“You should come with us,” she said. “To the station buildings.”
He shook his head. “I’ll stay here.”
“Will you be safe?”
“Safe enough.” He shifted the map that lay on the table next to him, and Camilla saw the black polymer grip of JT’s gun peeking out from underneath. It had been within inches of his hand the whole time.
“What about when you sleep?” she asked. “Heather disappeared while everyone was asleep.”
Juan seemed to think about it. “Not an issue,” he said. “From now on,
no one
sleeps.”
He straightened, turning to Brent. “Time to open up the pharmacy. What was that stuff that lets you skip sleep with no side effects?”
“Modafinil,” Mason cut in. “The Silicon Valley round-the-clock brain booster.”
Brent nodded. “Popular with the medical profession, too.”
Juan watched his face closely. “How much of it should we take?”
“Four hundred milligrams every twenty-four hours should keep you alert for a few days.”
“How much do you take, Brent?”
“A little more than that.” He chuckled. “About nine thousand milligrams. But I don’t recommend you try that yourselves—the results wouldn’t be pretty. I’ve had years to build up a tolerance.”
He tapped the inside of his elbow. “I’m also relying on the modafinil to counteract the high levels of opioid analgesics I’m injecting. That isn’t a factor for the rest of you.” Reaching into a pocket of his fishing vest, he withdrew a handful of foil pill packs and dropped them on the bed.
Juan picked up a few and pocketed them. Camilla dubiously did the same, followed by Mason and Dmitry.
Juan dusted off his hands. “Well, if that’s it, then—”
Camilla grabbed his wrist. “Juan, people are betting on us right now. Illegal gambling.”
“It fits.”
“And Natalie—Veronica may only be trying to protect her, but what if we’re wrong? What if Veronica herself took Natalie?”
Mason laughed. “You really haven’t figured Veronica out. She’s a mystery to you, isn’t she?”
Camilla stared at him surprise.
“She’s very high functioning considering what she is,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“Mason, it’s been a long day…”
“Veronica’s a sexual predator, Camilla. She likes to kill men.” Mason grinned. “I’m lucky, I suppose. For some reason, she doesn’t really consider me a man.”
Was this another one of his morbid theories? Camilla looked at Brent.
Brent shrugged. “I’m not a psychiatrist. I suppose it could make sense.”
“But that means Natalie…”
“…is safer with her than with us,” Mason said. “Because if JT or Jordan didn’t take Natalie, then somebody in this room did.”
Troubled, Camilla thought about it. Travis’s paint color—brown—had been smeared on Natalie’s sweatshirt. Whoever had taken her had probably also freed Travis. And then deliberately framed him, using paint from his spare ammunition cartridge the same way Camilla had used hers on Juan after JT destroyed her paintball gun.
Juan spoke. “Veronica’s a danger to Camilla and Jordan as well.”
Remembering the sneaky way Veronica’s eyes had skittered away from her earlier, Camilla felt the skin at the back of her neck tighten. Veronica hadn’t wanted Camilla to catch her looking. And there had been something dark and calculating in that silvery gaze, hadn’t there?
“I think Juan’s right,” she said. “Veronica wants the ten million, and we’re both ahead of her in points.”
Mason nodded. “I hadn’t considered that. But it’s scary, given what she learned tonight by killing Travis…”
Camilla finished his thought.
“There’s more than one way to move up the scoreboard.”
V
eronica stood at the window. Staring through a narrow gap where the clear plastic had pulled away from the frame, she scanned the rain-washed darkness outside. A flash of lightning illuminated the open ground before her. All clear. She walked briskly through darkened rooms to another window at the back and checked the flat area behind the houses. Clear.
Natalie was upstairs. Resting. She was safe.
He—whoever he was—wouldn’t get past Veronica again.
She felt guilty. The lure of money had caused her to lose track of her priorities, and poor Natalie had suffered for it. The person who had done it… Veronica would punish him as soon as she found out which of them he was. She would make him crawl. Make him beg. Make him bleed. Her breathing sped up, and tingling warmth spread through her body.
She found herself hoping it was Juan.
After all, a man who could do a thing like that to his own sister, to his own mother—abandoning them to die… A man like that might be capable of doing
anything
to a woman. Her chest heaved. Anything at all.
Painful things. Disgusting things.
Sick
things.
Things that would make her bleed.
Letting her eyes unfocus, Veronica raised a hand and traced her mouth with her fingertips, brushing them against her lips.
Things that would leave permanent scars inside her.
Things she couldn’t even
imagine
.
The tingling intensified, localized, sharpened. She could hear herself panting now, and she hated herself for it.
A small noise came from the other side of the room. From the stairs.
Her gaze hardened, snapping into focus. The ground around the houses remained clear. Face warm, mouth dry, Veronica continued to stare out the window.
“Where do you think you’re going, dear?” she asked the room behind her.
No answer.
She turned around.
Natalie held the banister, swaying slightly, unsteady on her feet.
“You should be resting right now,” Veronica said. “You have to give your heart time to recover.”
“I’ll be right back.” Natalie wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I won’t be long.”
“Natalie, you can’t go outside. It’s too dangerous for you. Whichever one of them it was, he’s going to try again.”
Natalie looked at the floor. “I know.”
“So why are you doing this?”
“I need to.”
“No. Absolutely not. I forbid it.”
Natalie shuffled her feet, pulling the sleeves of her paint-stained hoodie over her hands. She looked everywhere but at Veronica.
A ribbon of fear, bright and electric, laced Veronica’s spine.
“Please, Natalie.” Her voice broke. “I can’t protect you if you won’t listen to me.”
J
ordan pulled her sealskin cape tighter around her. Lightning illuminated the backs of seals sleeping on the dark beach that stretched below the crack in the bluff where she had made her shelter.
The blue canopy overhead kept off the rain, and the sandstone walls on each side kept the wind away. The greasy smell of cooking seal rose from the small fire in front of her. She avoided looking at the fire, which would blind her to anything sneaking up on her from the darkness beyond, making the speargun across her knees useless until her eyes adjusted again.
She reached up and twitched a corner of the sloping blue cloth she had spiked between the walls above her—the game flag, which she had cut from its pole. The curtain of water cascading from its surface parted to give her a clearer view of the beach, where small groups of seals huddled together for warmth. There were fewer of them than before, and she wondered about that a little. Why were they leaving? The seals didn’t seem to notice the little bit of hunting that she was forced to do for survival, or even the crazy thing she had done, angry, earlier tonight. She didn’t think it was the sharks, either. The seals would be used to them—a natural and familiar hazard here. Something different was thinning their crowds on the island.
Juan could probably explain it to her. He could sit by her side here, his arm around her, and they could talk about it. He could point things out to her in that calm way…
Worthless lying bastard.
She didn’t care about the fucking seals. She wanted to go home.
Jordan’s broken ankle hurt. Her toes, purple and swollen under their covering of dirt, looked like cocktail sausages. When she got back she might need surgery to avoid permanent damage. But for now, there wasn’t much she could do beyond binding it as well as she could. And she would just have to deal with the pain, but pain was something she had taught herself to ignore.
Her finger had hurt when she broke it, too.
She rubbed the crooked pinky, remembering. She had caught it on the bars in a bad transition during the state semifinals, in her senior year of high school. She had landed and looked at her hand, eyes going wide with shock at seeing her pinky poke sideways with an L bend where there shouldn’t be one. Covering it with her other hand, she had walked to the locker room before the tears could start. Sitting on the bench, she kept it covered when the coach brought her parents in.
Her coach looked apologetic. “I can drive her to the emergency room for you—”
“Hold on.” Her father held up a hand. With the other, he raised his phone to his ear again and turned away, listening. Malcolm Vaughan ran a tech hedge fund, and the phone was stuck to his head most of the time.
“I can’t right now; I’m watching my daughter win a trophy…” He paused, nodding. “Of course we are. We’re shooting for 2008, but 2012 is more likely. No point rushing unless she’s ready to win the gold… Look, can I call you back—wait a minute, they want to
what
?” He waved the coach away, and stuck a finger in his other ear. “No, they can’t do that! Tell them Kleiner and Sequoia committed already…” He walked out into the hallway, his voice growing heated. Shaking his head, he waved her mother forward to deal with her situation.
Jordan realized that her father hadn’t looked at her once. She turned toward her mother.
Colleen Vaughan spoke to Jordan’s coach in a voice ripe with concern.
“Does this mean she won’t qualify for the finals?”
Jordan’s eyes narrowed, and she stood. Grabbing the athletic tape off the bench, she marched into the restroom, into a toilet stall. Steeling herself, she looked at her hand, ignoring the knock at the stall door.
“Are you all right?” Her coach.
“A tantrum doesn’t solve anything.” Her mother.
Jordan lowered the lid and sat. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed her injured finger with her good hand and yanked the bent pinky straight. The bolt of pain made her arm shake, and her elbow slammed against the side of the stall.
“Kicking the wall?” Her mother again. “Very mature, Jordan.”
Silent tears ran down her face as she wrapped her throbbing pinky and her ring finger in layers of tape, binding them together.
“Answer me when I’m talking to you. Remember our conversation the last time? Do you want me to sell all the horses?”
Jordan scrubbed her forearm across her face and composed her expression. Then she opened the stall door, ignoring her mother.
“It was only sprained a little. I’m ready now.”
Her coach shook her head. “I saw your finger.”
Jordan looked at her with contempt. “Get the fuck out of my way.”
On the way home in the back of the Bentley, Jordan ignored her parents’ questions. She had qualified for the all-state finals, using the pain that throbbed up her wrist to her elbow to drive herself relentlessly, winning every event. She held her trophy on her lap as she looked out the window, her fingers manipulating the little golden figure on top. Jordan kept her face expressionless as she snapped off its plastic arms, legs, and head.
She never spoke to her father again.
I
nside the station building, Camilla sat on a cot with her back against the wall. She huddled under her space blanket, trying to stay warm. The scientist Heather had been taken from the adjoining building—a fact that never left her mind. But at least she wasn’t alone now. Brent, Mason, and Dmitry crowded the room around her, lounging on the other cot or sitting on the floorboards. Nobody spoke much.
She held in her hands a bound report,
Archaeology and History In Año Nuevo State Park,
which she was reading by the light of Lauren’s LED lantern
.
She had found it among the zoology surveys, and Dmitry hadn’t recognized the Parks & Rec Cultural Heritage publication. She turned the pages, partly to keep her mind occupied but also to look for anything that might help. Exactly what she was searching for, she had no idea, but anything was better than letting her thoughts run wild in frightened and exhausted circles, as they had for the past few hours.
Julian had made an offhand comment about tomorrow’s game, calling it
“a most dangerous game indeed.
” At the time, she hadn’t thought anything of it, but now his words haunted her. Camilla had an awful suspicion that she knew what tomorrow’s game was going to be. But she didn’t dare to discuss it with Brent or Mason, for fear that either of them might be Julian’s spy.
The Most Dangerous Game…
Long ago, she remembered reading a short story of that name. Written in the 1920s, it was a classic about a famous big-game hunter who falls off a ship and washes up on an uncharted island owned by an exiled general. Claiming he hunts only “the most dangerous game,” the general invites the hunter to join him. Upon learning the intended prey is human, the hunter refuses, only to find that he himself has become the hunted.
Was Julian planning to show up tomorrow with a pack of dogs and a hunting rifle? Would there be multiple hunters? Would the spy unmask himself or herself and join the hunt at Julian’s side?
The pages rattled in her hands and the Mylar space blanket crinkled around her arms and shoulders. Closing the report, she grabbed her knees to hide her shaking. A few hours ago she had been ready to kill Julian herself, and couldn’t wait until he arrived so they could grab him. She had been so hopelessly naive.
Vita Brevis didn’t blink an eye at murder. Quibbles about terminology aside, Mason was right: Julian had brought them all here to die.
All but one of them.
Who was his spy?
Veronica was the only one who could see the monitors. Julian could be speaking to her right now, giving her instructions. She was a multiple murderer. She had killed Travis right before their eyes, with no more remorse than if she were swatting a fly. She had nearly killed JT—a Force Recon Marine—with her bare hands. She was lethal enough without a weapon, but if Julian gave her one…