The Last Resort(39)

An image fills the screen: an enlarged animated diagram of the earpiece tracker and the side of a head, showing the ear. The display is schematic, so they can see both inside and out, and the image rotates slowly, showing what happens as the prong of the tracker is inserted, and how it butterflies open inside, fixing it in place.

Amelia gasps. They don’t need to see what happens if someone attempts to pull the tracker off. She looks at the others. They’re silent, their mouths open in shock.

The image disappears and the aerial shot of the island returns briefly, before it pans out once more. The screen vanishes and Amelia stares at the blank space, swivels in her seat to take in the bay. So they’ve been duped. Brought here under false pretences to guinea-pig some newfangled neurology gizmos. Her first reaction is a wave of relief that her tracker couldn’t be made to latch onto – into – her ear back at the visitor centre. But in the next moment, the feeling is replaced by a tickle of unease as she wonders if maybe it was a ruse. If there’s a reason she’s not getting access to the test device.

And that tickle is joined by another deeper, creeping feeling that she knows exactly where this place is – but her memory is keeping it tightly locked away from her . . . and she has no idea why.





Tiggy

Tiggy has heard enough. She’s bored of this trip. There’s no opportunity to build her brand. No opportunity to network with anyone of actual use to her. What has she gained, aside from a humiliating reveal of a night she’d much rather forget? It’s all Giles’s fault. If he hadn’t been with those two sluts, if he hadn’t apparently bragged about it, like it was something to be proud of, then those bitches would never have known. He convinced her to come here, and now she hasn’t even got him here to get through it with. She’s sick of these people.

She’s also sick of these people asking her where Giles is.

At first, she’d played the worried girlfriend card – despite the horrible projection of his filthy threesome that she really didn’t need to see, and his protestations that she’d got it all wrong. Yeah, it was all wrong – wrong because Giles is a filthy cheating scumbag, and apart from anything else, his attractiveness as a partner is very much on the wane. His late-night drug-taking is starting to take its toll, not to mention his business starting to slide down the chute of ‘has been’. At least Tiggy is able to adapt her own brand and stay on trend. So what if those bitches say she’s ugly? She knows she’s not. She sorted them out anyway, didn’t she?

They’re just jealous.

She ignores Amelia’s calls for her to come back, to stay with the group. All that crap about tides and rocks and whatever else. She can see the way out of here, and she’ll head there herself. The aerial shot of the island hadn’t been up for long, but she’d seen it, mapped it and spotted where they’re all meant to be heading: the big house.

There was a lighthouse at the top end of the island, and the house wasn’t far from there. The others might have come to the conclusion that she was stupid, but what they don’t know is that she has both a photographic memory and an extremely good sense of direction. She excelled at geography at school, understood how to read terrain on a map and how to deal with it.

Yes, the tide is coming in soon. The position of the sun tells her what she needs to know. She’ll be out of here and on a flight back to the mainland before the rest of them have even worked out where she’s gone.

She’s pretty sure she recognises this island, from a trip long ago. Something she hasn’t thought about in years. Something she’d rather forget.

But that doesn’t matter now.

She wants to find this ‘host’. This person in charge of Timeo. She wants to know why she is here. Why her, when there are plenty of other brand experts and influencers they could have chosen? They’d told her it would be worth it. They’d told her it would clean her slate. Her ‘slate’ being that unfortunate incident at the party, about which they were disconcertingly well informed. But everyone’s seen it now, haven’t they? They know what she’s capable of, and they are 100 per cent judging her for it. So why is she really here?

She gets why Amelia is here. Of all of them, she’s the most obvious, now that they’ve been here for the best part of a day. It had seemed like a mistake. She didn’t fit in with the others at all. Her personality, her skill set. None of it was right.

But, of course, it was right. She’s the peacekeeper. She’s the stable one. She’s the confidante. And it had worked. She’d got Tiggy to admit to something she never thought she would voice. That thing with her not having the same tracker as everyone else had seemed suspicious, and it still does – but it means Amelia gets to probe in her own way. Even if their fancy tech can read their minds, having a real person teasing things out is much more effective. None of them trust the tech – but they all seem to trust Amelia.

But the tech simply can’t do what they’re claiming. Way too fantastically Black Mirror. Though how else to explain it? Where could the footage have come from? That was a very exclusive party. No cameras. Definitely no filming. And it had been shot from her point of view. She’d have had to be fitted with a helmet-cam or something.

From the Timeo presentation, it seems that the whole story had unfurled from inside herself . . . that this was Tiggy’s own memory, released via the tracker that is still pinned above her left ear. It seems too impossibly far-fetched, and yet – she knows it’s accurate. She was there. It happened exactly as it was projected.