Still more people were jumping, but as the platforms retracted, they were farther away now, getting closer to shore and the shallow water. There was an almost constant churning in the cold ocean around her as the conscious contestants swam for the beach. At least ten people were floating in the waves like rag dolls.

  Emerson’s eyes fell on Kodi’s white shirt, and she swam toward him as fast as she could.

  She had to shove the floating bodies of several other contestants aside to get to Kodi, but when she made it to him, she hauled him onto his back, wrapped an arm beneath his neck so that his face stayed above the surface, and began to backstroke toward shore.

  Emerson had only made about ten yards of progress when Never broke the surface, gasping desperately for air. She caught a mouthful of salt water, and then fell beneath the rolling waves once again.

  I can’t swim. I’m not drowning before the show even begins …

  Those had been Never’s words on the ship, and they flashed through Emerson’s mind now loud and bright like a firework.

  “Hey!” Emerson screamed, looking around for somebody, anybody who might be willing to help, but they were all swimming for their lives. “Hey! Help! We need help over here!”

  Her legs churned, growing fatigued while her one free hand continued to scoop the water, keeping both her and Kodi afloat. If she reached out for Never, they’d both go under.

  Never resurfaced for a second, long enough to catch half a breath, and then was gone again. She was silent in her desperation, quietly dying in front of dozens of people. Emerson had heard that was usually the case—those who were drowning didn’t scream for help, or wave their arms. They were too busy fighting for oxygen and trying to crawl their way back to the surface.

  “Help us! Please!” Emerson called out to the disappearing wave of humans who thrashed their way to the beach.

  And in the hopeless, silent seconds that followed, Emerson felt more lost than she ever had.

  “I got her!” a voice called from beside her, and Alasdair George William Tremblay-Birchall came splashing past in a perfect front crawl that propelled him through the water like a Jet Ski. He grabbed Never effortlessly out of the swelling waves, and—like Emerson—turned onto his back and carried her shoreward.

  With a sense of enormous relief, Emerson kicked her legs and pushed herself through the cold water with one hand as fast as she could. Never was safe, but she had to get Kodi ashore as quickly as she could. She didn’t know how much water he had inhaled, how long it had been since he’d taken a breath, and seconds mattered.

  She forced her legs to kick and kick and kick against the resistance of the water. On her back, she could see that all four platforms had receded until they were barely visible, and everyone had jumped apart from Billie Joe Walker, who was now inching away from the disappearing platform and screaming down into the rocky shallows below.

  As the platform disappeared and Billie Joe fell, Emerson looked away, but there was no way to cover her ears from the wet impact of the terrified boy’s body striking the shallow surf and the jagged rocks.

  He wouldn’t be the only one to die that day, Emerson knew it. She could hear the gasping, gulping sounds coming from those who were drowning before her. She could see the unresponsive bodies bobbing on the constancy of the rolling water, like store mannequins in their strange deadness.

  As Alasdair made it to the shore, Never began to cough and splutter, and Emerson felt a brief moment of relief. At least Never was alive.

  Emerson’s shoulders hit sand, and she stood up, dragging Kodi through the surf and onto the beach. His head rocked horribly, unresponsively, on his shoulders, and Emerson thought about Jorgensen, how he hadn’t come back, how his cadaver eyes had stared dryly at the burning moon, how his blue lips would not open and breathe in new air, how he had refused to come back to the world of the living.

  Pushing all this darkness aside, Emerson rolled Kodi fully onto his back, pressed two fingers just below his jaw, and waited … nothing. No pulse. No heartbeat. No life.

  Cobalt Skiba came stumbling out of the surf beside them. He looked over to Emerson. “Where’s Llanzo? Where is he?”

  Emerson ignored him. She knelt beside Kodi and began chest compressions.

  The world swirled around her like an oil painting melting in a bonfire. She saw the face of Jorgensen contorting in pain as his chest shattered like porcelain while she pressed into it. She felt the scorching heat in her hands as Marvin Tzu’s burning corpse lay where Kodi’s should’ve been. She heard the scream of Kester buried alive beneath the earth somewhere nearby, and she knew none of it was real. Her mind was simply reeling from the reality of right now.

  All these fever-dream visions dissolved into that place where vague dream memories go upon waking as Kodi rolled violently onto his side and vomited salt water into the sand.

  Emerson felt her heart had been uncaged, finally beating once again. Kodi was alive. He was alive.

  “Kodi. Kodi, are you okay?” she asked, frantically turning his haggard face to hers, his lip split open once again.

  His eyes—at first unknowing—found hers, and he smiled. “I knew you’d save me,” he choked, and Emerson wrapped her arms around him, crying with relief.

  But it could not last long. There were others still out there in the water, and she had to go.

  “I’ll come back,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth, tasting blood, before getting to her burned-out legs and clambering into the breaking waves.

  “Stop!” someone called, and Emerson turned to see Levi, the Topsider who had tried to hit on her on the ship, standing in the surf, screaming at her. “Stop! The more of them that die, the better chance we have of winning this show!”

  “We can still save them!” Number 38, Vintage Patel, joined Emerson in the water. “It takes three minutes for the brain to start dying after unconsciousness! We can still save them!” Even at a time like this, she was still talking in trivia. She dove into the water, kicking her legs and throwing her arms over her head as fast as she could.

  “Let them die,” the morbid Delilah Scattergood said. “It’ll be funny.”

  “There’s something seriously wrong with you!” Alasdair said.

  Delilah just shrugged.

  “Viewers can only follow one contestant at a time!” Levi yelled. “If they die, their followers will follow us. Tell them, Imelda!”

  Emerson looked to Imelda and felt a stirring of hope as she saw doubt in the silver-haired girl’s eyes.

  “If we save them, we’ll be heroes,” Emerson said. “Think of the followers!”

  “She’s right,” Imelda said. “The more of them we save, the more followers we get, and that’s the aim of this game.”

  Imelda ran back into the water, followed by her group of top-halfers. Emerson dove into the waves along with Vintage and Alasdair.

  In the end, the rescue mission had been an exercise in futility.

  The bodies had been in the water for too long, and none of them survived.

  When all was said and done, when the last body was dragged back to shore, twelve more contestants were dead. They were: number 12, Billie Joe Walker; number 2, Cameron Angus; number 19, Rose Pascoe; number 28, Sian McNamara; number 46, Amanda Anderson; number 40, James Sunday; number 9, Hugo von Hugo; number 14, Llanzo Robinson; number 5, Green Glow Ali; number 8, Amelia Rock; and number 3, Genji Gao.

  Vintage Patel had died after swimming back out into the ocean to try to save others.

  They were all just kids. All of them with ambition and dreams and memories. All of them gone. It weighed on Emerson.

  The remaining twenty-one contestants sat on the dunes, just like they had after the first game, and they tried not to look at the dead faces of their fellow contestants … of their friends.

  Cobalt Skiba sobbed loudly and lamented the death of Llanzo, his friend. “I loved him,” Cobalt cried, his tears disappearing into the sand between his feet. “I loved him.”

  The three ear-piercing beeps of the public address system sounded and the Producer’s voice congratulated them on completing game two. He told them to meet on the beach in one minute.

  The contestants didn’t move from their spot. The air was still; it was always still here on this strange island.

  Soon after, the Producer appeared, walking slowly and nonchalantly along the beach as though he were going for an evening stroll. The hatred that ran through the group was like a heated filament. They all wanted him dead, just like the children who lay on the sand dunes. They wanted him to humiliate himself for followers before jumping from one hundred feet; they wanted him to be buried alive and then make a video pretending everything was amazing. But each of them was primed with a poison that kept them dancing to the Producer’s tune no matter what.

  “Contestants,” the Producer said, turning on the high beam of his smile. “Well done on completing game number two. You have all taken another huge step toward rehabilitation. You learned about empathy today.”

  “That’s crap!” Emerson yelled. “We didn’t learn anything. We watched our friends die!”

  “Ms. Ness, I advise you to lower your voice. More intelligent minds than yours have conceptualized this game show. Have you faced trauma over the last two days? Yes, you have! But if we are to fundamentally change who you are, we are going to have to harness trauma! Trauma builds new neural pathways in your damaged brains! You are broken, and trauma will fix you!”

  The evil in the Producer’s eyes was accentuated by the glittering reflection of the half-set sun that turned them red and wicked.

  “This whole thing is horrible,” Tiger muttered, and the Producer turned his hellish gaze onto her for a moment before speaking again.

  “Today’s winner, thanks to the selfish actions of Kodiak Finch, is Imelda Fleet, who was the first to make it back to shore and therefore wins immunity from the public vote.”

  “As if she needs it,” Teller said.

  “The last to make it to the beach,” the Producer continued, “and the person who will face the public vote, was Gamble Delaney. Commiserations, Mr. Delaney.”

  Gamble nodded in prideful defiance. “It’s fine,” he muttered, running his tongue over his large teeth.

  “Now, follow me,” the Producer said, and the island began to turn.

  None of them stumbled as they walked away from the row of dead contestants.

  Emerson did not follow. She stayed where she was, watching the Producer walk on the spot as the island moved beneath his feet.

  “I’d keep up if I were you, Ms. Ness,” the Producer said without looking back. “That poison is a nasty way to go.”

  Emerson clenched her jaw and let the anger rage in her for a moment, and then she followed.

  On the other side of the island, the bonfire was still burning, the scoreboard was still illuminated, the bedrooms had been cleaned and the beds made. The only change was that thirteen of the bedrooms had been dismantled and removed from the beach entirely.

  Emerson looked at the leaderboard and saw that her follower ban was still active for another twenty-six minutes, and she was far, far behind everyone else.

  “Just like last night,” the Producer said, turning around and facing the group, “you will record your daily video diaries. All follower bans will be temporarily lifted. After that, we shall see who gets the daily prize, and which contestant will be facing Mr. Delaney in the public vote. Recording of video diaries will begin in ten minutes. Good luck.”

  He turned and walked away, his shiny black shoes leaving half-moon shapes in the sand.

  Imelda, Levi, Delilah, Decker, and a few other contestants at the top of the leaderboard seemed able to shake off the ordeal they had faced more easily than others (especially Delilah, who seemed to enjoy the constant death that surrounded them). They made their way over to their bedrooms and began rehearsing what they were going to say and do during their diaries: Imelda was doing vocal warm-ups, practicing her laugh; Decker Shimada was spraying his hair with what looked like an entire can of hairspray to make his Mohawk stand up; Steele Sawyer was doing push-ups as fast as he could, then pushing his sunglasses down his nose to check if the veins in his arms were standing out.

  “Hey,” Kodi said, and Emerson turned to see him looking weak and frail for the first time since she had known him.

  “Hey,” she replied. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I was dead for five minutes,” he replied, and smiled. That smile seemed to reignite the light in him.

  Emerson smiled too, and then the smile faltered. “I was scared. I thought that …”

  “Yeah,” he said before she could finish. “I was scared too.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, not mentioning the kiss. Kodi half laughed, skimming the back of Emerson’s hand with the softness of his thumb.

  “What did you mean, up there on the diving board, when you said … after everything it took to get here?”

  Kodi swallowed and looked out to the horizon. “Not yet, okay? I’ll tell you what I meant, but not right now.”

  “I’m probably about to be voted out,” Emerson said.

  “Well, you’d better do something about that,” Kodi replied, and smiled once more before heading off to his room to record his diary.

  Emerson watched him go, thinking how unfair it was to be falling for someone in a place like this, at a time like this. It was inconvenient and ill-advised, but she couldn’t help the way she felt.

  Emerson reached into her back pocket, and her heart sank as she realized that the bottle lid was gone.

  “You should do your diary tonight,” a voice said, and Emerson felt a tightening in her neck muscles when she realized it was Teller.

  “Hi, Teller,” she said, trying and failing to put a believable smile on her face. She felt bad about her reaction to Teller. He wasn’t a bad person. He just always seemed to appear at the wrong moment, and say the wrong thing.

  “Are you going to? Are you going to say something when they start recording?”

  “I don’t think so,” Emerson admitted.

  “You have to, Emerson! You have to!”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “But … well … I want you to!”

  Emerson frowned. “Why do you want me to?”

  “Because you’re at the bottom of the leaderboard, and you can’t keep ending up in the viewer vote because sooner or later you’ll get voted off! And if you get voted off, I won’t get a chance to …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence, and Emerson didn’t want him to, but she couldn’t just leave him standing there with that hopeful look in his eyes. “Chance to what?” she asked.

  “A chance to convince you that you and me would be pretty good together!” he blurted out.

  Emerson laughed. She couldn’t help it. She tried to get a hand to her mouth as if she could stuff the laugh back in, but it was already out there, and Teller’s face had fallen into a mask of pure hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Teller, I didn’t mean to laugh.”

  “Well, what’s so funny about it?” he muttered, looking down at the sand.

  “Nothing, nothing is funny about it, except that … except that it just can’t happen.” Kodi was lying on his bed, arms behind his head, looking up at the dark skies. She looked back to Teller. “Think about it; we’re going to end up in jail or dead over the next few days. That’s how this ends, not with love or happiness. It ends in death or imprisonment. So, I’m sorry I laughed, but it’s either that or I burst into tears.”

  Teller nodded. “I get that,” he said. “I just think that we’d be good together.”

  Again, the muscles in Emerson’s neck tightened, but she forced herself to nod. “Maybe in another life.”

  Teller smiled. “I like that. In another life.”

  Emerson nodded again. She was about to say her goodbyes and make her way to her room when Teller spoke again.

  “Will you just promise me one thing? Will you just promise me you won’t fall in love with Kodi?”

  Emerson sighed; she looked at the tall, broad-shouldered boy with his deep brown eyes. “No,” she said to Teller. “No, I won’t promise that, and it’s a selfish thing to ask of anyone.”

  Teller’s normally placid face twisted into one of anger and disgust. “I don’t get you, Emerson,” he spat. “That boy is cruel and heartless and thinks he’s better than everyone. You just like him because he’s good-looking! That’s not fair. I’m a better person than him, but I’m not handsome so no one cares!”

  Emerson felt her anger and her pity battling inside her. In the end, pity won. “Teller,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “You try so hard to be a good person, but you need to listen to yourself. A truly good person wouldn’t accuse another person of being so shallow that they’d like someone because of the way they look. Do you really think so little of me? If you do, why would you want to be with me anyway? You’re frustrated, I get that, but you need to learn to think through your emotions before you act on them.”

  Teller looked down at the sand, then back up at Emerson. There were tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It just always goes this way, you know? There’s always someone better than me and … I don’t know.”

  “Teller, I’m not looking for the best person. There’s no hierarchy of people. Surely we’re all just looking for the right person?”

  Teller nodded, and the tears that had welled in his eyes spilled onto the sand. “I’m … I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m not the right person.”

  Teller walked away, and Emerson watched him go. She felt truly bad for him. Even though he was the same age as her, he was somehow younger. He was confused and he thought he was in love. She sighed and then rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of it all. Here she was on an island of death, and she was dealing with lovesick boys and her own flailing emotions.

  She walked to her bed and sat down.

  “What’s your plan?” Alasdair asked from his room.

  Emerson looked at her name in last place on the scoreboard, and then over to Kodi. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27