His soles are so slick with blood, it’s hard to tell how badly he’s bleeding, but at least it’s not spurting. I don’t know what flipped the switch in his brain back to normal, but I need to stop the bleeding right now or none of it will matter.
A door stands open like a mouth waiting to swallow us. At least it’s only six feet away.
“We need to go through that door.” I want to assure him that I’ll stop the bleeding, but I don’t know what the Game Master would do if he heard me—would that make him mad? Would he stop me from helping Nico? I highly doubt he’d let Nico bleed to death, since that would be a lame ending to the trials, but it’s not worth the risk. “Okay?”
Nico nods.
I untangle myself from him, wincing when a stab of pain shoots up my thigh. My cargo pants are stained with blood. I can’t tell the extent of the damage under my clothes beyond the bottle neck jutting out of my knee.
Nico pushes onto his hands and knees. They quake under his weight, which seems to piss him off. He grits his teeth and crawls toward the door.
I grab our boots and socks and shrug on Dad’s jacket, holding the torn canvas closed for a second, then I force my body to move.
I scoot over the threshold into the room and find that, sure enough, it’s the same one we started in.
Nico has stopped ten feet in. He tries to move his right arm forward, but it drags on the ground. His face has gone tight around his eyes. He’s breathing through his nose.
He scans the room, his eyes tracking from camera to camera.
He glances over his shoulder at me then drags himself to a column three feet away until his back is pressed against it. I move closer to him, and he reaches out his arm to guide me with tiny movements until I’m sitting across from him.
His eyes are glassy and unfocused. When he tries to talk, the words come out in the wrong order. He has to stop and start again.
“He shouldn’t be able to see us here,” Nico says, words slurring. “Or hear us, long as we keep our voices down. Cameras are old models. Got a good look at them during trial. Fixed position. No pan or tilt.”
As if on cue, the speakers crackle to life: “Make your way to the main playing area.”
My fingers find the hem of my sweatshirt and twist until the cotton cuts into my knuckles. “Do we have to go?”
Nico’s eyes track across the ceiling. “We might have a few minutes before he’d bother coming down to enforce it.”
A few minutes. Hey, that’s something.
I lean out from behind the column far enough to stare down the nearest camera lens and flip it off with both hands.
“SUCK MY DICK, YOU PSYCHOTIC ASSHOLE!” I give the camera a big, cheesy grin, then duck behind the column.
“Well,” Nico says, his mouth twitching. “I’d say our time is halved now.”
A deep clang echoes somewhere deep in the guts of this place.
I push myself backward until I’m sitting near his outstretched feet, hovering my hands over them as I try to figure out where to start. The only light reaching us is from the red emergency strips in the hallway, casting everything in a horror-movie glow. But even in the dimness, I can tell his body is reminding him he has lost enough blood to make a vampire’s day. Violent tremors course through him, but not in a way that says he’s cold, more like his body is pulling from every muscle it has not to give in and sprawl out on the floor. There’s a glassy sheen on his skin, giving him the look of a wax figure melting under harsh light.
He moves his foot away before I can touch him. “Give me your knee,” he says, reaching for me.
“No.” I grip his ankle and pull his leg down until it’s lying flat between my bent legs. I need to keep my knee still. The glass shard will dig in deeper if I straighten it. “You first.”
He opens his mouth to argue. I tighten my grip. Does he not know how to let someone take care of him? He lives with DJ. I find that impossible.
His skin is cold under my fingers. I can feel his eyes on my probably bloodied face as I study the glass embedded in his skin, and I try not to think about how we’re sitting right now, how his leg is stretched between mine, how this is the most we’ve touched each other outside of him carrying me since that night in the kitchen. I don’t have tweezers or antiseptic or bandages or any of the things you’re supposed to use for something like this.
I’ve seen so much blood in my life that it’s weird I still get queasy looking at other people’s injuries. My body responds sympathetically at a cellular level. But my body must know how much Nico needs me, because I have no problem looking at this now.
His cuts aren’t clean. His soles look like they were pushed up against a meat grinder, and I don’t know if there’s enough skin left over to heal.
“Should I get the water?” I ask. “Try to rinse these out?”
Nico considers, then shakes his head. “Just pull the glass. Water won’t help much, and we need it to drink.”
