There Are Only Four (The Competition Archives Book 1) Read online

  With one final surge of panic-induced energy, my body surges back to solid ground. I stumble in my haste, and my chest smacks the concrete. My lungs are a searing organ of fire choking on the air flooding them. I sputter, my muscles convulsing, but I manage to swing myself around on unsteady arms to watch for Luka. For an agonizing moment, the shifting sections are void of human life. It is only seconds, but I age years as I wait, and then a wall moves and spits him out into the open. My whole body gives a sigh of relief at the sight of him, but then red fills my vision. It is unnaturally bright in this pallid landscape. My exhale catches in my throat, freezing like a swallowed ice cube strangling its unsuspecting victim.

  Luka stumbles forward, pale and unstable. His back and shoulder pour crimson, leaving a trail of gore along the graying concrete, and his arm hangs at an unnatural angle. Instantly I think of his cry when I bumped him, and with horror I realize that I knocked him into the path of the falling wall. I thought it had just clipped him, but I was wrong.

  Luka staggers, and I’m on my feet and before him faster than I believed possible. My arms catch his fall, and together we settle to the floor. Warmth oozes over my hands in hot pulses. Terror possesses me like a demon in the night, and with shaking fingers, I pull his jacket aside. A gash starts at his shoulder blade and travels down his back, cleaving a flap of hanging flesh from his body. I gag at the sight. Blood pumps from it and spreads down his chest and arm, and while I am no doctor, I know this is bad. Tears involuntarily spring to my eyes, and I suck in ragged, desperate breaths.

  “It’s okay,” Luka whispers, but I see the fear in his eyes. This stupid, brave boy that my heart loves without reason. I will not accept this. He has to live. I won’t let him leave me.

  With fast movements, I peel off my jacket and shirt and sit in my sports bra as I strip the clothes from his torso. I shove my balled-up top into the wound and use his larger one to tie the fabric to his body. It isn’t perfect, but it will hold, god willing. I then take his jacket and create a makeshift sling for his almost useless arm. I grab mine to reinforce his bandaging, but he shakes his head as I put it against his skin.

  “No.” he pushes it back into my hands. “They’re sick, watching us die for sport,” he continues when my eyebrows rise in question. “I don’t want them seeing you like that. Wear the jacket. Do not give them anything else to enjoy.”

  “But you need it,” I argue.

  “Please,” he says and brushes his bloody fingers over my cheek as if he is marking me as his. “I don’t want to die knowing the perverts viewing this game are staring at you.”

  “You will not die.”

  “I…”

  “You’re not going to die. Say it… Luka, say it.”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  I take the jacket back from his sticky grasp and shrug it on, zipping it to cover my exposed skin.

  “I’ll carry you if I have to.” I pull his body against mine and struggle to a stand.

  “You can’t…”

  “I watched Jude and Serene die,” I interrupt. “If you think I’m just going to leave you to bleed out, you have another thing coming. I WILL carry you, Luka. We cross the finish line together or not at all.”

  Without warning, Luka leans forward and presses his lips to my cheek, millimeters away from my mouth. My breath catches at the tender gesture, and I wrap my arms around him tighter, kissing his sweaty hair. I love this boy in a way I cannot explain, and I kiss his head again for good measure.

  “Together,” he says with a breathless pant.

  “Together,” I vow, and then I drag him to the tower.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The finale looms with mocking height, rendering all below it as ants to be crushed. It is a structural monster among mere mortals, and its colossal girth and bulky sections stand as a testament to its gruesome glory. It has stood the test of time, weathered every attack thrust against it, and as I drag Luka with slow and awkward movements, its invincibility greets us with a haughty air. This final leg of our disastrous journey hovers ready to strike down any resilient survivors who have escaped the maze’s vicious attempts. This is the gatekeeper, the last defense against the living, and it will not be so easily defeated.

  I pull Luka’s pale figure to the wall and lean him against the concrete, granting my fatigued muscles a small respite. My neck cranes at an uncomfortable angle to get a full view of this final haul. It seems the only way up is the narrow doorway on the ground beckoning us into the darkness. About halfway up, the ascent ceases to be inside, and the sole path to the next section is to scale the cubed blocks outside, much like the disastrous climb in the blackness earlier when we still had four. Toward the top, though, the route to the finish line looks to return to the innards of the tower. They want to see how many people fall, leaving only the worthy to battle for the championship.

  “Do you need a break?” I ask. Luka shakes his head with slow movements, but I see the color of his skin pale as if his life is draining as I watch. I open my mouth to argue, to insist he sit down and catch his breath, but the end is his only hope. He needs a doctor, and my small shirt will only staunch the blood for so long. His only chance at survival is to complete the maze and escape.

  “We’re almost there.” I tuck myself beneath his good arm and remove him from the wall’s crutch. “Who knows, maybe we’ll be the first to finish. Maybe we will win.”

  “You don’t think we took too many breaks?” Luka asks as we close in on the black doorway beckoning us with its ill intent.

  “You were one of the strongest and most athletic competitors at that last breakfast. If you needed to rest, then so did the others. No one ran this maze without stopping, and who knows how many died on that dark climb. At least we survived that.”

  “Well, we have one more chance at that death.” Luka nods his head upward as we step into the tower’s darkness. “The light is dim. You think they will turn them off again?”

  “No,” I answer as we meet a circular stone staircase that ascends into almost blackness. “This is the climax. They want the world to watch us in high definition.”

  Luka grunts an unintelligible reply and places one foot warily on the stairs. When no evil launches from the dark to devour us, I follow suit, and together we scale the winding stairwell up into the consuming black.

  Nothing happens for the first half of the climb. The dark is a thick cloak over our eyes, keeping our future shrouded in mystery, but our every step is met with solid stone. The incline is steep though, and my energy is a desert, dry and barren. Luka wheezes beside me, his blood loss a siren dragging him to the depths. I do my best to support his weight, but the blond boy is much larger than I am. My legs are desperate to give out, my back begging to collapse under the stress, but I grit my teeth with grinding force. If sheer will could be consumed as fuel, my body would be a seething hulk of rage and strength.

  Luka trips, and without warning, his body plummets. His weight catches me unaware and rips me off balance with a harsh jolt to my vertebrae. With a yelp, I topple forward, Luka crashing hard beside me, and as we slide down a few steps, he roars. He bucks backward and severs our connection. In the darkness, I can make out his huddled shape against the wall, cradling his broken arm.

  “Luka,” I whisper as my torso drags over the stairs to him. He flinches at my approach, and I stop, his labored, pained voice shaking me to my core. For a moment, neither of us moves, but then I push past his invisible barrier and envelop him in my arms. I pull the sobbing boy to his feet, and his body shakes against me. We move slowly, but once he is standing, I re-adjust his sling. The small movement causes him to cry out in misery, but he does not recoil. I tighten his bindings, and as my fingers finish their task, his forehead falls to my head. It rests there for a long while, his ragged breathing fluttering my hair.

  “Get me out of here,” he rasps, his defeated tone clinging to my body for strength. My arms wrap around his bare and bloody waist, and once more, I b
egin to drag him up the steps.

  “We are going to make it?” Luka’s weak voice asks.

  “Yes,” I promise. “And we will win.”

  “Good… I want to survive long enough to strangle whoever designed this place.”

  “I’ll hold them down while you do it.” I smirk, and Luka leans his head against my temple.

  “I wouldn’t have survived this without you. Even if I wasn’t hurt, I still don’t think I could do it. There is something about you. We make a good team.”

  “We are a good team,” I agree. “If we survive this, promise we won’t say goodbye.”

  “Say goodbye to you?” A short laugh bursts from his lips. “I could never. I would rather run this maze for a second time than never see you again.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “I’m not.” He squeezes my shoulders weakly, as if to reassure me of his words. “It’s the truth. I know it’s weird, but for some reason you have this hold on me. There is no one I would rather have by my side in this chaos than you.”

  “I wish we had met somewhere else. I would have liked not having a time limit on our friendship.”

  “Hey.” His head moves against mine, coaxing me to look up into his eyes. “You promised me we would make it. We don’t have a shelf life. We aren’t dying.”

  “I didn’t think Jude and Serene would die,” I say. “I barely knew Jude, but Serene… she had a way of making us feel loved. I could not save her. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t… what if I can’t save you?”

  “Then just stay with me till the end,” he says with such heartbreaking sincerity that tears flood my eyes. “But you won’t need to. You said it yourself. We are going to win.”

  “Yes,” I agree, wiping my wet cheeks on his bare shoulder. “Then when we are free, we will make them pay for this.”

  “Together.”

  We round what feels like the hundredth curve in the stairs, and suddenly the next step is absent. Only empty air offers aid like a toothless gap in a brittle mouth. The stone steps resume their ascent further up the stairwell, though, as if nothing was amiss.

  “The second we jump this, the climb stops being a simple staircase, doesn’t it?” Luka asks, and I look up at him with wide eyes. We are both winded. Of course this is where they ignite the fire and brimstone in their pit of hell.

  “Be careful,” Luka says when he sees my face, “and don’t do anything stupid for my sake.”

  “Luka…”

  “I mean it,” he interrupts. “You need to make it to the end. I want to get there with you, but I can’t cost you your life.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I say, but I can tell by the look in his eyes he does not believe me. He doesn’t push the issue, though. It’s as if he had to voice it for his own conscience, but I’m crossing the finish line with him or not at all. No one else from our team is dying.

  “Are you ready?” he asks in an unsure tone.

  “No.”

  “Neither am I.”

  And we jump.

  The moment our toes graze the opposite stairs, the stairwell rears to life. It shakes beneath our thunderous landing as if to tease us with the question of who will plummet to the concrete below? Us or them?

  I drag Luka’s unsteady body up, and a group of steps before us wrenches free from their place in the wall as if the welded stone suddenly caved in to gravity. The newly created gap is a single step longer than the previous. It’s like the traps that killed Serene. They will grow ever wider until one of us is sacrificed to the unyielding ground below. Thankfully, this staircase winds upwards in layers, and if we drop through, the rung of stairs below should break our fall.

  The gap approaches fast, and we soar over it with relative ease, but no sooner do we land, the steps before us give way with little ceremony. I stumble as I struggle to catch my footing in time to leap over the newly emptied air. Luka curses as he fumbles over the jump, colliding heavily with the opposite ledge of concrete, and my breath releases a groan as the burn in my thighs turns to singeing iron pokers.

  “We can’t fall,” Luka huffs almost unintelligibly. “They retracted all the stairs below. If we do, we fall all the way down.”

  It’s my turn to curse, but another set of crumbling steps drowns out my anger. We leap across, and Luka’s longer legs carry him with ease. He lands a safe distance from the edge, but my shorter jump deposits me on the first step after the gap. I wobble precariously, and the stone below my boots cracks and gives way.

  My entire body pitches forward as my footing disappears, and my shins crack the sharp corner as I fall. I scream in pain, dragging myself away from danger, but the stairs keep falling. Each time my foot connects with support, the solidness vanishes and becomes thin air.

  I am screaming with a viciousness I didn’t think I was capable of. My chest grates over the jaggedness, my kneecaps digging into the hard surfaces with determination. To hell with the pain. Pain means I yet live.

  “Get up!” I realize Luka has been yelling above the chaos. His good hand snatches my jacket and lifts me up. My knees shove off the steps, but just as I regain a foothold, the stairs pull their support from me as if they relish this cruel joke. My body plummets down, and with an excruciating jolt of pain, my arms catch the ledge. My shoulders jerk with such force, I’m surprised my joints do not separate. I swing precariously over the black abyss and brace for the fall I know is coming. This step might give way any second, just as its predecessors did, and my blood will paint the concrete below with a chaotic vibrancy that would rival a Pollock.

  “Take my hand.” Luka thrusts a sweaty, adrenaline-laced palm in my face. “Now!” I reach for him, barely clinging to the dangling stair. The moment our fingers lock, Luka shoves one foot against the wall and the other against the steps and heaves. His voice exits him in waves of anguish as his shredded back pulls my weight. I can see the glint of tears in his eyes as he ignores his agony to save me. My hands claw the stone for any handhold. My nails bend and crack, all needles and razors, but the smooth surface offers no hope. Luka’s strength does not falter, and slowly my abdomen abrades over the ledge.

  Luka pushes himself up to the next step and strains against my hanging weight. I swing my knee over, and I am safe. God have mercy on me, for I am back on solid ground, if only temporarily. I crawl with wobbling arms to Luka and scoop him to me. His breath falls heavy in my ear, and it is as if I can feel his pain in his every exhale. He needs a doctor, not the grueling task of saving me from a televised bloodbath, but the tower groans its brutality as a reminder that no matter what he deserves, Luka is its wounded prey.

  “Go!” I shove him upward. He winces at the touch, and I try not to think of the pain rescuing me inflicted. Blood trickles fresh down his bare back as he stumbles. If only I could give him my unmarred flesh.

  Without warning, the stairs before Luka drop from the wall. He teeters on the balls of his feet as he tries to stop, but before he can fall, I’m behind him. My arms fling around his torso, and I draw his spine to me with urgent hands, welding him to my body. He grunts at the pain of his torn flesh colliding with my chest, but he does not plummet to his demise. That is all that matters. As soon as we steady, I thrust the both of us forward, and we fly over the ravenous darkness.

  “Stop trying to take him from me!” I am a banshee as I charge hellward, for that is where this tower climbs to. My body is breaking. My strength has evaporated like a single drop of water in the Sahara heat, but my resolution is a fiend. It screams within me and erupts from my lips. “You can’t have him! He is mine.” The stairwell grumbles again, preparing their ruthless havoc, but my mouth opens with a vengeance. “You can’t have him! Do you hear me, you bastards? I won’t let you.”

  The stairs stop their ominous whir of death, and the air falls still with an eerie peace. I hold my breath, waiting for every step to give way and sacrifice us both to its blood-thirst, but it holds solid and strong. Luka’s fingers search in the dim light for mine, and we
clutch hands as our pace slows. With each stride, I expect the maze to extract payment for my defiance, but it does not. It’s as if it has heard my plea and answered favorably. I know that is not the case though, however badly I pray for it to be so. I suspect that the game has realized Luka and I are an inseparable team, and these mechanical traps will not be our downfall. It knows we will help each other instead of saving ourselves. It saw me keep Serene and Luka from suffering Jude’s fate. It witnessed me trying to save Serene. No, I think the human gods flipping switches to decide our fates are planning something different for us.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The rest of the climb is only as difficult as putting one foot before the other. Our thighs burn. Our lungs are shredded paper oozing air. Our tongues are swollen with dehydration, and our stomachs are shrunken cavities that have forgotten the feeling of nourishment.

  When we finally arrive at the end of the staircase, my arms slip from Luka’s waist, and I falter. I collapse in a heap and curl into the fetal position with trembling limbs and painfully heaving ribs. Luka crumbles beside me, but he only sits, sparing his back and arm the agony of the concrete’s harsh contact. He peers down at my prostrated figure, and outside of the darkened stairwell, I can see clearly how much worse he looks. Death lingers in his shadow; its boney fingers clenching and curling, anxious to dig into warm flesh and make it ice. I reach out and place my palm on Luka’s knee, but he merely stares at it as if he is too weak to even hold my hand.

  We remain that way for a long time, my thumb running over his kneecap in soft circles. Maybe we should stay here together, just lie down and let it end in each other’s arms. I open my mouth. I’ll tell him to sleep here with me. I will hold him until we are both gone.

  “Luka?” his name on my tongue surprises me as much as the sight behind him. All thoughts of failure evaporate, and I scramble to my knees. I crawl like a crippled animal across the ledge and grab the small paper bag sitting inconspicuously against the wall. I tear it open with violent fingers and burst into tears as its contents spill over my lap. A single bottle of water rolls over the concrete, and I lunge to catch it before it can escape and then look down to my legs. One sandwich wrapped in plastic sits on my thighs, our manna in the desert.