Heat hits me like a slap. One second I’m hunched in a wolf-pelt burrito, shivering and cursing the Arctic; the next, I’m roasting alive, sweat pouring down my back, boots sinking in sand that might as well be lava. I blink, trying to focus, but my vision swims and the world spins—my body’s not ready for this.

  My shoulder throbs where the last wolf got me, and I can feel the scab on my thigh tearing open with each step. For a second, I just stand there, dizzy, pulse fluttering. I almost drop my sled, and Elen has to nudge me forward.

  She’s still here. Still standing. Still wearing what’s left of a wolf pelt, which now smells like boiled dog and misery. Her limp is better, but she moves like she expects the ground to bite her at any moment—which, given the Trials, is a safe bet.

  She doesn’t waste time on awe. “Charming,” she says, deadpan. “Next they’ll drop us in a volcano spa.”

  I try to snort, but it comes out a dry cough. “The Trials really specialize in five-star accommodations.” My tongue feels thick, my lips cracked and bleeding. Every word hurts.

  Around us, the other survivors look just as stunned—thirty-two left, counting me and Elen. Most are already sizing each other up, forming little cliques or staking out their own patch of sand. The smart ones start scavenging. The rest just sweat and look lost.

  I take inventory: One wolf-pelt cloak, now doubling as shade and filter; a knife crafted from a wolf’s fang with a wire-wrapped handle; a "canteen" that’s really a hollowed-out femur. My sled, a half-melted skeleton, drags behind me, filled with scavenged odds and ends. I even gifted Elen the water pouch made from wolf stomach lining—generous, I know. Nothing’s pretty, and everything’s on the verge of falling apart. Basically, that’s my brand now.

  A breeze picks up—except, ha, psych, it’s a micro-razor sandstorm, and it’s heading straight for us. The wind howls, picking up flecks of sand so sharp they slice through the first candidate dumb enough to stand tall.

  I reach for Elen, but my injured arm is slow. She has to yank me toward a narrow canyon. We duck behind a boulder, wolf pelts pulled tight, and I jam bits of bone and scrap metal into the cracks to plug the gaps. My hands shake, and I nearly drop the whole pile twice before I manage to wedge them in. It’s improv shelter, starring: desperation. We huddle in the dark, the sandstorm screaming past like a banshee with a grudge.

  “Not natural,” I mutter—then choke on grit. “Look at how it moves. Like it’s got a target.”

  Elen peers out, squinting. “It’s tracking us.”

  “Because of course it is.”

  When the storm finally dies, we’re both coated in powder-fine grit that’s probably now part of my DNA. I spit sand and check our supplies. Water: critical. Food: whatever I can kill or scavenge. Hope: running on fumes.

  Our first “meal” is whatever lizard-thing I manage to spear with my makeshift pike. The first throw is a miss—my arm’s too stiff, and the spear bounces off a rock. Elen winces as it clatters. I try again, fighting a wave of dizziness, and finally get lucky. I drain its blood, filter it through scrap cloth, and split it with Elen. It tastes like copper and regret, but it’s wet. We gnaw on the roasted meat, using sun-baked rocks as a grill. I try not to think about parasites. Or what happened to the last person who didn’t cook their food long enough.

  By day five, I’m wishing for frostbite again, just for variety. The desert is alive—like, actually alive. The ground shifts, dunes re-form, and sometimes the sand pulses, like something big is moving underneath. We fight off a creature that’s part mountain lion, part fever dream—claws like kitchen knives, eyes like searchlights. My gear takes a hit. I get a nice new scar on my thigh, which is just what my collection needed.

  I bring the beast down with a lot of luck and a little rage, stabbing until it stops moving. Halfway through, my wounded leg gives out and I almost drop the knife—one swipe of its claws nearly opens me from hip to knee. I barely roll away in time, pain white-hot and blinding. “Blood,” I rasp to Elen, my voice raw. “Filter it, or we’re toast.”

  Elen’s already got her scavenged med kit out. “Nice work,” she says, deadpan. “If ‘nice’ means ‘barely survived and now you’re bleeding everywhere.’”

  I crack a grin despite the pain. “Just trying to keep things interesting.” I press a rag to my thigh, but my fingers are clumsy and slick with blood. Elen has to help tie the bandage.

  We drain the blood and filter it through a strip of wolf pelt and a piece of bone. Every drop is a bargaining chip with death. Every cut, a fresh reminder that Atreu never believes in half-measures.

  Around noon, the landscape wobbles—mirages flicker at the edges of my vision, pools of water that vanish when I blink. We skirt one dune and my boot plunges into what looks like sand, but isn’t. Quicksand. I jerk back, but my bad leg lags a second too long.

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  Elen grabs my shoulder, pulling hard. The sand sucks at my boot, greedy as a tax collector. My heart thunders. For one wild second I imagine the desert swallowing me whole, nothing left but a memory and a grim punchline.

  Finally, I wrench free, minus one boot and most of my dignity. Elen snorts. “You planning to donate the other one, too?”

  “I was going for ‘fashionably uneven,’” I grunt, shaking sand from my sock.

  The heat blurs my vision and suddenly I’m twelve again, sweating through desert drills with my father barking orders. “Hydration, Aeliana! You lose focus, you lose your life.” He’d say it like a joke, but I’d see the fear in his eyes. Even then, he knew you couldn’t outfight the environment. Only respect it.

  I wonder what he’d say if he could see me now—limping, caked in blood and sand, still too stubborn to quit.

  Just as dusk falls, Elen spots a cluster of spindly cactus. “There,” she says, pointing with her chin. I hack one open with my knife, hands shaking, and slurp the bitter, clear juice. It burns going down, but it’s wet. For five blissful minutes, life feels almost manageable.

  Elen leans back, eyes closed. “Universe, you’ve got jokes. But I’ll take it.”

  Seventeen days in, we’re down six more candidates—not killed by monsters, but by thirst, sun, each other. The desert turns people inside out; the worst parts bubble to the top. Alliances die as fast as friendships. I keep my circle small. Elen and me: Team Unlikely.

  Our wolf pelts are now multi-tools: shade, water catchers, bandages, and, when things get desperate, a way to signal help—or, more realistically, to signal “please rob me, I’m out of ideas.”

  We’re picking our way along a cracked dune when a shadow lurches into view. I tense, hand on my knife, but it’s just a kid—barely eighteen, face blistered, lips shredded from the sun. He’s clutching a ragged water skin like it’s holy. His eyes flicker from me to Elen, calculating odds.

  “Back off,” I warn, voice flat.

  He hesitates, desperation and terror warring in his expression. For a heartbeat, I expect him to bolt—or attack. Instead, he just shakes his head, mutters something about “not enough left for sharing,” and disappears across the sand.

  Elen watches him go, thumb flicking her canine, something unreadable in her eyes. “He won’t last two more days.”

  I wish I could disagree.

  By week six, we’re barely recognizable. The desert has scrubbed us raw—skin cracked, lips bleeding, hair matted with sweat and dust. I think about all the survival guides I read as a kid, and how not a single one mentioned “patch your shoes with lizard skin and hope for the best.”

  “How much farther?” Elen croaks, voice shredded.

  I squint, the sun momentarily blinds me. “If this trial is anything like the last one, then Center’s fifty kilometers, give or take—more give than take.”

  She laughs, the sound as dry as my canteen. “If. That’s adorable.”

  Sandstorms are a regular guest star. The first one lasts two days, nearly buries us alive in our makeshift shelter. I use wolf-bone stakes and some wire to brace the “walls,” but my fingers are so numb and swollen I drop the last stake, and have to dig it out of the sand while the wind tries to rip the shelter apart.

  Elen and I take turns sleeping—if you can call it sleep when you’re listening for the sound of the world coming to kill you. I wake from one “nap” to find my arm has gone completely numb, likely from lying on my injured shoulder, and for a heart-stopping moment, I think I’ve lost it to infection or the cold.

  Traveling for three days and more than 50 kilometers, the next challenge looms literally: a cliff face rising like some giant’s middle finger to the sky. Bone fragments, both old and fresh, litter the base. The vultures here are mechanical, their eyes glowing, tracking us with the kind of interest usually reserved for overripe meat.

  I look up, calculating. “That’s our way up.” My voice wavers, and I have to steady myself against the rock. My injured leg aches with every shift of weight.

  Elen just groans. “Of course it is. Why would the Trials ever give us stairs?”

  We scavenge from the dead—no shame left. I pry tech from a half-buried skeleton, using a titanium joint from some poor Apex kid to rig a climbing hook. “Some might call this grave robbing,” Elen mutters as I work.

  I grin. “I call it recycling. Very environmentally conscious.” My laugh is more a wheeze.

  We rig climbing gear from scavenged bones, bits of wire, and what’s left of my pride. The first hundred meters are a nightmare. Every handhold feels like a dare. Halfway up, my shoulder spasms and I nearly lose my grip. My foot slips, scraping skin raw, and I dangle for a terrifying moment, legs flailing, shoulder screaming in protest. “Well,” Elen calls down, “that was dramatic.”

  “Exciting,” I gasp. “Let’s not do it again.” My hands shake as I force them to keep moving.

  We find a narrow ledge, just wide enough for two broken people and a pile of regrets. Elen patches my shoulder with a poultice made from desert moss and sand—don’t ask what it smells like. “This is gonna hurt,” she warns.

  “Wouldn’t give you the satisfaction,” I grit out, jaw clenched until it aches. She presses the poultice in place and I nearly bite through my tongue trying not to scream.

  Night falls. The temperature plummets. We huddle together under what’s left of our wolf pelts, personal space a distant memory. Elen’s elbow is in my ribs; my foot is probably under her thigh. “This what passes for romance in the Trials?” she asks.

  “Romance? Please,” I snort. “This is Stockholm syndrome with sunburn.”

  For a minute, we just breathe. The desert is quiet, except for the vultures’ mechanical whirr, the wind, and the sound of two idiots who refuse to die.

  “If anyone told me I’d be spooning a Crimson just to survive, I’d have laughed in their face,” Elen says, voice low.

  “Yeah, well, my brother would need therapy if he saw this,” I reply.

  She snorts. “You’re like the sister I never wanted.”

  “Right back at ya. But if anyone’s killing you, it’s me—not the desert.”

  We laugh. It’s ugly, raw, and exactly what we need.

  I stare up at the stars—so many, so cold and remote. Survival isn’t noble. It’s not even fair. It’s just us, patching gear with whatever we can steal from the dead and refusing to quit.

  Tomorrow we climb. Tomorrow we fight. Tomorrow, maybe, we make it one step closer to the center.

  But tonight, against all odds, we’re still here. And honestly? That’s enough.