by Nicole Thorn
He looked like he wanted nothing to do with it, but it didn’t seem like one of those things that came with a choice. He made himself walk over to the edge of the giant screen that now had an image of a roulette wheel on it.
“All you have to do is press your hand to the screen,” Callie said.
Jasper did it, and the wheel with all our names on it started to spin. It slowed, a fake ticker slowing down. Then it stopped dead on my name.
“Zander Dovetree is our next contestant!” Callie sounded off as the crowd cheered loudly for me. It made my body shake, but I couldn’t let them see me like that. I had a part to play.
I turned off everything in my head, forcing a broad smile onto my face as I gave the crowd a wave. They cheered louder as I winked at a few demigods watching me.
Callie put her arm around my body, grinning up at me. “Care to tell us how you’re feeling right now?”
“Ready,” I lied. “I hope the gods have a real challenge for me because I’m going to kick its ass.”
They all cheered for me again, but the sound might as well have been bullets leaving a gun. Each one made me want to double over and unload my breakfast onto the stage. Tossing my cookies would do nothing to get me through this trial.
“Step over here,” Callie ordered me, pulling me along and turning me to the screen. “Let’s take a look at what you’ll be doing today.”
Names started showing up on the board, along with pictures and information. I saw a woman named Jessica Harper. Age twenty-three, a husband, a new job. Then Grant Lee, who was thirty, had two kids. Another name, and another, and another. They all piled up until I saw ten of them stacked beside each other on the screen.
“Meet your goals,” Callie said. “We…” She paused, clearing her throat as her eyes went blank for a moment. The girl paled as she stared at the changing screen. “We have all ten of these people trapped in a house that’s just met with a terrible fate.”
The image on the screen to that of a two-story house with smoke climbing out of every window in it. Orange flames danced along the side of the house. My chest pumped at the sight.
“It’s your job to get as many out as you can,” Callie said in a breath. “You have until… You have until it’s over. Go!”
Double doors at the center of the stage opened into pure blackness. I didn’t waste a second running through it, the screams of the cheering crowd coming to a sharp end the moment I stepped inside. The blackness ate me up and spat me out again onto the grass.
I didn’t know where the hell I ended up, but it was night when I looked up at the burning house alone on a hill. The flames had grown since I’d seen them on the screen, so I shot up from the ground and onto my feet in no time.
I ran as fast as my body would allow, the distance between me and the house growing smaller with every passing second. Heat rolled onto me as I heard screams coming from inside the house. I busted through the front door, fire greeting me.
I didn’t let myself scream in pain as my clothes started burning. Fabric fused with my skin and went ignored as I tried to target the closest scream. I couldn’t tell where it came from, drowned out with the sounds of other people calling out, and the house crumbling around me.
Quickly, I took in my surroundings to could get a sense of where I was. It felt like a farmhouse, looking older and slightly worn down. Pictures of a family hung on the wall, from what I could tell. Two parents, four kids, and a dog all posed for several photos being destroyed by fire. I didn’t recognize any of them from the pictures I’d been forced to look at, knowing that those ten lives depended on me and me alone.
I heard something pounding on a door, sending me into the side room before I really had time to think. My chest felt like a tornado, the terror of almost a dozen people resonating inside of me. It tangled up in my own feelings, similar to what these people felt. I had to push it away if I wanted to focus on the task at hand.
I found myself in a kitchen, desperately searching for anyone to grab. That pounding got louder, coming from the pantry door. When I ripped it open, I found a man tied up and on the floor. Bloodshot eyes looked up at me with desperation.
I didn’t waste a moment explaining what was happening. I picked him up and hurried to the bay window on the other side of the kitchen. I kicked it, shattering the glass around us and making the man scream again. I broke the rope on his hands, then shoved him out the window and to a three-foot drop.
Nine more to go.
I followed the other screams, pretending they were anything but that. The terror of it wouldn’t do anything but slow me down, forcing me to soak in the horror I already knew these humans felt. They had families and lives they wanted to get back to, and they’d probably been plucked from their homes for this damn thing. Innocent people were suffering so I could be tested.
I found three more people in less than as many minutes, and I got them outside as quickly as I could. Smoke filled the house, making me cough up blackness onto my hands. My shirt had burned away except for what had glued itself to my body. My instant healing was to thank for that, and the clothes would probably need to fully be burned off me if I wanted to fix the problem.
I stumbled through to the living room again, catching myself on a wall. It cracked under my weight, and I felt that crack spreading to the rest of the house. I couldn’t hear Callie’s voice, making me feel grateful and more alone than I had been expecting. It was just me and all this fire, and my desperation as I tried to move forward.
“Please!” someone else yelled out before hacking out a cough. These humans couldn’t handle as much smoke as I could, and I had no idea how much time I’d wasted so far in my stumbling. I tried to count how many people I had left. Five or six? My brain fogged up, making it hard to think.
I broke into a bedroom, falling flat on my face. I looked up to see a young girl on a bed, her hands bound, same as her feet. When I tried to push myself up, I could barely get to my knees. My vision blurred, but I could see her face clearly enough. She couldn’t have been fifteen, screaming for me. There was another person her age in this house. I hadn’t found him yet, but I could remember him from the screen.
I made myself get on my feet and then to the bed. I broke her ropes as her eyes closed. I would have screamed out for her to hold her breath, but I didn’t have a voice. She collapsed the moment I had her in my arms, but I made my way to the door, even with the dead weight.
My foot went sideways once I reached the living room. I stumbled once again, crashing into the bottom of the staircase. The wood gave way, cracking as the banister broke. I shoved my way past it, having a girl to get out into the crisp air.
I blinked, and we were both on the ground and gasping for air. The girl rolled onto her stomach, vomiting onto the grass as I heard something inside the house breaking. When I looked up, the side had started to cave in with the roof. I didn’t know how many more seconds I had.
My eyes scanned the people outside. How many? Seven? Eight? I couldn’t count them anymore. I couldn’t see. Everything blurred together. I could still hear screams, telling me I had to go. I couldn’t waste more time out here. I couldn’t fail even more people.
I pushed to my feet, running into the house and burning the hell out of my arm. I yelled out from the pain of that, my back burning too. The roof caved in on the left side of the house and I barely dodged out of the way before something massive could have hit me in the head. A beam crashed into the floor instead, breaking what used to be hardwood.
I stared in the directions I heard the remaining screams from. One from up the stairs where I had already been, and one from straight through the house. How… how had I missed the other one upstairs? I didn’t know. To get them, I would have had to cross burning stairs that might not hold my weight. If I got to the top of the crumbling upstairs, then it could make the rest of the house collapse onto the other person. If I went for the downstairs person first, I could have time. I could…
No. The smoke was to
o thick to even see, and those screams sounded muffled already. I needed to be in both places at once. I needed two of me grabbing those who remained.
In that infinite second, I stared at the steps and then the door in front of me. I couldn’t… I couldn’t get them both. It wasn’t possible. I’d been so fast. I’d hurried and gotten burned and got them as quickly as I could have. I hadn’t made a mistake, and even when I tripped, it had only lasted seconds. Seconds that wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d done everything right, and it didn’t matter. How could it not matter… Someone would die here tonight, and I couldn’t stop it.
Jasmine
C allie, shaking, lifted the microphone to her lips. “This is it, everyone,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady, considering my fella looked like he would fall apart at any second. I didn’t hate Callie. I knew that she would never have done this if she had a choice. No, the gods had forced her into this, just like they forced Zander into this trial, and I hated them. I hated them more in that second than I had ever hated a god in my entire life.
If one had been in front of me, I would have punched them in the face just to show how angry I felt.
Callie continued, unaware of the thoughts in my head. “Will Zander try to save them both, getting himself hurt in the process?”
Pretty much the second he had gone through the door, Callie had revealed the purpose of this trial. To see if Zander understood that sometimes you couldn’t save everyone, and you had to do the best you could anyway. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. How could they hurt Zander like this?
Instead, I stood set apart from my family, staring at the screen, at Zander’s face, horrified by the trial. The people in the stands all watched, their eyes glued to the screen. Tension had risen in the air. They felt like hungry beasts to me, waiting to dine on our failure.
And I stood there, all by myself. Jasper had his arms wrapped tightly around Kizzy, but we still weren’t on talking terms. I hadn’t forgiven him for the things that he said, and every time I looked at Kizzy, she’d turn away. As if she wouldn’t have done the same thing had Zander actually said those terrible things to Jasper. She would have been infuriated. But no, because I hurt her boyfriend, I had to get shunned.
Juniper and Verin stood off to the side, not understanding what this felt like for me. Juniper watched the screen, tears in her eyes, gaze focused on Zander, but she didn’t tremble like I did. She didn’t feel the worry that I did. She wouldn’t lose something the way that I would lose something if Zander got hurt. And Verin stood next to her, stoic as ever, telling her that he would figure it out, that he would do his best, that Zander would make it through this.
As if he knew.
I wrung my hands, turning back to look at the screen.
Zander’s heartbreakingly beautiful face, covered in soot, set in determination. He turned toward the person downstairs, the one who could still scream. The one that had been left upstairs, they had gotten quiet. Zander ran through the hallways, his arm up to cover his mouth. The damage had already been done. He coughed and hacked with each step, but he didn’t let that slow him down.
I put my hand over my heart, pretending that he could feel how much I loved him at that moment. Hoping that he knew that I had faith in him.
Zander came to a door at the end of the hallway. It had been left partially open. Flames had eaten away at the carpet leading into the room. A bound woman laid on a bed, huddled together, her eyes dull with fear. She couldn’t even look at Zander, but she kept screaming.
My fella grabbed her, shredding her ties with his bare hands just like he had done with all the others.
The tension in the room got even worse as we all watched Zander fling her over his shoulder. He started to run through the house.
The audience sucked in a collective breath when he reached the stairs. This would be it. Would he try to save the other person too or save what he could and leave the rest to die?
I wanted to hold Zander more than ever.
He came even with the stairs… and passed them. He ran outside, the woman still over his shoulder. He dumped her amongst the other people he had saved. One of the men rolled her onto her stomach when she started to cough. Black gunk left her mouth as her hacking grew steadily worse.
We all waited a heartbeat as Zander turned to look at the house again. I could almost hear his thoughts. Would it be worth going back in, trying even when he knew that he couldn’t save her? Would it be worth the pain of having to fail when only a few seconds more meant that he could have saved someone?
Then the roof fell into the house. The crash must’ve been tremendous, though we couldn’t hear it from here. Zander winced, closing his eyes and looking away from the house. Then he opened his eyes and stared at it again as more roof fell inward.
He turned to the crowd of people that he had managed to save and started shooing them away as the debris began to fly, dust filling the air. The entire structure would collapse soon. And for the first time since the entire trial began, official vehicles had started to appear. A fire truck, ambulances. Zander directed people toward the ambulances, trying to help them.
The gods must’ve decided that was enough exposure. Zander got yanked out of the scene, pulled into this world, with us once more.
Callie, tears on her cheeks, spoke steadily to the crowd. “There you have it, folks. Zander Dovetree has beaten his first trial.”
He looked confused.
I ran up to Zander, throwing my arms around him. His skin looked terrible and I knew that getting what remained of his clothing off him would be a pain in the ass, but I also knew that it could wait a couple of seconds. He needed to have a moment of comfort, even if that moment came in front of a crowd of people, all cheering and crowing in excitement.
“I did it?” Zander said.
I dropped down from him, brushing the tears from my own eyes. I didn’t want to think about the person he couldn’t save. I didn’t want to imagine what their family would think when they didn’t come home. Or what they would think when they got a phone call, telling them what happened.
“You did it,” I said. “The trial was that… was that you can’t save everyone. You had to let someone die.”
Zander stared at me for such a long moment, it felt like the world had stopped. Then he looked back at Callie, still crying. “Well, that concludes today’s trials, everyone. Please join us tomorrow, as we continue. Good day everyone!” She waved until the second the screen behind her went blank, indicating that the filming had stopped. Then Callie threw the microphone onto the ground.
Aster, who had been sitting in the crowd like before, ran up to her. His arms went around her immediately, and Callie buried her face in his shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” Zander said, rubbing at his face and smearing the soot there.
Our family approached.
“I was… supposed to let someone die? That was my trial? To let a helpless person, bound in a burning house, die? What could that possibly have done for me?” His anger started to build. “What exactly are we getting from these trials, if in order to prove we can handle it, we have to let people die?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it has to be worth it.”
“Does it?” he demanded, staring down at me. “Does it have to be worth it? Think about it for a second. This is exactly the kind of game that the gods love to play. They give you something, something that you think you need, and then they punish you for it, and laugh.”
“Not here,” Kizzy said when she reached us. She wrapped her arms around Zander, squeezing him tightly. “Not right now.”
That didn’t seem to appease him any. Zander started to shake.
Callie came up to us, and whispered, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what they were going to do until they already had those people in the house. I would have warned you; I would have told you if I had known. I would’ve done something.”
Zander didn’t answer. His anger seemed to h
ave dissipated, but that left him looking lost. Or like he was in shock, maybe.
I turned to Callie, taking control of the situation since no one else seemed willing or able to. “Is there a private room nearby, where I can take care of Zander?” I asked. If he had been in his right mind, it would have occurred to him that he was standing in the middle of a studio, pretty much buck ass naked. Some of his clothing still stuck to his skin in a painful looking way, and he had soot covering him from head to toe, but still. He couldn’t have been comfortable like that.
Callie sucked in a breath, nodding. “Um, yeah. The gods say that you can go through that door right there,” she said, pointing to one behind us. “You should be able to take care of him in there, but then you need to come back out so that we can…” She wrinkled her nose, grabbing Aster by the hand and squeezing until her knuckles turned white. “Celebrate.”
I didn’t even want to touch that one.
Grabbing Zander, I hauled him after me. He let me move him without much trouble, affirming my shock theory.
“I’ll help,” Kizzy said.
“No,” I told her, harsher than I meant to. “You stay there, I’ll take care of Zander.”
“Jasmine—”
“No,” I said.
She rocked back on her heels and didn’t argue again as I dragged Zander into the private room that Callie had directed us. I blinked when we stepped inside. Private and luxurious, I mentally corrected myself. It looked like a bathroom, but the kind of bathroom that rich people dream of. It had a tub big enough to fit Nemo comfortably, a shower stall that looked like it would hold six people without them bumping elbows, and everything was made of white marble with brownish gold swirls in it. Gold accents had been littered throughout the bathroom.
It had a large TV on the wall with gold edges—I didn’t even know how they managed that—and four chairs just waiting for someone to sit in them.
