Soul Beach

excited to sleep. I need to know what I can find out about Triti. And after what Danny said, I feel important. Special. For the first time in ages – maybe even in my whole life – I might just make a difference.
    I drag the laptop onto the duvet. The bedside lamp’s off, so Dad won’t see any light under the door when he gets up for his two a.m. pace. Instead, I surf by the glow of the screen.
    Google tells me that Triti is either a Hindu name meaning a moment in time or a wish, or that it’s a disease. But when I add anorexic to it, or London schoolgirl or death, nothing comes up. I can’t give up now, especially after what Danny said. I am the only person who can . . .
    Perhaps I’m on the wrong track. Triti said herself that she was a nobody, but there’s nothing to stop Guests making up stories, even creating whole new identities for themselves when they arrive on the Beach. Dead people can lie and cheat just the same. What was it Danny said: whatever we are, we’re not angels .
    It makes my head spin. The person whose death I know most about is Danny, so I replay the news report about his funeral, to see if there could be some clue I’ve missed that might explain Soul Beach. But no: just the same sobbing class mates, and the same hushed reporter whispering respectfully, and the same giant-sized photographs of a handsome, happy Daniel Cross giving his million dollar smile straight to camera.
    But then I spot that the sidebar of related stories has a new addition.
    CROSS HEIR INVESTIGATION NEARS END: NEW VIDEO!
    I click through. It buffers for a second or so, and then I gasp.
    Danny is at a barbecue. With a girl.
    ‘ This exclusive video of Cross Enterprises heir Daniel Cross reveals for the first time the loss that devastated not only his family, but also the many young people who loved the boy predicted to be one of America’s rising business stars.’
    The reporter sounds really pleased with herself, even though the video’s been filmed on someone’s camera phone and is jerky and low res. Danny has his arm around the girl, who is chestnut-haired and petite. The same girl I saw at the funeral? That time, she was too far off to tell.
    But she doesn’t take her eyes off him once as he poses for the camera, holding up a bottle of beer and laughing.
    ‘ Kiss her, Dan, kiss her for the camera .’ The guy with the phone is calling out instructions. Danny seems to hesitate before he leans down and plants the softest, briefest kiss on the girl’s lips.
    ‘ These pictures, taken just weeks before the airplane crash that killed both eighteen-year-old Daniel and his father’s pilot, show a confident, happy young man. But was that very confidence his undoing?’
    The phone camera pans across from Danny to other undead, un-rich kids, and then the report switches to footage of the crash scene, where the wreckage is scattered across the yellow earth. The shape of the plane itself made a dent in the sand on impact, keeping its form, just about, like an upended jigsaw.
    There’s an interview with an investigator, who says that the destruction was so total that there’s little chance of ever knowing quite what happened, but that witnesses spoke of Danny taking the controls even before he took off.
    And then the reporter almost explodes with excitement. ‘ And XCT Live News has obtained another exclusive picture which appears to corroborate those reports.’
    A photograph. Danny sits in the cockpit of his father’s plane, which is bigger than I expected: the aerial shots of the wreckage gave no sense of scale. The picture is taken by someone standing outside the plane, and in the seat next to Danny, there’s a beefy man with a too-broad smile, his arm placed proprietarily on the back of the pilot’s seat.
    Something about this whole video unsettles me. It’s the same sensation I felt when this all started, when I stared and stared at Meggie’s first email but couldn’t see that the time it was sent was also her date of death . . .
    ‘ This photograph, taken on the afternoon of the ill-fated final flight, suggests Daniel had already decided to take control of his father’s airplane before it left the ground. With terrible consequences for the real pilot, himself, his family and, who knows, maybe America too?’
    The mobile phone footage repeats over her last words, which are spoken in an overly dramatic whisper that even Sahara couldn’t manage.
    Is it that photo that’s making me uncomfortable? Or