Chapter 114.
Ant was going to outlast them all.
He just was.
He was supposed to win in the end, that was his deal with The Host, back at the beginning, before he knew Ward Hillshire’s true identity. He would spy on the other contestants. Not that he ever learned very much. From the start they’d all kept their distance from him.
And ultimately, Ant would act as The Host’s henchman that day up on Mount Washington.
“My money’s on you,” The Host had told him when they’d struck their deal. “Quite a lot of money.”
“Why?” Tipton had asked.
“Because we’re very much alike,” The Host had said.
“In what way?” Ant had asked.
“Kill or be killed,” The Host had said that day.
“Not by choice.”
“I know. Also like me you need a reason. Mine is the salvation of the world. Yours is her. The one person that you know I can still reach.”
His hand wanders to the chain around his neck, the last gift she gave him before she left.
Ant had made it entirely clear he was willing to kill whoever got in his way to save her. He had shown how far he was willing to go on the mountain, where he’d been ordered to kill Reg Drummond and make it look like an accident.
Knowing now that the man had wanted to kill his own son.
That way Ward Hillshire would have been the last man standing in the family.
He’d never come right out and told Ant to kill the boy.
He’d never used those exact words. But it had been understood.
The closest Hillshire had come was saying, “Once Reg is gone . . . it would be a shame if the boy didn’t make it down either. ”
But Ant Tipton had failed in his mission that day. Wyatt had survived.
Looking back now, having never discussed this with Ward Hillshire when he still thought of him as The Host, Ant wonders if the grenade at the hospital was supposed to kill Wyatt.
But Tipton learned something that day: If you win by breaking someone, you lose. Maybe even if it meant losing her. Maybe even if it meant losing the world.
He’s in one of these rooms along with the others. Maybe, he can’t help but think, it’s because Hillshire has reneged on our deal. Maybe everything changed when I didn’t succeed in killing Wyatt. Maybe she’s already gone.
Or it’s as simple as this: Ant really does have to pass one final test before being declared the winner. Hillshire can’t hand him the trophy simply for showing up today.
Ant has never doubted, not for a minute, that he’s better than McHenry. Not just stronger. But more strong-minded than this oil rigger from Texas who fancied himself as such a tough guy because he’d been an Army Ranger once.
And as much as Alek Andrich has surprised him with her own toughness and resolve, she believed in the group more than she believed in herself. To Tipton, that seemed a fatal weakness. Even if he now saw there was a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
Zhi? Formidable for sure. But small and quiet. He couldn’t command a group, let alone humanity.
I’m supposed to be the last one in the room.
Just not this room.
He’s on fire.
He’s the one being burned alive.
Hillshire had spoken of mind games.
Ant is certain he’s in the process of losing his.
Tipton has always believed he can outlast anything.
That’s been the point.
Not the medals. Not the money. Not the talk.
Outlasting. For himself. For her.
But the room won’t let him outlast it.
Because it’s not testing his body.
It’s testing the part of him that was twelve years old and trapped in a world that suddenly decided to burn.
The heat in here feels real. The smoke looks real. It crawls across the ceiling and down the walls.
Tipton’s breath comes in ragged slices. His eyes sting. His throat burns.
His screams are once again drowned out by the primal screams he heard that day in the small plane, the last sounds he ever heard from his parents and brother.
Ant Tipton, survivor of that crash and survivor of war, is succumbing to a different kind of warfare.
Psychological warfare.
It is why, now that he’s reached his breaking point, Ant is ready to do the unthinkable:
Surrender.
Tipton violently pulls his arms away from the arms of his chair, ripping away the leather restraints. Not because he’s a superhero—because panic makes you strong in stupid ways.
Doesn’t just unhook his seat belt.
Rips it off, tearing it into two pieces.
“Enough!” he shouts, voice raw, trying to make himself heard over the cries still being pumped into the room, even louder now than before. “ENOUGH! You win! Okay? YOU WIN!”
He looks down as he sees the flames licking at his black jeans.
“Let me out of here!”
Smoke is filling the chamber. Tipton feels the burn of that on his throat, gagging as he blindly stumbles toward the door, eyes full of smoke and tears. He’s now the one inside that burning apartment, inside the fire from which Wyatt had saved that little girl.
Only Ant Tipton is trying to save himself.
When he finally gets his hand on the handle, he’s the one crying out again, the same pain of having touched a hot stove.
He jerks back, swearing silently in his head, because even now he refuses to give them the satisfaction of hearing him break.
But the handle won’t turn.
He pulls his hand away, takes off his black T-shirt, covers the handle with it, tries to open the door again.
Nothing.
Locked from the outside.
Tipton takes a step back into the smoke and charges the door now, lowering his shoulder like he’s the one who played American football the way McHenry did back in Texas, trying to turn himself into a human battering ram.
This time the searing pain is in his shoulder, the sharp ache of having broken it.
Ant Tipton feels broken, gutted, humiliated, after all the times he’d told himself he’d die before he quit.
He slides down the wall next to the door, until he is seated next to it.
Smoke and flames everywhere. The room is a furnace. The air is poison.
Tipton tries to tell himself he can’t possibly be burning up this way.
This can’t be real.
But it all couldn’t be more real.
He tastes the word they gave him—quit—right on the edge of his tongue, and it terrifies him more than the fire, so he bites down and swallows it like poison.
Tipton thinks: This is what it must have been like for my brother that day.
And for the first time in his life—maybe the first time since he was twelve—Ant Tipton thinks something he’s never allowed himself to think.
Maybe surviving wasn’t proof of strength.
Maybe it was just delay.
Maybe this is the way he was meant to die all along.
He sighs out one last whispered word. He whispers it like a confession. Not surrender. A trade.
Because somewhere out there . . . he hoped she was still alive. He wishes he could just see her one last time.