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“But when we reached the shuttlecraft, we were going to take off.”
“The shuttlecraft wasn’t real,” Stari said patiently.
“It was real,” I said. “I saw it.”
“You saw what they wanted you to see. It was a prop, an empty shell. It was no more capable of flying than I am. I’m sorry, but trying to reach the shuttlecraft was always doomed to fail.”
It took a while for me to process what she was saying. It was all fake? How could that be?
“We were in a reality TV show,” I said. “They gave us a mission. To reach the shuttlecraft before it exploded.”
Stari took a seat beside me.
“There have been other contestants,” she said. “Many others. Some were even more successful than you. They reached the shuttlecraft and flicked the switches to fly away, only it wouldn’t take off. It couldn’t take off. The Changelings in the control room blew it up anyway.”
It was a lot to take in.
“No,” I said. “The trackers had to do it.”
“The Changelings in the Control Room blew the ship up and then edited a tracker into the shot later to make it look like they were the ones who did it. No one in the gameshow ever escapes. Not ever.”
No one.
Not ever.
It’d been fake from the get-go. No chance we were going to escape. And that meant all the pain and challenges we’d faced had been engineered by the Changelings.
My eyes drifted down to Stari’s wrists. They were exposed and showed no seam of skin as Chax had described if she was a Changeling in disguise.
But she could still be hired by the Changelings to play this role. This could be fake too. Couldn’t it?
How did I know I wasn’t still in the TV show? For all I knew, I could still be neck-deep in their twisted game.
Still, there were little things that told me differently. It was in the look of shock on Iron Hoof’s face when the shooting began and he got hit in the shoulder by a bolt of plasma. It was on Stari’s face when she showed up to help me.
It was real. At least, it seemed real.
The Yayora were as terrified to be getting involved as I was at seeing them there.
Were they acting? Or was it genuine?
I went round and round in circles and none of it made sense.
I needed Chax. He would know what to do.
“How is Chax?” I said. “Is he okay?”
Stari took my hands in hers. The distressed look in her eyes was a dagger in my heart. She looked away from me.
“We did everything we could to save him,” Stari said. “But his injuries were too great.”
I heard her words but my brain refused to process them. They didn’t make sense.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “He’s a Titan. They can heal really fast. He’ll be okay. Just give him time.”
“We did. I’m sorry.”
“Just let him rest,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”
