Shink!
The door slid open, revealing a small figure. I caught the briefest glimpse of light behind her. Yayora welded a shuttlecraft in the middle distance. They shouted to one another as a worker dropped a metal tool.
The door slid shut, blocking them out. I was left with the female Yayora. She carried a tray laden with food.
“You’re awake,” she said.
Her smile was warm and genuine. She was the same Yayora I saw outside, the one who ran to my side to help me and Chax.
“You must be hungry,” she said, placing the tray beside me on the bed. “I didn’t know what you like to eat, so I brought a little of everything.”
None of it looked appetizing. They were lumps of jelly. It didn’t help they were brightly colored.
“Thanks,” I said.
An uneasy silence passed between us the way it always did between strangers.
“I’m Stari,” she said.
“Maddy,” I said.
The uneasiness returned with a vengeance.
“What happened out there?” I said. “I mean, I know what happened. Just… what happened?”
“You were waylaid by Iron Hoof,” Stari said. “He knew where you would be and at what time. After you injured him before, all he had to do was wait for you to turn up.”
“How could he know where we’d be? I mean, no one else knew where the shuttlecraft was.”
Stari’s eyes shifted to one side. It told me everything I needed to know and the blood drained from my face.
“He knew?” I said. “How?”
“The Changelings told him.”
“How is that supposed to be fair?”
“It’s not. None of this is meant to be fair. If it was, there’s a chance you might escape.”
“But when we reached the shuttlecraft, we were going to take off.”
“The shuttlecraft wasn’t real,” Stari said patiently.
“It was real,” I said. “I saw it.”
“You saw what they wanted you to see. It was a prop, an empty shell. It was no more capable of flying than I am. I’m sorry, but trying to reach the shuttlecraft was always doomed to fail.”
It took a while for me to process what she was saying. It was all fake? How could that be?
“We were in a reality TV show,” I said. “They gave us a mission. To reach the shuttlecraft before it exploded.”
Stari took a seat beside me.
“There have been other contestants,” she said. “Many others. Some were even more successful than you. They reached the shuttlecraft and flicked the switches to fly away, only it wouldn’t take off. It couldn’t take off. The Changelings in the control room blew it up anyway.”
It was a lot to take in.
“No,” I said. “The trackers had to do it.”
“The Changelings in the Control Room blew the ship up and then edited a tracker into the shot later to make it look like they were the ones who did it. No one in the gameshow ever escapes. Not ever.”
No one.
Not ever.
It’d been fake from the get-go. No chance we were going to escape. And that meant all the pain and challenges we’d faced had been engineered by the Changelings.
My eyes drifted down to Stari’s wrists. They were exposed and showed no seam of skin as Chax had described if she was a Changeling in disguise.
But she could still be hired by the Changelings to play this role. This could be fake too. Couldn’t it?
How did I know I wasn’t still in the TV show? For all I knew, I could still be neck-deep in their twisted game.
Still, there were little things that told me differently. It was in the look of shock on Iron Hoof’s face when the shooting began and he got hit in the shoulder by a bolt of plasma. It was on Stari’s face when she showed up to help me.
It was real. At least, it seemed real.
The Yayora were as terrified to be getting involved as I was at seeing them there.
Were they acting? Or was it genuine?
I went round and round in circles and none of it made sense.
I needed Chax. He would know what to do.
“How is Chax?” I said. “Is he okay?”
Stari took my hands in hers. The distressed look in her eyes was a dagger in my heart. She looked away from me.
“We did everything we could to save him,” Stari said. “But his injuries were too great.”
I heard her words but my brain refused to process them. They didn’t make sense.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “He’s a Titan. They can heal really fast. He’ll be okay. Just give him time.”
“We did. I’m sorry.”
“Just let him rest,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”
“He is at rest. Now.”
That single word, “Now,” turned her entire meaning on its head. Not that it wasn’t obvious before. I just refused to accept it.
And just like that, she shattered my entire world.
I clung to the hope I misunderstood her. But I wouldn’t question her. That would make it too real.
“I’m sorry,” Stari said.
The tears were in my eyes before I blinked again. They ran down my cheeks but I couldn’t feel them.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Stari looked up at me.
“He’s still out there somewhere,” I said. “He has to be.”
“I know it’s difficult to accept,” Stari said.
“He’s too strong to be gone. He’s still out there fighting. I know it.”
“I could show you his body if that would help.”
I searched Stari’s face for any hint she was bluffing.
I found none.
I decided to call her bluff, tell her I wanted to see his body. Even if she took me to see him, I would assume the body wasn’t his. It would be fake, a forgery they’d made, like this entire gameshow.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to see him.”
Stari searched my expression before nodding.
“Then follow me,” she said.
The door slid open automatically as she approached it. I got up and moved toward the doorway but couldn’t pass through it.
Stari stood on the
