The words are simple. Unadorned. They hit harder for it.
Ghost’s mouth tightens, not in disagreement but in recognition. Hatchet’s pen taps once against the pad, a quiet, involuntary sound. He doesn’t write.
Kayla breathes out slowly, then continues. “I let myself think about winning. Ending it. Making sure it can’t start again.”
She gestures vaguely, the same motion as before. The island. The asylum. All of it bundled into a single shape she refuses to name.
“Living after that?” She shakes her head. “That feels like tempting fate.”
No apology in her voice. No defensiveness. Just a line she hasn’t crossed.
I believe her. That’s the unsettling part. I believe she’s planned every step of the fall and none of the ground beyond it.
“I never needed to live once I’d completed my plan. But that was before…” She trails off and her hand unconsciously goes to her stomach.
Hatchet shifts in his chair, just enough for the movement to register. He writes then, slow and deliberate, and turns the pad.
We survive anyway.
Kayla looksat the words for a long moment. Something flickers across her face – not hope. Something quieter. Something more dangerous.
“Maybe,” she says. “If we’re allowed to.”
No one knows how to answer that.
The future, it turns out, isn’t empty. It’s sealed. Locked tight, like a door none of us have tried to open yet.
The conversation doesn’t resolve. It just…ends.
Not with agreement, not with conflict. It thins out, like smoke you stop noticing until it’s gone. Ghost goes quiet, attention drifting back to his food. Hatchet sets the pad asidewithout writing anything else. Kayla looks down at her hands like she’s already moved on to the next calculation.
No one saysso that’s that.
Food gets eaten because it’s there, not because anyone’s hungry. I take a few bites, more out of habit than appetite, and stop when the taste turns to paste in my mouth. Around me, the room hums with low, practical movement – not coordinated, not planned. Just people existing in the same space without colliding.
Snow still hasn’t come back. I checked when I gave the food to the others next door and they said they’d knock when he did. They’ve left us alone so far so that’s both good and unsettling.
That absence threads itself through everything now. Not loud enough to name, but present all the same. Like a loose wire we’re all stepping around without acknowledging.
Hatchet does a slow circuit of the room, eyes on the door, the window, the adjoining wall. Routine, but looser than usual. He doesn’t look tense. That’s new.
I realise I’m not tense either.
That’s new too.
But it’s the quiet that finally trips me.
Not sudden. Not dramatic. Just noticeable in the way a sound dropping out of a room makes your ears ring. The hotel should be louder than this. Pipes. Footsteps. Someone arguing in the distance. Something.
Instead, everything feels…held.
Kayla’s sitting still now, gaze unfocused, like she’s already halfway somewhere else. Ghost leans back in his chair, legs stretched out, comfortable in a way he usually saves for places that don’t matter. Hatchet’s stopped moving entirely, attention fixed forward, as if he’s listening for something that hasn’t happened yet.
The room is orderly without anyone deciding it should be.
No clutter.
No raised voices.
