt.
    There was a hard sharp pain as her shoulder hit rock. Shekicked her legs and her knees scraped against an almost-vertical wet slurry of gravel.
    Her clothing weighed her down, wrapped tight around her, seized her arms and legs. Diana struggled, surprised by how hard she struggled, how much she wanted to reach the bright, sunlit surface, which was a hundred million miles away.
    She came up, was caught by the soft swell, and tossed like a doll against a lichen-slicked boulder. She scrabbled with both hands as she choked. Fingernails on rock. Feet