Arena Three

I’m hardly in a fit enough state to run. Ben has to hold me close to him to keep me on my feet. Numb with grief, I’m somehow able to trace my steps back through the twisting, labyrinthine underground. From above, the audience is roaring, the commentator desperately trying to quell the chaos. It sounds like we’ve started a riot.

I’m hardly able to stand. I wince with every step. But we reach the very last corridor and race up the very last staircase. Then all at once, we burst out into the desert heat, into the abyss of nothing. We’re free from the arena.

We start running full speed, knowing we only have a few minutes before the arena blows up. Even from outside we can hear the angry crowd. Shots start ringing out and it occurs to me that the slaverunners have opened fire on their own people.

As we race across the expanse, away from the arena, I hear the whining sound of bombs flying through the air.

The bombs hit and explode, the force so strong Ben and I are both flung forward. Heat blasts my face, singeing my hair. I land with a hard thud on my back and my head slams against the asphalt, making me bite down hard on my tongue.

I taste blood in my mouth. There’s a ringing in my ears that’s beyond painful. I’m completely dazed, unable to move or think or get my thoughts in any kind of order. Acrid smoke billows above me. I manage to roll over onto my chest. A little way behind me, I can see Ben lying face down on the ground. He’s completely still and I pray that he’s just been knocked unconscious. Behind him, I can see a scene of utter carnage. Enormous flames are leaping into the air, and bits of metal and body parts rain down. I duck as pieces of the arena grating thud just an inch to the side of my head.

I look back and see that where the arena stood is now nothing more than a smoldering crater. The bomb obliterated everything. It wiped out thousands of people in one blast.

There is no arena. There is no Ryan.

Then the world turns black.

EPILOGUE

They tell me this is what victory feels like. But I can’t bring myself to celebrate. Not when I wake from my coma two days later in Dad’s compound in Houston as a hero, nor when I’m reunited with Bree. I don’t celebrate when my dad tells me how proud he is of me for what I’ve done.

We won. The plan to destroy the arenas simultaneously went off without a hitch. Or at least it did as far as everyone else is concerned. No one knows about the grueling hours I spent in Arena 3, fighting for my life against the vicious mutants the nuclear war created. Nor does anyone know what Ben and Ryan did for me, about how they both had a gut feeling that something was wrong, and how they put their differences aside to unite and help me with their secret plan B. No one realizes that if it weren’t for them, I would have died in the arena, our whole plan would have fallen apart, and we’d all be under slaverunner control right now.

I know I’ll never be able to tell them, that I will never be able to admit that I screwed up the most important thing I was ever going to do. I have to accept their praise even though I don’t deserve it. I have to let them comfort me over Ryan mysteriously running away from the compound, knowing I will never be able to tell anyone that he is in fact dead because of me.

No one knows any of that. They all believe, when they found me unconscious in the desert, that my skin had been burned by the bomb’s blast. They all needed me to be their hero and so I had no choice but to accept.

Only Ben seems to understand why I am so subdued. He knows why I don’t dance and drink and celebrate like the rest of them. Like always, it’s Ben who understands that what I have experienced has marked me, damaged me, possibly forever. The only good thing to come out of all of this is that I know we’ll be by each other’s side, silent, supporting, not needing to speak to understand where the other is coming from.

In the first week after the arenas are obliterated, we receive a message from a squad in the Midwest. Arena 4 has fallen, its prisoners liberated. They’re all on buses heading south since we have the infrastructure in place and plenty of food to support them. But still I don’t celebrate.

In the second week, we get an even bigger surprise when the Commander from Fort Noix arrives with his troops. He admits he was wrong to ignore my dad’s appeal for help. He vows to do everything he can to help, and they strike up a bargain to take in a thousand orphans from the fallen cities and rescued from the sex trade. They’ll be placed with families in the cabins in the woods.

But even this is not enough for me to celebrate. Nor is the moment when Charlie and Bree’s friendship blossoms into first love, nor when Zeke and Stephan are rescued from Memphis, nor the moment when I am finally able to look Ben in the eye and tell him that I love him, that I finally can be with him in the way he wants me to be.

The point when I am finally able to smile for the first time comes a whole year later.

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