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“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Maddy said. “You’ve played this gameshow of theirs many times, each time with a different partner. A different girl.”
Her eyes glinted with jealousy at the word “girl.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Oh, I think I know exactly what it was like. Stari showed me the footage from your other… performances.”
“It was different with them. I didn’t love them—”
“I’m sure the sex was real torture.”
“No, it wasn’t torture—”
Maddy turned on me.
“Did you love any of them?” she said.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“You sure seemed to enjoy being with them.”
Her eyes burned like red-hot furnaces.
“I had to do it,” I said. “If I didn’t, they would have killed the girls. Maybe me too. The audience watched the show because the contestants care about each other. They want to see us fall in love. I had to make it look like we were in love. But we weren’t.”
“Maybe you weren’t,” Maddy said. “But they were.”
I turned away.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes their love might have been real.”
“There’s no ‘might’ about it!” Maddy said. “They loved you and you led them to their deaths!”
“We tried to escape. But we always failed.”
“The whole gameshow was fake.”
“The only real thing were the girls,” I said. “And the weapons and explosions.”
“Did you ever reach the shuttlecraft with them?” Maddy said.
“No. The closest I ever came was with you. I thought if we could reach it, if we could get away, we could finally be safe.”
Maddy’s eyes drifted between mine.
“You really don’t know, do you?” she said.
“Don’t know what?”
Her eyes scrubbed my face again, looking for something that wasn’t there.
“The shuttlecraft,” she said. “It wasn’t real. It was a prop, something for you to chase after but never reach. Even if you did—as other contestants with their partners managed to do, the Changelings blew it up and then later edited it so it looked like one of the trackers did it.”
“What?” I said. “No, that can’t be right.”
“It is. Stari showed me the footage. It hasn’t happened just once. It’s happened many times.”
The planet shifted beneath my feet and I almost lost my balance. I braced myself on the wall and let the full implications roll over me.
