Page 93 of The Most Dangerous Games

He has been trying to remember but everything in his brain is a terrible jumble, everything is happening so fast.

Then he remembers.

His brain drags up her last words to hurt him.

I’ll be right behind you.

She said it before he jumped. She said it, and meant it.

He’d had to get to Rupert before it was too late.

I’ll be right behind you.

He hadn’t checked once. He hadn’t even looked back.

The boat rises out of the water slightly as the pilot increases the speed.

The bumps just make Jack hold on to Elena more tightly.

She really does look peaceful. He brushes wet hair away from her eyes.

He doesn’t say I love you out loud.

He can’t.

But it’s there in the way he holds her, in the way he can’t stop shaking.

Jack has so many regrets in his life. But he knows in this moment that he will never have a more painful one than this:

Not telling Elena how completely he’d fallen for her before it was too late.

60.

Death Valley

Jimmy and Carlos Lopez begin to make their way back to Alek and Marcelo. Jimmy hopes they aren’t too late. They might be.

Leave me, Alek had said. A command. From a natural leader.

Jimmy and Lopez are moving more slowly than ever, both of them weakening fast, feeling the heat hit with the force of strong wind blowing dead against them.

But there’s another reason their progress is so slow, and it has nothing to do with the heat. It’s the water they’re carrying.

Lopez used the knife to cut open the sealed plastic liner from the supply case they were issued at the start—thick plastic. He twists it into a bag, ties it shut with strips torn from his own shirt, and makes a second smaller pouch from a second liner.

It leaked.

Every few steps Jimmy feels water run down his wrist, and it makes him want to scream.

Because that water is Alek.

That water is Marcelo.

That water is the difference between “we finish” and “they die.”

It was Lopez’s idea.

Maybe he isn’t a gangster, Jimmy thinks. Just a competitor who never loses. Either way, Jimmy is glad that Lopez seems to know his way around a desert.