Starvation becomes a very real possibility for the weakened girls. Martha could spare them from that fate, but it would require a sacrifice she's not prepared to make. Flashbacks take us into her past, revealing the childhood trauma that's made it hard for Martha to grow up and rise to difficult challenges. Leah's paranoia about the island escalates to a fever pitch.
A group of teenage girls from different backgrounds - Fatin Jadmani, Dot Campbell, Martha Blackburn, Rachel Reid, Shelby Goodkind, Nora Reid, Toni Shalifoe, and Leah Rilke - are on an airplane when it crashes into the ocean while en route to Hawaii for the Dawn of Eve program, a young women's empowerment retreat. They survive the crash and find themselves stranded on a deserted island. As the girls work to survive as castaways and learn about each other, they are unaware that they are subjects of a social experiment; the plane crash was staged and their stranding orchestrated by Gretchen Klein, the head of the Dawn of Eve program. The girls' adventures on the island are intercut with flashback scenes about their lives before the crash, and flashforward scenes where two men claiming to be FBI agents interview the survivors after their supposed rescue.