The room smelled of blood and dust; broken chairs lay like fallen soldiers against the walls. Light from a single, bare bulb swung gently overhead, exaggerating shadows until the space felt alive with restless shapes. Kai and Sara lay on the floor between them, faces pale, the ragged breaths they drew like small protests against the silence. Around them, the others stood frozen not out of courage, but because the kind of fear that strips a person of motion had settled in their bones. Each watched with wide eyes, counting the seconds that might name them next.
Jinni trembled on the edge of collapse. Rage flared in her chest, raw and animal, and beneath that rage, a deeper, colder current: grief. She knelt beside Sara, fingers stained, lips parted in a cry that broke into something like a promise. "Eli," she said, voice torn between plea and verdict, "I never threw for revenge before. But you made a choice and choices have consequences. I will make you pay for what you did."
Eli's face lost color. Guilt folded him inward like a paper figure. "No," he said, panic threading his voice. "It wasn't it just happened. I was angry. Please, Jinni… don't let Sara suffer more." The words were small, flimsy things against the magnitude of the room.
They moved into the ritual regardless, as if the rules of the game were physical gravity they could not escape. Jinni rose, clutching the dart. Her hands shook, but it was not only fear; it was deliberation. Every heartbeat measured intent. She stood with the weight of everyone's hope and accusation balanced on the tip of her dart.
She aimed.
Time thinned. The world narrowed to the white of the board, the black of the bull, the seam of possibility between life and death. The throw left her hand like a statement; it landed clean, absolute in the bullseye.
Silence fell heavy as a curtain. Jinni had promised retribution and then, with the same hands, undone the path of killing the way the game demanded. Confusion rippled across faces like wind across still water. Relief and suspicion braided together. For a moment, no one could read the truth behind her action.
Eli's voice came out as a whisper, incredulous and raw. "Why, Jinni? Why hit the bullseye?"
Her face hardened in a momentary, unreadable mask. For the first time, she let the logic of survival override the logic of vengeance. "Yes," she said flatly, "I want revenge. But not like this." Her words were cool, deliberate. "This game wants us to destroy one another and call that victory. If we feed it that hunger, we become its trophies. I will not let them win us. Use your aim to live, Eli to free Kai."
The bars of the room seemed to compress. Eli stared at her, and in his eyes something shifted a small, stunned forgiveness, and then a focus that steadied his limbs. He wiped the salt of his tears away with the back of his hand and bent toward the board. The dart he held was no longer an instrument of blind impulse but of intention guided by a new code: preserve, not punish.
He threw. The dart found the bullseye with a solidity that sounded like a decision. The guards surged forward, professional and cold, but urgency tempered their movements. They ferried Kai and Sara from the floor and began the work of stopping the blood, of patching torn flesh and splinted bones. Nurses the men were not, but their efficiency bought time blood loss slowed, breaths steadied.
Jinni and Eli stood apart from the motion, unable to join the frantic ministrations. Relief washed through them in sharp, real waves; it tasted of copper and exhaustion. They had not embraced triumph only a small reprieve. The game had taken enough. The cost remained high; wounds, visible and invisible, would not vanish.
From the shadowed edge of the room the masked man observed with the clinical interest of someone cataloguing specimens. "You are strong," he said finally, the words measured and oddly approving. "Few make this kind of choice easily." His voice was flat, but there was a hint of acknowledgment not warmth, but recognition.
The announcement came next, almost perfunctory: the games continued. "Next match: Ethan's team versus Finn's team."
Finn reacted like a struck animal. He lurched forward, eyes wide, voice cracking with a mixture of defiance and despair. "No," he shouted. "I will not play. If you want me dead, just kill me. Don't make me play your sick games."
His refusal was not bravado. It was the honest sound of a man whose boundary had finally snapped. Those around him pressed in, soft voices trying to tilt him back toward reason. Fear made them clumsy counselors; the crowd's attempts were like fingers trying to hold a river.
The masked man stepped closer, not with threat but with a surgical calm. He widened his reach to the one thing that could pierce Finn's armor an anchor no one else in the room could touch. "Think about your son, Finn," he said.
At that invocation, Finn's defiance crumpled. The name of someone beloved is a lever that moves the heaviest of wills. For a long moment he looked at the floor as if counting the price of every possible action. Then, slowly, he nodded. The gesture was small, private, loaded with a hundred things: fear, shame, duty. He walked to his position.
As Ethan's team took their places and Finn steadied himself, the room exhaled a brittle breath and readied once more. The game went on a ritual of choices, each one folding a little more humanity into the margins. Outside, life might still stretch on in ordinary ways, but inside the bulb-lit room the rules had shifted: survival had become a moral calculus, each throw a line drawn through mercy and rage.