Hours later…

You lie on the freezing stone floor, shivering.

After Justin and ****-Soo finished injecting you, they cut you down from the cage. ****-Soo had looked particularly **** to let you down, but Justin’s words still echo in your ears.

‘By all means, make your way back to the resort, if you can. And please do tell Emma everything that happened tonight. She’ll never believe you, and I’m very much looking forward to watching her heart break. Again.’

The cut on your leg is still leaking crimson into the floor, and you’d been too weak and disoriented by the time they dropped you on the floor to do much more than kick out at them ineffectually. With a contemptuous look, ****-Soo had heaved up a stone slab from the ground, and they’d both vanished down a pitch-black hole into the depths of the mountain.

A smuggler’s tunnel. You breathe hard, painfully, the room swimming in front of your eyes. Cold sweat runs down your back, and it’s a struggle not to pass out.

No.

You **** your eyes open. As long as you’re thinking, as long as you’re lucid, there’s still a chance. And thinking keeps you awake, no matter how much it hurts – so you search your exhausted brain, trying to remember anything and everything you know about this place.

There’s not much. Most of what you remember comes from the museum – centuries ago, fugitive slaves came ashore at Runaway Beach, then dug tunnels up to the plantations so they could help their families escape. A record number of slaves were rescued before the tunnels were exposed; but later, much later, the rocky passages were rediscovered by moonshiners and smugglers operating out of the jungle. They repaired the tunnels, and extended them – and now there’s a whole network of underground passageways criss-crossing the island.

Many are caved in, some have collapsed altogether and all of them are strictly off-limits, declared unsafe for tourists by the island’s governor. But that hasn’t stopped ****-Soo and Justin.

The slab lies discarded where they left it – which is a good thing, since in your current state, you’re not sure you could lift it. You crawl painfully over to the hole, and look down.

It’s a short drop to a sandy pit, which slopes down sharply into darkness. Probably this one heads straight to the beach; if it was dug underneath a sugar mill, chances are it’s one of the original escape tunnels.

But you’re losing blood fast, and you’ll never make it if you don’t do something about your wound.

You tear off your shirt, ripping a long strip and rolling it up so you’ll have something to bite down on. Then you tear off another strip to bandage your leg, eyes burning with tears as you yank the makeshift dressing round a cut that’s definitely going to need stitches. The knots have to be tight, and you very nearly pass out with each yank of the material.

What feels like half an hour later, the room stops swaying long enough for you to tentatively hoist yourself over the entrance to the tunnel, and drop down inside.