A Prayer for Something Better

#1

((Jewel Evans continued from Grins and Guns))

Jewel sat on her bed, tears still periodically dripping from the corners of her eyes, landing against her leggings, spots of darker darkness against the black background. She was trying to tell herself that everything would be alright.

"Dinner," came the shout from downstairs. Jewel was in luck: it was Chloe rather than their mother and thus the call could be safely ignored. Jewel closed her eyes and then rubbed at their corners, squeezing all the wetness she could out, then wiped her hands against the sheets. She'd held it together through the end of math class, somehow, and through the end of school by taking a bathroom break in every class to go and stand in front of the mirror and breathe fast and shallow, but as soon as she'd made it home it had been up the stairs two at a time and to her bed with the door slamming behind her and then alternating outbursts, tears she wiped away and growls and shouts she muffled in her pillow and dull incomprehension as she stared at the wall or ceiling.

And now she was thinking about it again, thinking about the blood—tastefully splattered; he'd been shot, yes, but he hadn't been a mess like some she'd seen, hadn't had his guts spilling all over like an extra in some fucking zombie movie—and about the way he'd been there with them in the end, how Shawn had said he died a hero. Died a hero? Oh yes, that argument could be made, and for reasons perhaps even loosely similar to those for which his allies saw fit to laud him, but to Jewel his heroism stemmed all from emotion and motivation and not a bit from his success. He'd stuck by his friends, and he'd killed for his friends, and he'd died for his friends, and it was just shitty luck that those friends had been Shawn Morrison and Mae St. Clair.

Someone should have shot them. Someone should have snuck up in the night and slit their throats, or Shawn and Leopold should have been sitting in each other's places, or Vincent should have turned up and made himself useful. Really, the simplest answer was that Zach should have killed them himself. He must have thought about it. No way to avoid it in SOTF—even with the new gimmick of teams, because he wasn't on theirs. The three of them couldn't all survive—well, they could, if he was lucky and good and crazy enough, but throughout the game it had become more and more clear that he wasn't. He'd surely thought about murdering Shawn and Mae, and just as surely he'd dismissed the idea out of hand, because they were his friends and whatever evil and violence he perpetrated upon his erstwhile high school tormentors and random passersby or threats from the other school, he'd had his people he watched out for, the ones who counted, and he'd been determined to do right by them.

That was maybe one of the reasons she'd loved him. It wasn't all of it. She'd taken a liking to him right from the start, and maybe that was because she could tell he wasn't a nobody. He had that edge, that immediate air about him that let her know he was a little bit messed up and not afraid to let it show. He hadn't wasted too much time bemoaning his situation. He'd taken stock of what was important to him and had taken action to achieve his ends. He was brutal when he had to be, and clever when it suited him, and he never seemed fully comfortable sitting idle.

"Dinner," Chloe shouted again. Jewel thought about how they'd dug a grave in the sand and covered him up, and she wondered what happened to the bodies at the end of it all, whether they were returned to their families or buried en masse or donated to science, and she realized she'd never really given it that much thought before. Somewhere in Bryan, Texas, Zach's family was getting the news and learning to live without him. Were they having a funeral? Would they put up a headstone, or would they say a few words and then leave the rest to recollection?

Would they try to forget him?

Jewel had this horrible thought that maybe what Zach had done had been deemed unforgivable by those whose love for him should have been unconditional, that they would try to erase him from their minds, that there would be no funeral, no mourning, no chair left empty or bedroom left untouched, just a hole to be filled with gravel as quickly as possible. The corners of her eyes stung and her throat constricted, hurt like she was being choked as she tried to keep her mouth in a straight line and her gaze fixed in front of her. She looked at her desk—the Champions launcher was up; she'd turned it on to patch out of habit in the fifteen seconds between door slam and bed and she'd been too preoccupied to hear the chime letting her know it was done—and the wall behind it, the posters hanging there, portraits of contestants from past seasons who she'd liked, had felt for, but could barely give a shit about compared to Zach. His face also adorned her walls, not through any official merchandise—it was just a bit too soon for that—but in the form of screenshots she'd printed and taped up and drawings of her own.

She couldn't focus on the faces. She couldn't even really think. Her throat hurt so badly, and her vision blurred and then narrowed, degree by degree, as her eyes squeezed shut against her will. Soon, there was nothing but blackness, blackness like what death might have been like, or maybe death was something even more total and awful, and she couldn't stop herself from crying anymore and so the sobs came, each one raspy and painful and only just muted by the pillow she snatched off the bed and clutched against her face.

There was a banging on her door.

"Jewel. Dinner." Chloe's shout had more than a hint of irritation to it.

"I'm not fucking hungry," Jewel screamed, the instant flash-boil of her anger cutting through most of the fuzz in her throat but producing a pain something like how it must have felt to be stabbed—or shot—and venting her wrath so loudly that even she paused for a moment, taken aback. She blinked. The light blue of her pillowcase, the same one she'd slept on for almost ten years now, was smeared with her mascara and eyeshadow. She tossed the pillow aside. It landed with a muffled thump against her trash can, tipping it over and letting tissues and crumpled papers spill across the floor. Jewel dragged her forearm across her eyes again, and it too came away smudged.

She turned her back to the door a half second before it creaked open. She wanted to yell again, tell Chloe to get away, go away and leave her alone, but the shouting seconds before had burned through Jewel's reserves of emotional energy and so instead she just looked at her window. The blinds were drawn. It was evening and the last hints of sunset peeked through the gaps in the slats.

"Hey," Chloe said. Her steps when she entered the room were quick and angry at first, but then slowed and became hesitant, and her voice was quiet and nervous. "You alright?"

"No," Jewel said.

There was a space of maybe five seconds in which neither girl spoke. Then Jewel surprised herself by breaking the silence.

"Zach died," she said.

"Yeah," Chloe said. She scratched at her head—Jewel absolutely hated it and Chloe did it fucking constantly, scratching her head with that awful scritch scritch noise and maybe getting invisible flakes of dandruff everywhere and borrowing Jewel's brushes to pretty herself up afterwards all the time—and then said, "I'm sorry."

"Thanks," Jewel said. She patted the bed. She was sitting cross-legged, like the inflexible man's Lotus Position, so there was room on the bottom half of the bed, even if it was covered in all her balled up sheets. Chloe stepped over Jewel's backpack and flipped on the desk lamp and then came over and sat at the foot of the bed, far enough that she couldn't just reach out and touch Jewel. The sudden intensity of light made Jewel blink; her overhead was on a dimmer and she usually kept it low, but her desk lamp was an old one with a big bulb and a thin shade. Outside, the sun slipped over the horizon, leaving only the purple of dusk to show through the blinds.

"You alright?" Chloe asked.

"No," Jewel said again, and she couldn't even be properly pissed off that Chloe had just asked the same question for the second time in a minute.

"Girls?" This was their mother's voice, just loud enough to carry without ever quite sounding raised, and Jewel cringed and tensed. "Dinner."

"Just a sec," Chloe said to Jewel, and she got up and made her way out of the room, scratching her head again as she slid the door shut. Jewel glowered at her posters. What did she even mean, having Grace Clarkson on her wall? When Grace had dropped to the ground, gurgling blood out of her mouth and into her lungs, Jewel had been five years old. She'd been watching Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and kid stuff like that. If Grace had survived, she would have been almost thirty, old enough to be fretting about whether or not she'd ever meet the right guy and have kids, or maybe she'd have even been a mother. She would have had a career, rent to pay, a whole social network. Maybe she'd have been killed in a bus crash. She would never have had anything to do with Jewel Evans. The only possible point of intersection in the Venn diagram of their worlds was Jewel watching Grace's last choking breaths.

Zach was someone she could have talked to online, on some fan site or other. They were both seventeen. Maybe he'd played Champions—maybe she'd played alongside him and grit her teeth and grumbled under her breath to keep from asking him what the fuck was wrong with him, feeding top five fucking kills in eight minutes when their jungler wasn't even connected—and she'd never known it. It was easy to forget sometimes, because she'd come to TV late, through reruns and boxed sets, and the contestants were eternal teenagers, immortals forever on the cusp of adulthood, the only ones allowed to get old and gain weight and wrap their fancy sports cars around streetlights the lucky handful who fought tooth and nail for their right to disintegrate and were lucky or good enough to see it pay off. The rest were insects caught in the amber of film, always there to be exhumed and reexamined by the curious, always there for Jewel if she needed to visit them. It had been comforting to her for a long time, and Zach was in that space now, there on YouTube and on her walls, and she could hear him or see him or relive these final days of his life whenever she chose, getting to know him better, catching secret smiles and inexplicable glances and all the little things that let her know he'd been. It had always been enough before.

The footsteps on the staircase slowly filtered into Jewel's awareness, and then her door opened again. She was looking at her desk at this point, and so she caught Chloe in her peripheral vision, awkwardly balancing two plates on her right arm so as to have a hand free to manage the door, before closing it behind her with her foot and transferring the second plate back to her left hand.

"You hungry?" she said. Jewel hadn't even finished shaking her head before Chloe had set one of the plates down on the desk, under the lamp. The other, she brought with her to the bed. She took up her position behind Jewel again, but closer this time.

"I told mom you were sick," she said. She fidgeted a little and scratched at her head. "Mind if I eat?"

"Sure," Jewel said. The food smelled good—something savory and oily, strong enough that she couldn't resist taking a quarter turn to look. Chloe had a plate of roast chicken and mashed potatoes in her lap, a half cob of corn lying between them. It wasn't the sort of thing the family ate that often, and Jewel felt her mouth water and her stomach clench at the sight of it, then felt her stomach clench further because she realized that Zach would never eat roast chicken again, that he would never eat anything again, that he was just as dead as the dismembered bird whose leg Chloe raised to her lips and whose muscle she pulled free with her teeth and then chewed.

They sat quietly for a long time. Chloe occasionally glanced at Jewel, but for the most part her attention was on her meal. She reduced the chicken to a pile of very smooth bones, then crunched her way through the corn cob, then produced a spoon from her pocket and polished off the mashed potatoes. Jewel watched. Chloe had always been a very clean and meticulous eater; it was the one area in which she was undeniably fussier and more image-conscious than Jewel. After she'd finished, Chloe stood up and walked over to the horizontal trash can. She made a face and shoveled Jewel's papers and Kleenex back in, tipped it upright again, then dumped the bones. She set her empty plate next to Jewel's full one.

"You want to talk about it?" she said.

"I don't know." Jewel startled herself by responding so quickly and with such a level voice. She'd been so caught up in her sister's precise movements that even the pain of the renewed revelation of Zach's death had faded into the background. She felt guilty, like she'd betrayed him somehow. The ground wasn't cold and she was already starting to think that maybe she could manage a few mouthfuls of potatoes.

"Okay," Chloe said. She sat back down on the bed. Jewel looked up at the ceiling. There weren't any posters there—it was a bumpy popcorn ceiling, so they wouldn't stay up. She took a deep breath (another thing Zach wouldn't be doing ever again), held the air in her lungs until her stomach started to feel warm, then let it out.

"Did you see what Vincent did to Ben and Glen?" she eventually asked.

"Yeah," Chloe said. "I think he'll do well. I don't think he'll win, but he's a shoe-in for final ten at least. I bet he lands fifth. Might even make third."

"Yeah," Jewel said. She picked at her leggings, smoothing a crease that wasn't there. "Coleen doesn't like him."

"I don't like him," Chloe said. "I like watching him, though. He knows what he's doing. Even when he gets hurt, he doesn't stop."

"I can't believe he just died like that," Jewel said. Chloe said nothing, so she continued. "I mean, I can, I guess. But it's just... I don't know. Since the season started, he's been there. And it's not like a lot of the others. Like, Jonas has been around, and it was kind of sad what happened to him because he was so funny, but you sort of expect it, you know?"

"Yeah," Chloe said, "I guess so."

"But, like, Zach knew what he was doing. He was smart, and he had a plan. I thought it would work. I know he didn't play everything the best, but it just—I thought it would turn out. I thought he'd get ten and maybe Shawn and Mae would make it out later, or maybe they'd die while he was still there and he wouldn't have to worry about them anymore and could just make it to the end, or he'd, I don't know, come up with..."

Her throat was hurting again, her words coming faster and faster, and Chloe bit her lip and scratched her head and Jewel tried to take deep breaths and tried not to cry and she at least managed to keep the blurriness to the edges of her vision.

"At least he got what he wanted," Chloe said in that tone she put on when she was trying to be helpful, and just like every time she messed it up. "He got Shawn and Mae out of trouble."

"I hope they die," Jewel said.

Chloe said nothing.

"I hope they die," Jewel said again. "They deserve to die. They killed him. If they hadn't been there, he would've played it safe. He would've gotten out. I know he would've."

Chloe said nothing. Jewel looked at her posters and wanted to rip them off the walls, wad them and shove them in the trashcan and then kick it across the floor, send it spinning and let the garbage spill everywhere again, but Chloe was there so instead she just balled her fists.

"I don't like Mae either," Chloe said after a while. "I think she's really fake."

"I hope she dies," Jewel said, "and I hope it hurts."

"Why?"

The response was so unexpected that Jewel had to turn it over two or three times in her head before coming to grips with it. It was rare, really rare, that Chloe challenged Jewel when she was being tolerant—usually the bitchiness was reserved for when Jewel wanted to have Coleen over for a viewing party and wanted it to really specifically be a two-person viewing party, up in her room, alone, with no little sisters allowed. But then, Chloe's tone hadn't really been one of challenge, Jewel realized, but rather of questioning. And she had to really think before she came up with an answer.

"She was there," Jewel said. "She was there, and, and she could've have done something and she didn't. And he trusted her. He loved her and he trusted her and she never wanted him. Neither of them wanted them. He just tagged along, doing what he had to to keep them safe, and they didn't care about him at all. Or at least, they didn't care about him as much as he cared about them."

"What about when he left?" Chloe said.

"What?"

"When he left. What was with that?"

Jewel squeezed her eyes shut. She ran her hand across her forehead—it felt a little greasy, like maybe she should take a shower before bed even though she took one that morning before school and would take one tomorrow morning too—and pushed her hair behind her ears, and massaged her temple a little bit, and tried to remember. The truth was, she'd been so caught up in the death, those last few painful moments, the ebb and flow of blood and consciousness, that she'd let the other events slide into the back of her mind, to the place where she stored details to pull out and analyze during repeated viewings. They were part of her impression, her knowledge of him, surely, but not the part she'd been calling on in her conversation thus far.

So, what was with that?

"I don't know," Jewel said. "Maybe he thought it was best. Maybe he was trying to get away."

Chloe nodded. She didn't look fully convinced, and Jewel felt another wave of rage like the one that had made her scream earlier, but this time she had enough self control to keep it down. She stood, walked to the desk, picked up the plate, and by the time she was back the flash had passed. She had a drumstick, and she picked it up, then realized she was holding a bone and set it back down.

"You want my chicken?" she said. Chloe took it, and Jewel made her way through the corn—the way the strands got caught in her teeth normally drove her crazy, but today the distraction it provided was welcome—and the potatoes, using another spoon from her sister's pocket. Eating felt good, the sweetness of the corn and salt of the potatoes blending well, and she was still hungry when she was done, since she'd skipped the main part of the meal, but it was in this very physical way that she could set aside. It was dark outside by now, but still fairly early. Normally, she'd be booting up Champions or calling a friend or slogging through homework, but each of those ideas made her feel worse than the next. She sat quietly, and eventually Chloe's boredom must have outweighed her empathy, because she stood up and collected both the plates and spoons.

"You going to be alright?" she asked, turning back to look at Jewel a half step away from the door.

"Probably," Jewel said. She wasn't sure if she meant it or not. Some of that uncertainty must have come through, because Chloe sighed.

"I'll tell mom you're still not feeling good," she said.

"Thanks," Jewel said.

Chloe left, probably to go catch SOTF on stream in her room, closing the door behind her. Jewel thought about doing something, and then she dismissed the idea and lay back on her bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about Zach and how he'd died.

"Jesus Christ, Jewel," Coleen said. "Stop being such a baby about this. Shit happens."

If anyone else had said that, Jewel would have hated them for it. Coleen got off easy—Jewel's lips curled down into a vicious frown, one Coleen couldn't even see because she was in her own room, talking with Jewel on the phone. She'd called to talk about how funny it was that Marcus Walker and Timothy Walker died right after each other, and was pissed to find out Jewel hadn't watched anything since Zach.

"Like," Coleen said, "I get that he was your favorite. I still think he was shitty, but whatever. You have shitty taste sometimes. Water's wet."

Jewel was in pajamas by now and was absently pulling on each of her toes in sequence with her left hand, like she was playing This Little Piggy. Her dad was out of the house because he'd drawn the short straw when someone on the overnight crew called in sick and nobody wanted to fill in. Her mom was downstairs, probably reading still. Jewel had managed a few forays into the house outside her room, and her parents had generally accepted that she wasn't feeling great. She was pretty sure her father had an idea what was actually up, but he hadn't said anything except that she should get some rest. She'd been about to close her eyes and try to sleep without focusing on the blood and the sand when Coleen had called.

"I mean," Coleen continued, "I fucking love Shawn. I hope he takes it. But if Vincent smashes his head open or whatever, yeah, I'll be a bit disappointed, but I won't fucking hold a wake or an all-night vigil or whatever."

"I'm just sad," Jewel said, "okay? He didn't deserve that."

"Nobody deserves it," Coleen said, "and you don't care about the others like that. You're just sad 'cause you wanted to fuck him."

She laughed like she was making a joke and Jewel made herself laugh too because Coleen was really pushing it and they'd been friends for a very long time, almost as long as Jewel could remember, and this was getting close to the sort of place where if they weren't just joking around then maybe they couldn't be anymore. Jewel had already lost enough today.

"But really," Coleen said, "you need to get over this shit and get back in the saddle. I need you, Jewel. I've been talking with Tasha all day and she's all into Renée even though she's done jack shit, and I am so over hearing about that. Like, at least pick Nate or Odile or something."

"I don't know," Jewel said. Now she was running her left hand over her ankle and up her leg, up to her knee. Her skin was a little prickly; she'd have to shave in the morning or wear something opaque. "I don't know if I care."

"Of course you care," Coleen said. "You cared yesterday. What about Vincent?"

Jewel sighed.

"I know," she said. "It's just tough. It's hard to even think about it."

"It's hard because you're not doing anything but thinking," Coleen said. "I mean, come on. Have you tried?"

Jewel looked over at her computer, the screensaver—an ever-changing pattern of bullet holes appearing and disappearing at irregular intervals—hiding the Champions launcher, patched for hours now and still untouched. She hadn't read anything, hadn't opened her backpack or looked at her schoolwork, hadn't even put on music. It had been a long, long time since she'd sat for so long without something to draw her attention, though of course tonight her focus had been held by those images: blood, beach, grave.

"Just watch a little tonight, or tomorrow morning or something. Catch up on Amber." Coleen said it like a suggestion, but Jewel knew that if she didn't say anything, her assent would be assumed and there would be a quiz.

"We'll see," she said, meaning no. "I'll probably be up to it, but I'm pretty tired, so I don't know if I'll have time."

"Make time," Coleen said. "It won't take that long."

"I'll try," Jewel said. She shifted on the bed, moving from her initial position—in the middle of the bed, knees pulled to her chest, left hand back on her toes—to a more horizontal one, lying straight and flat like she was going to go to sleep. She pulled the covers up to her chest. The sheets were still cold, colder than her body temperature, and she shivered for a second, then pulled her legs up closer to her core to conserve heat.

"Good," Coleen said. "Do that."

That sounded like the conversation was over, so Jewel closed her eyes and got ready to say goodnight and try not to let the images creep in again. She'd only known his face for a little while, but she'd memorized it pretty quickly: light green eyes against pale skin, the glasses he'd come in sporting, black hair buzzed short, more stubble as the game wore on, a nose that was big but not too big. She had to admit, if she'd seen him in other circumstances, at school or out around town, she wouldn't have thought twice about him. He was cute, but only when she really mulled it over, when she paid attention to the ways he moved and talked and the things he did.

"I don't get it," Coleen said. Jewel's eyes opened again; the dimmed ceiling light seemed impossibly bright. "You haven't been like this before."

"Like what?" Jewel said.

"You know."

She did.

She took a deep, slow breath, and this time she managed to keep all of the thoughts that simple action stirred up corralled in the back of her mind. Coleen could probably hear her exhale, but didn't say anything. After a few heartbeats, Jewel forced herself to answer.

"He was different," she said. "He was special."

She went quiet to see if that was enough, but Coleen wasn't saying anything which meant Jewel was supposed to keep talking. She wasn't sure how to feel about this, wasn't quite sure what was going on. She was pretty sure she was either explaining her feelings or trying to defend them, but without Coleen chiming in, she couldn't say which it was.

"He was smart," she said. "He knew what he was doing, and sometimes he made bad choices anyways, because they were better for his friends. Sometimes he did things to show me how he was feeling. He liked it, and I think that scared him, but he couldn't stop."

"You didn't know him." There was an edge to that—defending, then—but Jewel smiled anyways.

"I knew what he wanted me to know. He was sharing all the time. You just had to watch him. He wasn't like the others." Jewel ran her free hand through her hair, tugging on the curly ends, massaging her scalp.

"I think we would've gotten along, Coleen," she said. "Not just him and me. You too. He was like us. He'd tell you what he thought about Amber. He'd probably say she was hot but totally fucked."

"Whatever," Coleen said, but she laughed. The trial was over, or at least in recess. "I've sorry your island husband got shot. You can laugh at me when someone fucks Shawn up. Get some sleep and tell me what you think of Amber."

"Alright," Jewel said. "Goodnight."

After Coleen hung up, after Jewel brushed her teeth and said goodnight to Chloe (demurring when Chloe offered to show her a bitching kill that had just been broadcast), after she turned out the lights and took out her piercings and closed her eyes, Jewel thought about Zach, and about their time together.

Coleen was right. She hadn't known him, not beyond the image he chose to or could not help but project. Maybe the real Zach—the Zach whose parents were coping, the Zach who'd hung out with Shawn and Mae back in Texas, the Zach who'd held thoughts he probably never shared with anyone—was nothing like that Zach on the other side of the cameras who she'd fallen for. The two were connected, though. Her Zach was a construct of the real Zach. He was the real Zach's ideal just as much as he was hers, and faced with danger and the probability of his impending death, he was what had risen to the surface.

Soon, Jewel would go to school again, and her life would return to normal, but she would carry her feelings for her Zach with her, would carry the memory of this boy she'd never met, and she wouldn't be alone. Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of other people would carry him with them as well, not as a punch line or bit player but as a person they'd let into their hearts, one to whom they'd extended empathy and for whom they'd cheered and hoped and cried.

Zach had died, both the real Zach and her Zach, but he'd touched people and become real to them.

In a way, he'd gotten something better than surviving.

Jewel stopped breaking things after a while.

The condominium was cold and that cold made her arms and legs and shoulders tense and tremble and that trembling flared up the pain by aggravating her cuts and bruises and strained muscles and that pain made it so, so hard not to cry. She was ascending, step by step moving up the staircase that connected the various units and floors, left hand on the wall to steady herself. Her arm looked strange to her, thin and pale and smeared in red and brown, bandage starting to fray around the edges, black nail polish and the nails beneath it chipped. The walls were white, and Jewel's clothing was all black, and she retained enough presence of mind to acknowledge the way she would have at home appreciated the contrast of the shot.

She'd left her bag down below. It had not been intentional. She'd been carried by her momentum to the stairs, and hadn't when she first began her climb really comprehended the height, had only at the third floor remembered that the building was one of the tallest in the resort—nothing next to the tower, but enough to loom over everything else.

She perhaps should have turned around at that point, but an urge to see compelled her to keep moving. She shuffled her feet slowly and as lightly as she could, though the pain would make her at times stumble or favor her uninjured leg in such a way as to result in a loud step. Every landing, every door she passed she half expected to disgorge other students, people she had unfinished business with—and how many of those were there? It had been easy to keep track for a long time, but now she could think of Yagmur and that was it—or killers. Who even was killing? She had an idea that it was mostly her classmates, which quirked her lips, but could not bring to mind names or faces. She paused and took a deep breath and tried to recall, but the last announcement felt much longer ago than the dozen or so hours it had been. Another would be coming soon.

The top floor finally arrived. There was an elevator right there, of course, as with most buildings of any notable height or likelihood to attract disabled patrons. Jewel wasn't sure if it would still work. Probably, not that it mattered since she had only noticed it at the conclusion of her journey.

She made her way down the hall, picked the first door on the left, limped through another living space for rent.

She'd only been in hotels a few times in her life. Her family did not frequently take vacations, but when her dad was promoted, he promised he'd take them skiing next Christmas. They'd piled into the sedan and driven to Colorado, to Vail, and had stayed in an awful rental unit for a weekend. Jewel had fallen ill on the way, with a fever that by the time they arrived had subsided to simple yet overwhelming fatigue, and so she had stayed inside while Chloe and her mom and her dad went out and skied. At thirteen, she had been old enough to stay on her own, old enough to insist that her family continue with their plans and not waste the time they'd been so excited for on her account, old enough to bitterly resent their taking her up on her suggestion. She'd spent her time laying on the couch, listening to music or playing video games, periodically turning to stare out the frosted windows at the snow falling outside.

That was the time these units recalled for her, and not only because outside she knew the snow was piling up. There was a certain inoffensive anonymity to everything, a calculated approachability unlikely to particularly offend—or excite—any sensibilities but the most mainstream. She moved past a television set and a potted fern which she suspected was plastic and to a glass sliding door.

It took more force than she expected to get the door open, because she had to use only her left hand and the angle was awkward and the first time she tried the gash the second-to-last boy had inflicted upon her burned with protest maybe. She managed to get about a foot of gap and slipped out onto the balcony. It faced the boardwalk and the sea, though she couldn't make out much through the pre-dawn dark and the snow, which now fell more slowly but no less heavily. There were plastic chairs set up. Jewel tipped and shook one using only her left hand, clearing it mostly of snow, and then sat down. It felt like she hadn't sat for a long time, though she recalled distinctly perching while talking to Sarah.

She stood again a second later, looking down to the ground, but could see no trace of her friend. It wasn't a surprise; Sarah had left when Jewel was still on the ground floor, probably more than an hour before. Jewel sat back down a few moments later, letting her body actually relax now. The pain wasn't so bad when she didn't focus on anything. Her eyes shut, but she held her tongue between her teeth and every time her thoughts drifted too associatively she bit down hard until the pain brought her back to awareness. Her arms and legs still sported goosebumps, but she didn't shiver anymore. It was too cold to let herself sleep.

After a long time, the announcements came on. Jewel had gotten used to the near-silence broken only by her own breathes and the occasional crash or gunshot or scream conjured from her surroundings or subconscious, and so it took her a half second to remember what was happening. When she did, she tried to pay attention.

The balance of deaths was a strange phenomenon, one she'd argued about before. How the fuck, she'd asked, did so many people manage to get themselves killed with absolutely no help? It was often by mistake, and there was a little of that here (Dehydration? She reached to take a sip of water to chase the dryness from her mouth and then realized her bag was downstairs still) but mostly people had started killing themselves either intentionally or through poor danger zone management. Her eyes widened then, and she tensed and stood, moved back towards the door off the balcony, but paused as the announcer rattled off the list of forbidden areas and returned to her seat when it was finished.

Fifty down. A dozen in the last twelve hours, seven victims and five accidents or suicides. Take away her two, that left natural causes and the other contestants dead even. She smirked, even though something that had been said was weighing on her. She knew one of the names—Cathryn. It was Cathryn; she'd killed Nina, who had been passed out in the same place as Jewel way back at the start of everything. Cathryn, who maybe hadn't been keeping up with the errand Jewel had sent her on, or maybe had and had just had found time to smother Nina in her sleep regardless. It was tough to say, since Jewel hadn't given any thought to monitoring her network in some time.

Killing someone in their sleep was pretty rare.

Jewel stood up again and went back inside. The shivering came back as she started to warm up. She looked at the elevator, thought briefly of calling it, and then moved to the stairs, edging back down the way she'd came, left hand bracing her now against the opposite wall as before.

Her bag was still below, and there was no telling if anyone else had sought shelter in the units while she was gone.

((Jewel Evans continued Sharp and Clear and Pure and Gone))