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Especially since I knew most of them had coke addictions that would make Banff look like it was a tropical paradise.
Once upon a time, I could’ve called a lot of them my friends. I sure as fuck recognized enough of them from my classes and extracurricular programs. Got drunk at their parties. Hung out with them after school. Went to their families’ long weekend barbecues.
But that’s all they were now,people I recognized.
After they’d turned their backs on me, they might as well have beennothingfor all I cared.
My eye caught on Jenna’s photo, her dark hair carefully styled into waves that reminded me a bit of the flapper costume she’d worn last Halloween.
Surprise tickled my senses.I hadn’t realized she was playing.
Okay, fine.There was one person in the arena that I could depend on. If I could find her. Of all of the useless pricks I’d called my friends before, she was the only one ever to check up on me.
She was kind, good in a way the others weren’t.
Well, her and Kohl.I flinched away from that train of thought. I didn’t have time to think about them now.
“Are you watching or playing?” a girl with a shaved head and a silver ring through her lip asked, her booted foot tapping impatiently against the sticky floor.
“How do you know I’m going to the playground?” I asked, narrowly resisting the urge to pull my hood up.
It wouldn’t do me any good anyway. If I was sure ofanything,it was that eventually, everyone would knowexactlywho I was.
Honestly, I was kind of counting on it. But it needed to be at the right moment.
She shrugged a bronze shoulder, blowing a bubble in her violently purple, grape-scented gum that popped with a smack. “Look around you, sugar. Isn’t that where we’re all going?”
Fair enough.
I’d gone to a lot of trouble to be invisible tonight.
As a legacy, I should’ve been up there with the rest of them. But I’d registered late to avoid the press junket. In the arena, I’d have to rely on my mask to hide my identity. I just needed to avoid recognition from the other players until I got through the stylists. Then it would be fair game, the viewers were going to love a surpriselegacycontestant.
It should’ve been easy, blending in with the crowd for a twenty-minute train ride.Should’vebeing the operative word.
If I was normal like this girl—some no-name first-time entrant—maybe it would’ve been. But instead, I’d spent my entire life on a fucking pedestal, paraded around like an accessory to prove that the gamesworked. That you could rip yourself out of poverty for the tiny, insignificant price of your humanity.
It made me sick, to watch people praise my parents for the horrifying things they’d done in their games.
And yet here I was, offering up my soul just like them.
Not that I had much of a choice.
I needed that fucking money.
My face had been plastered on every magazine, gossip blog, and newspaper since before I could hold my own head up. That’s what happened whenbothof your parents were Legacies.
I laughed lightly, my eyes flicking around the packed train car at the sea of black-clad young adults. Most of them were barely eighteen, like me, eligible for the very first time to play.
What did it say about this country that so few people could afford college that they were willing to kill for the opportunity to go? The chance was so slim of winning that you’d probably be better off trying for the lottery, but after the games took hold, more and more people started to bet on the outcomes ofthatthan spend their precious few dollars on a lottery ticket.
“Well?” the girl asked, raising a split eyebrow. “Are you a viewer or a player?”
“Player,” I said, my hand going to the bracelet on my wrist. “Hide and Seek. You?”
“Player,” she echoed with a sarcastic peace sign. “Truth or Dare.”
The games had three main events. All held on Paradise Pier, an island just off the coast that they refurbished every year into a new and exciting death trap. The first event, Hide and Seek, took place at sundown on kickoff day and ended when the first ray of sunlight hit the arena the next morning.
