Mag-log inMICHAEL'S POV"Do you want to play the question game tonight?"I looked up from the water glass I had been turning in my hands. Sarah was sitting across the table with her elbows on the surface and her chin resting on her folded hands, and she was looking at me with an expression that was neither performing casualness nor hiding the fact that the question had cost something to ask."If you want," I said."I am asking if you want to.""Then yes," I said. "I want to."She nodded, sat back, picked up her cup, and held it with both hands. "You go first," she said."You initiated it," I said. "You go first."She looked at her cup for a moment. Then she looked at me."What are you most afraid of inside this building?" she said. "Not dying. Not losing. Not failing the games. What specifically. The real answer."The real answer.I looked at the table. I looked at my water glass. I thought about giving her the version of the answer that was true enough to satisfy the rules of the game without
SARAH'S POV"Up, now. Both of you."The guard's voice came through the door speaker at five in the morning, and I was sitting up before I was fully awake, the specific reflex the Trial House had built into me over weeks of games that started without warning and punished slowness.Michael was already on his feet.He looked at me across the dim room. "Early.""Yes," I said."That is not standard.""No," I said. "It’s not."We dressed without speaking and reported to the game gate with the other pairs, all of us half-awake and reading the room for what was coming. The hall had the particular tension of people who had learned that early games were usually worse than scheduled ones. Claudia liked the element of biological disadvantage. A body that had been asleep twenty minutes ago did not perform the same as a body that had been given time to prepare.The screen above the gate lit up.Carousel. Read Carefully.The rules appeared in white text. Circular track. Pairs run together. Every six
SARAH'S POV"Again," Michael said. "On my count this time.""Your count was wrong the last time.""My count was right. Your timing was off.""My timing was off because you counted too fast."He looked at me across the room. The water was at our ankles and rising, and we had approximately four minutes before it reached the panels on the walls and made the entire game irrelevant. The panels were shoulder height, one on each wall, and they had to be pressed simultaneously within a half-second window, or the electric current running through both of them found the water and found us.We had learned that the hard way twice.The first shock had been manageable. A full body jolt that threw both of us back and left my teeth aching. The second one had been worse because the water was higher, and when it hit me, I went down. My knees hit the floor, and my hands hit the water, and for approximately three seconds, I was not entirely sure where I was."Three," Michael said. "Two…one."I pressed.Th
SARAH'S POVMichael's breathing across the room was slow and even. He was asleep. I had been listening to it for two hours.I turned onto my back and looked up.The ceiling of the Trial House holding room was concrete, like everything else in this building, and it offered nothing, and that was exactly what I needed right now. No information, no calculation. Just a surface to look at while I did what I did at three in the morning when everything I had been managing during the day ran out of road.I was not performing anymore.That was the first thing.I lay with it and made myself look at it directly without softening it. Four days ago, I had been executing a plan. I had been deliberate and measured and treated the proximity to Michael as a tool, something to apply carefully in a specific direction for a specific outcome. I had been the person making the plan happen.I was not that person anymore.I did not know when exactly the shift had occurred. The bridge, maybe. The dark navigatio
MICHAEL'S POV"Game nine begins in forty minutes."The guard said it through the door and moved on down the corridor without waiting for a response. I looked at Sarah across the room. She was sitting at the table with both hands around her water cup, looking at the surface of the water, not at me.She had been doing that since last night.I knew the hesitation because I had it myself. That fraction of a second between what you actually feel and what you decide to say about it. It lived in the pause before a sentence, in the particular quality of a breath drawn before an answer. I had been managing my own version of it since I was six years old in a fifteen-degree room with nothing else to do but learn to control what showed on my face.She was managing something.Whatever it was had gotten larger overnight.I watched her turn the cup slowly in her hands. Around and around, not anxious but just thinking.I made a decision."Ready?" I said.She looked up."For the game," I said. "Forty
ALVIN'S POV"She is losing herself."Tom looked up from the floor, where he had been doing slow, careful stretches for his leg. He looked at me. Then on the screen, then back at me."I know," he said."You know, and you are doing nothing.""I am doing what is available to me from inside a locked room," he said. "Which is the same as the nothing you are doing."I looked at the screen.The footage was from the dining room. Tonight's dinner with Sarah and Michael is at the small table with the soft light between them. I had watched this footage for six days, and I knew the difference between what I was seeing now and what I had seen on day one.Day one had been two people performing proximity for separate reasons. Careful and measured. Both of them are running a strategy while pretending not to.This was not that anymore."Look at her face," I said.Tom looked at the screen."That is not the face of someone running Claudia's plan," I said. "That is Sarah. The real one. The one that only
GARRETT’S POV Even though I felt crazy terrified inside, I couldn’t slip up because he was already suspicious. So I remained composed and maintained eye contact as he taunted me with his venomous gaze.“Well then. Do your job, and I’ll get to mine,” he said coldly, slamming the door in my face.The
GARRETT’S POV Her eyes screamed for help. Too innocent for a world like this. I wanted to stay. Pull her aside, hold her hands, and whisper the truth. Tell her everything would be fine.But that was a lie.Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. It chains you, tighter and tighter, until freedom
FRIEDA’S POV I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. It may lie the answers to my freedom. FREEDOM. I’ve dreamt of it, but that’s all it’s ever been. Nothing but a mere dream. Or it could also sink me deeper into the bottom of the ocean. I should run away. Garrett warned me. If I wait too lon
FRIEDA’S POV I opened my eyes, my head spinning. The EKG monitor beeped steadily as I looked at my left hand and saw my veins connected to a drip. I rubbed my eyes with my right hand and yawned. Turning to my right, I saw a doctor sitting with her back to me, typing on a computer.“Doc what happe







