I woke struggling to breathe. Staring around me, I realised I was in the sick room where Kara had been. My hand reached automatically to a large, hard lump on the side of my head. It hurt. How did I get that? Confusion spun in my mind until I remembered. Ruth had pushed me into the path of a metal bird in challenge four. I didn’t know anything that happened after that.
Poppy’s fingers gently stroked my arm. “Evie, you’re awake . . .”
I half sat. “What happened? Do you know?”
“Just give yourself some time to—”
“Tell me!”
She set her lips together grimly. “You guys lost your challenge. Sorry.”
My heart fell. “Am I out of the program?”
“No. But Ruth and Harrington are.”
I sucked in a breath of relief. “God. Really? Can’t say I’ll miss them.”
“Me either.” She suppressed a giggle. “Harrington apparently copped a bird beak right to his shoulder. He’s too injured to continue.”
“Okay, well, that’s not good.”
“He was a jerk. Anyway, it’s breakfast time. Feel okay to walk out there with me?”
“I’ve been asleep all that time?”
“‘Fraid so. You must have needed it.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Rising, I let Poppy help me to my feet.
I spent the day of the fifth challenge out in the welcome sunshine and green of the garden. barely moving and barely speaking to anyone. People left me alone, apart from Brother Vito and Sister Dawn, who came to check on me a few times.
Yolanda stepped up to me just as the sun’s last rays were burning themselves out. She sat on the low bough of a tree beside my chair. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Is your head okay?”
“I’ll survive, I guess.” I managed a smile.
“Sucks we didn’t make it to the finish line.” The shade of the tree turned her skin to a deepest brown colour.
“Looks like I got the order of the puzzle pieces wrong.”
“What happened? I saw a bird coming your way and called out to you and then I was busy dodging birds myself. All of a sudden, you were on the floor and Harrington was bleeding.”
“Ruth pushed me out of the way. Just because she wanted Harrington’s puzzle piece first.”
She gasped. “That’s crazy. I’ve only been in one challenge with her before. But oh yeah, she doesn’t care what she has to do to win a challenge. She’s such a strange person.” She leaned her head back against the trunk. “Is this program helping any of us? I just feel on edge all the time.”
“Me too. At least there’s just today and tomorrow to get through.”
“Can’t wait. Scary though. I’ve built this whole fantasy thing up in my mind where I have a new shiny life. But I don’t know if I can do it.”
“What were you doing, before here?”
She half shrugged, twisting her long black hair around her fingers. “I don’t even know. One minute I was in college and everything was good. The next minute my boyfriend of four years dumped me. I felt like the world’s biggest loser, y’know? I came close to killing myself. Instead, I started going to every party and having every drug and sleeping with every guy. Just to kill the pain. I got kicked from my course. And that should have been enough to shock some sense into me. But by then it’d become normal just to wake up and have a pipe, y’know? Everyone I was hanging out with then was smoking ice. It didn’t seem like this crazy thing that was going to steal your life away. It just made me feel . . . good. When I saw my old boyfriend in the street, I didn’t even care anymore. Because I had something better.”
“I get you,” I told her. “That’s addiction. You don’t realise it’s so destructive because it makes you feel better about yourself.”
Nodding, she sighed. “You can guess the rest of my story. I had to make money somehow. I don’t want to go back to any of that. I want to press a reset button.”
“This—the program—is the reset button.” Even as I said it, I only half believed it.
“Man, I hope so. Hey, what’s your story? You’re from Australia, right?”
“Yeah. I was an ordinary mum in the suburbs with a husband and two small daughters. Willow and Lilly. I got hooked into gambling. Just trying to make our lives better. But it didn’t. I got into a terrifyingly huge amount of debt. Happened so quick. My next stop was trying to make some money as a kind of escort—a sugar baby. I’d go to dinner, chat with the guy, and hope he’d take me shopping afterwards to buy something expensive. Some did, some didn’t. One man—a chartered accountant—bought me a handbag with a two thousand dollar price tag. I sold it on EBay the next day.”