Chapter 5: Drop Day — The Wilderness Swallows Twenty-Four

The helicopter did not have windows on Kai's side, which he decided to interpret as a design choice rather than an oversight, because the alternative was that StreamBlood had put twenty-four people in a modified cargo transport and simply not thought about the view.

He had been sitting on a hard bench for forty minutes, shoulder to shoulder with a contestant named Brecken who kept rehearsing what sounded like an opening monologue under his breath, the words blurring together into a continuous anxious hum. Across the cabin, Caden Rhys sat with his eyes closed and his arms loose at his sides in the manner of someone who had been taught to project calm and had practiced it until the teaching disappeared. He looked like a man meditating. He was almost certainly running through a teleprompter behind his eyelids.

Kai ate the second half of a protein bar he had started in the processing hangar and looked at the floor.