In her entire life, Gigi had beaten Savannah exactly three times: once at Monopoly, once at hangman, and once in a dance battle that Savannah had insisted they weren’t actually waging.
Gigi told herself that the Grandest Game was going to be number four. She had big reverse-heisting plans for her winnings. Maybe then it would feel like enough.
“In some senses,” Xander Hawthorne announced with no small amount of dramatic flair, “the game starts tonight. In another very real sense, it starts right now…”
The instant Xander finished imparting instructions, Savannah took off, full speed. Recovering physicist Brady Daniels slipped quietly away, and Gigi…
Gigi tilted her head back to take in the view of the island from the dock. A rocky beach. A soaring cliff. A mansion straight out of Architectural Digest. The house was five stories tall, widest at the base, narrowing with every floor, giving it an almost triangular shape.
The entire ocean-side wall of the house looked to be made of glass.
Nothing but windows, Gigi thought, awe washing over her. Even just the sight of that house built into those cliffs made this all feel real. She was here. She was playing the Grandest Game. She’d won her ticket, one of only four wild cards in the world.
“I can do this,” Gigi said, forgetting for a second that she wasn’t alone
on the dock.
“You can do this,” Xander Hawthorne echoed encouragingly. “And when you do, Viking-style epics will be composed in your honor.” He paused. “By me,” he clarified. “They will be composed by me.”
Gigi hadn’t spent that much time with her half brother’s half brothers, but Xander was an easy person to know. He liked to describe himself as a human Rube Goldberg machine. In Gigi’s experience, Xander was an innovative, baked-goods-loving, big-hearted chaos factory who was always designing or building something.
And that gave Gigi an idea. “Our instructions were to search the island,” she noted. “The dock is attached the island. The boat is in the dock. Ergo, by the transitive property, I am totally allowed to search this boat.”
“There’s nothing on the boat,” Xander told her, but Gigi was already scrambling back over the side of the SL-52.
“Your obligatory hidden Twinkie supply begs to differ,” she called back. It didn’t take her long to find a locked compartment. A little recreational lock-picking, and… “Voilà.”
Inside, Gigi found what was, essentially, a Xander Hawthorne survival kit: two scones wrapped in paper towels, a box of Twinkies, an energy drink, a puzzle cube, a roll of leopard-print duct tape, and a permanent marker.
“I’ll be taking this.” Gigi claimed the energy drink. “And these.” She slipped the roll of duct tape onto her wrist and grabbed the marker. Given that the players hadn’t been allowed to bring any supplies with them to the island, having obtained anything potentially useful could give her an advantage. Turning back to face the massive cliffs and that house, she uncapped the marker and started drawing on the back of her hand.
“I have been sternly warned against ever giving you caffeine,” Xander said solemnly.
Gigi opened and downed the energy drink. “Have I ever mentioned that I love maps almost as much as I love islands?” She turned her hand so Xander could see the symbols she’d drawn there: a T for the T-shaped dock, a triangle for the house, some squiggly lines for the cliffs.
“Gigi Grayson, lay cartographer,” Xander declared.
Explore the island. Map it. Search for hints and Objects with a capital
O, to be used in the game. Her brain buzzing and her plan solidified, Gigi
bid Xander adieu. “For the record,” she told him, “I’m going to hold you to the promise of Viking epics, plural.”
