CHAPTER 18

WHEN THURSDAY AFTERNOON ROLLS AROUND, and they put up the preliminary rankings, I check the list first for myself—I’m safe at fifth place—then for only the handful of people I care about. Sim is still close to the bottom at sixteen, but that’s better than last week. Despite two cracked ribs, Maverick is still pretty high on the murder board at four—and bonus: his spleen is fine.

“Instead of releasing you for the day, recruits, we’re going to take you out for a little fun.” Matrix says it like we’re going to get ice cream, but we all know wherever we’re going, it won’t be nearly so innocuous.

They pile all seventeen of us into two black vans and drive us out in the direction of the mile markers. The markers stop at ten, but we keep going. Eventually, the asphalt stops, and we’re cruising along two wide tire tracks that want to be a dirt road when they grow up. We drive so far, the forest that underscores the mountains on the horizon becomes a wall of trees in front of us, so tall the sky is almost blocked from view. Not that there’s much view anyway. The sun has dipped below the mountains, and the orangish-pink hue in the western sky fades somewhere overhead to become a rich blue in the east.

We park, and they open the back of the van for us to file out. As soon as I jump down, a black snow vest and black knit cap are pressed into my arms, and a small brown package is dropped on top. An MRE, I realize after examining the package. Guess we won’t be back home for dinner. I slip into the clothing and shove the MRE into the vest pocket.

“Fall in, recruits,” Ruger calls to us. Some of us are slower than others to obey. I’m sluggish out of caution. I don’t know what they’ve brought us out here for, but it can’t be for a friendly campout. We’re not going to be sitting around a bonfire telling not-so-scary, scary stories; that’s for sure.

When we’re finally all lined up, Ruger starts, “Tonight, you’re all going to take off into those woods. Don’t bother trying to run.” He stares pointedly at Anomaly, who still bears a bruise the size of a meaty fist over one cheek from her turn in the sparring match. “There are hundreds of miles between you and those mountains and no sign of civilization until you reach the other side of them. You’ll die of exposure long before you see another live human being. And one MRE certainly isn’t going to sustain you long enough to get over that mountain range. So, if you’re smart, you’re not going to run.”

Wraith picks up where Ruger leaves off, giving him side-eye at the same time. “Even if you did try to run, we’ve tagged each of you with a tracker, and there is a perimeter, granted a wide one, but a perimeter, nonetheless. If you cross the boundary, we’ll be alerted.” She holds up her phone with what looks like a GPS map on the screen, and a group of little green dots all piled on top of one another in the center of the screen. Us.

“What you are going to do is hide. Sever and Ruger are going to start out our little game by finding two of you. Then the first two people found will take over the hunt. When you are found, you will join the hunt. When you find someone, you tag them in to hunt in your place, and you come back here to the vans. This will go on until all recruits have been found. The last remaining recruit wins and will immediately move to the top of the murder board and be safe from elimination, regardless of where you were ranked before this exercise.”

“How do you know you aren’t just going to use that thing to find us?” Hazard points an accusatory finger at Wraith’s phone.

“You’ll just have to take our word for it.”

Hazard looks anything but convinced, but he doesn’t argue with her.

Matrix steps up with a stopwatch. “Since my team won the combat tournament, you will get a five-minute head start over Team Sever. Alright recruits, you have five minutes to find a hole to crawl into or come up with a plan to evade us. Starting… now!”

Team Matrix takes off for the safety of the woods. Soon, they’re so far in, I can’t even hear them scrambling around in the foliage. And now we wait. Five long minutes pass, at least I assume it’s five minutes, since I don’t have a way to tell time. Then Sever steps up where Matrix stood a few minutes ago. “Alright, Team Sever, it’s your turn. Go!”

We scatter like bugs, darting into the tree line. I’m a city girl. I’ve never been in the woods in my life. The closest I’ve ever come to legit woods was the tiny sliver of nature preserve behind my high school. Sometimes students sneak in there to make out, and some of the less studious types use it as a haven for getting high. I was only in there once, because it is technically a shortcut from school to my house and I was late leaving, thanks to a meeting with my guidance counselor that ran long.

The five minutes it took me to get from one side of the preserve to the other was just long enough to put me face to face with a spider the size of an SUV, and I’m pretty sure a foamy-mouthed squirrel followed me for most of the way. I couldn’t have been more freaked if I’d spent an entire night in a foggy graveyard. I swore I would never do anything like that again. Nope, nature and I are not friends.

Now, here I am jogging into a real forest, not some fifty-yard stretch of nature preserve pretending to be a forest. I must be out of my ever-loving mind. Just turn around and go back. Be the first one to be found, I tell myself. But that wouldn’t really solve my problem, would it? I’d still be stuck out here until every last recruit was found.

Is this what Hell is like?

Something lands on my shoulder, and I almost leap out of my skin. I jump, turning almost in midair and swipe at my shoulder with all the grace of a fish on land. I slam face-first into a body, a person, standing right next to me. What I perceived as some unknown creature come to bite me to death is actually just Maverick.

“You okay?” In the darkness, his face is barely more than a collection of shadowy planes, unreadable, but his voice speaks to his amusement at my little impromptu dance routine.

“Fine.” There’s no way to recover the cool points I just lost here, so I opt to pretend the last thirty seconds never happened. “Shouldn’t you be hiding or something?” What I really want to ask him is why he’s here. Why is his tone so neutral after what I did? Shouldn’t he be seriously mad and trying to avoid me?

“Shouldn’t you?” he returns.

It takes me a minute to realize he’s answering the question I asked out loud, not the one running through my brain. “I’m trying to find a good spot.”

“The trick is to blend in. See, like here.” He points to a nearby tree with a thick lower limb that has grown almost horizontal in its quest for sunlight. “See how the bushes around it come right up to the trunk of this tree? You want to get in there.”

“Why are you helping me?” My question is a fragile whisper.

It’s a long moment before he whispers back, “I don’t know,” and I hear in his answer all the torment he isn’t giving voice to. I hurt him. He wants to be mad at me, but… “I guess I’m more of a masochist than I thought.”

There’s a long pause, a moment so pregnant with tension I’m surprised it doesn’t give birth to heartbreak. Then, he clears his throat, swallows. “Get as deep into the growth as you can, right at the base of the tree.” He motions for me to crawl into the bushes. He’s helping me. Again. And I’ve yet to offer him any help in return. Except, I absolutely wouldn’t suggest to anyone to crawl into a thick crop of bushes in the middle of the woods.

This is lunacy. I must be absolutely crazy to listen to him, but I do what he says. I drop down into a modified crawl, trying my best to keep as much of my body off the ground as possible. Skirting through the underbrush is harder than I imagined. Twigs pull at my hair, catch in my clothes, and snag on any exposed skin. But, eventually, I make it to the middle and drop down on my butt, leaning my back against the sturdy trunk. Then I try to make myself as small as possible, tucking my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them.

No sooner am I settled than Maverick plops down next to me.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Hiding.”

Duh. “Here?”

“Well, it is a good hiding spot. And big enough for two.”

Barely. He’s right, though. The spot at the base of the tree is well covered by surrounding shrubbery and sheltered from above by the weird-angled limb. And now that the sunlight is completely gone, all that’s left of Maverick is a silhouette two feet away. The chances of someone farther away spotting us behind all this brush are slim. Besides, there are worse people I could be crammed into such tight quarters with.

We sit in silence, and the moments stretch into days, months, decades. I rack my brain for something, anything, to say to him. Finally, I settle on whispering, “Why are you helping me?”

“Why not?” he breathes back.

“I betrayed you, shared the things you had told me in confidence. Why aren’t you mad at me?”

He turns toward me, and I feel more than see the movement in the darkness. “Infinity, The Program is designed to pit us against each other, to make us betray one another in a thousand different ways. Did I expect you to give away what I told you about my brother? No, but I can’t be mad at you for it. It was my fault.”

“You fault?” I parrot back to him.

“There’s an old adage that if you tell your secrets to the trees, you can be angry when the leaves tell those secrets to the wind. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is… I can’t be mad at you for sharing something I shared first.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I don’t deserve his forgiveness. I haven’t even fully forgiven myself for betraying his confidence the way I did. But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything, and we fall into silence again—though this time the quiet is more companionable than awkward. As the sounds of nature fill the void, I try to pretend we’re sitting in a dark theater or the like, try to convince myself we’re not out in the wilderness where any living creature could be lurking.

Despite my best efforts, my brain runs away with me, and I’m almost overwhelmed with images of all the crawly things that could come creeping out of the surrounding vegetation to make a meal of me. Every itch, every tickle, becomes, in my mind, a six- or eight-legged fiend salivating at the chance to dig fangs or proboscis into my delicate skin.

The crunch of twigs snapping under a boot pulls me from my anxious imaginings, and I stiffen. Even though I know it’s just a game, adrenaline surges through my veins, warming cramped muscles, preparing them for flight. The beam from a flashlight swings across the foliage several feet in front of us, bouncing with each step the holder takes.

Maverick’s hand lands on my forearm. Suddenly, his face is next to mine, his breath hot on my cheek. “If we don’t move, they won’t know we’re here.”

I take his warning to heart and hold every muscle in my body still, including my lungs. The light flits over us but doesn’t stop. Footsteps crunch over the dry, dead plant matter on the ground. Two steps, five, ten. It sounds like only one person, but they aren’t moving away. It’s more of a circling, like they know we’re here, but just can’t pinpoint our exact location.

I shift silently onto the balls of my feet and prepare to move from our hiding spot. “I’m going to draw him off. Stay put. I’ll try to circle back for you if I don’t get caught.”

“No, I’ll do it.” Maverick breathes the words against my ear and is gone before I even realize he’s moved.

Then I hear him several feet away, moving in the opposite direction from Flashlight Guy. The lurker skulking through the woods must hear Maverick, too, because he stops walking, shines his flashlight around, then takes off in the same direction Maverick ran.

The world is quiet once again. The minutes pass, creeping into oblivion. I strain my ears in the silence, listening for any sound, however slight. But nothing exists here except me and my own breath roaring in my ears.

Then a light, bright as the sun blinds me. A flashlight, aimed directly at my face. I close my eyes against the assault and wait for whoever is on the other end to announce my defeat. But instead of a gleeful, “Aha!” or “Found you!” the flashlight clicks off, and the quiet resumes.

A moment later, a body lands in the space next to me where Maverick sat a few moments ago.

“Infinity.” Ghost’s voice is music, sweet and low. And I never heard him move.

“I see where you got your name.”

He chuckles. “You uncovered my dark secret.”

“How’d you find me?” I wonder aloud. More to me than him. Until his flashlight landed on me, I was pretty sure I was safe inside Maverick’s hiding spot. And now Ghost is in here with me. What will Maverick say if he comes back and finds his spot taken?

“I could hear you moving around. And breathing.”

Am I really that loud a breather? “How’d you get the flashlight?” I ask. “Did they find you?”

Another chuckle, maybe because I’m asking eleventy-billion questions. “Not yet. I doubled back and swiped it from the van. And the instructors are done searching anyway. Only Sever and Ruger searched, and it only took them a few minutes to find Hack and Anomaly. Then they tapped out and left the girls to find everyone else.”

Sounds like he’s been watching things for a while. “Who’s been found so far?” Please don’t say Maverick.

“Quite a few people. Best I can tell, they’re just looking for us, Houdini, Maverick, Legacy, and Mirage. Everyone else was pretty easy to find.”

“So, what do we do? Just wait?” I lean closer to him. Not because I want to snuggle up to him, but because between the chill in the air and the lingering idea that there might still be creepy crawlies lurking, I’m craving the warmth and security of another human being.

“Just wait.” He slips an arm around my shoulder.

I melt against his side, soaking in the warmth I didn’t realize I was missing until he sat down next to me. It’s easier to relax against him, next to him, than it was with Maverick. Maybe because being near Ghost doesn’t leave my stomach in my throat and my nerve endings itching for contact. Ghost is comfortable.

“Have you been hiding here the whole time?” he whispers against the top of my head.

I tilt my head up to answer, but before I can get a word out, his lips are on mine, soft, caressing. Like a gentle embrace. I freeze, unsure of the sensation and of how to move forward. He sets a hand on my face and strokes my cheek with his thumb as his mouth moves over mine. Warmth and the tickle of anticipation start at the sensitized skin of my lips and spreads through me, setting off a swarm of nerves in my chest. I kiss him back slowly, and part my lips on an exhale.

Ghost uses the opportunity to slip his tongue ever so slightly between my lips. He tastes like cinnamon and sugar. A shiver races down my spine and back again, and I move my tongue against his. Am I doing this right, the way he likes? His kiss is practiced, like he’s kissed dozens of girls. I’ve kissed boys, but not dozens of them.

But then his kiss intensifies, and suddenly I don’t care if he’s kissed a hundred other girls. My body is alive with sensation; a million nerve endings buzz with thermal energy. I’m on fire. Ghost’s kiss is warming me from the inside out, he’s like my own personal sun in this cold, damp forest.

A light shines behind my eyelids. Have we set the foliage around us ablaze with our fevered embrace? I pull away from him slowly, but the ghost of his kiss still haunts my lips even after we part.

When I open my eyes, we haven’t sparked a forest fire with the heat of our kiss. It’s just a flashlight aimed directly in our faces. I try to search beyond the light to the person holding it, but it’s impossible. So, I give up and settle instead for shielding my eyes from the blinding brightness.

Please don’t let it be Maverick. I’m pretty sure I would die from mortification if it turns out to be Maverick on the other end of that flashlight. We’re not dating; I don’t owe him anything, but the idea that he might have caught us kissing makes my heart clench.

“Should I come back?”

Ugh. Hazard. They should have code named him Nuisance. But at least it’s not Maverick.

“What do you need, man, like two minutes? Three?”

“Okay, you caught us. You can leave now,” Ghost tells him without even looking at him.

Does he mean to kiss me again… right now? He’s still entirely too close to me, and with the light shining on us, I can see he’s watching me with heavy-lidded eyes. His lips are swollen and red, and the rise and fall of his chest is fast and heavy. All signs point to yes.

“Sorry, bro. No can do. You guys are the last ones out here… besides Mirage, that is. But once I bring you in, they’ll call the game, she’ll come out, and we can all go home. I’m not interested in sitting out in the middle of nowhere while you two make out. I’ve got me a date with a video game.”

As nice as that kiss was, I’m not super keen on the idea of staying out here in the dark woods any longer than I have to, either. I shift onto my hands and knees and crawl over Ghost and out of the bushes.

He groans quietly in protest but eventually follows me out of our hiding spot. The three of us trek back to the vans in silence, and the hike out of the woods seems to take a hundred awkward years longer than the trip in.

Finally, we step from dense growth to flat ground as we enter cleared land. We’re about fifty yards down from where the vans are parked with a group of recruits huddled around a small fire. Hazard jogs ahead of us, and as soon as he’s several steps away, Ghost moves closer. He reaches out and pulls a twig from my hair, then another. I smooth my hands over my hair in search of anymore, but all I feel is messy, frizzy hair. I wish I’d had the forethought to put it up in a ponytail before all this. I must look ridiculous right now.

“You found two recruits, Hazard?” Matrix asks when Ghost and I finally make it to the makeshift camp.

Hazard plops down in front of the fire and rips open an MRE. My vest pocket is mysteriously empty. Did he somehow manage to swipe my dinner? “Yup, found ‘em getting all fresh with each other in the bushes.”

An ember of embarrassment sets my cheeks aflame. My stomach is in knots; I wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway.

I dare a quick glance in Maverick’s direction as I claim an empty seat by the fire. He’s not looking at me; he’s staring into the flames like he didn’t even hear Hazard. And maybe he didn’t. A girl can dream, right?