New Year Island (41 page)

Mason spoke, sounding oddly serious. “The night before we were dropped off, on the ship, I noticed something unusual. Nobody made any calls telling loved ones, friends, or roommates what they were doing. That seems unlikely for an entire group of ten people. I don’t have any family that would want to hear from me, but the rest of you?”

Camilla shook her head and looked at the floor. “Where are you going with this, Mason?”

“Listen, it’s got to be said, so I’m saying it.” The lantern’s white light reflected from his broken glasses, making his eyes invisible. “We need to at least acknowledge a possibility here. This whole ‘reality show’ thing”—he air-quoted it with two fingers of each hand—”may not be exactly what we’ve been led to believe.”

“Meaning what?”

He waved a hand. “Call me morbid, but ask yourselves this question: what kind of reality show wouldn’t immediately pull the plug after contestants maimed each other, and one died in a horrible accident—maybe even live on camera, given the high-tech setup here?”

Veronica snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I hate to burst your bubble,” he said, “but I think we all need to keep an open mind. What if the reality show was a pretext, and this is what Julian intended all along? Am I the only one thinking this?”

“Oh god, Mason…” Camilla shook her head. “There really is something wrong with the way your mind works.”

“I agree,” Juan said, and she glanced up. “You sound paranoid.”

“But it can’t be a coincidence,” Mason said. “Think about it for a moment. They chose people who wouldn’t tell any—”

“No,” Camilla said. “There’s another reason they wanted us. I think we all have something else in common—something much more unusual.”

“You think you know why we’re here?” Veronica said, her voice harsh. “Then just say so. Why did they choose
us
?”

Camilla opened her mouth, but the words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t talk about it. She just couldn’t.

Thankfully, Brent spoke for her.

“What’s the most terrible experience of your life, Veronica?” he asked. “What defines who you are today? I think we’ve all got some idea, thanks to Julian’s nasty little profile. And we saw how you were able to handle JT.”

“Don’t you even—”

Brent raised a hand, silencing her. The light from the lantern lent him a terrible gravitas, making his face look ancient and forbidding.

“We’ve all heard a distorted version of my story,” he said. “And about JT’s last tour in Afghanistan. Lauren walked away from a climbing accident that cost two people their lives. In prison, child molesters usually don’t survive a month, but Travis did. He’s out on parole after a five-year sentence. Do you see the pattern here?”

Camilla found her voice.

“We’re survivors,” she said. “It’s what we have in common. Each of us is still alive because, at some point in the past, we’ve beaten incredible odds. That’s why they selected us.”

Brent nodded. “The seven-year survival rate for mesothelioma is less than five percent. I was diagnosed in 2004, and eight years later, here I am, alive and healthy, my cancer in full remission. But you said
‘we,’
Camilla, and I sensed something about you, too, when we first met. Tell us why you’re here.”

There was no turning back now. She looked into the lantern’s cold blue-white LED, its harsh light providing no warmth, no relief from the bleak sadness that washed over her. She stared at it so she wouldn’t have to see the faces of the other contestants as she spoke.

“I lost both my parents in the Loma Prieta earthquake when I was seven,” she said. “A two-story freeway collapsed in Oakland and our car was underneath. Somehow, I lived…”

Her voice was flat, affectless. Hearing it scared her. She had never told anyone this before, never let anyone get close enough to her to ask. Never.

“But I don’t remember any of it.” Why had she felt compelled to say that so quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth? Why was her heart beating so fast? Was it
really
the truth, or was it only what she had convinced herself of?

“When I got older, someone told me I was trapped in the car for four days. It took rescuers that long to clear enough wreckage to find us and get me out. They had to cut me out of the car… Both my legs were broken.”

Her shins were aching now. Shuddering, Camilla hugged her knees and closed her eyes, hearing an echo of the tortured creak of metal that haunted her dreams. Metal tearing, then awful wet, sloppy sounds and her own horrified shrieks. She wanted to find a corner, curl up, and just go away for a while.

“You’ve known you were a survivor ever since you were a child,” Brent said. “Somebody else now… Juan. If we’re right, then why are you here?”

Camilla perked up at the sound of his name. Opening her eyes, she took a deep breath and forced herself to let go of her knees. She watched Juan with curiosity. Jordan sat at his side. He didn’t answer at first, and when he did his voice was low.

“I’d rather not talk about it. But it fits the pattern.”

“This isn’t group therapy,” Mason said. “We aren’t sharing because we’re caring. Nobody believes me, but I think Julian made sure—”

Veronica shushed him with an impatient gesture. “Why would you try to hide something?” she asked Juan.

He seemed to consider this. “That’s fair, I suppose. It’s meaningless to worry about concealing an unsavory past right now. I was born in another country, in South America. I grew up on the streets. Things were different there—or perhaps not so very different from our worst inner cities here. My neighborhood was poor, and gangs ruled everywhere. You had to join one because, if you tried to go it alone, you wouldn’t last a day.

“Gang life is the same wherever you are. It’s not glamorous. We had to do ugly things every day to survive, and I’m not proud of that. At nineteen, I saw a chance to get out, and I took it… but the past has a way of catching up with you.”

Camilla had never heard Juan speak that much before. She wished she could see his expression more clearly, but shadows painted the planes of his cheeks and turned his eye sockets into pools of inky blackness. The dark clothing made him almost invisible—a ghost in the corner of the room.

“One of my old gang found me a couple years later. I had made a new life for myself in Long Beach, working as a deckhand on a dive boat. He booked a charter under a false name. You can imagine my surprise when he came aboard, but he had a gun.”

Juan’s voice was emotionless. “The captain was dead as soon as we left port. My old friend held the gun on me, making me drive the boat. He told me I had betrayed them all. He shot me in the chest twice, and once in the head. Then he threw me overboard, five miles out to sea.”

Jordan shifted beside him and put a hand on his forearm, rubbing it. Her face, too, was an unreadable mask of shadows.

“How did you survive?” Camilla asked, surprising herself.

“I was lucky. The Coast Guard was monitoring radio traffic and heard something suspicious. They boarded the empty boat, then started a search. They found me—pulled me out of the water before I bled out.”

“Doesn’t sound like it was just luck,” Brent said. “How long were you in the water?”

“A little more than five hours.”

“I rest my case.” Brent’s eyes roamed the room. “Natalie, how about you?”

Tucked next to Veronica, she shook her head. She didn’t look up at them.

“Natalie…?”

“Leave her alone.” Veronica’s voice split the cold air. “She grew up getting passed around from abusive foster home to abusive foster home, okay? Some really sick people out there. You don’t need to hear any details—it was ugly. Just use your goddamn imagination.”

Natalie sagged, shrinking into herself. Her head dipped, and she buried her face in Veronica’s shoulder.

Veronica put an arm around her. “This poor girl is more of a survivor than any of us.”

“Okay, I accept that.” Brent tucked his hands back in his vest pockets. “How about you, Mason? Or are you going to turn this into a joke, too?”

Camilla sat up straight, suddenly very curious. What had Mason walked away from that would have killed most people?

But he only shook his head. “I might be the exception that invalidates your little theory here. I didn’t escape the Twin Towers when the planes hit, didn’t eat my companions after an avalanche, or anything like that. I’m not sure how I fit the picture.”

Brent frowned. “It’s no coincidence that you’re one of the top scorers in this sick little competition. You’re usually one step ahead of the rest of us. Some people might find that very suspicious under these circumstances, Mason, but I think it’s only because you’re a survivor, too. I can see it in you—takes one to know one.”

Camilla caught herself nodding in agreement. Even Mason’s irreverent sense of humor was a characteristic frequently found in survivors.

“I’m a survivor in the dog-eat-dog corporate jungle,” he said. “But surviving layoffs is not the same thing as what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe it’s not that different,” Brent said. “Tell us.”

“Well, three years ago I worked for a New York boutique investment bank, on the fixed-income side. My department specialized in mortgage bonds. Subprime… Yes, you’re welcome.” Mason laughed. “Maybe you saw some of the bad press. The company was Dorer, Bradshaw, and Jameson. We were a smaller house but more leveraged than most—which was saying a lot back then.

I saw the warning signs early. Lots of people did, but most were too greedy to pull back—there was too much money to be made. But by the time the whole thing came crashing down, I had already divested my own interest. Our senior partners lost everything, though. And then the SEC raided us. Six of our board members were indicted for insider trading. Dorer, the senior partner, took a high dive out a corner office window. Bradshaw and Jameson went to jail. I got a slap on the wrist, then accepted a position with a retail bank out here and moved to California.”

The light glinting off Mason’s glasses hid his expression. “I feel a little silly even telling you this, but that’s my deepest, darkest survival story.”

“I suspect there’s something you’re leaving out,” Brent said. “How many of your peers managed to avoid being tainted by the scandal? How many were able to make a clean transition?”

Mason grinned. “Touché. I came out of it better than most.”

Camilla thought about it for a moment. It made sense. They were all survivors, but of different things: cancer, domestic violence, accidents, war, natural disaster, prison, child abuse, gang violence, corporate scandal, and…

“Jordan, how about you?” she asked.

Jordan leaned forward, draping herself over Juan’s back and letting her arms dangle over his chest. She rested her chin on his shoulder.

“I’ve been thinking about this while you guys were talking, but I can’t come up with anything. In fact, the last few days here have been the roughest in my entire life. Could I have been some kind of mistake?”

“I don’t believe that for a second.” Brent waved a hand at the gifts scattered across the floor, the monitor on the wall. “This whole thing has been orchestrated too carefully for a case of mistaken identity. There must be something that explains your presence here. Maybe, as in Mason’s case, yours wasn’t literal life-or-death survival.”

“I’ve led a fairly sheltered life, especially after hearing your stories. I’ve always gotten what I wanted, and people have been really nice to me. Could your theory that Julian chose survivors be wrong?”

“The math says it can’t be wrong,” Mason said. “Let’s say the odds of a person being a survivor are—”

“One in ten.” Camilla sat up straight. “No, wait, I’m wrong. One in ten people is a survivor
type.
That’s different. We’re actual
survivors.
”

Brent nodded. “Say ten percent are survivor types—the people likeliest to make it through a life-or-death situation. But most of them never end up facing those situations. Actual proven survivors? We’re much rarer. I don’t have the numbers.”

“Even at one in ten,” Mason said, “just do the math, Jordan. Statistically, only one of the contestants here should have been a survivor type. But eight of us were not only survivor types, but proven survivors. The odds are—”

“I get what you’re saying. Less than one in two million,” Jordan said. “Less than one in a
hundred
million if we count your story, too. But it still doesn’t change what I’m saying.” She held her hand up, displaying it. “It’s not that nothing bad has ever happened to me. I broke a finger once…”

Her pinky
was
a little crooked. Camilla had never noticed it before.

Jordan dropped her hand. “But that’s about the worst I can come up with.”

A sudden thought struck Camilla.

“Control group,” she said, recoiling from the awfulness of the idea even as she spoke. “What if this is some kind of sick psychological experiment and you’re supposed to be our control group?”

Jordan shook her head. “Psychology experiments have to pass ethics review boards. I took a grad psych class at Stanford, and we had a guest lecture from Phil Zimbardo—you know, the ‘Zimbardo experiment’ guy? Back in the seventies, he had half his subjects play prison guards and half play prisoners, but he had to shut the whole thing down because the mock prison guards turned abusive for real. Nowadays, an experiment like that would never be allowed. Psychologists can’t even come close to doing the stuff reality shows do—that’s why they love to analyze them.”

“Besides, you’re no control group,” Brent said. “You’re definitely a survivor type; your performance in Julian’s stupid games proves it. Your shoes, your food situation—these additional handicaps should have put you at a
huge
disadvantage, but up until today you were ahead of us all. The real question is, how did Julian know you were a survivor—or a survivor
type
?”

Jordan rubbed her crooked pinky with her other hand, thinking.

“I was a competitive gymnast. That’s how I broke this. But I quit after high school.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s nothing, really.”