Page 50 of Deviant

This means the rumors about him finding a way to be selected are true.

He’s the key.

It’s like Nora is leading me to the path I must take to achieve my goal. All I have to do is follow her breadcrumbs.

I shake my head, angry at myself for not having thought about this sooner.

Before I sought to be selected, there was someone else who was just as gung-ho about being chosen for the Harvest Dozen—Nora.

I can still remember the exact moment she made up her mind and decided her fate. It feels like it was just yesterday. But it wasn’t. It was more than a year ago that Nora set the wheels of our future in motion.

I’m jolted from my deep sleep by the low murmurs drifting in from the living room. One moment, I’m nestled in Nora’s bed, and the next, I’m wide awake, realizing she’s no longer asleep beside me. I wait a few minutes, thinking she’s just gone to the bathroom or is getting a glass of water from the kitchen, but when she doesn’t return, and the murmurs grow more pronounced, I decide to get up and check on her.

“She’s getting worse,” I hear my best friend say, sadness and anxiety coating her every word.

“I know,” Elias’s low timber voice replies.

“She needs care, E. Optimal care that Blackwater Falls just doesn’t have.”

“Fuck, Nora, don’t you think I know that?” he grumbles in frustration.

I hear my best friend sigh as I walk further down the hall, closer to the living room.

“We have to do something. We can’t just let her wither away like this.”

“And what do you suggest we do? Put her on the back of my bike and leave town?”

“And why the hell not?” Nora says angrily. “At least it might give her a chance.”

“If I did that, you’d be out of a mom and an older brother. They’d kill us before we even made it out of the state.”

“You don’t know that,” she says sheepishly.

Even though I can’t see her, hidden away in the corridor, I know she’s chewing nervously on her bottom lip.

“We do know that. Tell me one person who has left this godforsaken place and lived to tell the tale?”

Silence befalls the room while my anxiety shoots up, knowing exactly what Nora must be thinking.

“The winner of the games gets to leave. They and their family are given permission to go and never come back.”

“Fuck. Not this again, Nora,” Elias grumbles, and I imagine him running his fingers through his disheveled jet-black hair.

“Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not, but what good will that do us, huh? Putting our faith in winning an unwinnable game? I don’t like those odds.”

“There’s always a winner,” she spews back with conviction.

“And eleven losers. Eleven dead bodies, to be more precise.”

“You always were a glass-half-empty type of guy, big brother,” she goads, trying to lighten the tense mood.

“No. What I am is a realist.”

“I prefer my way of thinking. At least it will give Mom a shot.”

“Don’t you think I want that too?” he says, sounding almost hurt. “I just don’t think being delusional helps us in any way. The Scourge is not the way we get to save our mother from dying a slow and painful death.”

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