Reality Gold
Page 15
“The film crew?” AJ scoffed. “Those rubes don’t even know the difference between tikis and totems. Their set decor has Polynesian masks next to Native American tomahawks dipped in gold paint.”
The show did play fast and loose with certain details, and it made sense that no one involved knew too much about the island’s Inca history. Then I remembered Phil saying that nearly their whole crew had come with them from their Alaska show, never having seen the island. MrJackSparrow had definitely spent time on the island before this trip.
“But only people from the show are supposed to be on this island,” Alex said. “If someone’s looking for the gold, wouldn’t that mean they had to be someone from the show?”
“Supposed to is the key term,” AJ said. “You think someone looking for treasure is worried about what they’re supposed to be doing? The chaos of this crazy show is the perfect way for someone to slide in and get busy.”
I thought of the canoe, hidden next to Sean’s cliff. Someone could have easily rented it on their own and arrived on the island. If anyone noticed activity on the island, it would simply be attributed to the show. AJ was right; the show was a great cover.
“Another possibility is that it’s a crew member who accidentally stumbled onto it,” I said. “Like I was worried about before. Remember? They got here before we arrived to set up. They could have been walking around and randomly seen the cave opening. And we know they were up here to plant your immunity—”
Oops. I’d forgotten for a minute that we were on opposing teams. It was bad strategy to let Sol know we had it.
Cody and Alex exchanged looks.
“Immunity say what?” Porter asked innocently.
“You’re lucky Maren isn’t here. She’d kill you,” AJ warned. “But sure, someone theoretically could have accidentally discovered the shrine. We’ll know when we see the next clue. If we’re first to find it, then this discovery was a one-off. Only someone who knows how to read a map and has studied the rules of treasure hunting will be able to find the next clue.”
True. I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to find it. I held up the rubbing to make sure I’d gotten all the details. “What do you think of these clues?” I asked AJ. “The C and the X’s are probably meant to be Roman numerals. C is fifty and X is ten, so that equals seventy.”
“Sounds right,” AJ said cautiously. “But seventy what? seventy varas? And where do we start? The triangle must mean that we need to find a triangular area somewhere on the island and start there, but where and how would we find it?” He frowned in frustration. “Offhand, I don’t know how to read the rest of it. How about you?”
I shook my head no, and he started to rummage through his backpack before looking up, dejected. “I didn’t bring my Cipher. How could I be so stupid? It’s back at camp.”
“Dude, didn’t you learn anything from the first day here?” Cody had been inspecting the altar, but he had stopped to mimic Joaquin in a mock-serious accented voice. “Never leave your treasure hunting tools behind.”
Porter nodded. “He’s got a point. No doubt Maren’s got it now. Hope you have something to trade and I definitely don’t mean in the sexual favor department. She shot me down pretty quick, which means you have, like, no chance at all.”
I barely paid attention; I was thinking of all the things I needed to look up online.
Porter nudged me. I realized everyone else was ready to leave. “All good?” he asked. “We should probably get back to camp.”
I nodded, hanging back so I could take one last look around.
Outside, it was much lighter than it had been in the cavern, even though it was early evening.
“We gotta do one last thing before we leave,” AJ said. “Take a video of all of us here so that everything is documented.”
AJ held his phone out and rotated around to capture the full area, narrating the scene and describing our discovery. At the end, he faced the rest of us and we instinctively moved together to face the camera.
“Hashtag team treasure,” Alex called out.
“Hashtag fearless five,” I added, and the two of us burst out laughing at the shared joke.
“Hashtag I need my Cipher,” AJ said, which made Alex and I laugh even harder.
“Great idea,” Cody said. “Now we’ll have a video for Deb. This definitely has to count as a substantial clue, so we’ll win the—”
“Wait, what? You think this is a substantial clue?” AJ repeated, incredulous. “They’re not going to give us a pile of money for finding a shrine that someone practically led us to. Anyway, no thank you. I want to find the treasure, the actual treasure. We’re not telling Deb or anyone else anything. Zero. Zip.”
“He’s right,” I added quickly.
“You two are suffering from a strange obsession with this treasure,” Cody said, “so I’ll excuse y’all for not thinking straight right now. But yes, we will be telling Deb. I’m here for the money, and two hundred and fifty thousand is a lot of it.”
“Not split five ways,” Alex helpfully pointed out. “Fifty thousand for each of us is still a lot, but there’ll be taxes.”
“Whatever we get, it will be more than zero,” Cody said, “which is what it’ll be if we keep this a secret.”
“Hold on,” I said to Cody. “You just said you’re here for the money, and the real money will come from winning the show. We bring this video to Deb and Phil, and everything ends. The show becomes collateral damage. No show, no million-dollar prize, no college essays. The government will shut us down in five minutes and bring a bunch of treasure hunting experts in.”
Cody frowned. “But if we wait, whoever found the shrine first might publicize it. Then we’ll lose the treasure prize, and the show. It’s lose-lose.”
I thought quickly. “Whoever is on the trail of the gold isn’t looking for publicity. They’re sneaking around, and if they find it, they’ll probably sell it on the black market. The public will never know. Why don’t we keep the news to ourselves and try to find the next clue? The more we have to show Deb, the more likely it is we’ll get the treasure prize, plus we’ll keep the show running.”
“Seems fair to me,” Porter said.
Cody nodded. “A day or two, how about that? Show me that you can figure out the next clue. If you can’t, I’m going to Deb with this. I don’t want to risk losing that prize money.”
AJ and I quickly agreed. “No problem,” AJ told him. “I’m sure we can figure out the next clue.”
Porter shook his head. “If you say so. I have no idea how a bunch of shapes and numbers tell you what to do next, but go for it.”
“But what about the phones?” Alex asked. “The crew picks them up every so often to download our pictures. I saw Harry grab them the other morning. We all took pictures, so Deb will see the shrine.”
The light was dimming, and it felt as if we’d overstayed our welcome, but we couldn’t leave until we’d hashed everything out.
“Good point,” AJ said. “We can’t let Deb see those pics. I guess we keep the phones.”
“Keep ’em? That’s a terrible idea, son. Deb will instantly know something is up,” Cody pointed out.
I felt my stomach clench. We were looking at a choice of two terrible options. Turn the phones in, and Deb would see the shrine and that would be it for the show. Keep them, and we’d call attention to ourselves. Deb was smart—she’d send a crew up here to see what we’d been up to, and if she found the shrine, well, at that point it would be her discovery. Not ours.
“We have to delete all the shrine pictures off every phone,” Alex said. “It’s our only choice.”
AJ didn’t take that suggestion well. “No way. Delete all evidence of the ground-breaking, history-making centuries-old shrine we found? Sacrilege.” He defiantly shoved his phone down the front of his shorts. “Sorry, I’m keeping mine.”
“Hold on,” I said. I wanted to keep the pictures, too—at least until I could download them. “Let’s just think. Ideally, we want to keep the pictures. We might need proof we were here. But we can’t risk holding on to all the phones. How about we keep one of them?” I tipped my head toward AJ. “His, I guess. AJ has the most pictures of the shrine, anyway.”
“But Deb said if any of the phones didn’t make it back, she’d yank all of them,” Porter pointed out. “I personally don’t care too much about the phones, but I don’t want to be punished some other way.”
It was hard to argue with that. “How about this. We tell Deb that AJ lost it. That’s not completely unreasonable, right? People lose things all the time.”
It was our best option. Once everyone agreed, AJ took his phone out of his shorts.
“But any problems with Deb,” Cody warned him, “that phone gets returned. Understand? I’m not risking the game for a couple of pictures. I’d rather just tell Deb about the shrine and collect that finder’s fee, anyway. Don’t push your luck.”
I wasn’t happy about the extra pressure. As if finding the gold wasn’t hard enough, now we had to do it on Cody’s timeline? But at least we’d found a temporary solution. On the walk back, everyone dutifully deleted their pictures. Or, rather, the others did. I only pretended to. I’d delete them later, after I’d safely uploaded them. I thought about the conversation we’d had earlier, about cheating.
Uploading the pictures wasn’t cheating, I told myself. Not exactly. After all, I wasn’t doing this for money, and if I benefited, we all would, so what was the harm?
We were almost at camp when I felt Porter’s hand on my waist.
“Shhh. Stay back for a sec,” he said quietly. We waited for the others to go ahead. “Come on, let’s take the path back to the north end of the beach. Just us. I want to tell you something.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to say something that wasn’t completely dumb.
In the distance, the gong rang out.
Deb’s voice came through, amplified by a bullhorn. “Everyone return to base camp. New schedule today: there will be a nighttime challenge after dinner.”
Porter let out a groan. “Seriously?”
I couldn’t believe it. Tonight? What miserable, wretched timing.
“We probably have a few minutes before Deb starts screaming ultimatums,” Porter said. “Come on, let’s make her find us. She can’t start the challenge without us. We’ll pretend we didn’t hear.”
I wanted to go. I really, really did. Things changed so fast on this island, I might never get this moment back. But I had to download these photos before I returned my phone, and now that we were being summoned to a challenge, I had limited time.
“I don’t know. I think we should go back,” I said. “But we’ll meet later. After the challenge, okay?”
He looked disappointed. “Am I not as irresistible as my mother always told me I was?”
“Stop,” I said, laughing. “Later.”
I hesitated, though. I had signed up for this show so that I could present myself to the world looking good, but right now I was feeling good. I hadn’t really understood, until this exact minute, that there was a difference between those two things. An eternity had passed since the last time I’d felt any sort of acceptance. For so long I’d been on the outside looking in, feeling unwelcome, but here on the island things were starting to feel different. I was starting to feel like I might actually matter.
Even so, I couldn’t simply drop everything that had brought me here, and that’s what I’d be doing if I didn’t get online.
“I’m sorry,” I told Porter. “I really am. But there’s something I need to do, and if I don’t do it now, I might lose my chance.”
Annoyance flashed across his face. I wondered if I’d blown it, but then it disappeared. “Mysterious,” he said. “I like it.”
I prayed he meant it. If I had just ruined things between us, I’d regret it.
19
When we got to camp, I gave Porter a hurried—and reluctant—goodbye, then ran to the cabin to grab the satellite. As I headed for my spot in the woods, I noticed Maren in one of the hammocks on the beach. She was staring out at the water. I nearly didn’t recognize her. She didn’t have her black lipstick or heavy makeup on, and her hair was pulled into a loose knot on top of her head. When I got close, I could see brown roots at her temple, which was interesting. Forget the purple tips—not even the black part of her hair was real. Her sketch pad was facedown on the sand with her box of pencils.
I had wrapped a sweatshirt around the satellite so no one would wonder why I was bringing my “makeup” into the woods. I looked at it for a second, weighing my options. I was going to need to talk to Maren sometime to make things right between us. Despite my rush, now would be a good time to do that, seeing as how we might be voting later tonight.
I had this whole speech prepared in my head, but I didn’t say any of it when I saw her. She took her earbuds out when I approached.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hay is for horses,” she said absently. I waited for something more biting to follow, but nothing came.
“You look . . . relaxed,” I said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. She was still staring at the water. “I used to go to the beach a lot when I was little. I forgot what it was like to spend all day in the sand, just hanging out.”
I waited for her inevitable reminder that I was spoiled, that I took beaches and trips for granted, but I was wrong.
“I guess I wanted to take a day off, and just . . . I don’t know . . . be.” She looked at me and I nearly died, because she was actually smiling. “I know. So cheesy.”
“Well, maybe a little,” I agreed, somewhat cautiously.
Maren seemed to suddenly realize we were being nice to each other. She frowned at me. “What are you looking at? Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Are you here to give me a report on the day or what?”
I told her about the cave, the shrine, and the carvings.
There were a few seconds where we bonded again over the excitement of our find.
“We really might find the gold and win that money,” she said, morphing back into the nicer version that had slipped out a few minutes ago. Predictably, though, she flipped back quickly to her old self when she realized that some Sol members had been there for such an important discovery.
“I told you it was a bad idea to let them come,” she snapped. “No one ever listens to me. Now we’re stuck with them, the same way I let myself get stuck with you.”
She put her earbuds in and leaned back in the hammock. Fine with me. I had things to do.
I was probably going to end up missing dinner, but so be it. Preserving these photos was more important.
My hands were shaking as I logged in. So much was at stake. I felt a wash of relief once I transferred all the pictures to the server—a process that seemed to take forever—but saving these photos represented something tangible. They’d be mine, and I’d have them when I left the island no matter what happened after this point.
In the distance, the sounds from camp indicated dinner would be starting soon. Quickly, I logged into Smokey’s site, checking the battery first. The icon had drained even more. I frowned. How could that be? It had just been sitting in the safe. I still had plenty of life left, but it was frustrating that I needed to monitor it.
DeadSea was online, as usual. I didn’t need to ask him the basics. I knew the number seventy would be involved, but there were two things I needed help with. I wasn’t sure what the broken lines on the triangle meant, and I’d never seen an equation like this, not even in the Cipher.
I described them both.
DeadSea: First things first. That dot in the center of the broken lines will be your starting point. Is there a number on this marker? That will tell you how far to go
AnonGirl: 70. But what direction?
DeadSea: General rule: when given a triangle, walk in the direction of the topmost point, the point with the number 1 written next to it. But in your case, the presence of an equal sign means replace. Therefore, the phrase 2 = 1 means that Point 2 of the triangle replaces Point 1 in importance.
AnonGirl: ??? I don’t understand
There was no reply for at least thirty seconds, maybe longer. DeadSea was probably banging his head on the keyboard the way I did whenever I had to watch my mother try to copy-paste something on the computer.
DeadSea: It means stand at the center dot and walk 70 paces in the direction of Point 2
AnonGirl: Got it. But I don’t know where the triangular area is. How do I find it? Will it be near the spot where I found the marker?
DeadSea: Not necessarily
AnonGirl: ???
There were several seconds of silence. DeadSea had to be doing the keyboard head-bang thing again.
DeadSea: Context. Treasure hunting always comes down to the context of your search. Whoever hid the treasure left clues for you to find. Use the environment. Use whatever got you to the marker. Examine those things and you will find your triangle
Context—that made sense, and it meant that something in the shrine or on the map would show us where to look for a triangular-shaped area on the island. I started typing again.
AnonGirl: Last question. How about shrines? What would it mean to find one during a treasure hunt
DeadSea: Hugely important. Signifies direct involvement of the church, which means the treasure is of great value. Did you find a shrine? Tell me which treasure you are searching for. Are you in Spain? The Falklands? Where?
AnonGirl: I’d rather not say