Hour 20

Emi soaked a rag from her backpack with a quick splash of her limited drinking water and placed it on the man's head. As if in response to the refreshing contact of the cool cloth, he had awoken at once and tried to squeeze it for a drink, urging Emi to block his delirious wringing of it and hand him a fresh water bottle. For a moment, he appeared to not believe her offer was real; he looked upon her like she was a hallucination. Without warning, he snatched the bottle from her grasp and sucked it down with considerable force. She advised, "Be careful, don't drink it all at once!" but he wasn't holding his phone to allow for a translation and couldn't understand her. As he finished, he wiped the residual water droplets from his beard and slathered his face in the fresh feeling of cooling moisture. He looked to Emi, still obviously suffering from dehydration but now exuding a renewed passion in his movements, picked his phone back up, and spoke in a deep, throaty baritone, "Thank you, young lady. I felt like I was dying." Emi had taken her attention back to her phone to communicate properly and responded compassionately, "You probably shouldn't stand yet." He replied, "You're right. I'm sorry to waste your time." Emi turned her phone briefly so he could see she also had been texted the number 14 and said, "Don't worry about it. Right now, we're a team so your health is just as important as mine. If one of us dies, then the other..." She trailed off in a dramatic flair that she hadn't intended on; she had thought of Alex again, and her mind had gone blank. He agreed with her assessment, "That's true." A silence graced their conversation and both briefly stopped moving, allowing the flies and various other insects the opportunity to swarm them freely. The man pulled at his sweaty shirt in an effort to circulate some air and wave off the bugs around his face as he spoke, hoping to break the ice with the girl in front of him, "My name is Aleksandr." Emi's stomach rolled uncomfortably and she looked away. What kind of cruel irony was this? Could she not catch a break? To lose Alex, and then have his name flaunted in front of her so soon? She felt the biological compulsion to cry again and it only heightened the anger in her conscious mind. She had never been one to shed tears easily, but she had cried more in the last 24 hours than she had in the last 5, possibly even 10 years. It was wearing her out, depleting her psychological stamina, and stealing her self-esteem. Alexander efficiently picked up on the fact his words had affected her in a way he had not intended, though he couldn't know why or how. He expertly added, "My friends call me Sasha, though. In Russia, it's a common nickname." Emi, unable to look at him for fear of showing weakness was grateful for his tactical reading of social cues. "Sasha, I like that name," she said, trying to regain hold of the conversation. She steeled herself, wiped all doubt from her face, and turned to him, "You can call me Emi." Sasha gave her a half salute with his calloused hand as he abandoned wafting his shirt, "that's a unique name." She asked him, "So, you're from Russia? What have the games been like for you up until this point?" His phone relaxed for a second in his hand as he thought, then he repositioned it upright and explained, "At first, I was told to kill someone. Naturally, I thought it was ludicrous, but every officer in my prison keep got the same message." "Prison?" Emi asked inquisitively. He responded, "Yeah, I was a prison warden." He explained, "I'm from Omsk, but I've worked a lot recently in Orenburg Oblast." Realizing Emi couldn't equate what he said to any real meaning, he continued past it, "The prison I've been working at has kept me from Omsk, my... Home." His hesitancy at finishing his sentence, layered with the nuanced tightening of his dry lips, and the added fact he glanced at his ring,  informed Emi that there was more to his story than he cared to share. She asked, "Before you came here, what happened?" He said, "I was in a world of black." Emi, reassured, remarked, "Yeah, yeah! Me too!" They could both feel a genuine connection forming, one forced upon them by their unreal circumstances but authentic nonetheless. He continued, "There was some kind of... Organ fixture? A spinal cord, maybe? It promised me any wish, but..." He stopped, pain circulating his face. "I don't think anything can bring back what I lost. It was a laughable proposition, the world has been upended. Yet, I'm still fighting for..." A ding from both of their phones activated at the same time, causing them to automatically check their messages in a disturbing Pavlovian response. To their distress, the winning area had retracted, meaning an entire team had finished. Emi's mind flinched in defiance, "That's impossible! It's only been 15, 20 minutes max! For a team of strangers to win already, all 3 members completing 3 miles in this kind of unknown terrain..." Then it hit her, she remembered the trick she had pulled to surprise Liam from behind. "Change location," she muttered weakly to herself. She thought, But I only jumped 100, maybe 150 feet and that cost me 20 hours. To jump 3 miles..." Though the math she sped through in her head was rough, it was fairly accurate as she resolved, "That would be around 2,000 hours!" She looked to Sasha who must've come to a similar conclusion based on his rigid body language and thought, "how many people would they've killed to be able to comfortably sacrifice so many hours? Do we even have a chance?" As if converting her facial features to thought, Sasha stood up on his weak knees as he groaned, "We need to get moving." Emi supported his shoulder as she protested, "You aren't ready yet." He ordered hoarsely, "If we don't move now, we die." She had meant well, so normally the sternness in his voice would've made her react aggressively, but she understood it came from a place of panic. As they made their way out of the faint shade into the harsh sunlight, he stopped. Sasha could've sworn he felt eyes on him; he had no way to prove it as he scrutinized the treetops, but after years of working as a prison warden, he had honed a nearly indestructible sense adept at detecting murderous intent. Emi called, "What's wrong?" He followed her out of the bushy undergrowth, part of him wanting to share what he felt but another part not wanting to verbally confirm to any enemy in earshot that he knew of them.

They had only been moving for a few minutes when, As if to signify other teams understood what the last team had done, 2 more finished. As the winning circle shrank again, Emi said, "2 more teams have won; that's crazy. Not a single person, but teams of 3 individuals had enough hours to use change location." Sasha agreed, "That is unnerving. They..." He adjusted his line of thought, "We are the finalists after all, though." Feeling a sudden uncertainty, she asked, "How many hours do you have?" He looked displeased he had to prove himself to her but then shook off the feeling as he understood her questioning was valid. He showed her his phone, revealing he had 19 hours, and she turned hers, showing she had 6. A part of her was glad his hours were low, that he wasn't a maniac killer with copious hours to spare, but at the same time, the fewer hours her team had to call upon, the worse off they were. The vegetation ahead of them narrowed and She held her head low as she pressed on under a bristly thicket, electing to convert her energy to figuring out how to survive rather than dwelling on their weak points. Up ahead, there was a break in the trees and Emi could just make out the smooth, reflective gleam of moving water. It was only a delicate stream that could barely maintain a flow but Sasha took a break while Emi filled the empty water bottles they had. The landscape they had traversed was unforgiving, and the sun's heat bordered on insurmountable, but they kept moving.

Emi was just beginning to think it noteworthy that they hadn't encountered anyone else when their phones buzzed. They looked at each other, nodded, and answered. The monstrous voice announced, "Congratulations on making it past the first mile." Emi thought in disbelief, "It's only been 1 mile?" She wasn't as slow as Sasha, but her feet and knees were definitely starting to ache." The voice continued, "Starting now, each of your teammates that have made it this far will lose a random sense." Emi waited for more of an explanation, but nothing came. It took her a second to realize she couldn't hear anything, not the wind, insects, or Sasha's strained breathing. She looked down and saw her phone call was over, Sasha's as well. Sasha said something she couldn't hear, then said something else as his attention seemed stolen. He thought about his next move for a second, then pointed to his mouth and made an X with his hands, indicating he couldn't make any sound. As their situation was sinking in with a dreadful weight, she did the same but directed her hand to her ears, signaling she couldn't hear. Reality hit Emi like a truck, "if our final team member loses their eyesight without us to guide them, we're as good as dead." That's when she saw Sasha react strangely to his phone, then bring it back up to his ear. Emi checked hers but saw she had no incoming call. She thought it peculiar; as long as you were a part of the current game, all players would receive the same call for instructions. Confused, she looked back to Sasha, who appeared hyper-focused on whatever was being said to him. His eyes blinked rapidly as if distressed yet his stationary, unmoving form was framed harmoniously like an ancient statue against the muted green brush swaying behind him in the muggy breeze. Since she couldn't hear and only had her vision to rely on, she started to walk forward to see if she could distinguish anything noteworthy on his phone screen, but his gaze punched into her with such an unexpected ferocity she was compelled to stop mid-step. She hadn't known him long, but he seemed rather rugged, somewhere in the "tough guy" archetype, so for something to pressure his face into such blatant trepidation made everything all the more discomforting. She paid careful attention to his lips in a vain attempt to gain some form of insight into his conversation; though he couldn't talk, his mouth moved reflexively at some points, trying to produce sound. She had good intentions, but she didn't know Russian and couldn't begin to understand his silent lips without translation, so it was all a moot point. As he hung up his phone and refused to look at her, she had no idea what was going on.