Chapter 8 #2
“Aren’t they the ones from earlier?”
Cameras pivot. Heads turn. Attention swings like a floodlight.
And somewhere under the shock—under the dread, the absurdity, the immediate understanding that my life has just become a broadcast hazard—something wild and disbelieving breaks loose in me.
Because of course it’s her.
Of course the universe looked at my debt, my desperation, my half-buried photograph, my first sight of her across that room, and said Let’s make it operatic.
I laugh again, louder this time, helpless with disbelief. “You cannot be serious.”
Captain Photonic points directly at our screen. “Now there is a pairing with history!”
The crowd reacts like they’ve been handed a loaded weapon and permission.
Tilda finally turns her head toward me.
Her expression is magnificent.
Not in a comfortable way. Not in any way that suggests my continued survival is guaranteed. But magnificent. She looks like somebody carved rage out of moonlight and gave it a sponsor tag.
This is a terrible moment to notice that she’s beautiful.
Unfortunately, terrible moments have never stopped me before.
Everything in me is firing at once—shock, adrenaline, old want, black humor, the sudden absurd lift of being seen by the room and by her and by the monstrous machinery of the Challenge all at the same time.
So naturally, I make a bad decision.
I start toward her.
“Bron,” Dax hisses, scandalized. “No.”
“Bron,” Sonya says, voice half warning, half fascinated. “Do not.”
I grin at both of them, because if I stop to think, I may collapse into a pile of nerves and expensive tailoring.
“This,” I declare, “is either destiny or a felony.”
Then I cross the floor.
People are openly watching now. Contestants, reporters, sponsors, crew—every eye near enough to angle our way does. The screens above continue to pulse with our names. The music has shifted back to something grand and romantic and deeply offensive.
Tilda doesn’t move to meet me. She stands planted, one hand still wrapped around her water glass, gaze fixed on me with a level of warning that would stop a less committed idiot.
I am, alas, a very committed idiot.
When I reach her, I throw one arm around her shoulders with all the triumphant, incredulous energy currently overrunning my better judgment.
“There you are,” I say, looking up at the screen and then back at her with a laugh still in my voice. “We’re a theme.”
The contact lasts less than a second.
Tilda jerks out from under my arm like I’ve slapped her.
Not a startled flinch. Not a shy withdrawal.
A clean, immediate, furious shrug-off that creates distance with surgical precision.
My hand drops to empty air.
The room audibly reacts.
There’s a sharp scatter of laughter from one side, a collective inhale from the contestants nearest us, and somewhere behind me a reporter makes the delighted little sound of someone who just got exactly the footage they wanted.
Of course the cameras catch it.
Of course they do.
A drone dips so low I can see my own expression reflected in its lens for one embarrassing instant—half-grin, half-shock, hit by reality mid-performance.
Tilda turns to me, her voice low enough that only I and the closest scavengers can hear it.
“Don’t touch me.”
Every syllable is ice.
The grin dies properly this time.
Something in my chest gives a small, painful twist. Deserved. Entirely deserved. Still sharp.
I lift both hands in surrender. “Right. Sorry.”
Around us, the atmosphere crackles. The audience doesn’t know the details, but they know tension when they smell it.
Producers will be wetting themselves somewhere offstage.
Captain Photonic, still grandstanding above the crowd, is probably adding our names to whatever private list he keeps labeled excellent television.
Dax and Sonya have drifted closer without admitting it, drawn by the same appalled curiosity as everybody else.
Dax mutters, “I cannot believe you did that.”
“I can,” Sonya says. “That’s the upsetting part.”
Tilda doesn’t spare either of them a glance. Her attention is still on me, razor-thin and deadly.
“Was there a specific reason,” she asks, each word exquisitely controlled, “you thought that was a good idea?”
“Not good,” I admit. “Impulsive.”
“That is not better.”
“No.”
Above us, the giant screen transitions to another couple, then another, but the damage is done. People have already seen. Already marked us. Across the room I can hear someone saying, “That’s them, from before,” like we’ve become an exhibit.
I lower my voice. “You all right?”
The look she gives me could preserve meat.
“Are you unwell,” she says, “or is this your natural form?”
Sonya coughs into her hand to hide a laugh.
I should let the joke land. I should step back, give her space, stop feeding the machine.
Instead I say, softly, “Tilda.”
Her jaw tightens.
For one moment the noise thins. Just a thread of silence between us while the hall keeps roaring around the edges.
I can smell the citrus from her water, the faint clean note of her soap beneath the reception hall’s perfume fog, the electric charge of stage lighting warming glass and metal. Her pupils are blown a little wide. Whether from anger or adrenaline or both, I can’t tell. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“Believe it or not,” I say, “I’m as blindsided by this as you are.”
She lets out a small, humorless laugh. “That is not remotely comforting.”
“Fair.”
A producer appears near the stage, gesturing contestants into rough paired clusters for a photo op, because the universe is not done humiliating us yet.
“Contestant pairs to your marked positions!” a staff voice calls.
A groan rolls through the room.
Tilda closes her eyes for half a second, then opens them and goes colder still. It’s almost impressive, how quickly she can turn pain into polished hostility. She should teach seminars.
“Listen carefully,” she says, taking one tiny step closer so the cameras can’t easily read her mouth. “Whatever this is, whatever stunt they’re trying to pull, it changes nothing.”
The words land like stones.
I nod once. “Understood.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Do not smile at me like this is fate.”
That startles me, because she’s right. Somewhere under all the shock, some stupid, reckless part of me had reached for exactly that—fate, irony, one more impossible chance delivered by a rigged universe.
I let the thought die on my face.
“This is a mess,” I say instead.
“Yes,” she says. “You are.”
And there she is again. Knife to the gap in the ribs.
I almost laugh, but not because it’s funny. Because it hurts, and laughter has always been my cheapest armor.
The staff call goes out again, firmer this time.
Contestants begin moving in reluctant pairs toward lit floor markers beneath the screens.
All around us, bodies are stiff with resentment and disbelief.
One man is actively arguing with a producer about whether a fling on a gambling moon counts as romance.
The producer, maddeningly, seems to think yes.
Dax leans close enough to murmur, “You two are going to make this season unwatchably watchable.”
“Die quietly,” Tilda says without looking at him.
He raises both brows. “Right. Sorry.”
Sonya, more practical, nods toward the floor markers. “They’re not going to let you skip it.”
Tilda inhales through her nose.
“I know.”
We start walking because what else is there to do? Refusal is an option in theory, but not one either of us can afford in practice. The cameras move with us. Of course they do. A floating panel nearby flashes our names again with a stylized montage frame already waiting to be filled.
I keep a careful half-step of distance this time.
When we reach our assigned marker, Tilda stops dead center on it and folds one arm across her middle. A photographer waves at us.
“Closer together, please!”
“No,” Tilda says.
The photographer blinks. “For the shot—”
“No.”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to stay expressionless.
The photographer tries again, more diplomatic. “A little angle, then? Toward each other?”
Tilda turns her head just enough to look at him. “You may take the angle you get.”
Sonya, two markers down with a man who looks like he regrets all his ancestors, mutters, “I adore her.”
I probably shouldn’t hear that. I do.
The photographer looks at me, desperate. “Can you help?”
I spread my hands. “Friend, I’m doing brilliantly by remaining vertical.”
That gets a few laughs from the room and a tiny murderous glance from Tilda that somehow makes my pulse jump instead of my survival instincts. Troubling.
The camera flashes anyway.
One shot. Two. Three.
On the giant review monitor nearby, the images appear in sequence: other couples faking ease, hiding hatred, manufacturing intrigue. Then us—Tilda carved from ice, me standing beside her with my hands carefully to myself, the distance between our bodies bright as a wound.
The crowd loves it.
I can feel that too. The audience senses, even before the official metrics roll in. We’re not sweet. We’re not reconciled. We’re tension with cheekbones. Producers dine out on tension.
Captain Photonic’s voice pours over the hall again, ecstatic. “Now that is emotional voltage!”
Tilda mutters, “I hope he steps on a rake.”
My mouth betrays me with the ghost of a smile. “There you are.”
She hears it.
And for a single, dangerous heartbeat, her mouth almost twitches too.
Almost.
Then it’s gone.
She turns away from me as soon as the photo sequence ends, every line of her body saying exactly what her mouth hasn’t stopped saying all night: no, no, absolutely not.
But I’ve seen her. Really seen her now, up close, angry and alive and impossible under these vicious lights.
And the worst part—the truly catastrophic part—is that the theme announcement, the cameras, the public spectacle, all of it has only made one thing clearer.
I was in trouble before.
Now I am ruined.