Round one wraps at noon the next day. D-team posts three signed LOIs from on-island operators. A-team posts two from mainland prospects. C-team is at the bottom on point deductions.
Yara's face is granite. Logan looks at the scoreboard like he isn't worried.
Marcus is at the front of the main-house ballroom.
"Round one was the warm-up."
A new slide.
Round Two: Crisis Communications
Simulated scenario — Pellucid Edge has been publicly accused of a major privacy-data exposure. Each team submits a comms response within 12 hours, then defends it on a live company-wide Zoom webinar with chat enabled.
Every head in the room turns to Soren. The Edge product is his kernel.
Yara is at his shoulder in under five seconds. "Soren, we got this one, right?"
Get the technical narrative from him. Pin the architecture blame on Wren's old customer-requirements docs. She catches the bullet.
I can see her across the floor. She lifts her chin at me like she's already won.
That night, three things go up online inside about ninety minutes of each other.
A Blind post from a verified Pellucid email: Pellucid PM tanks privacy compliance to grab credit. Sources internal.
A Glassdoor review: Female PM (Asian, 3 yrs tenure, currently on the leadership track) altered requirements to ship faster, shipped a privacy bug. Avoid this company until she's gone.
A Twitter thread, anonymous, that gets four hundred retweets in an hour: PM at hot RTP SaaS startup is throwing user privacy under the bus for her own KPI. They're protecting her. Don't trust their compliance theater.
The attached screenshot is a doc I wrote. I recognize my own bullet structure. The screenshot has the title bar and the body paragraphs.
It does not have the approval row.
Indie is crying. "Wren. They said it was a simulation. This is on the internet."
I scroll back to the original Notion. I pull the version history.
The cropped-out approval row, on the production-frozen version, three weeks before launch.
Approver: Logan Cross.
Logan does not waste the morning.
By 9 a.m. he is in the main-house conference room with the A-team and a producer running the company-wide Zoom webinar. Six hundred Pellucid employees are watching from the mainland. Chat is on.
He slides a tablet across to me. Camera on my face.
"Wren. Pellucid is giving you the chance to explain."
He turns the tablet so the screenshot is centered.
"Did you write this requirements doc."
The webinar chat is moving fast. I can read it out of the corner of my eye.
she's done.
RIP D-team.
Cross going for the kill, brutal.
Yara is in frame behind him. Smile pressed flat.
Yes or no, both kill her. Wrenny, this is it.
I look at Logan.
"I wrote it."
His mouth lifts at the corner.
"So you admit you caused the privacy gap."
"I admit," I say, "that I wrote the initial draft."
His mouth stops moving.
I plug into the display. Mirror.
"This is the draft, dated March 6th. This is the review version, dated March 18th. This is the production-frozen version, dated April 2nd. The privacy field schema with the user-data capture flag was added during the third revision, between review and production."
The three Notion version snapshots roll up side by side.
"Page four of the final version. Approval block, SSO-signed."
The audit row resolves.
Approver: Logan Cross.
Signed via Pellucid SSO. Apr 2.
The conference room makes no noise.
Logan goes a degree paler. "That's not possible. How did you pull that record."
"Pellucid policy. Employees can request their own audit trail via Workspace Admin. I filed last night. Workspace Admin approved it this morning."
Legal was supposed to bottleneck that. Why did Legal cut the request.
The door opens. Jin walks in with a manila folder.
"Because I filed a parallel financial-risk escalation at the same time. Compliance kicks both at once."
She sets the folder on the table.
"Logan. After you signed off on the third-party data-cleaning vendor in this project, Pellucid procured the same service across four more projects. The vendor LLC is your brother-in-law's. Total spend, $1.2 million."
The chat panel on the screen turns into a wall of text scrolling so fast it blurs.
Logan reaches for the producer's laptop. "Cut the feed. Now."
"Keep it on."
Marcus walks in from the side door. Quiet word. The producer freezes.
Two syllables, and Logan stops moving.
I look at Marcus and something rearranges. The cull was never just a layoff exercise. He picked a closed island to filter his own people, but he is also fishing — leaving Logan exposed long enough for the line to pull.
Jin lays the documents out on the table without ceremony.
"In the last two years, five projects with vendor-spend anomalies traced back through Logan's approval chain. Cumulative spend: $1.2 million. Vendor LLC registered in Delaware, member of record: Brent Holloway. Brother-in-law."
Logan whips around. "Jin. You're a manager-level FP&A. You know what you're saying right now."
Jin smiles a thin small thing.
"I know."
My father took the fall for this same kind of routing two years ago. He died three months after they walked him out. He thought no one would ever pull the thread.
I lift my Bitwarden vault on a personal laptop and plug it in.
"I have backup."
The fund-flow diagram opens slow on the projector. Animated arrows that match Jin's filings, line by line.
Logan moves at the laptop. He gets two steps.
Soren is between him and the laptop before I see Soren move. He gets one of Logan's wrists, turns it, and pins Logan's forearm flat to the conference table. Three motions. Clean. Controlled. Logan's color goes off.
Soren looks down.
"Don't touch her things."
He's too close to her.
I want to throw him out the window.
Marcus tips his head at his security detail.
"Hold him in the wine cellar. Coast Guard's an hour out. State police are coming with them."
Logan is on his feet again when they take him. He stops on the way past my chair.
"Wren. You think you won this. I am not the only one on this island who wants you off it."
I don't turn my head.
Because over by the window, Yara's voice lands inside my skull, hissing.
Useless. I should have just buried her in the first place.
Round two scores up that evening. D-team takes first. A-team is gutted now that Logan is locked in the wine cellar — they fall to bottom. C-team loses points for coordinated harassment via anonymous channels once internal forensics ties the Blind post to a Pellucid-owned device.
But Yara doesn't get cut.
Marcus issues her a final written warning. She is still on the island. She is still on C-team.
Indie slams a hand on the conference table. "She actually committed an offense, Wren. How is she still here."
Mateo, first thing all day: "The rules are not fair."
Jin sips coffee, watching the door. "Marcus is waiting for whoever's behind her to show his face."
I nod.
Yara is just the knife. The hand on the knife hasn't moved yet.
Just before nine that night, every light in the breakout room cuts out. Backup generators pick up the corridor and the kitchen of the main house. The retreat-issued iPads flicker on.
Drill — Tropical Storm Warning Conditions. Inside two hours, all teams: complete supply allocation, headcount confirmation, and submit a 1-page emergency plan.
The wind outside the soundside window is louder than I expected.
Indie goes to inventory the supply closet. Mateo takes the cold-storage walkthrough. Drew takes the radio to coordinate water and food between teams.
I head toward the server room in the basement of the main house to look for an intranet relay.
Halfway down the hall my phone buzzes.
Yara.
Wrenny. Cross has a personal safe. There's a paper trail tying him to the guy actually pulling the strings. Meet me at the old lighthouse. I'll tell you everything.
Jin reads the screen over my shoulder. Cold huff. "Trap."
"I know."
Drew is on the radio at the kitchen counter, eyebrows up. "You know but you go."
I put the phone in my pocket.
"If she doesn't get me to walk out there, whatever's actually under her doesn't move."
Soren is on his feet. "I'm coming with you."
I haven't said anything yet. He's already pulling a Maglite off the supply rack.
Can't let her go alone.
I look at him. Something in my chest settles in a way it has not since I stepped off the ferry.
"Okay."
The lighthouse is fifteen minutes up the north spur road, decommissioned, brick and tabby concrete, the kind the National Park Service hasn't gotten to. Storm sheeting on the windows. The keeper's door is unlatched. The rain is coming in sideways and my flashlight beam is fraying in it.
I step in. Behind me the door slams. The deadbolt turns from the outside.
Yara, through the iron.
"Wren. How are you still this stupid."
She's laughing. Her voice shakes.
"You like recording everything, right? Go ahead. No signal, no cameras out here."
I don't say anything.
She keeps going. "You ruined my promotion. You made me a joke in front of everyone. You think you're so above it all? Without your parents bankrolling you you'd be nothing."
"My parents," I say, "paid my undergrad. The $11,000 you owed in grad-school tuition the year your card got declined — that was a loan from me."
Half a second of quiet on the other side of the door.
"That was voluntary!" she shouts.
Soren has the flashlight on the floor of the foyer. He runs it along the wall. He stops it at the base of the stairwell.
A stack of plastic tubs. Bottled water. Compressed protein bars. First-aid kits with the red cross on the lid.
The exact emergency supplies the drill is asking the teams to allocate.
I take a photo. I lift the lid on the top tub. The contents check.
"So you stashed them out here," I call through the door.
Yara's voice scrapes. "How did you know that."
If she's locked in, the main house can't find the supplies, D-team's plan fails, she's gone.
I photograph the second tub. Soren is already at the deadbolt. He runs a finger down the brass.
"Mechanical pin tumbler. Old."
He pulls a thin metal sleeve out of his jacket pocket and a short hooked pick.
I stare at him.
"You pick locks."
In the flashlight glow his ears go red.
"Robotics club in high school. We picked everything."
She's going to think I'm weird.
A small click.
The deadbolt rolls.
The door opens onto the doorway. Yara is still standing where she was. Her face stops moving.
Soren puts the picks back in his pocket and says, even and quiet:
"Move."