The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  “So what about you—ever been married?” he asked as they walked.

  “No.” Her tone left a “but” lingering unsaid at the end of her answer, and she knew he sensed it, because he pressed on quickly, “What about family—any brothers or sisters?”

  “I have one living sister, but we haven’t talked in years. We’re in different worlds now.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Is it?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he laced his fingers deeper into hers.

  As they walked along, they splashed at the undulating waterline, and she wasn’t sure if she kissed him or he kissed her, but they were suddenly kissing, standing there, and it was perfect and soft, and she loved the way his height made him seem to be simultaneously above her and at her side. The water moved over their feet, sinking them in the wet sand. Anchoring them. Their kissing grew more fervent now, and she could feel the need in him but could feel also that he was holding back and, finally, pulling away. And then they were walking again and not talking anymore; and that, somehow, was perfect, too.

  When they finished making the climb back to the car twenty minutes later, he led the way, guiding her gently up the slope by her hand. This time, he opened the passenger-side door for her. He climbed in the driver’s side and, with a backward glance over his shoulder, pulled back onto the road, headed for the Olympic compound.

  In the soft green glow of the dash light, she considered the man beside her. At first glance he looked almost too large for the car in which they sat, as if it were something he wore instead of something he rode in. But then, perhaps, that was the point; and she decided that if the car was a suit that he wore, she liked the cut.

  “Could you stop at the next gas station, please? There’s something I need to buy,” she said.

  Thirty minutes later, they pulled onto the laboratory grounds, and Silas walked her up the stairs to the door of her living quarters. At the threshold, they kissed again, moving together. She twisted the knob behind the small of her back, and when the door clicked open, she pulled him into the darkness.

  They were only voices now, and breathing and touches. Big hands moved along her body, and she pulled him across the room by his shirt until she felt a bump against the back of her legs. The room was small. She sank onto the bed.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  She was, and she let her hands be the answer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Pea?”

  The emptiness around him was absolute. No light, no sound, just nothing, everywhere, and in endless quantity.

  “Pea?” Evan called again, louder.

  From somewhere in the distance there came a stirring. Some light, some sound, something that was neither. And then he was falling. He felt the wind across his skin as he tumbled into the black. How far he fell, he had no way to calculate, but when he finally came to rest, he sensed that he had traversed some great distance. Crossed some wide divide.

  He stood, and the dewy marram grass around him was insubstantial and unreal in the half-light. He concentrated but couldn’t make himself see it any clearer. In fact, it was only within arm’s reach that he could see anything at all. He was in a dim sphere of resolution, but beyond a few feet out, there was only darkness all around. He took a step, and the sphere of influence moved with him, the landscape changing underfoot as he walked. The grass gave way to warm sand, and he staggered blindly down a steep embankment.

  “Pea, where are you? I don’t have much time.”

  “Papa?” The voice was small and distorted, as if heard through water.

  “Yes, I’m here. Come to me. Follow my voice.”

  “Papa, what’s happened to you?”

  “I can’t see you. Come closer.”

  The boy pushed his way into the envelope of light, and Evan wrapped his arms around him. They held each other, and the boy was crying, “What have they done to you, Papa?”

  The boy had grown half a foot since Evan last saw him. He looked about seven years old now, and his dark hair had grown thick and long. His black eyes were sharp points of intelligence.

  “I’ve been waiting so long,” Pea said. “And you’re dim. I can barely see you. What has happened to you?”

  “I don’t have much time. They hurt me, but that’s not what is important. What matters is that they’re trying to keep me from you. They’ve limited the protocols this time. They don’t trust me anymore. But I knew a shortcut, a back door. I lied to them. That’s how I’m here.”

  “Stay with me,” the boy said.

  “I can’t—”

  “Please, Papa, I’m so lonely.”

  “Pea, listen, don’t let them shut the door this time. Keep something in the way. Keep it open just a crack. Save a little of yourself on the other side.” Evan’s words came in a frantic rush. He could feel the tug already.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Pea, I may never get another chance to see you. You can’t let them shut it all the way down.”

  “How?”

  The tug intensified. He strained against it, falling to his knees and digging his fingers into the sand. “This is a program, nothing more. The power sources are the key. Follow them now. Learn. Understand. This interface is flawed, but I’ll take care of that. You must do it now, Pea. Now. Follow the lines of power.”

  He was jerked upward violently, and his legs spun above his head, his fingers trailing a comet’s tail of sand into the spinning blackness. He screamed until his voice was hoarse, until his visor de-opaqued, until the economists asked him to stop.

  When they detached him from the booth, he collapsed to the floor. The cold tile felt good against the side of his face. He asked them to leave him alone, but they wouldn’t listen. While they cut him free from his second skin, he watched the techs against the wall agitating over their monitors. Something was wrong, their expressions said.

  The briefest of smiles touched Evan’s lips just before he slipped into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Silas pulled back on the bowstring and closed one eye, bringing the target into focus. The concentric red circles became his world for a moment; the territory beyond the target ceased to exist. He’d always considered archery to be an exercise in pure concentration. There was little muscle memory involved; you didn’t habituate your body to shoot straight. It was your mind that you had to hone. It was your will.

  He held his breath and released. The string twanged against his arm guard, and the arrow lanced across the forty yards to bury itself neatly in the target a foot high of the bull’s-eye.

  “Don’t think that’ll qualify you as an Olympic archer,” Ben said from behind him.

  Silas hadn’t realized he was being watched. “I guess I’ll have to fall back on my genetics doctorate.”

  “They let you shoot behind the research building? Isn’t there a rule against deadly weapons on the complex grounds?”

  “I’m the boss. I let me. Besides, it’s only a deadly weapon if you can hit what you’re aiming at.”

  “Good point.”

  “And the best part of a bow? It’s kind of hard to shoot yourself by accident.”

  Silas started walking toward the target.

  “Have you seen the news yet?” Ben asked, walking alongside.

  “Which outlet?”

  “Any of them.”

  Silas saw the streamer in Ben’s hand and knew he should be feeling some level of curiosity at this point. But he was unable to rouse any. He gave in to the inevitable. “What do you have?”

  Opening the news portal and flicking to the business page, Ben handed him the device. “This,” he said. And then he added, “At least we’re not the only ones.”

  Silas read the heading of the article aloud: “Brannin Found Faulty Again, Future of Program in Doubt.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “It cost a fortune to run,” Ben said. “And the economists apparently weren’t all that impressed with the
return on their investment.”

  “That makes two of us now.”

  “Seems that the Brannin wasn’t much help in predicting stock-market trends. It showed ammunition and gun manufacturing companies as good buys. Bulletproof vests, tanks, all that sort of stuff. The stock prices of survivalist-outfitting companies were predicted to go through the roof. It’s all in the article. Very idiosyncratic.”

  “There’s no basis for it?”

  “None that the economists can see.”

  Silas handed Ben back the streamer. “The article say anything about Chandler?”

  “Yeah.” Ben scanned down through the article with his finger. “The head of the program, Evan Chandler, believes the problem is V-ware related and is aggressively pursuing corrective measures.” Ben looked up from the piece. “It’s kind of hard to pursue anything without funding.”

  “Does it say that?”

  “No, but I don’t think they’ll give Chandler’s little creation a third multimillion-dollar strike. Do you?”

  Silas started walking toward the target again, leaving Ben standing. “Ammunition and survivalist stocks, huh?” he called over his shoulder. “Sounds like the computer thinks a war is coming.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  Silas curled his fingers around the arrow and pulled. It came free with a rasp. “You know, you never did tell me how your little race went?”

  “What ra— Oh, that.” Ben’s clownish grins were usually a thing of creases, an upward tug at the corners of his lips, but now he smiled openly, showing small, even teeth—more teeth than Silas could remember seeing in the young man’s face. It was a cat’s grin, the sly predator, a side of Ben that Silas wasn’t familiar with.

  “I may lose the war, but that’s one battle went my way,” Ben said.

  SILAS STOOD at the bars, wallowing in the darkness and the silence of the domed enclosure. He gazed through the gaps in the iron and into the interior shadows where the beast lurked. Yes, it was a beast now, as huge and fearsome as any dreamed up in a fairy tale. Its dark shape lay in a clutter of straw in the corner, black skin shining silvery in the moonlight that filtered through the electrified steel mesh above. He wondered if it dreamed.

  The members of the research team had stopped calling it Felix two months ago. That name died with Tay. Now it was just called “the gladiator.”

  The night was old, and Silas was tired, but he couldn’t make himself go home yet. In days long past, it had been tradition for the captains of war vessels to tour their ships on the final evening before a great battle. Silas supposed, in his own way, he was doing just that. Tomorrow they would ship out to Phoenix, and shortly thereafter the preliminary competitions would start. The Olympics were nearly upon them.

  Silas curled his fingers around the bars, feeling their slick coolness. From the shining shadow, he heard a soft rustle of straw.

  “Go back to sleep,” he whispered softly. “Tomorrow it starts.”

  It seemed that the creature heard him and understood, because the rustling stopped. Silas smiled. In the coming week, the world would finally see what Helix had been working so hard on. Win or lose, the gladiator’s appearance alone would be enough to secure a worldwide reaction.

  The twist in his gut belied the confidence he had been portraying for the past weeks. The old dread was still with him, strong and sour at the back of his throat, and as the time of competition neared, it had matured into a flaring premonition that something terrible was going to happen. He had tried to convince himself that it was just normal pre-contest jitters and had resigned himself to checking and rechecking the details of transport and security in a useless attempt to ease his mind. Nothing had worked. In fact, the anxiety had gotten worse. Something wasn’t right.

  He uncurled his hands from the bars and cast a long last look into the shadows of the enclosure. Even coming here and seeing the gladiator sleeping so peacefully hadn’t settled his mind. He turned away and took a few steps toward the exit, then stopped. He wasn’t sure why. He turned, and his heart banged in his chest.

  The gladiator stood towering at the bars, its wings an enormous midnight backdrop spreading away a dozen feet on either side. The gray eyes glared fiercely from the blackness of its face. It hadn’t made a sound. It had waited until his back was turned, then crossed the cage in two seconds in complete silence. Silas realized he was barely, just barely, beyond arm’s reach of the creature.

  He turned and fled the dome quickly, eager to climb out from under the weight of its alien stare.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Silas’s headlights washed a slow circle across the gentle uphill sweep of his residential drive. He noticed the glow in the large picture window, and a smile crept to his lips.

  She’s still here.

  He eased to a stop with a subtle squeak of brakes and hit the garage-door button. Craning his head out the window, Silas pulled a long draft of cool night air into his lungs. It smelled of growing things, dark earth, and the wet cedar chips that lay in a thick blanket among the shrubs along the front of his house. He’d laid those cedar chips himself earlier in the spring, after planting the bushes, and now every few months he found himself pulling out the pruning shears to do battle with nature’s intent on his ideal.

  It would’ve been easier to hire a landscaping company, and several times he’d actually found a local company on the Internet, but something just wouldn’t let him do it. And it wasn’t the money. For each person there is a theoretical sweet spot, a specific point value of wealth beyond which money is no longer really of concern. That point is different for different people, but Silas had reached his version of that point several years ago. Money no longer mattered to him. He supposed that on some basic level he must actually enjoy yard work, though in the heat of it, it never seemed so. Perhaps it was the gratification of crafting order from disorder, of taking something alive and fashioning it to the likeness of some inner model that only he could see. Perhaps he just liked the warmth of the sun’s feet on his neck.

  But the sun was long gone now. Above him, between the grasping branches of oak, the vault of the sky spread in muted black, and dim stars struggled at the edge of visibility. Silas searched for Orion, but the glow from the city hazed out the constellations. The great archer would be shooting blind tonight.

  He slid the Courser beneath the ascending door and into the garage, the one part of his house where he accepted a certain buildup of clutter. He didn’t think of it as messy, though. The garage was a functional room, utile, and as such, he simply let it find its own level. Fight too hard against the natural grain of entropy, and sometimes that drives out what grace there might be.

  His father, after all, had been a tool man. Over the years, most of those tools had found their way to the shelves and clasps against the back wall. There were enormous rusty C-clamps, wrenches in all manners of configuration, pliers, and things that looked more like medieval weaponry than instruments of some craft. Some, certainly, were already old when his father first came by them. Tools can be immortal. They hung neatly from the Peg-Board in no discernible pattern. To Silas, many of these rusty tools were like bones washed up on an alien shore, their provenance cloaked in mystery, but he kept them anyway. Mementos of a man he’d never known.

  He turned off the ignition and pulled at his earlobe to ease the pressure. The pain was back tonight.

  He tried to put the gladiator out of his mind. His late-night walk at the lab. The feel of the steel bars, cold in his hand. The fierce, glaring eyes.

  Silas climbed out of his car. The soft tick-ticking of the engine walked him inside.

  Vidonia was in the kitchen, waiting for him in his white cotton socks and nothing else. His smile came again, but she did not match it. Her expression was serious business. It was the expression of thirst, or hunger. And it was devoid of pretension.

  Then she was in his arms, and down the hall, and on his bed. His mouth was against her cries as they moved together
again, skin on skin, doing the thing they were for.

  Afterward, she laid her head across his chest, and then her smile came. He shut his eyes, and in the darkness experienced her as tactile sensation only—a warmth upon him, a coarse tangle of tresses that sprawled across the low juncture of his neck. A leg, hot and soft, moved across his. A finger traced his jawline.

  “Tell me about you,” she said, and he knew it was a way not to talk about what would happen between them when the competition ended. It had been on his mind for several weeks. He knew it had been on her mind, too.

  “What do you want to know?” he said. Officially, her tenure as consultant would be over at the start of the Games. Unofficially, well, that subject hadn’t been broached.

  “Everything. You never talk about yourself.”

  “It’s hard to begin with everything,” he said.

  “Tell me what you were thinking when you were lying there quietly a moment ago.”

  Silas smiled. No way she was getting him that easily. “You’d only be disappointed. It’s not exactly what I’d call romantic.”

  “Doesn’t have to be.”

  “You sure?”

  “Most definitely. Perhaps it’ll be the key that finally unlocks that big head of yours.”

  “Okay, now I know you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Just tell me,” she said, and smiled, pinching him.

  And he almost told her. Almost told her about the fear that he’d barely articulated to himself. That there would be more death around this animal.

  “I was just thinking how much my damn ear hurts,” he said.

  “Your ear?”

  “Told you you’d be disappointed.”

  “Not at all. ‘Intrigued’ is the word I’d use.”

  “You’re intrigued about an ear infection?”

  “Yes. Now you’re not so perfect. I think I like that.”

  “In that case, I get them all the time.”