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"It is midday." He continues to comb my hair with his fingers. "You needed to rest."

But I'm terrified now—the snow-people get angry when there's no food. It's why I cook for them even when I don't want to—I'm afraid of what they'll do next. "Corvak—the army?—"

"I am cooking what little they brought. Don't worry. It's handled."

"You shouldn't have let me sleep in."

"It's handled," he says again, voice patient. "And I cooked you a root in the coals. When you feel well enough, I want you to sit up and eat it, and then we will talk."

The last thing I want to do right now is eat. I want to ignore my stomach entirely. "You eat. I'm not hungry."

"If you don't eat one I will cook three and insist you eat all of them."

Grr. I sit up slowly, testing my queasiness. When everything stays down, I put my hand out to him. "Fine. I'll choke it down." His eyes crinkle with amusement at my dramatics and he hands me the root. I take the world's tiniest bite and chew slowly in the hopes that maybe my gut won't realize I'm eating. "Did you sleep well?"

"I have not slept at all," he says. "I came in here to check on you. The rest of the time I have been speaking with Valmir."

"You talked allnight?" I take a bigger bite, because I have things to ask him, too, and the longer I take to eat, the longer it takes to get answers.

"He had much to say."

It's a curiously vague statement, and one that concerns me. "Are you…okay?"

"It is a lot of information to digest," Corvak says, reaching for me. His fingers brush the hand in my lap. "If what Valmir has told me is true, we have a problem. Actually…we have many problems."

My stomach churns and the mouthful of root I have tastes like ash. I force myself to swallow, terrified. "Like…what?" Hehesitates, and I realize he doesn't want to tell me, which freaks me out even more. "Corvak…"

"There is no game," he says, choosing his words carefully. "I have been wrong all this time."

I stare at his outline in surprise. There's just enough light in our cave that I can make out his features and the defeated slump of his shoulders. "What do you mean, there's no game?"

He holds my hand tight, as if what he's about to say pains him. "I…all the memories I have, all the information I have been programmed with…it's not matching up. It is as you said—if this is a competition, where are the rest of our competitors? Where are the weapons? Where are the vid recorders? Why are we given so much land to maneuver? Why are they letting us interact with the local people? I don't have this in my memories. The game is supposed to be more contained, more structured. But when we woke up, I was certain that this was a battle scenario. That we were to fight to survive, or that we were to hunt for some sort of object, or?—"

I stop him before he can go on because he looks tormented. "Corvak, I'm not blaming you. God knows I have no idea what's been going on. But if it's not a game, what is it? What's going on?"

"There is no game. There was never a game. We were abandoned here. No one is monitoring us. No one is coming to retrieve us." His voice is heavy with regret. "I was wrong about all of it and I misled you."

My gut twists, but I don't know if it's sickness or anxiety over what he's saying. "I'm confused. You say there's no game, but that doesn't explain how I got here. I'm from Earth. There's nothing in that explanation that says how I managed to land halfway across a galaxy in the pod next to you. What's the point of that? And why would someone kidnap me from Earth just todump me on a snowy planet with no people?" I pause. "Thereareno people, right?"

"There is a village at the beach. That is where Valmir says he is from. And there is another village in the mountains to the south, but they are all mesakkah."

I still don't understand. I feel as if I'm missing a big piece of the puzzle. "So the thing with the parasite…was that a lie too? Is that why I'm dying?"

"It was not a lie—" He sounds anguished.

Squeezing his hand, I correct myself. "I'm not accusing you. Just…we're going off assumptions. I was wondering if they were lying to us, if they were pretending like they needed this parasite to live and it was really a set-up. That they were tricking us and hoping it would kill us…" But even that doesn't make sense, because if what Corvak is saying is true, they're not the enemy.

I'm starting to question everything that's happened since I woke up.

"Is the parasite why I'm sick?" I whisper, horrified.

He hesitates. "In a sense."

Oh god. Visions of worms crawling through my guts fill my mind. I think of the chest-burster from the movieAlien. Is that what's inside me making all the noise? "Fuck. It's eating me from the inside, isn't it?"

Corvak's hesitation makes me want to weep. "I…don't think so?"

I put a hand to my stomach, imagining it full of…things. I want to throw up a dozen times over.