The Ace (Stray Kids Kim Seungmin)

22

“That doesn’t make sense! You said you would hold back. You said she wouldn’t find out!”

Upon awakening, Hyunjin’s shouting was the first thing Harri heard. She ignored it at first, focusing rather on the pounding in her forehead and the sharp, stinging pain on her temple. Groaning she brought a hand up to it only to discover she was bleeding, not fatally but enough to make her feel even more faint than the dehydration already got her feeling. She closed her eyes, trying for the life of her to remember how she got here.

“What do you mean she’s waking up? Make her fall asleep again. Make them all fall asleep! They cannot find each other. Make sure they never find each other!”

Harri snapped out of her thoughts upon hearing that, eyes darting around the cave she found herself in before realising his voice wasn’t coming from inside the cave, it was coming from above it. It was also after she figured that out that she noticed that although he seemed to be having a conversation, no one was speaking to him. He seemed to just be talking to himself.

The cave Harri found herself in was nothing like the one the rest of her teammates had found in the jungle. This one resembled a large rabbit burrow rather than a cave: it was dug into the ground at the edge of a cliff and the opening was hidden by piled rocks and tree branches and shrubs, anything that would camouflage the hole. While the rocks blocked most of the light from outside, the branches allowed a fair amount of light to fill the cave, although this was still not enough for Harri to get a clear view of everything around her.

She did, however, have the perfect view of a full bottle of water and a cold bowl of vegetable soup with a few fresh-out-of-the-ground carrots beside it. Harri wasted no time to rush to it, gulping down the water as though her life depended on it and then stuffed the carrots into her mouth. Releasing a loud sigh of relief, she grabbed the bowl of soup and devoured it without second thought, spilling almost half of it all over herself as she did so.

For the first time in months, Harri actually believed there was a chance she could survive all this.

“I’m not asking you to try. I’m telling you to do it. If you want only one person to escape this game alive then you better start stepping up your game because I’m not going to do everything for you!”

She halted upon hearing his words. Only one person? Escape this game? Harri couldn’t believe her ears. She didn’t want to believe it. Just the thought of all her suffering, all the times she went to sleep on that desert unsure if she’d even wake up the next morning, the thought of all of that just being a game to the creators infuriated her. How dare they find amusement in her agony. How dare they find entertainment in her fight for survival.

Unable to contain her fury, she stood up, clutching her fists as she marched toward the covered entrance only to be stopped halfway through. It was only then that she noticed the chains cuffing her wrists and anklets. The metal was cold and heavy against her flesh which only made her more surprised by the fact she hadn’t noticed it earlier. She couldn’t say it was completely unexpected though. It only made sense that if Hyunjin was to keep her alive, the least he could do was chain her up so she could not leave.

“He told me to kill you,” Rayne’s voice came from an edge of the cave that the light didn’t quite reach so while Harri now knew that she was there, she couldn’t see her.

“Rayne-“

“Don’t. Just let me speak, ok? There’s a lot I need to tell you… a lot I need to apologise for.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything from you right now. Please just be quiet. I don’t want to hate you.”

“I want you to hate me. You have every reason to hate me. Harri, even I hate myself right now.”

“Shut up, ok? Just give me a moment to think.”

“You don’t need to think about anything. I’ll say it all right now. I’ll be completely honest. Anything you don’t understand, any questions you have, I’ll answer and explain. I need to get this off my chest. I need you to know that this is all my fault.”

“This isn’t your fault. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have followed you in the first place. I should have thought rationally instead of following my heart. I should have-“

“It was a trap,” Rayne interrupted her.

“What?”

“It was a trap. I was the trap. A few months after Mel arrived, I started having these strange dreams about the end of the world, about dying in the Pen. And then a voice started calling me in my dreams. I panicked. I thought it was the creators, I thought I was the Joker and I really didn’t want to be so I ignored it. I refused to respond. But every night he would call me again and tempt me and beg me to just listen to him and I really didn’t want to but each time I refused, the dream got worse and scarier and… more realistic. Harri, some nights I would actually watch all of you die, other nights I’d experience death in my sleep. I would die in my own dreams. And that’s how I knew they weren’t dreams. I watched as we all one by one betrayed each other, killed each other and I was told, he told me that the only way to avoid it and the only way to save you all was if I agreed to help him. I refused again. I knew it wasn’t worth it but then I started seeing weirder things…”

“What things?”

“I started seeing people, no, corpses of people I don’t know. They were all in the forest in the Pen and they were crying out to me, telling me to find them. To save them. And then I saw a symbol with a mountain range drawn in blood and then there was a girl. She was writing something in blood underneath it, Harri. But before I could see her face, I woke up. I was trembling, crying and just utterly terrified because I knew… I knew what I saw was not a dream,” she shook her head. “It was a memory. I couldn’t sleep after that. It was too scary. And I didn’t want to confess anything to you guys so I just lied and said I was having nightmares. You guys brushed it off so I tried to do so too but I couldn’t. In the end, I gave in. I agreed to help him. He sent the wolves over to the Pen to get me and then he told me he would use me as bait… As a trap to find the girl in the memories. He said I would lure her to him.”

“You remember seeing a girl writing something in blood? In the Pen? When was this, Rayne? When did you see all this? Where was I?”

“They weren’t my memories. They were his but… Harri… the girl had short blonde hair.”

“So? What does that have to do with anything.”

Rayne gulped, “well, it’s just that… you have short blonde hair. I could be wrong, and how I hope I am but… are you a hundred percent sure you aren’t the girl in his memories? Because if you are, his plan worked. He lured you to him.”