“You’re swimming across?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “We’re swimming.”
The alternative was to backtrack, or head north until the river either dried up or became more crossable. Either of them would have been a safer option, but AJ was not interested. He had no concern for the rushing water and the waterfall in the distance, no care for anything at all except finding the gold. He’d turned into a treasure bot. Must find treasure. Must keep going. Must finish this, no matter what.
Gold fever had consumed Miles, twisting him into a shell of the man he’d once been. It had cost him his funding, his friend, and then his life. I’d been blaming my father for treating Miles unfairly, but now I understood where he’d been coming from. AJ was not even remotely open to reason—it must have been the same with Miles.
There really wasn’t much point trying to argue with AJ, but I did silently curse him when I was up to my chest in icy water. Maren cursed him, too, but not silently. Not that he cared—as soon as he made it across the river, he squeezed out his shorts and shirt and wiped his glasses on a patch of grass and was immediately ready to continue.
“See?” he said. “Easy. Now we go east fifty paces. No big deal.”
The three of us girls needed a little more time to pull ourselves together. My foot was bleeding from a scrape on an underwater rock, and now we were wet and cold. Furthermore, the heavy overgrowth of trees meant it was a lot darker on this side. No bright, friendly colors or happy cow scenery. Very ominous, and it wasn’t only because my mood had crashed. Every swish of the branches, every snap of a twig, every flap of a bird’s wings was making me more and more nervous.
Fifty paces brought us to a rocky ridge, and sure enough, right where AJ had guessed we’d find it was the marker. Even from far away we could see the spot, because trees had been cleared and bushes messed with.
Sparrow had beaten us to it. Again.
This marker was bigger and more rectangular than the others. A little like a gravestone, actually. It had been mostly dug out as if waiting for us to finish the job. Or as if we’d interrupted a work in progress. The signs hadn’t been fully revealed yet, although I could make out what looked like the top of a very large letter—E or F.
It was a little strange how two separate groups could be so close to solving the riddle after all these years. Was the island finally loosening its grip on the treasure? I didn’t have time to think about it too much before AJ dropped to his knees and broke the peace with a long, loud howl.
“Way to play it cool,” Maren told him. “Do you mind not summoning the very smart and dedicated person with unfinished business who probably doesn’t want us here?”
AJ stayed on his knees, forehead pressed to the ground. Willa took some pictures before I pushed her arm down. It felt intrusive, as if we were watching him grieve.
“AJ,” I said gently. It was late afternoon, getting darker, but even worse, we might be in immediate danger.
But AJ didn’t move.
“Loser, it’s time to get up,” Maren said, not so gently.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move.
“Did you see that?” Willa asked, grabbing my arm. “Is someone over there?”
We stared in that direction. The breeze was swirling leaves and other things around, so it probably had been nothing more than that.
“Really wishing it wasn’t so creepy here,” Maren whispered.
For a few seconds the wind died and there was utter silence again—that same eerie silence I’d felt the other day, without any branches swishing or birds singing, as if the forest was holding its breath.
Then the wind started up again, stronger.
Willa gasped. Something blew over the nearest rocky ridge, a tumbling spinning whirl of black. For a second I thought it was an injured bird, but it was too fluid. A garbage bag?
But it was neither of those things, and when it finally caught on a tree I realized it was a bandanna, like the ones we were all wearing—except I’d never seen it in a color other than yellow or green. And this one was larger, too, more like a swim sarong. In black, with the show’s logo printed in bright white, it looked just like a pirate flag.
We all exchanged looks. It felt like a warning.
“That’s it,” Willa said. “I’m out.”
She started running. Maren and I followed, and I was pretty sure AJ did, too, but I didn’t wait to find out.
25
For once I was glad Taylor was so overly dramatic. When we finally made it back to camp, her screams of Oh my God I thought you were dead made a decent homecoming.
Maddie, Joaquin, and Taylor were the only people in camp—everyone else was a patient in the mainland hospital. We warmed up at the fire pit while Joaquin filled us in.
“Bad food poisoning,” he told us, and because it had hit everyone so hard and so fast, it was considered suspicious. Possibly criminal. “The police are involved now. Deb’s over there now begging them not to start a formal investigation, because the network is threatening to pull the plug on the whole ‘teen show experiment.’ Accidents, illnesses—the bosses at the network don’t like hearing that stuff. Deb’s got to kiss up to them, and I don’t know if you can tell, but she’s really not a fan of having to kiss up to anyone, especially not a bunch of risk-averse guys in suits.”
Of all of us, Willa looked the most upset by the news. “They wouldn’t really stop filming, would they?”
Joaquin shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I get paid either way, so I didn’t ask. But you should know Deb is pissed you guys took off,” he added. “She thought you’d crawled into the jungle and died, so she wasn’t too happy when we finally figured out you’d left to have a nice day exploring the island. If I were you, I’d stay as far out of her way as possible, because if she’s in a bad mood when she gets back here, well, you can kiss your phones and your freedom goodbye.”
The phones! I’d almost forgotten about them. I still had to convince AJ that he needed to put his phone back.
“When, exactly, do you think she’ll be getting back?” I asked.
Joaquin lifted his shoulders. “You think they confide in me? I’m only one level above you guys. Deb tells me where to be and when. That reminds me—she had me pick up some sandwiches in town, so don’t get too excited about dinner. I had to trash everything in the fridge.”
Sandwich was not the word I’d have chosen to describe the piles of soggy bread and slimy deli meat that greeted us at the Snack Bar.
I pulled AJ aside. “What does he mean, the network might pull the plug. Cancel filming? Would that mean we have to leave the island?”
AJ was looking rough. His shirt was torn, he had smears of blood on his shorts, and his expression was tight. He shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably. But what the hell? We’ve only been here, what, a week? I can’t even think about leaving, not now, not when we’re so close.”
I tried to bring up his phone, but he cut me off.
“There’s no way I’ll even consider turning it in. Not now. If the show is canceled, these photos are all I have to prove the shrine and the markers exist, so you better believe I’m going to hang on to them.”
Well, that was one problem settled. It was obvious I wasn’t going to convince AJ to return the phone, so I didn’t need to waste my time trying. And as for telling him I had a way to save his photos, well, I wasn’t about to show him my satellite now. He was so terrified this might be the end that he’d do anything to save himself. He’d sell me out in a second, no doubt about that. I’d just have to let him keep the phone and hope that Deb didn’t follow through on her threat.
I left AJ to his bad mood and his doomsday predictions and grabbed the satellite. I went to my usual spot even though it wasn’t necessary to be so elusive—there was hardly anyone around to catch me.
Annoyingly, the battery life
had dropped to nearly half, which was definitely a concern. It was also ridiculous, because what kind of espionage satellite designed for use in a remote location barely held a charge? My four-star review shrunk to three.
I logged into the forum. The envelope icon at the top of the screen was blinking. Uh oh. That was strange—I never got messages on this site. I clicked on it. Three messages from DeadSea asking again where I was, but this time he went further and offered help. You need someone who knows how rare shrines are, he wrote.
A person I’d never met was offering to drop everything and join a search that for all he knew was across the world. Well, that wasn’t weird at all. I stared at his message, processing what it meant, and I couldn’t come to any conclusion other than what we were finding was so unusual that it was even freaking out DeadSea. DeadSea! He was a seasoned hunter. He had seen it all.
What if . . . no, I didn’t want to think about it.
But I had to. What if Deb had faked the whole thing? What if the shrine wasn’t real, and this whole thing had been a giant wild-goose chase designed to bring an element of drama to the show?
I felt sick. If that was true, Deb had played us, and it meant I was going to look like a giant idiot on the show. Once again, I’d be the butt of a public joke.
I was trapped in a nightmare of repetition. Even worse, it was one of my own making. Would I ever stop getting myself into these same terrible situations?
Deb never showed up the rest of the day, or that night, either. Most of the sick players were still missing, too, but a small batch of them arrived by boat the next morning. If I hadn’t seen the boat slide onto the beach, though, I wouldn’t have realized anyone had returned because every single one of them had beelined for their beds and showed no signs of emerging.
It was just as well, because it didn’t seem as if filming was going to resume anytime soon. There weren’t any cameras here today, and it was strange how we’d gotten so used to them. At this point, their absence felt odder than their presence. Even odder, though, was that the crew didn’t seem inclined to hold our hands while the show was on hold. Periodically they’d dropped by with supplies—matches, new towels, food, a small amount of news—and then head back to their own village. Two days ago we’d been put to work doing a bunch of fake chores, but now it looked like we were actually going to be running the place.
Rohan, the only one of us who knew his way around the kitchen, had designated himself the resident chef. Last night after taking one look at the “sandwiches,” he’d somehow managed to summon one of his local friends and put in a request for specific groceries. When the bags were unceremoniously dropped off at sunrise with a pile of breakfast burritos, he’d disappeared to the kitchen to start food prep.
AJ and I were headed back to the fourth marker, so I stopped by the kitchen before we left. “Got any snacks I can take with me today?” I asked.
Rohan put a couple of granola bars on the counter. “These survived the purge, but if you hold off on leaving, the chili is almost done.”
I shook my head. “AJ’s waiting for me.”
“You guys still living the treasure dream?” Rohan asked. He chopped up a bunch of onions lightning fast. I made a mental note not to ever get between him and his knife.
Cody, who was sitting at one of the tables, put in his two cents. “Y’all better be! When Deb gets back, I think we might have to hedge our bets and show her the shrine, so unless you find something soon . . .” He drew a line across his throat. I knew the gesture wasn’t meant to scare me, but the threat was still there. We really did have limited time.
AJ and I got going right away, proceeding carefully to the fourth marker. We stopped frequently to listen for sounds we weren’t alone, just in case the other treasure hunter was real and not a stunt of Deb’s. I hadn’t shared my theory with AJ yet, so he was more on edge than I was. Even so, I didn’t want to linger if there was still a chance we’d be in danger.
“Let’s be quick,” I said, when we finally got there. “Find the shovel and—”
But we didn’t need the shovel. MrJackSparrow had been back since yesterday, and he’d cleared the marker off. I waited for AJ to go nuts, but he contained himself admirably.
Still, he tossed me the paper and pencil more aggressively than he needed to after he’d taken a few pictures. “This guy is obviously working quickly, so let’s step it up. I’ll stand guard,” he said. “You do the rubbing.”
It was another simple marker—even plainer than the last one. There was a large letter F carved into it, and then underneath that, a smaller letter M. Underneath the M was the word south.
This was our third time, so we fell into our routine, and AJ had pulled out his Cipher before I’d even finished the rubbing. It was hard not to get excited when he told me what he learned. “The F means this is the final clue. This is it, Riley. We figure out these instructions, and they’ll lead us to the treasure, and if we do it soon, we might be able to get there first!”
We shared a minute of happy jumps and I was glad for the lack of the cameras. Two gawky people, hopping awkwardly to celebrate a discovery that may or may not be real—it would have been prime embarrassment footage. Still, I felt a thrill. Fake or not, we were still solving this puzzle, and it had been damn hard. Maybe solving a sham hunt didn’t make me the butt of a joke. Maybe . . . maybe it actually made me look smart.
We went to work deciphering the marker’s clues. M was the Roman numeral for one thousand. Since it was below the F, that meant we were supposed head south. And even if the positioning of the letters wasn’t clear, the word south made it a pretty straightforward reading.
AJ strapped on his pack. I paused. Straightforward. That word was literally the opposite of every clue thus far. Why would the final clue—arguably the most important one—be the most obvious?
“I know that look,” AJ said warily. “What’s wrong?”
I got everything out of the pack again. I held up the map. “Seems odd that the last clue is so easy. I mean, look at that marker. Picture some random guy out for a hike, not knowing anything about any of the clues that had come before it. With a small amount of work, he could easily figure it out. Don’t you think that scenario violates the spirit of the map? The last clue should be just as tricky and hard to read as all the others, if not more so.”
AJ sighed. “Well, when you put it like that . . .”
“The map has to come into it somehow. It has to. Something about this map needs to give us a different reading of the marker. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
AJ was the first to get a lightbulb moment. “The word south,” he said. “Why use it at all? Everyone knows the way these symbols are laid out we should go south. The word isn’t necessary.”
I was beginning to see. “Or maybe it is necessary.” I put my finger on the cross at the top of the map. “Because this cross says to reverse all explicitly stated directions.”
“Bingo,” AJ said.
“That means we go north.”
AJ nodded. “We go north.”
And so we did, walking nearly a mile, but when we got to the spot we’d assumed it would be, we were disappointed. There was no sign of any action. We’d gotten so used to MrJackSparrow arriving first to dig up the markers, that it felt oddly anticlimactic when there wasn’t any signs of digging. But it was good news, too, because it meant we were finally one step ahead. At least, that’s what we thought when we arrived, but after two hours without any luck, we weren’t so sure.
“I don’t get it,” AJ said. “There’s nothing here. Nothing at all, not even any rocks or natural landmarks, which makes it a strange choice for such an important hiding spot. Could we have read the marker wrong?”
Time ticked on, and when another hour went by without any progress, we called it a day. Either we’d read the clues wrong, or something else was going on. I spun the fake theory
around in my head. Was it a coincidence that MrJackSparrow, our constant nemesis, had suddenly disappeared? He’d been so tantalizingly close, and now nothing, right when the crew suddenly seemed uninterested in doing their jobs. I spent most of the walk back to camp wondering if I should share my theory with AJ or not, but when we were almost there, I made a decision.
“Hold up a sec,” I said. We were close enough to smell something delicious floating from camp, and based on the number of toys scattered on the beach—footballs, the volleyball net, cornhole boards—most of the players had come back to life.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” I told AJ. “What if . . . well, what if it was all fake?”
“What was fake?
“The shrine. The markers. All the clues.”
AJ looked skeptical. I kept going. “Remember how you found the immunity coin right near where we found the shrine? You said you’d told Deb that was where you planned to start searching, so she’d obviously planted it there for you to find. What if she planted everything else, too? Starting with the shrine itself. Some of us running around on a treasure hunt would definitely add drama to her show. Rohan was right, she’s been working behind the scenes this whole time in every other way to get us hyped up. It makes sense she’d try to do it with the treasure stuff, too. And remember, looking for the treasure wasn’t part of her original description of the show. She added it. Why? Maybe because she suddenly had this great faux plotline.”
“You think the shrine is fake?” AJ looked stricken. Then he smiled, relieved. “It’s not a terrible theory, I’ll give you that, but we had a camera with us only once, so it’s not like there’s a ton of footage. If Deb had gone to all that effort to fake us out, she’d want every second on film.”
I’d been thinking about that, too, and something had hit me last night when Willa showed me some of the pictures she’d taken during our adventure. When I’d been arguing with Maren at the second marker, I’d thought Willa had just walked away, but she’d managed to take a few pictures of us first. I hardly recognized myself. There was actual, visible emotion on my face and my arm was extended forcefully. I was so used to thinking of myself as background noise, wallpaper, but the girl in those pictures was vibrant and almost compelling. Like someone who’d look perfectly natural showing up on Willa’s Instagram. Like someone who—what had Deb said that first day? I looked like someone who mattered.
Reality Gold Page 20