“Max,” Arnett said with a scowl. “Everyone already agreed I was taking the last goddamn slice.”

Max spun around with a look of horror on his face.

“Dude, you thought he wouldn’t notice?” Vick asked, laughing. “You were carrying around a fork with whipped cream on it.”

“Goddammit, kid. What did I say about food thieves?” Arnett asked.

“Sorry, sorry,” Max said.

“You could have just bought yourself a damn slice if you just wanted cake.”

“Yeah, I know. I should have.”

“This is the second time you’ve munched on someone else’s food, kid. The first time was with Kayden’s chips, remember?”

“Hey, Arnett,” Raine said.

“What?”

“Catch.” He tossed something to Arnett, who caught it clumsily. “That’s a packet of cookies Max put in the cupboard.”

Arnett looked at it with wide eyes. “Damn, it’s from Belgium. This is high quality stuff, man.”

“Raine, those were mine!” Max said miserably.

“It’s just one packet, Max. There are three more in the box.” Then Raine said to Arnett, “While you eat that, Max will go buy you a slice of cake as an apology.”

“Whaaat?” Max asked. “Those cookies were enough of an—”

“Come on, Max.” Raine put a hand on his shoulder. “Arnett was getting too mad for just a slice of cake, but you did eat his food.”

Max hesitated for a moment. Then he sighed. “Alright. I’m sorry.”

Arnett was eating a cookie. “Eh, it’s alright,” he said with a shrug. “But no more food-stealing.”

Raine echoed the sentiment. He didn’t want his own food taken.

It was Saturday. They had splurged and had split a cake for breakfast. Most of their teammates now were outside to prepare for the competition.

Raine had managed to spend two hours in the morning studying physics. Then he was done. He could take no more. He wanted to recharge by taking a walk around the town, but he couldn’t because of his leg. So he just lingered at the apartment, not really sure what to do.

Max soon left to get a slice of cake.

“Those cookies were amazing,” Arnett said after finishing them. “But now I’m bored.”

“That makes two of us,” Raine sighed. “Aren’t you going to go get ready for the competition?”

“I paid Vick with a slice of cake to have him teach me math for an hour. I’m at my mental limit. But maybe I’ll go to the shooting range after lunch.”

So that’s why he was so pissed that Max stole his slice. Raine nodded. “I should do that too.” 

“I’ll join, too. I want to shoot like Kayden,” Vick said.

So an hour later, after having lunch and after Max returned with a slice of cake, the three of them went to the shooting range.

They spent about an hour there, practicing with the fake guns, until Raine got a call from June. A doctor was going to take a look at his injuries, she said. Vick joked that he was going to get fixed up with some black magic and forced to compete next week. Raine laughed, but with the strangeness of Hopkins, he was a bit scared he really would have to compete.

He went to the hospital. The doctor was a friendly young lady with glasses. 

“Your injuries almost certainly aren’t going to be done healing by Friday,” the doctor said. “Your leg in particular should take another two weeks. And after that, you’ll need rehab. That’ll take a good two months, at a minimum.”

Raine smiled wryly. “So I’ll keep the crutch for a while?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

When he left the hospital, he was left feeling both relieved and disappointed.

. . . .

Sunday was even less eventful. Raine studied and went to the shooting range again while his teammates ran, cycled, and swam. Then Monday came along.

“I fucking told you to paddle on three!” Edgar roared.

“I did!” his teammate cried. “Why the fuck are you paddling so hard?”

“It’s not me who’s paddling hard, dumbass. It’s you who’s being fucking lazy.”

Raine and Vick looked over.

“Oh shit, do you think they’re going to fight?” Vick asked.

“Steele should break them up before that happens,” Raine said, glancing at Edgar’s canoe.

“But damn, dude. The guy has some serious issues,” Vick said.

“It seems so.”

Soon, as expected, Steele interrupted Edgar’s argument with his teammate.

Edgar’s teammate climbed onto the speedboat. Edgar himself was left on the canoe to cool his head. Steele told him he didn’t need to join the rest in going to the archery range.

“Does that mean I’ve been dropped?” Edgar asked in shock.

“What are you talking about?” Steele sighed.

“Don’t play dumb,” he said, suddenly angry. “I know that Hopkins drops people in training.”

Instead of getting mad, Steele just rolled her eyes. “We don’t drop anyone in training these days. We stopped doing that five years ago.”

“O-Oh. I see.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “Jesus. Just sit there for an while and calm the fuck down.”

Raine and Vick paddled back to the pier. Most of the new employees were talking about Edgar’s outburst. Even Raine’s team spoke about it.

“It’s good for us,” Arnett said. “One competitor out of the running.”

“I feel bad for him,” Grant said. “He looks like he’s falling apart.”

“Yeah,” Kayden said, “he needs help.”

Raine nodded, staring at Edgar’s canoe.

The new employees left the beach and headed for the archery range. The atmosphere was different from before. Knowing there was a competition ahead, everyone put in extra effort in an attempt to get ahead. People had fewer friendly conversations with those from other teams.

Kayden drew his bow, taking a deep breath. After few seconds, he fired.

While almost everyone else missed or hit the edge of the target, Kayden’s arrow flew right onto the bullseye.

Max applauded with a grin on his face. “We’re going to win the archery contest, at least.”

“Don’t get overconfident,” Reo said. “Even the best have bad days. Even the worst can make a lucky shot.”

“That’s true,” Kayden said. He pointed at Arnett. “But with me and Arnett, our team is really likely to win the archery part of the competition.”

Arnett was standing nearby, ready to shoot. He breathed in deeply and drew his bow. He loosed the arrow.

It landed on one of the target’s middle rings.

Arnett cursed. “All your talking threw me off, guys.”

“Yeah, sure it did,” Vick said. He squinted at the target. “That was still a good shot, dude.”

“No, I can hit the bullseye if I just try a little harder.”

He nocked another arrow and drew his bow again. He held it for two seconds with a look of intense focus. He released the arrow.

It landed an inch farther from the bullseye than the first arrow.

Arnett groaned in frustration and tried again.

Raine took a look at how those from other teams were doing. Marco was about as good as Arnett, as was someone on Cecily’s team. A handful of others at least hit the target consistently. Everyone else performed worse.

Well, archery won’t be a concern.

After an hour at the archery range, the team leaders went to the Costas Hall while the rest went to the running track. By now, the team leaders had gotten acquainted with each other. They spoke with each other to kill the small amount of time they had before the lesson began.

“Hey Marco, what’s up with your teammate?” the Chinese woman, Julia, asked.

Marco groaned. “Please don’t remind me. I’ve never seen someone crack so badly under pressure.”

“Does he get no sleep or something?” Raine asked.

“He gets plenty of sleep,” Marco said. Then he paused. “Although he does complain about nightmares once in a while. Anyway, how are your teams doing? I think you can guess how mine is.”

“It’s peaceful,” Julia said with a smile.

“Mine’s doing fine,” Raine said.

Others said their teams were ‘okay’ or ‘holding up alright,’ even though Raine saw stress and worry on most of their faces. Meanwhile, Cecily responded with a small shrug while she stared at her phone.

Hugh’s arrival cut their conversation short. He had everyone except Raine and Cecily follow him.

“We’ll cover basic German today. Williams, you’re fluent, right?” Hugh asked.

“Yes,” Raine said.

“Caraway is an intermediate in it, but she’s fluent in Russian. It won’t help either of you to join the rest. Take a seat in that room,” he said, pointing at a door, “and have a conversation for thirty minutes. Caraway, speak in German. Williams, speak in Russian.”

“We’re supposed to talk for thirty minutes?” she asked with a frown.

“Yes, for thirty minutes. Push yourselves to say words you rarely use.”

“Alright,” Raine said, heading for the room. Cecily sighed and followed.

The room was a mid-sized classroom. There was a massive glass panel on the wall, so they could look out to the lobby from inside.

“It’s a nice day today,” Raine said in Russian as he grabbed a seat.

“That’s only if you ignore the crazy bastard trying to start a fight every other day,” Cecily said in German.

“He’s concerning. Don’t you think?”

“No. Why worry about someone else? I’m busy trying to learn and train.”

He sighed. Maybe someone as self-centered as you can’t understand.

“You’re overly concerned about other people’s lives,” she said.

“Have you considered that maybe you’re the one who cares too little about them?” he asked with a slight frown.

When you spend too much time thinking about others, how can you rise to the top?”

“Often, it’s only with the help of others that you rise at all.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You can only get so far by relying on someone else.”

“Therefore you take the harder path when you don’t have to? Here’s a metaphor. Imagine a tower with five floors. The first three floors are easy to climb with help but hard to climb without it. The last two floors have to be climbed alone. You’re saying you want to climb all five floors on your own. It’s illogical.”

“If I climb the first three floors with help, I’ll lack the skills I could have built by taking it on alone, skills necessary to continue to the last two floors. Furthermore, by getting no help, I know my achievements are mine and mine alone.”

Raine sighed. That’s moronic.

He changed the topic to something less contentious.

“What did you do before coming to this island?” he asked. Then they went back and forth with bits of information about themselves. “What are you majoring in?”

“Economics. And before you ask, yes, I’m in it to get a job on Wall Street.”

Somehow, I’m not surprised. He said something along the lines of ‘Good for you’ and moved on.

Their conversation slowly made its descent to something so stiff and boring it wouldn’t be out of place in a language textbook.

Then, in their last few minutes, Cecily groaned. “I’m bored of questions. Tell me something crazy.”

“We’re on a private island owned by a company that’s hired us to do work that apparently requires us to ride horses, shoot guns, speak German, swim, canoe, cycle, and run, among other things. I think that’s pretty crazy.”

“Goddammit, that reminds me!” she said, snapping her fingers. “The others learned how to drift, you know. They learned how to drift.”

“That bothered me too,” he said, smiling wryly. “We sat in a room learning how to write Ephrian while everyone else got to drift and drive around a race track.”

“Do we get a makeup lesson?”

“If we don’t, I’m going to complain to Steele.”

“I’m pretty sure I know what she’s going to say.”

“‘Too bad, fuck off.’”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

Hugh came into the room then. The thirty minutes were up. The other eight team leaders were on the way out of the Costas Hall.

Raine and Cecily left the room.

“Thanks, Caraway,” Raine said.

She nodded. She was about to stride out the front doors when her feet stopped. “What was your name again?”

Jesus Christ, how direct. He would have thought she was insulting him if not for the fact that she was looking right at him with her head tilted. “It’s Raine Williams.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Raine. Huh, funny name.”

She continued on her way out.

Wow, thanks. He left with a sigh.

. . . .

In the evening, Raine’s team went to the cafeteria for dinner. Reo took little time to decide what to eat and grabbed a table. Most of them grabbed a seat after a handful of minutes, but Vick took twice as much time as them. He went back and forth between their table and the food-serving counter three times.

“Fuck the no-tray thing,” he said. He had seven plates of food in front of him.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Max said. “That’s a lot of food, Vick.”

“I’ll eat it all,” Vick said. “Anyway, now that we’re here, let’s talk about some serious shit that we still haven’t gone over yet.”

“Did Max take someone’s piece of cake again?” Arnett asked.

“That was just one time!” Max cried.

“No, no,” Vick said. “We’ve all been preparing for the competition. Obviously, none of us want to be in the bottom-tier. But how badly do you guys want to get our team into the top tier?”

“Pretty badly. The idea of harder training is scary shit, but it'll be worth it for a 120 grand,” Arnett said.

“But is 120,000 really all that much better than 60,000?” Vick asked.

“It is,” Grant said, frowning. “It would work miracles for my life, honestly.”

“Yeah, a 120 grand...that would make life so much better,” Max said. “I think I could handle harder training for that.”

With that kind of money, in just a few years, I would have enough to throw at my investments and make a million or two before I’m forty. Jesus. Raine imagined what he could get with that much money: a BMW i8 for himself, a few apartments (not in California) for his friends, and many, many vacations to everywhere from London to St. Petersburg to Tokyo.

“We have a serious shot at being number one,” Kayden said. “I'm going to assume that top spot will have some sweet rewards besides putting us in the top tier. Our team isn’t falling apart, and all of us are in a decent state of mind. Just that gives us a serious leg up over some of the other teams.”

“It does,” Lukas said with a smile. “So let’s go for it.”

Reo nodded. “It’s worth a shot,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure every other team will be gunning for that top spot. Have you noticed some of the looks people are giving each other?” Arnett asked.

“Everyone can dream, but not many manage to actually put in the work,” Raine said. “And we’re on the right side of a large skill disparity in archery and Ephrian.”

“Eh, that’s true,” Arnett said.

“So let’s get that top spot.” Raine smiled. “And let’s get that 120,000 pay.”