They shone with a pain, an anger, and intensity all her own. I hadn’t seen that look on her face since I first turned up in her room. A day that felt like a lifetime ago now.
Her true emotion was cloudy and overcast, difficult to ascertain. Anything I tried to read into it was nothing more than what I was projecting onto her. I emptied my mind of thoughts and tried to read her expression.
She was angry. But she was also confused. And she cared. A lot. She wanted to know what was going on.
I wondered what Stari had told her and how much I could get away with not revealing to her…
No, I thought. No more running from the truth.
Maddy deserved to know what had happened and why I did what I had.
Maddy approached my cell door. She watched me closely, her eyes taking in every detail.
I turned my body as she came closer. I didn’t want her to see me. Not like this.
She stopped at the cell door and peered at the line that delineated the room she stood in and my cell. There was a look of deep thought on her face.
“Don’t come in,” I said. “Please.”
She considered my response for a moment before ignoring me completely and stepping in my cell.
I was caged, trapped. Nowhere for me to hide or escape to.
She appraised the interior of my cell. It was bare. I hadn’t personalized it. The only things I had of any value were tucked away safely in my mind and I couldn’t exactly pin those to the wall. I wouldn’t even if I could. They were personal, private moments. I didn’t want to share them with anyone.
She stepped closer and still didn’t say a word.
I didn’t know how she would react next. She might unleash her anger on me, beating at me with her clenched fists. I wouldn’t even try to protect myself.
Or she might just stand there, staring at me, her pain drilling into me harder than anything she could dish out physically.
“Why did you tell them not to inform me you were still alive?” Maddy said.
I couldn’t bear to face the pain in her eyes. Pain I had caused. I looked away.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this,” I said.
“Like what?”
I turned my face toward her. There was no avoiding her now.
“Like this,” I said.
I gauged the look in her eye as she looked me over. Her eyes ran over the burns wrapped around my chin and across my cheek.
She reached up to touch my face, but I pulled away.
“Does it hurt?” she said.
Agony. But being away from you hurts more.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You’re as handsome as you’ve always been,” she said.
A hot wad formed at the back of my throat.
“It really doesn’t bother you?” I said.
She shook her head.
“The only thing that matters to me is you’re alive,” she said.
I smiled, but the warmth didn’t return to her face.
“But that’s not the real reason you avoided me, is it?” she said.
The hardness returned to her voice.
I scanned her face, looking for hints about how much she knew. Stari knew almost everything. Could she have told Maddy?
I cleared my throat.
“How, uh, did the mission go?” I said.
“The mission went well,” Maddy said. “But an innocent Yayora soldier died, pretending to be me. She was sacrificed so I might live.”
“The Yayora are at war. Sometimes tough decisions have to be made.”
“And you know something about tough decisions, don’t you?” she said.
The blood drained from my face. I glanced at the empty doorway. If I ran now, I could escape that question and the conversation it would lead to.
It wasn’t going to be much fun.
Stari had told her everything—everything she knew, at least.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Maddy said. “You’ve played this gameshow of theirs many times, each time with a different partner. A different girl.”
Her eyes glinted with jealousy at the word “girl.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Oh, I think I know exactly what it was like. Stari showed me the footage from your other… performances.”
“It was different with them. I didn’t love them—”
“I’m sure the sex was real torture.”
“No, it wasn’t torture—”
Maddy turned on me.
“Did you love any of them?” she said.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“You sure seemed to enjoy being with them.”
Her eyes burned like red-hot furnaces.
“I had to do it,” I said. “If I didn’t, they would have killed the girls. Maybe me too. The audience watched the show because the contestants care about each other. They want to see us fall in love. I had to make it look like we were in love. But we weren’t.”
“Maybe you weren’t,” Maddy said. “But they were.”
I turned away.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes their love might have been real.”
“There’s no ‘might’ about it!” Maddy said. “They loved you and you led them to their deaths!”
“We tried to escape. But we always failed.”
“The whole gameshow was fake.”
“The only real thing were the girls,” I said. “And the weapons and explosions.”
“Did you ever reach the shuttlecraft with them?” Maddy said.
“No. The closest I ever came was with you. I thought if we could reach it, if we could get away, we could finally be safe.”
Maddy’s eyes drifted between mine.
“You really don’t know, do you?” she said.
“Don’t know what?”
Her eyes scrubbed my face again, looking for something that wasn’t there.
“The shuttlecraft,” she said. “It wasn’t real. It was a prop, something for you to chase after but never reach. Even if you did—as other contestants with their partners managed to do, the Changelings blew it up and then later edited it so it looked like one of the trackers did it.”
“What?” I said. “No, that can’t be right.”
“It is. Stari showed me the footage. It hasn’t happened just once. It’s happened many times.”
The planet shifted beneath my feet and I almost
