All of us. Five people who walked into this room as strangers and are leaving it as?—
What, exactly?
Allies? Reluctant co-conspirators? A pack-in-waiting that nobody in the formation actually wanted but that circumstances have made non-negotiable?
I don’t know.
I don’t know what to call us.
And not knowing what to call something is, for me, the same as not knowing how to defend against it.
We rise from our seats. The motion is staggered—the Prime Alpha first, already standing, already closer to the door than the rest of us; then the twins, moving in their synchronized way that makes standing look choreographed; then Hawk, unfolding from his chair with the restless fluidity of a predator who has been still for too long; then me, the stab wound protesting the transition from seated to vertical with a dull reminder that my body is still in the process of healing from injuries sustained before any of this was a possibility.
Violet turns her chair away from us.
The rotation is smooth, theatrical—the same dramatic reveal in reverse, the high-backed leather presenting itself to the room as the woman behind it faces whatever landscape is visible through the office’s eastern windows. We are no longer her audience. We are dismissed. The meeting is concluded, the terms delivered, the envelopes distributed.
“Enjoy the spiraling journey.” Her voice comes from beyond the chair’s back, disembodied and sweet. “And try to ensure you’re well-equipped for this.”
A pause.
“Anything can happen. And we have no responsibility in your survival.”
The final sentence lands in the room like the closing line of a contract’s liability clause—legal, precise, and designed to ensure that whatever happens next cannot be traced back to the person who set it in motion. I can envision the smile on her dark red lips without needing to see it—warm and cold simultaneously, the expression of a woman who cares about the people she sends into danger but refuses to let that care compromise the strategic necessity of sending them.
We leave.
The mahogany door closes behind us with a soft, expensive click, and the corridor of the administrative building’s east wing receives us back into its oil-painting-lined, marble-floored, portrait-judged embrace. The soundproofing seal releases, and the ambient noise of the world beyond Violet’s office floods in—distant footsteps, the hum of the climate system, the muffled sounds of an institution continuing to function while five people walk away from a meeting that has just rearranged the trajectory of their collective futures.
The heaviness is immediate and unanimous.
It settles over us like a change in weather—a collective awareness, shared without verbal acknowledgment, that what just happened in that room is irreversible. The Prime Alpha walks ahead, his stride long and purposeful, creating distance between himself and the rest of us with the deliberate efficiency of someone who processes significant information in solitude. The twins walk together, their synchronized steps producing arhythm that might be comforting to them but sounds like a countdown to everyone else.
Hawk sighs.
The exhale is long, slow, carrying the weight of a man who has just voluntarily attached himself to a suicide mission because the woman he loves was too stubborn to attend alone. He reaches into his back pocket and produces a cigarette—slightly bent, clearly pre-rolled, the paper discolored at one end from being carried against body heat.
He lights it with the battered Zippo—the silver casing catching the corridor’s ambient light as the flame illuminates his amber eyes and the shadows beneath his cheekbones. He takes a drag, lets the smoke fill his lungs with the practiced patience of a man who has made peace with his vices and considers them essential infrastructure.
The exhale rises toward the vaulted ceiling in a thin, gray column.
“Ain’t that the Hunger Games for you.”
I give him a side look.
The expression is delivered with the full, measured precision of a woman who has just been compared to a fictional dystopian combatant and is not entirely sure the comparison is inaccurate.
“You never watched it,” I mutter.
He chuckles—low, warm, the sound that comes from the part of him that is still capable of finding humor in situations that should be categorically devoid of it.
He offers me the cigarette—an extension of his hand that is simultaneously a gesture of generosity and a closing of distance, a physical reminder that whatever just happened in that room, whatever impossible task has been laid before us, whatever spiraling journey Violet’s sweet voice promised from behind her turned chair—we are still two people who share things in the dark.
I take it.
The paper is warm from his lips. The smoke fills my lungs with the familiar, grounding taste of tobacco and something underneath it that might be acceptance or might be the particular flavor of resignation that passes for courage in Savage Knot.
“Then we’d best start,” he says, his amber eyes scanning the corridor ahead where three silhouettes are walking away from us at varying speeds and varying levels of barely contained existential crisis, “cause clearly we have a week to get to know one another before our lives are on the line for a one-night adventure.”
