The smoke hits her first. It's thick and black, and it coats her lungs like tar.
The fire is still raging at the Cornucopia. The pile of supplies has become a blue-orange bonfire, but the flames have spread somehow. Maybe the Careers had paraffin lamps like she did, and they spilled, or maybe the Amphisobian girl's Molotov cocktail leaked flammable liquid over a wider surface area than she intended. Either way, the Cornucopia is completely encircled.
Celgnar has taken refuge on top of the metal structure, with whatever weapons he could salvage from the fire. When he sees Leela – running for her life with a pack of maddened mutts on her heels – he swears. Leela assumes the stream of words he screams out at her are swearwords, anyway. He has fallen back on his native Martian, and she can't understand a word of it.
The bullet that zings past her ear speaks the universal language of violence though.
Leela keeps running. She can't duck or weave – she doesn't have the strength to do anything but run, straight and fast, and hope to outpace the mutts. They're gaining on her. The smoke in her lungs is slowing her down, making it hard to breathe. Her muscles are screaming. Her only hope is to keep moving – too fast for Celgnar to hit, too fast for the mutts to catch.
Super-heated air hits her in the face.
A second bullet flies past her, but the hot air warps its trajectory. It hits one of the mutts instead.
The ring of fire is dead ahead. The mutts are closing in behind.
Sweat drips into her eye. She coughs and stumbles – don't fall, don't fall . . .
She's almost there, almost clear of the fire. All she needs to do is jump. And then -
Pressure. Pain. The feeling closes on her calf like steel jaws, and Leela screams.
She kicks out in desperation. The mutt falls away, but its jaws are still shut tight on her leg, and a chunk of her flesh comes away with it. It tears off with sickening ease; a mouthful of thick, bloody jelly that can't be part of her, can't belong to her . . .
Her head is spinning.
She wants to vomit, to black out, to die . . .
She falls into the fire.
Leela throws her arms up automatically to shield her face. The instant she spends in the inferno feels like an eternity; searing hot and suffocating.
And then she is through and gasping on the other side.
She drops and rolls, and rolls again, crushing the flames that still lick at her clothes and hair. There are holes burnt out of her clothes and she reeks of singed hair. Her palms and forearms are tender to the touch, heat still building beneath the skin even as the surface layers turn red and shiny.
She has rolled into the mouth of the Cornucopia.
The air is hotter in here. The metal buckles and groans, but Celgnar can't reach her, and the mutts are snarling on the other side of the flames. It's the safest place she could be.
Her stomach pitches and she vomits pure bile. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then rolls over to get a better look at the wound on her leg.
There is blood everywhere. It looks bad, but closer inspection reveals the mutt's teeth have missed any major arteries. It's a flesh wound: ugly and liable to turn septic if she doesn't get it treated soon, but not immediately life-threatening. She thinks of Fry. The throwing star hit him in the chest, and the blood was bright red. It gushed out like a geyser every time they took the pressure off, until they managed to repair the wound. She isn't bleeding even half so much. And her lightheadedness is probably caused more by smoke inhalation than blood loss. She can survive this.
Leela tears off the sleeve of her sweater and cinches it tight around the missing flesh. If she avoids putting any weight on her leg, she can move. It'll be slow going, but better than nothing.
The mutts are howling. On the roof of the Cornucopia, Celgnar is screaming. Threatening to kill her, probably. Every so often he fires off a shot.
Leela grits her teeth and begins to crawl deeper into the Cornucopia. Smoke and shadows swallow her up as the walls narrow around her, curling in to form the tip of the horn. Blisters the size of plums are swelling on her forearms. She drags herself on, fighting the urge to scream as the concrete peels strips off her burned skin.
When she gets to the tip of the horn, it's not hard to kick away a sheet of metal and worm her way out. It makes a noise, but Celgnar doesn't notice. Not when the entire structure is groaning in the heat. The metal bangs and groans as it is slowly warped out of shape. On the roof, the rubber of Celgnar's boots is melting. He isn't screaming anymore – he's coughing too hard for that. He must think Leela is still inside, licking her wounds or passed out from the smoke, because all his attention is on the mutts now. They're inching closer, waiting for a break in the flames. Preparing to jump.
She doesn't have much time.
There is a plinth nearby. A tribute stood here a week ago. (A week? Has it been a week? Or more? Her thinking is fuzzy – the Games feel like they've lasted forever, and the time before seems distant and unreal.) But Leela remembers what the Gamemakers told them, remembers the warning that is passed down to the tributes every year. If you leave your place before the countdown ends, you'll be blown to smithereens.
There are explosives buried in the ground.
It's not a weapon a tribute is ever supposed to use. It's just another way for the Gamemakers to keep them in their place. But the choice facing her now is to add to the list of reasons the Gamemakers hate her, or be torn apart by their hell-hounds. It's not a choice, she tells herself.
Besides . . . she still hasn't heard the cannon. If it hasn't gone off yet, then Fry isn't dead yet. Leela isn't sure why this matters, why it drives her to work faster, try harder, keep on living when the best way to help him would be to die here and now. All she knows is that it does.
The ground is disturbed by the foot of the pedestal, where the charges were set. Leela digs through the dirt, flinging fistfuls of earth to the side. Her fingers close around a smooth, waxy stick in a nest of wiring. She rips it out.
Her eye is streaming. Her lungs are on fire.
She lurches around to the mouth of the Cornucopia. The mutts have broken through the flames, followed the scent of her blood into the Cornucopia itself. Celgnar is on his knees, woozy from the smoke. He must be out of ammo, because he has thrown aside the gun and is half-leaning on his spear. He sees Leela and starts to rise.
Leela lifts her arm.
It feels wrong ending it like this, doing it like this. It's not a mercy killing and it's not a fair fight. It's just . . . death. Painful, ugly death.
She throws the explosive into the mouth of the Cornucopia and drops to the ground.
Leela doesn't see the explosion. It's too bright, too loud, too close. She shields her face and neck with her arms, but the aftershock tears through her anyway, a wave of sound and heat and noise that feels like it could punch the heart clean out of her chest. It strips her skin raw and leaves her ears ringing. When the cannon tolls for Celgnar, she can't hear it.
Her mouth tastes like ash. Everything is burned, and burning, and the world is swimming around her. She tries to sit up and it all goes black.
It's hard to say how long she was out.
Her surroundings are smoldering when Leela opens her eye again, and the air is still thick and hot. She tries to take a breath and her chest immediately constricts, forcing the air back out in a violent coughing fit. Her throat feels scalded all the way down to her lungs.
Her balance is off-kilter too. Her right ear is crusted with dried blood, and her hearing on that side has a murky, underwater feel. The explosion must have blown out her eardrum.
She is supposed to get up. There was something she needed to do, but she can't remember what it was, or why it mattered.
They should fire the cannon, she thinks. End it now. End her now. It's time, isn't it?
She closes her eye again.
Ash is drifting through the air. Bleached white flakes of it stick to her cheeks. Some of those flakes are Celgnar, and that thought would have made Leela want to scrape her own skin off, once. But now it doesn't seem to matter. What difference does it make? They're all dead, really, all the tributes, and they always were. They were just too stupid to know it.
Fry isn't dead.
The thought arrives fully-formed in her head, and it jolts her because it has feeling behind it. It's sharp. Insistent.
Fry isn't dead.
That's true, isn't it? It must be true. The hovercraft hasn't come for her yet, she isn't hearing fanfare and celebratory cannon fire and Abner Doubledeal's smug congratulations booming out from a hidden speaker. Which means she isn't this year's Victor. Not yet.
They're waiting for him to die.
Leela drags herself to her knees, and starts to crawl. Her body protests, but she ignores it. She can feel her heartbeat again, hard and fast against her ribcage. She doesn't have a plan. The only thing she knows is that if Fry is still alive, she's not alone.
Her progress is pitiful.
The Gamemakers are probably laughing at her. Leela knows how they think. They'll zoom the cameras out until she is nothing at all, just a tiny, insignificant speck in a ruined world. Or maybe they'll focus in on one particularly pathetic detail, like the burned skin of her hands, or the trail of blood behind her. She made one of the most thrilling kills of the Games, but she broke an unwritten rule to do it. They'll try to make her look as weak as possible in the aftermath.
Not that it will take much trying. She might not be dying, but she's in a sorry state.
This is how they'll punish her, she thinks blearily. She defied the Gamemakers for Fry, over and over, but it won't matter, because they'll make sure the audience sees how futile it was. When Fry dies, they'll mine every moment of her grief and then they'll airlift a broken girl out of the arena, and put a crown on her head. To mock her. To show everyone what winning is really worth, when the girl who wanted to win can't even remember why.
Fry is lying motionless where she left him. For one awful moment Leela thinks maybe he is dead – maybe the Gamemakers silenced the cannon and left his body here to mess with her – but then she gets close enough to make out his breathing.
"Fry."
The word comes out half a cough, making her throat sting.
She turns him over. His eyes are closed, but when she shakes him by the shoulder they flutter open, wide and unfocused like a boy already dead.
It unnerves her.
"Fry," she says again, more urgently this time. "Fry, wake up."
She shakes him again, and his gaze comes back into focus.
"L – Leela?"
Leela nods. Her throat feels like sandpaper. Her eye is still streaming. She must look as bad as she feels, because Fry's forehead creases in concern.
"Oh no," he whispers. "You're dead too. No . . . no . . ."
Leela grabs his hand. It's cold and limp in her grasp, and Fry doesn't seem to register her touch at all. She swallows hard.
"I'm not dead," she rasps. "Neither are you. Can you . . . can you sit up?"
Fry shakes his head, then blinks drunkenly, as if the effort made him dizzy.
Leela grits her teeth. She won't end it like this, with Fry lying discarded in the road and her kneeling over him like his wailing widow. That's the visual the Gamemakers want, and Leela won't let them have it.
She summons all her strength instead, and uses it to stand. To drag Fry across the street and prop him against a wall before she collapses in a heap beside him.
Moving him was a bad idea. He slips out of consciousness again, and only wakes when she shakes him hard. But he does wake. He's not dead. Not yet.
"Leela," he mumbles, more relieved this time than scared. His hand twitches, like he wants to touch her but doesn't have the strength. "You came back."
Leela nods.
"You're still alive."
It's the only explanation she can give. Fry seems to get it though. He smiles weakly at her.
"I know. You did it, Leela. You kept me alive. And I kept you alive." His hand finds hers, fingers curl around her own. "And now you have to kill me."
Time seems to stop.
Leela can't think – can't process what he's saying, can't fight him on it. All she can do is watch Fry's fingers unfurl, watch him tip the poisoned darts into her hand. The darts she planted on him to fend off the mutts. The ones she took from the Amphisobian girl.
The girl wanted to use them to kill Fry.
Dead in a minute. That's what she promised.
No pain.
But . . . she can't. She can't.
She finds a word at last.
"No."
"Leela, you have to." Fry squeezes her hand, frustration evident on his face. "You know you do. We can't both win!"
"Then we both lose!"
The words come out too loud, ringing in the silence, and they scald her throat. But Leela doesn't try to take them back. It's the truth, isn't it? It's what she's been thinking all along: if only one of them wins, then both of them lose. There won't be a Victor, not for her and Fry. Just the one who dies, and the one who has to live with it.
And then it hits her. The way to make the Gamemakers feel it.
"We both lose," she murmurs.
She uncaps the poison darts and puts one back in Fry's hand, curling his fingers around it and raising it level with her own heart. She holds the other up to his chest.
"I don't want to win. Not without you."
Horror dawns on Fry's face.
"No. No way." Under her splayed fingers, Leela can feel his heart pick up. "I won't."
Leela hesitates. She could yell at him, or try to make him see her point of view, but there's no time. They have to act before the Gamemakers do.
So she plays the only card she can. It doesn't feel fair, but then, nothing about this is fair.
Fry's hair is stiff with dirt and sweat. Leela pushes it out of his eyes and touches his cheek. The gesture is so gentle it feels foreign, but it works. Fry's anger becomes uncertainty.
"Wha . . . what are you . . . ?"
"Do you love me?"
Fry swallows. There is a long, long pause.
"Yes," he whispers at last.
Leela rests her forehead against his and shuts her eye. It's a tiny respite, an instant in which she can pretend the arena doesn't exist.
"Then trust me," she breathes back.
Fry shivers.
"Together?" he asks.
"On three," Leela confirms.
Fry nods.
"Okay."
He takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"Three," Leela says quietly.
She presses her lips to his then pulls away, afraid to prolong the kiss.
"Two," Fry mumbles.
He's really going to do it. He's really going to die for her.
And she's going to die for him.
I'm sorry, Mom, Leela thinks.
"One -"
"STOP! STOP!" Abner Doubledeal's wild, panicked voice bursts out of hidden speakers. "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND VARIATIONS THEREUPON, I GIVE YOU THE JOINT VICTORS OF THIS YEAR'S CITIZENSHIP GAMES – TURANGA LEELA AND PHILIP J FRY!"