Page 56 of The Most Dangerous Games

How hard will he have to push any of these people to get them to push the red buttons around their necks?

He watches now as Wyatt Jordan walks with the German girl toward the cottages.

People think love is a weakness.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s leverage.

He changes the camera angle and watches Wyatt glance over his shoulder one last time, like he can feel the eyes on him.

You’re learning, The Host thinks.

Too late.

The Host thinks to himself, It would be a pity if one of them is the next to die.

39.

Before she heads back over to the main house the next morning along with the others—The Host having commanded they be back inside the ballroom by eight o’clock or the games would begin without them—Alek Andrich places an allowed call to her mother back home.

They haven’t spoken since she had boarded another Globemaster at Williams Field, near McMurdo Station, for the flight they didn’t even know was to the United States until they were in midair. And they had only spoken for a couple of minutes that day before the plane took off.

Alek hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not to her mother and not even to Hannah, that being anywhere near a military plane gave her terrible flashbacks about what had happened since the war started falling out of the sky on her family.

Alek just wants to hear Danyia Andrich’s voice this morning. As insane as her mother’s life was through the wars and as insane as Alek’s has become since she left, somehow the sound of her mother’s voice still brings normalcy to her, even peace, if only for a little while.

Her mother answers on the second ring.

“Alechka,” Danyia says, and the sound of her voice hits Alek in the chest like warmth.

“I’m okay,” Alek says immediately. Because that’s what mothers need first.

She does not tell her mother about her near-death experience at the Erebus Ice Tongue, knowing full well by now that Danyia Andrich is already scared enough by this journey her daughter has taken.

Sometimes, her mother says, she feels she’s sent her daughter off to fight.

“Where are you?” her mother asks.

“Kentucky,” Alek says. “America.”

A pause on the line. A breath.

“And what is next?” Danyia asks. Trying to sound calm. Failing.

“I think this morning we’re actually going to be competing in board games,” Alek says.

“You mean like Monopoly?”

Alek thinks of the money, money beyond avarice, waiting for someone at the end of these games.

“Yes, Mama. Like that.”

Neither one of them speaks until her mother says, “My daughter, after the way you’ve described some of those against whom you are competing, after what you’ve already survived . . . are you sure it’s still worth it for you to be there?”

Alek closes her eyes.

She doesn’t tell her mother about the crack in the ice. The hole. The water. Reg’s hand on her wrist. Wyatt and Hannah anchoring—shoulder to shoulder, locked in.