Then Things Went Dark, page 8
“Again with this? Really?”
Araminta doesn’t speak, just stares until he answers.
Rhys glances around, checks they’re alone before that relaxed grin appears on his face.
“Phenomenal,” he says, grabbing his towel from the side and heading off to shower. “Then again, I do tend to bring the best performance out of people.”
Kalpana hesitates for so long, she convinces herself she’s not going to do it.
And then she rips down one of the secrets.
Legal affairs.
That’s it? She turns it over, wondering if she should take another. She was so certain this was where Jerome was standing, and this would confirm that, right? But the sharp, angular lilt is not what she imagined his handwriting would be, and the words themselves are so vague, she’s suddenly unsure. Isn’t Araminta estranged? And musicians are always embroiled in such scandal—copyright infringements or contract breaches or more mundane things. She knows nothing about Rhys but certainly wouldn’t put it past him. And Isko—
“My, my!”
Kalpana takes the note down in plain sight, no plans to hide it, and still jumps when she hears Isko’s voice.
“Kalpana! I thought you were better than this. Our noble little activist?”
She arches an eyebrow. “Exposing dirty secrets is part of the job.”
“This is base and you know it. The rest of us are here for our own sense of self-importance. I thought you believed yourself better.”
She folds her arms across her chest to hide her sneering disbelief. Doesn’t he realize she’s here for both? They would never have put someone without a sense of self-importance on a show called Iconic. It wouldn’t make for good television.
Though she’s not sure she’s given enough of that either. The most entertainment she can offer is the way she’s scrambling for an excuse—her boldness predicated on her certainty the note would be Jerome’s, revealing a smoking gun, or an absence so obvious it would be suspicious in and of itself.
But this is nothing. She has already hinted at what she knows about Jerome and cannot go after him without strengthening the case. Men like that have a way of refuting everything.
So she makes some vague effort to distract Isko from the card in her hand: “I’m not even sure I can say what I am and what I’m not at this point,” she admits. “I feel so useless. I thought I could leverage this for some important cause, but no one cares to hear it.”
“Of course not. No one wants your preaching; we just want to know if you and Araminta are a thing.”
Kalpana spins to face him, eyes wide.
Isko: It’s not like I perform teenage tasks for spoiled rich girls often. All things considered, I think I was actually rather subtle.
“Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“Something to do with that ‘running off to the smoking area to make out’ thing.”
“If we kissed, I can hardly remember it,” she says. A brush of lips under the soft torch light in the midst of all this isolation? She’s not lying: the memory is a blur. She’s extrapolated it, stretched it, teased it for all it was worth until the moment, fully romanticized, was worthy of being pocketed away for future purposes. She’ll stick it in a poem or spin it into a slogan.
“Are you craving a refresher?”
Kalpana: Is that seriously what these people care about? Who’s kissing who?
“Do you really think one kiss is the greatest thing I can offer this island? That any of us can?” She can feel the card curling beneath her sweat-dampened fingers.
Isko doesn’t answer because no, of course not, this is no standard reality show. They are not regular people seeking romance and relaxation. They’re more—the entirety of the human experience condensed into six beings, bursting at the seams in their desire to portray it all, to offer the chaos of the world some semblance of meaning.
Admitting interest in a kiss feels like admitting they’re all ordinary after all.
With Isko still watching, Kalpana turns back to the wall and pries a nail loose, pushing it back into the card—secret facing out for anyone to read.
If someone wants to write something so empty, then fine—they should have no problem with everyone reading it.
With only five minutes of internet access, there are only so many things you can search for. Theo can’t wade past the outfit-of-the-day articles for Araminta to get to the real dirt and after three pages, he moves on. Rhys is a nobody—a few regional theaters, no social media—and while he hopes destroying the man might be on the cards, it appears it isn’t on the internet.
And then he tries Jerome, and it’s all there: a scandal blowing up the chat rooms and hashtags.
He runs out his final minute skimming the details, and now in the bright light of day, he’s ready to expose it all.
He finds Jerome on the beach.
“Newman!” Jerome cries, sprawled across the sand, legs splayed, drink clutched lazily in his hand. “Come, sit, talk. We should get to know each other better. I think I know some of your friends. Annaliese? The rapper? I met her at a dinner once and now we’re very firm friends. Nearly something more than that, but we both decided against it. Oh, do you know—”
Theo lets him warble on, suddenly doubtful. He’d seen this too—pictures of Jerome with people who were famous or fame adjacent, collecting connections like trading cards. He imagines he’ll be one of his name-drops one day. “Are you excited for tonight’s challenge?” Theo asks, suddenly wondering if that might be the better place for his big reveal. A camera hovers nearby, but perhaps he needs the others to be his audience, to let them run away with it and propel the drama further.
Jerome shrugs. “The weekly challenges interest me but not the daily ones. All Araminta got was a marketing task.”
“She’s an influencer.”
Jerome sits up. “Interesting—you didn’t take your internet time to research her then. If you only searched yourself, I imagine you’d be far more despondent right now. So which one of us was worth your time?”
Theo is careful not to look down or away. “If I googled Araminta, I wouldn’t think of her as an influencer?”
“Theo, she’s one of the most prolific sculptors in the world. It just so happens no one cares about sculpture, so we all know her first and foremost from her bloodline and then her social channels.”
“I…how do you know?”
Jerome scoffs. “It was very easy to find the line-up, Theo. People googling the show and the names attached, rumors spreading through back channels. It’s the internet. You can find out anything.”
Theo: I think we might have been overlooking Jerome. He’s said nothing about anyone; but I think he might already know every filthy secret pinned to that wall.
“So, Araminta,” he prompts.
“Award-winning artist, verified slut, and a girl who only dropped daddy when she had enough success to know she didn’t have too much to lose.”
“That’s not fair. She probably didn’t know—”
“About her father’s funding of the Scottish Oil Pipeline? Maybe. But funny how she suddenly cared about displaced residents and obliterated nature reserves when she didn’t care about the workers he paid three pence an hour, or when he destroyed unions, or the years of deforestation. She won a prestigious and very lucrative art prize, and the next morning, it was all over the internet that she had cut ties with the rest of her family and wanted nothing to do with their blood money. And of course, all the attention just made her richer, followers rocketing, brand deals flocking.”
Theo is torn. This was his plan, right? To deflect from his own imploding life by tearing apart someone else’s. But this isn’t what he intended…
Which Jerome knows.
Of course he does; he’s doing this on purpose—has realized that if Theo is seeking him out when they’ve hardly exchanged a sentence or two, then he has to be the topic of last night’s internet access. Jerome knows Theo has something on him and he’s bombarding him with this instead, offering it up like a bribe.
And issuing a warning at the same time: come for me and I’ll throw you under too. He probably has information on them all that’s far more damning and buried far deeper than a five-minute google might allow.
“I don’t know; family matters are messy,” Theo says, leaning into it, giving Jerome the opportunity to drag Araminta further, because if her reputation is on the line, then maybe his isn’t. “There might have been other factors—or it might have been the thing that pushed her over.”
Jerome shrugs. “Maybe but don’t you have to look at how calculating people might have been in the past to see them properly in this competition?”
“You have a point.”
“So that’s her: sculptor, sure, but social media star who knows how to spin her image. No one knows quite how they’re perceived and how to work it to their advantage like she does. You know the tabloids called her the Nymph of Knightsbridge? A plethora of famous hook-ups and sexual scandals and she comes out of it wearing white satin on a sun-kissed island. Her ex wrote a song about her—“Peppermint”—and she made it go viral on TikTok, a whole “why are you so obsessed with me” trend off the back of making people obsessed with her. She’s a genius. And she’s a liar.”
Theo should be pleased. Of everyone on the island, Araminta seems to be at the center of everything. It’s the very reason he googled her name first. That was supposed to be him. He can almost hear his publicist yelling at him to cause a scandal.
But he doesn’t like to be threatened, even in the vague-edged way Jerome is parceling out information.
And if Jerome does have something on them all, he’s a threat that needs to be shot down.
Which, Theo realizes, he’ll have to do far more carefully than the clumsy confrontation he’d planned. He’ll inevitably retaliate and Theo needs to make sure he comes for someone else. He needs to be so far down the domino chain no one remembers the first one to fall was him.
Which means that when it comes to Jerome, he needs to give someone else the ammunition and let them fire the gun.
One by one they find the card.
Their fury turns to quiet unease when Isko reveals Kalpana took it. They’d all assumed she’d cling to the moral high ground, or the illusion of it at least. If even she isn’t playing fair then no one is.
But it does make Theo’s decision of who to hand this information to awfully easy.
He finds Kalpana and invites her for a chat, positioning himself next to her in front of a camera, their microphones crisp and clear. But the stream mysteriously malfunctions and it does not make the episode edit. This is not how the producers want secrets to come out; better to wait for the shock reveal—which they’re certain they can orchestrate.
When they return to the others, they act suspiciously normal, Kalpana launching into a spiel about living off a dollar a day to raise awareness of food poverty. Araminta blinks and, in a naïve way that feels laced with cruelty, asks, “Oh, that’s not much, is it?”
Isko isn’t there to be her reality check.
But later, he finds her in the kitchen.
“I suppose we should report back,” he says, letting his hair fall into his face as he flushes with embarrassment at the words that just stumbled from his lips.
“I believe the word Rhys used was ‘phenomenal’.”
“Just tell me—”
“I’m not exaggerating.” Araminta glances at him, her tone so nonchalant the conversation could have been about anything. “That was the word he used.”
Isko considers this before turning to the alcohol. “Whisky or tequila?”
“White rum.”
He tosses the bottle in her direction and her composure cracks.
“Well, what about Kalpana?”
Isko catches something in her voice that is not emotion, something beyond even intent. It’s more like a vibration, a frequency he is attuned to, and he knows this is his opportunity to point a camera in his direction and spin something the audience will love.
“She doesn’t like you,” he snaps—cold, cruel, and with a perfect edge of disinterest. “She doesn’t want you. Move on.”
He thinks that Araminta is a mirror, reflecting his own performance back—he forgets that she is the original.
He only remembers it when the mirror cracks. Tears glisten in Araminta’s eyes and she rapidly blinks them away. Letting them fall might be a bit much. But she tilts her face toward the light and lets the cameras catch their existence all the same.
It’s difficult to track time on the island, the days long and hot and plunging suddenly into the bitter, cold nights. But when the alarm trills, it seems to them all too early.
When they gather around the TV screen, it’s not Eloise who greets them but a message:
We request that you stay in the villa while we set up equipment for tonight’s challenge.
It doesn’t make the edited cut. Nor do the two hours of the contestants anxiously huddled inside, gravitating toward windows while pretending they don’t care all that much. Makeup is applied with shaking hands, drinks are hurriedly sipped, and by the time dinner rolls around, it’s all they can do to pick at it—all except Rhys who does not give any indication of nerves, nor even that he might be expected to perform in a challenge anytime soon.
Meanwhile, those streaming the show are flooding social media with their speculation about the challenge and all the things that might be happening.
By the time the alarm rings again, the contestants are practically falling over themselves to hurry out the door and toward the patio screen: Please continue to the beach.
Lanterns light the path they are supposed to take, the sky rapidly darkening behind them.
“This can’t be a mini-challenge,” Araminta mutters as her high heel sticks in a gap between the wooden slats.
When they emerge onto the sand, they’ve composed themselves like returning heroes. They’re half expecting Eloise to be standing there in the flesh, but instead, a giant screen has been erected in the center of a large plinth, six wooden tables set in a circle around it. The polished mahogany is so out of place on this bleached island that it’s immediately obvious what the design team are aiming for: a courtroom. One where six defendants can stand.
“Contestants, please take a seat!” Eloise squeals excitedly from the screen. Unsettled, but attempting to appear confident—after all, icons do not doubt themselves—they fall into their seats.
Eloise’s smile is empty; she seems to look right past them. She’s too perfect, too immaculate. The contestants are beautiful but they are ruined too: the sun has burned patches around bikini edges, sunscreen has blocked their pores, and foundation clumps on their warm, sweaty skin. Everyone is windswept, salt-teased, and never quite clean enough.
“For today’s challenge, the audience has voted to test your popularity. Ultimately, icons are decided first and foremost by how many people believe them to be one. Your task is simple: among yourselves you must vote for a leader…and then you must decide who is the least popular, least iconic and least worthy of their place on the show. That’s right,” Eloise says, baring her teeth, though it might be a smile. “Tonight, one of you is leaving the island. And you get to choose who that is. All you need is for five of you to come to a consensus.”
The screen switches off, and without Eloise to stare at, the contestants turn to face each other.
For a moment, sheer silence and utter shock.
Then: “Araminta.”
Heads swivel to Rhys. Araminta gasps, her nails piercing her own leg beneath the table.
Rhys smiles gently, but his eyes reflect the torch light and it’s clear unsettling her was intentional.
“For team leader,” he continues, flashing her a conspiratorial wink.
But any relief is short-lived when Jerome rushes. “Absolutely not; she’s first in line for the chopping block.”
“Is she?” Kalpana snaps.
“Of all of us, Araminta has had the most opportunity to become iconic of her own volition,” Jerome says. “She’s been in the public eye for years and has never made it off the D list. She’s had everything handed to her, and she still needs to go on a TV show to even potentially make it. She’s the least iconic of all of us.”
“She’s the most talented person here,” Rhys snaps. “She’s the most successful, and she won the first popularity vote. If she’s not the leader of this thing, it loses all credibility.”
Araminta leans on the edge of her chair, engrossed but hesitant, like she’s waiting for the twist.
Araminta: Oh god. I like him. I really do—and I know he’s probably just playing a long con, or damn, I don’t know—setting me up high so he can flirt with me and join me at the top. But it’s working.
“I second Araminta for team leader,” Isko says calmly, staring at a camera instead of his other contestants.
Isko: A shaky alliance is better than none. I plan to protect it.
“Third,” Theo says, seated to Jerome’s right. The man startles, not expecting disagreement to come from that side. He turns and they lock eyes.
Jerome: Theo voting for Araminta after everything I told him earlier? I wonder what secrets he’s hiding. You know he was a rather last-minute addition to the line-up? That certainly might be worth digging into.
Kalpana does quick math. “Fourth.”
“Fifth,” Araminta says quietly, as though shocked at the sudden support. She is unwilling to believe she is truly so good at playing this game—there must be motives at play, cards being dealt. She’s likely a strategic choice for now and someone to betray later.
A consensus of five is reached. And now they’re on to the real test.
“Do we even need to discuss this?” Kalpana asks. “All but one of us just came to an agreement—surely that outlier should be the one to go.”
Araminta rises from her table and goes to stand before the plinth at the center—team leader, now the judge. Whichever way she chooses, she imagines people will scramble to agree, lest they run the risk of everyone turning on them next. “Everyone should have the opportunity to plead their case. But yes, I suppose we should start with Jerome.” She tries to stay calm, worried any hint of smugness in her words will damn her.
