She snorted. “You’d know if there was competition.”
A knowing half-smile. “Stop distracting me, Firecracker.”
He straightened, serious again, focus coiling through his frame. “Watermaker’s functional, circulating into the reservoirs now. That’ll give us time—some, anyway—but we still can’t restore full pressure to the resort until the pipe is repaired,” he said, back in motion already, hands darting over his tablet. “It’s only patched, of course. It will take hours to fix it all properly.”
He glared at the door. “Where the hell are my supplies?”
“I haven’t heard from anyone, including Andy.” Lena braced herself for the thunderclap. Her voice sounded small in the cramped, humid room, the air saturated with burnt plastic and the dull minerality of groundwater. “No one is answering the phone in Maintenance.”
David didn’t explode so much as detonate. His jaw snapped rigid, lips thin, and his fingers curled around his phone with white-knuckled determination. His shoulders, already tense with the weight of being the only person standing between the resort and a full-blown logistical disaster, seemed to arch and lock.
He thumbed a contact with clipped intensity and pressed the phone to his ear as he paced in short, agitated strides. A full minute passed—long enough for Lena to note every beat of her pulse.
David swore, soft yet vicious, and hung up before stabbing another number. “Zach, anything?”
Lena edged closer, alert and anxious, wishing he’d put it on speaker. He tilted his head fractionally as he listened, eyes narrowed like he could will better answers from thin air.
“Thanks. We may have an issue,” he said, voice grim, muscles bunching under the damp fabric of his shirt. Not that she noticed. “No one from Maintenance is here. Andy isn’t answering his phone. More immediately, I need PVC pipe to replace the broken sections before we can restore water pressure to the resort. Right now, only one line is intact, so there is very limited access. The good news—if we can call it that—is that the watermaker is back online. It’s refilling the tanks now.”
His voice faltered on the word 'refilling.' Not from weakness, of course not, but from the sheer monumental effort of keeping his frustration in. Lena’s stomach clenched. She couldn’t remember him ever looking this close to burnout.
He listened again, nodding at whatever Zach was saying. Then, unexpectedly—ridiculously—a small laugh broke from David’s throat, dry and tired and even a little amazed. He ended the call and turned toward her.
“Zach’s on it. He’s going full bloodhound on the maintenance crew and the supplies, so we have a few minutes to grab some food.”
Lena blinked, disoriented by the sudden switch, like someone had flipped a page in a book she was still reading. “Food?”
“Yes,” he said with finality, already striding toward her golf cart like it might vanish if they didn’t reach it fast enough. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday, and you,” he shot her a glance, a shadow of his usual sardonic humor returning to his voice, “look one stiff wind away from passing out.”
Lena slid behind the wheel. The moment he dropped into the passenger seat, his whole body slackened with exhaustion. He slumped back and closed his eyes, sweat glistening on his throatand forearms, his damp shirt clinging to the hard lines of his torso.
“I’m beat,” he muttered, voice raspy but lighter, like some invisible hand unclasped from around his ribs. “I hate working in those sheds. They’re like saunas on the best of days. Today, it felt like someone stuffed a server rack into a volcano.”
Lena started the cart and steered it toward the cafeteria. Her hands quivered on the wheel; her mind swirled. Systems failing. Staff missing. Sabotage. Yet amidst everything, they still had to remember to breathe, to drink, to eat.
The wind stirred against her face as she picked up speed, carrying the scent of baked earth and salt-drenched foliage. David tipped his head back on the cushion, eyes still closed, face angled to the sky like the sun held an answer he couldn’t code his way into.
And somewhere deep within her, Lena felt it too: a fragile, tense thread holding everything together. Not steel. Not certainty. Only the grit of exhausted people who refused to let this place be torn apart.
Lena’s fingers tightened on the golf cart’s steering wheel as her gaze snagged on the sleek outline of a black SUV beyond the curve in the path. It was parked at an angle, barely visible in the shadows of the banyan trees. The windows were pitch-black, the kind that didn’t reflect anything but absorbed the light.
Goosebumps prickled along her arms regardless of the soupy heat pressing on her skin. She looked again, but saw nothing out of place.
“David,” she said, tightening her grip. Her voice came out quieter than intended, scarcely above the crunch of tires on the gravel. Her heart pounded unevenly, like it remembered how easily it could break.
“Hmm?” He was still slumped in the seat, eyes shut, the wear of the morning honed his sharp edges. Sweat beaded onhis temples, his shirt clung across his chest, but he hadn’t once complained.
“There was a car,” she forced a lightness into her voice. “Near that clump of palms. Black SUV. Tinted windows. Just… sitting there. But now it’s gone.”
David sat up straight, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Zach’s guys, maybe? They could’ve rotated checkpoints.”
“Maybe,” Lena said, doubt clear in her voice as the cart rounded the bend—nothing there now but vague tire impressions already softening in the moist earth. Her skin itched like it always did when something wasn’t right, her instincts whispering from the back of her skull.
But Zach’s people didn’t leave tracks. Not visible ones. And resort security vehicles displayed window tags and identifiers. This one was sleek, anonymous.
Lena swallowed hard. “It felt like they were watching.”
David didn’t answer right away, but she saw him pull out his tablet with renewed intensity, lips clamped shut as he opened a security overlay. The shadows of the trees flickered across his face as they drove under the canopy, light breaking here and there like shattered glass.
