Chapter 40
People forget there are major arteries in feet: the dorsalis pedis and posterior tibial. If you see rhythmic spurting from a foot wound, apply direct pressure immediately. A person can bleed out from a severed foot artery in minutes.
—Everything You Need to Know About Emergency Medicine (When You Can’t Go to the ER) by Benjamin Ashford
So much glass has been poured onto the floor that the cracked tiles are completely buried. Some pieces are small. Others are large shards that look like they were once part of beer bottles.
“Your task is to cross the room,” the Game Master says, through a speaker at the other end of the hallway. “The first person to reach the other side is the winner.”
I raise my eyes to the runway of glass, and all the way to where it ends. It has to be… what? Twenty-five, thirty feet away?
“Your shoes and socks must be removed from your feet before the trial begins. You have one minute to remove them.”
The speaker cuts out. I drop my eyes to my steel-toed boots. On the other side of the hall, a timer counts down in glowing red digits.
0:59
0:58
Nico sits to untie his boots, but his fingers slip off the laces. He makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, trying again, but the knot stays tied firmly.
He’s been acting more like his normal self since I let him down from the pole.
Less like he wants to rip my throat out with his teeth, and more like the Nico who brought me soup and tattooed a stick figure on the inside of his pinky knuckle because he thought it was funny.
What will the Game Master do if Nico can’t get his boots off in time?
I gently bat his hands out of the way and begin working his knots loose. Each lace requires me to wobble it for a couple of seconds before I can get a finger under the loop. I’m surprised he doesn’t fight me. I guess even he realizes he needs the help.
0:42
I wrench off his boots and peel his damp socks away, and he stands up as I untie my own. The concrete is so cold it feels like it’s burning my soles. I jam my socks into my pockets, mind racing as I try to come up with a strategy.
Nico is standing barefoot on the edge, studying the glass. I join him.
Am I really going to try to outrun him? I don’t want to watch him hang from his wrists again. One turn on the pole has already made his hands swell up. What if another means he can’t move them at all?
“Get ready to run,” Nico says, turning his head to rake his eyes up and down me. “Or the second that timer goes off, you’re eating glass.”
I snap my gaze forward again. What the hell?
Had he been pretending to be nice to me so that I’d help him untie his boots?
0:30
His switch must still be flipped. I can’t let the bad version of Nico string me up on the pole. I’d be completely at his mercy. He could do anything he wanted to me.
I’m not going to hang back and find out if he means it about throwing me into the glass. He cut me with that scalpel. His long legs are going to eat up ground way faster than mine.
I have no choice. I have to outrun him.
0:25
Nico hurls his boots one at a time to the other end of the hallway. The first one clears the finish line. The second lands in the glass, pushing some shards across the yellow line.
Hang on.
I shrug off Dad’s jacket, bunching it up and laying it flat on the ground. Nico casts a sidelong glance at me.
0:19
I drag the jacket back and forth, testing how much resistance the concrete gives. I’m going to have to give this some gas.
0:11
I slip one hand in each boot, bending over so I’m standing on my hands and feet, then put both boots on my jacket. The Game Master said I had to remove my boots from my feet. He didn’t say I couldn’t wear them on my hands.
0:05
I do Mom’s breathing exercise. I’ll have to compartmentalize the pain the way Dad taught me, the way I did when I ran to the neighbor’s house on my broken leg.
0:02
Nico’s not looking at the finish line. His eyes are firmly on me.
0:01
The timer hits zero, and a brand-new ten-minute timer starts counting down.
“You may begin.”
Nico lunges for me.
I let out a strangled yell. Angling my jacket like a snowplow, I charge into the field of glass like I’m storming the beaches of Normandy.
The canvas pushes all the big pieces out of the way. Tiny shards snag in my soles, but I pump my legs like pistons.
Nico curses behind me, but I’m too focused on running to glance back at him.
Glass scrapes and crunches as I push through it, forming a narrow channel with my jacket. I keep my eyes trained on the timer flashing red at the far end. Twenty feet. Fifteen. My calves are burning, and my legs keep churning, but I don’t slow down.
A shard punches through my sole. I shove the sensation into a box in my head and slam the lid. Pain is information.
I lean forward, pushing harder with each step. The jacket is doing its job, and I’m eating up ground. Ten more feet. I can do this.
The jacket snags. Momentum hurls my body forward. My boots weigh my hands down, and I can’t get them in front of me.
My face smashes into the glass.
For one blessed second, there’s nothing. But then the pain comes.
It explodes everywhere at once. My scream snags in my throat because it can’t move past the pain in my face, in my forearms, in my knees.
“Pain is information,” I force out through gritted teeth. I can picture Dad’s voice so clearly, it’s like he’s here with me, urging me on. “Pain is information.”
I’m reaching for my jacket when a massive shard drives into my kneecap.
This time, my scream makes it out. I bend to find a chunk of green glass the size of my thumb jutting out of my knee.
It’s part of a bottleneck. I can see the threaded part that would screw onto a cap, and it’s buried so deep that the edges disappear into my skin.
My hand flies toward it, but I know enough from Mom’s first-aid lectures that pulling it would make me bleed faster. I need to get across first.
I grab my jacket, but it doesn’t want to come. The canvas has snagged on something.
Glass crunches behind me. One glance over my shoulder reveals Nico walking through the path I already cleared. He’s not far behind.
Three big jumps could get me to the finish line, but landing that hard on glass, punching through my feet? I might not get back up in time to jump again.
Nico’s footsteps grind closer.
I hurl my boots across the finish line like Nico did, watching each one tumble end over end before they skid across the yellow paint. There’s no time for me to overthink it.
I run.
I make it two steps before my brain stops me. There’s too much pain to compartmentalize. It blows the lid off my compartment, and everything I’ve been suppressing comes pouring out.
Blood wells up, warm and slick, seeping between my toes. I force another step. The pain is not just information anymore, it’s everything, it’s the only thing. I try to take another step, but my foot won’t move. I’m still two jumps away.
Behind me, Nico makes this growling sound like he’s arguing with the pain itself.
I push what glass I can out of the way with the side of my toes, but my injured knee is making my entire leg stiff, and on my next step, my foot comes down on a long piece I missed.
The glass slides straight up into my arch, slicing my flesh like butter.
An amalgamation of everything I’ve rammed into the box in my head erupts from me in a sound that’s equal parts scream and sob.
I lean onto my other leg, throwing my arms out for balance, but it’s no use. The hallway is tipping. I windmill my arms—
Arms slide under mine.
No.
I try to pull myself away before Nico can throw me, but he grunts as I squirm and his mouth presses against my ear.
“Stop fucking fighting me,” he growls, and he sounds so much like his normal self that my body stills. “Arms around me.”
I loop my arms around his neck, my fingers locking behind his head as he scoops one arm under my legs and bands the other across my back.
He hauls me up against his chest, holding me so close I can feel his heart thumping through his shirt.
The shards of glass that were trapped in the folds of my clothes come free and make tiny tinkling noises as they fall onto the floor.
He supports my weight with his forearms, his hands still curled in the same way as after he came down from the pole.
I look up at him, and his eyes are looking straight ahead, fixed on the finish line, but his grip on me is gentle despite the urgency.
He carries me across the glass field, each step sending vibrations through his body that I feel in my bones. His breathing comes in harsh pants, but he doesn’t slow down. My heart is pounding hard enough to numb my own pain.
I turn my face into his shirt, mumbling into his leather jacket so the Game Master can’t see me talking. “Why are you doing this?”
He doesn’t look at me. When he speaks, his voice is so quiet I’m sure only I can hear him over the crunch of glass under his feet. “Why do you think, Eden?”
It feels like my ribcage has been cracked open to let light in. His arms tighten around me, hauling me up until we’re practically nose to nose. Then he ducks his head, his lips ghosting against the shell of my ear when he speaks.
“I thought I could do this,” he says, “but I can’t fucking handle seeing you in pain.”
The weight of his arms around me feels impossible. A hallucination my pain-addled brain is conjuring up to comfort me, like how when you die, every neuron in your brain fires at the same time, giving you one last good thing before pushing you into oblivion.
But I know it’s real because he keeps stopping midstride, catching his breath, before struggling forward again, and no good thing my brain could conjure up would include him in pain.
I drop my heavy head onto his chest. The glass thins out near the end.
He sets me down over the yellow line. My knees buckle, and I land in a heap on the smooth concrete, staring up at Nico as he steps over the line.
I’m going to be the one up on the pole after this, but right now all consequences feel so unimportant because I have the real Nico back.
Any amount of pain is worth it for that.
“Trial two is complete,” the Game Master says, each word bitten off with barely concealed annoyance. “Subject Two is the winner.”
The words take a second to sink in. How can I be the winner? Nico is still standing, swaying between his feet, like some hundred-year-old tree that a storm can bend but not take down. His face doesn’t reflect my own confusion.
Because he purposefully put me down before he crossed the finish line.
There are so many things I need to say, but the camera lens reflects the red emergency lights, and I can say none of them. I go to pull the flaps of my jacket around myself, for a hug from Dad, but my heart stops dead in my chest.
Dad’s jacket is still sitting out in the glass, balled up and torn and soaked in my blood.
The speaker turns on with a hiss.
“The loser will now begin his punishment,” the Game Master says. “It appears Subject Two has left her coat behind. Subject One will retrieve it.”