Reality Gold

by Tiffany Brooks

  It all hinged on the immunity coin.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” I had laid out the strategy ahead of Council. “The three girls will vote for AJ, and AJ will vote for Maddie. That would normally mean that AJ would be voted out because he has more votes, but instead, he’ll present the immunity coin.”

  “How could I have forgotten about that thing?” AJ smacked his forehead. We’d all gotten so caught up in the treasure hunt we’d forgotten about the immunity coin from that first day.

  “That means AJ can’t be voted off, and so the person who will end up leaving is Maddie, even though she only got one vote. We all get what we want. The three of us stay. Maddie wants to leave, so she does—but she goes out with dignity.”

  Maren looked surprised. “That could actually work.”

  Maddie liked the plan, too, enough to not mind seeing Joaquin as much as she’d feared.

  “You four don’t seem as worried as I’d expect,” Joaquin said to us after everyone from Sol had filtered out. The firelight made his face almost ghoulish, or maybe it was just that I’d never look at him the same way again.

  “Does that disappoint you?” Maren asked.

  “I’m intrigued, more accurately. Emotion has run high at every other Council, but at this one, arguably the most important one, you four are calm and collected.”

  “Can we get this over with?” Maddie said.

  Joaquin had the decency to look stunned, but it only lasted a second. “If that’s what you want.”

  He called the camera crew and they all slid into position. After Joaquin gave his usual Council talk, we got our marbles and quickly cast our votes. Usually there was another question and answer session about how we felt about our vote and all that, but not tonight.

  “I have an announcement,” AJ said. “I would like to use my immunity coin tonight.”

  Joaquin looked confused. His eyes did a quick flit toward Maddie and he frowned. Phil must have told him that Maddie wanted to go home, and so he’d expected her name to be the one announced.

  “The immunity coin is sacred, AJ. Meant to be used only once, and only when you are in personal jeopardy.”

  “I think I am, obviously.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want to do, please bring it to the altar.”

  “Oh, I don’t have it on me,” AJ told him.

  Joaquin’s expression was condescending. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever thought he was charming. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said. “In order to use the immunity coin, you must surrender it.”

  “I am going to surrender it, but first I need a boat ride back to Black Rock to get it from my safe.”

  Joaquin dropped the host act. “Deb? Phil? A little help, please. AJ needs you to explain the rules.”

  The crew flipped on some of the giant lights, and Deb approached the altar.

  AJ did not, in fact, need a refresher on the rules. He’d gotten one earlier, when we had summoned Phil back to our team hut and we’d grilled him on the mechanics of using the immunity coin. We’d asked the question ten different ways to make sure, but Phil had never said that the coin had to be present at the Council during voting.

  “Are you really going to allow this?” Joaquin said to Deb, after she gave a nod for AJ to get it. “He’s banking on a loophole. You’re the rulemaker. Tell him he got it wrong.”

  Deb wasn’t concerned. She was a lot less stressed tonight, probably because she felt like she’d finally gotten things on track after the food poisoning.

  “It isn’t a loophole, because he’s right,” Deb said. “No one ever specifically said the coin had to be physically present to be used. It was assumed whoever had the immunity coin would bring it, but he didn’t, and it’s not of major consequence, so I’m going to allow him to go get it. What’s it to you, anyway? This Council isn’t nearly as long as usual. Let him get the coin, and we’ll still finish up at a decent time. Does everything have to be debated? Can we get through a single day without a screw-up? For once. Please.”

  I was amazed by Deb’s ability to remove herself so completely from what was happening around her that she was unaware of a serious undercurrent of chaos flowing through this Council. Her attention was mostly on the curled and crumpled sheaf of papers pinned to her clipboard. The show was what mattered; always the show. Or rather, only the show.

  AJ left, and with Deb scribbling away at her notes, that left Joaquin to face Maren, Maddie, and me on his own. I felt some satisfaction that he couldn’t make eye contact with any of us. No fun bantering tonight. No folksy, fake conversations, either. It was a stark change from previous Councils, and I wondered why no one from the crew seemed to notice that things between Joaquin and the players were not proceeding as usual. None of them noticed that for the first time he’d joined them outside the Council area during the filming break instead of plopping himself down with the players.

  In the distance, I heard the motor from the island shuttle, quickly followed by the thud of pounding feet getting louder and closer. Someone was running, hard.

  AJ burst through torch-lined Council entrance. He called my name.

  The crew was caught off-guard by his sudden entrance, and they scrambled to get into position. Deb called for the bright stage lights to be turned off in favor of the set lighting. “Torches only, please!”

  AJ was out of breath. Something was definitely wrong. He wasn’t triumphantly waving the coin around. In fact, he looked about as far from triumphant as a person could get.

  “Riley, it wasn’t—”

  Joaquin, back at his place at the altar, scolded him. “AJ, please take your seat. As always, we’ll need to observe the rules of silence for the counting of the votes.”

  AJ ignored him. He was still working to catching his breath—doubled over, hands on his knees. “Listen to me. Someone stole the immunity coin. They did it while we were here. I saw it in my safe before I left the cabin, but when I went back, it was gone.”

  “What?” I was sitting between Maren and Maddie, and the three of us looked back and forth at each other in confusion. How was that possible? Our whole plan depended on that immunity coin. AJ had three votes and Maddie had one. Without the immunity coin, AJ would be voted off and Maddie would have to stay.

  “It’s gone, you guys. Someone is messing with us, and I’m out. Riley, I left all my notes and files for you in a pile on my bed. Take them and go back to the fourth marker. The answer has got to be there somewhere.”

  “What? No,” I said. This couldn’t be the end for him. Not now. How had everything fallen apart so quickly? Worst of all, it all fell on me. Messing around with the vote had been my idea.

  Maddie was going to hold me to account. “What’s going on?” she asked me.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Maddie wouldn’t have even been here if I hadn’t convinced her to come. Do this and you’ll leave with dignity, I’d told her. “AJ couldn’t find the coin—”

  “I couldn’t find it because it was stolen,” AJ interrupted. “I looked everywhere, but it was gone. Someone knew how to break into my safe, and they took it.”

  From his position at the altar, Joaquin continued to call for silence and we continued to ignore him. Finally, he lost patience and hit the gong. He waited for the reverberations to stop before addressing AJ. “This is your final chance to present the immunity coin.”

  “I don’t have it,” AJ told him. “But then, you probably knew that. Or someone did, because this whole game is fixed—”

  “You really don’t have the coin?” Maddie said. “But . . . but we all voted for you. That’s three votes, and only one for me.”

  She seemed to be finally understanding the consequences of a lost coin. “Wait, no!” she cried, as Joaquin reached for the jars to begin the voting ceremony.

  He tipped my jar over first. It was empty. “Riley, you have z
ero votes.”

  It was the same for Maren’s jar.

  I watched in horrified silence when Joaquin picked up Maddie’s. I put my arm around her. What else could I do? It was obvious what was about to happen.

  Joaquin tipped the jar over and a single marble rolled out. “Maddie, one vote.”

  I felt her tremble, and the shaking only grew worse after three marbles came from AJ’s jar.

  “AJ, three votes,” Joaquin announced. “Your teammates have voted you out. I’m sorry, but it’s time—”

  Maddie shook off my arm. “That’s not right,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?” Joaquin asked her. He either couldn’t summon the jovial, friendly host personality, or he’d never had one in the first place and we’d only seen what we wanted to.

  “I’m the one going home,” Maddie said. “Not AJ. Me. I’m the one leaving tonight.”

  She turned to me. “That’s what you said. You told me I’d be the one voted off.”

  “Maddie, I tried—”

  I had no explanation, other than we’d been blindsided. There was nothing for any of us to do except watch as AJ approached the altar for his goodbye blessing. Maddie joined him.

  “I want to trade places with AJ,” Maddie said to Joaquin. “Give me the goodbye blessing, please.”

  Joaquin didn’t display any emotion at all. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” he told Maddie coldly.

  And that’s when she lost it. There was no doubt in my mind that when the show aired, there would be a clip of me assuring Maddie she’d go home with her dignity intact would accompany her meltdown. There was crying, some screaming, and things disintegrated into enough of a mess for Deb to finally step onto the Council floor and get involved.

  She tried to calm Maddie down, to no avail. “Maddie, what’s going on here? You’re all mixed up tonight. Most people get upset when they’re voted off, not when they get to stay.”

  “She’s not mixed up,” Maren called out. “She’s messed up. There’s a huge difference, and if your boy Joaquin had kept to himself—”

  Deb’s entire demeanor changed in the two seconds between Joaquin and himself. Her hand dropped from Maddie’s back, and her entire body straightened and tensed, as if something was expanding on the inside. “Joaquin, I swear to God, you had better pray you haven’t ruined my show.”

  That was it for me. Enough with the precious show. I started in on Deb, and Maren didn’t need any encouragement to let her insults fly, too.

  “How dare you let this happen!”

  “You only care about one thing!”

  “If my parents had any idea what was going on here . . . !”

  The altar, set up to be a sacred space for meditative thought and reflection, instead played host to an explosion of angry accusations.

  “Enough!” Deb screamed at me and Maren. “Get yourselves back to camp. Get out of here right now, or I won’t wait for the network to shut us down. I’ll do it myself!”

  Maren and I left for Black Rock without the usual post-Council niceties.

  “What a freaking mess. Who could have taken the coin?” Maren asked. “Deb? To make the show more dramatic?”

  I shook my head in frustration. “No idea.”

  I’d been spinning through all the possibilities the entire boat ride. It had to be someone from the show, someone who could have gotten a master key or known how to override the thumbprint requirement. Deb was high on the list, but it could have been anyone on the crew. I wondered, though, if the goal for stealing it was to create drama for the show or whether there was some sort of treasure manipulation going on. Had someone wanted AJ out of the way to affect our search for the treasure?

  “And what was that business at the end, about the network shutting us down?” Maren said. “I was hoping all those rumors were just talk.”

  Same. I hadn’t truly realized we were that close to the show actually getting canceled, and it was taking all I had not to fall into a panic. Not only was the brainy half of our partnership gone, leaving everything up to me, but now I might have a lot less time to accomplish anything.

  When we got to Black Rock, Maren and I split up and I hurried toward the boys’ cabin. I wanted to get to AJ’s safe before someone from the crew came to pack up his things. I nearly crashed into Lou, who was waiting outside the front door.

  “Whoa, what are you doing here?” I asked. “Isn’t filming done for the day?”

  He lifted his camera to his shoulder. “Guess not. Phil told me to get over here, so here I am.”

  “Whatever. I’m getting something of AJ’s. It’s really not going to be that exciting, but if you want to film it, fine. Let’s do it.”

  I went inside and flipped on the light.

  There was a scream, first from someone else, and then from me.

  Willa and Porter were in the cabin. Together. It was nearly a repeat of last night, when I’d seen Joaquin and Maddie, and my brain was having trouble processing it.

  They split apart when the lights went on, but not fast enough. It must have been a coping mechanism, because my mind zeroed in on seemingly inconsequential details like Willa’s brown leather sandals on the floor, one of them upside down as if it had been kicked off in a hurry. Porter’s navy sweater was in a heap on the floor. There were two Snack Bar glasses on top of a safe. I saw it all, understanding the implications and rejecting them at the same time.

  It felt like the ground was tilting, or maybe it was that my legs were getting weak, but something was making it very hard to stay upright. I backed up, not quite in control, bumping into a bed and sending a lacrosse stick clattering to the floor on my way out the door.

  I thought I’d been betrayed before. I thought I had experienced the worst of what that emotion brought. But nothing I’d ever been through compared to what I was feeling right now. Their treachery was affecting me in a real, physical way—squeezing my chest and violently churning my stomach.

  I trusted Porter. I didn’t trust anyone, and I’d trusted him.

  Had he been using me the whole time? And what about Willa? In some ways, her deception was worse. She’d encouraged me to go for Porter knowing she planned to as well. She’d acted as architect of this twisted triangle. Why—because she could? She had thought it would be fun?

  From inside the cabin, Porter was calling my name. It took everything I had, but I left without answering.

  31

  Waking up the next morning was brutal. I’d dragged a blanket from the Huaca hut last night to sleep on the beach, and when I opened my eyes I marveled at the bright blue sky and the soothing swish of the waves. Last night circumstances had been savagely altered—relationships destroyed, hopes burst, and trust mangled, yet somehow in the face of all that, the world was proceeding as usual.

  I felt something tap my head. “Rise and shine, buttercup,” Maren said.

  I pushed her foot away. “Get your dirty toes out of my hair,” I mumbled. “And go away. Today has been canceled.”

  “Make sure you stay out here looking like a pathetic loser for at least another five minutes. The other team is going to breakfast soon and I’m sure you want them to see you like this, right? Especially Porter and Willa.”

  Ugh. I wrapped myself in the blanket and waddled into the hut to collapse on the couch. “Who? I don’t know anyone with those names.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Last night, Maren had done something that had completely surprised me. When I made it back to the Huaca hut, I hadn’t even finished the Willa-Porter story before she had stormed out of the cabin to tell them off. Maren, of all people. It felt odd to even think it: Maren had made that grand gesture for me without a second thought.

  “About last night,” I started to say. “Thank you. Again. I’m—”

  Maren frowned. “Don’t ruin it by getting all sappy
. We’re teammates. The last two teammates left of Huaca, actually, and that’s what teammates do. Bring each other coffee, too.” She pointed toward the table where a Reality Gold branded coffee cup sat steaming. “Your turn tomorrow.”

  “If we’re even here tomorrow.” I traded the couch for a seat at the table. I had work to do if I wanted to figure out this final clue. Somehow, AJ and I had read the marker wrong, and I needed to figure out how.

  “Thank God we’re our own team,” I said. How things had changed! I never thought I’d be saying that to Maren. “I really can’t face those two.”

  “Oh, yeah. About that . . .”

  I looked up sharply. “What?”

  “I got a heads-up from Katya while I was getting coffee that we’re merging into one team.” She made a face. “Sorry.”

  “Well, isn’t that perfect.” A few days ago, I would have been thrilled to hear I’d be with Willa and Porter. But now that was bad news.

  Maren flopped down on the couch with her sketch pad. “I still can’t believe Willa and Porter did that to you. What a wild night. It was like one of a hundred crazy things that happened. Maddie trying to quit, someone stealing AJ’s coin, and all that stuff with Joaquin. Gross.”

  That reminded me. I was still stewing about Joaquin. Now that we knew what he was really like, I suspected there had been other issues. I wanted to look him up online. Normally, I’d sneak off to my satellite spot. But Maren had shown me last night that I could trust her.

  “I’ve got something else crazy to show you,” I told her. I’d hidden the satellite in the couch cushions last night, since the safe wasn’t as secure a hiding place as I’d thought. Unlike AJ, she didn’t recognize it for what it was, even when I opened it up and got the connector cord ready.

  “It’s a satellite. I’ve been using it to get online.”