Savage Run

by E. J. Squires

  With gritted teeth, I climb up the stake a few more inches, and swing my leg over to the next one. The pain is unbearable, but I force myself to remain conscious, thrusting any thought of giving up out of my mind. Every move is an effort, but I’m not going to let Johnny win! The balls are swooshing behind me now, the crackling noise of the flames a constant reminder of the burns on my face, abdomen and hands. I don’t feel like a human being at all, just a partial person, being held together by raw stubbornness.

  With every single ounce of energy I can muster, I climb upward. My body is trembling violently, but I refuse to give in. I’m so close to the end. If I just climb a little higher, I’ll be able to see it. I wrap my forearms around the pole instead of using my palms. It makes it harder, but my legs are strong and I manage to keep most of the pressure there. I reach for the flat surface of the post and climb up to a standing position. I want to cry, want the triumph to register, but I’m not done yet. I hop onto the last post, and landing onto the metal platform at the end, I collapse to the ground.

  But knowing how little time I have left—I dig deep and find the strength to stand up. In front of me, at the end of the long track, I see the finish line and there stands Johnny, whooping and jumping, congratulating himself on his triumph. Cory stands there too, pulling something out of his thigh. An arrow? I’m relieved to see that he made it, but who won? And where are the others? I see a body—someone from another city—lying lifeless on the track, facedown with blood coming from his chest, arrows jutting out from his back. He didn’t deserve to die this way, not when he was so close to victory. The other four—Timothy included—must have died back in the swamps because surely they would have made it by now.

  I, however, still have a chance at third place. I stand up and start limping forward. Just as I’m about to move ahead, I see Timothy zooming by me. No! I push off from the gritty ground, my leg stabbing in pain but sprint as fast as I can. Then I feel a sharp pain in my upper arm followed by a sharp pain in my calf muscle. Tears fill my eyes and Timothy’s body vanishes beyond my sight. But I don’t slow down. Another sharp pain appears in my abdomen, exactly where Johnny stabbed me, and it causes me to fall to the ground, scraping my hands and knees. I gasp, but rise up again, still without taking my eyes off the end.

  I limp forward—the pain is unbearable now, and yet another sharp pain hits my thigh. Looking down, I see a small silver arrow. Why are they shooting at us? Haven’t they had their fun? I hobble forward, commanding my legs to move when all they want to do is quit. When I’m almost at the end, the tears gone from my eyes, I see Timothy lying on the ground. An arrow is embedded in his head and he lies on his stomach, his cheek resting against the ground. His eyes open and vacant. Oh, Timothy.

  I run in third.

  Chapter 30

  Third! I collapse to the ground onto my side in a fetal position—avoiding lying on my burned skin. Panting, the tears stream down the side of my temple and across the bridge of my nose. It’s a silent cry, a barely there moan—I don’t have the will for more. Arthor. Gemma. My father. Ruth. Nicholas. All the sacrifices and heartaches and losses that I’ve endured, now live and breathe inside of me in this very moment. Was it all worth it? For my freedom? I’m too exhausted to weigh that right now. And will President Volkov even let me have my victory? A girl he tried to have killed? As I see it, he has no choice if he wants to keep the support of the Konders’ and the other benefactors. But I can never be too certain. If he does, the money I receive will be more than enough to purchase Gemma’s freedom. But if he doesn’t…it’s too terrifying to think about.

  I lift my hands to look at them. Inundated with slivers, they’re swelling quickly and are bleeding. I touch the right side of my face as lightly as I can, but it stings so badly that I withdraw my hand at once. And when I look up at my abdomen, it’s a red, round, blistering mess. Lifting my head, I pull out the silver arrows that pierced my body during the sprint, almost too unconscious to feel them.

  Cory approaches me and crouches down by my side. His white hair has streaks of blood in it, and his clothes are torn, burned, and caked in dirt. “You look like death. You okay?”

  I am too spent to punch him anywhere. “Have you seen what you look like?”

  He laughs dryly, offers me his hand and helps me stand up. Carefully, very carefully. “Who won?”

  “I did,” Cory says, a proud look on his face.

  At least there’s some comfort in knowing that Johnny wasn’t the victor, even though I think there will be a lot more problems moving ahead now that he knows he’s the son of President Volkov. I suppose I’ll never know if sharing that information with him was what saved my life, but in the end, it was worth the risk. Peering over at Johnny, he looks at me, and he wears a terrifying grin. What’s going on in that head of his?

  Still afraid that Johnny will come after me, I limp alongside Cory to the UVC station just outside of the track. He offers to help me walk, but I hurt everywhere so it’s just as good if I struggle on alone instead of incurring further pain. Just as we’re about to get on the capsule, a few other participants run across the finish line—the next round of eight, in which five made it. Their faces are beaming with all sort of emotion—pride, relief, and sadness. Everything I felt and still feel. Though most of them are smiling, some of them fall to the earth and kiss the ground, while others kneel and lift their arms up toward the heavens.

  In the distance, past the corpses on the track, I see others swinging on the monkey bars and jumping from stake to stake, avoiding the burning wrecking balls. But way back in the jungle is Arthor—my friend, if they haven’t taken his body down already. Tears well up in my eyes and I am incapable of silencing a sob. He almost made it. And he easily could have had I forced him to stay behind with me—had we stayed together. We were stronger as a team. A sudden rush of guilt clenches me when I remember shooting him in the Caves of Choice. Maybe he knew that I did it, and this is why he decided to abandon me. Maybe he was so hurt by what I did he had no other choice but to leave. The only reason I survived is because he helped me—I stand on the shoulders of a giant. I’ll never know why he truly decided to do it. Like I’ll never know if Gemma would have survived had she come with me. And I still don’t know for sure whether or not she’s alive. But I will persist until I know.

  Back home, my father might be expecting me, waiting for me to show my face so he can tell me what a dishonor I am to the family. Maybe I won’t go home. Maybe if President Volkov is set on killing me, I’ll have to take Nicholas’s offer and flee to the Konders’s. But I won’t until I have freed Gemma and her mother.

  I tag along with Cory onto the capsule and sit next to him. Johnny stares at me from the other side, but I’m past caring or reacting to how he treats me. I ease into the harness, but there’s no way to prevent my burned back from pressing against the seat and my abdomen from coming in contact with the straps. Soon after, the capsule takes off with a jolt. In a daze of pain and shock, I glare out the window, for the most part unaware of all the trees and mountains that start to pass by. We pass through a tunnel, and the fluorescent blue lights make everyone’s faces look like ghouls, the humming sound muffling the whispers and muted laughs.

  Slipping in and out of consciousness, I don’t know how much time passes before the capsule stops. I peer out the window and see the Newland flag flapping in the wind, and the familiar upside down spin-top structure and shiny metal buildings that makes up Volkov Village.

  The participants file out of the capsule, and as they step outside, I watch them one by one raising their arms in victory. Cory nods to me as he’s about to leave the capsule. “You good?”

  “Yeah, just need a minute.” Cory leaves and I hear the crowd of representatives cheer for the victor. Sitting here, I try to gather my strength to stand up, but the longer I sit, the weaker I feel. Just one more minute and I think I can gather some strength. But it doesn’t come.

  After some time, Mai peeks her head in the door.
“Heidi?” She rushes to my side, but doesn’t touch me, only gasps. I’ve never seen fear in her eyes until now. “Just lie still. I’ll have the paramedics right here.”

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re stationed outside of Asolo, Cory’s hometown.”

  “I placed third?” I mumble, not sure if I remember correctly.

  “Yes. My brave little girl.” Her eyes brim with tears. “We’re going to take good care of you.”

  “Where’s…” Just as I’m about to ask where he is, Nicholas enters. I tell my lips to smile, but now even that is asking too much.

  “You made it. You placed third.”

  Hearing him say it, it becomes all the more real. He walks over to me as Mai walks out, and though his expression is reserved, beneath his calm demeanor I sense great alarm.

  Mai steps out of the capsule with two men dressed in white scrubs, rolling in a gurney. She keeps turning away, but I can see from here how she keeps whisking her tears away.

  “She’s severely dehydrated and she’s lost a lot of blood,” Nicholas says.

  The paramedics carefully unfasten my harness and help me onto the bed. On the way to the hospital, Mai drives in a transporter behind us and Nicholas sits in the back of the ambulance with me. The paramedics are hooking me up to all sorts of machines, poking me with needles and sticking devices into my mouth. They’re throwing around words like echocardiogram and hypovolemic shock.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Nicholas repeats over and over. “Just fine.”

  The paramedic must have given me something for the pain because I feel really woozy and the burns don’t sting as much. I can’t get over how afraid Mai looked when she saw me. Now that I think about it, her face was more than concerned, more than worried about one of her participants. It was as if her eyes carried extreme regret and loss of something that was a not only familiar to her, but a true part of her.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  “What?” Nicholas says.

  “Does Mai…know me from somewhere?”

  Nicholas folds his hands. “Hmmm. That’s a conversation for you and her to have.”

  So she does know me. But from where? I’ve ruled out that she is my mother—not that mothers don’t leave their children, but what mother would leave a baby with such a cruel man as my father? And then pretend to not know me when we meet again?

  “So what happens now is we wait for the results from the Savage Run,” Nicholas says.

  “Oh—those…”

  “The Closing Ceremonies are in two days, and that will give you ample time to recover. You’re not considered a Master citizen until you receive your official certificate and ID, so until then, I’ll be or a Unifer will be staying with you at all times.”

  “Do you know…did I…?”

  “You made it, Heidi. You were in the top three.”

  “You don’t think your father…?”

  “He may be a tyrant, but he doesn’t lie about everything.”

  “No, only when it’s important,” I say more bitterly than I meant.

  Nicholas squeezes his lips to a line. “He’ll keep his promise because this has to do with money.”

  “That didn’t stop him from trying to kill me off.”

  “I know what happened to your parachute. And with Johnny.” He caresses my hair, probably the only part of me that doesn’t hurt. My life, he says, is still in danger from Johnny. And of course I know that. Nicholas thinks that maybe Johnny went off the deep end when chasing me. President Volkov claims he didn’t rig my parachute, but Nicholas is almost certain he did. But of course he has to deny it, Nicholas says, because if he doesn’t, President Volkov will lose the support of his benefactors. I’m not going to bark up that tree—not until I have made sure Gemma is safe.

  “I told Johnny,” I admit.

  Nicholas’s eyes squint for a moment, but then he says, “I’m sure you did it to save your life.”

  “So you’re not mad?”

  “All I want is to take you in my arms right now, and the only thing stopping me is that I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I want that, too.

  Chapter 31

  After two days of intensive treatments and several rounds of surgery, Asolo Hospital finally gives me the go ahead, and I’m released into the care of Nicholas. I’ve soaked in the blue liquid for the past twelve hours, my mind running wild with ideas of what I’ll do once I return to Culmination. I won’t go home first; I need to hire an advocate the second I step off the aircraft. The most ruthless one in town and I know exactly which one. I delivered blood pressure medicine to him all the time. I don’t know his relationship to Master Douglas, but I hope he’ll represent me.

  My burns are completely gone, the wounds from the arrows healed, but my shoulder still hurts from where Johnny threw his knife into it. And because my foot was broken in three places, the doctor said it would be a few more weeks until I’m completely back to normal and walking without pain.

  Once we’re seated in the transporter, the doors closed, I remember the very first time I met Nicholas—just shy of ten days ago—and how afraid I was. I’m still afraid now, but for different reasons. And so much has changed. I feel like I know Nicholas, not like I just met him. We’ve been through so much together, and being partners in crime, as he calls it, makes me feel even more bound to him. I wonder if things will be the same for us now that the stress of the Savage Run, and me surviving it, is gone. The second he reaches over and takes his hand in mine, I know it is.

  “Before I forget,” I say. “I wanted to tell you that while I was in the Caves of Choice, I finally understood what you meant by saying that sometimes freedom is a burden.”

  A crinkle appears between his eyebrows. “That’s funny.”

  His comment surprises me. “Why?”

  “Because you taught me that responsibility is something I should never again take for granted. And you were right.” He lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it. “Heidi. I thought…I thought I would lose you.” His voice is trembling.

  “Well, you’ve lived your entire life without me, so I think you’d be just fine.”

  “But I wasn’t really alive before I met you.” I give him a smile and he commands the transporter to start.

  As if avoiding talking about us, we immediately begin to discuss what our next steps of action will be. It’s decided that he flies with my to Culmination, bringing both of his bodyguards just in case Johnny or his father have any ideas. And we’ll hire the advocate with the money I’ll receive from having finished third place. As we drive into the Savage Run housing area, Nicholas explains I can either stay with him in his townhome or I can go back to the hole in the floor toilet room. I laugh. Of course I choose his place, though all of a sudden I’m terrified of being alone with him. He drives all the way up to his doorstep.

  “Are the others in there?” I ask, eyeing the Nissen hut across the way.

  “Yes. Johnny included. I think he felt snubbed when President Volkov didn’t invite him to stay elsewhere.”

  It’s too early to tell whether or not that’s an indication of what will happen in the future. “It will be interesting to see what happened tonight at the Closing Ceremonies.”

  “Unfortunately, I know about as much as you do about what’s going to happen.” He follows me inside the townhome and closes the door behind us. When he comes up behind me and places his hands on my shoulders, I tense up. Does he expect something of me? Maybe I should have gone to my room. I don’t know what to tell him because I don’t know what I want. There’s nothing holding me back now and without the stress of the next obstacle looming in the distance, I feel myself floundering.

  “Mai wanted me to give you this.”

  I turn around and see him holding a white envelope with my name on it. “Where is she?”

  “She needed to leave.”

  I gaze into his blue eyes while taking the letter out of his hands. The letter feels heavy in my
hands, like there is something more inside than just paper, and I sense that this is more than just a farewell letter from a registrar.

  “I need to make a last visit to the office,” he says. “Please, make yourself at home.” He walks toward the front door.

  It’s clear to me that he’s giving me room to read the letter by myself, and I’m sure once I read the content of it, I’ll be grateful to be alone. But right now I just want to be near him—not alone. Watching him walk away, I wait too long and soon he’s out the door.

  I sit down at the round kitchen table—the table where just a few days ago we discussed how the three remaining would survive the last phase together. I’m the only one left. I remember grabbing Arthor’s hand and how Timothy said he couldn’t handle being around gays. And what about Danny? I wonder how he died, because I doubt he quit; he doesn’t seem like the type of guy. Fighting against my tears, I open the letter. A locket falls onto the table—the locket I gave to Sergio, trading it for my freedom. My mother’s locket. And though I had suspicions about Mai before, now I know. Of course. I just wasn’t ready to see it. Didn’t want to see it. How did she get it, though? I inhale deeply and start to read.

  Dear Heidi,

  I have completed my commitment to Savage Run, but I needed to leave before I had the opportunity to speak with you. You have proved that you are a fearless girl. But now you must be braver and more unwavering than you’ve ever been, do you hear? Stronger than you ever thought you could be. I’ll be thinking of you day and night, praying for you. I love you.