“EDEN AND ISLA HAVE ONE MORE PUZZLE PIECE TO COLLECT!” Vivian called. She was standing off to the side of the course, her eyes covered by her tortoiseshell sunglasses to ward off the intense sun. And the sun was intense. Valerie could feel its heat through the slats. “HALLIE AND STEVIE ARE PASSING AMY AND NIKO!”
“PUSH!” Adrienne called again. This time Valerie didn’t fight her, she pushed as hard as a woman during childbirth, and then, slowly, reluctantly, the wheel began to move.
And move it did, albeit slowly.
By the time they got to the other side, Adrienne’s face flushed a violent, blotchy red. Valerie imagined she looked just as bad. Her face was hot. Her back was screaming, and when the wheel hit the end of the trench, she couldn’t scramble out of it fast enough.
Immediately Adrienne bent forward. She had her hands on her knees and was breathing hard. “I’m seeing stars,” she muttered, her head hanging low enough for that blotchy red to turn purple. “I don’t think I can go any further. It’s not like we’re going to win the reward anyway.” Then she pushed herself upstraight enough for the purple to drain away. “Eden and Isla are way ahead of us. They’re going to finish that puzzle and—”
“We’re not quitting,” Valerie said. Her breath had evened to a manageable rhythm.
“Why not?” Adrienne snapped back. She shot Valerie a look that Valerie should’ve seen coming. Wasn’t everything building up to this anyway? Wasn’t this the actual elephant in the room, so to speak? Everyone else was probably thinking it, but Adrienne was the only one to have the guts to say it out loud. “It’s not like you haven’t done it before.”
But even so, Valerie felt the words like a blow to the face. She drew air into lungs that suddenly felt too small. “I didn’t quit that challenge.”
And it was the truth. Just because she’d stepped down the ledge without crumpling to the ground like everyone else hadn’t meant that she’d stepped off willingly. But people didn’t seem to believe her when she said her body had moved of its own accord. That one second she was deep in concentration, and the next her foot was on the sand, and Vivian was shouting that she and her teammate were no longer in the game.
“Then what happened if you didn’t quit?” Adrienne said, looking at her with eyes so dark blue they might as well have been the freezing, bottomless depth of the Gulf of Alaska. “Because we all saw it. We all saw you step down and quit.”
“Fine,” Valerie relented. Because admitting that was easier than admitting that after standing on that beam, balancing those water-logged buckets for what felt like too long, she’d experienced a vision. She’d seen Harriet in her prime, spinning barefoot around their backyard, a fireweed tucked behind her ear while she laughingly twirled a yellow silk scarf around her head like a ribbon dancer. Then the vision had changed. Suddenly Valerie was sixteen again, standing in her mother’s hair salon when she witnessed her mother’s knees buckle,watched her fall against a rolling metal cart, plastic hair rollers scattering across the linoleum floor. Then remission. Then not. Then her mother walking slowly down the grocery aisle, one hand braced against the cart. Her mother needing to sit halfway up the harbor steps because she was too breathless to continue. Her mother in that awful chair. That pained smile.
And then the worst part. Valerie had watched Harriet walk toward her across that beach. But she was younger, her skin sun-warmed, her cheeks rosy, and hair loose and wind-tossed the way it used to be. Behind her, large ethereal wings had unfurled, and then Harriet wasn’t so much walking as drifting backward, the tide pulling around her ankles.
Valerie had instinctively stepped toward the vision of her mother. Not because she wanted to go with her. Because she wanted to stop her from leaving forever.
How could she possibly explain that to anyone? She couldn’t. Which was why she opened her mouth to say something else. Anything else. But before she could, Vivian’s voice thundered, “EDEN AND ISLA WIN THE FIRST SEASON TEN REWARD CHALLENGE!”
Chapter Eight
Adrienne was pissed. Properly incandescently pissed in a way that made her teeth feel too tight in her mouth and her hair feel too heavy against the back of her neck.
She quickly twisted her hair into a bun above her head and then picked up a stick, which she used to thwack a clump of dried sea fennel. The brittle stems snapped satisfyingly. Then she stomped further along the shoreline, past the shelter. Past the stretch of beach where the camera crew was set up. When she reached the spot where the beach narrowed, she squeezed between the sea and a jumble of sun-bleached limestone boulders where tamarisks and pine trees grew out of impossible cracks in the rock.
It felt wonderfully private. And quite possibly the best spot for a protection bracelet to be hidden in plain view. If she found one—though last season there hadn’t been one, which showed just how highly unpredictableOutlast Herwas—she certainly wouldn’t show it to Valerie. Not a chance. Not after she was quite certain Valerie had thrown the challenge and squashed their chances of winning that reward.
The thought of the reward brought fresh tears to her eyes. Literal tears. Adrienne blinked them back and ignored the hollow growl coming from her stomach. Two days in and she already couldn’t stomach the taste of rice or beans, or more accurately the absence of taste. Even the occasional fig and sour wild grapes they found growing near the cliffs weren’t enough to satisfy her craving. Adrienne had been eating caviar since she was two. Her favorite meal as a toddler had been truffle pastashaved tableside at a restaurant in Milan, where the waiter used white gloves to handle the delicacy. She’d never even had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Never eaten instant noodles out of a packet or stood over a sink at midnight eating cold leftovers. Wherever she went, there was always a chef. Always. Which was why when Vivian announced the feast, Adrienne’s toes had curled with excitement. “A traditional Greek feast awaits the winners. Freshly grilled dorade. Warm pitas. Thick tzatziki drizzled with olive oil. Horiatiki salad. Golden Saganaki and herb-packed keftedes,” Vivian had said.
In fact, she could even taste the reward in her imagination because she’d had it all before. Adrienne had eaten dorade in the south of France, at a cliffside restaurant near Eze. The tzatziki reminded her of Santorini three summers ago, which she’d used to smother warm pitas while sitting on a terrace overlooking the caldera. The sunset had turned the whitewashed buildings pink and gold. The saganaki made her think of Hydra, where she’d eaten lunch with her mother at a waterfront taverna while they’d watched donkeys carry luggage through the narrow streets. And the keftedes transported her right back to Cyprus, where she’d spent the evening with a tall blonde who had tasted nearly as delicious as the decadent dessert Ekmek Kataifi.
Each memory made her hungrier.
Was this really what she was resorting to? Self-punishment.
“What are you doing?” a voice said so loud and clear behind her that Adrienne whipped her head so fast, her body followed, and then, in some bizarre twist of events, she was fighting gravity. Her arms clambered for something to grab onto, and her right foot dropped into a narrow crack between rocks. Her left foot stepped forward, hoping for steady ground, but didn’t find it.
She was just about to hit the rock face first when suddenly she stopped falling.
Valerie was there. She had both hands on Adrienne’s waist. Adrienne could feel her fingers like burn marks against her bare skin.
And then nothing.
Valerie stepped away just as that drop in Adrienne’s stomach snapped back into place as if it hadn’t been there in the first place.
“Now we’re even,” Valerie said matter-of-factly.
Adrienne, who quickly stepped onto a smoother, flatter rock in case she lost her balance again, shook her head in disbelief. Not so much for being saved—although for some reason she had expected Valerie to watch her fall—but because of that snarky comment. As if Adrienne were going to send her an invoice for helping her back aboardThe Valentine. She was many things, but she didn’t keep a scoreboard for basic human decency. “I wasn’t expecting you to pay me back.”
Valerie said nothing. She just leapt onto another boulder, and before Adrienne knew it, she had mountain goated her way up to a higher ridge where the limestone opened into a narrow spine of rock threaded with scrubby juniper and pale, wind-bent grass.