Juliette Sargent For Survival Of The Fittest Version Seven Winner

[MurderWeasel]

Juliette Sargent's life was over. This was true no matter what happened from here out.

That didn't mean she had to die.

The waves lapped quietly against the hull of the boat as she huddled against a wall across from some kind of machinery, perhaps a boiler or an engine. She was still dry, thankfully. If she was to march towards her doom, she saw no need to do so while damp.

She'd fixed her hair and makeup a few minutes ago. They'd taken her phone and her notepad and a number of other things, but had left her compact mirror and hair ties and makeup in her handbag. They'd provided her with a wicked straight razor and a can of shaving cream, so she would be able to meet her fate with smooth legs. Her eyebrows, well, that remained to be seen.

It was a good enough day for a dream to die.

She hadn't wanted to go into politics her whole life. Oh, she would say she'd always known were she on the campaign trail, but it wasn't that simple at all. Indeed, it was only in her freshman year she'd found her calling. It had carried her through colossal mountains of bullshit these last three years and change, had kept her head on straight when nothing else would. She had to be presentable. She had to be calm and clear and perfect. Mistakes were to be shoved into corners and under rugs, stifled and ignored. She had to smile, every day, no matter what happened. There was no room to cry or shout or curse at the idiots she was forced to share classrooms with. There was no room to love and mean it.

There was a loose bolt lying on the ground, orange with rust. Maybe it had fallen from above, from the great gash through which the sky could be seen, and out of the line of sight of which Juliette stayed. It didn't matter. She picked up the bolt and it stained her fingers and she didn't have anything at hand to wipe them on and that didn't matter either. She casually flicked it across the room, to plop into a shallow pool of water.

Nobody would elect somebody who killed a classmate on live video. It didn't matter what Canon said about shooting someone in the middle of the street. Seeing was believing. And even if she by some miracle made it through the whole thing with her morality and reputation intact, it would be her sole remarkable trait for the rest of her life. She would be defined not by what she did or who she was but by what others had done to her, what she had suffered. Any electoral victory would be tainted by that, by the pity vote, the murky whisperings that she wasn't worthy, just a symbol.

No, no. She was done. She would never be president, or representative, or even chair of an HOA. Someone had taken that all from her casually, with hardly a thought. They didn't know who she was. They didn't care. She was to be a statistic, one more corpse on the pile, one more name on the monument. And it was all because someone made an arbitrary call.

What she felt, more than anything else, was an intense jealousy. Forget being president. The president couldn't stop this. He couldn't save Juliette, or if he could, if she was whisked to safety, he couldn't save her future, her identity. It was already gone, and that was real power. If this whole thing ended in thirty seconds, if the cool metal collar around her neck fell away, her life would still never be the same again.

Juliette's dirtiest secret was that she'd never come close to figuring out which party she would run as.

There was a clanging up above, and she pulled herself to her feet, unsteady on the tilted floor. She checked her hair once more in her compact, nudged her ponytail infinitesimally towards center. When one door closed, another opened. When one future evaporated, a new one coalesced from the vapor. She felt something she hadn't in a long, long time.

She felt free.

Step by step, Juliette moved through the derelict vessel, curious just who her first encounter in this new world would be.

((Juliette Sargent continued in Holiday In Cambodia))