But there was no sign of it: no red stains on clothes, no red streaks on skin, no red sweeps across the honey-yellow floorboards. There was also no scent of it that she could detect—although there were plenty of other smells, none of them pleasant.
No blood, though. And that had to be good … right?
“Ahhh!” she screamed, as a white-hot blast of pain shocked her.
Applecart. Over.
The pain in her left elbow destabilized everything, her body becoming like a folding table that had had a leg kicked out—and just like a bowl of fruit on a previously level surface, Peyton crashed to the ground, his limp limbs bouncing like McIntoshes.
“Oh, my God,” she gritted as she grabbed her arm and massaged where the electrical current had licked into her.
She’d gotten too close to a chest-press machine. And as she measured the amount of equipment she still had to work through, she thought … I can’t do this. I can’t …
“Can you stand up?” she said.
Peyton answered in a non-verbal fashion that didn’t just suggest no, but emphatically announced that that was still a negative.
God, how could there still be anything left in his stomach?
“I can’t do this,” she moaned as she looked around and massaged her elbow.
As her eyes bounced back and forth, she realized that she was searching for help, some kind of lifeline, a rescuer. There had to be somebody she could turn to …
For only the second time in her life, she prayed to the Scribe Virgin, squeezing her lids closed, trying to find the proper words against the jarring backdrops of the sounds, smells, sights, and the razor-sharp adrenaline spasms racking her internal wiring. Somehow, she managed to ask the race’s deity to send someone to make this stop, to take care of Peyton, to rescue all the other people who were down, to get everyone out of this hellhole—
Stop wasting time, an inner voice commanded.
It was such a shock, she wrenched around, expecting to find somebody behind her. No one was there.
Maybe it had been piped in from overhead?
Stop wasting time. Go!
“I can’t pick him up again!”
You’d better fucking figure out how!
“I can’t do this!”
You’d better fucking do this!
“Okay, all right, okay, all right.”
She mumbled those words over and over again as she restraddled Peyton and humped him back up into position. The second dead lift was even more uncoordinated than the first, her body loose in places that really, totally didn’t help—but Peyton seemed to be recovering strength, his hands gripping her hips and holding on.
By the time she cleared the obstacle course, she was running out of energy, and she performed a quick calculation on the distance to the door—and then added ancillary factors like how much her shoulder was deforming under the weight, and the fact that, inconveniently, she needed to pee so badly she felt like someone was daggering her lower abdomen.
Breaking into a shuffling gallop, her feet skimmed over the blessedly unobstructed floor, and the less shimmying, the better for her passenger and her whole body.
Wait a minute.
The door was shut.
As she closed in on her destination, she frowned and commanded her eyes to focus through the flaring lights. Shit, the door was shut. But there had been people standing around the opening only moments before?
Coming up to the panel, she let Peyton slide off her back and barely spared him a glance as he sprawled out flat on the floor.
What had happened to the frickin’ door?
No handle or doorknob. No hinges. No glass to break.
Pivoting around, she surveyed—Jesus, there were gym ropes hanging about thirty feet away. The thick lengths had appeared from the ceiling, and there were two people climbing them with the kind of speed that made her want to sit down and give up right where she was.
“Peyton?” she said as she angled her head to watch the pair ascend. “I’m not going to be to carry you up those.”
Hell, she didn’t think she could drag her own weight on the twirling lengths.
Where were the two of them going? she wondered as they disappeared out of sight.
“Peyton, we’re going to need to—”
One after the other both ropes fell to the floor, the slaps of the thick, woven lengths sounding out even over all the other noise.
Where had the two people gone?
Rubbing her eyes, she wanted to scream. Instead, she gritted out, “What the hell are we going to do—”
A fresh blast of cool, clean air had her twisting back around. The door had opened again, revealing a dense black void.
As though it had consumed the other trainees who had entered and was ready for another meal.
Peyton struggled to his feet, his shaking hands wiping down his face. “I can walk.”
“Thank God.”
He glanced over at her. “I owe you.”
“Let’s see if heading through here actually gets us anywhere first.”
“We go together.” His eyes burned as he offered her the crook of his elbow—as if they were going into a ballroom full of silk gowns and white-tie tuxedoes. “I’m not going to leave you.”
Paradise stared at him for a moment. “Together.”
Linking her arm through his, she wasn’t surprised that he used her to steady himself. Still, this was a huge improvement over his comatose-but-for-the-barfing.
They stepped forward at the same time, the doorjamb wide enough to accommodate them both—