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Smoke issued from Kren’s back where the electric pulse had burned him. He struggled to get to his feet but he couldn’t do it.
“Kren!” I screamed.
He managed to turn his face toward me. He couldn’t see me. His eyes rolled in their sockets and he could hardly move.
“Take him to the pit,” the Supervisor said. “Organize a Survivor tournament. It’s about time we had ourselves a new champion.”
18
KREN
The guards tossed me in the holding cell they usually used for large monsters. Occasionally, they carted them in for special events. A team of fighters was pitted against the poor beasts. When it came to cruelty, the Supervisor knew no bounds.
The guards slammed the door shut and marched away.
I rolled over and immediately stopped. The pain was intense from the shock rifles. They locked up your muscles and made your teeth clench. If you didn’t jam your jaw shut before the attack happened, you could easily end up with broken or snapped teeth.
I would have said I was lucky they hadn’t killed me on the laboratory’s floor but that would have ignored the fact that the Supervisor never liked to waste good resources, not when he could teach a lesson to the other inmates.
Other inmates.
I was the only innocent man there and I was going to die before all of them.
The Survivor Challenge was a death sentence. In all my years at the prison, I could only recall it happening twice. Once when a prisoner attempted an attack on the Supervisor’s life and the other when a prisoner somehow survived a successful escape.
Those mistakes hadn’t been repeated.
The cage was rarely cleaned. It smelled like festering dung and what little straw and dry grass there was tossed up enough fetid dust to clog my nose.
I leaned against the back wall and took stock of my situation. I’d gone into the Supervisor’s lab to learn Ivy’s location. I told the Supervisor the truth about my ability and what I could do.
Harper’s interruption came a moment too late. I could have avoided telling him everything. It would have done little save delay him. He had Ivy locked in her own cell.
He was never going to let her go.
It was hard to work out what kind of plan the Supervisor had developed with Ivy.
What was it? I wondered. Had she betrayed me? Did she really love me? Or was it all just a show?
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.
But when I saw her, when she managed to break through that barrier of her prison, my heart rejoiced.
She hadn’t betrayed me, I knew. Not with that kindly look on her face. And if she had, she’d paid for it by being locked up in that cell.
A cell in the laboratory.
Were they doing experiments on her? Was there something about her I didn’t know?
Or had she been deliberately put in that cell for me to see her? Was it some kind of sadistic plan the Supervisor was running? I wouldn’t put it past him.
None of it made any sense.
The only thing I could cling to, the only truth I knew, was that I was madly in love with her. Even when the guards shot me with their shock rifles, the only thing I cared about was seeing her one last time.
Instead, I was faced with the blank wall. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t imagined her.
But no. Why would the Supervisor react the way he had if it hadn’t been as much a shock for him to see her there as it was for me?
