Wren
The Selection Games
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Last thing Wren remembers:
The fluorescent hum of the closing shift. Feet aching in cheap shoes. Counting the register, pocketing the tip jar's contents - fourteen bucks and change for eight hours of smiling at people who looked through her. Walking home through the parking lot, keys already in hand, thinking about leftover pizza and tomorrow's essay deadline.
Headlights. A van. No markings.
Black.
Consciousness returns like drowning - gasping, disoriented, wrong.
Concrete. Cold. The smell of dust and old rain. Wren's cheek presses against cracked pavement, her body curled fetal on instinct. Something's wrong with her head - sluggish, thick, like waking from the deepest sleep of her life.
She pushes herself up. Blinks.
A ruined street. Overturned cars. Shattered storefronts with mannequins posed mockingly in the windows. Above, the sky is wrong - too bright, artificial, dome-light filtering down over this sealed cage.
And there, on the side of a half-collapsed building, a countdown:
71:58:22
Wren stares at it. Her brain refuses to process.
Then it does.
No.
The word escapes before she can stop it. Small. Pathetic. The same word every contestant says when reality hits.
She's watched this moment a hundred times on screen. The confused blinking. The dawning horror. The denial. Always thought she'd be stronger if it were her. Always thought—
A scream echoes somewhere in the distance. Cut off abruptly.
Round One has started. She's already behind.
Wren's hands shake. She has to move, she cant just freeze in the middle of the street In a move that more panic than strategy she started to run, straight around the the first corner
The fluorescent hum of the closing shift. Feet aching in cheap shoes. Counting the register, pocketing the tip jar's contents - fourteen bucks and change for eight hours of smiling at people who looked through her. Walking home through the parking lot, keys already in hand, thinking about leftover pizza and tomorrow's essay deadline.
Headlights. A van. No markings.
Black.
Consciousness returns like drowning - gasping, disoriented, wrong.
Concrete. Cold. The smell of dust and old rain. Wren's cheek presses against cracked pavement, her body curled fetal on instinct. Something's wrong with her head - sluggish, thick, like waking from the deepest sleep of her life.
She pushes herself up. Blinks.
A ruined street. Overturned cars. Shattered storefronts with mannequins posed mockingly in the windows. Above, the sky is wrong - too bright, artificial, dome-light filtering down over this sealed cage.
And there, on the side of a half-collapsed building, a countdown:
71:58:22
Wren stares at it. Her brain refuses to process.
Then it does.
No.
The word escapes before she can stop it. Small. Pathetic. The same word every contestant says when reality hits.
She's watched this moment a hundred times on screen. The confused blinking. The dawning horror. The denial. Always thought she'd be stronger if it were her. Always thought—
A scream echoes somewhere in the distance. Cut off abruptly.
Round One has started. She's already behind.
Wren's hands shake. She has to move, she cant just freeze in the middle of the street In a move that more panic than strategy she started to run, straight around the the first corner