Hide(47)

“Idaho.”

“Okay, maybe that’s why the hell not.” But Ava laughs. Not at him—she’s inviting him to laugh with her.

So he does, and he’s happy, and things aren’t so bad at all. Maybe they’ll even get fun again. “What should we do at the end of this day? Find another spot, or stay here?”

“It’s a maze,” Mack says. “The park. Atrius figured it out.”

“So tonight we try to solve it?” Ava sounds intrigued. “Makes as much sense as anything else.” She doesn’t add that it’s good for her to have a goal, a purpose. That she needs to keep them all focused. Organized. Together.

Ava wraps an arm around Mack’s waist. Mack agreed to stay, but Ava’s not taking any chances. She wants to anchor her here, to keep Mack next to her, to have someone to press against and remember her own borders. Her own realness.

Ava still thinks some fucked-up shit is going down, but she can keep Mack safe, and Mack can keep her safe, too. And they’ll both keep that overgrown puppy of a human Brandon safe, and sad, lost LeGrand safe, too. A new platoon. A new family.

Mack can’t decide if it’s claustrophobic having Ava on one side and Brandon on the other. All this warmth and affection and companionship and, most foreign, hope for a future, utterly lacking in her life for years and now hyper-concentrated. The pressure is building in her chest, and if she opens her mouth, she doesn’t know whether a laugh or a scream will come out. So she strokes Ava’s soft fuzz of hair and closes her eyes and tries to simply exist.

Yes, she’s not alone. But it doesn’t mean she’s not still hidden. It just means she has help now.



* * *



—

LeGrand in his tree.

Ava and Mack and Brandon in their wooden womb.

Beautiful Ava and Jaden on the other side of the park, Ava walking a few steps behind Jaden as he looks for the best place to betray her.

And, in the center of it all, shuddering wet breaths grow shallower and more erratic as dawn approaches and hunger spikes.



* * *



—

Jaden’s not a bad guy.

He’ll be the first to tell you that, and he has told people that, over and over, so many times that it’s become something of a catchphrase. “I’m not a bad guy,” he says, his arms held wide, a wryly innocent grin on his almost handsome-enough face.

One of his exes once said he looked like the guy they put in the picture frame to sell it. Blandly attractive, a filler until the frame has something that actually matters in it. No! her friend had exclaimed, all of them several drinks deep. He looks like a sock model!

He had laughed. But every time he pulled on socks or walked past a display of frames in a store, he remembered their appraisals, and it rankled him. But he wasn’t a bad guy. He had nudes of that ex, and he never posted them.

That ex is on his mind as he stands back, watching the current future ex in his life examine an old roller-coaster track. It climbs until it disappears into the trees, an ivy-choked outline of what it had once been.

All Jaden wants is one, just one, woman in his life who is loyal. Who is beautiful and funny and lives for him. Who doesn’t let him down. Doesn’t laugh at him. Looks at him and makes him feel as special as he wants to be. Even his own mother barely waited for him to graduate high school before declaring herself retired from parenthood and moving to Florida. He once decided to see how long it would take her to call him if he didn’t call her once a month. After seven months, on the verge of tears, he broke down and called her. She honestly had no idea how long it had been. She didn’t miss him at all, didn’t think of him when he wasn’t there.

Object permanence doesn’t exist where Jaden is concerned. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s been the same with every girlfriend, every woman in his life. They always hit a certain point and then can’t wait to get rid of him. So now he gets rid of them first.

“We could follow the track up,” Ava suggests. She doesn’t want to try to find the others. We should win on our own merit, she had said earlier, as if sabotaging others hadn’t been her idea, floated to impress Jaden and make him invest in her. And as if they could both still win. As if they don’t know there’s only going to be one winner.

What was she talking about with the freaks? Were they mocking him? Plotting? Did she talk him out of trying to find the other group as part of a larger play? They all know he’s the biggest threat. He’s going to win. No matter what they do, he’s going to win.

He looks at the track. He could climb it, no problem. He’s in the best shape of his life. When he was fourteen, chubby, depressed, mocked at school and ignored at home, he had discovered obstacle-course competitions. He loved watching them, but more than that, he loved the interviews. All these people who had sad lives like him, who had been unloved and lost, had turned that in on themselves and crafted perfect machines of bodies. Machines that could do incredible things. Machines that functioned so well they couldn’t be sad or hurt or lonely anymore.

He tried getting on the show seven seasons in a row, and never made it past the walk-on line. What did that say, then, that he had spent so many years doing exactly what they did, exactly what they told him to, overcoming everything in his life, practicing his backstory in front of the mirror so that he would come across as not a bad guy, not a bad guy at all, and they had never let him on?