Page 17 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

“Like life,” she said.

He cast her a look she couldn’t read, finally nodded.

“Are you from here?” she asked.

“I had family here, spent summers on Falcão Island as a kid. It feels like home in some ways.”

Gustavo had a serious aura, but it was lightened by an air of benevolent mischief,like the boys she found most frequently in her office at school. Not the troubled ones, the ones she worried about, but the wild ones. The boys for whom the structure and schedule of school was a kind of torture. They weren’t bad as much as they were out of place, needed to be ranging through the woods somewhere instead of being chained to a desk. Gustavo seemed like someone who might get into trouble but talk his way out of it. Then get in trouble for something else.

“My son has a friend here, someone he met onRed World.”

Gustavo nodded. “There’s a trend of people from other countries settling here. There are good jobs for hiking, climbing, and canyoneering guides, surfing teachers, hospitality, too. It’s cheap to live, beautiful. But isolated. The island can close in on you sometimes.”

In the distance, she saw the town on the coast, Ponte Rico. It was bigger than she’d imagined, looked bustling and clean. But then it disappeared behind a swath of deep green.

As they kept driving, she glanced at her phone a couple times to see if there was another text. But no. She breathed, forced herself out of her head and into her body.

“Tell me about a time you were under pressure and how you handled it,” the very young, bespectacled Dr. Garvey had prompted during the Zoom psych evaluation she’d done to qualify for the competition.

“How often would you say you lose your temper? Do you ever feel like you’re out of control?

“Have you experienced clinical depression, or any other kind of mental illness?

“Would you say you are an introvert or extrovert?”

She’d answered all his questions as truthfully as she could. She remembered how her heart thumped during that session, though Dr. Garvey had been kind and nonjudgmental.

As a result of those sessions, an extensive questionnaire, no doubt an exhaustive internet search, a background check, and the essay Violet and Blake had helped her write,Maverick and his Extreme team probably knew more about her than anyone else did, including her children.

They had all the tools necessary to mess with her—if that was part of the game. Texting from burner phones, telling her to go back to her kids. That would be easy.

“There it is,” said Gustavo, pointing ahead.

She leaned forward and saw it. A giant concrete structure thrust itself out of the fecundity around it. A man-made thing, all hard angles and gray surfaces, unwelcome to the eye in the natural beauty of its surroundings. Even from this distance she could see that the windows were hollow of glass, that parts of it were crumbling.

“Enchantments,” she said.

It was not in the least enchanting. It looked like a prison, or something from one of the ruined civilizations in the dystopian novels that Violet favored.

“That’s what Mav has been calling it,” said Gustavo with a tight smile. “But the original name in Portuguese was Esperança, really.”

She knew enough Portuguese to get the irony.

“Hope,” she said. “It meanshope.”

Gustavo nodded, and he looked up as well to the looming structure. It seemed to stare back at them. Then as they grew closer, it vanished from view.

He took a sharp turn off the road, and they were plunged into the blackness of the thick tree cover overhead. The road grew rougher. Adele jostled in her seat, grabbed for the handle above the window.

Gustavo flipped on the headlights, the beams carving through the darkness. Around the next bend, there was something in the road. Something big.

He brought the Rover to an abrupt stop. “Whatisthat?” he said.

It was a huge pulsating mass in the dim light. Adele couldn’t make it out right away.Gustavo climbed out of the vehicle, grabbing his phone. But he didn’t approach the thing, staying behind the open car door, pointing the phone camera lens at the road.

Adele leaned closer to the windshield, and the form took shape.

It was an enormous bird of prey, its ferruginous wings extended, flapping, its end feathers wide and tilting up like the spread fingers of a hand. In its yellow beak it held some kind of small mammal, hanging limp, dead.

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