XX: Day Three, Dawn & Afternoon.
Sabre Hennedige, 15
Applicant #6
He's not sure how long he stands there.
He balances on top of the monolith for a very long while, certainly. Enough for the sun to fully rise. Brighter and brighter, until it hurts his eyes to look. He presses a hand to his bleeding ear to find two long tears towards the bottom of the lobe, and two of the little hoops there missing. Only the third remains, and the few he has along the very top ridge.
The number on the bracelet says nineteen. It still says nineteen just like before.
So, Faye's not-dead. Faye's just fell... because of him?
No, not because of him. He thought she was stabilized.
But he knows that's not the truth, either. She was so frantic in her movements, worried about the prospect of falling. She wouldn't have grabbed at him so desperately if she was stable, wouldn't have hurt him the way she did. There's a little bit of blood on the rock underneath him, and pooling on his fingers where he prods at the injury, gently.
Faye's alive.
He keeps pressure against his ear and slowly lowers himself down, off in search of his missing ears.
He takes his time picking his way down to the ground, painfully slow. He doesn't want to fall like she did.
Dropped, his brain says. You dropped her.
He didn't, though. She lost her balance before he did anything.
She was going to fall anyway. And she had acted like she owned him, telling him to be more confident herself, like that was a switch he could just turn off and on. Like how it used to be.
Not one owned him. He was his own person - he had made sure of that, even if he didn't know what to do with himself most days. He wasn't about to let Faye take that control away from him the way it seemed she was trying so desperately to.
So maybe, possibly, he let go with the intention that the fall would kill her. Maybe he did.
He's not so sure, yet.
He gets down to the ground, staring at the dirt with an intensity that screams earrings gone for good. They could be anywhere; chances are they're still up somewhere on the rock. They didn't fall the same way she did. He scrabbles back up a ways, keeps the pressure. It's not bleeding that much. He doesn't really need an intact earlobe.
There's a wheeze - an awful, quiet little wheeze, and he freezes mid-step, foot half-raised. He hears it again, slightly louder.
It has to be.
If it's not Faye then he has to acknowledge that he might as well truly be off the deepest end in existence. Maybe he already is. He didn't all the way intend to kill her. Sometimes accidents just happen, thoughts lead you to believe you're doing the right thing. And like he said - she couldn't control him. Her hands wouldn't be all over him, controlling his every move.
"Faye," he calls, cautiously, but gets no response save for another awful wheeze. He creeps towards the sound. It's around the side where she fell.
Where he let go.
It must be her, though, because the only other option would be a ghost, and he's not that confused, not yet. He sees her feet, first, tucked away in their dusty little flats, poking out from beyond one of the rocks. Another wheeze. He peeks around the edge.
She's face-up, which doesn't seem fair. There's a lot of blood. Her eyes are cracked open, the tips of two of her left fingers moving, but nothing else save for her lips and the blood slowly dripping from her skull to the rock below.
There's a bone poking out of her leg, too, middle of the shin. Just like Victoire Garcia's was.
Everything comes full circle.
"Faye," he says again, but she remains still. Her fingers twitch again, and one of his little silver hoops comes rolling out of his palm onto the rock below. He lunges for it, for some strange reason, feels her eyes flicker over to him as he moves right up to her side to grab at it. Everything feels better once he has possession of it once again. It's only one, but it's better than nothing.
Faye wheezes again, lips parting. Definitely still alive. Immobile, judging by the bone poking out of her shin. Perhaps there's something else wrong, too. She's not moving anything below the shoulders, limp and awkwardly stuck over the point of a rock. Certainly there's something broken elsewhere, then. A lot of things, if he was a betting man.
He's not.
So he didn't kill her. That's good. He's still not sure if he meant to, or not.
There were a lot of awful cracks on the way down, the main one being her tibia, but he heard other noises too. Not a single scream out of her mouth. Maybe she hadn't had the time, before the point of impact.
He hadn't said a word during the whole exchange either.
Her fingers twitch, and he prepares to inch backwards, away from her hand, like she's going to get him. She can't move, though. It's becoming awkward. He feels increasingly terrible watching her lying here like this, not doing anything while she suffers away. He wonders, absentmindedly, if Victoire screamed when Nikolai dropped her. She probably did.
What is he supposed to do, though? She has no weapon, no way to access him. Should he hold her hand? He's never held anyone's hand before besides his mother's, when he was much younger. He hasn't held it in a while.
He doesn't think Faye would take kindly to him holding her hand, not after... this.
He shoves his earring deep in the pocket of his slacks, and brushes against the compact little metal tool, nestled away at the bottom.
He has no easy answer, except for that.
Is that an easy answer, though? He would have to kill her, in order to end her suffering. He didn't intend to kill her.
Maybe he did. Not like this, though. Doing it this way seems so much more monstrous, so much more awful. Maybe she'll scream this time, too. He has no idea, and isn't sure he wants to. His other option is taking the bike and leaving her here, until the birds come round and begin to peck at her eyes. Maybe something else would get her, first. He isn't sure what other animals are around here.
The metal spike could do the job. It could slit her throat. He'd probably have to poke a hole, drag back the skin and muscle. It wouldn't be as pretty as a knife doing it.
A knife's not pretty, either.
He pulls the tool out. She wheezes again, but this time it breaks in the middle, shoots towards a higher pitch.
Oh, she's scared. He didn't know that was a thing Faye could do.
He presses the tip of the spike against her throat. Her head jerks away, but only an inch or two. It moves with her, and he shifts forward on his knees to keep up after her. If he just thinks of it mechanically, then it's nothing. He's not killing her, really, but putting her out of her misery. That's merciful.
He pushes in. The spike sinks into her throat easier than he expected, like nothing at all, really. Maybe he's just stronger than he thought. That's a good sign; he's on the right track.
He drags right, digging the tip in. It's sharp, but doesn't cut right, not quite like butter, as some people would say. It's jagged at best when it cuts through another inch of her neck. She's still alive, too, eyes still open, though it almost looks as if she's trying to struggle away, now. It's nerve-wracking.
The tool stops, caught up in some tissue or muscle, and he presses a finger against her throat to clear the way, running his nail along the seam of the wound. He gets through another inch, then two.
That should be good, right? It's not her whole throat the entire way round, but he doesn't think he should do that much.
He pulls the tool out and there's an immediate gush of blood down her neck. She chokes up a mouthful of it too. He backs up, getting to his feet. There's already blood soaked into the collar of his shirt from his ear - he doesn't want more of it on him than the bit that's seeped under his nails.
The wheezing has stopped, but now it's just a louder gurgle.
He puts the tool back in his pocket, rolling the earring between two fingers as he feels it, and heads back for the bike. Mechanically.
Mechanically is best. He knows it.
The number is down to eighteen before he even gets back on the bike.
Tarquin Vierra, 16
Applicant #4
The whole world is reduced to a numbing amount of pain.
He thinks numbing because everything he had in his brain at the time just froze over, like an ice age reserved for him and him specifically.
Topher is yelling. He's yelling a whole hell of a lot. Tarquin isn't sure why, exactly, but feels like it has to do with why he's in so much pain.
He's in a lot of pain, honestly. He'd be panicking if his brain wasn't an entire block of ice.
He can hear Noelani, now, and then a very burst of frantic, panicked shouting that sounds a lot like Jay. Well, at least the three of them are here. That has to be a good sign. Probably, anyway. He's not so sure about what's good and what isn't, right now.
"God, what is that?" Jay asks. "Is that like a fucking trap, or something?"
"It looks like a bear trap," Topher says and oh, suddenly this all makes a lot more sense. Someone grabs his face - has to be Noelani, certainly, because it sounds like the other two are flailing around down by his feet.
He doesn't want to, but he opens his eyes. It's not so bright here, where the rock shields some of the sun. This had looked like a promising area, he and Topher had both thought. There were signs of previous human life, some hundreds of years ago, and an entrance into the side of the hill like a mine-shaft, somehow not collapsed. It was hardly visible even from here, tucked away into the rock.
Or maybe that was because he was on the ground, now, and couldn't see much of anything.
"Hey," Noelani says, although her voice is too fast to be considered normal. "Hey, you're fine. It's all fine."
"Is it?" he asks, voice strained. He doesn't dare try to move.
"Yeah, totally. All good."
He nods. He feels stupid nodding.
"How do we get it off?" Noelani asks, looking backwards at the other two. He's just staring right overhead, trying to focus on the sky. That's much better than thinking about how much it hurts.
"Do we want to get it off?" Jay wonders. "Do you know how much that's going to bleed if we do? Wouldn't it be better if we left it on?"
"And do what? It's fastened to the rock. So we're just supposed to leave him here?"
He looks at Noelani, then, and she smiles at him. It's sort of grim. "I wasn't serious. We're not leaving you here."
"Oh," he manages. "Okay. Should I look?"
"Do you want to?"
He's honestly not sure, but he nods anyway. Noelani slide an arm under his shoulders to help him up, and he flattens his palms to the ground, slowly inching his way into a sitting position. It's maybe not as terrible as he was expecting. By the reactions he was expecting half his leg to be missing, which would prove to be a problem for the future.
There's a decent amount of blood, though, soaked into the light fabric of his pants all around the ankle. He can barely even see the thing they're calling a bear trap, hidden among the fabric and buried in his skin. There's a chain extending out from it, presumably towards a rock behind him that he doesn't shift to look at.
He wiggles his toes. It hurts, but he can feel them.
"I shouldn't have looked," he decides. "Fuck."
He can't imagine how bad it looks underneath the layer of clothing, how mangled his leg must be. With that amount of blood there's something seriously sharp digging into his leg, something severing parts of it open.
"That— that metal thing you have—"
"It's too wide to fit in there," Noelani answers. "And none of us are strong enough to pry it open."
"Speak for yourself," Jay mutters, poking experimentally at the chain like that's really going to do anything. He might be strong enough to do anything, if he could reach the trap in the first place, but he can't at this angle. And he isn't sure he would want to.
"Jay's right, anyway," she continues. "It would bleed too much. We'd need something to stop the bleeding before we..."
"We don't have anything to stop the bleeding," Topher breaks in. "We just need to get him out of it."
"Well, then I'm saying we need to go look for something. Maybe there's a town nearby, or even a few buildings. Even if we could find a few extra shirts, or some blankets."
They're going to leave him here. They're going to leave him here stuck in this thing, even though Noelani said they wouldn't. His chest sort of hurts at the thought.
"Calm down," Noelani instructs. She's still got a hand on his wrist. The bracelet's still hidden, and so is the line of his pulse, but she certainly must be able to feel it if he can hear it in his own ears. "Someone will stay here with you. Jay, if Topher and I go walk for a few hours, will you stay here with him? Like I said, you're right. We can't do anything until we're prepared to fix it."
How do they fix this? His leg, his ankle, it's all completely mangled and bleeding and why is this thing even out here in the first place?
"Why would they set traps for us?" he breathes. "What, their guns aren't good enough on their own?"
He looks up, and Noelani and Jay are sharing a glance, something unspoken passing between their eyes.
"What?" he forces out.
"Nothing," Noelani says, too quick for it to be true. "We need to go. Jay will stay here with you. If we're not back by night..."
"Don't say that," he insists.
"What am I supposed to do if you don't come back by night?" Jay asks. "Like you said, we can't get him out of it."
"Then you'll have to figure something out," Noelani answers. She squeezes his hand until he turns to her. She offers another smile, a poor one. For once it does nothing to make him feel better. If she was staying here with him, maybe, but there's no way she'd split up from Topher right now, and he wouldn't ask her to. He doesn't have any siblings, but even if it was one of his friends from back home he wouldn't leave them either.
"Just take it easy," she says quietly, and lets go of his hand. "Let's go, Toph."
She passes the metal bar off to Jay as the two of them head off, back down the rocky hill. Jay stands there, towering above him for once, fingers flexing against the metal. He watches them for a long while before his gaze focuses elsewhere, seemingly in every direction but the one they just walked off in.
"What are you not saying?" he asks. "What do you and Noelani know that we don't?"
Jay doesn't answer. He avoids looking down at him entirely, it seems.
"Nothing," he says eventually. "At least I really hope it's nothing."
Myra Callaghan-Alistair, 18
Applicant #5
She's never been in the middle of such an awful situation before.
It's quiet, and then it's not. Someone starts freaking out, and then everything falls silent once again.
It's a vicious cycle. But it makes sense.
It was an accident. She maintains that. People fought; that was the natural order of things. Not everyone could get along all of the time - that would just be silly. The world only turned because some people fought and some people loved. It kept on spinning.
But it didn't always have to end the way it did.
And it was her fault.
They couldn't even see where Emmi landed, after she had plunged off the edge of the cliff. But the number on the bracelet had changed, finally, so at least it had been quick. At least she didn't suffer.
That's what Myra's living with, now. The realization that someone died because of her, and she's happy only because it was a quick death.
They may not have gotten along like old friends, but she didn't want to kill her. They were going to fight, get their anger out, and that was supposed to be the end. Throwing a few punches and kicks at each other was supposed to be enough to sort it out. She doesn't know how it happened, doesn't know how they ended up turned around, doesn't know how hard she must have shoved her for the edge of the cliff to give way under her feet...
But it doesn't matter now.
Arwen looks to be in a state of shock. She's sitting in the back of the truck with her arms wrapped around herself, looking very un-Arwen like as she stares at the cliff's edge. Myra was the one that had pulled her back from that same edge, eventually, only for Arwen to rip herself out of Myra's arms, screaming obscenities.
And she deserved them. She didn't yell back.
The truth is that she was allowing her brain to slip away into a sort of soupy-like texture, because everything blended together. There were no harsh edges, no harsh words. Just easy consistency.
Jupiter's been crying. Maybe they've stopped, now, because Myra can no longer hear them. Or maybe Gideon's just muffling it.
"Myra?"
She doesn't move, unsurprised when Jahaira finally sits down next to her in the dirt. Her eyes look just as blank as Myra feels.
This whole thing is just awful. She can feel the air around them, like she could cut it with a knife, if she had one. Everyone's flickering eyes watching each other like they're afraid they'll be the next ones over the edge.
"Did you mean it?" Jahaira whispers. "Did you mean to—"
"Of course not," she snaps. Gideon's eyes snap to hers, already narrowed. "I didn't mean for her to fall off the edge, I didn't realize how close we were..."
"But Jupiter tried to warn you," Arwen says flatly. "Don't pretend you didn't hear them. You heard. You just didn't care."
"Because you're the pinnacle for caring, right, Arwen?" she asks, clambering to her feet. Jahaira looks up at her in alarm, eyes already saying not again, not again.
Maybe, again. She's not writing the possibility of it out just yet.
Arwen stays seated in her hunched over position, arms drawn around herself. Even in this state she almost looks like royalty, and Myra would believe it if not for the sheen to her eyes, the worried clench of her fingers around her own arms.
"At least I cared enough to not push someone off a damn cliff."
"I didn't push her!" she bursts out. "It— it was an accident, she slipped. Do you hear me? It was an accident."
"Nothing like that is an accident."
"She threw the first punch."
"So your first response is to fucking kill her?" Arwen snaps. Now she gets to her feet, finally, slipping from the back of the truck. Suddenly the royalty makes all the more sense, even though her purple hair now is dull in comparison to what it looked like a few days ago, softened by dirt and sand.
"I just told you it was an accident."
"And I told you - nothing you do is accidental. Maybe even you didn't know it, but you were thinking it somewhere in the back of the mind. That it would be easier if she was gone."
"And maybe I'm thinking that about you," she replies. "But I'm not doing anything about that, am I?"
"Not yet," Arwen scoffs. "God, not yet. This is what we're reduced to. Just get it over with and kill me, then, or give it your best shot."
"Don't," Jahaira says. "Please don't fight. You guys don't need to fight."
They don't, but they might. As terrible as it sounds, fighting with Emmi seemed easier. Maybe because of the missing arm, or something else she wasn't quite sure about. Arwen is more intimidating, an opponent that looks as if they'll bite back with all the force in the world. And she just killed, indirectly, the person Arwen was closest with by a very long mile.
She wonders who would win this fight, and can't say confidently that it would be her.
She doesn't know which outcome she would hate worse, either.
"I changed my mind," she says instead. "We should go. Or I'll just go, if that makes it easier."
"So now you want to go," Arwen mutters. "All of this and now you're agreeing to go. Was it worth it, then?"
It wasn't. None of this was. She wants to go back home so desperately, she wants to be back in a tattoo parlor, she wants to rewind time even just an hour, to before all of this. She wants Emmi to still be here.
Fights happen. They don't have to end the way this one did. She would pull them both back from the edge, let them get their anger out at a safe distance.
No one would have to die.
"I think it would be easier if you went, actually," Arwen says. She leans back against the edge of the truck but now her arms are folded across her chest, held more taut. Myra can see where her nails are digging into her own skin, the golden polish chipped away at the edges to reveal the brittleness underneath. No longer perfect. Far from it, in fact.
Nothing about any of them is perfect anymore.
"That's it, then?" she asks. "You want me to go?"
Arwen swallows, working away for a few seconds. Myra can sense all of the things she wants to say just out of reach, held carefully on her tongue. When she looks up there's something different about her eyes. The sheen is gone to them.
The sadness erased. Like the flip of a switch, a quick shift of emotions.
"Yeah," Arwen answers. "Yeah, I do."
Something shifts behind her. Gideon, maybe, or Jupiter. She forgot they were even there.
Jahaira turns, too, just a fraction of an inch. Her mouth falls open.
"Fuck," she says. "Jesus, don't—"
Something cracks into the back of Myra's head.
There's no more shifting, after that.
Jahaira Aurelion, 16
Applicant #23
She flings herself away, far away from the madness, and closes her eyes.
She goes somewhere else. Into one of the pictures she took of the early morning light rising over the mountains, golden and pink and purple light spilling over the desert. She pretends she's far away, just a girl in a peaceful desert town, a place where her and her sister could dance in the rainstorms that only pass through a few times a year.
She opens her eyes, miraculously, and she is not dead.
But Myra is.
That's what the thunderstorm was the entire time. The crack of the thunder the sound of her skull, underneath the impact of the bat. The sound of their shoes sinking into the soft mud more like the fluid that must be leaking out of her brain, into the dirt. It sounds just like it, the soft, wet sounds of the impact over and over again. So much so that she's not sure if she can take it anymore.
There's a sound that's ruining it all, too, the louder sounds of someone retching. Arwen is still standing at the back of the truck watching Gideon do... just what he's doing, so it must be Jupiter.
Of course it's Jupiter.
"Stop," she pleads, finally. "Stop, please, just stop—"
She flattens her hands over her ears, so she's not sure if anything else comes out of her mouth, or if the sound really stops. Why would Gideon listen to her, after all, or Arwen? After what they just did?
It was Gideon's action, but Arwen saw it all coming. She didn't see it until the last second, until it was too late to stop it. That means even Jupiter saw it coming, then, and didn't pull him away, take the bat from his hands. They let him do it all the same.
This is just a nightmare, someone's awful creation, another simulation. It certainly can't be happening, because what then?
She opens her eyes, unaware of when she had closed them again. Arwen's gone - she hears the noise of the truck's door slamming as if underwater, somewhere very far away. Gideon is still standing over the body. Myra, not the body. It's still Myra.
She's just not really here anymore.
"What did you do?" she asks weakly. "Why— what, what did you do?"
He considers that. "Conflict resolution."
"She's dead."
"That she is."
She nearly collapses into the dirt, her knees are shaking so bad. Is that what Arwen felt, in the moment that they realized Emmi had gone off the cliff? Did she feel the same way Jahaira feels now? Myra's here but she's gone, and the back of her skull is a caved-in, bloody mess, nothing more than a hole where so much had been before, face down in the dirt.
The sick thing is, she's glad she can't see her face. She doesn't want to.
Something in her moves. She's not sure what part of her. It requires her navigating around the body, around Myra, to get to Gideon. Once there she reaches her hands out and shoves him, only once, hard in the chest. He only stumbles back a pace. It still satisfies something in her.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she hisses. "Are you insane? Why— why would you just do that, why—"
"It's done now," he interrupts. "You can do whatever you want. See you."
See you, like they're ending a school day. Gideon readjusts the bat in his hands, handle still clean, and starts walking away. Dimly, to her left, the car starts. Jupiter and her stare at each other. She imagines they look much the same - horrified, confused, shocked.
But Jupiter let it happen, she reminds herself. Jupiter's not a good person the way she thought.
They glance around a few times, at Jahaira and the rumbling car, to Gideon's retreating form. The breath they take makes their entire body quiver.
"Mal!" they call, voice just as shaky. "Wait up!"
They turn around to give chase. It's an awkward, hobbling sort of run. Jahaira no longer has the capacity to feel bad about it.
There's blood almost an inch from her shoes, and she shuffles away from it. She gets the feeling that the two of them are never coming back.
Which leaves her standing there, like she was the murderer, and Arwen in the car. She is not Myra's killer, neither of them. One more so than the other, perhaps, but at neither of their hands. Or maybe at the heart of it they were all at fault.
It feels like they were all at fault. How the Sentinels must be laughing at them now.
Her walk to the passenger side of the truck is like that of a robot; she'd be laughing at someone walking this way, back home, but can only imagine that it's appropriate now. She reaches for the door handle without looking up, to where Arwen must be watching. She remains unsurprised when the door doesn't pull open like it would normally, locked tight.
"Please," she says, hoping her voice is loud enough. She feels weak. She hates feeling that way.
She doesn't hear the lock click open, but Arwen reaches over and opens the door.
"It wasn't locked," she says flatly. "It gets stuck. You didn't pull hard enough."
There isn't even any room in her for mortification anymore. She just nods, dimly, and climbs into the passenger seat. It would be too easy to curl up and let the worn leather swallow her whole - that's what she wants to do.
"Don't want to take a picture now?" Arwen asks. There's not as much maliciousness in it as Jahaira would expect, but it's still a dig. She palms the camera, tucked into the pocket of her shorts. It's still there, but it's of no use now. Some things can't be captured with just a photograph. It wouldn't be able to express how she feels now, what the sheen of blood looks like in the afternoon desert sun when it's coming out of one of your friends.
It would be fake, like everything else feels.
She shakes her head, staring ahead. Arwen is staring at the side of her face, she can feel it, but she gazes resolutely ahead, lets her hand fall away from the camera.
Like she said, no use now. No use ever again, maybe.
It's that thought, of them all, that makes her feel the most desolate.
Damas Mancer, 13
Applicant #12
"Do you think she found something?" he asks.
Percy shrugs. He feels it where his arms are draped over his shoulders. "Hopefully. It's that or she's getting attacked by something, and I'm not sure if I'm in the correct mindset to deal with that."
He nods in agreement, settling his chin back over his arm. Verity's up ahead and over a hill, yelling and creating the greatest racket he's heard in the past three days, or possibly a lot longer. He can't remember ever making that much noise in his entire life. It's a testament to just how different certain people are, he guesses. And it's a nice change from the drag of the normal days.
This is their normal days, now.
"Guys!" Verity is shouting, over and over again. It's getting louder as Percy makes his way further up the hill, still with Damas perched on his back.
"Are you going to drop dead soon?" he asks, focusing on each uncertain step underneath them both.
"Probably," Percy huffs. "Sorry if I do."
He nods again, sagely. At this point he's trying to make himself as easy to carry as possible, let Percy manhandle him as he pleases. He's given up his little hat, too, even though it doesn't quite fit Percy's head. He's resorted to holding it over top of him. It's not very much shade for the person doing all the work, but it's something.
The space between them is slick with sweat. He's not exactly enjoying it either.
"Guys!" Verity yells again, just as they crest the top of the little hill.
Percy nearly collapses, he suspects, but not from exhaustion.
"Oh, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," he breathes, and Damas nods. Again. He feels stupid for nodding so much.
It's not the vast, flowing stream that seems to haunt both his nightmares and dreams, but it's water. It's a wide swath cut through the rocky desert. There's even grass and flowers, large boulders. The river isn't flowing at all force - in fact, it's not even ankle deep, as Verity is proving as she wades through it. But it's lapping over her shoes and still running, even though the basin is half-dried out. There's even a little boardwalk built out over some parts of it, broken pieces of dilapidated wood hanging off into the water and grass below.
He can imagine it in cooler times, when the water is running properly, swollen after the rain.
Verity lays down at the edge of it and promptly sticks the entire bottom half of her face into the stream.
"I don't even care if that's safe to drink," Percy announces. "I'll die from bad water, I don't care."
He huffs out a little agreeable laugh - somehow that sounds better than dying from heatstroke. Not so hot, in the very least. Hot like he is, he's certain, from fever. It's not just the climate that's doing it to him.
He doesn't know anything about the types of infections that could be lingering in the wound on his side, mostly taped over. Even the tape is starting to lose its grip, between the sweat and the movement. He isn't sure how long it will last.
Percy deposits him at the edge of the stream and then wades into it himself, sitting down in the deepest part of it with a splash and a thud. It still doesn't even flow over his knees, but Verity lifts her head up from the water and laughs, full of glee.
It feels a lot better than it used to.
He pulls himself to the water's edge and dips his hands in. It's not even cool, lukewarm at best, and it tastes slightly muddy when he lifts it to his lips and drinks, but it may just be the best thing he's ever tasted. He takes another handful, slowly. They're so hungry and dehydrated that too much water probably won't do them any good.
He takes a few more handfuls and then shifts forward again, draping his arms into the water. Even the lukewarm temperature of it feels so much better than the sun. Verity has rolled over and is just about laying in it, staring up at the sun and looking deliriously happy about it, if she can see anything at all.
Something twinges in his side once he lays down and he nearly cries out in pain, a pulsing agony rippling through his side, all the way into his stomach.
"If there's water, there's probably an old town or something around here, right?" Verity asks, while he's biting the inside of his cheek.
"Probably," Percy answers. He turns over onto his hands and knees, looking around. "Maybe towards that bend?"
He looks up, even though his eyes are blurry with pain-induced tears. There's some rock maybe a mile or two away, the child of a mountain. Something could be hiding behind it.
"Well we should go look, then. We could find somewhere to stay and we'd have water close by!"
Verity sounds she's picking a very delusional vacation spot, but he's in too much pain to protest or even tell her as much. He twitches again, trying to alleviate it, and swears something tears back open. He presses a hand against it and feels just a little more warmth seep through his already crusted-over shirt.
More blood. More risk of infection.
How bad could the risk be, if he already has one?
At this point he's just delaying the inevitable, unsure of why. He rubs at the wound through the shirt, feeling some of the tape edges peel free. It's already starting to come apart, anyway. Him unraveling it faster is only ensuring that he goes quicker.
But he's fine with that, really. Like he said, it's the inevitable. He doesn't want to burden these two with his life forever, not when they look so happy now. They have no right to look so happy, but it's beautiful, and he hopes to see it again, before he goes.
"This is nice," Verity decides. She looks at Percy, and then at him.
He smiles. Nods.
It is nice. And it will be nice too, after he's gone.
He's sure of it.
Emmi Langlois, 17
Applicant #13
People always talk about the different types of pain.
There's the emotional pain, the mental pain. The kind that sticks with you even when nothing on the outside hurts. She can feel that type, vaguely, tucked away into some back corner of her brain from the trauma of it all. The shock.
But there's the more pressing, alarming matter of the physical pain.
She moves - tries to, really. She can feel all of her fingers and toes; that's a good thing, certainly. There's something sticky and wet over her closed eyelids. Blood, presumably. She cracks them open and it's all she can see, the sky and the rock above her tinged red. She closes them again. It's easier that way, and not as complicated to focus.
The whole side of her face burns, like she's rubbed it raw. She twists her neck - it's sore, but she can still move it. Her head is throbbing, and she can feel where her hair is plastered to the ground because of all the blood. There's a deep, stabbing pain in her shoulder, and she's not sure what to call that. Dislocated? Broken? Just generally destroyed from the fall?
Her arm, though, the whole one, can move with only minimal pain. It hurts, no doubt scraped open and torn like her face is, but she gently rubs at some of the blood that's certainly in her eyes, clearing it away. When she opens them next everything is still faintly pink, blurry at the edges, but at least she can properly see.
The top edge of the cliff where she plunged off is no longer in sight. She can see it when she turns her head to the right, maybe ten or fifteen feet over. She must have hit more rock and rolled this way. Now she's tucked under the rocky overhang dug into the side of the cliff, laying on more rock and dirt. She doesn't dare move. She tongues at the split in her lip, feels her way up her jaw. It feels okay. The entire left side of her face is scraped to hell, as she predicted, and most of her ear. Her nose is sore when she prods at it but not too painful. There's another deeper gouge on her temple extending all the way into her hairline, god only knows how long and deep.
But she's alive, somehow. She can feel all her fingers and her toes.
She's alive, after falling off a cliff.
She takes deep breath after deep breath, focusing on nothing but her breathing. As long as she keeps it even and steady everything will be fine.
Or at least that's what she's trying to convince herself of, anyway.
If something is seriously wrong with her shoulder, she'll have to find a way to bandage it. A bandage, or an extra shirt, neither of which she actually has. She'll need more to cover some of her wounds.
And then what, if she can even walk? She has no water, no food, no others.
She can't hear them on the cliff above, either.
She doesn't get the feeling they're down here looking, either.
Okay, so she needs to try and stand. She has a map, which will help, and a box of matches. It's better than having nothing. She braces her elbow against the ground and pushes up, slowly. Her whole body throbs, her stomach and right side worst of all. Inch by inch she raises herself into a sitting position, until she can brace her back against the wide rock behind her.
It's worse than she thought, upon inspection.
There's a lot of blood, but she expected that. She was expecting the pain and the blood, the broken rock underneath her. What she wasn't expecting was the jagged tree branch sticking out of her abdomen.
She's an odd one, sometimes, and she knows it best of all, but something in her brain flees the premises. The panic, maybe. It packs up and leaves. She tries for a scream, tries for a faint whimper, even, and nothing will come out.
There's a fucking tree branch through her abdomen.
It's through her stomach and angled out towards the right, where the tip has burst through from her side, around her ribs. It's a foot long, at least, and as big around as her forearm.
And she's still not dead, miraculously.
That doesn't make any sense.
Maybe she's in shock. It certainly feels like she is.
There's a scraggly little tree clinging to the rock. One of the branches is snapped off, the one that must be in her now. She only knows it because she can see the bloody, broken end still clinging on. It must have stopped some of her momentum - that has to be the reason why she wasn't shattered into a hundred pieces upon hitting the ground.
The tree branch currently in her abdomen stopped her from splattering all over the ground.
Suddenly, this all seems to be a much bigger problem.
She takes another deep breath. It hurts worse than before. No shit, Emmi, her brain says back. You've got a branch in you, and approximately fuck-all else.
But that means nothing. She lays here and dies, or she gets moving. She figures something out.
She doesn't quite know how to lay down and die.
It seems like she has some work to do, then.
Happy 100k everyone. Not exactly the happiest way to ring it in, but alas.
Until next time.