The White Games

27) Chapter Twenty-Seven

Clarice Barron – Day Eight - 12:25 AM

We step out into the tunnels, our footsteps slapping eerily against the floor. Fluorescent lights line the wall, offering some illumination as we head down the narrow confines. But it's never enough to fully reveal what lies ahead of us. Impenetrable blackness is all I can see.

Alana walks at my side, not making a sound. She unsettles me now. The things she has done...it's not normal, not right. What is she? Mr. White has blabbed about some nonsense for quite awhile, but I never really knew what he meant. Until now...

Alana is...something. I don't know what. Special, certainly. Even powerful. She completely healed my wounds...with nothing more than her mind. How? I need to know.

"Alana..." I think of how to best start this conversation.

"Mmm...?" She grips one of her knives tightly between her fingers, not looking away from the long, narrow tunnel that stretches before us.

"How did you...heal me? You didn't use medicine. My wounds are completely gone."

There's a long pause. Alana stops in her tracks, staring at the stone walls around us with a forlorn expression.

"Alana?" I stop a few paces ahead of her. She's still staring at the wall. "I need to know. It could possibly save my life. Maybe even let me win." I'm already imagining what I could do with such power...the way Mr. White has been speaking, it seems clear that this isn't only Alana's power. That I can get it too.

"I don't know." Her whisper is soft and faint, barely audible. "I don't know anything. I don't even know what I'm doing!"

"You must know something." That power. With it I could wipe out the other Challengers, destroy Mr. White, and even get revenge on the people who always abandon me. The world doesn't care about me. It never has. But with Alana's power...

I could make the world care.

"No!" Alana's hands grip her head, rocking back and forth as she stands in place. I expected her scream to echo back to us, but there's nothing. Nothing but the repressive silence.

"Think!" I grab her by the shoulders and shake her. "The answer is with you! It has to be!"

"Get off me!" I'm surprised by her strength as she shoves me away. My back brushes against the wall as she glares daggers at me. "I don't want to be your tool!"

"You won't have to be, if only you told me how you did it!" I'm shouting. Why am I shouting? That's probably not the best way to get her to open up, but her hesitancy is making me impatient. I stop and take a deep breath to calm myself. That power...

"I already told you I don't know!" Alana forces her way past me, staring into the blackness ahead. Tears fill her eyes. "I just want to go home!"

"With that power, you just might." I find that the lie comes quite easily. She won't get home. I need to be the winner, which means she needs to die. Not right now, certainly not. But later, when the numbers have dwindled and I've learned to do what she can...

I won't feel bad about it. It's just what has to be done.

"Forget about this," Alana continues forward now, and I'm forced to walk to keep up with her. "We need to find one of those rooms."

Silence retakes us as we walk down the long hallway. There's no turns, no twists. Nothing but a straight line. Why? Where is it leading us? I'd probably think longer on this if I wasn't obsessed with questioning Alana.

I ask her everything I can think of as we walk. About her experiences on the island, what she saw in the fog, what she thinks about lies, whether she believes Mr. White when he rants about society.