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Chapter 20: A Special Night

Everyone gets up and walks obediently into the Elimination Room as soon as Rob and Meredith ask them to. It's alarming how little fight they put up, and Sasha doesn't want to see the way some of their faces switch over abruptly from mild boredom to a readiness for war.

Sasha's legs don't want to work. Her muscles have gone limp and she can't imagine how much effort it will take to walk into that room, but Francie lingers for a minute, saying, "You can't just sit here - you won't get out of it that way."

She puts out her hand and Sasha takes it, allowing the diminutive teenager to haul her off the couch. Daniel stands up, too, and the three of them are momentarily alone in the living room.

Francie says quietly, "Remember, you're a couple, you're in love, you couldn't bear to be separated tonight."

Then she walks ahead of them into the room.

Sasha looks at Daniel. His eyes are still red but at least they've stopped watering, and she slips her hand into his. Couple or not, she won't let go of him no matter what happens tonight - they're in this together for better or worse.

Daniel drops the damp towel on the couch and they walk into the room. Every step feels like Sasha's last, like a short walk down death row. It feels just like running into the basement at the Haven of Salvation, knowing nothing good can come of it and having no other options.

The door slams shut behind them the moment they enter, locks clicking into place and making Sasha want to jump out of her skin. The room is large, about the same size as the living room, with white walls and lit aggressively with fluorescent overhead lights. They hurt Sasha's eyes, but that's the least of her problems.

Most of the other contestants have already sat down at a long table, thirteen chairs all lined up on the same side like apostles at the Last Supper. That must make Taylor Jesus, because he's sitting in the middle.

There are a pair of chairs waiting for Sasha and Daniel at the end, and one more open spot beside Taylor - the girl who had spent most of the afternoon with her knees hugged to her chest on the couch is now pacing frenetically back and forth behind the table, past a row of storage drawers built into the wall.

Daniel leads the way in front of the table and Sasha notices that there are little paper name tags hanging off the front of the table, just like in kindergarten when the teacher hasn't had the chance to memorize her students' names yet. The people sitting at home watching this, voting on which one of them to kill tonight, can't even be bothered to remember their names without a visual cue, and Sasha starts to feel sick. She wonders if her votes will rise along with the contents of her stomach.

This feels like walking in front of a row of prison cells, reading the names of everyone she'll have to compete with to stay her execution. Francie is sitting on Taylor's left side, and the empty chair behind him - for the pacing girl - is labeled Erica. Beside Francie is Brody, who looks familiar, and then Jessica, Rich, Micah, and Jane.

Jane.

Sasha's legs go to jelly again and she stumbles with her next step. Daniel notices the direction of her gaze and holds her steady. He mutters to her, "It's a coincidence. Don't think about it."

It could be - it must be because this Jane has been here longer than Sasha - but it feels like psychological warfare. She can't think about her Jane right now, though, can't worry about how she's doing and whether she knows what she's cooking for the other shelter residents. She just has to keep walking steadily toward that empty chair at the end of the row with her name on it.

There are Dustin and Anthony, holding hands on top of the table and utilizing the same strategy that Francie had picked out for Sasha and Daniel. And then in the chair next to Daniel's, there's Melody - the last remaining triplet. She looks battle-hardened, staring straight ahead with tightly pinched lips as Sasha and Daniel slide into their seats.

The wall in front of them is made of glass, reflecting their own scared faces back at them, and there's no question that there are cameras behind the glass. Sasha wonders if there are living observers there, too, and the idea of human eyes on her is even more disturbing than the ever-present lens of cameras. She's used to being watched, but she doesn't like the idea of being observed.

Then the glass changes, thirteen names superimposed over it. Each one has a number below it, their current position in the race to a million votes. Sasha finds her own name, the number 1,432 beneath it. It fluctuates constantly, up a few votes and then back down again, and everyone else's name does the same.

Then Sasha sees Daniel's name, and something lurches in her throat.

His number is 100,076.

"What the heck did you do, new guy?" Taylor asks with a snort.

There are a few other names on the wall that have already reached six digits, but not many, and Daniel's is the only one that is steadily rising.

101,835.

It jumps almost two thousand votes in the blink of an eye and Sasha has the urge to stand up, to yell at the people behind the glass, at the viewers, and tell them to stop it. But of course that won't work - it's what they're here for. They're hungry for a spectacle, and they think Daniel and Sasha can give it to them.