Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Reid
Day twenty-three. Recovery day.
Mac briefs us at morning formation. "Lighter load today. Shelter construction challenge. Work at your own pace. No time limits. No competitive elements."
Translation: production knows we're all exhausted and needs us functional for next week's challenges.
I'm grateful. My shoulder is still sore from the rope bridge. Sulla's palms are bandaged from rope burns. We both need recovery time.
We're gathering materials at our build site when I hear Sienna curse sharply.
She's twenty feet away, holding her hand. Blood drips from her fingers.
"You okay?" I call.
"Yeah, just—" She winces. "I didn't know splinters came in size large. My fingernails are too short. I can’t grab it. I can wait until Juno comes back, she had to go for an interview."
I grab the first aid kit from my pack, find the tweezers, and cross to her. "Let me see."
She hesitates. We're not partners. Not friends. Just contestants who've been civil to each other for three weeks.
"It's fine," she says. "I can handle it."
"I know you can. But you're going to need both hands for the build."
She extends her hand. It's a bad one, a full inch of wood under the skin at the base of her thumb. I pull it clean, flush the wound, apply antiseptic, wrap it with gauze. Efficient. Careful.
Sienna watches my hands. "You've done this before."
"A few times."
"Thanks," Sienna says quietly. "You didn't have to."
"No problem."
"Most people would've let me handle it myself. Competition and all."
I shrug. "We're all out here trying to survive. Helping when we can seems like the least we can do."
She studies me for a moment. "You're different than I expected."
I don't answer. Just pack up the kit and go back to work.
After discussing our plan, Sulla and I get to work, synchronized.
I handle the frame structure. He manages the canvas and weatherproofing. We move around each other without wasted motion. No conflict.
He's quieter than usual. Thoughtful. I catch him watching me a few times — not the way he sometimes does when he thinks I'm not looking, but different. Considering something.
"You're good at this," I say as he secures a corner.
"Had practice. Different materials, but same principle."
We work in silence for a while. The shelter takes shape. Functional. Solid.
Then Sulla stops working. Just stands there holding a length of rope, staring at nothing.
"Sulla?"
He blinks, focuses on me, his expression raw, vulnerable.
"What you did. With Sienna. You helped her without thinking about it."
"It was just a bandage."
"No." He sets down the rope carefully. "It was kindness. You saw someone hurt and you helped. No calculation. No wondering what you'd get in return. Just… kindness."
"That's what people do."
"Not in my experience." He's quiet for so long, the implications about his life land hard in my gut. Then, "I wasn't a good man. Before the ice. I hurt people."
I stop. Look at him. He's focused on tying a knot. Not looking at me.
"We all have things we're not proud of," I say.
"Not like this."
"You'd be surprised what I've done, Sulla."
He looks up. "What have you done?"
I set down what I'm holding.
I don't plan what comes next. It just comes out, the way things do when you're too tired to keep them in anymore.
"I had a lieutenant. Ramirez. He was twenty-six. Good soldier. Better person." I look at my hands. "We were in Iraq. On reconnaissance. Mountain terrain. Just the two of us. He took a round and went over the edge of a ridge. I caught his hand."
Sulla is very still.
“I couldn’t hold him.” The words are flat. I’ve said them to myself ten thousand times. Somehow they’re harder out loud.
“He fell. Survived the fall. Broken and bleeding. I couldn’t reach him—enemy fire pinned me down. I called it in. We were four clicks from extraction. The firing stopped. The enemy moved on, but the medevac took too long. He bled out alone in the dirt while I sat helpless on the ridge, watching.”
The wind moves through the trees. Somewhere distant a bird calls.
“My commanding officer filed the report. Said the mission parameters had been followed correctly. Said the outcome was unavoidable.” I can feel my jaw tightening. “He lied. I called for backup and was denied. Twice. When I testified, they believed my CO. He let Ramirez die. Protected himself.”
"And the inquiry—"
"Believed him. He had twenty years of service and a general who owed him a favor.
" I exhale slowly. "I testified. Told them exactly what I knew.
It didn't matter. They closed the investigation in six weeks.
" A pause. "I was medically discharged four months later.
PTSD. Which was real. But the timing wasn't a coincidence. "
Sulla hasn't moved. He's watching me with an expression I can't fully read — not pity, nothing as simple as that. Something more careful.
"I think about him every day," I say. "Ramirez.
Not always the way he died. Sometimes I just think about the way he laughed.
He had this laugh that was completely disproportionate to the joke, like he thought everything was funnier than it was.
" I stop. Swallow. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. "
"Because yesterday you were hanging over a ravine thinking you were back on that ridge," Sulla says quietly. "Because I was there and I didn't understand it fully and I should."
That lands somewhere in the center of my chest.
"I should have held on," I say. It comes out smaller than I intend. "I know the physics. I know the ground was crumbling. I know there was nothing I could have done differently. I have been told by three separate therapists that it was not my fault." A beat. "I still should have held on."
Sulla crosses the distance between us. Doesn't touch me. Just stands close enough that I could reach him if I needed to.
"You did hold on," he says. "Yesterday. On that bridge. You held on."
I look up at him.
"You were back in Iraq. I could see it. You were somewhere else entirely, and you still held on long enough for me to reach you."
My eyes are burning. I don't cry. I don't. Not in front of cameras, not in front of anyone, not since the night I got the discharge papers and sat in my car in a parking garage for two hours because I didn't trust myself to drive.
"It's not the same," I say.
"No. But you're still here. You held on."
I press my lips together. Look away. There are cameras fifty feet from us and I will absolutely not do this here.
"We should finish the shelter," I say.
"Yes."
He goes back to his side. I go back to mine. We work in silence, but it's a different silence than before — something has been set down between us that wasn't there this morning.
"What if I told you everything I did," he says, a while later. Voice low. "Before the ice. All of it. What if you knew the full truth of what I was."
I think about that. About the man who ran across a failing bridge. About the man who sat on the floor with Trevor in the dark and talked him back from the edge. About the man standing across from me right now, asking the question with his whole face braced for the answer.
"Tell me when you're ready," I say. "Or don't. I know who you are now. That's what I'm going on."
"Even without knowing what I was?"
"Even then."
He stares at me. Something in his expression I don't have a word for.
"I'll tell you," he says finally. "When this is over. When there are no cameras. When we have time for everything."
"Okay."
"Just not yet."
"I said okay, Sulla." I say it gently, with conviction, not irritation.
He nods. Goes back to the shelter. But something has shifted—some weight fractionally lifted from the set of his shoulders.
Mac comes by to inspect. Declares it sound. Dismisses us for the day.
That evening we sit outside our tent eating MREs. The sun is setting, gold light filtering through the trees.
I open my meal pouch. Beef stew. Or what passes for it.
"These are terrible," I say, stirring the gelatinous mass.
Sulla opens his. Studies it. "I've had worse."
Something about the absolute deadpan delivery makes me laugh. Real laughter. Not polite or performed. The kind that comes from somewhere you forgot existed.
Sulla stares at me.
"What?" I ask.
"I've never heard you laugh before."
"I don't laugh much."
"You should." He pauses. "It's beautiful."
The word hits me sideways. I go still. He goes still. The moment stretches between us, charged with everything we're not allowed to say out loud.
I want to kiss him. Want to close the distance and kiss him the way I did in the bathroom, want his hands on my face again.
But cameras. Production. The contract with teeth.
"We should sleep," I say. Voice rough.
"Yes."
The sun drops below the hills. Darkness creeping in. We sit here anyway.
Finally I stand. "Long day tomorrow."
"Yes."
We go into the tent. Change for sleep with backs turned. The routine. The practiced distance.
Settle onto our cots. Four feet apart.
"Reid?" His voice in the darkness.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For what you told me. About Ramirez."
I stare at the ceiling of the tent. "You're the first person I've told who didn't immediately tell me it wasn't my fault."
A beat.
"It wasn't your fault," he says. "But I understand why that doesn't help."
Something in my chest cracks open, very quietly, like ice at the end of a long winter.
"Yeah," I say. "Goodnight, Sulla."
"Goodnight, Reid."
I lie in the dark listening to him breathe. Thinking about a twenty-six-year-old with a disproportionate laugh. About a ridge in Iraq. About a bridge in Scotland and a hand that didn't slip.
One week left.
I don't know what happens after. I don't know if this survives outside this bubble, outside the cameras and the compressed intensity of forty people trying to endure the same thing together.
But Sulla makes me want to find out.
And I haven't wanted to try anything in a very long time.