Page 5 of The Most Dangerous Games

“If we go in, grab my sleeve,” Alek says. “We’ll get through this together.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Hannah says.

Alek smiles.

“I’m good at looking calmer than I feel,” she says.

It takes some effort, the wind in both their faces, but Hannah smiles back.

“Thank you,” she says.

“For what?”

“I know you’ve been looking out for me, without making it look that way, almost from the first moment we met,” she says.

“I like you,” Alek says. “I’ve liked you from the start. And I’m frankly not sure I could have done this at your age. It’s why I think you’re probably braver than I’ll ever be.”

“Hey, you’re not that much older than I am,” Hannah says.

Alek’s face turns serious. “Yes,” she says, “I am.”

“Maybe we really can take care of each other,” Hannah says. “I never had a sister.”

“I did,” Alek says.

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” Alek says.

“I’m so sorry,” Hannah says.

Not as sorry as I am, Alek is about to say, but she feels it first—a low thrumming through the rubber hull, a pulse under the water. Something hits the Zodiac hard—torpedo-hard—and the bow jumps out of the water.

“Whale!” Hannah yells before the others realize what just happened. Then, her eyes filled with both wonder and terror, she points a stiff arm at the water. “Orca!”

The Zodiac jumps. Then it flips.

Water slams her face. The cold is instant and brutal. They’ve been dunked into McMurdo Sound.

In water this cold, you lose your hands first. Then you lose your mind, Alek thinks.

The cold stuns her. Her lungs seize. She battles back to the surface. Her arms and legs already feel numb. When she manages to get her head above water, gulping in air, she’s less than twenty yards from a black-and-white orca whale that is the biggest, most frightening creature she’s ever seen in her life.

Her head swivels as she sees dark, cresting waves surrounding others who were just ejected from the Zodiac boat.

She frantically searches for any sight of Hannah Wagner’s red hair. But she can’t see her friend anywhere.

Just killer whales that seem to be everywhere.

This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare.

Steven Noble

2.

Jack

Off the Coast of Chile