TWENTY-SIX

Mellow Mary, as Kenna had always thought of the computer voice, dispassionately announced: “Challenge number nine complete. Please indicate when ready to continue.”

Jason shed his shirt; a sheen of perspiration glistened over his torso. “You sure you want to finish?”

Bent in half, hands on her knees, Kenna breathed deep. “Yeah.”

“You don’t look so good. We should’ve stopped at eight.”

She lifted her head to face him. “And have to start from the beginning on our next attempt? No, thanks.”

Jason ran the back of his hand over his forehead, wiping away sweat. He blinked several times. “You don’t think Stewart would actually make us start all over again, do you? He seems like a pretty easygoing guy.”

“Yeah, right.” Kenna’s most recent conversation with Stewart had been anything but. When Kenna had arrived at AdventureSome after her appointment with Dr. Baxter, she’d found Stewart agitated. He wanted to know why she hadn’t mentioned the break-in at her apartment. Silently cursing Vanessa’s big mouth, Kenna told the truth: she hadn’t discovered anything missing. “I want to put all the negative behind me.”

That’s when he’d dropped the bombshell. Dr. Baxter had called Stewart this morning to advise him of Kenna’s tenuous hold on her envoy credentials. “Based on Dr. Baxter’s recommendations, I can’t let you back into VR,” he’d told her. “You can go through the exercises with Jason, but no more individual capsule time for you until you get a clean bill of health.”

Kenna had argued that Dr. Baxter was out of line. Health privacy laws should have prevented her from talking with Stewart about Kenna’s mental health. A valid point, Stewart had conceded. Except for the fact that Kenna had signed away those rights when she took on the envoy position. A damaged envoy posed real danger to unwary participants.

Kenna took another deep breath. Had my appointment been only this morning?

Now, Kenna stood. She rolled her shoulders and closed her eyes for several seconds, centering herself before she answered Jason. She decided that she would make it through this last challenge today. And she’d return to the jungle tonight, too.

You can’t stop me, Stewart.

“I don’t care if he would have let us complete one exercise per day and call it done. I’m not about to walk away from it now. Not when we’re this close.”

“Suit yourself,” Jason said.

They stood for a long moment, two people in a bright white, empty room. No sights, no sound. Nothing but their uneven breaths, echoing against the shiny blank walls.

“Any idea what this next one is going to be?” he asked.

“No clue,” she said. “When I went through exercises with…” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say “with Charlie,” but the words caught in her chest and stuck there.

Jason arched an eyebrow, his face unreadable. “Oh,” he said, stringing the word out. He nodded, as though confirming something in his mind. “That’s why you keep beating me. You’ve done some of these before.”

Fury broke through Kenna’s logjam of emotions. “For your information, Mr. Flaxibar,” she said, feeling the rush of hot blood to her face and the lights sparking behind her eyes, signaling an imminent loss of control, “this program changes each go-round. They have like…three hundred thousand different challenges that they can throw at you, and guess what? Not one of the ones we went through is a repeat for me, okay?”

She spun away from him, striding to the room’s far corner, needing to release some of the pressure that’d built up, yet again. With her hands flat against two walls, she stared into the corner and took several deep breaths before turning to face him again. “What I was about to say,” she continued in a quiet voice that carried across the twenty feet that separated them, “is that subsequent exercises are always based on how well you did up until now.”

He maintained a blank expression. “How well I did?”

“How well we did. As a team.”

“And how well, in your estimation, have we done?”

Kenna considered that. “We’ve done well,” she finally admitted.

“As well as you did last time?”

“Don’t go there.”

“Fair enough,” he said. The look he shot her was back-to-business, and she returned to his side of the room.

“I’m ready anytime you are,” she said.

He nodded. “Program,” he called out, “begin.”