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ANGELINE

The air in the trailer was thick with tension, with the scent of sweat. Angeline felt as if her legs might give out beneath her, so she leaned against the long table in the center. It wobbled, gear knocking. She was overcome by exhaustion, horror at what they’d done. Fear, it was a kaleidoscope, bending reality. She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths.

What is real? What is true?

Had they really found Alex’s dead body? Had they really dumped him and his phone off a cliff? It had seemed right, like the only option then. Now it seemed like what it was. Depraved. The actions of people not in their right minds. Who had killed Alex? Where was that person now?

Her eyes fell on Mav. It could only have been him. Who else? But she just couldn’t believe that. She just…couldn’t.

“That little bitch,” hissed Mav, as if Malinka was their biggest problem. “She is not the winner. No matter what. Though, we’ll probably get a shit ton of views because of that.”

Angeline already knew about Chloe, the girl’s obsession with Maverick. It was not the revelation Malinka clearly had thought it would be. Angeline honestly couldn’t care less about Maverick’s little side pieces. She wouldn’t have given Chloe a second thought if not for the horror show of her disappearance. Lots of girls wanted Mav, threw themselves at him, were obsessed with him. Maverick, she knew, only really wanted Angeline.

Angeline walked over to peer out the window. The hiders were in a huddle by the fire pit, talking. What were they saying? There was still time for them to leave. Would they? The sky was darkening. Petra’s men stood statue-still.

How would they get out of this? How, how , had they gotten into it ?

Mav sunk his head down in his hands. Gustavo looked off into the middle distance; he hadn’t made eye contact with her since the wall. Hector was a cartoon character of stress hair a mess, eyes bulging, looking back and forth between them. His forehead was beaded with perspiration.

Finally, he blew. “Can someone tell me what the actual fuck is going on?”

They all stared at Hector as he went on. “All the cameras I set up? They’re dead. I think there is someone out there. Sabotaging the game.”

Angeline just felt numb, stared out the window at the armed men. She needed to get out of this trailer. It stank of sweat and dread.

“Look at this,” Hector said when none of them spoke.

He opened an image on one of the laptops. A masked face filled the screen—bright white with button eyes and stitching for a mouth—lingered a moment, taunting, before the screen went dark.

“I told you,” said Maverick, spreading his arms. “I told you there was someone out there trying to hurt us.”

“I’m going out there,” said Gustavo, moving toward the door. “I’m going to find out who’s doing this.”

“No,” said Angeline, too quickly. She felt the heat of Mav’s gaze. “What if Mav’s right? What if someone really is trying to hurt us ?”

“What do you mean?” Maverick barked at her. “ What if Mav’s right? Alex is dead—someone killed him. There’s definitely someone out there. They’re definitely trying to hurt us, Ange. They are hurting us.”

Hector released a horrified sob. “What?”

Oh, shit. They hadn’t told Hector about Alex.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” said Mav, eyes filling. “We…found him at the hotel.”

Hector shook his head rapidly. Angeline rose to embrace him as he started weeping uncontrollably. Now Mav was crying, too. Which made Angeline cry again. Tavo was the only one who stood stone-faced. He moved toward the door, put a hand on the knob.

“You told the police he went home,” said Hector, his voice hoarse with emotion.

Maverick hung his head.

“Why did you do that?” Hector went on. “We have to tell them. We have to call Lucia.”

“We can’t ,” said Maverick, wiping at his eyes. Was he really crying? wondered Angeline. There was something blank to him, something empty. Had there always been?

“Not yet.”

“ Who killed Alex?”

“We don’t know,” said Mav. “Someone’s been following me. Threatening me.”

“Where is he? His… b-b-ody ?”

None of them could answer. Angeline kept replaying the moment when they dumped Alex over the wall. Above the violence of the waves they never even heard it hit below, from that great height. He was just—gone.

“Honestly, Hector,” said Angeline, soothing him, “the less you know, the better.”

Maverick explained the situation to Hector, stopping short of their dumping the body, who just stared at him like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But—but—but.”

“We have to complete the game. Trust me on this,” said Mav. “Otherwise, we all lose everything.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Hector.

“We’re broke, Hec. We survive this challenge, get flush, fix the books, and sell. And we all get rich. Otherwise, we’ll be bankrupt inside a month.”

Hector’s face was a mask of confusion. Listening to Maverick talk, Angeline realized he was delusional. Maybe she was, too. There was no way back from where they were.

“All the money we made,” said Hector, “where did it go, Mav? We worked so hard.”

Angeline and Tavo locked eyes, both of them thinking of Alex’s texts to Lucia. When she turned back to Maverick, he was watching them. His eyes. They were so cold.

“I don’t know, buddy,” said Maverick like he was talking to a child. “Challenges like this, I guess. We gave a shit ton away. Our expenses were high. We’ve been losing viewers. All the bad publicity. But if we can do this, we can fix it.”

Outside, the sky rumbled, the small amount of light coming in through the narrow, opaque windows growing dimmer.

“But we’ve already lost everything,” said Hector, his voice soft and frightened. “People know that something has happened to Alex, because of Malinka’s live. We’ll lose the sponsors. WeWatch will dump us. There’s so much heat already because of Chloe, because of Moms Against Mav. The subpar sponsors that are still with us are already squirrelly as fuck.”

Maverick shook his head.

“Views,” he said. “They only care about views. If we give them that tonight, they won’t do a thing except throw more money at us. I promise you that. That’s the way the world works now.”

How was he always so sure of himself, of his own rightness?

“Alex,” Hector said, then started to cry again. Helpless. Like a child. Angeline felt the weight of his grief, something neither she, Tavo, nor Maverick had expressed, if they’d felt it at all. They’d gone from horror and shock straight into survival mode. What did that make them?

How easy it had been to haul Alex to the wall in that rug. To watch as Tavo and Maverick hefted him over the side. Like he was not a person, their friend, someone’s father, husband. She was back there now, feeling the wind and sea spray. It hadn’t seemed real even, like she was in a video game, the way you do things like cut off someone’s head or slice them in half with a machete and it isn’t real, it’s just a game, just a simulation. That’s how it felt.

But it was real.

She felt herself go weak inside, that childish churning of fear.

Stop it, Angeline. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s what her abuela always said. When the worst thing happens, you don’t curl up into a ball, you stand and fight. She could grieve later. Atone later. They all could.

“Tavo,” said Angeline, still holding Hector who had his head on her shoulder, clung to her like a little kid. It was a bit ridiculous as he was nearly twice her size. Still, she drew some comfort from being able to comfort him. “What is the deal with those men? With Petra?”

Tavo blew out an exhausted breath, rubbed hard at his right shoulder which she knew was injured. “Petra. She’s—I don’t know how to explain it—like a shaman, a spiritual leader.”

“With an army?” said Maverick.

“Some people call her a radical shaman , like a fighting shaman, if that makes sense. She protects the island and its people from the encroachment of outside forces.”

“What does that even mean?” asked Angeline. She thought of the old woman, small, wrinkled, and still somehow powerful. Righteous, a warrior.

“These islands were once untouched ecosystems with primeval forests, populated only by people whose ancestors had been here for a millennium. Over the centuries, people from Europe settled the islands.”

Tavo moved back toward them, went on, “In the eighties, the government allowed European companies to come in and clear-cut the land to raise cattle. We lost almost fifty percent of those ancient trees. Petra’s father, whose family descended from S?o Miguel, sold a huge portion of their ancestral lands, and in doing so became very, very rich. They became the wealthiest family on the islands.”

The trees. The thought of companies cutting down ancient forest made Angeline helplessly angry. How could be people be so blinded by greed?

Tavo went on, “Petra, in full rebellion of her father, became an environmental activist. She organized locals to make life very difficult for the cattle companies—staging sit-ins on land that was scheduled to be clear-cut, encouraging locals not to work in the slaughterhouses, lobbying the government not to allow foreign workers to be imported. She made life very difficult for the companies destroying the islands. One by one, they left. Now, her father dead, Petra uses her family’s wealth to control the islands and keep them safe from—”

“People like us,” said Angeline, feeling a squeeze on her heart.

Tavo offered a reluctant nod. “She and her team managed to eject the European companies, reclaim the land, and force the government to legislate against excessive tourism, any cattle ranching, blocking big corporations from building resorts and hotels, and resisting ports for cruise ships.”

“That’s nuts,” said Mav. “Don’t they want money? Look at this place. It could be a tourist mecca. Instead, it’s a ghost town.”

A ghost town. That’s what Mav saw when he looked at this pristine and beautiful place. A reflection of his own emptiness.

“Not everyone is motivated only by wealth,” said Tavo, voice low and cold.

“I haven’t heard you complaining,” said Mav. “You’ve never turned down your paycheck.”

She didn’t like the look on Gustavo’s face. Nose wrinkled like he was smelling something bad, eyes narrow. It was pure disgust.

“Look,” said Angeline. “We have like twenty huge, unsolvable problems right now. And if we’re going to survive them and get off this island, we have to work together. Can we do that?”

The silence grew heavier, electric with all their dark thoughts and raging emotions.

Angeline’s stomach bottomed out, a horrible sinking sensation. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. Before the last challenge, before Chloe, before she’d started sleeping with Tavo, they’d had a big anniversary party at Mav’s place. They brought in servers, bartenders, a chef. There was a jazz singer, an endless well of booze and food. At one point late in the evening, she’d stood on the balcony with Mav, looking inside at the party. Alex and Lucia were dancing slow, madly in love. Hector was laughing uproariously about something. Tavo was hitting on one of the waitresses.

“We built this,” Maverick had said. “From nothing.”

“ You did,” she said.

“Nah,” he demurred. “All of us. The guys have been here since the beginning. You gave us a soul, a mission. We’re a family. And Extreme is the thing we all made together. We play hard, we give back. It’s good, right? Like really, really good?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. Truly.”

And she’d believed that.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear. He’d said it before, but he didn’t say it often. “Thank you for making me a better man.”

She loved him so much in that moment, his boyishness, his passion for Extreme, his willingness to give credit to his friends, when everyone knew that there was no Extreme without Mav. That he needed her.

“I love you, too,” she answered. She’d meant that, too, then.

And she remembered thinking that everything was so right, how could it ever go wrong? How could something so big, so powerful ever be anything less?

Now in the trailer, company teetering on the brink, Alex gone, what they’d done. There was a mercenary army guarding their exit. Maybe a killer or at least a saboteur stalking them. A challenge they had to get off the ground or lose everything. She didn’t even want to look at social.

All the men—the boys—were looking at her.

“What are we going to do?” asked Hector. The wind was wild now. The first raindrops started to fall.

“The only thing we can do. Play the game.”