Mag-log inSARAH'S POV"Who is the 'she' in question?"He was sitting up now, fully awake, looking at me with the particular attention he invested in things that mattered. Complete and unmoving.I had been lying awake all night preparing and rehearsing for this moment, and now that it was here, my mouth was dry, and my hands were pressing flat against the mattress, and the sentence I had rehearsed in the dark was gone.So I started from the beginning…."There is a Controller above Khalid," I started, regardless. "Someone who came into this building after you did. A person who killed Khalid, then took his mask, his chair, and has been running the games since. I know this is crazy, but… it is what it is.” Michael did not move."I know who it is," I continued. "And yes, she summoned me to her office weeks ago and told me what she wanted.""Who?" he asked curiously, his face already projecting worry in his expression."Claudia Hart."“Claudia Hart?” He repeated, and the repetition felt like a storm
SARAH'S POV"I will not run from it."His words were still in the room at midnight.The words were still hanging there at one in the morning, still there at two. Michael's breathing beside me had been slow and even for an hour, and I had been lying on my back looking at the ceiling, and my brain had not slowed down once.I cataloged everything.Claudia's deadline first. It sat at the front of everything like a door I could not stop looking at. Close, closer than I had been allowing myself to count. She had given me an assignment, a condition, and a threat, and I had accepted all three, and the clock had been running since that office, and it was nearly out.The notebook was under the mattress. The sentence pressed flat beneath me. Thirteen words I had written without permission and could not unwrite.And Michael beside me, his arm warm on mine. His breathing, slow and present. I thought about everything he had done.He went back into a burning building for my parents. He had carried
SARAH'S POV"Two feet of rope," Michael said, looking at the coil the guard dropped between us. "That is not much room.""No," I answered."Falls count against both of us.""I read the rules."He crouched and picked up the rope. He looked at it and then at me. "You lead on the walls.""And you lead on the bridge if there is one.""Agreed."We tied off and stood two feet apart. The short rope pulled my attention to every small movement he made. The horn sounded.We ran.The first wall was four meters. I went up and over, and the rope pulled taut behind me for half a second, and then he was over, and we landed and kept moving. I had not told him to follow immediately. He had felt it through the rope.Around us, other pairs were already struggling. The tether exposed every gap between people who did not know each other well enough. I heard it in the sounds they made, the surprised grunts when the rope jerked, the instructions that came too late. A pair to our left went down together when
SARAH'S POV"Sit down and face your partner."The room was small. One table with two chairs. One red button between them, and nothing else.Michael sat across from me and looked at the button and then at me.I read the rules on the wall screen. One person presses it. Two of their lives transfer to the partner. If neither presses within twenty minutes, both lose three lives. If both press simultaneously, nothing happens, and the clock resets.Simple but brutal. Designed to make one person give themselves up for the other.I looked at Michael.He looked at me.I had already decided I was going to press it. I could see from his face that he had already decided the same thing. The particular stillness he wore when a decision was finished. Settled and done."Do not," I said."Sarah.""You have more lives. It makes more sense for me to press.""It makes more sense for neither of us to press," he answered. "We do it simultaneously.""That is nearly impossible to coordinate."He looked at me
SARAH'S POV"Stop lying to yourself."I expressed it quietly to the bathroom mirror at three in the morning. My reflection looked back at me and did not argue.I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, opened the notebook on my knees, and turned to the first page.Day two: I read it like reading a report. Clinical, removed, and progress notes. Michael's behavior in the first game. Things to observe and things to tell Claudia. Cold and functional and completely professional.Day three: The same.Day four: I slowed down.The handwriting changed halfway down the page. Slightly looser. The sentences stopped sounding like a report. I had written about the bridge game and the way he positioned himself two panels back to give me space, and I had written it not as a tactical observation but as something else. Something I had not been managing when I wrote it.I kept reading.Day five. Day six. By day six, I was not writing about the assignment at all. I was writing about the ques
MICHAEL'S POV"You should eat."Sarah looked at her plate and picked up her fork without arguing. We were at the dining table, and the food had been sitting in front of her, untouched, for several minutes. She ate slowly, and I watched her across the table and said nothing.She had been different since the hatch. Not closed off but quieter in the particular way of a woman who has arrived at something and is living inside it before she says it out loud. All afternoon, I had been trying to read the difference, and I had not been able to name it.We walked back to the room after dinner.She sat on her bed and pulled out the notebook. I took the chair. She opened it and began writing, and I looked at the wall and tried to think about something other than what had happened earlier. The chemical at our waist. The dead end solid under my palm. My hands on her face in the dark before I had decided anything. My forehead against hers.I had been afraid of her dying.She shifted on the bed, tuc
FRIEDA’S POV“We’re approaching the coordinates now."Commander Hayes's voice passed through the helicopter headset. I pressed my face against the window, watching the landscape change from gray ocean to green countryside.My hands shook as I gripped Patricia's files. I'd been reading them for the e
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







