Chapter 16
The Test: Part Two
“Tomorrow,” I mutter once we follow them outside onto the beach.
“You said the test would be tomorrow.” My gaze darts to Ziv’s.
He nods in agreement. We weren’t prepared for this.
Tomorrow isn’t the same as today, and we’ve…
been so cold to one another, and for what?
Suddenly, I realize this could be the last time I’m by his side.
This morning could’ve been the last morning we woke up in the same room.
After this, it could all be over. “You confirmed it would be tomorrow.”
The chancellor’s smile is tight. “Lord Forchan showed up a day early, and since the contents of the test will be a surprise to you, we figured losing a day wouldn’t make much of a difference.”
“Wouldn’t make much of a difference?” Ziv repeats with a look of sheer disgust. “How dare you? Losing a day that could be spent with my mate means a world of ficqing difference, you hideous feathered cretin.”
He charges toward Lord Forchan, his muscles bunching as he seems to grow in size. The chancellor steps in front of him, pushing him back, and I melt at the sight of him fighting for what could be our last moments.
The chancellor guides Akkal to her right as they take a few steps back, giving us room. They’re close enough to hear us, but there’s enough space for us to do whatever it is we’re expected to do.
“This part of the test is about physical trust and communication,” Lord Forchan explains. “For the first challenge, you’ll need to get on your bellies in the sand, with your hands clasped behind your backs.”
We’re hesitant at first, waiting for him to explain the whole thing before we begin. When it’s clear he’s not going to, we get into position.
“All my hands behind my back?” Ziv asks.
“Yes. All four.” The lord clears his throat. “You both must return to a standing position from where you are now, without using your hands. You may use your heads and necks to assist one another, but never unclasp your hands. Are you ready? Begin!”
“Wait, what the fuck?” Give a girl a moment to get situated.
Ziv and I wiggle toward each other until the tops of our heads touch, then we flop and scrunch and end up in a variety of unflattering poses to get to our knees.
The sand makes this incredibly difficult, because whenever one of us gets a bit of leverage, our toes slide through the sand, and we end up flat on our bellies.
I get to my knees first and notice Ziv is struggling, likely because he’s so top heavy.
I look down at myself and estimate that I can probably get to my feet right now, but if Ziv can’t even lift his chest, we’re fucked. I tuck my chin into my chest and attempt a graceful roll back down, but it’s more of a thud. Wiggling forward on my knees, I press my head into his left shoulder.
“Ziv, do what I’m doing.”
“Mm?” he grunts. He lifts his head, his cheek covered in sand and watches me demonstrate.
“Push your head against me, I’ll push back, and you’ll have leverage to lift yourself up.”
He scoffs. “That’s not going to work, June. I’m twice your size.”
“Just try it,” I reply, clearly annoyed. “If it doesn’t work we’ll reassess.”
“Fine.” He’s out of breath, but he follows my lead.
I make sure to inch my head lower and lower as we pretend to be bulls, until I’m able to get the back of my head beneath his shoulder. “Come on, Ziv. Push. You’ve got this.”
A long, rattling groan echoes out of him as his chest slowly rises. Once he’s up, the pressure on my neck disappears, and we both lean back on our heels before standing.
“Next challenge.”
“There’s more?” Ziv shouts with a dramatic roll of his eyes.
I can’t blame him. I’m out of breath and shaky from the first challenge, and he’s not giving us a break before the second.
Lord Forchan smiles. “Yes. There’s more.
” He gestures for his minions to get down in the dirt for a demonstration.
“One of you lays on your back with your knees bent. The other person faces the opposite direction, belly down. You must hold onto each other’s knees, and mimic a walk, one person on the ground, and the other in the air above them. ”
At first, the description of this challenge makes no fucking sense, but when Dumb and Dumber act it out, it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.
“Okay, I’ll hold you up,” Ziv says.
“Yeah, that’s the only way to do this.” The alternative would be like trying to lift a cast-iron pan with only my pinky.
Ziv lays back on the sand with his knees bent, and I climb over him as if we’re about to sixty-nine.
My hands settle on his legs just below his knees, and I feel like we’re about to rock this pose until my feet leave the ground. “Whoa, hold the goddamn phone.”
He puts me down. “What? I need to lift you.”
“I know, I wasn’t ready.”
“Rest your weight on my shins. It’ll be less awkward when I lift your legs.”
“Okay, okay. I’m good.” I get into position, and my feet leave the ground, and we’re perfectly still for one second when I realize how hard this is going to be. “Now we have to move? Fuck me.” Why didn’t I get good at holding plank pose? That would’ve come in real handy right about now.
“I’m going to move my legs,” he says from beneath me. “You need to move yours too. Back and forth.”
I start moving my bottom half, and it feels like he’s about to drop me. I find myself tilting to one side, but Ziv shifts me back into place.
“Not like that. You have to trust me, June. Okay?”
“Yeah,” I mutter, not trusting him. “I trust you.”
We start to move again, and he stops me. “No. You need to move your legs as if you’re sliding through the air on your knees.”
How am I supposed to know what that feels like? “Okay.”
I can tell on the third attempt my movements still aren’t right, but Ziv is so strong that he molds them into however they’re supposed to look. After five seconds of this, Lord Forchan tells us we can stop.
“The next challenge is to create a picnic table using your bodies and eat this plate of fruit from it.” Dumb holds out a small tablecloth, while Dumber glides the plate in front of our faces like the world’s most obnoxious server.
They show us how to hold the pose, which again, looks fairly simple, before Lord Forchan shouts, “Begin!”
Ziv plops down, then, planting his hands in the sand beneath his shoulders, he lifts his hips off the ground until his stomach is completely level.
I straddle his waist, resting my weight on his thighs.
I lean my upper body back, tucking each foot into each of his back armpits so that the tops of my toes press against his upper back.
“Lean back as far as you can,” he tells me. “But slowly.”
I cross my arms over my chest and lower myself as he lifts one hand off the ground, and then the other.
And once that second hand is no longer touching sand, I go flying.
I end up with my feet and ass in the air with all my weight pressing into the back of my neck, which is about as comfortable as an IUD insertion sans anesthesia.
Ziv rushes to lift me and plant me back on my feet. “Are you well?”
I rub my neck as I shake the sand out of my shirt. “Fine. Just sore.”
“Let’s go again.” He claps his hands together. “We can do this.”
We try a second time, and a third, and a fourth. As he gets into a position for a fifth try, I throw up my hands. “No. It’s not working. Our sizes are too different. There’s no way to level out.”
He scratches his chin. “What if we switch positions?”
I let out a choked laugh. “You think my micro pits can hold your flippers? We do that and you’re flinging me twenty feet behind you and my back is never the same and I rip your face off.”
“All right! Fine,” he bites out. Then turns to Lord Forchan. “We forfeit this challenge. What’s the next one?”
“The next one is the last one.”
My heart leaps at the prospect of this being over.
“You must take these items and create a stool that will hold the weight of both of you standing on it for a full minute.” He drops the items on the sand.
We get down on our knees to examine our supplies, which appear to be this planet’s version of twine, a jar filled with a sticky putty of some kind, and six thick magazines for tourists interested in visiting the island.
“If it collapses with both of you standing on it, you’ve lost the challenge.”
Shit. I’m not worried about throwing something together resembling a stool.
But both of us have to stand on it for a minute without it falling apart?
That’s where we’re screwed. Even if I weren’t blessed with a belly and fat ass, Ziv is a massive guy.
He’s got to be almost seven feet tall and has enough bulky muscle to make him weigh over three hundred pounds.
If we can make something that holds him, it’ll probably be sturdy enough to hold both of us.
“Begin any time now, murderer,” Lord Forchan taunts after watching us sit there in the sand staring at the supplies for several minutes.
Ziv and I exchange a panicked look. We have no idea how to do this, and after forfeiting the last challenge, if we don’t nail this, I’m as good as dead.
“Okay,” I say, clapping my hands together in an attempt to shake off the anxiety. “We can do this.”
He nods and starts pulling the twine apart. I dig out a large glob of the putty and start rolling the magazines into hollow tubes. A strangled grunt escapes him a while later, and I look up to find him staring at the sand, shaking his head.
“The time we wasted,” he mutters, looking irritated. “We played it all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Akkal called you tetra.” He shrugs. “What of it? We let that one word pull us apart to the point where we didn’t even touch each other. Idiocy.”
I don’t disagree with him, but why bring this up now? We’re fighting for my life here, and our focus needs to be on building the stool, not rehashing the mistakes we made. What is he thinking? “It was your idea.”