Page 3 of Rat Race

“Naw, we trust you,” Pa said, the corners of his dark eyes crinkling with his toothy, gaped smile. Man always could eat a cob of corn through a picket fence. “Always been our littleathlete, Cam. Ain’t none that could get through the simulations faster than you.”

I pushed away the warm, preening feelings in my gut. It didn’t do me any good towantmy parents to be proud of me… And yet a voice whispered in the back of my mind,Honor your parents.

When I was barely to Pa’s knee, I couldn’t wait for my turn in the Games. My siblings graduated the training program one by one, the entire family piling into a town car just like this to drop them off at the train station to the island. As viewers, we would take one of the ferries—and get ice cream. Not a bad consolation prize.

For Hope’s Games, five years earlier, when I was thirteen, I’d been so jealous of her that I’d cried the entire way to the ferry car park.How dare she go without me?I remembered thinking. Teenage Cam was outraged that their favorite sister had abandoned them in the viewing area while she went off to make the family proud.

It was supposed to bemyjob.

But now that my turn was finally here? It felt a bit like bread that’d been left on the counter overnight—stale. Not disconnected in the way that things you’re looking forward to often do. Like how graduation is supposed to be this big, life-changing moment, and really it’s just a hot, sweaty day in an auditorium with faulty air conditioning and far too many mouth-breathin’ hogs.

Naw, this was something else.

Like disillusionment, or whatever.

I was just another checkbox in a long line of Legacy babies Ma and Pa had reared for the sole purpose of creating champions. No more or less important than a prize-winning pig they’d been feeding since spring. People just took a little longer to prime.

The insignia on my jacket, a pair of golden interconnected horseshoes with six diamonds fitted into them—real ones, not those lab-grown fakes—had room for one more gem to be fitted into the material. It was my spot. And a silent warning that the only way I was allowed to come out of the maze was as a winner.

Fine, or as a corpse.

Billy’s diamond had been pressed out of his ashes. The only loss in our entire family’s history in four generations.

Anembarrassment.

However the fuck I felt about the Games, I knew one thing—I wasn’t no fuckin’ embarrassment.

I’m going to win.

The car slowed to a stop as the train station came into view, halting at the rounded bottom of the drop-off zone. Concrete steps sandwiched between elegant flower beds led toward the modern platform. A few uniformed security guards lingered by the glass sliding doors, made necessary by the quickly accumulating crowd, desperate to get a first glimpse at the people that, in a few hours’ time, could go from run-of-the-mill players tochampions.

Ma flicked her cigarette onto the pavement and rolled up her window at the first camera flash, raising a bottle-blonde eyebrow. “Teeth check.”

I smiled big, turning my head in the car’s dim lights for her to inspect for stray food or missed plaque. She nodded, humming in approval before reaching out to fluff my hair into devil-may-care perfection.

Pa huffed. “Betsy, leave ‘em be for Christ’s sake.”

She rolled her eyes, ignoring him. “We’ll be in the gallery, same?—”

“Spot as every year. Yeah, Ma, I know. Now let me out of this car to kiss babies and make the Ranch some money.”

Pa offered me a checkered red and white bandana with the same insignia as my jacket, and I took it, quickly using it to shine my silver belt buckle. “I was worried that with you going off to that fancy school you might come home to us with all these ideas in your head. But you never fail to impress me, Camilla. Congratulations.”

Not good luck.

Luck would mean that there was a chance I wouldn’t win. Naw, as far as he was concerned, I just needed to walk in there and claim my trophy.

He was probably right.

I tucked the handkerchief into my pocket, tipping an invisible hat to my parents as I opened the door of the car to an explosion of screams and applause.

His worries about my newfangled modern secular values were only half right anyways. Questioning. That was the word I kept telling myself.

Turns out it wasn’t so easy to walk away from values your parents spent your entire life beating into you. It took a bit more than a Poli-Sci lecture and a couple well-positioned classes on propaganda.

Thanking my lucky stars for the heavy ropes keeping the crowd back from the steps, I waved with that same practiced smile. “Aw shucks, all this for little ol’ me?”

“Camilla,” Ma started sternly, “Make sure you talk about the Ranch?—”

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