He hadn’t offered any encouragement.
He just kept his pace without deviation or distraction.
“Don’t waste time or energy on me,” the female said. “I’ve made my decision. I can’t feel my legs anymore, and I think my shoulder is broken. If you can keep moving, you need to do it. You’re too tired to carry me, but even if you could, I will be no one else’s burden.”
Paradise’s eyes stung with tears. “Well … shit.”
The female smiled a little. “You’re going to win this.”
“What?”
“Just go. You got this, girl.”
Okaaaaaay, and someone else had gone delirious, clearly.
The female gave her a shove and a nod. “Prove to the boys we’re not just equal, we’re better than them. Don’t let me down.”
Paradise shook her head. If anyone was going to win a war of the sexes, the better bet was on the female in front of her.
“Go. You can do this.”
Paradise was cursing to herself as she turned away and resumed walking. Craziness. Just insanity.
As her feet skimmed over the now-packed dirt, she checked the sky again. The stars shone as bright as ever, which told her that dawn remained a ways off.
How long had they been walking? she wondered. And how much longer…?
By now, Craeg was well off in the distance. From time to time, she caught his scent on the breeze, but it was just a faint hint. Talk about winners? He was the one who was going to “first place” this: He was stronger and tougher—and she had to believe, even if it went against every core principle she personally had, that his single-minded, unwavering commitment to himself was going to see him through this better than her compassionate interest in others.
Weight carried, whether it was physically, mentally, or emotionally, slowed you down.
And as she kept going, through the cold wind that no longer registered, she felt the loss of each member of their little group—and all the others who had suffered before, whether it was in the gym, the pool …
No, that male up ahead of her was going to be the last candidate standing.
As she rounded a bend in the track, a barrier in her path registered. It was some ways away, but it was definitely an obstacle on the ground in the center of the trail.
Not just an obstacle.
It was … Craeg.
Her brain flipped into a faster gear, ordering her to rush to him—her body, however, could not respond to the flush of adrenaline. Even as her brain hit all kinds of alarm buttons, her pace didn’t change, that shuffling of her feet and lurching of her upper torso unaltered by the panic.
Coming up to him, she discovered that he had collapsed facedown in the path, his arms flopped at his sides as if he had lacked the strength or consciousness to brace himself for the impact. His legs were lax, his Nikes turned inward.
“Craeg?”
When she went to crouch down, she fell herself, because her knees refused to bend—and then, as she tried to roll him over, her hands kept slipping free of the grip of his clothes, his shoulder, his arm.
Although maybe that was because he weighed twice as much as Peyton did.
She could get him only half on his side, and God, he was so pale that his face glowed like a ghost’s. At least he was breathing, though, and after a moment, his eyes opened in a series of messy blinks.
It was bizarre, but her first thought was to offer him her vein—which was something that hadn’t occurred to her up until now, even when Peyton had hit the ground.
The impulse was so strong, she brought her wrist up to her mouth—
He stopped her, slapping her arm down. “No…” he rasped.
“You’re bleeding.” She nodded down at the big red stain on his jeans. “You need strength.”
As his eyes locked on hers, a strange kind of tunnel vision reduced the entire world to just the two of them: The forest around them, the construct under which they had been laboring, the toil they were both enduring … it all disappeared along with the aches and pains in her body and her head.
His gaze wiped her clean. Refreshed her. Energized her.
“Leave me here,” he mumbled, his head shaking back and forth on the ground. “Go ahead. You’re the last one…”
“You can get up. You can keep going—”
“Stop wasting time. Go…”
“You have to get up.”
He closed his eyes and turned his head away from her, as if he were done with the conversation. But then he said, “This is about your survival. Survival means you continue no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifice. So stop wasting breath, get back on your feet, and move.”
“I don’t want to leave you here.” Also didn’t want to look too closely into why she had walked away from Peyton, but couldn’t seem to bear leaving this total stranger behind. “I’m not going to leave you.”
His eyes swung around and they were pissed. “How about this. I don’t want help from the likes of you—I don’t want to be rescued by some dumb female … some dumb, weak, fumbling female who should never have been allowed into this program in the first place.”
Paradise fell back onto the forest floor, a blazing pain ripping through her chest. Except then she shook her head. “That’s not what you really believe. That’s not what you told me the first night we met. You told me to come here even when my father didn’t.”
“I lied.”
“You’re lying now.”