Game of Flames

by Robin Wasserman

  But as usual, Gabriel was unable or unwilling to tone down his use of the Voyagers equipment. He was like a NASCAR driver; if Gabriel was behind the wheel of a race car with a track in front of him, there was only one choice—gun it.

  “Bring us in about twenty feet from the surface,” Dash said. “We’ll deploy the watercraft first.”

  “I tested all the watercraft instruments in the premission phase,” Carly said. “Best I can tell, everything checked out okay.”

  “It’s a good thing we can’t locate the element from up here,” Gabriel said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have a chance to take those babies out for a spin.”

  The crew stopped talking as the ship accelerated. Dash gripped his armrests as his back pushed firmly into his seat. They were coming in hotter than Dash liked, nose down toward the watery surface of Aqua Gen.

  “Pull back, Gabriel. You’re heading in too steep.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Gabriel said as he expertly tilted the front of the Cloud Cat. They hovered precisely twenty feet above the surface of the water.

  The pressure the crew felt subsided as soon as the ship leveled and slowed. Rocket, who had been sitting on Carly’s lap, barked once with what Carly felt sure was appreciation.

  “Piper, take the helm,” Dash said.

  Piper moved her air chair to a predetermined location at the front of the Cloud Cat. After Piper had cleared level nine navigation training, STEAM and a team of Zrks had retrofitted a locking hub for Piper to dock her chair. She settled in, and Rocket leapt from Carly’s lap to sit obediently at Piper’s side.

  “I have the controls,” Piper said, and she couldn’t help smiling as she stared out at the serene surface of Aqua Gen.

  The rest of the crew moved off the main deck and into the cargo hold at the rear. There Dash saw three personal watercraft and one submarine. The submarine was shaped like a twelve-foot torpedo, with two seats and controls that were dug into the center, like a kayak. It was a two-person vehicle, but the element extraction could be done with only one person. Dash planned to complete it himself, because it was more dangerous than he’d let on. There was nothing safe about finding yourself 20,000 feet under the surface of an endless sea. But the sub would need to wait; it was the watercraft they needed now.

  Each watercraft was shaped like a wishbone, with a single seat positioned in the center of the Y. Propulsion came from the twin jet engines at the tail ends of the Y, and all the mapping tools were in the long nose. They were sleek, beautiful machines, cast in blue and green camouflage to match the surface.

  “Man, I love this gig,” Gabriel said as he stared at the most expensive watercraft ever created.

  Carly was a bit more cautious than Gabriel. “It’s too bad we can’t send the sub in without this surface work,” she said. “I don’t like being exposed any longer than we have to.”

  Dash agreed, but they all knew the limitations of the technology. STEAM 6000 had made sure to explain it in excruciating detail and test them relentlessly while they were in Gamma Speed. They would need to ride the surface of the water and search for an oily film of Pollen Slither. Once they found that, they could trace a direct path to the source 20,000 feet below.

  “If only the Pollen Slither wasn’t so diluted when it reached the surface,” Carly continued while they all put on life vests and boarded their own watercrafts.

  “No way!” Gabriel said. “After all that training on the ship with these things, we’ve gotta ride ’em for real.”

  Dash knew he should reassure Carly, but he could feel himself being pulled into the gravitational force of Gabriel’s excitement.

  “I’m not going to lie. I have been looking forward to this.”

  “That’s my man,” Gabriel said, and he leaned out for a fist bump that Dash neglected to see.

  “Don’t leave me hangin’,” Gabriel said.

  Dash returned the bump, then turned to his left where Carly was seated and offered a fist bump to her. She took a deep, nervous breath and put on her helmet, ignoring Dash’s fist. “Let’s do this.”

  Dash and Gabriel put on their helmets, and they all buckled into their seats.

  “Everyone ready?” Dash asked, testing the person-to-person audio inside the helmets. He got nods all around and tapped a command into his screen. “Piper, open bay doors.”

  “You got it,” Piper said from the deck. A hydraulic sound filled the Cloud Cat bay, and light pierced Dash’s eyes. He stared down a forty-five-degree metal ramp, followed by open air and water below. He tried to swallow and found a lump in his throat that felt like a walnut.

  “Gabriel deploy in five, four, three, two, one,” Dash ordered.

  Gabriel’s watercraft flew down the deck like a stone in a slingshot. It arced up and swayed left, then straightened out and glided onto the surface of the water. Gabriel zoomed out into the sea of Aqua Gen and circled back, waiting for the rest of his team as he pumped his fist in the air.

  “Carly deploy in five—”

  Dash didn’t get any farther into the order before Carly’s watercraft flew out of the cargo bay. She took a hard right and nearly flipped over, then went into a nosedive and pierced the surface, disappearing like a swordfish into the depths of Aqua Gen.

  “Carly!” Dash yelled. Just as the water started to settle and turn smooth and glassy, Carly’s watercraft burst out into the open again, achieved seven feet of amazing air, and landed perfectly on the surface.

  Gabriel was super jealous.

  “Aw, man, why didn’t I think of that?” Gabriel said. “Incredible!”

  “Thanks,” Carly said. The audio on her helmet communication flickered, but she caught the end of what Gabriel was saying. She tried to smile, but she was soaking wet and a little bit shaken up. Then she thought about it: it was kind of a sweet move, and she was still breathing! Maybe this mission wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  “Deploying now,” Dash informed Piper. His finger was on the trigger that would send him hurtling onto an unknown planet. He hoped his landing would be more like Gabriel’s than Carly’s. “Close bay doors when I’m clear, then move point-seven-five miles off the surface and hold.”

  “Understood,” Piper said. “And, Dash?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to do great.”

  “Thanks, Piper.”

  Rocket barked his approval as well, and something about his decision to bring Piper along gave Dash the confidence he needed to press the button. He flew a straight path, hardly wobbling at all, and landed softly on the water below. Carly and Gabriel moved into formation beside him, and they all took a moment to gaze out over the endless liquid.

  “We’re on an alien planet, far away from home,” Dash said.

  “It never gets old,” Gabriel added.

  Carly didn’t have any words. Mostly she felt relief—she’d done it. She was on another planet. A sun from another galaxy shone down on an aquamarine sea. She leaned over and looked into the endless depths, a void that seemed to go on forever.

  The water darkened beneath her, and she looked overhead out of habit. Had a cloud drifted by, blotting out the sun? No, there were no clouds. When she looked back, it was gone. Or was it? Maybe all the water was darker beneath her.

  “Did you guys see that?” she asked.

  Carly couldn’t be sure she’d seen anything, and she was concerned Dash and Gabriel already thought she was being too nervous. Maybe it was a trick of light from the shimmering sun.

  “It was nothing, I think,” Carly said.

  Then she felt something bump against the bottom of her watercraft.

  —

  Dash looked to the sky, hoping to see the Cloud Cat still holding low to the water, but it was long gone. There was no time to call Piper back and complete the not-so-simple reboarding procedure. The water swelled up beneath him, like a blue whale was about to crest the surface. He felt the watercraft tilt to one side.

  “Evacuate protocol one!” Dash y
elled.

  They’d practiced two types of evacuation plans during training. One meant stay together; two meant splitting apart and going in different directions. They’d practiced both in the event of an unexpected encounter during the extraction. It had taken all of a few seconds on Aqua Gen to stumble into something.

  “Predator Z!” Dash yelled as he went straight to full throttle and the watercraft bucked and swayed beneath him. He looked back as the surface boiled higher, with Carly and Gabriel on the other side of the creature that was about to show itself.

  Dash hoped his team had heard the order, but he couldn’t be sure as the Predator Z broke the surface. It was like nothing Dash had ever seen or imagined, twice as big as a killer whale but so much faster. The length of its body flew into the air like a dolphin, dripping water beneath its great hull of a stomach. It was the most amazing shade of bright blue, which only made the rows of teeth stand out more.

  Dash turned hard to the right, trying desperately to outrun the enormous wake the Predator Z created. A twenty-foot wall of water rose up behind him, pushing Dash faster and faster. The normal top speed of the watercraft was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-five miles per hour, but the wave pushed his speed to sixty. He was flying along the surface, barely holding on.

  Dash looked over one shoulder and then the other, but all he could see was the huge wave pushing him relentlessly away from Carly and Gabriel. He turned the watercraft softly to his left, preparing to try to make it over the cresting water. That was when he saw the Predator Z once more, its lizard-like skin just beneath the surface. It was moving as fast as Dash was, tracking him with a basketball-sized eye. A lightning bolt of fear shot through Dash’s body as he throttled the watercraft to full speed, pulling away from the menacing eyeball. The beast moved in behind Dash and gave chase as Dash turned hard into the open sea and crouched down, becoming as aerodynamic as he could.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” he said as the watercraft sped up to seventy miles per hour. He’d seen footage of speedboats catching the wrong angle and going airborne, tumbling end over end and breaking into pieces. One wrong move and the same fate awaited Dash, and then he’d be Predator Z food for sure. The water was an endless sheet of glass in front of him, and he glided along its surface in a perfectly straight line. A full minute passed and he didn’t look back. It felt to Dash like he could keep searching for a distant shore forever.

  At last he risked lifting his head and turning around, expecting to see the great alien creature of the sea bearing down on him. Instead he saw only the wake he’d left behind, like the third-base line to home. He slowed down, then came to a stop, bobbing gently on the water.

  “Where are you?” he whispered, searching every inch of the horizon.

  Dash doubled back to look for his teammates, hoping they hadn’t been capsized. He saw nothing. No Predator Z. No Carly or Gabriel. He drove the watercraft in a circle, feeling a sudden loss of direction. Everything looked the same. Water, water, and more water.

  “Carly! Gabriel!” he called out. He was alone on a planet far from home, and the quiet unnerved him. He felt a loneliness he hadn’t experienced for weeks. On his second spin around, Dash saw the Predator Z rise once more, about a hundred yards to his left. It was cutting a path in the distance, and he felt a pang of hysteria at the idea that one or both of his friends were clutched between its teeth.

  Dash double-checked the helmet communication system and tried again.

  “Gabriel, come in! Carly, answer!”

  Silence.

  Robin Wasserman is the bestselling author of several books for children and young adults, including the Chasing Yesterday trilogy, the Cold Awakening trilogy, The Book of Blood and Shadow, and The Waking Dark. Her books have sold more than half a million copies, appeared on many best-of-year lists, and been adapted into a television miniseries. She grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, where, in the grand tradition of the only child, she told herself stories to pass the time. Now she lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is still telling herself stories. The only difference is that now she writes them down for other people to read (and that she’s allowed to eat dessert for dinner). She’s still hoping to be the first woman on Mars. Or, at least, once she’s very old, to move to a nice retirement village on the moon.

  Find out more at robinwasserman.com.

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