Oh no!
I heard him calling in the distance, but in my fear, his voice sounded distorted as if time was slowing down. “Prin-ses-sa! Prin-ses-sa! You wait!” I didn’t know if he sounded angry, desperate, or helpless, perhaps all three, and he was getting closer faster than I could flee. At some point, I stopped, breathless, glanced over my shoulder, and spotted him barely twenty yards behind me between the swamp cypresses. He was a colossus, but I could only make out his outline in shadowsthrough the fog and descending darkness, which meant he couldn’t see me well either. I gasped for air quietly and ran hunched over under the cover of several bushes back to the trail. I wanted to cry out of fear, but I was far too unsettled.
When I reached the trail, it lay like a weak, green trickle in a veil that made me almost invisible. I heard Pan calling again, but I felt safer in the thick fog. I ran on, feeling neither my pounding heart nor the branches scratching my cheeks, but a completely different, deep pain. Pan had lied to me! He had deceived us all. He had thrown me overboard! And he was definitely the one who had passed on the coordinates.
At some point, I saw our hut behind the dark trunks, which appeared as if it was floating in the air because of the ground fog. Nathan was emerging from the clouds of the floating forest with Troy and Icarus by his side.Oh God! Oh thank God!
“Nathan!” I yelled as loudly as I could, and luckily, he turned in my direction even if he hadn’t seen me yet. “Nathan! Help!”
Even from a distance, I saw his body tensing at my scream. “Willa?” He peered blindly into the veil of fog while I practically flew the last few yards. At the men’s workshop, I fell to my knees, unable to breathe calmly.
Nathan was by my side immediately and pulled me up by my arms, but he had to hold me so that I wouldn’t topple over. “Will, what’s wrong?” His concern outweighed his anger about the stolen phone.
“Pan,” I gasped. “He had the camphor ointment.”
I wanted to tell him what had happened when Pan appeared a few yards away, straight out of the forest. His dark Medusa curls snaked around his face and horror filled his eyes like black lights. The sight of him made my heart heavy.
“I no ointment!” he gasped. “You must believe.”
Nathan exchanged a look with Troy and Icarus. “But the tube disappeared and we searched for it everywhere onthe Agamemnon!” he said confused. He didn’t understand immediately.
“Because Pan had it the whole time.” Bitterness lay on my tongue.
“I don’t believe that! That can’t be!” Nathan stared at Pan as his expression changed from incomprehension to confusion. “Kjertan had it?You?”
“It was in the grass after I bumped into him.” Now tears stung my eyes. Pan, of all people, who had always seemed so caring. Had he been watching me lately just to drown me in the swamp one day? Had he been imagining how he would kill me while pretending to be in love with me?
“Oh my God…” I heard Troy say behind me. “And I always suspected Stanton. When I think about everything I said to him…”
In the silence that followed, all that could be heard was Pan’s and my labored breathing. Pan simply stood there with his shoulders sagging without saying a word. He just stared at me with that dismay in his eyes that made me doubt his guilt despite everything.
“Did you have the ointment, Kjertan?” Nathan tried to speak calmly, but there was a threatening tremor in his voice. He had risen to his full height, but he was still smaller than Pan. By a lot.
Pan shook his head. “I not know about ointment. I see it for first time today.” He held up the tube so the others could see it, but then he threw it away as if it contained a poisonous essence.
“He...he must have put it in his pocket on the Agamemnon and had it with him when we jumped overboard,” I stammered.
“Then why did he carry it around and not throw it away?” Nathan wiped his face, looking completely at a loss. “Kjertan was also the one who said he heard you scream. Itcouldn’thave been him.”
“Maybe the ointment was some kind of trophy,” Troy said thoughtfully. “You often hear that. Murderers keep something from their victims or something of their plan. Don’t you think it’s strange that he was the only one who heard Willa?”
Nathan glanced from me to Pan, then at Icarus, and finally at Troy. His face was ashen and he looked years older.
“What would be better at diverting suspicion from you than saying you heard screams? Admit it, Nathan… You suspected all of us at one point, just not him!”
Nathan pressed his lips together, refraining from nodding, but I saw that Troy had hit the nail on the head.
“I nothing do with it. I only look for Willa. I worried because away, alone, and in dark.”
Troy looked as if a huge light had just dawned on him. “Back on the Agamemnon, you didn’t expect Nathan to free Willa from the net quickly enough…you thought she would drown anyway.”
Pan stared at Troy in disbelief. “I not traitor, Noah. I not killer. I rather die than harm Willa.”
“Who says Stanton didn’t lose the ointment when we were combing through everything here,” Icarus interjected, who had been silent the whole time. “Perhaps it was him after all.” He was standing a little way off next to a makeshift scaffold on which the men were working on driftwood. Again, everyone was silent and it seemed as if the fog was getting thicker every second. I had to admit that it sounded plausible even if I didn’t truly believe it. Sparta had simply been too weak.And in the end, too nice, my inner voice added.
Nathan looked at me briefly before turning back to Icarus. “Perhaps,” he then said. “Even though I hate to speak ill of the dead, one thing is certain for me now: whoever threw Willa overboard back then must have also passed the coordinates on to Isaac. At first, he wanted to take care of her himself becausehe thought the plan had failed, and when that didn’t work, he wanted to leave her to Isaac to take care of.”
“That is not necessarily the case,” Icarus pointed out, and his thin face took on a brooding expression. “Someone could have wanted to kill her out of pure hatred and someone like Alvin or Owen gave away the coordinates.”
