New Year Island (40 page)

In real life, great white sharks also preyed on seals and sea lions, but attacks on humans were extremely rare—usually cases of mistaken identity when a diver or surfer in a wet suit looked like a seal to them. Fatal attacks were even rarer; most of the time, the shark broke off the attack after one exploratory bite.

Squinting, heart pounding, she swept the surface with her eyes, in a line between where the fin had dipped and where the man was paddling the piece of wreckage. Nothing. Knowing it was coming but not being able to see it only made it worse.

What they had witnessed this morning—Lauren’s death—did not jive with what the Woods Hole expert had presented. However, the
way
the shark attacked did match the seal predation behavior the expert had described. The shark would dive deep, then attack vertically from below—invisible to a seal swimming at the surface until it was too late. Even so, half the time the seals escaped. They didn’t actually see the shark coming, but they sensed it, leaping away as soon as they felt the…

Camilla’s eyes widened. She cupped her hands and screamed out to the man on the water. “Pressure wave.
PRESSURE WAVE!
”

The man stopped paddling and scrambled up onto the piece of wreckage, balancing in an awkward crouch.

Camilla closed her eyes in relief; he understood her. Then she opened them again, unable to look away. The man wobbled on the broken section of platform, watching the water at his feet. His paddling had closed about half the distance with the dock, but he still looked very small and vulnerable to her, with a wide expanse of open water all around him.

Time stood frozen again; the seconds stretched as nobody moved, nobody spoke.

Then the man hurled himself forward in a wild leap as the platform exploded out of the water beneath his feet, lifted by a pointed snout and gaping jaws that knocked him cartwheeling through the air. Rising out of the water to almost its full length, like a missile launched from an underwater submarine, the shark dwarfed him, holding the crushed platform in bathtub-size jaws ringed with serrated triangular white razors. Spitting out the splintered wood in a spray of water, it slid backward to disappear beneath the waves again.

The man splashed back into the water and spluttered to the surface immediately.

“Swim, Dmitry!” Heather screamed, next to Camilla’s ear.

Eighty feet from shore, he flailed at the water, not making much progress.

Camilla’s eyes were drawn to Juan, braced near the end of the dock, leaning forward over the water as if ready to jump. But he just stood there. Dmitry thrashed and struggled, getting closer but obviously needing help. What was Juan waiting for?

“Go!” she shouted. “Go help him!”

Without turning his head, Juan held up his hand—
I heard you
—but still he didn’t jump. Her throat tightened. She had seen him risk his life to save a child; was he just going to watch this man Dmitry die now?

She wasn’t a great swimmer, but
somebody
had to help him. Camilla bounded down the breakwater, leaping from rock to rock, risking a bad tumble.

As she drew closer, Juan backed up several steps on the dock, then ran forward, picking up speed to split the water in a clean dive. The tightness in her heart loosened—she wasn’t wrong about him. But long seconds went by, and he didn’t resurface. Oh god, had the shark…?

Popping up alongside Dmitry, Juan rolled him onto his back and looped an arm over his chest. As he stroked toward the dock, hauling the scientist, Camilla searched the water around them, looking for a fin, a disturbance, seeing nothing. A few minutes later, they reached the shallows and pulled themselves up onto the rocks.

Camilla scrambled toward where the two men lay on their backs, but before she could reach them Juan slapped Dmitry on the shoulder, rolled over, and stood up.

He headed for the dock, and she followed.

Pushing roughly past her, the bearded scientist named Jacob grabbed Juan by the arm. “That was sixty thousand dollars of Institute property—”

Juan shook off his hand, ignoring him, and lay down at the end of the dock. He reached an arm into the water, shoulder deep, fishing around by touch, and pulled a six-foot loop of steel chain out of the water. He stood up, dropping it on the deck. It lay in a puddle of water, glinting in the sun, its shiny two-inch links solid and heavy-looking. Camilla stared at them as the others crowded the dock behind her.

“Brand-new,” she said. “This was put there recently.”

Juan nodded. “No tarnish at all. I felt an eyebolt under the dock, too.”

“The end of the chain probably had a hook on it, hanging from that,” she said. “Whoever did this would have needed only a few seconds to reach underneath, grab the hook, and connect it to the engine’s frame. It hung out of sight in the water until the boat ran out the full length of the chain—”

“‘Whoever did this’?”
Jacob thrust himself forward again, leveling a finger at her. “Don’t try to deny it. It was you people!”

Stomach tight, Camilla looked at them all. “He’s right. One of us did it. There’s no one else here. But Mason was—” …
with me the whole time,
she was going to say, but Brent held up his hand, cutting her off.

“Before we all start accusing each other again,” he said, “I’d like you all to remember what happened last time someone thought that was a good idea.”

Veronica’s face darkened. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m getting pretty tired of treating serious injuries under these conditions. We should focus on getting rescued and let the police sort out who did what.” Brent dusted his hands together, looking at the scientists. “How long until you’re missed? How soon will your colleagues come looking for you?”

Jacob turned to look at the other two scientists. Dmitry sat on the edge of the dock, breathing heavily. He shook his head. Camilla watched Heather’s face blanch.
No way
. It couldn’t be…

“Uh, yeah,” Jacob said. “We… well, we…”

“Nobody knows we’re here,” Heather said. “Normally, we’re here for a couple of weeks in December, but this year, at the last minute, we got told to stay home. Then we heard about a reality show being shot out here, and we wanted to make sure our research was safe and the animals weren’t being bothered.”

The look on her face made Camilla’s cheeks feel hot. She looked down at the ground.

“Nobody knows we’re here,” Jacob said. “Oh fuck, nobody knows we’re out here.”

Brent sagged. “Then we have a real problem.”

“S
o let me get this right,” Jacob said, rubbing his beard. “You’ve all been here for five days, on your own, doing whatever stupid shit some guy on this TV screen tells you to?”

Camilla closed her eyes and nodded. “It sounds so dumb now.”

“Yeah. Darwin-award-level dumb.”

Blank now, the monitor screen stared from the wall above the fireplace, mocking them all. The entire group, including the three new arrivals, had gathered in the central room of the Victorian house. Jacob paced back and forth, asking questions, and Camilla didn’t like the answers she had for him.

“What happened to your face, by the way?” he asked.

“Everyone’s under a lot of strain,” she said. “Some of us aren’t handling it too well.”

“I don’t get it.” Heather looked from Camilla to Mason, to Veronica, to Brent, taking in all their injuries. “You did this to
each other
?”

The worst part was, Camilla could see it all from the scientists’ perspective. She felt again the rattling impact of Mason’s body striking the ground with her arms wrapped around his shins, and her face tightened in shame. They all had crossed the line and let things get out of control, allowing themselves to be manipulated by Julian.

They
had
done this to themselves, really.

She heard little Avery again, wishing he were dead, and her eyes prickled. She had come here for the best of reasons, but she had done things she
knew
were wrong, and she had rationalized them to herself. And now people were hurt. Now Lauren was dead.

Heather stared at her. “I mean, what kind of people
do
this?”

Camilla crossed her arms and stared at the floorboards. “I can see how it looks—”

“Look,” Brent said. “I’m a doctor. Stop with the petty judgments for a minute and listen to me. You three don’t have the full picture. We’ve got two people upstairs who are seriously injured. I’ve sedated them, but we’ve got to get them to a hospital right away. And earlier today, a woman was killed trying to reach the mainland.”

“She drowned?” Jacob asked.

Brent shook his head. “One of your research subjects ate her.”

Heather’s face changed. She turned to Camilla and cupped a hand over her mouth. “You said that. I remember now, but in all the confusion, I—”

“Who saw it?” Jacob asked. “Did you see any distinguishing marks? Scars? On the shark that attacked her?”

“Jacob!” Heather gasped.

Brent shook his head, a disgusted expression on his face. “Try your phones,” he said. “Let’s hope they work—none of ours can get a signal.”

“Nonsense. Mine works fine here.” Jacob pulled out a phone and looked at the screen. He frowned. “Well, it always did before.”

“They’re jamming the signals,” Camilla said. “We’re cut off.”

“But why?” Jacob asked.

“Julian, the host, told us we’d be isolated for two weeks.” Something else was bothering her now—something they needed to do right away, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.

“Why would you agree to this craziness?” Jacob asked.

She looked away, not wanting to answer.

Brent spoke for her. “The grand prize is a substantial sum.”

“How much money?” Jacob sounded angry. “How much money did they promise you, to ruin decades of conservation and scientific progress here?”

“Five million dollars.”

“Five million? five…” Jacob’s eyes flickered in rapid-fire blinks. “
Fuck
you people. Seriously. We have to scrounge every year for pennies to keep our research going, because nobody seems to understand how important it is, but they have no problem paying a bunch of idiots five million dollars to kill themselves on TV—”

“Please, Jacob,” Heather said. “Their friend died—”

“The gasoline,” Camilla said, uncrossing her arms and straightening as she realized what was gnawing at her. Whoever Julian’s spy among them was, he or she would know about the plan to send a signal. It would be easy to sneak away. “We need to go get it out of the shed right now. We need to keep an eye on it and make sure nothing happens to it before it’s dark enough.”

“Dark enough?” Jacob asked. “Dark enough for what?”

• • •

“I can’t let you do this,” Jacob said, jogging alongside Juan and Mason. “There’s been too much damage already.”

Mason patted Jacob on the arm and grinned at him. Juan ignored him completely.

Camilla led everyone across the open ground toward the storage shed. Juan pulled open the shed door, and he and Mason went inside. As the shadows deepened and lengthened around them all, the others gathered in a wide semicircle outside the doorway.

A moment later, Juan was back empty-handed. Camilla felt the familiar sinking in the pit of her stomach again as he leaned against the shed wall with his hands in his pockets, eyeing them all, not saying anything. She could smell gasoline.

Mason stepped out of the shed, holding a large red gasoline can out in front of him by one fingertip. He tossed it the ground, where it landed with a hollow
thunk
. “Okay, this isn’t funny anymore. Who has something to share with the class? Speak up.”

“Cute,” Veronica said, stalking forward. “You probably did it yourself—”

“Veronica,” Brent rumbled.

“He hasn’t been out of my sight all afternoon,” Camilla said, stepping between her and Mason. “He couldn’t have chained their boat, either.”

Veronica speared her with that pale-silver stare. “Maybe both of you did it, then.”

“It could have happened hours ago,” Juan said. “Before we even talked about a signal fire.”

“And you were the first to think of that, weren’t you?” Veronica’s voice was dark velvet, rich with insinuation. She turned back to Camilla. “Or was that
you
?”

The back of Camilla’s neck tensed. Her belly tightened. She had seen what Veronica was capable of.

“Or maybe I did it,” Brent said. “Or even Natalie here. The point is, it could be anyone. Let’s go inside, put our heads together, and see if we can come up with some answers that make sense.”

“L
et’s start at the beginning,” Brent said. “None of us went looking for this. Vita Brevis came to us. What made them choose
us
specifically?”

The seven contestants sat in a wide circle on the floor in the great room of the Victorian house—the red team’s former quarters. It was nearly dark, and the temperature was dropping. Lauren’s LED camping lamp sat in the center of the floor.

Camilla could see their breath: small puffs of vapor that glowed in the lamplight before vanishing. She rubbed her arms, trying to shake off the chill, which seemed to come from deep inside her rather than the cold air. Her heart thudded in dread as she considered what she would have to tell the others: her most private secret. She didn’t want to talk about this—she had even dumped Dean for digging into her past behind her back. But she had to set aside her personal discomfort now. The others needed to know.

At least the three scientists weren’t with them—that would have made it worse. But they had taken the other lantern to the science station, to gather and protect their work.

Camilla took a deep breath. “Brent’s right. Why we were selected—I think that’s the key to understanding this.”

The camping light threw shadows across the faces of her fellow contestants, distorting them and making expressions unreadable. Like kids on a campout holding flashlights under their chins and telling scary stories. She shivered, looking from face to face. One of them knew what she was going to say already. But which one?