by Paul Draker
Veins stood out on the side of JT’s shaved head. He turned and walked away, limping slightly. Veronica stalked after him, continuing to berate him in a low, angry voice.
Natalie stood fifteen feet away, eyes wide, mouth open. She hadn’t moved. Lauren materialized at her side and grabbed the other end of the blue flagpole. “If you’re just going to stand there like an idiot,” she said, “give that to me.”
Natalie shook her head, refusing to let go.
Watching the two red-team women struggle over the flag, Camilla shook her head in disbelief. Then she thought of what she herself had done to Mason earlier.
It was all of them, really. Julian had turned them into animals.
Tinkling laughter trailed past her ear as Jordan ran forward, clapping a hand on Natalie’s shoulder as she went by: a tag. Natalie’s face crumpled, and she released the flag, sending Lauren stumbling back with it. Falling to her knees, Lauren immediately threw the blue flag away before Jordan could tag her, too.
But Jordan didn’t stop. She scooped up the flag and continued down onto the beach, where the red base was.
“Where are you going?” Camilla shouted after her.
Jordan should have taken the blue flag to safety, not closer to danger. Mason was stuck back at their base, unable to run, after Camilla’s own tackle had injured his knees. And JT had tagged both her and Veronica out—by the time they made it to their base and back, it would all be over. This was all down to their team captain now.
“Jordan, get it out of here!” Camilla yelled.
Shaking her head, Jordan tossed the blue flag onto the sand next to the red base. Cheeks flushed, eyes bright, she took a few barefoot steps back toward the water and settled into a ready stance, facing Lauren. The flag lay between them.
“You dropped something,” she called to Lauren.
She was baiting Lauren, wanting her to pick it up so she could tag her. But from the expression on Lauren’s face, Camilla could see what a bad idea this was. She ran forward.
Lauren’s mouth pulled into a snarl. She took a few steps to the side and crouched, reaching down by her feet. Then she straightened, holding a four-foot length of steel pipe with a jagged chunk of concrete at the end. It looked like a medieval mace.
Jordan’s eyes widened.
“No worries—I found it,” Lauren called back. “But thanks.”
“Stop it right now!” Camilla shouted at them.
Jordan glanced at her. “Stay out of this, sister.”
“Listen to your captain,” Lauren said, moving toward the flag, steel pipe held ready. “She’s got the right idea.”
Camilla got in between them and stepped toward Lauren, hands raised. “Can’t you see what’s going to happen here?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something black and red rising out of the water behind Jordan.
Camilla screamed.
Jordan whipped around, too late. An arc of red knocked her legs out from under her with a wet slap, and she crashed to the ground, flat on her back. A black figure whipped the soaked red flag upright and swung a leg up onto the rock behind her. Then a dripping Juan pushed himself upright and swept past Jordan, thrusting the base of the flagpole into her stomach as he went by—a quick, vicious jab, like a downhill racer planting a ski pole. She doubled over onto her side, arms wrapped around her midsection, and pulled her knees to her chest.
Camilla ran to her, passing Juan as he bent to grab the blue flag. She dropped to her knees by Jordan’s side. “Oh god, are you okay?”
Jordan rocked back and forth, hugging her stomach, eyes screwed shut. Her face was red, and the cords in her neck stood out. Camilla laid a hand on her forehead, and Jordan grunted one word: “Bastard.”
Juan planted both flags in the red base and stepped back.
Lauren’s voice rose behind them. “God damn it, Juan.” She sounded upset.
Camilla didn’t know why—after all, the red team had just won. But she didn’t care about that. She stared at Juan, dripping water from his short black hair, and a fist tightened around her heart. Fighting to keep her composure, she gently brushed her injured friend’s hair back from her forehead.
“Why?” she asked. “Why, Juan?”
Juan’s expression was neutral. He rubbed at his temple. Then he shrugged.
CHAPTER 74
Pelagic Institute, Santa Cruz, California
In the lab, Heather hunched in front of her widescreen Samsung monitor, sipping tea from the oversize mug she held. Jacob leaned over her shoulder. The fronds of a small spider plant dangled from the shelf above, touching the corner of the screen, and he slapped them away abruptly. She hated it when he got like this.
He pointed. “Just try and tell me you don’t see that.”
On the monitor, glowing trails stretched behind moving dots—each dot labeled with an alphanumeric designation. The trails arced and looped, tracing out their patterns against a background of fainter lines, like the contour lines on a topographic map. A digital clock at the bottom of the screen spun through a five-day period on fast-forward as she watched first one, then two, then four labeled dots appear at the edges of the screen to swirl into a circling pattern at the center.
“I see it,” she said. “Your convergence pattern. They’re not supposed to do that.”
“This is only last year’s tags,” Jacob said. “There may be even more of them. Nobody’s ever seen this shit before, Heather—it’s a totally new behavior. And we’re sitting here with our thumbs in our asses.” He pounded his fist on the worktable, sloshing tea out of her cup. “What the fuck is going on out there?”
She pushed back from her workstation, getting a little space between her and Jacob, when the door to the lab swung open with a creak.
Dmitry leaned inside the doorway. Looking pleased with himself, he cracked a Diet Coke. “I find out who is on island.”
“Who?” she asked.
Dmitry’s grin spread. “My cousin Sasha, he sometimes drives truck for Institute. I get him job—take care of family. Sasha tells me, last week he took Karen down to Monterey Aquarium to help with new exhibit. Is not eating, this one. She give it checkup so they can keep on display longer than last one. Bring more visitors, more money—”
“Yes, yes, the fucking tourists love it when they have one.” Jacob waved an impatient hand. “Go on.”
“Sasha said Karen is talking on cell phone whole way, sounding very nervous. She keep saying, ‘What assurances you give me?’ and ‘Can I get in writing?’ Sasha pretending not to listen, but hearing everything.”
“So who is on the island instead of us?” Heather asked.
“Is reality show.”
Jacob laughed and dropped into the beanbag chair beside the desk. “You mean documentary. They’re making a documentary. ‘Reality show’ means something else, Dmitry.”
“No.” Dmitry looked offended. “I know what is documentary. They making reality show on island right now, like Fear Factory. Survivors. American Idols.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Your cousin misunderstood.”
Heather nodded. “I’m afraid he’s right, Dmitry. Parks and Rec would never allow it.”
“Is true,” Dmitry said. “Sasha say Karen talk about money, too, asking when they sending the wire transfer for Institute. But then she ask about different wire transfer, too.”
Heather tensed. “You know, the weird way Karen was acting, the way she cut out yesterday, I could almost believe something like this.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Jacob blinked rapidly. “This month—”
“Of course they’d do it this month,” she said. “Any other time, there’s no way they could get away with it.”
“I don’t understand,” Dmitry said. “Island is closed to public always.”
Heather remembered that he was new to the team. “In December, they close down the whole shoreside state park, too,” she said.
He nodded in understand
ing. “Because of elephant seals arriving. Mating season.” His hands moved in a graphic gesture that she didn’t want to try interpreting.
Jacob bounced out of the beanbag and paced to the window, grabbing the front of his sweatshirt. “For the next two weeks, Año Nuevo is the most isolated stretch of coast in California. That island might as well be in fucking Antarctica somewhere. They could be doing anything out there right now, and nobody would see. We have to check it out.”
The monitor suddenly switched to screen saver, startling Heather. She twitched, spilling her tea, and its sweet, herbal scent filled the air. “I think they paid Karen off,” she said. “Bribed her. This is so wrong… Raja’s team spent four seasons hiding in blinds to avoid disrupting the animals’ natural behavior. A bunch of TV people running around—that’ll set the mammal studies back years. Years.”
Jacob pointed at the monitor again. “This is why we have to go out there. The convergence pattern. Whoever they are, they’re causing it somehow.”
Dmitry shook his head. “Is not good idea. We get fired.”
“Why’d they choose Año Nuevo, anyway?” Heather twisted a lock of hair between her fingers, then caught herself doing it and stopped. “I thought they liked tropical settings with everyone shirtless, in bikini tops. Did Sasha catch the name of which studio is behind this? Maybe we can call them.”
“Sasha is good listener. He hear name of company sending wire transfer: Vita Brevis Entertainment.”
“Oh, shit,” Jacob said. “It’s really true.”
Heather spun back to her monitor. “Let’s see what Google has to say about Vita Brevis Entertainment.”
• • •
A few minutes later, she turned back to the others, puzzled. “This just keeps getting better and better. I found some old quote they probably got the name from, and a couple similar-sounding companies, but no Vita Brevis Entertainment.”
“That’s a waste of time.” Jacob crossed the lab with angry strides and turned her monitor off. “I’m telling you, we need to just take the fucking boat and go out there.”
CHAPTER 75
With only four people sitting and leaning against the walls, the great room of the Victorian house now seemed a vast empty space. Lauren stared down at her hands. Her eyes still itched from the bear spray. The blue team had stayed in their own building instead of joining the others—smart of them, considering the way Lauren and her teammates felt right now. The midafternoon sun filtered weakly through the dull gray overcast outside.
Her chest tightened every time she glanced at Juan. He should have let her plant the flag. The scoreboard glowed from the monitor above them all, taunting her.
Somehow, she had ended up in the bottom three. How the Christ had that happened?
Nobody felt much like talking, it seemed. Lauren certainly didn’t. JT kept rubbing his shin. In the corner of the room, Natalie was almost invisible with her knees tucked up in front of her chest. She never took her eyes off the doorway.
The fifth member of their team—Travis—was still missing, but Lauren didn’t give a shit about that. If he never came back, that would be just fine with her.
“We got that security thing,” JT said. “We won today, so we can’t lose these points now. The other team can still lose theirs.”
“Big deal,” she said. “I don’t have many to lose, but I see playing captain worked out well for somebody today.” She glared at Juan. “Don’t get too comfortable, though. Your pretty little barefoot princess next door is still ahead of you, amigo. You should have spiked her harder.”
Juan had changed into dry clothes—all black, of course. What was with that, anyway?
He shrugged. “Julian had a second monitor screen in the other house all along,” he said. “That tells me he expected things to get tense between the teams. For this amount of money, perhaps it was inevitable.”
Lauren looked down at her hands again. It was easy to stay angry, to psych herself up. But maybe it was time to listen to the small voice that she had been hearing for the past two days, growing more and more insistent with every passing hour. The others had to be thinking the same thing, even if no one else was willing to admit it.
“This situation,” she said. “I’ve been here before. You take a bunch of ultracompetitive people together and put a crazy challenge in front of them, nobody’s gonna back out. You ignore what your instincts are telling you. Next thing you know, people are dead. Something real bad is gonna happen here. I know it. And you know what else? It almost seems like Julian wants that.”
Juan looked thoughtful. “Maybe something has already happened. Nobody’s seen Travis since the beginning of the game. We should go out, look for him.”
“Yeah, Travis.” Lauren made a sour face. “Here’s a little something about our good buddy Travis you might find interesting.”
Reaching into the pocket of her cargo pants, she pulled out the envelope she had dried out last night. Most of the ink had washed away, but this morning she had read the parts of the letter that were still legible. It was enough. She handed the envelope to Juan.
“JT, Natalie,” she called. “Come over here. You ought to see this, too.”
Juan looked at the return address, and his brows arched. Then he pulled the letter out of the envelope. JT and Natalie looked over his shoulder as he scanned the faded paragraphs, reading aloud.
“Lewd or lascivious conduct with a minor fourteen or fifteen years of age… rape using threat of force… aggravated assault… counts of sodomy… the defendant, Travis Hargrave, represented that… sentenced to a state correctional facility for no less than… parole eligibility in four years… registration as a sex offender…”
JT let out an explosive breath. “Where’d you get this, Lauren?” His voice was unusually quiet.
“One of the caches from the second day’s competition. It got soaked, so I didn’t read it ‘til this morning.”
A look of surprise crossed Juan’s face. “A rapist, a child molester. And clearly, Julian knew.” He tapped the letter with the back of his other hand. “He’s telling us.”
Lauren glanced at Natalie, seeing no surprise at all in her expression.
JT got up and walked to the big front window, rubbing the back of his shaved head. His voice was pitched high, incredulous.
“What kind of fucked-up reality show is this?”
CHAPTER 76
In the Greek Revival house, the blue team was gathered around the monitor. Camilla sat next to Jordan, peering at her in concern. “You could be—I don’t know—bleeding internally, or something,” she said. “Please let Brent have a look at you.”
Jordan shook her head. She was acting like a stubborn little girl, and Camilla knew how to deal with those. She changed the subject.
“You’re way ahead of everybody,” she said. “What are you going to do with the money if you win?”
“When I win.” Jordan looked away.
“When you win. How will you spend it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care about that.” Jordan rubbed her stomach. “For me, it’s never been about the money.” Her megawatt smile reappeared, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, and Camilla felt her own excitement return. Maybe she was being too much of a worrywart. She sneaked a glance at the scoreboard:
At least she was still in the top five, and she wasn’t going to be naive anymore. Teams didn’t matter; it was every person for herself. She had dropped the ball today fooling herself about that, but tomorrow she was going to play harder, smarter. Her kids were counting on her. They really had no one else to fight for them. She pictured Avery’s tear-streaked face, Cassie’s sullen stares, Ellie, Davey—all of them. By taking their parents, life hadn’t played fair with them, had it? She was here to try to make up for that. So why should she play fair?
Jordan was going to be very, very hard to beat, but even if she won, that might be all right, too. If she didn’t care about the money, then maybe Camilla could convince her to care about s
omething else. What if Jordan joined the foundation’s board? What a spokesperson she would make for the kids! And as a journalist, she could get their stories out, find people who wanted to help.
Camilla laid a hand on Jordan’s arm. “I’ve got an idea I’d like you to think about. You don’t have to answer now…”
The room brightened, and Julian appeared on the monitor.
Sitting on Jordan’s other side, Veronica held up a warning hand. “Quiet, everybody.”
Their host smiled at them from the screen, looking relaxed. “I must give my congratulations to today’s winning team,” he said. “You all played very hard out there. A gripping contest—our most exciting day yet. Team spirit was strong.
“But there are also the individual gains and losses.” His eyes roamed the room. “It’s at this point that the winners start to sort themselves from the losers. Look around you, at your fellow players. One of you will walk away with five million dollars. Ask yourselves the question: ‘Will it be me? Or them?’
“The winning team’s points are now secure, and this gives them some advantage in future competitions. But for members of today’s losing team, if you push yourselves, you can easily overcome the edge the other team’s victory has bought them.
“And now, since last night’s contestant profile was such a hit,” Julian said, “we bring you another one. She’s a steadying influence, a quiet source of calm strength for us all. Let’s find out who she is, what she’s had to overcome to become the person we see today.”
Camilla blew out a breath as the screen went blank. She wasn’t ready for this. She could never be ready for this. Her thoughts whirled and collided.
Not me, please not me. Let it be anyone but me.
The face that appeared on the screen wasn’t hers. Her pounding heart slowed as she stared in surprise.
On-screen, a teenage girl of 16 or 17 raised a middle finger at the camera. The photograph was slightly faded but still clear enough. A black Goth-rock T-shirt stretched tight across her chest: an image of rock star Marilyn Manson in an obscene pose. Rips and holes tattered the shirt and the cutoff jean shorts she wore, deliberately exposing broad areas of skin. The girl’s hair was tar black and cut short in a spiky wild shag. Pale makeup caked her sneering face, and a half-inch silver hoop pierced one nostril. Thick black eye shadow and mascara surrounded piercing silver-blue eyes that burned with fierce anger. An hour earlier, Camilla had stared into those same eyes and seen that same fury in them.