Left!

Jade dodges around the tree, and finds herself facing a steep, sandy hill. She scrambles upwards on all fours, grabbing onto handholds where she sees them - a root of a tree, a big rock, a tuft of grass -

The grass comes out in her hand, and she slides. Suddenly there's another hand around her ankle.

"Gotcha, Ginger - ARRGH!"

Jade kicks with her other foot and sends a blast of sand into Lucas' face. I didn't know he was so close behind! she thinks, struggling with adrenaline-fueled enegry up the slope. There had better be some cover at the top of this thing, or he's got me!

A much larger outcropping of tall, strong grass grows along the top of the cliff - Jade grabs it with both hands and pulls herself over the lip, rolling to her feet. Her heart drops into her stomach as she sees what lies before her - a long, open stretch of bare, sandy dirt, with no cover to speak of all the way to the ocean.

Oh, fuck.

With no other options except to give up, Jade turns and runs toward the only cover she can see, a distant tree-covered hill that must be at least half a mile away. Her feet pound the sand, burning with the heat of the long afternoon, and she hears a distant grunt behind her as Lucas reaches the top of the cliff, and his own rapidly approaching footsteps.

The trees don't seem any closer.

Suddenly, even the option of running until she's caught is taken from her. Up ahead about fifty yards, a flock of seagulls seems to fly up straight from the ground, and Jade realizes she's heading toward a drop-off. The footsteps behind her slow as Lucas seems to realize the same thing she does: there's nowhere left for her to run. She's trapped between the edge of a cliff, a long slope down to the beach, and the man coming up behind her.

In that moment, time seems to slow to a crawl.

Jade flashes back to what brought her here. The money, of course... she was desperate enough to get it from anywhere, even something like this. It was the only way; she'd even considered prostitution, but it wouldn't get her the money she needed fast enough. Of course she'd had second thoughts, in the strange days leading up to the event, where she'd effectively signed her life away and then gone through the onslaught of recorded interviews where she'd been ordered to stick to the script or be dropped from the program, the photo shoots for publicity, the medical examinations which felt like rape in and of themselves, the lineup with all the other girls, and then the selection - the way the host had looked her over like a piece of meat and found her "girlish innocence" appealing. Just like Lucas had.

The terrifying helicopter ride to the island, all the worse because there had been no windows to see where they were going. The way they'd been herded into the shack, reminded of the rules, made to strip down naked... that was when she realized how real it was, that this was really happening.

Then, two hours submerged in mud, as close as she could imagine to being buried alive . The man behind the bushes who she'd helped in exchange for information... which would probably do her no good now that she'd left the map and everything else behind. The terrifying encounter with Enrico, over something as simple as a jug of fresh water... water that had been tainted to turn her into the horny little slut the producers wanted. Then, there was Tiffany... the way that her body had felt when Jade embraced her, that brief moment of respite from the nightmare... shattered by the men who had come to find them. And now, one of them was nearly upon her. He was going to catch her, and rape her, steal her virginity and people would watch the whole thing on television and be entertained by it.

"NO!" Jade shouts aloud.

A surge of new energy courses into her, and in that moment, Jade feels invincible. She will NOT be caught! Jade puts on a burst of speed she never knew existed in her, charging straight for the cliff. She'll be leaving this game on her own terms, and to Hell with them!

At the edge, she leaps.

For a moment, it feels almost as if she might fly away into the clouds... but then, inevitably, she plunges.

One...

Two...

Thr-

-SMACK!-

The water hits like a concrete wall, but yields to her. She kicks furiously, bumps her head against the smooth, sandy bottom. Her lungs scream for air! Jade rights herself, pushes hard from the bottom, rises to the light and breaks the surface, gasping for breath. The salt water stings her eyes as she tries to look around, but before she can get her bearings, the water pulls hard at her and begins dragging her out toward the sea. The dead branch of a tree sticks up from the water, and Jade grabs desperately onto it. The water recedes, pulling strongly past her body... then a wave comes in and abruptly shifts the flow in the other direction, pushing her off her perch. Struggling with what little strength she has left, she swims for a rocky outcropping, and at last pulls herself up onto dry land, shaking uncontrollably even though the sun is warm on her pale skin.

She looks back up at the cliff, where she sees Lucas and two other men looking down at her in sheer disbelief. The cliff face seems impossibly high... and when the wave comes in again, Jade realizes that she jumped at just the right moment to land in deep water, right when the wave came in to fill the inlet. Half a second earlier or later, and she would have been splattered on the rocks.

Jade rises to her feet. Her legs ache from running, and from the impact into the water. She splashes across shallow inlet between the cliff and the palm trees that line the other side, and, with a last look back at the men left standing on the edge of the cliff, she disappears once more into the trees.