Chapter 10: The Partner Draft
The bunk room woke in layers, the way it always did on the show: first the low mechanical hum of the dome vents kicking on, then the rustle of sheets, then the murmured half sentences of people who had not slept and did not want to admit it. David had been awake for most of it. He had lain on his back in the dark and watched the ceiling go from black to grey to a pale signal blue, and he had told himself a dozen times that he was not waiting for anything. It had not worked once.
He sat up. Across the room, Remy's bunk was already made and already empty, the blanket folded at the foot in a neat, military line that seemed less like tidiness and more like a man who had been up for hours and needed something to do with his hands.
David dressed in the same grey shirt as always. He brushed his teeth at the long communal trough of sinks and kept his eyes on the mirror, which meant he could not stop seeing the man behind him, and eventually he stopped looking at the mirror too.
The atrium was brighter than it had any right to be. The dome above them caught the morning sun and threw it down in hard white slabs across the polished floor, neon dormant, the whole arena stripped of its night face. Crew members moved along the edges with clipboards and headsets. A single platform stood at the center, a low hexagonal dais with a pedestal on it and nothing else, and everyone in the cast had gathered around it in the loose, suspicious ring of people who know they are about to be told something.
Beatriz was there, in the same neon orange, ponytail pulled tight, arms crossed, scanning the group with the frank appraisal of an athlete sizing up a bracket. She caught David's eye and gave him a small nod, nothing more, but it was a nod that said the invitation from last night was still open and that she was willing to wait.
Mia stood with the Heartbreakers near the front. She did not nod. She just looked at him, one eyebrow up, the question plain on her face that was unsaid: how did last night go. He gave her a small shrug he hoped said later.
Then the lights changed. The neon strips along the base of the walls came up all at once, and the hostess, Zola Maddux walked out from a side door with a headset mic and the emerald jumpsuit back on, and the room went quiet the way rooms did when the woman who held the money walked in.
"Good morning," Zola said. "You look awful. That's fine. Some of you did very well last night and some of you did not, and the ones who did not are about to get a chance to fix it." She climbed the low dais and stood at the pedestal. "The next challenge is called The Long Pull. It is a physical elimination trial. Two at a time, a rope, a marked circle, and a scoreboard, and whoever steps outside the circle is out. This one is played in pairs."
A ripple went through the group. Lance and Denise looked at each other. The twins, Diana and Daphne, looked at each other and then, in unison, at David. Kyle said something to Owen under his breath.
"Here is the twist," Zola said, and the room went still again. "You do not pick your own partners. The pairs are drawn at random." She let that sit. "With two exceptions. Last night's challenge produced two winners. Remy won the bonus as the winning partner. David won immunity for the week. Because of that, both men get to choose their partner for The Long Pull, and they get to choose first."
The silence was total. David could hear the vents again.
"Before the draw," Zola said. "In front of everyone. Live on camera. Remy, David, you will each name a woman in this house. She is your partner. Whatever happens after that draw, that is your pair for the challenge." She smiled at the two of them in turn, and it was the same smile she had worn in the red room. "Ladies, the rest of you will be drawn from the bowl. Gentlemen, if you have something to say, now is the time to say it."
And that was it. That was the whole thing. David understood it before he had finished hearing it, the way he sometimes understood a broken line of code before he ran it. The network did not want a challenge. The network wanted the choice, on camera, in front of fifteen witnesses, and it wanted the choice to mean something. Two names, spoken out loud, and the whole house reading the subtext like a text message.
Remy was already stepping forward. Of course he was. He had come to the dais in a slate blue shirt with the top buttons undone and sleeves rolled, hair set, and he moved the way he moved everywhere, like the floor had been laid for him. He stopped at the base of the dais and turned to face the women, hands loose at his sides, and began to look.
David watched him do it. It was a thing to watch. Remy did not look at the women the way a man looks at a room he finds attractive. He looked at them the way a player looks at a board, and the scan moved in a pattern: Beatriz first and longest, a measured beat at the strongest body in the house; Claire, brief, dismissed; the twins, a flick and gone, cute but expensive; Mia last, and on Mia he stopped, and David felt his chest tighten.
Then Remy looked away from Mia and dropped his eyes, and for exactly one second, no longer, he glanced at David. It was not a look. It was a check. A tally. Then it was gone, and he turned back to Zola.
"I'm going to choose the person who will not be surprised by anything I do," Remy said. "Beatriz."
Beatriz did not react with surprise, which was its own kind of answer. She uncrossed her arms and walked over to stand at Remy's shoulder, and the two of them together on that dais looked like a magazine cover, all muscle and polish and teeth, and a low noise went around the room that was not exactly applause.
"Beatriz Cardoso," Zola confirmed. "Now, David. Your choice."
The floor of David's stomach dropped out. Every face in the ring turned to him at once, and he was suddenly certain that this was worse than the blindfold, worse than the kiss, worse than anything the house had asked him to do, because there was no booth to hide in and no dark to hide behind and no version of this where the choice was private. Whoever he named would become his partner, and his partner would be the answer to the question the entire cast had been asking about him since the first night. Who is he playing for. Everyone would know. There would be no explaining it afterward, because there would be no afterward, because a name is a name and it cannot be walked back.
He looked at the room and looked at the room and looked at the room. Claire was leaning against a pillar with a smile that said pick me and I will make it worth your while. The twins had drifted to the front, and Diana tapped a finger twice against her collarbone, a signal so small and so deliberate that David knew in that instant exactly why Remy had warned him about them. Beatriz was already taken, and she gave him a look from Remy's side that was almost sympathetic, as if she had just watched a door close on him.
And behind the twins, a little to the left, stood Mia. Arms folded. Not smiling. Not signaling. Not doing anything at all except watching him with the steady, patient expression of a woman who had told him on his first night that she would not use him and then had kept her word for a whole week.
David's hands were sweating. He put them behind his back. The vents hummed. Somewhere high above, the dome caught a passing bird, a tiny shadow sliding across the bright floor between all of them and gone.
"David," Zola said again, gently this time. "Your choice."
“I pick… Renee.”
Renee had a surprised look on her face. David picked her because he had a plan: To pick a strong woman and to not deviate from his circle of friends and associates in the game. Physically, David isn’t much of a threat in competition. However he knew that Renee was sneaky strong due to her occupation and her build. He didn’t have to win another competition. He won the last two. He didn’t want to be a target.
“Look, I think I have a plan. Do you trust me?” David whispered to Renee. She nodded. “Go with me, all right?”
Renee held his eyes for exactly one second, the way a woman decides whether a door is locked or open, and then she stepped out of the line and crossed the floor without looking back to see who was watching her do it. She stopped at his shoulder, close enough that only he could hear her.
"Talk quickly.”
"Later," he said. "Just stand here."
"Standing is free." She folded her arms and faced the dais with the flat, patient stillness of someone who got paid to watch people in rooms like this.
Zola tilted her head.
"Renee Vaughn. Interesting." She said the word with the same pleasure she had used on the dais the night before, the pleasure of a woman watching her own show work. "So. Remy and Beatriz. David and Renee. Those pairs are locked. Whatever happens for the rest of this week, those two teams stay together."
A small sound went around the atrium. Claire was leaning against a pillar with her arms crossed, and she let out a short laugh that was aimed at no one in particular.
“Two men with immunity in one week, and they both pick bodyguards," she said. "That is one way to play it."
Kyle said something under his breath to Owen, and Owen snorted, and the twins swapped a look between themselves, brief and unreadable. Diana's two-finger tap against her collarbone had stopped. Daphne only watched David with her head tilted, the way she might watch an animal do something unexpected, and the corner of her mouth went down a fraction before she smoothed it out again.
Beatriz, standing at Remy's shoulder with her ponytail still taut, looked across the dais at David and gave him another small nod, one that carried a single unspoken line in it: not bad. Then her eyes shifted to Remy beside her, and something flickered there, curious, the look of an athlete who has just noticed a change in an opponent's stance.
Remy did not look at David at all. He stood with his hands loose and his eyes on the bowl, and his face was the smooth, unbothered face of the man from the first night, the promoter's face, and David felt the weight of it settle onto the floor between them like a dropped stone.
"Now the rest of you," Zola said. She picked the pedestal's glass bowl up in both hands and shook it once. Paper squares, each with a name. "Ladies, you draw. If you draw a man, he is your partner. If the men run out before the women do, the last two of you draw each other, and I expect all of you to be professionals about it."
She called them forward one at a time.
Tasha drew Joey and made a show of it, pumping her fist. Simone drew Derek, who unfolded his arms for the first time all morning. Diana drew Lance, and Denise's face went tight for half a beat before she covered it, which meant half the house saw exactly the thing she had tried not to show. Daphne drew Owen. And then Zola looked into the bowl and read the last name against the single man left standing in the ring.
"Mia, you have Kyle."
Kyle put both hands up like a man accepting a trophy. He said something to Mia that David could not hear, and whatever it was, Mia answered it with a smile that had no warmth anywhere in it, and then she walked over and stood beside him, arms folded, and did not look at David once. Not once. That was the thing that landed hardest. She had looked at him every other time in a week.
The last two names went to Claire and Denise, and the atrium took it with a low, knowing noise, because the couple had finally been split and everyone alive in that room knew the cameras had just found their new favorite thread.
"Rules," Zola said over the noise. "One pair against another pair, two at a time. A rope, a marked circle, and a scoreboard. You hold the rope and you hold your ground. The moment a member of a pair steps outside the circle, that pair is out of the round. You lose two rounds, both of you go up for nomination. There is no immunity in this one. Nobody is safe just for winning before." She paused long enough to let the last part find David, and he understood that she was talking to him and that he should not take it personally, and that he should take it entirely personally. "You have one hour. Warm up. Then we pull."
The ring broke apart.
David and Renee walked toward the far colonnade, past the bar, past the glass wall with the pool behind it, and Renee did not speak until they were clear of the cluster of bodies and voices. Then she did.
"Spill it."
"I'm the target," David said. "Two wins in a week. Everyone in there is looking for a reason to put me on the block, and the reason is right in front of them. I didn't want to hand them one."
"So you picked the corrections officer with a bench press instead of the girl you've been staring at all week." Renee said it without heat. She was watching the room behind him, not him. "You know what picking Mia would have done?"
"Put a target on her back with me," David said. "She has kids. She can't be the one the house decides to punish for looking after the weird guy."
Renee was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded once, and it was the same nod she had given him in the ring, short and final.
"Fine. Then here's mine. You are not going to out-pull anybody in this house except maybe Kyle, and even Kyle has thirty pounds of neck on you. So this is what we do. I anchor. You stay standing. You do not try to be a hero for one second, because the second you do, you step out of that circle and take me with you."
"That's the plan?"
"That's the plan," she said. "I'd tell you to trust me, but you already did the trusting. So hold the rope and let the big girl work."
He laughed, and it came out of him easily, the first easy thing he had felt since he woke up.
Then, across the atrium, Beatriz's voice carried. "David." She was walking toward them with Remy a step behind her, and she stopped a few feet away with her hands on her hips, ponytail swinging. "You're not going to come find me for that drink, are you. I can tell. You have the face of a man who is going to be busy all week."
"Something like that," David said.
"Then I'll find you," she said with a smirk.
“Let’s get it… partner.” David said to his new partner.
“I like that. Partner. Let’s get it.”