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He smelled earthy, but not dirty. He put his hand on my knee, and I felt the same thrill that I had felt the first day, when we had walked beside each other and his arm had brushed against mine.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Everything was uncertain then.”

We were quiet for a little while. I could hear the faint call of distant birds. There was a small amount of ash near the perimeter, blown over from the bushfires.

“I used to see you walking around the compound,” he said. “I’d be in the orchard, or doing something in the house, and when I caught sight of you, even just for a second, I’d feel out of breath.”

I felt a vague sense of shame, knowing that Sam had been available to me. “I always go for the Ryans. They make me feel safe, but I still end up getting hurt.”

“Do you think,” he said, then stopped and smiled in a self-mocking kind of way. “Do you think that you would have come to me, if I hadn’t come to you? If Becca had gone, would you have come to my bed?”

The question saddened me, because I knew that it was justified, and that Sam knew that it was justified, too. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for Sam—but rather than fixing a situation that made me unhappy, I tended to hang around and wait for someone to fix it forme.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sam pulled me against him and stroked my hair. To my infinite relief, I had received peroxide and hair dye in a Personal Task, and my hair was a fresh, bright blond again. I’d had to insult Carlos’s mother to earn it; he had looked hurt, and baffled, but I would have insulted his mother a thousand times over, and the mother of everyone in the compound, if it meant having my hair back as it had been.

“Things will only get more competitive the longer we stay here,” he said. “Particularly the final five, if we make it that far.”

“We’ll make it to the final five,” I said. “We’ll be the last two, me and you.”

He smiled a little but shook his head. “I don’t care about making it to the end.”

I looked at him in shock. “Well, why are you here, then, if you don’t want to win?”

“Lily,” he said, almost sadly. “I stayed for you.”

“Sam,” I said. It was strange—even as I rejoiced in the realization that he could now be mine, I wanted more: I wanted to know that he wouldn’t grow bored and find someone else. I thought, in a brief moment of unease, about the trampoline that I had wanted so desperately as a child—that maddening, all-consuming desire to possess something that I didn’t have—and how quickly I had tired of it, how soon after I was looking for something new to covet.

“Listen,” he said seriously. “I’m not going to be another Ryan. I won’t treat you badly, and try to be rid of you if it suits me. Things will get more brutal here, Lily, but I would leave before I had to hurt you in any way.”

“Neither of us are leaving. Look at this place—look at what we’ve done. Why would we leave?”

He was quiet for a long while, and I let my eyes wander along the boundary, the fence, and the sparse, dry bushes that surrounded the compound, and back to the shed, our Cave of Wonders. Even Becca, the least materialistic of all of us, couldn’t resist its draw, though she preferred to call it “the warehouse.”

“Maybe we could do it,” he said finally. “We could stay here and build a life for just the two of us, at least for a while.” The longest anyone had stayed had been six weeks after everyone else had gone. We could do that; that, and more.

“Of course we could. That’s what all of this has been leading up to.” I thought of all the rewards we would have won by the time the others had left: how well stocked the compound would be, how easy it would be to spend our days here.

Just then, the irrigation system started up and we were cast in a light shower of artificial rain. I wondered if it was set on a timer, or if the producers had turned it on to create a romantic moment for us. Within seconds, my hair was damp. Sam smiled at me, and I smiled back. He moved a piece of wet hair behind my ear and stroked the line of my jaw.

The whistle blew, piercing through the silence.

“Why aren’t you in charge?” I asked. “You’d do a better job of it than Tom and Andrew.”

“I’m happy to help out where I can, but I don’t want to be the one to make the rules,” he said. “I don’t think that we necessarily need anyone in charge, right now; I think they both like to feel needed, Andrew particularly. I’m not sure what they even do, Andrew and Tom.” The whistle blew again, high and shrill as a bird’s cry. We went inside.

—

I had enjoyedlife in the compound from the beginning, and if anyone had asked me, I would have said it was the relationships I had forged that I enjoyed the most. It wouldn’t have been a lie, but it wasn’t entirely the truth either. Up until this point, what I’d truly enjoyed doing most was completing the Personal Tasks. Seb had been right: if you spoke about something that you wanted, you were often offered it as a reward. This meant that we spent a great amount of time sitting around talking about material things. Sam wasn’t partial to those kinds of conversations, but I could sit speaking with Candice for hours under the shade of a tree. It would have looked greedy to simply sit around and say, “I want, I want, I want,” and so we tried to work our wishes into our general conversation.

“It’s so warm,” I would say. It was surely the statement that we uttered the most, but it didn’t stop us from saying it again and again, day after day.

“Boiling,” Candice would say.

“We should go inside, to the bedroom, where there’s air conditioning…”

“Mmm. Shame to go in, though. It’s such a beautiful day.”