Two hours later, Gigi’s left hand and arm were getting crowded, and she was starting to think that maybe she should have done some cardio in the lead-up to the game. But who was she kidding? Gigi didn’t do cardio.
Wherever her twin was, Savannah definitely wasn’t out of breath.
“I’m not wheezing.” Gigi gave herself a little pep talk. “I’m breathing in an almost musical manner.”
Regardless, she kept going. More cliffs. Ruins. The forest—half-burned, half-alive. She came out of the forest on the south side of the island to find a staircase carved in stone that stretched all the way down to the rocky shore below.
Standing at the top of that staircase made Gigi feel small. Not in a bad way—in a Stonehenge, Grand Canyon, Wonder of the World kind of way.
She managed to squeeze a staircase symbol onto her arm, and then she descended the stone steps. The last three were covered with moss. The back of Gigi’s neck tingled. There wasn’t moss on any of the others.
Gigi knelt to swipe at the step beneath her feet. She’d cleared an inch of moss off the stone when she saw the edge of the first letter. Chalk. It was smeared, but only a little.
Two minutes and one carefully cleared step later, she had a word.
MANGA.
There was nothing under the moss on the next step. But on the final step, there was another word: RA.
“Manga,” Gigi said. “As in, a Japanese graphic novel. Ra, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun.” She paused. “The sun.” Gigi looked to its position in the sky, a reminder that she was racing the clock. I’ve only got until sunset.
Not willing to waste precious time puzzling over a clue she could work to decode later, Gigi lifted her shirt, grabbed her pen, and scrawled the clues across her midriff. MANGA. RA.
She looked back down at the chalk writing on the steps and hesitated. This was a competition. Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, Gigi scuffed the chalk off with the heel of her hand.
 |
Down the shoreline, around the bend, on the southeast side of the island, Gigi found a building rising out of the water. It looked like the kind of thing she would have expected to see in medieval Europe, possibly on a canal, all archways and heavy stone. It wasn’t until Gigi got closer that she realized that underneath all that stone, out on the water, was another dock.
“Boathouse,” she concluded. “Creepy, somewhat gothic boathouse.” Out of canvas on her left arm, she switched her pen to the other hand and began sketching a trio of arches on the back of her right.
Further exploration revealed that the dock beneath the archways contained two smaller boat slips perpendicular to a very large one, with a sizable platform in between. Gigi sketched a series of rectangles beneath the arches. “Who’s feeling triumphantly ambidextrous? This girl.”
That was when she saw the ladder built into the boathouse wall.
“When in doubt, go up.” Gigi went up—and immediately discovered she wasn’t alone.
Standing on top of the archway was an old woman. She had gray hair that had been dyed black at the ends and held herself like a person used to walking through hurricanes. In her hand, she held… something.
Gigi took a cautious step forward. The old woman didn’t so much as turn. Instead, she lifted the object in her hand to her eyes.
Binoculars? As Gigi got closer, she realized: Not binoculars. Opera glasses. They were ornate, encrusted with jewels, and aimed at something
—or someone—on the island below.
Gigi turned her head. From the top of the boathouse, you could see the entire eastern coast of the island, a long stretch of unmarked shore broken only by the helipad in the distance. A ways down, Gigi saw a familiar figure. Brady. He wasn’t alone.
Another player? Gigi couldn’t make out the other guy’s features, but something about the way he was standing reminded her of a honey badger or possibly a wolverine.
“They know each other,” the old woman said. “Quite well, I would wager.”
Gigi wondered just how good the magnification on those opera glasses was—and where the old woman had found them. They had to be an Object, capital O, a part of the game.
“How can you tell?” Gigi said.
“How can I tell that they know each other?” The woman continued peering through the opera glasses. “Body language, mostly.”
In the silence that followed, Gigi clocked the slightest move of the woman’s lips. Mostly, Gigi thought. Body language, mostly.
“You’re reading their lips,” she realized. “What are they saying?”
“The one on the left likes ponies. The one on the right likes to eat ponies.” The old woman’s voice was dry. “Timeless tale, really.”
The one on the left was Brady. “Ponies?” Gigi repeated. “You don’t actually expect me to believe that?”
“Oh, let an old lady have her fun.” The woman lowered her opera glasses and turned to look at Gigi head-on. “I’m Odette, and you, darling young thing, are observant.”
“I’m Gigi,” Gigi said. “And I try.”
“You do, don’t you?” Odette replied. “Try. The world just loves women who try.” Odette caught Gigi’s gaze and held it. “Unless and until we try too hard.”
With that, the old woman began to make her way slowly back to the ladder. Right before she descended, she spoke again. “I’ll tell you this much, from one woman who tries too hard to another: They were talking about a girl, and, from what I gather, she’s dead.”
