“Stay still! Wait until –”
I don’t get to finish. At the very center of the room, the floor splits open, pulling outward.
Toward us.
It ripples, flows away, creating a roughly square hole a few feet wide, right where the figurines were slotted.
The shaking stops and the floor stabilizes.
“Okay. Damn. Let’s not do that again.”
Mika tugs at her collar. “Is it hotter?”
I frown, creep toward the new pit in the floor. As I draw near, the heat definitely increases, worsens with every step. I have a bad feeling as I peer into the hole.
Yup. Called it. “Great.”
“What?” Mika doesn’t follow my lead, stays close to the wall.
“Oh, you know. Just your average infinite lake of flame. Nothing major.”
“Seriously?”
“Like I said. Let’s not do that again.”
By the door are three lights I hadn’t noticed before, left after the walls stopped flashing. Three huge balls. Two of them are green.
One is now red.
“Only three mistakes? Harsh.” Mika tugs at her collar, again. Sweat already dots her forehead and runs in a thin stream down her chest, disappearing between her breasts.
I’m not much better. A fat drop runs into my eye, and I curse, wiping away the sting. “I’m not sure what my mistake was. ”
Mika chews her lip. “Water and fire. Opposites. Opposing forces.” She points to the male and female symbols. “Man and woman. Opposite in a different way. Complimentary.”
“Damn. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” I give her a crooked grin over my shoulder as I dash back to my section. “Touch fire again.”
She does, lighting it. When she does, the red in her section of wall goes back to gray.
This time, I touch what looks like a little pile of firewood. Green light radiates forth.
“Fire and wood. Complimentary.”
“See, you’re not just good looks,” Mika says, moving to the next section.
I’ll remember this, but I don’t respond because as I move to the next section, my display dings. “Five-minute warning.”
The room is sweltering, over a hundred degrees easily. God, I hate the heat.
“Okay,” Mika says, wiping her eyes with her forearm. “What have we got?”
“I’ll tell you what I have, and you choose the match. You’re definitely smarter than me.”
“Fine, we can argue about that one when we have more time. Go.”
I scan the symbols. “Uhh… horse?”
She murmurs to herself as she thinks. “Man again? Rider? No, not really mutually beneficial. Hmm…what else?”
00:04:00… 00:03:59… And we’re only on the third set. Panic starts to set in. There must be something really general, something that would fit many criteria. “Uhh… a plant?”
“Water!” Mika says immediately, triumphant.
The wall lights up green.
We move on immediately. Behind me, the pit roars. “Is it my imagination, or is that getting louder? Hotter?”
“No, it definitely is.” Her voice is strained, tight. “Come on. What have we got?”
Fuck. “Math.” There are no more symbols. Instead, mathematical equations dot each square. “Not really my strong suit.”
“Doesn’t have to be,” she says. “At least, not yet. This is simple stuff.”
She’s right, they’re three-part equations. I gasp a long breath, trying to work up spit in a mouth already bone dry. “Five plus four minus nine!”
“Ummm… No zero over here! Next one!”
“Seven plus twelve minus six!”
A pause. “Nothing! Next!”
“Eight times six minus ten!”
Another pause. “Thirty-eight! Hit that one!”
We hit together. Green lights .
Three minutes.
No time to celebrate. The next two panels are the same, increasingly complex math. Luckily, Mika’s a goddamn genius, and we move to the last panel with no more mistakes.
But we have two minutes for the final panel. Should be enough, if it’s more math or pictures. The furnace behind me roars as I move close to the door. “Okay, ready!”
The wall lights, and my heart falls through the floor. “Mine are blank! Nothing here!”
Mika’s eyes are on her section, wide, panicked. “They’re not blank! It’s the symbols! I can see them… But I still don’t know what they mean!”
Shit. I glance to my wrist. “Ninety seconds!”
“That’s not helping!”
“Sorry! We have one more freebie… Make a guess and let’s try something!”
“Ahh… Okay!” Mika glances between my panel and hers, gasping. “Left row, third from the top!”
I hit it. Amber light glows behind the panel, hideous promise. Will it change to green, or red?
Mika extends a hesitant finger and presses another panel.
Red.
The shaking starts immediately, so violent it knocks me to my knees. Mika screams, stumbling back as the pit expands, eating the floor with savage hunger. She falls back a few steps, trying to catch her balance.
“Mika!” I dive up, grab her outstretched hands just as the pit draws up under her feet.
She falls.
There’s a frozen moment where my awareness is perfect, like the world stands still. This is just like the curve on the highway. Mika’s eyes, stretched wide in terror. Her mouth, frozen in an O of surprise as the floor under her disappears. Her hand reaches for me.
Her dagger. I snap it free from her belt as she tumbles downward.
With one hand I grasp hers as tight as I can. With the other, I stab her dagger into the floor, adrenaline and fear lending me savage power.
The dagger rips into the ground just as Mika reaches the terminus of her fall and transfers all her weight to me. I can’t believe it doesn’t snap like mine did in the dungeon, but I’m not questioning it.
It feels like my arm tries to rip itself from my socket. Her weight pulls me across the ground, toward the pit, but the dagger holds, arresting my slide. My head goes over, but only just, and what I see would make me piss myself if there was any water left in my body.
Fire. Infinite flame, stretching in every direction.
“Sam!” Mika shrieks. “Don’t let go!” Her eyes are on me.
“I won’t! Don’t look down! Climb!” My hand is sweaty and hers is no better. But she reaches up with her other hand and grasps my wrist just as she loses grip. I can’t speak, can only hold on, gritting my teeth against the agony as she climbs me, using my shirt for handholds. It doesn’t tear, and despite being tensile and almost stretchy, it holds her weight. Thank God for alien shirt technology.
She reaches around my shoulder, using my neck for leverage, and I roll, taking her up from the pit with one last savage burst of strength. We lay for just a moment, her on top of me, just breathing. She lifts her head, wants to say something, but I shake my head. “Time!” I shout over the roar of the pit.
Less than thirty seconds.
We scramble up, an impressive feat, considering that I feel like I just got hit by a fucking tank and she doesn’t look much better. “One try left!”
Her head swivels back and forth as her lips move, whispering words I can’t hear. “I think… I think…” She points at one of mine. “That one!”
“Are you sure?”
The look she casts me is desperate, terrified, but she nods. “Yes. I can feel it. I don’t know how, but I know!”
Good enough for me. Fifteen seconds left. I slap the panel.
She hesitates for the briefest moment before hitting hers.
Green.
I whoop as the panel with the exit lights, waiting for our handprints. We hit it immediately, this time with eight seconds to spare.
The shepherd forms just as we escape, hand in hand.
7
Convalescence Field 2
> Aspirant #2239
Room Timer: 00:10:00
“This is the most delicious water I’ve ever tasted,” I say, back resting against the wall. Two canteens were sitting in the middle of the floor when we stumbled through the door. After a moment of deliberation, we decided that the place wouldn’t try to kill us in a convalescence room, and I took an experimental drink. Not poison.
Orange glows pulses above us, and the oven of the last room is a distant memory. Mika closes her eyes as her arm knits. “Gimme.” I do, and she drinks greedily, then lets her head fall back. “Fuck.”
“Shit,” I agree.
“That was nuts. Like a scene from a movie.” Her head tilts, and she cracks one eye. “The kind where the hero saves the heroine from falling into the pit at the last second.”
“Is that what I am? Your hero?”
“Right now? You bet your ass.” Her voice is low, husky.
CONVALESCENCE COMPLETE. INITIATING ROOM TIMER.
“Always at the worst time.”
Mika gives a weak laugh. “Yeah.”
“You were amazing back there. I’d be dead right now, if not for you.”
“Same.” Her mouth quirks. “Maybe that’s the point of this place?”
“Yeah. Rely on each other, trust each other, and get rewarded with… Not dying.”
Mika straightens. Her hand is in mine. I don’t remember it happening. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Trust me?”
“After all that? What we’ve been through already?”
“Sam. I mean it.”
I think back to Amy’s betrayal, to every person whose left me or hurt me, from a Dad that disappeared when I was ten after my mother died, to a few hours ago when I got the Cinemax version of a breakup.
But all that dissolves in the endless ocean of Mika’s eyes. There’s no deception there, no malice. But it’s more than that. Why is she here? Why am I? Out of everyone who's ever died, who died in the world today, this place chose her to wake up with me. There must be a reason.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
“Good,” she says, giving me her sideways smile. “Because if I’m gonna be falling into any more fucking fire pits, I gotta know you’ll be there to catch me.”
“Scout’s honor,” I say, standing with her.
“You were in Scouts?”
“Foster parents made me. I hated it back then. Miss it now.” I crack my shoulders.
Mika stretches, almost catlike, working out kinks in her newly healed arm. The odd clothes this place gave us already hug her curves, and wet with sweat from the furnace room, they’re skintight over breasts that erase all rational thought.
I’m staring, too long. Some alarm is my brain blares. I tear my eyes upward, an apology on my lips, but stop.
She stares at me the same way I looked at her. Her eyes roam across a shirt plastered by sweat to my chest and abs; I’m not a bodybuilder, but I’m in good shape. Her gaze drops lower, to tight pants that leave nothing to the imagination, especially with the memory of her tits still fresh in my mind. She bites her lip, which really doesn’t help the situation downstairs.
Finally, her alarm goes off, and her eyes snap up to mine. Her cheeks color. We take each other in for a long moment, but neither of us apologize.
FIVE MINUTE WARNING
“That’s really starting to piss me off.”
“You have no idea,” she says.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Mika rakes me with a last look, then turns and walks the walls, like each time before. This time, she stops in the middle of one of them. “Huh.”
“What?” I ask, desperate for something new to concentrate on.
“This is different than the last few times. The symbols are huge, and I think they end… About here.” She turns. “After that last room, I’m afraid to try it. Maybe we should just move on.”
“I don’t know.” In each room we got help of some kind or another. And I can’t get past my revelation from before. That maybe she was chosen to be here with me. “I think I trust it. This place is scary as fuck, but it seems to have rules. I think we’re safe, in these healing rooms.”
Mika swallows. “Okay. I think I know what this one means.”
“Yeah?”
“Push here,” she says.
“Ha ha. Very funny. Hurry up and finger that hole.”
I’m rewarded when her finger stops on the way to the hatch. “You’re terrible.”
“A little.”
She shakes her head, opens her mouth to retort, but her words are stolen as her touch triggers a reaction.
This time, it’s not a hatch that opens. It’s the entire wall, dissolving away to reveal…
“It’s an arsenal .”
Mika takes a long step back, hand at her throat. “So many…”
Before us is arrayed enough weaponry to outfit a small army, from every period of time I can imagine. Swords and axes are mounted next to guns and rifles. There are variations of everything; long swords to short, stabbing blades; axes that I could barely lift to so tiny I can’t imagine them chopping wood; and the guns… I spot everything from a Desert Eagle to futuristic weapons I’m sure don’t exist on Earth.
“Holy shit.”
Mika is silent, standing straight and staring.
I come up next to her, nudge her hand with mine. “You okay?”
“The last time this place gave us a weapon, we had to fight for our lives.” She takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t… I don’t even feel like the same person I was a few hours ago. But this…” She finally turns, falls against me, trembling. “Sam, I’m fucking scared.”
I wrap her in my arms. “I am, too. And I know what you mean, feeling like a different person.” I step back so I can see her face. “But I think we’ll be okay.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re a really good team.”
She laughs, but it’s hollow, unconvinced. “Been tight, so far.”
“Sometimes, yeah. But we’re here. A moment ago, when you asked if I trusted you…”
“Yeah?”
“I do. Which is crazy. I don’t really know you. You don’t know me. But I feel it when I look in your eyes. And I realized something. This place… It chose us, out of everyone it could have. It paired us for a reason.” I smile, and it’s genuine. “I trust that .”
She hugs me again, a brief embrace, but her fingers run across my arms in promise as she pulls away. “You know what? I think I do, too.”
“Okay,” I say, turning to the weapons. “Uh, any idea how we choose? Or, what we choose?”
Mika’s eyes are distant, scanning a blank section of wall underneath a row of rifles. “Sam, after that last room… I think I can read this.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know. I just… Know. I couldn’t read it out loud, don’t even know what the symbols mean. But when I stare at them, relax my mind… They just make sense.”
“What are they saying, now?”
“To choose one. And to choose wisely.”
“Damn. I was kind of looking forward to replaying that scene in the hotel lobby from The Matrix.”
“Guns. Lots of guns .” She laughs. “Gotta pick one, champ.”
I briefly consider grabbing two weapons at the same time, to see if I can get away with it, think outside the box. But no. Not worth the risk. This place has a harsh way of punishing fuckups, and I’m not about to press it.
I chew my lip. “Well, I don’t know shit about hand to hand fighting if it isn’t fists. Swords, axes, and such. I mean, I get the concept. Sharp point goes in the other person and all that. Slashy slashy. But yeah, I’d probably kill myself long before I do any damage to my enemy.”
Mika run her hands along a series of long staves, each made of different wood and with different kinds of glowing jewels at their tips. “I don’t know. You were pretty handy with an axe, back in the dungeon.”
She whistles It Takes Two by Marvin Gaye instead of answering.
Smartass.
In the end, I have to go with a gun. I learned to shoot rifles in the Scouts, and I’ve fired a few handguns in my life. Mika eyes me as I browse handguns, eyebrow raised. “Hey, I’m a pretty good shot. I’m a long way from being a sniper or whatever, but I can hold my own. Even won a sharpshooter competition when I was twelve.”
“Okay, Tex. Choose your weapon.”
“Don’t rush me.” I glance to the time. Two minutes. “Well, rush me a little.”
In the end, I can’t pass up on a future weapon. Long, sleek barrel, white and grey, with a massive chamber above a double grip. It looks like a blaster rifle from Alien, or something. I heft it, feel its weight; it’s light, but solid. Kind of terrifying to hold.
Mika’s brow lifts higher.
I grin like a kid in a candy shop. “I hope it’s a laser gun or something.”
“Remind me to stand behind you when you fire it for the first time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I sass. “One minute. What are you choosing?”
“I can’t decide. Red, green, or blue?” The three staffs she indicates are gorgeous, gnarled dark wood that look hewn from single, slender logs. “Uh, are they magical?”
“I don’t know, but knowing this place… I have to try.” She grins. “I like to play a mage, in games.”
“Then by all means, go forth Master Mage. Red probably means fire, right? Let’s roast some motherfuckers.”
Her laugh is merry. “Kay.” She pulls the staff free, and the gem pulses, once, at her touch. It lifts from the top of the staff, detaching, and then floats a handspan above it, slowly rotating. She looks as delighted as I felt a few moments before. “Definitely magic.”
“Ding!” I yell.
Mika rolls her eyes.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
ONE MINUTE WARNING
“Are you sure we can’t grab just one more…” I reach forward, fingers aching to pull a glowing dagger from the wall, but before I get close, the wall reforms, and I have to jump back to avoid getting sliced in half.
Mika tsks, slaps my hand. “You called me greedy?”
Aspirant: A Sci-Fi Harem Adventure Page 5