Yumi and I exchange a narrowed glance, genuinely considering.
I start, “No, that has to be—”
At the same time, she says, “What about the—”
We pause at the same time, laughing. I don’t even care that it’s all performance. How easy it is to get back in sync with someone you used to know so well.
“The pole challenge?” I ask, referring to the time teams had to climb a greased-up metal pole to retrieve their clue. It looked deceptively simple, but it took hours to complete. In the end, itseemed to come down more to luck than anything. One contestant shattered his leg when he slipped right at the top. He crashed into the ground, clue envelope in hand, and was immediately rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.
Yumi shakes her head, looks up in thought, then nods. “Yes. But no, I was thinking of the sandcastle challenge.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” I agree, remembering the way the teams toiled on the beach, trying to build ten sandcastles on the shoreline during high tide. It was heartbreaking every time a team completed nine castles and got their hopes up, only for a rogue wave to wash all of their hard work away.
Aliona watches us, amused, waiting for our answer.
“This was one of the most physically demanding First Adventures inThe Adventureverse’s history, that’s for sure,” I say. “But it wasn’t the most difficult.”
“You came up with an unexpected solution. Would you say that was working smarter, not harder?”
“We were working smarter, not harder today,” I parrot. I have a feeling I’m going to be doing a lot of parroting for the foreseeable future. “I remembered Dino and Duke doing something similar for the shoe challenge in Mexico, and…” Hesitating, I look at Yumi. I just have to do it.Just do it.“I could see the mental toll it was taking on Yumi. I mean, it was taking a toll on me, too, but watching her suffer was really…uh, hard.”
Yumi pats my arm awkwardly.
Aliona looks between us with a slight frown. I think she’s going to say something, but instead she changes topics. “There was a point where you discussed switching tasks but ultimately decidednot to. If you had known that the FINESSE challenge was undoing combination locks, would you have changed your minds?”
Yumi answers, “The fact that the other challenge was undoing combination locks only makes me even more glad we stuck with the FORCE challenge. Noelle…” She trails off, grimacing.
I finish for her. “I’m really bad with things like that.”
“You’re bad with things like what?”
“I’m really bad with those patience-testing puzzles. Trying the same combo on twenty different locks. I have a low frustration tolerance for that kind of challenge. We’re banned from an escape room chain in Phoenix because I got fed up and tried to open one of the clues by smashing it against a table. Not my greatest birthday.”
Aliona points at me, approving of my anecdote. “So, it sounds like you took the right path in the end, even though it was tough.”
“We definitely made the right choice,” Yumi says. “Even though the challenge was tough, we pushed through and stuck to what we know as superfans.”
“We got really lucky today,” I start, pausing in surprise when a big, fat raindrop hits me on the forehead. It’s the only warning we get before the sky opens up. For a moment, the downpour is so heavy that I can’t see much beyond the poles that hold Aliona’s canopy up. The water splashes against the ground, peppering my ankles with mud, flooding my water shoes. Injury, meet insult. It stops as quickly as it started, and I’m looking into Aliona’s delighted eyes again.
Against my will, I have just satisfied her daily quota for Good TV.
Chapter 17
A Day at the Beach
Aliona shepherds us through thewallpapered hallways of a nearby budget hotel, stopping to let me buy some “dinner” from the lobby’s concession stand.
“Here we are,” she yawns, tapping her key card to unlock a room with two queen-sized beds. There’s an empty space where a TV usually is, based on the loose wires and dust-free rectangle of wall.
Circling us, she deftly unfastens our mic packs and shoves them into her bag for charging. She produces a roll of masking tape from her pocket and holds it aloft. “We’ll know if you leave the room, so stay put. Your crew members will be waiting outside your door with your clue envelope at seven sharp, but they will never wake you if you sleep in. This is the only warning you’ll get about that. Okay, see you bright and early tomorrow. Hopefully.”
She gives a little wave and lets the door fall shut. The sound of the masking tape being pulled and placed on the outside of our doorjamb prompts me to say, “I feel like we’re on a middle school field trip.”
But gone is cordialAdventureverseYumi. In her place is a stone wall.
“I’m gonna shower,” she says, her plastic-wrapped pack hitting the bathroom’s tiled floor with a thud. “That okay?”
I would like to change, obviously, but I don’t want to do it without showering. “Yeah, I’ll use it when you’re done,” I say.
