And Then There Were 10 Novels & Stories

I was so quiet, even quieter than when I was alive. "What happened?" Mom finally arrived too, panting heavily. When she saw my dry, stiff body, she screamed in terror. "Aah! Brandon!" Dad reached out a trembling hand to check my breathing, and a look of despair washed over his face. "How did this happen? How did this happen?!" Mom dropped to the floor and shook Dad frantically. Dad stood frozen, his mind blank, but Grandma's weak words echoed in his ears like thunder. "Mom said..." He swallowed hard. "She said we were destined to have no children, so she used her lifespan to trade for Brandon... The countdown was the countdown to her death, not Brandon's..."

The lady closest to me screamed at the top of her lungs. Momentarily rendering me deaf as I squeezed my eyes shut. But even that didn’t stop the words from ringing in my head; “No. 10,” 10. I… I was No. 10. It said so on my tag. My eyes opened just then, hands frantic as I checked to make sure. “No. 10.” I confirmed breathlessly. “No. 10. I… I won? Me?” “Oh, Madam!” Mae burst out crying right then. Her face twisting to a real ugly state as she wrapped her arms around me. “Madam! W-w-we won. We won, Madam. We won!!”

“The leaders. The ones who run each zone. You’ll need to know who’s in charge if you plan to stay alive.” I hesitated, then stepped on beside him. The platform hummed, rising smoothly. The air got colder, the walls shifting from steel to glass. I could see faint holograms of maps flickering around us glowing numbers labeled from 1 to 10. “What are those?” I asked. “The zones,” Nova said. “Erevos has ten of them. Zone 1’s the beginners the ones who just got dumped here like you. Zone 10’s the top. The elites. They’ve survived every phase.”

The guards look at me like I've lost it. [Hector, I can't reach you. I'm losing my mind.] [They say if you bleed enough, the person you miss will appear in your dreams. So every night I cut my skin. It hurts, but the more I bleed, the happier I feel—because then I dream of you.] ... Ten thousand messages, all the same unhinged rambling. One thing was clear—Donna's mind was gone.

I placed the papers on the table, neat and tidy. I was going to leave a message for her, but I did not go through with it. Instead, I said it in my mind, 'Hey honey, this is the last time I'm calling you that, I guess. I spent ten years in love with you. It's really hard doing that, I know, but I'm giving up anyway. Congratulations, to both you and me.' I grabbed my suitcase. The moment the countdown was over, I put my hand on the doorknob.

Marianna D'Andrea moved quickly. By the time I got home, the divorce papers were already waiting for me. She said, "Sign them. I'll handle Leopoldo's side. In one month, you'll receive the finalized divorce decree. Once you leave, don't ever come back. The Madre of the Vece family was never meant to be a nobody like you." "Okay," I replied calmly. After that, I handled my adoptive father, Raffaello Conti's funeral alone.

nThen she looked up. The room waited. "What is it?" My voice sounded thin as I asked. Mara closed the notebook slowly.nVery slowly infact. Then she said the one thing none of us expected. "Arthur found Site Ten." The storage room fell silent. Site Ten. We had spent the entire day learning there were nine sites. Nine observation zones. Nine locations. Nine communities. The notebooks had repeated the same structure over and over. Nine. Always nine. Yet Armitage's final entry clearly referenced something else.