XXXI: Day Eight, Evening.
Jupiter Valens, 14
Applicant #16
Should they really be headed towards the light?
"Should we be headed towards the light?" he asks Sabre over the sound of the bike, which is muffled because of the rather slow speed they're going at. It's like something's broken, but he's no mechanic, and neither is Sabre.
Sabre shrugs - he feels it where he's leaning over his shoulder to try and get a better look.
He's not sure what it is. A dull glow seeping from one of the windows it what appears to be a hovel of a building at the base of the mountains. Fire, maybe, or a dying flashlight. He doesn't know the difference.
It's obvious that it's something, though, someone who probably said hello to him at some point passing by each other in the hallway at the Institute. Hell, he could have shared a room with them. He almost hopes that the case - he wouldn't have a reason to be scared of Damas, or maybe it could even be Topher or Tarquin. That wouldn't be so bad. He could fix that.
Gideon, though. Gideon would hurt him.
Sabre slows the bike down even further on the last stretch to the building, stopping maybe twenty feet away from it. There's no way whoever's inside hasn't heard them - the bike makes enough racket to wake the dead. One of his worst fears is that he'll somehow survive this whole situation and still hear that noise wherever he goes, when he lays down at night. It's a terrible noise.
"So what are we doing?" he asks, when the both of them stay firmly seated on the bike.
"I don't know?"
"Then why did we come this way!" he hisses. "We didn't have to, you know."
"We could leave?"
"Well, not now," he mutters, even though they absolutely could. He's already clambering off the bike, actively ignoring his own advice. "We're here, we have to see who it is."
How bad could it go, really? Five other people are somewhere here and one could be just in front of them. Maybe they'd be okay with joining up. Three is a good number, better than four ended up being. Even with the thought of that in the back of his mind he still grabs a hold of the metal bar, taking a few paces towards the building.
"I'll go around the back," Sabre offers. "It looks like it stretches a ways. Meet in the middle?"
"Sounds good. Be careful."
Sabre nods and jogs around the side of the building soundlessly, out of view. He keeps his eyes trained on the flickering in the window. It definitely looks like fire closer up, moving back and forth like a grouping of flames. For someone to have started a fire they must have had the supplies to do so - the temperature is dropping lower than he thinks it ever has before, but not enough for someone to put up the real primitive efforts to start a fire.
No, this was easy for them. A match, or a lighter. Something.
They probably have more supplies than Jay does.
On second thought, why did Sabre say meet in the middle and furthermore why did he even agree? Chances are one of them will find whoever's lurking in here before they meet back up again, and who knows what will happen when it's just two people facing off. At least with Sabre by his side he would have felt a little bit more confident, and he's sure the feeling would be reciprocated.
God, he's an idiot. The actual worst.
He edges closer to the window, expecting and awaiting movement, but none ever comes. Finally he takes a chance at peeking in - the room is bare, stunningly so. There's nothing in it except peeling walls and a solid concrete floor, cracked at the entryway that's to his right.
And there is indeed a fire roaring in the corner, a pile of wood, scraps of something, and some brush shoved underneath it all, burning away. It's decently sized for something so makeshift.
There's also a backpack sitting by it. If this was Jay here he definitely wouldn't have left the thing so close to the fire when there's nothing to contain it. One stray ember could light the whole thing up, and it looks like it's full of supplies.
No one appears on the other side of the window.
He kind of wants it.
No, scratch that, he definitely wants it. He's fucking starving, alright? If anything is going to contain food that's going to be it, and even if it doesn't maybe it'll have something that can lift his spirits more. Bottles of water to replenish their empty stock, pills to stop the throbbing in his nose, a machine that will literally teleport him the hell out of here.
Anything, really. He's not being picky here.
He hurries around the side of the building and into the room before he can change his mind. There's a door leading into another room, and at least one more beyond that. He can't see Sabre, though, so probably more. He can't hear him either.
There's nothing he can hear really except the fire.
With one hand extended out holding onto the bar he creeps closer and closer, fingers edging towards the backpack. It feels like a practical fucking joke, like there must be a string attached to the strap and someone's about to tug it away from him out the door.
No one would have just left this here, not even for five minutes.
There's no way.
His hand touches it though, fabric scratchy underhand, and nothing happens. He waits, turns around a few times, waiting for the truth to hit. He's still not looking when he unzips the front pouch, slowly, dipping his hand inside as if something's about to bite him. No matter how hard he looks nothing appears.
There's cool plastic underneath his hands and he finally chances a glance in. It's something about the size of his finger, long and thin, tucked away under a layer of protective casing. A needle, looks like. Unopened.
Why would someone have this? Better question - where the hell did they get it?
There are footsteps behind him. He turns, expecting Sabre. They're the same quiet tempo, even and quick.
It's not Sabre.
And he doesn't get a chance to see who it really is, before they shove him into the fire.
Emmi Langlois, 17
Applicant #13
She's been sitting here for a while.
She drove for longer, probably, in a lot of circles or squares or other shapes. For a long while she hadn't known what to do. Nothing made sense, no option came to mind over any other.
She had driven around for hours on end, stopping only when she had realized how foolish she was being wasting that much gas.
The mountains were good for hiding - she tucked the car away and climbed to the nearest precipice, sitting down on the edge of it. The fall was at least a hundred feet as the only safe way away was the road she had driven up in the first place. Although it would have scared anyone else that had been through what she had, it didn't ignite any sort of worry in here.
Unless she jumped, she wasn't going over.
She wasn't going to jump.
She had come to a conclusion in all those hours; she absolutely was not going to die.
That left her with two paths. She could kill everyone else left, six people in total, and become the last one standing. Then she would have to hope that her victory status granted her some sort of immunity from death, but she didn't get the feeling that Carnelia Trevall and her wacky gang of Sentinels were feeling so kind. Chances are she'd get two whole seconds of relief from being the last one left and they'd kill her anyway.
Like she said - she wasn't going to die.
So if the first path was a no-go, then that left her with one. She had chosen this edge for a reason - she could see light in the distance at the bottom of the mountain she sat on now, and then a few hours later two more people approaching it on a bike.
Having the map was turning out to be a more useful tool than she thought. After much time spent tracing lines with her finger she had figured out exactly where she was now.
Okay, maybe not exactly. It was a pretty accurate guess, though.
They were leaning towards the left of the valley. She had driven quite a ways away from the castle-looking building and gone in circles, but had always made left progress it seemed. They had started closer to the bottom, that she was more certain of now. The valley wasn't quite as wide at the top. A boundary was easier to access.
She had a car, now. It was tempting to make a break for it. Civilization couldn't be that far away.
Something was keeping her from doing that, though. She couldn't put her finger on it. She takes a few more sips of water and munches on some more granola at the sight of the bike, and that's what makes her stand up.
There's probably someone in that building. Two more on the bike. That's at least three. She's four.
Counting doesn't really do anything for her. Math has never been her strong suit.
She gets back in the truck, not waiting to see if the bike is actually headed towards the building with the light or going to veer off at the last second. She piles all of her supplies in the front seat, keeps the gun close and the machete. She's probably going to need it.
Emmi looks up, something she hasn't allowed herself to do in all the hours since she's been back in the truck. She finds herself in the rearview mirror, almost stunned at what she sees looking back at her.
There's not much that's recognizable. Her face is bruised and scraped, blood dried in the grooves at the bottom of her nose and the corners of her eyes, her mouth. Her lip is split down the side, there's a cut across the bridge of her nose and another over her temple. The only thing she sees that even mildly looks like herself is the hair, brown with the pink in it, but the pink has almost been hidden beneath the layer of caked on dirt and dust. Even the tightly wound braid Arwen had put in it was almost gone, now.
She reaches up and prods at her split lip. It doesn't hurt. Her shoulder hasn't been aching for quite some time either. Everything is scabbed over, healing. Maybe her stomach and side still aren't doing quite so good, but she's not a doctor. She wasn't expecting miracles.
Besides the obvious she's healing. She's getting better.
The thought nearly makes her cry. For a long while she thought she was going to die in that canyon; it certainly felt that way.
But here she is. And she has a decision to make.
She turns the key over and pulls the truck back onto the road. It took her a few minutes to get up here, taking each corner and turn slow. Now she knows what it looks like, though, and she knows exactly the path she'll be following.
Mentally and physically. She knows.
It won't take her long to get to the bottom. A shorter amount of time, even, to cross the distance from the bottom to the building just ahead.
There's no telling what could happen. As she's come to discover it's usually the worst thing you can imagine, but even that is survivable.
And she's going to survive.
Isperia Martorell, 16
Applicant #17
Ria makes sure not to look at him too directly.
No, when she grabs him by the shoulders and pushes him towards the fire's center, she actually looks away.
That doesn't stop her from seeing though, from hearing the screams the second he topples over into the fire she built in the corner of the room for almost this exact reason. There was never a stabbing in her future. She couldn't see herself doing it.
Fire is better. For her.
Not him, though. He's howling as the fire catches on his clothes - he rolls away from it and then back into it, still screaming. He probably doesn't even realize what he's doing, that he's making it worse in the process of trying to put it out.
She can smell it all - the burning hair, the melting flesh, the charred scent of his clothing turning to ash.
She heard the bike outside, thought he killed Meris, he participated in that. And now he's dying.
It still doesn't really feel like she did it.
"Ria?"
She recognizes that voice, as if from years ago. A distant memory, a quiet one, one that almost sounds like...
Oh, no.
She turns. Sabre is lurking in the doorway she popped out of in the first place, lurking in the corner of the room until he was unaware she was watching him peek through her bag. There were two of them, then, when Meris died. She didn't know there would still be two of them now.
And it's Sabre. One of the few people who offered her any amount of kindness, one of the only ones she could have imagined ever becoming friends with. She didn't do friends very easily.
"Sabre," she answers, much weaker than his own. His eyes are vacant, staring beyond her into the fire. The body is still up in flames, but he's stopped screaming. Dead, or unconscious from the pain. Either way, it's better.
It's Sabre. Sabre helped kill Meris.
The two of them should never have been killers.
"Sabre," she repeats. He swallows, staring at the corpse just beyond her feet. His hands are shaking, the left one that's clutching a small tool twitching so badly that she half-expects him to drop it. All observation fails her in that moment; she has no clue what he's thinking, what he's about to do.
"What did you do?" he breathes. "Why did you..."
Oh, they were close. Or something like that. She's not the best person to ask in terms of understanding interpersonal relationships, although she'd like to have worked on that more. She may not get the time now.
It could be right now, too, although it's quite difficult when Sabre won't meet her eyes.
She doesn't think she could look herself in the eye right now either. She never was a big fan of mirrors.
"I'm sorry," she starts. Not enough. Not good enough. She struggles for more words. "I thought..."
"What did you think?" he says. "That he was going to kill you? He wouldn't. He wasn't going to. I wasn't going to."
"What about Meris, then?" she accuses. "He killed her. You killed her."
"I knew it was you," he says. "I saw someone hiding behind the rocks and I turned us around so that nothing would happen."
"A lot of good that did us," she manages. "I didn't— I'm sorry."
The worst part about the antivenom working is that her head is slowly clearing after the multiple injections she's pumped herself full of. There's no longer that dangerous, confusing fog to act as an excuse. It's just her and how useless she is, how much she doesn't get. She'll never understand this.
His hands are still trembling. His fingers readjust along the tool, knuckles whitening. There's blood dried all over the spike on the end.
He looks like he doesn't know what to do with it.
"Sabre," she says. He looks at her then for the first time. The look in his eyes is worse than what she was anticipating it to be.
"I don't know what I'm doing." His voice shakes, tears well in his eyes until a few spill over. Tarquin left her two knives in the bag, two knives that are still there now. The metal bar he had is lying abandoned half in the flames.
The fact that she's considering a weapon now means a lot of things.
"I never know what I'm doing," he continues. "I never get it— I just can't figure it out."
"You can," she murmurs. "You can, I know you can. It's hard now, but one day you will. I know you will."
He shakes his head. More tears. For a second she considers doing something totally unlike herself, as if taking a step forward to grab onto him is wise, or smart. Her mom always said how smart she was, and that's not it.
He raises it, just a bit. She can't tell if the spike is more pointed at her or back at himself.
Neither are particularly appealing options.
Finally, then, she takes a step forward. His whole body jerks as if he's suddenly been brought back to life and he rears away from her. He's going to hurt himself, then, come to a breaking point where he—
There's a crack like thunder. She shies away, arms flung across her face as if to protect herself from some invisible strike that never comes.
When she finally dares to look up there's blood in Sabre's mouth, some seeping down to the end of his chin. He stumbles forward a few paces as if he's about to come into her arms, admitting defeat, but she finds she can't even open them. She doesn't even know what to think until she sees the shadow just beyond him, the end of a smoking gun.
She still doesn't open her arms. Sabre falls to the ground at her feet, a bullet in his back.
Dead.
"Sorry," Emmi says. "But that looked like it was going south."
Her knees wobble and then she's on the ground. Her hands catch on the cool pavement, scraping up the already rough edges of her palms. She wants to look. Can't. There's a lot of blood blooming out from a single point in the center of his back - she definitely can't look.
"I wanted at least one of you alive," she says. "Both would have been preferable, but it didn't look likely."
Ria tries to say something and chokes on the air she inhales, gasping there on the ground like an idiot. Emmi takes a few steps closer and she shies away, the threat of a sob in her throat.
Why did this happen? Why did it happen like this?
"Listen to me," Emmi says. "I have an idea, but I'm going to need help. And if you're still alive then I think you can help."
She shakes her head, feeling like an imitation of Sabre. She can't even stand up, what is she going to do to help anyone right now? She killed someone instead of seeing their true intentions, couldn't help Sabre, watched him collapse and die and did nothing.
And she's still not doing anything.
"Isperia," Emmi says slowly. "It's Isperia, right?"
"Ria," she chokes.
"Alright, Ria." Emmi crouches down, still a good few feet away. That makes her feel a bit better. "I'm not asking you to trust me. Not after everything that's happened. But I need help."
"With what?"
"Get in the car and I'll tell you."
"Car?" she rasps, looking around as if one will suddenly appear out of thin air. It wouldn't be the strangest thing that's happened, or the worst.
No, the worst is in front of her. It's always been right in front of her, her doing.
"Outside," Emmi clarifies. "I want you to come with me."
She still feels like she's choking, struggling to breathe. She's had an anxiety attack before, more than one, in fact. This doesn't feel anything like it. It sort of just feels like she's dying, which she knows she's not. It would be too easy to just die now.
She's never going to get back up.
Not unless...
Emmi is still looking at her. She just killed Sabre. Sabre who probably wanted to die anyway, but that doesn't matter. And now she's here in front of Ria, asking for something that makes no sense at all. Something she's not even sure she can do.
All of a sudden there's a hand outstretched towards her. Emmi stands back up but the hand stays, waiting.
Ria gets the feeling she'd wait forever, if the situation called for it.
She knows deep down that if Emmi leaves right now she'll never get back up again. She'll stay here with these bodies until she withers away and dies, or until the Sentinels put her out of her misery. She feels so weak, broken, like everything Tarquin did was the most pointless thing in the universe, that Mel and Meris died for nothing, that Sabre...
She doesn't want to know what Sabre felt. She thinks if she did she might let the earth swallow her whole.
She swallows. There's not a single part of her that's not shaking.
Emmi's hand is steady, unwavering, when she takes it to stand back up.
Soran Faerber, 18
Applicant #8
Driving really isn't all that bad.
It's something to focus on, which is leagues better than his aching side or his aching neck or his aching literally fucking everything.
Even Icarus isn't choosing to be a particularly annoying thorn in his side for once. He's been oddly quiet. It's sort of terrifying, really. It has to have been at least an hour since he's heard his voice; that has to be some kind of record.
He notices him looking over, though, like he's convinced Soran is about to do some kind of spectacular tuck and roll out of the car, leaving him to crash into the nearest wall.
The town they've found is bigger than anything else thus far, but it's still nothing much. It's equivalent to a few city blocks, if that. All of the buildings are small, fixed with broken, unreadable signs and caved-in wrap around porches. He's driving down each worn dirt road at a snail's pace, taking each one with careful precision, watching every corner.
"Are we looking for something?" Icarus asks quietly. Record broken, but at least it was quiet.
"I'm not."
"Well, I haven't seen anything."
Every conversation they have now is loaded, the number seven hanging over their heads—
"It's down to five," he realizes, turning his hand around the steering wheel to better see the little screen. Icarus' head snaps around to see for himself, but there's no denying the number in the corner of the screen. The twenty-four below it only looks more sad.
Icarus mutters something under his breath, inaudible, and then lets his head thud into the window.
"What?"
"What's our plan? Kill the other three people and then what?"
"I kill you, presumably, because your idea of fighting someone stronger than you is just to punch them and your track record with that is less than stellar."
Icarus doesn't even look alarmed, just resigned, which is truly telling of their relationship right now. Before... everything, he would have taken that seriously.
Maybe he still is.
"That was a joke," he clarifies. Icarus sighs.
Okay, so he knew. That's good.
"I don't wanna die," he continues.
"And you think I do?" he asks.
"No. But presumably one of us is going to."
"I would say that's looking pretty likely, yeah," he says. Icarus continues making a whole lot of vaguely irritated, upset noises, and there's nothing he can really do about it. No matter what he does he's never been able to shut him up. The only time he ever got close was when he kissed him, and even then he got punched for it. It was a shitty punch, but still.
"Look, as much as it pains me to admit this, if it's not going to be me I'd like it to be you."
"That pains you?"
"Not terribly. I just have a persona to maintain."
Icarus cracks a smile. "You're doing a terrible job."
He is. He also doesn't really mind. They've got this far, done this much. Done it together. There's really no faking it around him anymore. Even when he doesn't want him to Icarus knows. Icarus knows him better than Icarus knows himself, he feels. Or maybe he's just easier to understand. That's one of the only things he remembers his mother telling him, how much like an open book he could read.
He likes to think he's fixed that, that he can't be read by whoever so much as looks his way. Maybe Icarus just doesn't fit in that equation.
"So we get to the final two," he says. "Final two, and then we sit there until the Sentinels show up. Whoever lives lives."
"You're really not gonna kill me."
It's not a question. "Tried once. Didn't work. Figure you get a pass now."
"You just like me too much. Admit it."
"You're right - I don't mind you."
"Well I don't mind you either," Icarus says easily, like he's been thinking it for a while. He figures that's the closest the two of them are ever going to get to any type of admission, when at least one of them is going to be dead soon. They don't have time for much else when that's looming on the horizon. All he knows is that they don't have much time left, whatever that entails. He's not going to waste that time being a liar, refusing to admit the truth until he's blue in the face.
They lapse back into silence again. He almost points it out, but the conversation didn't scrape at his nerves like they used to. It just felt easy, sort of stupidly easy.
Well, they definitely are both stupid, if nothing else.
"I think I saw someone," Icarus says some ten minutes later, another few circles of the dirt roads completed. He slams the car into a dead stop so fast that he crashes into the steering wheel - more pain flares up in his chest and radiates out, all the way down his sides.
"For the first time in my life I'm going to advocate for seat-belts," he wheezes.
"You dying?"
"Maybe. Don't think so. Which way?"
His eyes are squeezed shut against the pain; he only opens them when Icarus doesn't respond. Icarus who is looking at him like he has no concern for the outside world, for the person he just supposedly saw.
"Which way?" he forces out again, leaning back in his seat. The pain is ebbing away again. It hurts like hell, but it's always on the brief side. He can handle it.
Icarus looks conflicted, not nearly a strong enough word for the war in his eyes. There's a decision to make here. Soran could drive for hours and not see anyone, not without another pair of eyes looking. If Icarus doesn't point it out nothing may ever happen. They'll drive forever.
It's a beyond important decision.
"Left," Icarus says finally, looking in the aforementioned direction, towards a cluster of buildings at the edge of the town.
They lie to themselves. Not often to each other.
Icarus wouldn't lie to him now.
Soran waits until the pain fades a smidgen more and then turns the car left, towards whatever it was that Icarus saw.
Whoever.
Decision made.
Percius Marigold, 17
Applicant #2
Lights equal bad.
There are lights.
This is bad.
That's basically how his brain has been working since he finally dragged his sorry ass out of the building, long after Emmi had left him there. He had passed by the Sentinel's body and then Gideon's out back because he had nearly tripped over it beside the well.
There was more blood than there had any right to be for a single gun shot, splattered all over the ground.
No one could tell him what it was from though.
He had found more signs of civilization in the past sixteen hours than he ever had when Damas and Verity were still around. No food or water, but he didn't really need that now. Just buildings. More of them than he really wanted. Buildings hid things.
Buildings were bad?
He couldn't really decide. He was still working in very simple equations.
He ends up laying on the floor in one of the buildings on the outer fringe, closest to the mountains, staring out the hole in the roof because it was helping him ignore the incessant throbbing in his wrist and where his hand no longer was. It still sort of felt like he had one.
No matter how many times he checked, though, it hadn't spontaneously grown back.
He couldn't get that lucky.
He would think the stars overhead were pretty if he cared about the stars for even a second.
When he hears the car he doesn't even react. For someone not wearing a tracking bracelet it sure seems like they know where he is. What, are they stalking him? Have they known this whole time, screwing with him for their own amusement?
He sits up, pressing his hand into his throbbing temples. He can't see outside much - the window is too high for him to see anything other than the rooftops next door and the sky above, and the door is around the corner, in the entrance hall.
He should probably at least see who it is and where they are.
Shuffling over to the door seems like the best bet so that's exactly what he does, wiggling over to the entrance on his knees. He stops at the single cracked stair, holding the door-frame to lean a little ways out. There is indeed a car although it's quite a ways away still, several streets away. Still, the headlights cut a wide swath through the darkness, angled just past the house he was in now.
Okay, so he should probably go. That would be smart.
He crawls back to the window and brushes the last of the glass of the sill before he pulls himself over it, tucking his wrist against his chest just before he lands with a thud in the dirt below. He's up just as quick as he fell, diving behind a thicket and under a broken fence railing, hurrying across the road before the headlights turn in his direction.
It's a big place. He could definitely find a better place to hide, somewhere they won't think to look. Maybe his appearance as a rightfully dead man will shock them all into leaving him alone.
Unlikely, but he doesn't want to think about fighting a Sentinel a second time. He probably wouldn't win again.
He waits until the headlights disappear again, turning a corner in the opposite direction. Maybe they really haven't seen him. If they can't track him and they didn't follow him here in the first place, then they have no idea of his whereabouts.
There's a building across the next road, bigger than the others.
More places to hide.
He steps onto it, the cracked pavement still warm underfoot, and a car roars around the corner. It stops some ten feet away from him with an ear-splitting screech, two people eyeballing him from the front seats.
Well, that's a problem.
And those definitely aren't Sentinels.
"Why are you here too?" he shouts. "Why?"
It's loud but he doesn't have the frame of mind to care. Soran sort of looks like he wants to laugh. Icarus looks vaguely concerned, but so is he. In fact, he's a lot concerned.
He looks back, but the other car is gone from view. That doesn't mean it's gone for good. In fact, with these two here, it's even more likely that they're going to come back. Come back and do what, he doesn't want to know.
Soran rolls down the window at a snail's pace. "Why are you still alive?"
"Why are you still alive?" he fires back. "Why are you still alive and together of all things?"
He probably shouldn't attempt to figure that out. No, what he needs to decide is what he's going to do, exactly. Run? Run where, exactly? They're going to follow him, presumably. They're both bruised and covered in blood, and he doesn't think either of them would pass up killing him.
This is karma coming back for him, no doubt about it.
He has the gun. Should he try and shoot at one of them? Does he even have the aim?
"There's someone else here," he tells them. "Sentinels, I think."
"How many?"
"I didn't fucking find out!" he says wildly. "At least one!"
"We can handle one. Handled one, actually."
Percy almost retorts an angry I have too! but it's not all the way true, and he's not proud of it anyway. Besides, if they did it too it doesn't look like they came out of it unscathed. Far from it, really, if all the injuries he can see are from that one fight. There's a lot here going on, and he could make it worse with just a few words. He's already in deep enough shit - he doesn't need more.
"Are you going to kill me too?" he asks, and watches them share a look. What, are they communicating telepathically now? When the hell did that development occur?
"Where's the Sentinel?"
He points off, at least, in the direction he last saw the car. "That way."
Soran appears to consider that, following Percy's finger to a point in the distance, where the car may or may not be anymore. He's not so sure.
"Thanks," Soran says slowly. "I think I will, then."
"Will what?"
They both look at him, eyes flat. As if to say what, are you stupid?
Oh. Right. They're definitely going to kill him, or at least try.
Yeah, he does feel sort of stupid.
And this is very, very bad.
You know, a strangely high amount of people voted for Jay on the current poll for this to happen immediately after. At least I thought it was funny! Please note that I'm only laughing because I loved that kid (along with Sabre) more than I love myself and I'd be crying if not. That poll is still open if you want to get in on it.
Anyway, final five is here, and only two more chapters to go until the Games are finished. If you have any thoughts, time is running out for you to say them. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Until next time.