Most Dangerous Games of Survival

Chapter 1.

Alek

Antarctica

Can one person really save the world?

Aleksandra Andrich—Alek—nearly six feet, twenty-two, battle-tested. She’s a survivor of the many wars that have chewed up her corner of the Carpathian Belt. Her family has been running from sirens for so long she can’t even tell you in what country the running started.

They’d warned her she might die. They’d also promised one person could fix the world.

But that’s not what races through her mind.

What races through her mind is that question about why she’s here, why they’re all here.

Whoever The One is, will they really be able to change things for the better?

Or is the trick getting other people to move with you?

For now, Alek just needs to survive this first day in Antarctica.

They’ve dressed them all the same: thermal gear, goggles, face wraps.

And the same little add-on nobody talks about—a plastic wristband clipped snug over her glove, warm against her pulse.

A tracker. Heartbeat, location, motion. If it flatlines, they’re already moving.

Her wristband warms against her pulse. She checks under the band: PROPERTY OF H. GAMES, INC.

She and the others are crammed into one of five Zodiac boats. They’re in the middle of the freezing water of McMurdo Sound, on their way to Ross Island. Her hands are already shaking from the cold, despite the thick gloves and her thermal parka.

They’re expecting final instructions for today’s test upon arrival at the island. The Host—the voice they first heard back in Ohio—had communicated as much before they’d been transferred to the Zodiac boats:

“Today we begin to find out which of you is worth selecting—because today the games start for real. Good luck to one and all. And trust me: You’ll need more than luck on Ross Island. You are being evaluated in ways you won’t perceive. We watch the map. It changes by the hour.”

In Ohio, she had caught one last clipped line that a lot of the players ignored: “We don’t save what’s on it. We manage it.” But it didn’t make any sense to her so she let it go.

The words have the same calm menace as an emergency broadcast. She’s heard that tone before.

It’s been drilled into all of them that the games they are about to play are the most dangerous any man or woman has ever experienced.

The rules have been explained to them. Alek has already memorized these rules—her life depends on it.

It’s been indicated that everything on this journey is a test of their skill set. Tests to see which one of them has the leadership skills to save the world. She wonders if that is true, or if it’s even possible.

They were told the rules would be clear. That they’d be enforced consistently. That this would all be fair.

That was the first lie.

More than that, Alek is worried if she makes one mistake, her wristband will stop buzzing and someone will zip her into a bag. Maybe in the next hour.

The Zodiac she’s in hits another wave and goes airborne again.

Alek traps another scream in her throat.

She grips the rail in front of her harder, and slivers of ice crack off the metal railing and fall into the sound.

She can swim. That isn’t the problem. What happens if the boat capsizes, she ends up in subzero water, and all of her body somehow turns to ice?

What then?

Another wave hits. Another jolt to her system. Alek’s glove slips. Ice bites her palm. One mistake and she’s gone. She locks her arm.

The letter had said that she would need to be brave.

Be brave now, she tells herself, despite the wind and water all around her and the unimaginable cold trying to swallow her up on McMurdo Sound, out here at the ends of the earth.

Alek plants her feet and tightens her lock on the railing as a way of not sliding across the deck. And maybe over into the water. She’s ready for the next wave created by the wake of the Zodiac in front of them.

Get a grip, Alek tells herself.

And not just on the railing.

She thinks of her mother again. She misses her more than ever, on this boat trip into the frozen unknown. She hopes her mother is safe back home, in the small mountain town they last settled in two years ago. But the sirens had recently caught up to them again . . .

Alek is farther away from her mother than she has ever been in her life. She and her sister were raised by their parents to be dreamers—back when her father was still there to say it out loud.

That was before the endless raids and evacuations turned the only world she’s ever known into a living nightmare.

But she reminds herself why she is here:

She keeps telling herself that these games, feeling as dangerous as promised before they’ve actually begun, are a chance to still have the life for herself she’d imagined, that her parents had told her she could have.

She reminds herself of that, especially here and now when her heart wants to come out of her chest as the cold wind knifes into her face and makes it impossible to breathe. Alek is surprised that her quiet tears haven’t turned to icicles on her cheeks from the wind.

One more time all the feelings of helplessness she felt back home with the war raging around her have come rushing back. They’re coming at her in waves.

Not once, though, does she want the pilot to turn around. And she knows why. This competition—this chance she’s been given along with the others—has allowed her to do something she had stopped since the war ripped her family apart:

Alek is allowing herself to dream again.

Dream of a better world, for her and her sweet mother and everyone else. At least in this moment when she needs strength, she’s made stronger by the knowledge that she is one of the few chosen to compete for an almost unimaginable fortune over the next few days.

But that’s only if she lives to cash the check.

A billion dollars.

More money than she could spend in several lifetimes.

But Alek and the others know they are competing for an even bigger prize:

To be known as a hero around the world, as big and crazy an idea as that is. Only one of them can win. One out of the thousand summoned from all over the world to a cornfield in Ohio a few days ago.

But first she has to make it through a day when she will be asked to cross a treacherous stretch known as the Erebus Ice Tongue, where every step could be her last.

That’s the first test, at the coldest place on earth.

For the moment, she is on the seventeen-foot Zodiac plowing through icy water.

Next to her is a redheaded German girl, Hannah Wagner, Player #222.

Hannah is an extraordinary prodigy studying oceanography as an eighteen-year-old junior at MIT.

Hannah’s eyes keep flicking to details other people miss—where the speakers are mounted, where the cameras aren’t.

Next to Hannah at the bow of the sleek, inflatable boat is Wyatt Jordan, player #77, a gifted college student from New York City. Alek can already see that Wyatt is quite taken with Hannah, in just the short time he’s known her.

“Can I be honest with you?” Hannah Wagner confides to Alek. “I’m scared.” It’s as if she hasn’t just moved closer to Alek but has actually gotten all the way inside her head.

Alek is already fond of this shy, brilliant German girl. They bonded almost immediately in Ohio. Alek felt she’d been given a second chance to be a big sister. She already has a sense of how strong Hannah is. Alek still wants to protect her at the same time, the way a big sister would.

“If we go in, grab my sleeve,” Alek says. “We’ll get through this together.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Hannah says.

Alek smiles.

“I’m good at looking calmer than I feel,” she says.

It takes some effort, the wind in both their faces, but Hannah smiles back.

“Thank you,” she says.

“For what?”

“I know you’ve been looking out for me, without making it look that way, almost from the first moment we met,” she says.

“I like you,” Alek says. “I’ve liked you from the start. And I’m frankly not sure I could have done this at your age. It’s why I think you’re probably braver than I’ll ever be.”

“Hey, you’re not that much older than I am,” Hannah says.

Alek’s face turns serious. “Yes,” she says, “I am.”

“Maybe we really can take care of each other,” Hannah says. “I never had a sister.”

“I did,” Alek says.

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” Alek says.

“I’m so sorry,” Hannah says.

Not as sorry as I am, Alek is about to say, but she feels it first—a low thrumming through the rubber hull, a pulse under the water. Something hits the Zodiac hard—torpedo-hard—and the bow jumps out of the water.

“Whale!” Hannah yells before the others realize what just happened. Then, her eyes filled with both wonder and terror, she points a stiff arm at the water. “Orca!”

The Zodiac jumps. Then it flips.

Water slams her face. The cold is instant and brutal. They’ve been dunked into McMurdo Sound.

In water this cold, you lose your hands first. Then you lose your mind, Alek thinks.

The cold stuns her. Her lungs seize. She battles back to the surface.

Her arms and legs already feel numb. When she manages to get her head above water, gulping in air, she’s less than twenty yards from a black-and-white orca whale that is the biggest, most frightening creature she’s ever seen in her life.

Her head swivels as she sees dark, cresting waves surrounding others who were just ejected from the Zodiac boat.

She frantically searches for any sight of Hannah Wagner’s red hair. But she can’t see her friend anywhere.

Just killer whales that seem to be everywhere.

This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare.

Steven Noble