Rae places one bare foot on the slim surface, and her entire body trembles. I remember too late that she said she was terrified of heights.
She might not be as tough as she likes to pretend—but she’s badass brave, all the way down to her toes.
I take a deep breath. If Rae can take the lead, then I can certainly follow.
Except…I don’t remove my shoes, the way Rae did, so my grip might not be as good as hers. And the beam is much narrower than I thought. There’s hardly an inch on either side of my sneaker, so there’s little margin for error.
But I can’t think about failure or death. I just focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Extend both arms to keep the balance in my core. Make sure I don’t sway too much to either side, or I’ll meet the same fate as Mateo.
The tears surge up my throat—but no. Thoughts of Mateo are off-limits. I have to put all of my attention on surviving.
Look straight ahead. Hone my concentration. And then—I can’t help myself—my gaze flickers down. The crocodiles have their snouts tilted up, jaws open wide, waiting for one of us to fall. A clod of dirt shakes loose from my shoe. One of the crocodiles snaps it out of the air and swallows it whole.
Not. Reassuring. That could be me. But it’s not. No matter how deep I have to dig, it will not be me.
Halfway across the beam, a stiff breeze buffets me. But how…? The whole time we’ve been in the caves, I haven’t felt a semblance of wind, even underneath the gaping skylights. And now, the air blows at me not from across the pit, where there might be an exit, but from my side, where there’s nothing but solid rock wall.
I look up. Xander’s watching us, arms crossed, expression smug. That’s when I get it. The breeze is not natural—it’s as manufactured as this steel beam. Designed to make our already difficult task more challenging.
Ahead of me, Rae stops walking. Her calves tremble, and her breath comes in long, shuddering exhales. It doesn’t take any special ability to sense that she’s freaked out.
“It’s only wind,” I say in a low voice. “Not strong enough to knock us over. He doesn’t want us to die. He only wants to mess with our minds.”
Rae nods, acknowledging my words, even if she doesn’t dare turn around. A moment later, she takes a step. And then another. Behind me, I hear the shuffle of Bodin’s bigger feet. He’s at my back again—no surprise. For some reason, he’s taken it upon himself to be my protector.
I don’t need protection, from him or anyone else. Or at least that’s what Mama tells me. That’s the hard lesson I’m trying to learn before she leaves my life forever. But my bravery is still a work in progress, and I can’t help but feel reassured by Bodin’s presence.
Rae takes her final steps and crosses onto solid ground. I’m next. Just eleven more steps, I’m guessing, now ten…
For no reason at all, I look down again. A flash of…blue? Is that right? I’d know that color anywhere, considering I wore it some time ago. Mateo’s shirt. It’s got to be.
My foot slips. Silly. The last thing I should be doing on a skinny ledge is letting my mind wander. I squint and I don’t see any blue anywhere, so it must have been my imagination. I regain my footing, but on my very next step, my sneaker skids again…
Bodin catches me around the waist. “Careful,” he says into my ear. “It would be a shame to lose you to crocodiles who don’t even need to eat.”
I quickly go on edge, pushing his hands away.
“There’s something…slick on this beam.” I frown at the oily black liquid coating the metal in front of me. “We need to move carefully.”
Inch by infinitesimal inch, I make my way along the metal bridge. My muscles are so tight that they start to cramp, and I’m one tremor away from being knocked off balance. But I do it. I cross the pit safely, with Bodin and Sylvie close behind. It only takes nine steps to reach the end, so I step twice on the solid ground.
Bodin and Sylvie join Rae on the dirt, sweat pouring down their faces, but I stand, even as I pant with exhaustion. Xander simply waits, his hands tucked behind his back.
“What was the point of that?” Rae—who’s had a little bit more respite than the rest of us—bursts out. “Do you just like torturing us? At the end of three long days, after witnessing our friend go down, that challenge—or whatever the heck you want to call it—was just cruel.”
Xander rocks back and forth on his heels. “That wasn’t my intention. As I’ve told you from the beginning, my purpose here is to push you to your emotional extremes. I thought one of you might be fatigued enough to be pushed over the brink—but I was wrong.” He shrugs. “You win some, you lose some.”
His casualness is like a kick to my stomach when I’m already down. Inside my sneakers, I curl my toes inward, tensing my entire feet. “Where’s Mateo?”
“He’s never been safer.” Xander pulls a handful of breadcrumbs from his pocket and scatters them on the ground. The birds swarm him as though they haven’t eaten in a week—and maybe they haven’t.
“That’s a lie,” I retort. “We saw him fall into the pit. We have no proof that he’s not dead and dismembered, split up in the tummies of each of the crocodiles.”
“Thanks for that visual,” Bodin mutters.
“What about a third option?” Xander raises an eyebrow. “The one you already know but refuse to admit to yourself?”
Sylvie lifts her face from the ground, and her entire left cheek is caked with dirt. “You mean when his arms got shorter?”
She saw that, too?
“That’s right.” Xander nods, as though this is a classroom and Sylvie is his top student. “His powers are starting to surface.”
Bodin’s mouth drops. “Mateo turned into a crocodile?”
“A crocodile person,” Xander clarifies. “He can resume partial or full human form, but he will transform into a crocodile with the moon every night. And in spite of your oh-so-shocked faces, it’s not such a remarkable occurrence. In fact, it’s a very pedestrian talent, for a very pedestrian boy.” He gestures toward the pit. “As you can see, that’s the ability that most of my subjects manifest.”
My head jerks up, even as my heart rejoices that Mateo is not dead. “What are you saying? Does that mean…you’ve done this before? We aren’t the first people you’ve kidnapped?”
Xander laughs, long and loud. It echoes through the cavern, and the crocodiles grow more agitated, climbing over each other as though they’re trying to escape from the pit.
“You can’t possibly think I did all of this for you?” He stands and walks over to the pit, sticking his hand into the empty space. A moment later, a crocodile shoots into the air, no doubt propelled by his friends, and taps his snout against Xander’s palm. “I have a very complex operation here, all designed for one purpose alone: to find my Lotus Flower Champion, the person whose one rare talent has been eluding me my entire life.”
The cold begins in my core, frosting its way up my spine, vertebra by vertebra.
“Most people would call me a dreamer. Or less generously: a fool. To continue to persist, after I’ve failed again and again.” His voice strengthens in volume and tone. “But I will not give up hope—not when salvation is within my reach. By my best estimate, there are hundreds of people with this latent ability scattered across the world. I just need one of them to fall within my control.”
“But the Thai authorities must be suspicious about all the missing people, after all of this time,” Bodin says.
Xander whirls toward his former employee. “Do you not think that I’ve thought this through? Do you not assume that I’ve planned every last detail, in order to make this operation a success? You’ve known me for a long time, Bodin. You should know by now that I leave nothing to chance.”
He shakes his head sadly. “That kind of question only comes from a mind that accepts what it sees. That cannot imagine a world outside of the box. What makes you think all of my disappearances occur in the vicinity of Koh Samui or even Thailand? Why do you assume that’s where we are now? Ever heard of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? There are ways to make people vanish. And now, perhaps, you can answer the question that’s been plaguing decades of journalists: where all of those people went.”
I blink. No way. Did Xander just take credit for the disappearance of MH370? Sure, he mentioned it before, but I thought he was just grandstanding. Is he actually responsible for that flight vanishing?
Xander claps his hands together, not slowly this time, but briskly and impatiently. “Okay. Let’s get you lot back to camp so that we can continue our game.”
“Continue?” I echo. “But we never started.”
Our captor breaks into a smile, so wide that I can see his chipped cuspid. “Don’t you get it yet? You’ve been playing the entire time. This whole island is a game. The polished wall with a golden key hidden just out of reach. The extra sticky mud in the river that made it incredibly difficult for you to wash off. Even Mateo’s rock wall, whose handholds were designed to crumble after he reached the halfway point.”
He sneers at me. “How you didn’t reach your emotional breaking point, I’ll never know.”
I return his stare, not giving anything away—even though I am shaking, trembling, vibrating on the inside. He’s procured a lot of information about me. He might even know that I have OCD, but he has no idea how it feels to live with this disorder.
He doesn’t know that I am tested every second of every day, from wake to sleep—and often during the night, as well, in the form of stress dreams. He doesn’t know that meltdowns like that are a regular occurrence in my everyday life. So, the mud might have pushed me to the brink…but I’ve been there many, many times.
I don’t say anything, though. Because, in this game, knowledge is power. And although my advantage may not seem like much, it’s the only one I’ve got.