“But in about thirty minutes, that would be okay, right?” Ethan says with a crooked smile.
I give him a tired sideways glance as I trudge along, feeling lines of pain shooting through my arm and into my shoulder. “Yeah, sure. In thirty minutes, you can put me out of my misery, if you like. And if you can.”
“Unless you get to me first, eh?” Ethan says, glancing over at the automatic firearm I’m carrying. He raises his non-existent faded brows.
But at that point I decide that he is probably okay.
“So how screwed are we, anyone know?” Jared says a few minutes later, as we walk down some street in the suburb headed south toward downtown. “How much time do we have left?”
Ethan pops a small gadget out of his pocket. “It’s close to nine AM, Pacific Time. Not too bad.”
“We got lucky because of the time zone factor,” Zoe says.
“Yeah.” I sigh. “The three hours we gained we lost being driven in the wrong direction by the drones.”
“Well, guys,” Ethan says cheerfully. “Back in that botanical gardens place I saw a large visitor map, one of those ‘you are here’ things, and it had some info about the Huntington being located twelve miles from downtown L.A. So it’s not as bad as you think. We’re more than halfway there! Just need to keep moving southwest.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jared rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Okay, then.”
We trudge forward some more. Or at least I trudge, while the others are walking at a brisk pace and I am barely keeping up. My wounded arm is numb almost completely, and it has swollen, I think. I really need medical attention. Or at least to sit down. Or—no, yeah, I need medical attention.
“I am going to try to get back on the hoverboard,” I say.
Zoe nods. “Might as well.”
“If the drones show up again, we’ll just see them and hop off the boards immediately.”
There are four of us, and three boards. Zoe and I straddle Zoe’s original board, while Jared gets on the one that carried Sarah’s body.
“Hey, Gwen, how about you un-key this board or whatever it is you did to it, so that I can command it myself properly?” Jared glances at me in expectation.
I nod tiredly. Then I take a deep breath and sing a sequence that releases the Aural Block on the second board. Of course I don’t tell him what it is I am actually doing.
Jared then sings in a light tenor a new keying sequence, and gets on the board, straddling it like a horse. “Why stand when you can sit?” he mutters tiredly, shrugging to excuse himself, but no one cares.
Ethan meanwhile gets up on his own board and rides it properly, standing up, like a skateboarder. From the lanky looks of him and the effortless way he balances it, he has ridden boards before.
Regardless of our riding form, we soon make the hoverboards rise up about five feet from the ground.
Then we all fly in a close formation, one after the other, at street level, at about twenty-five miles an hour.
We are somewhere in Alhambra, a few blocks away from Atlantic Boulevard to the west and the I-10 San Bernardino Freeway to the south, when the hurricane sound returns.
In seconds, the southwest sky is blackened out with drone shuttles as they rise from their launch sites and start moving at us.
Oh, but they are moving fast!
“Drones! Get off the boards!” Zoe cries wildly, giving me a loud earful.
As quickly as we can, we sing the hover stop commands and jump off, with not a moment to spare.
We stand away from the boards as the drones pass directly overhead, ignoring us. Instead they keep moving north many blocks beyond us, where once again we hear screams and firing, as other Candidates are caught unaware.
“I bet the end of this hot zone is just up ahead,” Ethan says.
“Yeah, I can’t wait,” I mutter tiredly, as I resume walking.
Ethan’s right. We get to the intersection of Atlantic and the I-10 Freeway, and the street is marked with four-color beacons every thirty feet. The beacons are installed along the freeway and along Atlantic Boulevard, this time on street level, so all we need to do is cross the barrier in either direction to be out of this hot zone. The red stripe is painted on our side of the barrier, as though to remind us.
And the barrier itself is a simple chain link fence. Except it is at least fifteen feet tall, with barbed wire on the top.
And, judging by the “Danger, High Voltage, Do Not Touch” and the skull and crossbones sign, and—as if that’s not enough—the lightning zigzag, this is an electric fence.
“Great, just what we need,” Jared says, wiping his forehead streaked with sweat and road dust, and remainders of Sarah’s blood.
We stand at the corner, evaluating the situation.
“Okay, so what options do we have?” Ethan says. “Fly over? Climb over? Find a door or a hole in the fence? Disable the electricity?”
“That pretty much covers it. . . .” I stand next to Zoe and our hoverboard. I sway slightly, feeling a head-rush from the heat of the merciless SoCal sun overhead, and from the fact that I can barely remain upright due to approaching shock and loss of sensation in my arm.
“Which fence should we try to cross? The freeway or the street one?” Jared nods at the Freeway side. “I think if we follow along and find an I-10 overpass we might be able to just walk under?”
“Not so easy.” Ethan points down along the fence boundary to where the closest overpass is to our left. “The Atlanteans stuck a pesky fence continuation under the overpass too. The entire way is blocked.”
“How quickly can we saddle up and fly over the fence?” Jared ponders.
“Not quickly enough,” I say. “There are drone launch sites hidden all along this street, there, can you see? There are more drones waiting to fly up and incinerate us.”
And I point to the dark convex spots in the concrete of the street where the tops of the drone shuttles show, sitting like recessed mushrooms. I just saw them, just made out what they are. . . .
Holy crap, they are all around us! Like, there’s one two feet away on the sidewalk next to my feet!
Good thing I said something because Ethan was about to get on his hoverboard.
“No! Stop! Don’t touch your board!” I exclaim.
Ethan whistles, and quickly backs away. “Wow, thanks.”
“Okay, so much for flying over.” Zoe looks sullen and hopeless.
As we continue standing, not knowing how to proceed, more Candidates who cleverly avoided the drones the same way we did, gradually arrive. We gather at the corner of the zone, milling around.
“Hey, what are you all waiting for?” an older teen girl with dark hair and an arrogant expression says. Her token and armband are red, and she’s carrying not one but two long, impressive swords. . . .
Apparently, very sharp swords.
Because she stands back, then swings powerfully, and her sword crashes against the chain links.
There is a hissing sound and sparks fly. . . . The girl screams, then starts arcing with the electric charge, and is unable to drop the sword. A few seconds later, her burned body falls down on the concrete, at the foot of the fence.
A strong horrible smell of burning flesh is carried on the hot wind.
“What a stupid idiot!” some freshman-age kid says. “Couldn’t she see the ‘danger, high voltage’ sign?”
“Shut up! Just—shut up!” another girl Candidate says, holding her hand across her mouth. “That was awful!”
“Yeah, it was. But she’s still an id—”
“She was. She’s gone now. Have some respect, man,” Jared says. “We’re all in this screwed up crap Semi-Finals together, you might say we’re all idiots.”
Chapter 37
About twenty minutes later, as we still have no solution to getting past this hot zone boundary fence, I risk doing something a little crazy.
I approach one of the “recessed mushroom” drones that’s cleverly resting in its lau
nch pad—or whatever the hole-in-the-concrete thing underneath it is. And then, taking a deep breath, I put my foot down on top of the drone.
“Hey! Watch it, there, careful,” Ethan says to me. He’s been observing me silently for the last few minutes.
But, nothing happens to me. So I press down harder with my foot, then take a step and stand on top of the slightly curving surface.
“Oh, no! What are you doing?” Zoe says. “What if you activate it and it explodes or starts firing?”
The drone is circular, curved slightly like an upside-down plate, or a classic warrior shield, only about four feet in diameter, like an oversized large manhole cover.
I stand with both feet on it, testing its resilience. There is lack of give, which is good.
And then I sing an F note, followed by the rest of the keying sequence.
Yeah, I’ve assumed this thing is made of orichalcum.
Everyone stares at me like I’m crazy. Candidates turn in my direction. Jaws drop.
With a soft lurch, the drone rises and hovers about a foot over the launch pad, with me standing up on its mushroom-cap shaped surface.
I balance with my hands, starting to flail slightly, and my usual terror of heights kicks in . . . plus I am not in my best physical shape right now. And the weight of the automatic rifle on my shoulder is pulling me off-kilter.
But I steel myself and sing the rising object sequence, my voice soaring an octave higher. The drone begins to rise, carrying me with it.
I start to close my eyes in that automatic response to the terror of vertigo. Soon I am rising over the barbed wire top end of the fence and over the beacons along the boundary.
As I pass the beacons, my yellow token flashes brightly as I get auto-scanned by the zone boundary. . . .
The choice before me is to go straight ahead and over the I-10 freeway with its six lanes of onrushing traffic in both directions, while balanced on top of a flimsy rounded slippery object not designed to be ridden. Or I can direct the “drone-board” to go to the right, over the Atlantic Boulevard traffic with half the lanes but equally-rush-hour levels of vehicles in both directions. Then I would still have to cross the freeway somehow, later, but under less pressure to stay upright on the surface of a flimsy drone. . . .
A Greek mythology reference comes to me. Scylla or Charybdis, Gwen Lark. . . . Scylla or Charybdis.
What would Odysseus do?
I think Odysseus would do the smart thing. . . . I bet he’d take the easier crossing on Atlantic Boulevard.
But considering that I am this close to passing out, this close to being on my last strength here, the smart thing would be just to go forward as far as I can, while I still can.
Damn, but I should have sat down on that drone instead of trying to balance on it while standing upright.
Well, too late now. . . .
I think this as I start moving the drone forward over the twelve lanes of freeway.
The next two minutes are the longest minutes of my life. The drone, with me riding it, sails very slowly over the San Bernardino Freeway.
I never look down, not once, only hear the roar of cars and semis below, the honking of horns, and feel the churn of air from the vehicles in motion cutting the wind tunnel right underneath me.
Just don’t think, don’t think.
Don’t look down.
Breathe. . . .
Finally, after an eternity, I reach the other side. Somehow I have managed not to fall off, and now the sidewalk of the other side of the freeway beckons, is looming before me.
I sing the descent and then the hover stop sequence.
I don’t so much jump off as I fall off the drone and collapse onto the sidewalk, hitting my knee as I land, and scraping my good hand that’s attached to the arm without the bullet lodged in it—the limb I can still use in its entirety.
I crouch, then sit on the concrete, right next to the hovering drone, and for about thirty seconds I simply breathe and breathe and think nothing.
And then I look back over the short pedestrian fence railing on this side of the freeway, and I see them.
Candidates riding drones, just like me—dozens of them—crossing the freeway.
Looks like I’ve set a trend.
“Okay, you’re officially crazy,” Jared tells me, as he lands his own drone two feet away from me. “But in a good way. Wow! That was brilliant!”
“You’re right, I am crazy.” I sigh, glancing up at him. “I had no idea it would work.”
“Well, yeah, who knew the drones would be dumb enough to let us ride them?” Ethan says, landing on the other side, followed by Zoe who is riding her drone while seated on it.
“Actually,” I say, “the Atlanteans probably had no idea we would be dumb enough to try something like that. So they never bothered programming the drones against this kind of thing.”
“How do you know,” Zoe says, “that they didn’t want us to do it? Maybe that’s part of our test, to think in weird new ways to solve tough problems?”
“Yeah, I suppose,” I say. “Could be.”
“So, now what?” Ethan stretches his long arms, swinging them side-to-side.
“Call our boards here, I guess. And send the drones back to their manholes.”
Ethan stares at me. “Huh? Can you do that? How can you call so far across the road? Will the voice keying work long distance?”
Obviously he doesn’t know.
“Yeah, she can do that,” Zoe says, rolling her eyes.
And so I send away the drones and call our three hoverboards. My voice rises cleanly over the noise of traffic, and in moments, the boards come sailing across the freeway expanse toward us.
Again, other Candidates stare in surprise and almost in dismay. Because the rest of the boards—their boards—are still stuck on the other side of the freeway, inside the hot zone. At this point, if these Candidates want to ride anything the rest of the way downtown, these drones that they used to cross the boundary are all they’ve got.
“How in the world are you doing this?” a girl says to me.
I shrug.
The good thing is, we’re in a safe zone now, and this is Monterey Park, according to a road sign. The bad thing is, I am not doing too well.
“Hey, so what was that thing you did?” Ethan asks me again as we get back on our three boards. “How did you sing loud enough for the boards to come to you from so far away?”
“I dunno, I have this talent, I guess,” I mutter. And then I watch as several teens try to emulate me. A girl sings a keying sequence at the top of her voice, leaning over the freeway guardrail. But her voice is not as precisely in tune as she could make it, and so her board remains inert on the other side of the freeway. Another boy tries the same thing, belting it out loudly, and again, imprecisely. . . .
Meanwhile, most people simply give up on their boards and sit down on their drones instead, rising in the air while riding these huge, black, upside-down dinner plates made of orichalcum.
“Better than nothing!” a wiry Asian kid with a Yellow Quadrant armband exclaims, laughing down at me as he zips away on top of a drone in the direction of downtown.
Zoe and I sit down on our board and rise up in the air, followed by Jared and Ethan on theirs. And this time, we can safely go much higher, above the treetops, without dealing with a projectile firing system trying to bring us down.
My vertigo seems less acute now, as we rise thirty feet above street level. Maybe because by now I am too faint to care about anything but staying awake and upright.
I put all my effort into singing the hover commands properly, focusing on the right notes and precision of tone.
We move southwest, crossing varied neighborhoods, and in about twenty minutes approaching the 710, the Long Beach Freeway, which runs north-south and apparently designates another zone boundary.
Because, yeah, I see the dratted four-color beacons every thirty feet, festooning the top of another chain link fence that runs paral
lel to the 710.
“Oh, damn . . .” Jared mutters, riding his own board right next to ours, feet dangling. “How much do you wanna bet this is another hot zone coming up?”
“Where are we anyway, East L.A.?” Zoe asks me. The dry wind whips her hair at this altitude.
We all stare down.
“I don’t know, not sure.” I barely find the energy to answer her, that’s how fuzzy my brain is at this point.
“Not quite,” Ethan says. “We’re just a few blocks north of it. . . . I think. It’s out of our way.”
“So, ready to cross the boundary?” Jared takes a deep breath and sings the notes to move forward. He’s the first of us to sail over the beacons and his red token flashes as he gets scanned.
Next, Zoe and I cross over, at least ten feet above the beacons and fence top.
Then, Ethan comes after.
As soon as we pass the boundary, we check for a red stripe painted on this side of the fence, and sure enough, there is one.
Which means, we’re in another hot zone.
Meanwhile, we see that many other Candidates are riding drones in the air around us. However, in addition to us, only a few are on hoverboards.
Lucky for us, the drones themselves don’t seem to care. Apparently, the “rules” of this particular hot zone don’t work the same way—don’t activate the drones to kill the hoverboard riders.
So . . . what do they activate instead?
Great, I think. What will it be?
What horrible new surprises lie in store for us here, as we get closer to downtown?
It occurs to me incidentally: At least some people figured out how to call their hoverboards remotely across that other freeway.
It doesn’t require a Logos voice, merely the ability to be both loud and precise, as Mr. Warrenson taught us in Atlantis Tech class, and as I’m sure the other Instructors in other RQCs across the country did also. It’s surprising how many people must have forgotten—or at least, did not extend the notion of auto-keying objects that were simply out of reach across the table from you, to the idea of doing the same thing from very far away.
[Atlantis Grail 01.0] Qualify Page 47