Chapter 45.
It takes Alek a second to make words.
Like her brain keeps rejecting the sentence.
Alek explains that the apartment building they had been living in—hiding in—had been hit by a bomb.
“That was . . . her . . . her friend Sofia who called me,” she says, fighting for any scrap of control. “My mother had given her the number . . . Sofia . . . but only in the case . . .” Her chest is heaving again. “. . . in case of an emergency.”
Reg kneels on one side, steady as stone.
“Your mother?” he asks, and can’t finish the question.
Alek shakes her head fast, like she’s trying to shake off the image.
“She’s alive,” Alek says. “But hurt badly . . . her ceiling . . . collapsed. Ten bodies so far have been recovered.” Alek still has the phone in her shaking right hand. She swallows hard. “She’s at the hospital.”
“How badly hurt?” Wyatt asks.
“Sofia says things were broken,” Alek says. “Maybe many things.”
She looks up at Wyatt, and it’s the first time she looks her age since he met her.
“This is . . . was for her more than me,” she says. “Me being here and not with her there.” Her voice breaks on the last word.
“We all know that,” Reg says quietly.
“I have to leave,” Alek says. “I have to push my button. I have to—You both understand, don’t you?”
Wyatt thinks: She wants us to pull her to safety one more time.
Reg puts a hand on her shoulder. Firm. Gentle. Nonnegotiable.
“Breathe,” Reg says. “Just breathe.”
Alek tries. Fails. Tries again.
“Help me,” Alek says to them in a small voice.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Reg says. “We both will. Just breathe.”
Reg keeps his voice low.
“Get information first,” he says. “Make the decision with facts, not panic. Because once you press it . . . that’s it.”
Wyatt watches Alek’s hand tremble near the pendant at her chest. She’s staring at it like it’s a gun.
Wyatt had wanted to go looking for Hannah as soon as he’d left the ballroom, to try to understand what had happened to them this morning. But he knows he can’t leave Alek, any more than he would have left her that day when she fell through the ice.
“We’re not leaving you,” Wyatt says.
Reg nods. “Not until you know.”
He thinks: This is a different kind of test for Alek. Not part of this competition, but the most difficult test yet. By a lot. All of them had left their old lives behind when they’d entered this competition. But Alek’s has just reached out to her in this lousy way.
They walk her back to her cottage like she’s fragile glass.
Alek sits on the front steps with her phone in both hands, knuckles white.
“Wyatt and I will stay with you until you hear back from your mother’s friend,” Reg says. He smiles at her again and puts a hand on her shoulder. She reaches up and covers it with her own. “You know by now that we have your back, no matter what.”
As they sit there with her, Wyatt once again thinks how full of it a guy like Tipton is, thinking that alliances and even newly formed friendships don’t matter here.
They do.
Jimmy was absolutely right after dinner last night.
Some of us feel we’re all in this together, no matter how much we all want to be the ultimate winner.
Wyatt is intelligent enough to know that might change eventually, probably will change, as their numbers continue to dwindle.
Maybe it will be him against Reg or Alek, or Jack.
Or Hannah.
Just not right now.
They sit there.
Minutes pass.
Then more.
Wyatt tries small talk once—about Go, about how he thought he had control until he didn’t—then stops. Alek’s eyes are on nothing. His words can’t reach her.
Finally she whispers, barely audible, “I’ve never felt so helpless.”
Her phone rings.
All three of them flinch.
Alek answers, voice shaking.
“Please give me good news,” she says in English.
She listens quietly for a long time, answering her mother’s friend in their native language. Alek waits and then listens again, her face fierce with concentration. Wyatt and Reg stand nearby and listen.
They hear her soften and say, “I’m here, Mama,” before nodding and listening all over again.
Finally, almost out of nowhere, a smile begins to form. Not much of one, Wyatt thinks. But whatever she’s hearing can’t be terrible news, that much is quite clear.
Before the call ends, Alek Andrich laughs heartily, laughs so hard Wyatt is almost afraid she might start crying again.
He feels closer to her than ever. He’s certain Reg feels the same way.
Feels this is one of those special moments that continue to make the whole competition worthwhile, even after what happened this morning with Hannah, something he’s still trying to process.
He’s been given a whole new reason for being here.
At last Alek puts the phone away. She wipes her face with the back of her hand and looks at them.
“Broken arm,” she says. “Four cracked ribs. A concussion. She’s going to be in some pain for a while, the doctors tell her, especially with the ribs. But they say she’s going to be fine.”
Wyatt finally exhales. “I’m so glad,” Wyatt says. “For your mother, of course. But also for you.”
“She wouldn’t even hear of me coming home,” Alek says.
Wyatt says, “You have to tell us what she said that made you laugh so hard.”
“My sweet, gentle mother,” she says, voice steady, “told me to stop whining . . . and go kick some ass.”