“Anyone holding on to hard feelings toward AJ after last night?” Phil asked. Just like yesterday, he was wearing shorts that went past his knees and well-worn Birkenstocks. I tried to picture Murch trading in his football jersey for a blue Hawaiian shirt, a visual so out there that I actually shook my head to clear it.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Maren said. She was holding a fistful of ocean gunk, and Phil stepped back, as if afraid she might toss it at him.
I wondered what it would be like not to care at all about what anyone else thought. Every time I had a conversation with someone I played it over and over in my head and wondered if it would have been better to say something a different way, or not to have said anything at all. What was it like to do things without ever thinking twice? Maren stuck out, but she didn’t care. She didn’t overthink everything. I wondered: if I didn’t keep things in, and instead simply said them, would I still have this incredibly destructive need to correct things? Maybe not. Maybe getting the words out, no matter how inelegantly, was the important part.
Phil smiled. “A team code of silence. I like it. Well, good news. It’s a relationship-building day today. Team bonding, and all that. We’ll fit in some more confessionals, but other than that, the day is yours to do what you want.”
“Search for treasure, obviously.” AJ threw his last chunk of seaweed into the ocean and wiped his hands on his shorts. “You can find me north of the first marker, at the base of Black Rock.”
That was annoying. I knew we were going to be filmed, so the crew would know soon enough where we were going, but did AJ have to announce it so casually? And what was with saying me instead of us? Hadn’t we just formed a partnership?
“Go for it,” Phil told him. “And don’t forget, there are two protection coins hidden somewhere on the island. Maybe you’ll find one to turn in at a future Council for immunity.”
“Sure. Or maybe I’ll find a hundred million dollars’ worth of Incan gold.”
“And who wouldn’t want an extra hundred mil?” Maren said. She was definitely circling something, I could feel it.
“Right, Riley?”
And there it was.
“You won’t be able to keep the treasure,” Phil interrupted. “You know that, right? You all signed a form signing over the rights of your discovery to the show. You’ll receive money instead as a prize—”
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Maren said, curtly cutting him off. And then to me, “I’m still wondering why you were here two years ago. You’re a treasure hunter or something?”
“Not me. My dad. I came for the ride.”
“Ladies, come on,” AJ said. “Whatever this is, drop it. There’s gold out there, waiting to be found. Phil, I’m going to need some stuff. Weren’t you telling us about some supplies stored somewhere? I want some backpacks for the team.”
Phil walked off with AJ, but the camera guy stayed.
“I’m still trying to figure out why you were here.” Maren was obviously not going to let this drop. “Your parents said hey, let’s go on a vacation to an island where people are searching for treasure? And then you just happened to conveniently drop in two weeks before that guy died?”
“I told you, my father likes to get involved in treasure hunts. He’s done some deep-sea ship salvage, too. That’s how he met Miles. My father financed the one that found the Emily Bligh. Did you hear about that one maybe thirty years ago, off the coast of Miami? After they brought that ship up, Miles invited him to partner on his next dig and it grew from there.”
“Your dad ‘gets involved.’ He’s ‘done’ some ship salvage.” Maren used air quotes as she repeated my words. “Is that a fancy way of saying he pays for those things?”
“What does it matter?” I asked defensively.
“I’m curious why you’re here, that’s all. If you win, so what? You don’t need the money. For some of us, probably most of us, this is really important. It matters a lot. It might mean the difference between getting into college or even being able to pay for it.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Sit at home and never do anything?”
“Works for me. At least you wouldn’t be here instead of someone else who needs to be.”
I scowled at her. “Maybe I need to be here, too. There are other reasons besides money.”
“Not good ones.”
I hadn’t noticed Sean behind me until he cleared his throat. I’d thought he’d gone off with the other three players on our team.
“So, not to interrupt, but . . . you guys have obviously formed a group here,” Sean said. “Do I have to search for treasure to be in it? Or can I just vote with you? It turns out I’m not so into this whole treasure hunt thing, and since it’s optional, I was going to film some tricks on the beach instead. Deb told me I could use some of the pro camera shots for my site, but if you guys want me to come . . .”
“Yeah we do, because who’s to say you won’t turn on us and form a partnership with someone else while we’re gone?” Maren asked.
“Oh, hey, no. I want to stick around as long as possible and you guys seem like the only ones with any real clue what’s going on here. London seems cool, but Lucas is a little too full of himself. Maddie seems like a sweet kid but she’s definitely the kind of girl who posts too many times a day, you know what I’m saying?”
“Fine,” Maren said. “Scram. Just get ready to vote the way we tell you.”
She didn’t get a chance to start in on me again because Porter had joined us. Our little square of newly cleared sand was turning into a real hub of activity this morning.
“Nice,” he said, evaluating our disagreement with a lazy, knowing smile. “Is that how you’re running your team over here?”
“Who says I’m running anything?” Maren snapped.
“Whatever. Do you have any of my stuff from the helicopter?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe . . . ?” he looked at her expectantly.
“You’ll know when you have something to offer me in exchange.”
“We’re on different teams, so I don’t see how—”
“You’ll think of something.”
Porter frowned. “Like a sex trade or something?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
Porter’s expression turned to something more arrogant. His shorts were yellow today, and he had the same type of button-down shirt as before, but this one was white. He could have walked straight out of that My dad’s a lawyer meme.
“Oh, are girls more your thing?” he asked Maren.
“Literally anyone is more my thing, but more importantly, you’re proving stupider by the second. How about I give you the afternoon to think about a game strategy that could benefit me enough to consider your proposal, ’kay? Now run along and go do your lax bro thing with your lax bro friends. Bye.”
Porter didn’t move for a few seconds. He wasn’t used to being turned down flat like that, I could tell. I almost felt sorry for him. A hurt look flashed across his face, quickly, barely noticeable and for a second he looked like a little boy. But then he ruined it.
“Yup. Definitely a lesbian.”
Ugh. I’d been waffling on him, but I’d been right the first time: jerk. That realization made it easier not to notice the way his hair swept perfectly across his forehead, a little bit tousled, not overly styled.
“That’s not even an insult,” I said. “Is that the best you can come up with?”
Porter looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten I was there, and if I was feeling congratulatory, he looked even more pained than he had before. He liked to be liked. I recognized that quality in him after isolating it in myself.
“Ohhhhh, I forgot. You said you’re from Frisco, right? Lots of L-G-B-T people there.” He drew out the letters. Interesting that he was using that term. Maybe he wasn’t so igno
rant after all. His use of “Frisco” was another matter.
“You forgot the Q. LGBTQ. And it’s not Frisco.”
“Sure it is.”
“Um, no, it’s really not.”
Now he was back to his usual smiling self. “But everyone I know calls it Frisco.”
“Hmmm. How many of those everyones are actually from San Francisco?”
“What do you call it, then? San Fran?”
I shuddered. “God, no. That’s only slightly better. SF, mostly. Or, you know, its actual name.”
“Eh, that’s too long. Frisco sounds much better.”
Maren grunted in disgust, as if offended by the conversation. She hadn’t circled back to start in on me about my father again, so hopefully that meant she was dropping it, at least for a little while. Or maybe it was because AJ came back with Phil before she got a chance.
“All right, kids,” AJ said, dumping a pile of backpacks and hats and random gear on the sand. “Let’s do this. Sign out your phones and let’s go.”
“Hold on,” Phil said, lifting his walkie. “We’re sending a different camera with you. One of the big ones.” He assigned someone named Harry to cover us, who replied with “flying in.” I was starting to understand the filming language. I wondered if the other guy here, the one who’d been filming us all along, was offended at getting replaced or if they were assigned to do different types of filming. Maybe this guy wasn’t allowed off camp grounds.
“Smart idea,” AJ agreed. “Because we’re the only action worth watching.”
“I can’t believe you actually think you have a shot at finding the gold,” Porter said. “No offense, but if the pros haven’t been able to find it for four hundred years, what makes you so sure you’ll be able to do it?”
“What makes you so sure I’m not a pro?” AJ shot back.
“Because you’re twelve?”
“I’m seventeen and three-quarters, you jerk.”
“Take it easy,” Phil said. “Why don’t you guys get going, but make sure to come back for lunch.”
“We’re good,” AJ said. He held up his backpack. “We’ve got snacks and tons of water. We’ll come back later.”
“Let me rephrase. Union rules say we need to rotate the camera guys on and off duty, so you need to come back to pick up a different camera. And maybe while you’re here, you’ll get invited to throw a football around, do some team bonding. Got it?”
AJ hiked the backpack over both shoulders and snapped its belt around his waist. “Do I look like a guy who’s going to get invited to toss a football around?”
Phil sighed. “Fair point.”
Harry arrived, and Phil waved us off. “Go on then. Get lucky.”
12
The three of us walked from camp into the woods to the first marker, keeping an eye out for any of the other players to make sure we weren’t followed.
There were actually four of us, I realized. Not three. Harry, the camera guy, counted, too. It was easy to discount him because he never spoke, and it was amazing how quickly you could get used to something you originally considered obtrusive.
At one point, we heard the drone buzzing overhead, obviously tasked with finding all of us scattered around the island and filming our different locations. When we reached a clearing, Harry gave a wave and it zoomed off to pinpoint another group.
When we got to the marker, AJ dropped the backpack and pulled out his copy of the map. Like me, he had scrawled notes all over it. I peered over AJ’s shoulder to see if he’d been able to interpret all of the secret codes. Right away I noticed that he’d circled the cross at the top of the map. Smart boy. Drawn the way it was, with three dots at the top of the cross with the bottom leg pointing at the N in the word Negra, it was a signal indicating that all explicitly written directions should be reversed. Like where it said 40 varas south. The correct way to read that instruction was to go north, not south. AJ had caught a few other things, too, like how the bisected triangle in the fourth line of text meant there would be a triangle marking the final treasure spot.
“Why is some of it written in English?” Maren asked, reading the clues aloud. “‘The way shall be easy, forty varas south, dig.’ Shouldn’t all that be in Portuguese, or Incan, or some other language besides English?”
I knew the answer to that. I’d learned a lot by lurking around on Smokey’s site. There were a few regulars—DeadSea, MrJackSparrow, and Viper5—who’d explained the way subtle clues can affect the way a map is read.
“The fact that it’s written in English is a clue in itself,” I explained. “It means the Church is involved, so we need to read the clues with an eye toward biblical hints. See the numbers 7, 4, 7? That’s a reference to John, Chapter 7, Verse 47: have you also been led astray?”
Maren looked skeptical. “So?”
“It means watch out, this map is heavily coded and will be hella hard to decipher,” AJ said.
Maren shook her head. “I’m going to do you a favor and pretend I didn’t hear that. Hella hard. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
AJ wasn’t offended. He pointed toward the Black Rock mountains that rose up ahead of us, smack in the center of the island. “From this marker, we’re going to go straight. Forty varas—”
“Varas is basically another word for paces,” I explained to Maren. “You can use those two words interchangeably. And forty is another biblical reference. In this case, the number forty doesn’t literally mean forty. You know how in the story of Noah’s Ark it rained for forty days and forty nights? That’s just a way of saying it rained as long as it needed to rain to clean everything up. Same principle here. We walk as far as we need to, which will probably put us right at the base of Black Rock.”
“If you say so,” Maren said. “This is all clear as mud to me.”
AJ was bobbing his head to a silent, happy beat. “Yup, the base of Black Rock. That’s where I saw those caves on the NASA images.”
“And that’s exactly where Miles was searching,” I added.
AJ held out his fist for a bump. I complied, and we began walking toward our destination, AJ in the lead.
“What if we run into some pirates?” Maren asked. She was joking; we’d had a whole discussion about pirates last night on the boat back to the island. Someone had seen lights in the distance where there was only supposed to be darkness, and it had set off a chain of freakouts. Taylor’s meltdown was still bouncing between my eardrums.
“Please,” AJ told her. “Do yourself a favor and take these pirates a little more seriously. Modern pirates are bad news. Thieves who terrorize by boat, sailing around and robbing tourists. They try to instill enough terror so that if you do see them, you’ll hand over anything valuable without a fight. They’re not a joke. But we won’t run into them here. The only thing you girls have gotten right about pirates is that they stick to the water.”
“That would be good news, except we’ll probably be spending most of our time near the water,” Maren pointed out. “So . . .”
“Just walk,” AJ told her. “I can only deal with one thing at a time.”
There wasn’t exactly a clear path, but the route Miles’s crew had walked two years ago was implied. There were fewer low branches, and the dirt was flatter, signaling this was the way to go. After about twenty minutes, I looked up. Black Rock loomed large. We were getting closer.
Clouds had drifted in and were collecting around the peak of Black Rock. It reminded me of the fog in San Francisco, the way it would slide in and silently wrap itself around the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog back home was such a presence and had such a personality that there was even a name for it: Karl. I felt a ping of homesickness, which was a little unsettling since I’d spent the last several months wishing I could be anywhere but SF.
“It’s probably another ten minutes more,” I said. “Not far.”
The trees began to thicken, but we were still able to make out a slight trail. We had to slow down, though, ducking under the dense vegetation and stepping over fallen trees.
“What if we lose the next challenge?” I asked. “Who should we vote out?”
“Maddie,” Maren said immediately. “She bugs me. All that cutesy-pie stuff.”
“I think she’s sweet,” I countered.
“London or Lucas, then,” Maren said. “Don’t care which. Both seem like idiots to me.”
“Is anyone here not an idiot?” I asked. “Just wondering, because you seem pretty anti-everyone.”
“I’m partnering with you and the nerd here, aren’t I?”
There was that insistence again that we were partners, nothing more. Fine. I wouldn’t take it personally. It wasn’t like I was dying to be her friend, either.
“What do we think about the other team?” I asked.
As we pushed through the trees, we discussed the other players. We all agreed that Willa was definitely doing the show for social media followers; Murch, Porter, and Justin were a bunch of dumb jocks; Rohan was a pot stirrer; and Taylor was plain annoying.
“What about Alex?” I asked. “I can’t get a read on her.”
“I can,” AJ said. “I think she’d be one of the last ones alive in a zombie apocalypse. She’d be covered in blood and zombie guts but the guys would still be checking her out and the girls would be jealous how great she looked, even in ripped-up rags.”
“She looks tough enough to really get into it with some zombies, too,” Maren said. “Like if you came too close, she’d cut you.”
“Alex?” I asked with surprise. I hadn’t seen that, but it seemed like a strange observation coming from the girl with the perma-sour expression and the purple hair.
“Oh, for sure.”
The sky became visible again through the tops of the trees.
“We’re almost there,” I said. Soon enough, we were. The trees thinned out and we entered a clearing where the ground was uneven and lumpy. I stopped to look at the sky. Up close, Black Rock wasn’t so much one large rock as a series of them, piled on top of one another like one of those drip sand castles I used to make at the beach. The fog still circled, ribbonlike, around the tip.
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