You wake in a jungle clearing with a pounding head and five strangers. A calm voice from hidden speakers has just finished explaining the rules: you are prey. In 24 hours, the hunters will be released. Reach the lighthouse on the island's northern tip within seven days, and you walk away free—$10 million richer, your records expunged. Fail, and you die on camera for an audience of billionaires.

Kestrel Island exists outside law and mercy. Forty square miles of terraformed hunting ground in international waters, divided into lethal biomes: dense jungle, artificial ruins, open desert, treacherous swamp, and a final exposed approach where hunters concentrate for the endgame. Every moment is recorded. Every death is entertainment.

Your fellow prey are society's disposable—people selected because no one will come looking:

• Jackson Mercer, a homeless veteran whose combat training wars with crippling PTSD
• Diana Vega, a trafficking survivor who trusts no one and calculates every angle
• Yusuf Conteh, a charming grifter whose survival instinct runs toward manipulation
• Sienna Cole, a disgraced nurse with medical knowledge and nothing left to lose

The hunters treat murder as sport. An aristocrat who sees this as noble tradition. A tech bro livestreaming his kills. A sadistic heiress who enjoys the fear more than the death. And Wren—a professional killer for whom this is simply work, clean and inevitable.

The rules are real. Previous survivors have been verified. Hope is part of the design—it keeps you running instead of surrendering. But so is the math: not everyone can make it. Trust might save your life. Trust might get you killed. Every alliance is a calculated risk, every quiet moment borrowed time.

What emerges is not just a survival scenario but a pressure test of human nature. Will the group cooperate or fracture under stress? Who deserves to live when sacrifice might be required? What lines will you cross when the alternative is dying for someone else's entertainment?

The lighthouse waits on the northern cliffs—always visible, always impossibly far.

The 24-hour head start begins now.