Countdown

by Michelle Rowen

  After another f linch as if each of my words pained him, his expression hardened. “You really want to know? Are you sure about that, Kira?”

  I met his gaze unf linchingly, my hands curled into fists at my sides. “Yeah, I really am. Let’s go one at a time. Tell me who this Gareth guy is.”

  Rogan studied me for what felt like an hour, but was probably no more than a minute, before he finally spoke.

  “Gareth is my father.”

  I COULDN’T HAVE HEARD HIM RIGHT.

  “Your father?” Rogan’s father was the producer of Countdown? “How is that even possible? Why would your father put you in this game? Does he even know you’re here?”

  Rogan hissed out a long sigh and went to stand in front of the display screen with the beautiful but fake view of that perpetually setting sun. “He knows. It’s…it’s complicated.”

  I had just sobered up in record time. “Why would your father produce a horrible game like this? One that puts his own son’s life at risk?”

  He laughed, and it was a hollow, soulless sound. “See, now you’ve come to my true secret, Kira. The one I would have preferred you never found out. You really want to know how screwed up my life is? Maybe then you can go back to hating me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He still refused to look directly at me. “This game we’re currently being forced to play? It was my idea.”

  My eyes widened. “What?”

  Now he turned to face me. “I’m still surprised you didn’t recognize my name when the announcer used it. Not only because of what they sent me to St. Augustine’s for—that was splashed all over the news when it happened, but you did say you don’t watch the news. But my father’s also one of the richest men in the world. Have you heard of Ellis Enterprises?”

  I blinked, trying to process what he was telling me. “I think so. Sure. It’s the huge company that makes all the computers, right?”

  He nodded. “Among other things. My father came from old money, but he managed to double it, and this was postPlague. He’s a business genius.” His expression grew pained. “He had two sons—one was set to rise in the family, to take over the business eventually. And then there was me. The loser. The junkie. The disappointment.”

  The billionaire Gareth Ellis. I had heard of him. I didn’t watch the news feeds or pay attention to social media and city gossip, but some things were just common knowledge whether you cared or not about the lives of the über rich and inf luential. Gareth Ellis was a billionaire who owned half of this city.

  And Rogan was his son.

  “What happened between you and your father?”

  He gave me a grim look. “Like I said, I was the rich kid who never suffered a day in his life—who could have anything he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Did I appreciate any of it? Not a chance. I was bored living here. I hated it. I could have had anything I wanted, could have gone anywhere I wanted. I could have helped people. But I spent my allowance on the most selfish things possible. Wasted it all. Then I got wasted. Regularly.” He snorted humorlessly. “I was using coke and ecstasy regularly by the time I was thirteen. Drugs were exciting, made everything more interesting, but they were just for fun, just for a quick high. I could have walked away at any time. But then I found Kerometh….” His expression shadowed. “It took me away for days—took my mind away, anyway. I was in such a stupor that life didn’t matter anymore. And I wanted to stay that way. Pathetic.”

  I pressed my lips together, letting him tell me all of this without interrupting. His expression was so pained, but I didn’t want to stop him. He needed to get this out. And I needed to hear it.

  “My father tried to get through to me, have me work parttime at his office. Give my life meaning, since I dropped out of school and refused to go back. He didn’t force me. He was calm—it was eerie, really. I knew he hated my guts by then, that I wasn’t living up to my brother’s shiny reputation. He said I could work at Ellis Enterprises and see if I liked it. It was that or rehab. I chose work. He’d already gotten involved with the Network by then and was trying to create a game to compete with the others. Games were my thing—I loved them. Spent hours, days, months playing online—even when I was high. He gave me the task to come up with a game idea. That finally got me interested in the job, which made my father happy. I mapped it out for him. Six levels of dangerous, life-threatening challenges played by actual people instead of avatars. The Network wasn’t interested in picking it up until my father sank a ton of money into developing an artificial intelligence program for them.”

  “Wait…artificial intelligence? Like the robot from level three?”

  He nodded with a jerk of his head. “Yeah. Almost got taken out by the same thing my father helped develop—that indirectly I helped develop. Ironic, right?”

  I took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “Okay, keep going.”

  He searched my face. “You sure you want to hear the rest?”

  I ignored my racing heart. “No. But keep going, anyway.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his forehead and paced to the other side of the luxurious room. “The game didn’t do so well in the beginning. There was too much competition from the other shows the Network carried—it was televised like a regular TV network three years ago. Then, trying to be a smart-ass, I randomly suggested they take things underground. Make all their shows, including Countdown, secret and exclusive so only certain people could access it. That got the Network’s attention—and my father’s attention, too. I swear, it was the first time he ever seemed proud of me. Too bad I was too high to appreciate it.”

  “So, it’s underground, thanks to the Subscriber implants,” I said. “Those weren’t being used before.”

  “That’s right. Cranium implants. Jonathan was my father’s best friend, and the head of the Ellis medical research department. It probably made my father feel better about his greed to put a chunk of money into medical research…something good for humanity, or whatever. Anyway, he had Jonathan work with our tech guys to develop a chip. Within a few months they were good to go.”

  I touched the back of my head to feel the incision mark on my scalp. The knot in my stomach grew tighter with every word he spoke.

  His mouth twisted. “I was first in line, along with my father, to volunteer to test the implants. It was more father and son bonding time. By then I craved it almost as much as Kerometh.”

  “Where was your brother?” I asked. “Did he have a part of any of this?”

  “No. Liam was at the Colony going to university at this time. He came back now and then, but it didn’t matter. Besides, we never got along that well.” There was something wounded in his tone that made me shy away from asking more questions about his brother. At least, for now. “Jonathan fitted both of us with a prototype—that’s the extra mark you found on my head—but they never worked properly. However, the next ones developed a couple months later worked perfectly, and Subscribers were put on a long waiting list to get one. My father’s people paid off the prison to use their inmates in the game—the levels were getting more dangerous with each cycle played. I was the one to think of the levels—it was big fun. If they won they got a reduction in their sentences. But then, one day, one of them was killed by accident on camera during one of the levels. I was horrified. Thought I’d be blamed, since it was my idea in the first place.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, my voice hoarse. “The Subscribers loved it.”

  He nodded grimly. “Yeah. Now a regular game wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more blood, more death, more everything. And if it was only inmates—scumbags who were already in prison for life—what did it matter? But it did. It bothered me a lot. But I was just a sixteen-year-old kid— nobody paid any attention to what I thought.”

  Rogan stared at me then, as if expecting me to have a look of disgust on my face. I couldn’t say this was an easy story to hear, but I knew he was being truthful with me. This was his secret shame—what he
thought I’d hate him for. But I didn’t. I was disgusted, but it wasn’t with him. Like he’d said, he was just a kid. It might have been his idea, but it wasn’t his fault that it had evolved into a sick and twisted show that killed people for the amusement of others.

  Rogan paced to the other side of the room. “It made me a little crazy, I guess. Pushed me deeper into Kerometh— enough that I started to lose my grip on reality. My father put me into Jonathan’s rehab program, but the withdrawal…” He shook his head. “It was like hell. And it only made everything worse, made me obsess about my mistakes, my choices. I knew I had to do something to fix the mess I’d made and keep anyone else from dying. Late one night, I escaped the group home, went to where we uploaded the feed to the Network, and I started pulling plugs and breaking the computers. My father tried to stop me, but I shoved him into a bank of computers. There was this power surge—a huge one that shut off all the electricity. By the time I got back to rehab, the police were there. It was my father—he called it in. He had me arrested. But it wasn’t for breaking and entering and destruction of property. By the next day there were pictures of me, video captures—all fake—and the story was about the murders of those girls.”

  He rubbed a hand over his mouth, his eyes haunted. “My family turned their back on me. My father disowned me. And the court threw me into St. Augustine’s just long enough for me to turn eighteen. If I hadn’t agreed to play this game I’d be packing my bags for Saradone.” He let out a short, humorless laugh. “I never thought my father wanted to see me again, and yet here I am. Maybe he wants to watch me die. Maybe that will give him some sort of closure—that his loser son is finally gone from the world.”

  He stopped talking, and I just stared at him, trying to take in everything he’d just said, and make some sense of it.

  “So, you’re trying to say that your father hated you that much?” My voice shook as I said it. “Enough to frame you for those murders? His own son? Why? Just to get you out of the way? To punish you for trying to destroy the game?”

  “I never said it made sense. None of it does, but I’ve never talked to him since.” He shook his head. “He never showed up for the trial. Never to visit me. Nothing.”

  “So, now everyone thinks you’re a murderer.”

  “That’s right.”

  I chewed my bottom lip. “When I read you empathically, I did feel guilt. You feel guilty about creating this game.”

  “If I’d never thought of it, it wouldn’t exist.”

  “But the Network would still exist,” I reasoned. “And you’re telling me there are other games on it like this. Countdown is just one piece of it.”

  My words didn’t do a thing to relieve the pain in his eyes. “Don’t try to make me feel better about this, Kira. It’s a waste of time. What I don’t understand is why my father is fine with all of this. He was always an emotionless prick, but I didn’t think he was actually evil.” He shrugged. “Maybe he gets off on the violence like the Subscribers do. Maybe he likes seeing people who don’t have a choice make the last mistake of their lives. But he never used to be like that. Maybe he’s just greedy. Like I was. Like I still would be if none of this had happened.”

  My jaw clenched. “I don’t think you’re anything like that.”

  “How can you say that after what I just told you?” I exhaled. “What you told me? That you were a selfinvolved stoner rich kid who was bored and helped create a dumb game that other self-involved people thought was cool? That might make you an asshole, but it doesn’t make you a monster.”

  “That’s entirely debatable.”

  “Whatever’s happened to this game since you’ve been gone is your father’s fault, not yours.” I tried to think. “You need to talk to your father.”

  He laughed coldly. “He won’t talk to me. I’ve tried to contact him before.”

  I tried to come up with another plan. There had to be something we could do to stop this. “Do you know anything about the game that could help us get out of it?”

  “If I did, don’t you think I would have done it already?” He looked at me with a challenge in his eyes to cover the pain there a moment ago. “Why are you even still talking to me? I thought you’d want to kill me for what I’ve just told you. If I didn’t help create this game, your life wouldn’t be on the line right now. You’d be safe.”

  I sent a glare his way. “You don’t know much if you think life on the streets of this city is safe. That’s where they plucked me from. Not some penthouse in the Colony.”

  His expression clouded and his brows drew together. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. But—damn it, I don’t know. All I know is, this is my fault. And getting to know you the last couple of days…it’s only made everything worse.”

  A sudden, sharp pain in my chest made me wince. “Sorry I’m such a problem for you.”

  His gaze snapped to mine. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—” He swore under his breath. “It’s just that now I give a damn about somebody other than myself. It makes things complicated.”

  My heart twisted. “Rogan…”

  He turned away. “Forget it. Just forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything since it doesn’t help. And if you say you don’t hate me, then you’re the liar now.”

  When he began moving toward the locked door, his shoulders stiff, I zipped in front of him to block his way.

  His expression was tense. “What?”

  “I don’t hate you, Rogan,” I said evenly. “And I am not a liar.”

  “Kira, you seriously need to—”

  I grabbed hold of him, went up on my tiptoes and crushed my mouth against his. He didn’t pull away. After a moment, his hands pressed against either side of my waist as he drew me closer.

  “What are you doing?” he breathed against my lips.

  “Kissing you.”

  “Why?” His brows drew together. I could feel the rapid beat of his heart against mine.

  “Because I really, really want to.”

  His breath was quick and warm against me. “It’s the food, the wine—the drugs they put in it—”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have that much. Besides, what I was feeling before has already worn off.”

  What I felt right now—it was real. No drugs required.

  “But, Kira—”

  I didn’t let him say anything else, because I kissed him again. Hard.

  His lips…they were perfect. Absolutely perfect.

  Full disclosure: I hadn’t kissed many boys in my life. I might have been five minutes away from selling my body at one point, but that had been an act of desperation, not any indication that I was experienced. But kissing—sure, it had happened a couple of times, before and after I lived on the streets, but it hadn’t been anything special and definitely wasn’t with anyone special.

  Nothing like this.

  Finally, I broke off the kiss, breathless. Our gazes met— his was fierce but uncertain. But only for a moment. Then he gathered me into his arms, sweeping me off my feet, and kissed me again.

  Talk about levels. We’d reached a whole new one in thirty seconds f lat.

  Before I realized it, I felt the press of the bed at my back. His mouth never left mine.

  His hands were at the sash at my waist, loosening it enough that he could part my robe, his palms gliding over my bare skin. I pulled at his robe, desperate now to feel his bare skin against mine.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered.

  I looked up at him, tracing the line of his scar with the tip of my finger. “So are you.”

  I drew his face closer so he could kiss me again, knowing that this felt right. It didn’t matter where we were, this felt so perfectly right with Rogan. His lips tracing the contour of my jaw, my ear, my throat…

  I didn’t want him to stop. My reward—this was my reward.

  But then I saw it.

  Out of the corner of my eye, in the ceiling.

  A small pinprick of a light
. Blinking.

  I froze.

  “What is it?” he asked, going very still.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  “Digicam,” I managed, the word just a croak. “They’re recording us.”

  He turned his face to look where my gaze had gone. His eyes narrowed, and he swore, softly at first, then more loudly.

  He yanked the bed sheet up to cover me. “That son of a bitch. It’s sick. He can’t do this.”

  “He can do anything he wants,” I said, my voice hollow now. I wasn’t even embarrassed. I was furious, but it was a slow burn. On the surface, I barely seemed annoyed. Underneath, I was ready to kill somebody.

  Reward level. Privacy.

  Yeah, right. I’d been so stupid. It was all a lie. They wanted to drug us up with the food and drink so we’d feel relaxed enough to have sex on camera to entertain the Subscribers. They wanted to take what should have been a perfect moment and make it into something dirty and ugly.

  And if I hadn’t seen the camera, that’s exactly what would have happened.

  It was disgusting.

  Rogan lowered his mouth to my ear. “We’ll beat them, Kira. We’ll make them pay for this. For all of this.”

  I clutched the sheets to my chest. “Damn right we will.”

  The door opened, and five men in white coats entered the room. Jonathan came in last.

  “It seems the reward level is officially over,” he told us.

  “You said that I’d have privacy,” I snarled at him. “It was part of the reward, remember? But they were recording this?”

  His expression was unreadable. “You must know by now that I’m a liar, Kira. There is no privacy in this game. Get dressed.”

  Rogan sent a venomous look toward the man. “You’re going to pay for this, you son of a bitch.”

  “Perhaps. But it won’t be today.”

  He nodded at one of the men, who threw a pile of clothes at us. But they weren’t the clothes I’d had before: cargo pants, tank top and my stolen red sneakers. These clothes were new and black, with black boots that hit the f loor by the bed with a clunk.