Page 65 of The Most Dangerous Games

Reg kneels on one side, steady as stone.

“Your mother?” he asks, and can’t finish the question.

Alek shakes her head fast, like she’s trying to shake off the image.

“She’s alive,” Alek says. “But hurt badly . . . her ceiling . . . collapsed. Ten bodies so far have been recovered.” Alek still has the phone in her shaking right hand. She swallows hard. “She’s at the hospital.”

“How badly hurt?” Wyatt asks.

“Sofia says things were broken,” Alek says. “Maybe many things.”

She looks up at Wyatt, and it’s the first time she looks her age since he met her.

“This is . . . was for her more than me,” she says. “Me being here and not with her there.” Her voice breaks on the last word.

“We all know that,” Reg says quietly.

“I have to leave,” Alek says. “I have to push my button. I have to—You both understand, don’t you?”

Wyatt thinks: She wants us to pull her to safety one more time.

Reg puts a hand on her shoulder. Firm. Gentle. Nonnegotiable.

“Breathe,” Reg says. “Just breathe.”

Alek tries. Fails. Tries again.

“Help me,” Alek says to them in a small voice.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Reg says. “We both will. Just breathe.”

Reg keeps his voice low.

“Get information first,” he says. “Make the decision with facts, not panic. Because once you press it . . . that’s it.”

Wyatt watches Alek’s hand tremble near the pendant at her chest. She’s staring at it like it’s a gun.

Wyatt had wanted to go looking for Hannah as soon as he’d left the ballroom, to try to understand what had happened to them this morning. But he knows he can’t leave Alek, any more than he would have left her that day when she fell through the ice.

“We’re not leaving you,” Wyatt says.

Reg nods. “Not until you know.”

He thinks: This is a different kind of test for Alek. Not part of this competition, but the most difficult test yet. By a lot. All of them had left their old lives behind when they’d entered this competition. But Alek’s has just reached out to her in this lousy way.

They walk her back to her cottage like she’s fragile glass.

Alek sits on the front steps with her phone in both hands, knuckles white.

“Wyatt and I will stay with you until you hear back from your mother’s friend,” Reg says. He smiles at her again and puts a hand on her shoulder. She reaches up and covers it with her own. “You know by now that we have your back, no matter what.”

As they sit there with her, Wyatt once again thinks how full of it a guy like Tipton is, thinking that alliances and even newly formed friendships don’t matter here.

They do.

Jimmy was absolutely right after dinner last night. Some of us feel we’re all in this together, no matter how much we all want to be the ultimate winner. Wyatt is intelligent enough to know that might change eventually, probably will change, as their numbers continue to dwindle. Maybe it will be him against Reg or Alek, or Jack.

Or Hannah.