Calamari set down another gem. Green square.
Green diamond.
Blue diamond.
Cupping my hands around the gems I had left, I looked for my best option. If Calamari could read auras, I knew she would see mine plummet. I found that I had only one move.
My coveted white diamond.
Wincing, I set it in the center of the table, and the crowd cheered. They jumped forward, knocking into my chair, and my chest slammed against the table. Behind Calamari, Wren’s hands were clasped over her mouth. More inmates were trying to make bets with her, but she waved them off. Elio was beeping, and I wanted to tell him that it would be okay. I wanted to yell at Wren that this was a stupid plan to begin with, that there had to be better ways to escape Ironside. Calamari’s tentacles slithered across the ground, winding around my legs, my hips, locking me in place against the table.
She set down one final gem. A red diamond. I had a red circle, and then we were both left with three.
A tie.
“Before we reveal,” Calamari drawled, “and before I inevitably kill you, I’ll offer you a trade. Switch places with your Earthan friend, and I’ll let you walk away. Refuse … and I’ll crush you both when I win.”
“You’re that confident your hand is better than mine?”
She relaxed back in her chair. “I am.”
I cut a glance to Wren. Her jaw had gone slack, beads of sweat dripping down her chin. She really thought I was going to give her up. And I guess I hadn’t given her a reason to believe otherwise, but I needed her. And she needed me too. So did Elio.
Elio. I found his eyes as he was jostled by the restless crowd. I just hoped he had enough sense to run when this plan went up in flames.
Looking back at Calamari, I shook my head, sealing my fate. “No deal.”
A bored sigh left her mouth. Her tentacles gleamed in the sunlight. She pushed away her partition to reveal her final three gems.
Two green diamonds. One blue triangle.
Not a bad combination, according to Wren. Diamonds were the highest shape, but green and blue were the second and third highest colors. I didn’t even bother acting surprised. Despite Calamari’s calm façade, I’d read her aura loud and clear. For the last three rounds, I’d known she was far less confident than she was letting on.
I pushed aside my own partition. Even though I’d given up the highest white diamond, I had something nearly as good. And sometimes, nearly was just enough to win.
Three green diamonds winked in the sunlight.
“No!” Calamari jumped to her feet, shoving the table away from us into the crowd. “I don’t lose!”
Around us, spectators yelled furiously, pushing and searching for Wren, who had vanished as soon as I revealed my winning gems. My stomach lurched. Where was she? Where was Elio? Calamari was closing in on me, her eyes as hard as ice chips, her tentacles winding around my torso, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. It didn’t matter that I won. She was going to break me anyway.
The crowd grew deafening. The ground rumbled underneath the beat of their angry footsteps. Calamari bared her teeth, tightened her hold, and I started to feel something in my spine pop—
And then a heaping pile of eggs and meat smacked into Calamari’s face and slipped down the front of her jumpsuit.
“What?” Slowly, she turned … and noticed Wren standing on the fringes of the crowd, armed with trays from the cafeteria. “What did you do?”
Wren shrugged. And that was when I unequivocally knew she had lost her marbles.
Because no sane person would ever scoop their hand into a bowl of mushed-up mystery meat and fling it at their enemy, yelling, “FOOD FIGHT!”
The meat got lodged in Calamari’s hair, some of it slipping down her cheek, leaving a muddy streak on her skin. Wren flung three more globs of meat into the crowd, pelting two inmates and one guard. That was all it took. The spectators either dived for cover or rushed to grab their own ammunition as, all around us, food went flying into tables and faces and fences like we were in the middle of a war zone.
The guards tried to quell the inmates, but they were caught up in the frenzy too. One man took a moldy hunk of bread to the face. Another woman slipped on a stream of vegetable pods and landed face-first in a pile of mushed-up fruit.
What the—? This was Wren’s big plan? This was the element of surprise she neglected to mention? I couldn’t deny it was effective. Calamari had grown so distracted by the onslaught that her tentacles had started to loosen their grip on me. Reaching for my chair, I beat them away, and the suckers detached from my skin with a sickening squelch. I ducked under the arm of a passing inmate as he aimed a glob of eggs at my face, and rolled behind a table that had been flipped on its side as a shield.
I found Elio hiding behind it, shaking.
My first fear was that he was glitching, but no. “The food! It’s being wasted!” With a shrill beep-beep-beeeep, he scooped up handfuls of dirty vegetables and clutched them to his chest like they were precious pearls.
“Elio!” I snapped my fingers to draw his attention. “Leave it! Where’s Wren?”
“Cora!” Wren dived behind the table with us, an aura of exhilaration brightening her face. “Great idea, right?”
The Snaps game and the dozens of bad bets were long forgotten. An inmate with glittering gold skin aimed a handful of meat at a second woman with smooth black antennae on her forehead. The meat trailed through the air like a comet’s tail, hitting its mark with a thud. Antennae Girl giggled and chucked a handful back.
“Come on! This is our chance!” Wren grabbed my shoulder as more guards spilled into the yard. They were caught up in the fight and were quickly distracted, jobs forgotten. Wren rolled out from behind the table as the crowd swelled and more food went flying.
I hurried to follow but was cut off by another inmate jumping through the air to avoid being hit by a bag of bread rolls. He crashed into my hip, and I slammed into the ground, my knees aching with the brunt of the fall. The man didn’t even apologize. He picked up a roll with his long trunk and launched it across the yard.
“Oh, no! Excuse me! I’ll just get out of your way next time!” I gave him a mock curtsy as he crawled behind a table before turning to Wren. “Okay, let’s—”
She was gone.
Spinning in a circle, I searched through the chaos. No. She wasn’t gone, I was just missing her somehow. Didn’t all Earthan kids play hide-and-seek?
But as my heart rate accelerated, I knew I was lying to myself. She wasn’t going to fight her way back through this mess to retrieve us. She had the pass codes, her way to the docking bay was clear. She had no need for us anymore. If she really intended to bring me and Elio onboard, she would have made sure we were with her before she ran.
Anger flared in my chest, deep and burning. I wished I had a blaster handy. I suddenly had a passionate need to destroy something.
Dodging another flailing inmate being sprayed with a vat of milk from the kitchens, I ducked behind the table again. A woman tried crowding in beside me, but I elbowed her out of the way. Wren or no Wren, I just had to make it to the docking bay before she did, hack the pass codes again, and then Elio and I would have her coveted ship all to ourselves.
Easy-peasy.
“New plan. Get up.” I tugged Elio’s hand, but he didn’t budge. I looked down and— “No. Not now. Not now.”