Page 145 of The Most Dangerous Games

Hannah Wagner is gone by the time Wyatt makes it back to her cottage.

It’s Alek sitting on the steps instead, arms wrapped around herself like she’s trying to hold her world together.

“She left,” Alek says.

Wyatt stares at the door like it might open if he stares hard enough. He has survived his duel. He walked out of the woods alive. And now he’s lost Hannah, this time for good, he’s certain of that. On a day when he’s done what he needed to win, somehow he still feels like he lost.

He sits down next to Alek on the front steps—to keep from falling down. It takes some time for either one of them to speak again.

Finally Wyatt says, “Did you at least get to say goodbye to her?”

Alek shakes her head.

“No goodbye,” she says. “No note. I think she’d had enough.”

“She wanted to win so bad,” Wyatt says, staring out at the lawn in front of them.

“Maybe in her own way she did,” Alek says.

Alek knows what happened between Wyatt and Zhi. All the survivors do. She says she still wants to hear all about it from him, maybe just because it’s a way for them to stop talking about Hannah.

Wyatt takes her through it, almost step by step, from the time The Host handed him his gun until he used it to shoot Zhi in the upper arm right after Zhi had missed.

“Remember when I told you I’d taken gymnastics in high school one time?” Wyatt says. “Well, if I make it out of this thing alive, someday I have to tell my old coach it saved my life twice.”

“So you’re telling me you saved your own life today from a gymnast because of a gymnastics move?”

“Kinda,” Wyatt says.

He grins.

“Think of me as the Artful Dodger,” Wyatt says.

“Wasn’t he a con man in Oliver Twist?” she says.

“Kinda,” Wyatt says again. After a long pause, he continues, “I hit him in the shoulder . . . I didn’t—” He stops. Tries again. “I didn’t mean to—”

Alek’s voice is gentle, but it doesn’t let him off the hook.

“Did he live?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

And that’s the worst part. Not knowing. Not being able to undo it. Not being able to call it anything clean.

“You still want company?” Alek says after another lengthy silence.

“No,” Wyatt says quietly.

“Come find me later,” Alek says.

“I will.”

Wyatt looks at Alek and thinks about how lucky he is to have her as a friend, even not knowing for how much longer.

“I’ll always be here for you,” she says.

“I know you will.”