New Year Island (30 page)

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.

Pelagic Institute, Santa Cruz, California

I
n 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 understanding. “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.”

W
ith 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?”

I
n 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?