Page 167 of The Most Dangerous Games

Psychological warfare.

It is why, now that he’s reached his breaking point, Ant is ready to do the unthinkable:

Surrender.

Tipton violently pulls his arms away from the arms of his chair, ripping away the leather restraints. Not because he’s a superhero—because panic makes you strong in stupid ways.

Doesn’t just unhook his seat belt.

Rips it off, tearing it into two pieces.

“Enough!” he shouts, voice raw, trying to make himself heard over the cries still being pumped into the room, even louder now than before. “ENOUGH! You win! Okay? YOU WIN!”

He looks down as he sees the flames licking at his black jeans.

“Let me out of here!”

Smoke is filling the chamber. Tipton feels the burn of that on his throat, gagging as he blindly stumbles toward the door, eyes full of smoke and tears. He’s now the one inside that burning apartment, inside the fire from which Wyatt had saved that little girl.

Only Ant Tipton is trying to save himself.

When he finally gets his hand on the handle, he’s the one crying out again, the same pain of having touched a hot stove.

He jerks back, swearing silently in his head, because even now he refuses to give them the satisfaction of hearing him break.

But the handle won’t turn.

He pulls his hand away, takes off his black T-shirt, covers the handle with it, tries to open the door again.

Nothing.

Locked from the outside.

Tipton takes a step back into the smoke and charges the door now, lowering his shoulder like he’s the one who played American football the way McHenry did back in Texas, trying to turn himself into a human battering ram.

This time the searing pain is in his shoulder, the sharp ache of having broken it.

Ant Tipton feels broken, gutted, humiliated, after all the times he’d told himself he’d die before he quit.

He slides down the wall next to the door, until he is seated next to it.

Smoke and flames everywhere. The room is a furnace. The air is poison.

Tipton tries to tell himself he can’t possibly be burning up this way.

This can’t be real.

But it all couldn’t be more real.

He tastes the word they gave him—quit—right on the edge of his tongue, and it terrifies him more than the fire, so he bites down and swallows it like poison.

Tipton thinks: This is what it must have been like for my brother that day.

And for the first time in his life—maybe the first time since he was twelve—Ant Tipton thinks something he’s never allowed himself to think.

Maybe surviving wasn’t proof of strength.

Maybe it was just delay.