Page 129 of Reverie
He reveals what I know to be the golden eye band that belonged to my father. Next to it is my mother’s pear-shaped diamond ring.
When I left Isla Cara after finding my father’s decomposing body, I threw his ring in with the box of other recovered materials.
“What’s this?” I ask, taking the rings from his palm.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about the symbols. Look at this one,” he says, shifting the papers across the desk. When he lands on a large photo of the floor in my father’s vault, I search it for clues.
“What am I supposed to see here?” I mutter, rubbing the skin between my eyebrows.
“Look at the lines here.” He points to the juncture at the top of the eye, right over where the iris would be. Tracing the line, I see the pear-shaped image form, but he doesn’t stop, and I see that?—
“It’s three-dimensional,” I say, assessing the rings in my hand.
“Yes, like a diamond. Put them together, Hunter,” Misha replies. Luna steps closer, as does my mother. I situate the smaller diamond ring beneath my father’s larger one. The image matches the one in the picture.
“Cool, but what does it mean?” I say.
“Wait,” my mother says. Taking the rings from me, she flips them over to peer at the undersides of the stones.
“Wow,” she says on a breath. “It looks like a code. Coordinates, maybe?”
Holy shit.
When held together, markings that would appear completely benign when the rings are separate now transform into a legible set of numbers and letters.
Max moves from his station, rushing over to us. Amelia hands him the rings, and he takes care to keep them pressed together.
Holding them high and close to his face, he says, “No, not coordinates. They’re the key to Leo’s anagram. A cipher.” He jumps over to his desk, sliding into his chair with his hands already on the keyboard. He types furiously for several seconds before blindly grabbing a notepad and pen and scribbling on the paper with his eyes locked on the screen. “But there are a few more digits in the series than is necessary.”
Max ignores us, and Leo walks over to him to pick up the notepad when Max drops the pen and returns both hands to his computer.
“How do you know?” Leo asks. We all tried working on the anagram that Leo received in a text message over the past several days. None of us could figure it out—meaning Max couldn’t figure it out.
He ran several scripts to try to detangle the code, but none of them worked. Deciding that there must be letters missing, we set solving the anagram aside.
Max pulls the pad from Leo’s hands and spins back to his desk, hunching over the notes and resuming his frantic pen scratches. After several seconds, he stops and his eyes move back and forth as he scans the top and the bottom of the page.
Misha taps on his phone and then turns it around to show us the map on his screen. “Clearly, they’re coordinates. And unsurprisingly, they take us to Isla Cara.” Misha’s eyes spark with excitement over his discovery. “Specifically, it leads to the northwest side of the island.”
“The mansion is on the southeast side,” I say.
“So clearly the northwest side is more important,” Misha offers, confident in his conclusions.
“It’s akey,” Max presses. “Everybody shut up so I can think.”
He curls in more on himself, and the scratch of his pen is loud in the room. Max is in the zone.
We all look at each other.
“Or it could be a date?” This comes from Leo. I work the numbers backward and forward in my brain.
It comes together. Zero-six two-zero.
“It’s June 20th,” I say. My brain goes back to the summers spent on Isla Cara…and the horrors that happened there every year. “It’s The Hunt.”
Leo gives me a grave expression, standing straight. On the summer solstice, my father gathers the selected elite to join him on Isla Cara. For seven days, they fulfill their deepest, most depraved desires. They dance with sin and play dark games.
No one is safe during The Hunts.