Reality Gold Read online

  Phil lumbered around the tables, passing out copies of the map. “If you’re planning to search for the treasure, you’ll definitely need one of these.”

  I didn’t need a map; I had my own copy in my safe in the cabin, but I took one from Phil anyway. I pretended to study it while paying attention to the talk swirling around me. Nearly everyone, thankfully, seemed clueless about how to find the gold. Conventional public wisdom was that the treasure would most likely be found in a grove on the far side of the island, because that’s where a silver buckle from the 1500s had been discovered about twenty years ago. Almost all the players had heard of the buckle’s discovery and seemed to be trying to pinpoint on the map exactly where that grove might be. Thank God—that was far away from where I planned to go. Any treasure hunter worth their salt knew the buckle had nothing to do with the gold.

  “This seems like forced labor to me,” Murch said to Phil as he took a map. “You’re letting us loose on the island and hoping we find the treasure. We do, and it’s a big win for you, but we just get a few bucks. You’re basically sending us to do your dirty work.”

  “Two hundred and fifty grand is more than just a few bucks—”

  “Shhhh!” At the Sol table, Justin stood up and motioned for silence.

  Angry voices shot out of from the trees.

  Deb emerged from the path, followed by Katya. “We’re going to have to improvise,” Deb was saying sharply. “We don’t have a choice.”

  They stopped short when they realized they had an attentive audience.

  “An island to explore, a beautiful beach, and all of you guys are sitting here waiting for someone to tell you what to do?” Deb asked. “Come on. No audience wants to watch a show of you lounging around. We need movement and action. Phil, did you explain the daily jobs? Might as well put them to work if this is what they’re going to give us on their own.”

  “Jobs?” Murch nodded knowingly. “What’d I just say? Forced labor.”

  “Yeah, this place is basically a prison camp,” Deb shot back, waving her clipboard toward the beach. “The daily jobs,” she explained, “are minor tasks to get you moving and interacting with each other. I doubt you’ll find them too taxing. Every day there will be a sign-up sheet at breakfast, and you can either choose something to do or one of us will assign you a job. We’ll have shifts in the kitchen doing light prep—”

  “I’ll take that.” A tall guy with a buzz cut tipped his chair back and he balanced, effortlessly, on the back legs. Everything about him was assured and no-nonsense, from his spiky hair to his sharp cheekbones and the way he observed the rest of us with his intense, dark eyes. He got some surprised looks. “What? My dad has a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Might as well stick with what I know.”

  “Love the enthusiasm, Rohan,” Deb said, “but we weren’t thinking there would be any need for shifts today so there isn’t anything needed in the kitchen right now. There’s been a slight change of filming plans, though, so we have an hour or two before our first challenge. Phil, what can we offer today? Firewood collection? Seaweed cleanup?”

  “How about both?”

  “Great. Both.” Deb directed Katya to get a branch from the fire pit. “Katya, hold it up so everyone can see. All right, everyone, see this piece of kindling? We need to keep a pile of similar-sized pieces of wood by the fire pit, because that’s where you’ll be spending most of your evenings and firelight gives a nice, scenic backdrop. How about each of you finds twenty pieces of wood, or Phil, whatever you want to assign. Okay? Joaquin, get some confessionals going, too.”

  The two women left in a rush, leaving Phil to explain the chore system in more detail. He showed us how the little bits of seaweed and driftwood that washed up with the high tide had to be cleared so that the beach was pristine for filming. “And no,” he added for Murch’s benefit, “it isn’t ‘forced labor.’ Crew members are going to be coming by every low tide to do a full cleanup, which includes raking the sand. Your contribution to this effort is very minor, and as Deb said, it’s to get some interactions going. We’ll use bits from those scenes as filler.”

  Beach-ready Willa chose seaweed cleanup, striding confidently toward the water. I had never seen anyone so comfortable wearing so little. She hadn’t so much as fidgeted with a bathing suit strap or adjust her bottoms, which was a skill, really. And like metal filings pulled by a magnet, a number of players—mostly male—followed her.

  “Hold up,” Joaquin said, pointing at each of us who were left, his finger finally settling on a quiet girl whose name I hadn’t heard yet.

  “You’re up, Rachel,” he told her. “Confessional time.”

  “One-on-one interviews,” Phil explained to the rest of us after they left, taking a path toward the camp interior. Better her than me. The longer I could delay my confessional, the better. I had no intention of confessing a thing.

  Instead, I chose firewood duty.

  “Twenty sticks?” I asked Phil.

  “Sure. Yeah. Twenty sounds good,” he said indifferently.

  “Don’t bother counting to twenty,” Rohan said as we walked into the woods. “This is all just a runaround. Just get an armload and be done with it.”

  “It seems a little strange that they started us off with such a bang, basically throwing us out of the helicopter, but now we’re killing time doing chores.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t planned,” Rohan said. We’d only gone a few feet into the woods, but we ran right into a dead tree with branches scattered all around. Rohan picked up some of the longer ones and began snapping them over his knee. The sound summoned AJ and Maren. I frowned. Had they been talking without me?

  “We were supposed to start the first challenge right after lunch but someone smashed up a bunch of equipment,” Rohan told us.

  Alex and Taylor emerged from beyond the fallen tree and came around to our side. Alex was using a couple of branches like walking sticks. Rohan held his hand out for them, snapped each of them over his knee, and tossed them to the ground. I threw a branch of my own on top, and Taylor threw one, too.

  “Who would do that? What kind of equipment?” Alex asked Rohan. “Like cameras?”

  He picked up another branch and threw it onto the pile. “I don’t know, but the local guys on the crew are scared. Stuff like that has been happening for a while. They all think that old curse is real.”

  AJ dropped a branch he’d dragged over to the pile. “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. The curse is not real. It was made up to keep people away.”

  “It’s working, dude.”

  Alex was pensive. “How do you know all of this?”

  “I talked to them,” Rohan said.

  Maren followed up. “How?”

  “How do you think? I opened my mouth and the words came out.”

  “I meant, literally how did Deb and Phil not object to that? Not to mention it doesn’t seem like too many of them speak English,” Maren pointed out.

  “I speak Portuguese, so that’s not really an issue.”

  Interesting: a competitor who spoke the language of our host country. That couldn’t be a coincidence. It wasn’t as if Portugese was commonly taught in school.

  I kept an eye on AJ. There was no way he was going to waste time gathering firewood when he could be checking out the first clue on the map: a stone marker not too far inland. If I’d never seen it in person, that’d be the first place I’d go.

  Sure enough, I was right. When the pile of sticks got large enough to start bringing to the beach, he slipped away. I was about to follow him when I realized there was a camera pointed in my direction. I hesitated. I didn’t want to be filmed sneaking off. That footage might turn into what Phil had just called a filler scene—and with just a few well-chosen snippets of me looking shady, Deb could shape the audience perception and shift reality, turning me into a villain.

&nbs
p; But I could use these filler scenes to my advantage, too.

  “Do you guys know where AJ went?” I asked innocently. Everyone looked around, even Maren. Good. That meant they hadn’t talked about the clue without me. “I’ll bet he started the treasure hunt.”

  “Little sneak,” Rohan said. “But if that guy knows where the gold is, let’s follow him.”

  Perfect. Now following AJ to the clue seemed like Rohan’s idea, not mine. I pointed north. “I think the first clue isn’t too far that way.”

  Alex took some of the firewood to the beach on her way to grab some of her Sol teammates. “Some of them are really into the treasure hunt,” she explained, which was fine by me. I wanted to see exactly who came along. That’s who my competition for the gold would be.

  The underbrush wasn’t too thick, and we easily found a path. I remembered the trail had been here two years ago, it just wasn’t as worn-in as it was now. The crew must have been taking some sightseeing trips between camp and the marker before our arrival.

  We had just reached a wide, bright clearing when Alex caught up to us. She had collected quite a group: a cameraman; Cody, Chloe, and Taylor from her team; and Sean, Lucas, and Maddie from mine. Across the open meadow, all of us could see AJ staring up at a giant stone totem pole that angled up from the tall grass like an unseemly scarecrow in a wheat field. I stared at it suspiciously. That monstrosity had definitely not been here two years ago.

  “That’s the first clue? Doesn’t seem hard to find at all. This thing is going to be a piece of cake,” Rohan said. I wasn’t going to guess out loud, but I was pretty sure Deb had put the stone totem there. The real marker was just a small, flat stone—probably not impressive enough for TV. Furthermore, I took note that Rohan didn’t seem to know that the first clue—the marker—had been discovered nearly two hundred years ago. The trail went cold from that point, though.

  A small black drone flew overhead, probably with a camera attached, capturing the bird’s-eye view of us as we approached the statue. It had been a long time since I’d been part of a group; I hadn’t quite gotten the feel of where I fit into this one yet. From above, we may have looked like a cohesive unit, but when you were down on the ground, it was obvious there was no real sense of camaraderie. If there were, we would have bunched up into several mini-groups, not a slim single-file line. That was fine with me; I’d become wary of new people, for obvious reasons. It was better to make connections slowly. Act too quickly and I might misjudge—allowing a new set of people to befriend and then abandon me, just like my old classmates at The Shaw School.

  “Got you,” Cody shouted to AJ when we were nearly across the field.

  AJ didn’t seem bothered by our arrival. “If you’d done even the slightest bit of research, you wouldn’t have needed to follow me,” he called back. “This marker has been public knowledge for years. I’m actually disappointed you had to rely on me to get here. Am I not going to have any real competition in this thing?”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Rohan muttered under his breath, although he was frowning. Probably realizing that it was not, in fact, going to be a piece of cake.

  When we reached AJ, one of the camera guys made sure to zoom in close enough to capture all the disappointed expressions. The unimposing stone square pressed into the dirt at the base of the totem pole had three dots carved into the surface in the shape of a pyramid.

  “That’s it?” Alex asked. She sounded as discouraged as the rest of the group looked.

  She bent down and traced the dots with her finger. I’d done the same, many times. Just as I’d done then, I thought about how strange it was to be so close to something that had been around for nearly four hundred years, and meant so much to so many. People who had touched this marker had died, probably not too long afterward. Maybe even Miles. I imagined him here, asking Lady Luck for guidance.

  I shivered. The drone swooped lower, breaking the mood for a second and reminding me there was nothing to worry about. We were under constant surveillance.

  On the other hand, the drone hovering above us was a bit menacing.

  “What do those dots mean? How are we supposed to know where to go from here?” Taylor asked AJ.

  AJ shrugged exaggeratedly. “Got me,” he said, not very convincingly. “This marker was the first, but also the last, clue found. No one has been able to figure out where to go next.”

  “Come on, dude. You must know something.” Rohan jumped in and worked on AJ a good while, but AJ held his ground. Good. I was glad the only other person here with any real knowledge of the treasure wasn’t going to blab about it.

  Even better, it seemed as if everyone was beginning to realize that treasure hunting was going to be a lot harder than they’d thought.

  “How is anyone supposed to see three dots on a stone square and know where to go next?” Chloe asked. “It’s impossible.”

  “Seriously? You guys are killing me,” AJ said. “I’ll let you in on something, but only because this info was freely available if any of you had bothered to look. That stone isn’t a clue. It’s a marker. Nothing more than that. Think of it as a dropped pin in Maps. It’s simply saying hey, start the next round of instructions here.”

  “What instructions?” Taylor asked.

  “The instructions are on the map,” AJ told her. “They’re hidden, but they’re there.”

  I was impressed. He did know what he was talking about.

  “How’d you learn all this for the show?” Maddie asked. “I read about the buckle, but that’s about it.”

  “I didn’t know much about any of it until this year, when I did an independent study on the island,” AJ said. “That’s why I wanted to come. See the place in person.”

  “Wow. I did this show so I’d have something to put on my college applications,” Chloe offered. “I had no idea people had, like, real reasons to come.”

  “Forget the essays. Isn’t the money the real reason why we’re all here?” Rohan asked.

  “Heck, yeah,” Cody answered. “I’m definitely here for the cash. College bills for sure, and besides, who doesn’t have a little side hustle that needs some funding?”

  “Same,” Lucas added. “I thought getting into Georgetown was hard, but it turns out finding ways to pay for it is way harder.”

  “So all of you have college plans?” Rohan asked. “Damn. I thought there might be some others like me.”

  “You’re not going to college?” Chloe asked in a shocked voice, as if she had never met anyone who would have considered such a thing.

  “Nope.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, and I was suddenly aware of the cameras again. The drone was hovering right above our circle, so virtually every angle was covered.

  Maddie piped up. “I’m not going to college right away. I’m starting my senior year, but I already know I’m going to take a gap year after graduation. After I leave here I’m volunteering in Costa Rica with Teen Trailblazers to rescue sea turtles, and if I like it, I’ll do that before starting college.”

  Rohan shook his head. “Yeah, Chipmunk? But that’s not the same thing, is it?”

  No one spoke.

  “Look at you,” Rohan said. “So shocked. Did you really think we were all the same? Honor roll bots looking to pad their applications and pay for a useless degree? You guys must really live in a bubble. What kind of show would that be?”

  “What do you mean, what kind of show?” Chloe asked.

  “It means filming a bunch of brainiacs without any secrets would be pretty boring to watch. Drama, that’s what this show is about.”

  “Oh my God, that’s so not true,” Taylor said, hands fluttering. “Deb said grades are important. I had to turn in my transcript. She told me my GPA was a big reason why I was picked.”

  “Then she lied to you.” Rohan seemed to be enjoying everyone else�
�s discomfort. “You think ratings will come from watching a bunch of library lovers figure out a puzzle or run around a maze? Nope. Ratings will come from the off-hours stuff. The scheming and backstabbing. Deb basically just admitted it. They have us doing chores so we can ‘interact’ with each other. Let me help you out. That’s code for girls pulling each other’s hair and wrestling on the sand in bikinis while the guys get in fights over girls who are out of their league.”

  Chloe shook her head dismissively. “No way. No one is going to scheme or wrestle or do any of that, because we all want to get into college and if the admissions committee sees us doing any of that stuff on TV we won’t get in anywhere.”

  “Ah, but you won’t be able to help it. That’s the beauty. Half of you are here because you’ve got something to prove, and I guarantee the other half has a ton of secrets. They want us to dig each other out, get to those secrets and fears and conflicts. And for those of you smug idiots who think that won’t happen, let me advise you that after you sell yourself out once, it’ll be easy to do again. And again.”

  That was ominous—and interesting. It sounded like he was accusing everyone of having a secret. What could the others be hiding?

  “I don’t have any secrets,” Chloe said. And then, defensively, when everyone just stared, “I don’t. I live in a small boring town with normal parents, and I’ve never gotten a grade below an A-minus or been grounded or anything.”

  “Fine. You’re practically putting me to sleep, but then you must be here for some other reason. Maybe it’s to provoke someone. You’re a rah-rah cheerleader, go-team girl. Maybe you’re here to get Goth Girl all hot and bothered.”

  “Goth? I assume you are talking about me,” Maren interjected. “I am not Goth. If you start calling me that I will literally smash your head in with a coconut.”