The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

  The terrapiters hadn’t come out yet, but everyone watching knew it was just a matter of time.

  Gabe’s Twitter account was still up on his phone, connecting him to rumors about Bart Devlin’s death and the insanity inside the arena. Without giving it much thought, he typed and sent a new Tweet to his small but growing collection of followers.

  The design of the Ruins seems elegant and fun when you’re a fan of the show but cruel and unfair when you don’t want someone to die.

  In the pregame segment about the Ruins, Gabe and the rest of the audience learned a crucial bit of info about how the obstacle worked, info the contestants didn’t know. At the center of the Ruins, inside a stone pyramid that every contestant eventually had to pass through, a laser beam of light crossed the floor. After three contestants crossed the beam, a panel on the floor would open and a horde of terrapiters trapped underneath could come out.

  Two contestants, Malcolm and Solomon, had already crossed through that beam. Jurrigan was working his way towards it. Jordan was close behind him.

  Jenna, in last place of the five still alive, had a lot of ground to make up before Jurrigan passed through that beam, and if she didn’t…

  He typed and sent another Tweet: I’ve decided I hate this show.

  Gabe watched on the big screen as Jenna worked her way across a series of platforms connected (and disconnected) by moving staircases. An MC Escher puzzle come to life, crossing the platforms required contestants first to find their way to the very bottom, then begin running up a massive staircase while it was still facing the wrong way, trusting that it would spin in the direction you needed it to go before you got to the top.

  The other contestants had been flummoxed by the twisting stairs, but Jenna was quick to spot the correct path to the top. Having arrived at the Ruins at least three minutes behind everyone else, she was now closing in on fourth place.

  The camera cut to Jurrigan who had just figured out how to get into the pyramid. Gabe watched as Jurrigan crossed through the laser beam, watched as a panel on the floor opened wide, watched as a horde of terrapiters scurried onto the course.

  Gabe didn’t know if he could do this again. He was still recovering from Jenna’s near-death at the hands of a giant squid monster. Now she had to face the jaws of a bunch of overgrown spiders?

  The show made sure to get a reaction shot of Jenna’s face when she heard them coming. The scraping and clicking sound they made, legs and exoskeletons. You can see it in her eyes, said Chad. One of the most recognizable sounds of The Tetradome Run. Yes, Jenna, the terrapiters are coming for you!

  Gabe turned away from the TV. He just…couldn’t.

  Jenna is a thousand miles away, he told himself. Innocent people get killed every day, he told himself. Wars, accidents, crimes, violence, people die, everyone dies and it’s just a show.

  He looked back at his phone with a mind to put these thoughts in a Tweet.

  He saw a new text message on the screen.

  Hi Mr. Chancellor. Thanks for coming to the party. I’ve left a present for you at the front desk. You should go get it.

  *****

  Gordon Bogel sat on the side of the road, listening to the radio, waiting. His phone rang. Incoming call from Arnold Detwick.

  “Hello?”

  “Alright Blake, I went to the guard station like you asked,” Arnold said. “I got a read on the locations of Nathan and Jenna’s cuffs. Something’s definitely mixed up.”

  “You mean Jenna and Nathan’s cuffs,” said Gordon.

  “Jenna is supposed to be contestant eleven, but she’s registering as contestant number one.”

  “So we’re just waiting for her to die.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. You were saying?”

  “Yes, the cuff that’s supposed to be assigned to Nathan is on Jenna’s wrist.”

  “How strange,” Gordon said. “How could we possibly have mixed up the cuffs?”

  “We didn’t mix them up,” said Arnold. “The other cuff, the one that’s supposed to be Jenna’s—it isn’t on Nathan’s wrist. It’s registering in a different place than his body. It’s strange. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  I do, Gordon thought.

  Somehow, Jenna had figured out how the bomb worked and was trying to stop it.

  He thought about when he went into the generator room to set the detonator. He thought about the purple flower he’d seen painted on a wall outside the cage.

  He thought about his years-long partner in this caper, a woman who, in recent weeks, had become downright irrational in her desire to get Jenna out alive.

  “Do you want me to look into this?” said Arnold.

  No. God no. All I want is for Jenna to die so the bomb goes off and all of this is over.

  “I’ll look into it myself,” said Gordon. “I want everyone back at their posts until the conclusion of the race.”

  CHAPTER 76

  Butterflies in a Hurricane

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.

  And now we come to the part of my story where I tell you what happened on the day Barbara Lomax died.

  I can’t.

  Not yet.

  I’m sitting here in the prison library, looking at the calendar, counting the weeks left in my life on one hand, knowing it’s time for me to put pen to paper about the big day, the day it happened, and I can’t do it.

  It’s too much.

  I will write about the big day next time. Today I’m going to put the memory of that horrible day out of my mind and write about one of my favorite memories instead.

  This memory happened on an All-City spring performance trip. It was my senior year of high school. That year, All-City Symphony got to go to San Diego.

  Three nights at the Suncoast Hotel. Two matinee performances at the Hunterson Center for the Performing Arts. A day at the zoo. A day at the beach. The mall, laser tag, a late-night movie, my boyfriend and me and a hundred high school orchestra nerds having a blast.

  On the last day of the trip, Rudy and I woke up early and met on the beach. We sat together in the sand and watched the sun come up. The whole ocean turned a deep shade of gold. It was so beautiful it made me question everything I thought I knew, even if only for a few minutes. When you encounter that kind of beauty, all the tasks and priorities and little anxieties of everyday life seem insignificant.

  After the sun completed its ascent into the sky, and the water went from gold to bright blue, I confessed to Rudy that I was nervous about the future.

  “What’s there to be nervous about?” he said.

  Rudy sat behind me, a human chairback, his arms and legs wrapped around me, the sound of rolling ocean waves under our conversation.

  “That it will never get better than this,” I said.

  We talked about purpose that morning. Two high school lovers in a sentimental moment, looking out over the ocean and pondering the big questions in life.

  We were both planning on careers in music. We were both eager to justify what we were doing, to bring some kind of meaning to the monumental time and effort we had already dedicated to our instruments.

  To bring beauty into the world. That’s what Rudy and I decided was our purpose in life. We’re artists and we bring beauty into the world.

  Cheesy? Sure. Dramatic teenagers of privilege who are a little too full of themselves? Probably. I don’t care. I have to believe it was true. I have to believe that, those times I stood on a stage at the front of a crowded theater and played the Mozart Concerto I had practiced for hours and hours, there was real meaning to it. I was bringing beauty into the world and making life better for the people listening to me play.

  I’ve had a lot of trouble dealing with my purpose since I’ve landed on death row. On some days, like today, I feel like I wasted hundreds of precious hours building a skill that ultimately took me nowhere. How much beauty did I really bring into the world?

  Not nearly e
nough to justify the time I spent locked in my bedroom, practicing scales.

  Today I’m acutely aware that you only get to be a teenager once. Today I’m remembering how Rudy and I were on that trip to San Diego, youthful and vibrant and free. Today I’m full of regret for not embracing it more. For not giving my all to those fleeting moments of freedom.

  Today I’m laughing at the arrogance of two teenage lovers sitting on a beach and declaring their purpose in life. As if life gives a damn what you want your purpose to be.

  What’s our purpose, Rudy?

  That morning on the beach was so special to me that, a year later, when my life had turned confusing and hard, I asked Rudy to watch another sunrise with me and…

  I had to take a break from writing just now. I’m fucking losing it here today, crying so hard I can hardly concentrate. In prison, you have good days and bad days, and the bad days are usually the ones where, in a moment of weakness, you allow yourself to think about what you’ve lost.

  What’s our purpose, Rudy?

  We don’t have one. You and I didn’t get to choose what our lives were about. We were victims of circumstance. Butterflies in a hurricane, our lives so short we only had time to go where the wind took us.

  CHAPTER 77

  The Tetradome Run played in the background as Gabe walked away from the private watch party and into the larger casino at Polaris.

  Jenna has jumped onto the bridge with a dozen terrapiters in tow!

  He walked past gamblers who gazed at televisions on the walls as they placed their bets.

  She’s jumped to another bridge! And another!

  Crowded bars along the edge of the casino floor, restaurants, shopping, the whole of the pathway to the front desk was dotted with televisions playing The Tetradome Run.

  Those terrapiters are crossing the platforms behind her and the next jump will be trickiest of all!

  He arrived at the front desk, got in line, and looked across the casino to a television mounted atop a row of slot machines. The screen showed six rotating bridges looming over a dark chasm. Jenna was angling to jump from one rotating bridge to the next. Monstrous spiders were leaping across the bridges behind her.

  He felt antsy. He was at the back of a line of tourists from other countries, the only people in the place who weren’t watching the show, families with children, they edged their suitcases ever closer to the desk while, across the way, Jenna leaped from one bridge to another, barely making it across.

  “Next,” called the clerk.

  The line moved forward. Gabe kept his eyes on the TV. Jenna was in midair between bridges. She wasn’t going to make it. The jump was too big. Her body was soaring, then plummeting…

  “Oh no,” Gabe said.

  Shouts, gasps, and cheers across the casino as Jenna grabbed hold of the bridge’s edge with one hand.

  “Next.”

  Jenna was hanging onto the corner of a rotating platform, her feet dangling over darkness.

  “Next.”

  It was hard to watch. The TV gave an overhead shot of Jenna supporting the weight of her whole body with a few fingers.

  A few fingers on her left hand.

  Something about the camera angle, the view of her face, the family resemblance. From this angle, Gabe saw not only Jenna, but Kyle. He saw the eyes of the young man whose photographs he’d been studying for the past two weeks.

  Her legs kicking for balance, Jenna was able to swing her other hand around and get it on the platform.

  “Next? Sir?”

  The bridge spun around. Terrapiters leaped through the air, reaching for Jenna with their legs, missing, and falling into darkness. Jenna pulled her body up, starting with her arms, swinging forward with her legs, getting one knee over the top of the platform.

  Gabe’s mind was struggling with nebulous thoughts about Jenna, Kyle, and words he’d read in the memoir.

  Left hand. Jenna grabbed the platform with her left hand.

  “Hello? Sir?”

  “What? Me? Oh!”

  It was his turn. He went to the desk.

  “May I help you?” the clerk said.

  “Hi. Sorry. Yes, my name is Gabe Chancellor, and I’m told you have a package for me.”

  *****

  The last streaks of purple in the night sky faded to darkness. His van parked on the side of the highway with the radio on and the window open, Gordon Bogel looked at the stars.

  Jenna has rounded the final turn and has daylight ahead of her! the radio announcer said. We’re late in the race and she is moving with spring in her step!

  She was in fourth place, closing in on third. The radio announcer, and the world, seemed to be rooting for her comeback. Gordon could sense that people were starting to believe she might do this.

  He looked at his watch. 9:52. Jenna had eight minutes to complete the final obstacle, catch the frontrunners, and get across the Freedom Bridge. Surely that was too much, wasn’t it? Even amidst what the announcer was now calling a “miracle comeback,” surely there was no way Jenna was stepping out of the Ruins in last place and winning the race, right?

  CHAPTER 78

  The Day It Happened

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall

  I was in tears when I called Sunny. I skipped the formalities and apologies that might have been appropriate when calling a former best friend that you’ve cut out of your life.

  “Seth came over and said he wanted to talk to me and we walked to the park and then…”

  I told her everything. I waited for her to give me some wisdom, or at least a best friend’s shoulder to cry on.

  What I got was concern for Seth.

  “I’m worried he might be suicidal,” she said. “He’s in a really dark place.”

  I could write a thousand pages about the complicated, multifaceted, multitalented person I knew as Sunny Paderewski, but nothing I can say about her gets at the truth more clearly than this: I called Sunny to tell her Seth tried to rape me and, within seconds, she had me totally turned around and worrying that Seth was suicidal. I called her because I needed a friend, but what I got was an agenda, one I didn’t recognize until it was too late.

  With Sunny, you never recognize what the agenda is until it’s too late.

  “I should call him” she said. “I should make sure he’s still alive.”

  Just like that, Sunny had me convinced that the most pressing concern was Seth’s mental health, not mine.

  In the case of this particular phone call, Sunny’s agenda was damage control. I don’t think Seth was supposed to come to my house the night before the assassination. I think his attempt to rape me was the action of a cowardly boy who, facing the prospect of pulling the trigger the next day, was in a panic. I think Sunny was mad at Seth for what he’d done, she was scared I was going to call the police or otherwise do something to ruin everything she’d planned.

  She promised to call me back, then she hung up, leaving me alone in my bedroom, in silence, wondering if I had just pushed a suicidal young man over the edge.

  For the next three hours I paced around the house. Late that night Kyle asked me if everything was okay and I snapped at him. My neighborhood went to sleep but I didn’t. I lurked in my house, in my yard, in my room, on my balcony, freakishly uncomfortable in my skin, paralyzed with indecision about what to do. Call the police. Call Sunny. Call Seth. Call Seth’s parents. Wait. Hide. Weep. Scream.

  When news finally came, it came in three text messages from Sunny. I remember them so vividly.

  The first message said:

  Talked to Seth. He’s okay and not going to hurt himself. Let’s talk tomorrow about what happened.

  The second message, which came about ten seconds later, said:

  You’re safe. You were put in an impossible situation tonight and you handled it well. It will be better in the morning, I promise.

  The third message…I’ll tell you about the third message in a bit. First I wan
t to mention something about my state of mind, something Sunny implicitly understood that many people wouldn’t. When you’re in crisis, what you need, maybe more than anything, is for someone you trust to take charge. When you are drowning in fear, or anger, or despair, or all of the above, your capacity to make good decisions goes into catastrophic failure. You will reach for whatever lifeline you can get.

  For me, on that night, a text message with clear instructions about what to do next, simple as they were, was a lifeline I was eager to grab.

  Here’s the third message, as close to verbatim as I can remember it:

  Let’s meet on campus tomorrow. Don’t forget to wear your pep band shirt. It’s important for you to keep up your normal routine these next few days. If you allow it to, your routine can carry you while your mind struggles to process what happened. Love you, girl. So happy to be talking to you again, even if the circumstances are shit.

  I went to bed. A few hours of bad dreams and interrupted sleep, then my neighbor fired up his leaf blower and the night was over. I checked my texts, re-read Sunny’s three messages from the night before, saw there was a new one that just came in.

  You’re usually at your locker around 10:30, right? Can I meet you there?

  I had two clarinets, one I kept at home and one I kept in a locker in the basement of McCallister Hall. Sunny knew this about me. She also knew that, on some Thursday nights, I played in the pep band at basketball games. She knew that my Thursday schedule allowed me no time to go home and change. She knew that, on this particular Thursday, I needed to put on my basketball band shirt in the morning and wear it all day.

  A blue and white striped polo. I’m told it’s famous now. I’m told Hillerman changed the basketball band uniforms specifically because of the infamy of that shirt. A girl wearing a ski mask appears from stage right, raises a pistol, kills Barbara Lomax in front of a live audience, and when police interview the witnesses, all anyone can remember is that the girl was wearing a blue and white striped polo shirt.