Reality Gold

by Tiffany Brooks

  “Hey, look at this!”

  AJ, who had gone ahead, was swinging something in the air. A coin on a cord. Weird, I just noticed that Harry had followed AJ ahead without even pausing, as if he knew something was there.

  “It’s one of those immunity coins Phil was talking about!”

  “No offense to your searching skills,” Maren said, “but that took all of four seconds. Seems suspicious. Where, exactly?”

  AJ hung it on the branch of the tree right next to him. “Here. Like that.”

  “Very coincidental that it would be waiting right here in the first place you decided to search,” I said. Something occurred to me. I remembered how freely he had announced where we were headed. “Did Deb know this was where you planned to look?”

  AJ shrugged and had the decency to look embarrassed. “I may have said something.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I was furious. Deb and her crew had been on the island for weeks ahead of our arrival. They’d come here at least once to plant that coin, probably a lot more than that if they had an inkling of curiosity. For all we knew, they could have already found the treasure. This location was high-value information, and AJ had given it away.

  “So what?” AJ said. “She wanted to know specifics. If I said no, she wasn’t going to let me on the show.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “Why are you so mad? Harry’s here right now, filming us, so our secret will be out this afternoon anyway—Deb could ask him where we went or simply watch the footage, so what does it matter if she found out before now?”

  It mattered. I shouldn’t have to explain why.

  “I guess I forgot you’re only doing this to get into college,” I told him angrily. “I’m used to working with people who have integrity and don’t blab about things when they don’t have to.”

  “Ooh-la-la, so fancy, with all those colleagues full of integrity. Hope you aren’t talking about your Smokey Joe’s pals, though, because I’m pretty sure none of them knows how to spell integrity, let alone has it.”

  “I think she’s talking about her father,” Maren offered. “The rich guy. He probably has tons of integrity.”

  “Excuse me for wanting to keep this spot to ourselves!” I said.

  “Chill out, Riley. I get it, but I told you, I’m good for this show. They want me to succeed. The longer I stay on this show, the better my odds are that I’ll find something, which is good for them. This immunity coin is a gift from Deb.”

  AJ leaned in toward Harry’s camera, moving in close as if to kiss the lens. “Thanks, Deb! Immunity, I’ll take it!”

  “Don’t touch the lens,” Harry warned, the first words I heard him say all morning.

  “We,” Maren said. “Get that word in your head because the three of us have a partnership, which extends to that immunity thingy. One of us might need that before you.”

  “Sure, yeah. Of course. It’s just a good sign. It means our partnership has been blessed by the Gods of Television.”

  The coin went into his backpack, accompanied by the more practical statement, “I’ll keep it in my safe with the map and we’ll bring it out for whoever needs it.”

  I didn’t show it, but inside I was still boiling. He’d pointed the crew here without a second thought. He was right, I had been talking about my Smokey Joe’s correspondents, but at least they were purists and would have viewed it as a betrayal to leak that information to outsiders. None of them would have done anything that careless.

  But I put all that aside and we spent the next few hours crisscrossing the base of Black Rock. We were searching for anything man-made, as well as possible cave openings. It was hard work and I was glad for our water bottles and AJ’s supply of snacks, although AJ never stopped. It was funny: he had the same obsessiveness as Miles when it came to the search, but they both had such different motivations. Miles was driven because he felt a connection to the gold, almost an obligation, but AJ only wanted to find the gold for what it would bring him afterward. For Miles it was the be-all and end-all; for AJ it was only a means to an end.

  I hadn’t realized the treasure could be so many things to so many different people, and what AJ had said this morning about someone looking for ways to sell the gold illegally was starting to really bother me. What if pirates or thieves were the ones to find the treasure instead of someone who cared about what happened to it?

  Not only that, but now that I’d seen AJ’s obsession up close, I was starting to think my partnership with him wasn’t the safety net I thought it would be. I was probably safe as long as I was valuable to him, but if he ever had to choose between me or his chance to find the gold, he’d obviously drop me in an instant. Maren didn’t seem to have any particular love for me, so she’d probably side with him. I was going to have to spend some time with Maddie and Sean—London would probably always blame me for Annika getting voted off—so I had ties to teammates other than AJ and Maren. I’d look up Sean’s YouTube channel later so we’d have something to talk about.

  I saw signs of Miles’s presence everywhere: a slightly worn path here, a cleared-out spot there. A bit of frayed string tied around a tree brought a flashback. I touched it, remembering the day I’d helped mark the searched areas. I could have been the one who put this here two years ago. How strange to think of all the things that had happened since then.

  We worked quietly, and the only real sound was the birds singing to each other, maybe making fun of our lack of progress. Generations of birds had watched hundreds of searchers come and go. Maybe they passed down the song of the treasure in lullabies to their chicks.

  A few times we got our hopes up when we found caves that we were able to squeeze into, but none led anywhere. I wished we had more of that string so we could isolate the new areas we searched. Without it, we had to resort to piling branches in lines to show all the zones we’d covered.

  At one point Harry’s walkie sputtered, although he was too far out of range for any real communication. The drone came back, circling low and aggressively.

  “I think that’s a sign it’s time to go back,” he told us.

  I looked at my phone and realized it was almost one o’clock. Great. We hadn’t found anything, and our teammates may have spent the whole day bonding and conspiring against us. What a waste.

  Maybe I could salvage the day by getting online. I really wanted to go to Smokey’s site to see if I could find that old conversation AJ had mentioned, the one about selling the gold illegally. If it really was a year ago, whoever it was may have even found the gold already. We could be wasting our time.

  The sun flickered off the rocks, as if saying goodbye. The birdsong was practically gleeful as we packed up and left.

  13

  “Whoa, what’s that?” Maren said. She was the leader this time, and we’d taken a different path back, one that went along the water. During Harry’s intermittent walkie use, he’d been able to figure out that some of the players were swimming on the north end of the beach near camp. This was the fastest route. Fine with me—I wanted to get back to camp as soon as possible so I could start working on my relationships with Sean and Maddie and get online.

  “What?” AJ asked. “Where?”

  “Over there. I think it’s a boat,” Maren said. “Yeah, look! It is.”

  I saw it, too. “Harry, should we go look?”

  Harry put his camera down. “A boat? What kind?”

  If he was speaking to us voluntarily, he must be concerned. Even more worrisome, he’d lowered his camera—he hadn’t done that the whole morning.

  We made our way down to the waterline. It was a canoe, half in the water, half haphazardly covered with branches and palm fronds, almost as if someone had tried to hide it in a hurry.

  We all stared at it, not saying anything, then the three of us turned in unison to gauge Harry’s reaction. He looked
worried.

  “Does it belong to the show?” Maren asked.

  He pulled off some of the palm fronds. “It could be. We rented a few canoes from a place on the mainland, and look, here’s their logo.” He shook his head. “But there was a whole warehouse full of canoes just like this available for rent. Anyone could have gotten one,” he said. I wondered if it felt good for him to finally speak. Did he have to hold back, or was being naturally silent a requirement for the job?

  “AJ, maybe it’s those pirates of yours finally making an appearance,” Maren said.

  “By canoe?” I said skeptically. “They’d have to paddle pretty hard to catch anyone. Hey, wait up, we’re coming to rob you.”

  “It’s not pirates. It’s got to be other treasure hunters,” AJ said anxiously. “Outlaws. And we just led them right to our search area!”

  Now AJ cared about other people finding our site? Harry wasn’t too interested in calming us down. Instead, he was moving around, trying to get a better signal. He kept shaking his walkie, but it just sputtered.

  “Damn these things. They were working fine until we started filming and now they’re nothing but junk.”

  “Shhh! Did you hear that? Up the hill,” AJ hissed. We all froze. “There!”

  It looked like there was movement further up the path, and then I heard it, too: branches being pushed aside, and not quietly. Someone was coming, and they were making enough noise that they either didn’t know we were there or were unconcerned about our presence. I would have assumed it was just another player, but not now, not with Harry staring at the woods with a panicked look on his face. He motioned us to the edge of the path. Maren and I ducked on one side while he and AJ went to the right.

  Someone was definitely coming. What do we do? I mouthed to Harry.

  He held up his palm. “Stay,” he mouthed back. “Low and quiet.”

  Suddenly Maren stood up. I grabbed her shirt but she pushed my hand away.

  “Rohan, you idiot!” she said. “You almost scared us to death.”

  Thankfully, she was right. Rohan was coming toward us. He looked surprised but not nervous. Not like someone who had stashed a contraband boat nearby. I wasn’t sure how he could have managed to arrange something like that only one day into the game, but then again, if it wasn’t his boat, then it was someone else’s. Frankly, I would have preferred it to be his, even if it meant he had a super-pro game strategy going on.

  “What are you doing out here?” Maren asked.

  “Same as you, obviously. Looking for some gold, or maybe an immunity coin.”

  AJ and I exchanged looks.

  “Yeah, we didn’t have any luck with that,” Maren said.

  “I’m sure you’d tell me if you found anything, right?”

  “Definitely.”

  Were they flirting? I guess it wasn’t the worst match in the world. They both had in-your-face personalities.

  “Your usual strategy of interrogating locals not working out?” Maren asked him, which was when it hit me. Maybe the boat was his. Maybe he’d asked someone on the crew to get it for him. But for what purpose?

  Rohan joined us. The path went up a hill and then bent left toward the water, and when the trees thinned out, we could see the beach down below. The rest of the players were gathered in the shallow water. Even Joaquin was there, with Maddie on his shoulders, and they were all staring upward at an outcropping to our left that jutted out from the forest. Some of them were holding their phones up, obviously filming something. We’d basically just passed the point they were looking at, but somehow we’d missed whatever they were waiting to see.

  “Is someone jumping?” I asked.

  The words were barely out of my mouth when I saw a figure emerge from the trees. It might have been Sean, but before I got a good look, he wobbled on the edge and plunged downward, his arms waving wildly.

  He really was a daredevil, although if I had to admit it out loud, I didn’t think his jump was particularly impressive.

  But then someone started screaming. It took me a second to realize Sean hadn’t jumped. He’d fallen.

  And now he was floating motionless in the water.

  14

  It takes a disaster to reveal everyone’s true colors. At least, that’s how it went last year after Izzy and I made that stupid mistake that had led to our expulsions. To celebrate passing our Marine Bio midterm, we’d decided to make weed brownies. Neither of us had ever vaped or smoked or tried edibles before, and we figured it was as good a time as any to try it for the first time. To this day, I have no idea why Izzy would have thought bringing the brownies to school was a smart thing to do, or why she would have eaten three of them on her own before the midterm, instead of after school the way we’d planned. But that’s what she did, and the resulting bad reaction meant that instead of taking an exam she took an ambulance ride to the hospital.

  Drugs on school property meant immediate expulsion, so Izzy was never going to be allowed to stay at Shaw. I didn’t eat any brownies—either on campus or off—but since I’d participated in making an illegal substance that had ended up on campus, I was suspended.

  Back then it had taken weeks for everyone to stop crying and wailing about how scary and horrible the whole thing was. No question Taylor would have been one of the dramatic girls in my class petitioning the headmaster for my dismissal, and her behavior didn’t disappoint now. Harry and another cameraman hadn’t even dragged Sean from the water before Taylor was screaming hysterically. Willa and Chloe weren’t too much more restrained, but surprisingly, Alex ran right over and offered CPR help. My brain is strange sometimes: while everyone else was freaking out about Sean, I couldn’t help but watch Alex and think, wow, AJ was right, that girl probably would survive a zombie apocalypse. Maybe I was just surprised that someone so pretty was so . . . I don’t know . . . capable.

  “But what if he dies?” Taylor was wailing.

  I tried not to roll my eyes. A few hours ago, Taylor probably hadn’t even known Sean’s name, or if she did, would have had no problem voting him out. But now she was acting as if his accident was a personal tragedy.

  It wasn’t until we were on our way back to camp that I realized this meant our team was down another member. If Sean didn’t come back, it was now the six of us to ten on the other team. We were definitely going to be at a huge disadvantage in the next challenge.

  We were, of course, forbidden to leave camp for the rest of the afternoon. I thought it would be hard to sneak off, but everyone seemed preoccupied enough that I found a chance to grab my satellite and slip into the woods unnoticed.

  I found a perfect little clearing behind the cabin. It was close to camp, which meant it wouldn’t take too much time getting set up, and there was a thick wall of vegetation that would keep me hidden from view. If anyone came close, I’d hear them way before they found me.

  When I plugged the satellite into my phone, I counted slowly while I waited for it to connect. Before I’d left home, I’d practiced using the satellite a million times so the process would go smoothly here.

  It beeped when I got to six. I frantically pushed the volume button. It was jarring how out of place that sound was. Because I was in the middle of a rainforest, or because I’d been away from tech? It could have been either reason.

  Three bars lit up. This thing was amazing. Four stars, Katie. I’d have to make sure she gave it a good review in her write-up.

  Of course, I looked Willa up before I did anything else. I’d expected her entire account to be solo pictures of her posed to look sexy in beautiful and improbable settings, but there were only one or two of those. The rest were all of her, having a great time—pressed against a friend as they pointed at the camera, dancing at a party in a tiny black dress with a group of other girls, decked out in blue and yellow at a UCLA football game. She was always in a crowd, and only rarely the cente
r of attention. She looked fun.

  I gave her my test. Willa: genuinely fun girl, or shallow princess? Hard to tell. From what I’d seen of her here so far, she wavered equally between both.

  Sean was next. Three bars weren’t strong enough to hold any of his videos for long, but the little I saw was what I expected: no fancy camerawork, just Sean, goofing around.

  I wished I knew some last names. I hesitated, and then googled Porter New York senior brown hair preppy funny, which was all I knew about him and was, unsurprisingly, not enough to find anything.

  I hesitated for a second before going to Smokey’s site. For the first time, it occurred to me that using this satellite might be considered cheating. If caught, I could get kicked off the island, and wow, that would be a bad look. Spoiled rich girl caught cheating with her rich girl device to find gold so she’d be even richer. When I’d come up with this plan, searching for the treasure wasn’t part of the game. Sure, bringing technology was forbidden, but it wasn’t like having the satellite was going to give me an advantage in the challenges for the show. But now things had changed.

  I shook it off. I’d gone through a lot of trouble to get to this point. I couldn’t stop now.

  I logged into Smokey’s site, username AnonGirl, and searched through the Black Rock discussion forum. AJ was right—there was a ton of debate about whether or not the old buckle was related to the treasure hunt, so it took me a while, but I finally found something of interest. The conversation was from last May, just over a year ago. I took a sharp breath when I saw the name of the user making the initial query: MrJackSparrow. I recognized his name. He was a frequent participant in the discussions in the map-reading forum.

  MrJackSparrow: Let’s say I find the treasure. It’s no good to me unless I can sell it. Where would I find a buyer?