There Are Only Four (The Competition Archives Book 1)

by Nicole Scarano

  “Luka…” I start.

  “We should try to escape. We should fight back. We aren’t lab rats. I say we climb over the wall and go from there. Maybe we can see a way out.”

  “I agree.” Serene’s words are mumbled by her shivering teeth. “We should take our chances.”

  “What if they come after us?” I ask.

  “They already are after us,” she says, and she’s right. Whether we scale the rubble or continue down our preordained path, they are hunting us. At least this way our deaths will be on our own terms, even if only in a small sense. Looking at it like this, we have little to lose.

  “Okay,” I agree. “... okay.”

  Luka takes off toward the obliterated wall, and Serene and I follow his renewed vigor. The sheer size of the collapsed section causes uneasiness to settle in my belly. Either this explosion was considerably larger than the game masters anticipated, or it’s a trap, a promise of an escape luring us into something much worse. I debate voicing my concern, but Luka is already scaling the cracked debris. I doubt my feeble words of warning will sway his resolve.

  His powerful body hurdles over the destruction with relative ease, and Serene is about to follow suit, when the collapsed wall shifts. A slab of metal and concrete slides from beneath Luka’s feet with thunder and speed, and one second he is standing before us; the next he vanishes in a cloud of smoke.

  Serene screams, and I bolt into a run. My boots pound the rubble, and within seconds I am flinging myself at the wreckage. Gone are my sore muscles. Gone is my suspicion. Only panic exists in my body. We cannot lose another teammate. They can’t do that to us.

  “Luka!” My voice catapults past my lips without my knowledge, his name both a prayer and a desperate cry. My belly and knees scrape over debris as I rush over the collapse, Serene’s panting behind me driving me faster.

  “Right here!” Luka’s arm shoots into the air, and some of the haze in my brain burns away. I dive for his hand, my stomach flat against a slab of concrete, and I peer below, expecting devastation.

  “Can you give me a pull?” Luka extends his palm to me as if I am merely aiding him out of a pool or up from the couch. Besides the dust from his fall coating his face, he is unharmed and whole, and the intense relief suddenly makes me feel like I might vomit.

  “He’s fine,” I say as Serene flings herself next to me.

  “Oh, thank god!” She looks how I feel. “You need to be more careful.”

  “Sorry,” he grunts as we haul him back to solid concrete. “This debris is unstable. We should go slow from here.”

  Serene and I exchange an exasperated glance before we pin Luka with reprimanding stares. He shrinks beneath our withering glares like a scolded pup.

  “I thought for a second we lost you too.” I brush dust from his skin with more force than necessary, but my heart is thundering so hard my hands can’t help but lash out, if only in this small way.

  “Sorry,” he repeats. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “I know.” I squeeze his wrist and hold tight before unhinging my grasp. “But we need you, so be careful.”

  “I will.” He returns the gesture and looks at Serene’s pale expression. “I promise.”

  Luka turns back to the destruction and leads the way at a significantly slower pace. The walls dividing this sector of the maze are tall but not as towering as the ones guarding the rotating climb, and before long we stand at the crest of the collapse. Luka stares at the intact section beside us and then runs his eyes up the length of my body as if to measure me.

  “You’re taller,” he says. “If I hoist you up, you can reach the top. Then I’ll help Serene, and lastly you two can pull me up. From that height, we should be able to see where we are.” Luka reaches for my waist and pulls me to him, but the rubble beneath us shifts. I trip on moving rebar, but he catches me before gravity claims me. His rescue does nothing to stop the avalanche of debris, and the upper layer of concrete and metal plummets down to collapse on the ground.

  “Oh god.” Serene’s words are as drained of color as her face. The displaced ruins reveal the cause for her distress. There among the stone and dust lay the bodies of the competitors who ran the course parallel to ours. Their limbs are strewn about the chaos, their torsos absent their legs. Fingers are pulverized, and heads are twisted backwards.

  “No…” My voice escapes in a breathless whisper. I pull myself from Luka’s grasp and move carefully across this grave of concrete. When I come to her body, I crouch beside the lifeless face and brush the hair from her eyes. It is one of the twins from the transport. I remember thinking how difficult it would be for a mother to have daughters on separate teams, but now? This is worse than anything I could have thought. A girl somewhere is missing her sister, her other half, and all for what? For ratings? Is this even a television show? How could it be?

  My hand crosses my chest in the sacred ritual, and my fingers fall to rest on the twin’s cool forehead. I am not sure what made me think of the gesture. I cannot recall if I am religious. To be honest with the fatigue, starvation, and fear pulsing through my veins, I barely remember anything about myself save the fact that I want to get out. I need to survive this, and the sign of the cross seemed the only thing my hands could do to honor my fallen competitor. I hope her parents did not see this, but if they are watching, that motion was for them. I can do nothing for this girl but send her off with my feeble blessings and believe that the angels have collected her soul.

  “Get me on the wall,” I say, bolting to my feet with new fortitude and rage. Luka seizes my waist and heaves me above his head. We miss our mark on the first attempt, but on the second, my fingers grasp the edge with a firm hold. I claw my way onto this looming barrier, using Luka’s shoulder and regrettably his skull to push myself up. My abdomen grates over the rough edge, and my muscles scream at me to stop moving, but within seconds I am on top of the maze. My breath comes out in wheezes, but I swing myself to my stomach and peer down at my teammates. My hands reach down for them with ready expectation, and Luka throws Serene as high as he can. Her hands grip mine as she soars heavenward, and I pull her beside me. As soon as she is safe, she mimics my prostrate position.

  “Can you make it?” she asks as she surveys the distance. Luka doesn’t answer. He simply steps back, traces the jump with his eyes, and then launches himself at us. His powerful thighs hurdle him into the air, and our arms beckon to him. The second my fingers touch his skin, they clench into a steel fist, but before I can pull him to the ledge, he slips from my grasp. I scramble to hold him steady, but his heavy weight plummets, forcing me to release him lest I fall face first to the rubble. A curse roils through me and lodges in my throat unspoken as Luka lands with a harsh thud and stumbles backward, almost falling down the steep pile of debris, but just as he is about to crash, his body jolts to a jerking stop.

  “I’m sorry.” Serene is on the verge of tears, her voice wavering on hysterical, and I realize he must have fallen because she failed to catch him. I want to scream at her, to berate her for not paying attention, but I bite my tongue so hard, pain blooms like a thorn in my mouth. This isn’t her fault. She is battered and breaking, and her grief is a vine, slowly strangling her until she ceases to exist. Serene is not like me. I am not sure when I noticed the change, but my fear is surrendering to my anger, to my determination. I am the vine, and I will not stop until I have smothered every crippling emotion within me. In the end, I’ll be the one left standing, and so help me god, I will drag these two with me if I have to.

  Frustration coats Luka’s face. Sensing his frayed nerves are at their breaking point, I open my mouth. “Try again,” I say with confidence. “We’ll catch you this time. Just give it another shot.” I lean further off the edge and meet his gaze. My eyes tell him I am ready. I’ll catch him if Serene cannot, and I will bear his weight. Luka inhales, and as his breath vacates his lungs, he bolts forward. His body launches, and Serene and I simultaneously brace for impact. He
slams into the wall with a punishing blow to his chest. His grunt is loud in my ear, but I ignore it and grab his bicep with one hand and the back of his shirt with the other. My whole body clenches, preparing to hold his weight, but Serene yells beside me with a ferocious war cry. Both of her hands capture his other arm, and Luka jerks to a halt.

  For a moment, he dangles from our grasps, and then slowly his feet brace against the concrete. He pushes himself up as we pull him forward, and after a few minutes of groaning and panting, all three of us collapse to the top of the wall. We made it.

  Chapter Ten

  Luka lays sprawled on top of us, our limbs tangled together as we catch our breath. Laughter unexpectedly rips through me as we lay there, and I see Serene staring at me out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t care. I can’t. I’m just glad we are still alive, and my arms fling around both of them. I hug them to me as tight as our skin allows, and once the laughter dies on my tongue, I kiss Luka’s cheek and then Serene’s forehead. She giggles slightly at my affection and hugs me back with all the strength left in her exhausted body. Luka pushes his weight further into us, crushing us to the concrete, and burrows his face in our hair. We cling to each other for a long while, and hope floods my soul. I don’t know these two well, but I love them. Deep down I know I do, and I clutch them harder. We can do this; as long as we stick together, we will be okay.

  After a few minutes, Luka finally peels his body from ours and swings back to his knees. His cheeks are flushed pink and his smile full as his hands reach for us. Serene and I accept his help, and together we stand atop this towering wall. The ledge is wide, and its thickness convinces me that the collapse below was an accident, a miscalculation on the game makers’ part. The power needed to bring down this much concrete would have dwarfed what was required to terrorize four teenagers. They made a mistake. I pray it isn’t their last.

  My gaze travels from the wall to the extending maze all around us. My breath catches, and Serene releases an involuntary squeak. This structure is monstrous, vast and all-consuming. The convoluted walls bend and weave until they disappear from sight, their heights changing from high to higher without rhyme or reason. Some sections are worn and battle scarred while some are fresh, as if the concrete was poured only days before our arrival. This fact causes my stomach to pitch. I ignore its implications, searching the distant corners for any potential, but the dome has us sealed within this hellscape. They built this network of traps and death in a massive circle, and as I stare at the far edges, I realize the starting gates we entered from line the maze’s outer circumference. There is no escape the way we came, nor would we survive crossing the thresholds of the other competitors’ entrances. There are undoubtedly precautions on the competition’s part to ensure we do not backtrack.

  “There.” Luka points to the center of the maze, and Serene and I follow his gesture. It looms a king among the unworthy, its height mocking our insignificant statures. The end of the labyrinth. The finish line. That tower of concrete and metal is what every section converges on. It is there on that peak that a winner will be crowned.

  “If we run the wall, we should be able to reach it faster than the rest and miss all the traps,” he continues.

  “We have to climb that?” Serene’s eyelids are drawn up so wide I fear her eyeballs will pop out of her skull, but the churning in my gut agrees with her disbelief. The end of the race is a tower that nearly reaches the dome’s ceiling. Its circumference is thick, thinning slightly as it dominates the air, and while the bottom half is relatively smooth, the top is composed of massive blocks similar to the last shifting climb, only larger. Impossibly so. It is a man-made mountain, but to my slight relief, it doesn’t look as if we’ll have to scale the entire distance. Some sections seem to have paths that take you within the tower, but I have faith that those dark recesses will be worse than a sheer plummet.

  “We should get moving,” I say, a black cloud of foreboding dampening my hope, and I move without waiting for an answer.

  We travel unopposed over the wall, walking in a single file line. We do not look down, only ahead, but occasionally, my peripheral vision catches the sheerness on either side of our feet. It would only take one slip. Perhaps this idea was not wise, but at least for now we seem unnoticed. Minutes trail by, maturing to an hour, and we continue unimpeded. I hope the game makers are scrambling in their control booths, their bosses raging at them for letting this happen. I doubt they have ever had to experience teenagers scaling these monstrous walls. I pray each and every one of them gets fired for this mistake, for allowing our defiance. It is a ridiculous thought, and unemployment is no repayment for the torture they inflict on innocence, but in my weary state, it is the best insult my mind can conjure.

  Mechanical humming breaks through my depressing imagination, and my muscles stiffen. Luka’s and Serene’s footfalls silence behind me. I brace both my body and my spirit for the trap these walls intend to unleash, but after a long moment of stillness, realization creeps in. The purr is too soft to be the maze. Something else is happening.

  “Keep moving,” I say, breaking into a run. I don’t wish to meet the harbinger of this sound. Our heavy footfalls are an anxious orchestra; our speed amplified by the height, and just as I reach my stride, blackness barrels from the air to block my way.

  My voice escapes my lips in strangled surprise, and I barely manage to duck before the object whips for my face. My ankle twists, and I fumble. My knees almost hit the wall. My palms grate the uneven surface. Serene screams in fear, but the sound only fuels my desperation not to fall, and I launch back to my feet. I whirl around, locating my sudden assailant, and watch with horror as a drone barrels for Serene’s nose. Without thinking, I leap for the black machine and capture its humming shape. With all my strength, I fling it sideways, derailing it from its deadly trajectory. It narrowly misses both Serene and Luka, but its flight corrects with alarming quickness. It slingshots around Luka’s head and locks its target on me. I take a single step, but that is all the movement I am allowed. The drone shoots forward with breathless speed for my chest, and with a yelp, I throw up my hands. I catch its driving force in my fists, the momentum propelling me backward until my right heel slips over the edge. My voice is rage and thunder. I push against this small machine bent on my death, but it drives onward, determined to knock me from my perch.

  Suddenly a screaming mass careens for me, and Luka is leaping through the air, arms raised. As he falls, his forearms crash hard against the drone, and it plummets to the concrete with a whoosh of wind. Before the drone can react, Luka lifts his boot and stomps with all his weight on its curved surface. The cracking rings out and echoes off the maze walls, but he does not stop. His foot pummels the machine until it is nothing but pieces of scrap metal and wiring. His features burn with vicious brutality, and his jaw is rigid with anger, and when Luka looks up at me, I am taken aback. The murder in his eyes is terrifying, and I flinch involuntarily when he reaches to pull me from the ledge.

  “Are you okay?” Serene runs forward and kicks the lifeless hunk of debris from the wall. I nod as it crashes to the maze floor far below. This is the first drone or camera I have seen during this race. They had lost us, and even though they located where we escaped to, I am glad that for a moment, we had ceased to exist.

  “That won’t be the last one,” I say as I back away from my teammates. “They know where we are. They’ll come for us.”

  “Let them come,” Luka growls. Lord have mercy on this competition’s producers if Luka ever finds himself in the same room as them, for he will not.

  I turn toward the center of the maze and continue to lead my team along our precarious path. Each step injects panic into my heart, but for ten or so silent minutes, nothing happens as we move ever closer to our destination.

  And then the humming returns, tenfold in its ominous approach. To my horror, eight drones rise above the walls, bearing a massive load beneath them. I cannot tell what the contraption is, bu
t I know it does not bode well. The question is, do they wish to kill us here and now and be done with our defiance, or are they going to force us down to the maze floor where our deaths are more cinematic?

  I expect the drones’ aim to narrow in on our group, but they continue parallel to our path. Once they exceed us by a couple yards, they angle their load directly above the wall. The barbaric looking machine fits securely over the width of our pathway, and with a loud click, two arms unfurl from its frame as the drones’ cables release their hold. The mechanical limbs clamp down on either side of the wall, small rollers pressing firmly against the concrete. For a few seconds, it sits there motionless, and then with such speed as to shock the soul from my body, it lifts a few feet off the ground to leave a gap beneath it.

  The drones and their swinging cables slowly retreat from the object and hone in on us. I stare at them, unsure of their purpose. What are they waiting for? And then a small blinking light catches my attention. The flashing red is a warning, a minuscule alarm attempting to jump-start my adrenaline.

  “It’s a camera,” I whisper. “It’s a camera!” My voice repeats with ear-splitting volume. They are filming. They have brought the show to us. “Run! Go back! Run!” But my words are cut off by the sound of metal slicing air.

  Blades shoot out from the contraption like gnashing teeth bent on cleaving flesh from bone. The engine within it whirs to life, and slowly it begins to roll toward us, picking up speed with each rotation.

  “Go, go, go!” Luka roars, but Serene and I are already moving, careening across the wall we just came down, flying drones in tow. The whir from each metallic revolution behind us draws closer with every spark of the long blades clipping the concrete. We will never make it back to the collapsed section. We cannot climb down the sheerness of the walls here. Our bodies would shatter upon impact if we leap from this elevation, but as the death trap gains momentum, those are our only two options. We jump, or that monstrosity consumes us.