Work Text:
It’s not like anyone’s keeping score. No one’s keeping track of whose spear is the first to pierce the lung, whose axe is the first to cleave the spine, whose traps are the first to snare the ankle. No matter what else they are at this point, they’re not flippant. This isn’t a game.
It isn’t.
Except.
Except when Shauna digs her knife into Gen’s throat, anointing her hands with arterial spray, Taissa can’t help but imagine a chalkboard with two columns. In one, the girls’ names are listed. In the next, empty squares. In her mind, she draws a single line in the space by Shauna’s name, marking the slaughter in stark dusty white.
Shauna: one kill.
Melissa’s next. Van’s the one to run her down, pinning her to the frozen ground and snapping her neck without flinching. The look on Van’s face is strangely tender as she lifts Melissa’s corpse onto the makeshift stretcher. Neither Van nor Taissa speaks as they take Melissa home.
When they arrive, the others get to work in silence. Taissa watches Akilah’s shoulders shake as she bundles Melissa’s clothes into a little pile.
Van: one kill.
Tai finally gets her head in the game when Jess, one of the JV girls Tai still barely knows, draws the Queen. She runs, like Mel and Nat before her, and Tai suspects it’s more out of principle than anything else. A Yellowjacket doesn’t take defeat lying down. She can respect that.
The hunt begins just before dawn. Taissa runs beneath the bruise-blue sky, feeling focused, alive. The cold that wraps around her bones is so familiar she barely notices it. Frigid air stabs into her lungs and hurts in the old way, the good way: the burn of early morning drills, the rush of blood through her veins, the fading protestations of her body as she molds it into something exceptional.
Jess is fast. Tai is faster.
Tai: one kill.
Van finishes the next hunt. She lures another of the JV girls, Amanda, into the pit she and Tai dug three days prior. Tai thinks maybe she should get partial credit for this one—she’s the one who suggested they build the trap there, after all. But it was Van who nipped at Amanda’s heels, a wolf in every way that mattered. It was Van who drove her into the pit, and Van who dragged her back after. Tai can’t take the win from her. She’s taken enough already.
Not for the first time, she thinks about how insane she’s being. How gracious she is, to let Van take the title of Best Murderer. Ridiculous.
No one else is giving out points like this, keeping track of whose hands are reddest. It’s just her, in the little corner of her mind that never left the soccer field.
Van: two kills.
Between Amanda and the next hunt, there’s a storm of sabotage. Supplies go missing. Food and drink are tainted. Traps are disarmed, broken, ruined.
It takes a while to find him, wily bastard that he is, but at last they find the literal hole he crawled into, and it’s only because of the antlers on Natalie’s brow that the girls don’t gut him then and there. They tie him up, leave him straining and screaming in the back of the cave while they move in, cloaking the walls in fur and bone. The Symbol is painted on the wall with the blood of a recently caught doe. Taissa imagines her little scoreboard sitting just below the Symbol, fresh blood dripping onto the chalk.
Their prisoner doesn’t approve of the redecoration.
“You’ve lost your minds,” he says. “All of you.”
No one listens to him.
No one has listened to Ben Scott in a long, long time.
Natalie looks away as their former coach struggles and curses, her lip bitten bloody, her hands curled into fists.
Officially, no one knows who ended his misery. They wake up one day to Misty’s keening, and find their prisoner slumped against the wall near the mouth, a shaky red line across his throat. His face is peaceful, like Nana’s in the coffin.
Akilah turns away, looking sick.
Officially, no one knows what happened.
Taissa adds it to the scoreboard in her mind anyway.
Nat: one kill.
There are kills no one can account for. Lives ended by everyone, and no one. Jackie. Javi. Travis, though his blood still pumps and his nerves still fire, is dead too, as dead as the pieces of heart still stuck between his teeth. He barely speaks anymore, just follows Natalie around like he’s trying to melt into her shadow, and vanish.
The WHS Yellowjackets: three kills, and counting.
She killed Laura Lee, she realizes one night. In her arms, Van twitches in her sleep, like a dog dreaming of rabbits. Tai pets her hair, marveling at how soft it is, even now.
Van, alive despite the violence forever etched into her skin. Alive despite Taissa’s arrogance.
Laura Lee, dead because of it.
It had been the expedition that had prompted the flight. Laura Lee flew that damn plane because Van needed a doctor, and Tai had let Laura Lee go to her death, because if the plane somehow made it, that would mean helicopters and hospitals and hot meals. It would mean that Van would be safe, and Tai would be forgiven.
So Tai, despite how stupid and reckless she knew Laura Lee’s decision was, said nothing. So Tai, who could have kept Laura Lee’s feet on the ground and her cells held together, did nothing.
Add it to the tally.
That’s cheating, she imagines Van saying. You want to take credit for killing someone, you do it yourself.
But it’s not cheating. It’s not a technicality. She killed Laura Lee the same way she killed Jackie, and Javi. Inaction at the right moment is as sharp as any spear.
Killing someone. Letting someone die. Same thing.
Tai: two kills.
Her dreams are always the same. Van draws the Queen. Tai can’t see the card—it’s just a smear of red and black and white—but she knows, down in the marrow of her, what it is. The cabin is still there, in the dream; four warm, fire-lit walls around them. There’s no one else: just Van with the card, and Tai with the axe.
Van grins like she used to: huge, bright, unafraid.
“Still got it, Turner?” Van asks, like it’s the first practice after summer break. “Let’s see.” And then she’s off, bursting out the door with a joyful laugh. Tai stands for a moment in the cabin, alone.
The axe is heavy in her hand.
The landscape blurs and changes as she sprints. The frozen earth turns to linoleum, the woods to a locker room. The lockers melt into pews, an empty coffin before her. The coffin swells like a great open mouth, a spiked pit, a frozen cliff. Her surroundings wheel and warp, and still Taissa runs, chasing a flash of copper just beyond her reach.
Van, reveling in the role of prey, is more beautiful than she’s ever been. Her laugh is birdsong. Her sweat is intoxicating. The culmination of this hunt will be the sweetest by far.
To win a game, the last obstacle you have to face is the goalie.
At last, Van stumbles over a tree root, and Tai pounces. She tackles her to the forest floor, and they roll there like they’re in the throes of something beautiful and innocent. Then Tai pins her down. Van looks up at her, face flushed, eyes shining.
“Good game,” Van says.
Before Tai can say anything, her hands move of their own accord, holding the axe above Van’s sternum. Van’s eyes widen with anticipation, hunger.
Tai can’t. She won’t. The notion of reducing Van to a victory, a line of chalk, a handful of calories to get her through the day, is abhorrent. She fights her own hands, but the axe doesn’t so much as shake.
“I don’t want to,” Tai says.
“You won,” Van replies. She places a hand over Taissa’s and presses down, driving the axe into her own chest. Scarlet blooms beneath the blade. “Take what’s yours.”
Tai wakes. Van sleeps soundly beside her.
Tai and Van: two kills each, still. Neck and gorgeous, delicious neck.
The next day, the cards come out again. Akilah doesn’t draw. Her eyes are huge and dull against her sunken face. When she speaks, her voice is tiny and ragged, like a little dead mouse.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
A Yellowjacket doesn’t take defeat lying down. That, more than refusing the cards, is Akilah’s crime. Still, there’s no fear in her face as Shauna approaches with the knife. Her breath steadies. Her shoulders relax.
Shauna raises the knife.
“Wait.”
Shauna stops. Akilah’s voice is still so soft, but there’s a power threaded into it that none of the girls want to interrogate.
Akilah meets Taissa’s gaze.
“Tai. Please.”
Everyone looks at Tai. Shauna, miserable. Van, searching. Lottie, stoic. Travis, hollow. Misty, curious. Nat, remorseful.
Akilah, imploring.
“I don’t want to,” Tai whispers. Her voice is nearly as small as Akilah’s. Another little mouse, to keep her company.
Akilah swallows. Tears drip down her cheeks.
“Please,” she says again.
Tai thinks of Akilah laughing by the lake, studying for the SAT, teasing her over the basin. Saving Van’s life. Praying in the snow. Dreaming of home.
Wordlessly, Shauna passes Taissa the knife.
Akilah closes her eyes. Tai keeps her hand as steady as she can.
That night, Mari wails into the dark, on and on, for hours. No one has it in them to quiet her.
Tai: three kills.
She wins.