by Joel Ohman
The bion stamped its feet and bellowed a challenge. It owned this forest, and it was angry. The maw of the great beast was a vortex of endless black and red, swirling and spinning down as if to the very depths of hell. Charley caught himself with a start. The sheer power of the beast was mesmerizing, and if he didn’t get it together fast, this devil-beast would seek him and devour him.
Whatever it was, Charley was certain of one thing: if there was a devil and if there was a seventh circle of hell, then he wanted to send this thing right back to it.
As Charley angled in, he slowed his pace slightly to consider his opponent. If the bion had a weakness—and admittedly that was a big if—then it was probably the stubby little hooves of a bull it possessed rather than the enormous clawed paws of a lion. Charley continued toward the bion at a steady hunter’s lope. With those hooves, he doubted the bion had the pouncing capability of a big cat, so he readied himself to get in nice and close.
Charley advanced with both of his blades drawn crosswise in front of him.
Hank had slowed his advance. He was watching Charley hesitantly out of the corner of his eye as he moved toward the bion to form a pincer movement.
Then the bion pounced.
So much for that theory. Charley had a split-second to think.
The bion landed less than a foot away from a twisting, darting Charley. Angry red eyes gleamed as it bucked and careened, dangerously close to goring Charley straight through the chest.
Hank dashed in with a yell and hacked at the beast’s side, leaving a wide gash across its ribs. An otherworldly sound escaped from its great mouth as it rounded on Hank, pressing him back toward Sandy.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Hank shouted.
“I can’t get a good shot!” Sandy cried, her face screwed up in panic.
“Just take the shot! Shoot when I hit the ground.”
Hank threw himself flat to the ground to give Sandy a better shot. She took it.
It was a good shot. But even with the enormous force of the crossbow propelling the arrow at top speed and lancing directly into the top of the bion’s neck in the mass of red curly mane, it only served to make it even more enraged.
And to cause it to stampede directly at Sandy and Hank.
Charley sheathed both of his swords between his shoulder blades and set off at a sprint toward the haunches of the bion. He vaulted over the bion’s rump by spreading his legs wide to each side and used his hands to propel himself up and onto the beast’s great shoulders.
He took two great fistfuls of the red curly mane and squeezed his knees tight.
Time slowed and expanded. This had to be a dream.
Somehow he had found himself in the unenviable situation of being the Devil’s bucking-bronco rider.
His hands were slipping. The dark curls of the bion’s mane felt thick with grease. He knew he couldn’t hold on much longer. And, with his body pressed flat against the bion’s back, and his face buried in the great greasy mane, the musky smell was so overpowering that it was hard to breathe.
With a ripple of its enormous neck muscles, the bion whiplashed its head up and down so violently that Charley lost his grip and flipped feet-over-head over the bion’s horns and onto the ground before it.
The bion reared up to stamp on Charley’s prone form. Charley barrel-rolled to one side and, in one smooth motion, reached over his shoulders with both hands and drew his blades. Kipping up, he was on his feet in a flash. The only real advantage he had over this beast was his speed, and he intended to make full use of it.
Stamping down on the spot on the ground where Charley had been lying a moment before, the bion rotated toward him, pawing and snorting its rage. The sound from its roar was loud enough to be physically imposing in its own right, but it seemed to be losing strength as it circled around Charley, perhaps due to the loss of blood from Hank’s gash to its side and Sandy’s arrow still protruding from its neck.
Charley backed away and then tensed himself.
He didn’t really know what to do next, but, like so much in life, Charley had learned that charging blindly ahead while screaming in rage tended to get results of one kind or another.
So, that’s just what he did.
The bion responded to Charley’s battle cry by dropping its head and aiming its horns directly at Charley’s incoming chest.
Some analytical part of Charley’s brain that was far-removed from his racing heart and pumping adrenaline was telling him that this was exactly what he wanted. He wanted the bion to fight like a bull, not like a lion.
Charley pictured that they were two trains barreling down one set of tracks directly toward each other. Charley knew he was just a little pump trolley heading straight into the path of an enormous, slowly chugging locomotive. He might be running faster than the bion, but he knew perfectly well who would be thrown off the tracks if they collided.
Just before the bion was on top of him, Charley flitted gracefully to the left, sucking in his stomach as the point of one of the horns whistled by his midsection. Now perpendicular to the bion, Charley dropped to one knee, as quick as a whip, and lashed out his blades at both of the beast’s front legs.
Stumbling and rolling with a grunt of pain, the bion landed heavily on one side. A precise slice of Charley’s blades across the now-exposed throat brought the great locomotive to its final stop.
The bion was dead.
Charley hated the killing. The bion had wanted to kill him and the others, true, but this still felt different than the other hunt. At least the meat from the rotthogs was needed for food. The only reason the bion had been killed was because Commander Orson had said so. And, worse, Charley was the one who had carried out the orders.
He felt sick inside. How was he now any different from the blue-coated guards, carrying out kill orders just based on a word from Orson? Well, this was an animal and not a human, but the principle of it was still wrong.
Looking down at the slain beast, Charley’s hatred for Commander Orson was back in full force, and swelling. He swallowed back the bile rising in his throat. He had done what he had to do. Now he could get Sven back, and then exact his revenge on Orson and the System like the trained killer that he was becoming.
He looked up at Hank’s begrudgingly impressed face and Sandy’s ashen look of pure wonder.
He forced a grin. “The devil is not so black as he is painted.”
Sandy’s nose crinkled up in a smile, hesitant at first and then growing wider, maybe glad to see that he hadn’t turned into some kind of monster himself after his outburst of violence.
“The path to paradise begins in hell,” she replied.
Her hair was positively shimmering in the fading sunlight. At this tiny moment of beauty, Charley allowed himself a small smile, a real one this time, in her direction.
“Let’s hope.”
* * *
Walking back toward Meritropolis, Charley with the bion’s head in a sack slung over his shoulder, the others trailing behind him, each was lost in their own thoughts. There was no mood to talk, as the Hunters dealt in their own way with the inevitable crash that followed the day’s earlier adrenaline high.
Charley had something he knew he should probably tell them, but he decided to keep it to himself. At least for now.
While undertaking the sickening task of beheading the bion, Charley had found something in its neck. Something that couldn’t possibly have come from anywhere in Meritropolis but the Tower. Charley had never seen anything like it. It was so sophisticated; Charley knew it must have either come from outside the walls of Meritropolis or from deep within the Tower, under the sole purview of Commander Orson.
Buried in the bion’s neck was an electronic chip, its indicator light still glowing bright and presumably transmitting data of some kind. Transmitting data to someone, or a group of someones, with seemingly vastly more resources than anyone in Meritropolis. Charley had no way of knowing what the chip was for, but he knew it was important.
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And now it was in Charley’s pocket.
CHAPTER 9
The Plan
It turned out Hank was right. His suggestion was much more satisfying than it would have been to just dump the head in Orson’s lap. Hank had insisted that they plant the bion’s great head on a stake in the center of the courtyard. A little melodramatic for Charley’s taste, but he had to agree, it got everyone’s attention.
People now treated Charley like a war hero fresh off the battlefield or some kind of monster-hunter happy to kill any manner of bogeyman. He was neither, but he didn’t do much to dissuade Hank and Sandy from cultivating the image. Due in no small part to Hank’s storytelling prowess, the account of the bion hunt had morphed into an epic worthy of one of Hercules’ 12 labors that Charley had read about as a child.
Getting Sven back had been anticlimactic. Orson hadn’t even bothered to come down from his tower. He had simply taken a long look at Charley and the stake, motioned with his hand, and then Sven had been released into the courtyard.
But Sven had changed.
Something had happened to him while in captivity, something that he didn’t talk about—to Charley or anyone else. That was unusual in itself, because the old Sven always talked about everything. But the new Sven rarely talked. And when he did, even his old humor seemed twisted. He made jokes about his low Score, others’ low Scores, and the System in general.
Charley couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Sven had become hardened and unstable. When Charley was honest with himself, even being around his best friend now made him nervous.
But Charley had also changed.
Not a day after returning from the bion hunt, Charley had been re-evaluated, re-stamped, and assessed by a guard on Assessment Day. He now had a Score of 137—almost as high as Orson’s 146. Even more than before, Commander Orson couldn’t just kill him outright with a Score like that—to do so would be contrary to the System itself. But in spite of that, Orson was likely just biding his time, waiting for Charley’s popularity to wane before he could have some kind of “accident” arranged.
It wouldn’t be hard to stage an “accident,” given that almost all Charley’s time for the last two weeks had been made up of fighting, hunting, and training with Grigor and the other High Scores. It would be easy enough to stage a sword slip here or a piece of equipment fail there—and that was just the training exercises. Charley was also aware he was in constant danger of some kind or another while hunting in the forest. All it would really take would be for Grigor to abandon Charley while out on a hunt, leaving Charley’s chance of survival to decrease dramatically. Yet, Grigor never did.
Charley was not naturally a trusting person, that was for certain. Yet, he trusted Grigor. Maybe it was the gift of the crossbow for the bion hunt, which he had since surreptitiously returned, or maybe it was the trust that naturally comes from having to depend on someone every day in perilous situations, but he was aware that he had felt it early. Regardless, Charley trusted Grigor, and he had the sense that Grigor trusted him, too.
Charley trusted Grigor with his life, but he didn’t quite trust Grigor with his secrets. He knew that he needed to tell someone about the electronic tracking chip he had found in the bion. He thought he should tell Sandy, and he wanted to tell Sven, maybe it would be just the thing to restore some of the old friendship that they had once shared, and tonight after training with Grigor this afternoon would be as good a time as any.
* * *
“Ox stance, now!” Grigor bellowed out. “Charley, rotate your right ankle—more! That’s it, keep your sword aimed at my throat!”
Charley’s forearms and shoulders burned. Every day was the same: up early in the morning to hunt with Grigor, and then the rest of the day was spent training with Grigor. Grigor was a patient teacher, a good teacher, but he was merciless.
“Charley! Your thumb needs to be under the blade, not on top of it—again, again!” Grigor looked over at a smirking Hank. “You, Hank! You’ve earned yourself a position in the Circle—everyone, at once, attack Hank!” Charley, Sandy, and the other High Scores moved en masse, swords drawn, to encircle Hank. A favorite of Grigor’s, the Circle was a drill designed to teach a solitary student how to battle multiple opponents at once.
Each of their training swords were blunted for safety, but they still hurt. Charley had bruises in various stages of coloration all over his body from the past weeks of hard training. “Advance! Advance! But with ox stance. Ox stance, Charley! Don’t just bull-rush in there without keeping your guard up!” Grigor motioned at Sandy as she expertly darted in from the Circle and flipped Hank’s sword to the ground, “Charley, watch Sandy—that is how it’s done!”
“Okay, okay,” Charley muttered. He was physically head and shoulders above almost anyone, except for Grigor and Orson, but he was finding that Grigor was adept at exposing his weakness: he had a tendency to rush in, throwing caution, and all of Grigor’s hard-drilled fighting stances, to the wind, when his blood was up.
“Again, everyone! Back in formation—Hank, pick up your sword. Let’s go! Let’s go! Ox stance, now lower to plow stance, good.” Grigor charged in with his own enormous training sword. “Now, roof guard, roof guard! Repel my attack, repel my attack!” Sweat poured down Charley’s brow, hampering his vision, but he gritted his teeth, and concentrated on following Grigor’s shouted commands exactly.
He would be using everything he learned in this class.
* * *
“So, you found this inside its neck?”
Charley raised his eyebrows at Sandy in mock annoyance.
“I mean, sorry, I know that’s what you just said, but you waited this long to tell us. Why, exactly? Don’t you think we might have wanted to know right away?”
Charley just shrugged and smiled good-naturedly, hoping to defuse this particular line of questioning. He trusted Sandy, mostly.
“Well, I mean obviously, you didn’t want Hank to know. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Right, right, of course.”
“And now we don’t want anyone but us three to know about it.”
“Yep.”
Sven still hadn’t said anything. Instead, he continued carefully turning the small thumb-sized chip over and over in his palm, looking at it intently.
Sandy glanced at Sven and then back at Charley. “And you just kept it in your pocket these past two weeks?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm, and it stayed glowing green the entire time?”
“Yep, every time that I could see. Although I wasn’t staring at it all day long, for obvious reasons.”
“Aren’t you worried that you are being tracked somehow?” Sandy asked.
Sven looked up and finally spoke. “It’s not like we aren’t all being tracked anyway.”
Sandy looked from Charley to Sven, as if noticing him for the first time. “What do you mean?”
“Our Scores. We’re all tracked by our Scores. The System is tracking us like cattle with our Scores branded on our arms—”
Charley interrupted. “What he means is that our Scores don’t just magically appear on our forearms. We are each evaluated and stamped as children, and then assessed every Assessment Day; we all know that. But it’s not like we can just scribble Scores on our arms; we have to go to an approved Score Stamper. ”
Sandy tried to catch up. “So, what does that have to do with tracking us?”
“Well, somehow the ink changes to reflect the changes in our Scores over time. I’m not exactly sure, but somehow that’s how it works, right?” Charley asked.
Sandy paused for a beat and then spoke quietly. “It’s a chip, too. Well, not a chip, like a physical computer chip like that one, but it’s got to be some type of special ink that the henna stampers use. It’s not like anyone thinks it’s actually henna; I think the name is just a remnant from pre-Event. Haven’t you ever wondered why they are so particular about choosing a certain type of ink labeled a certain way with your na
me on it ahead of time?”
Charley pondered. “It seems to make sense, but I’m not really sure. At first I thought that the bion chip had to originate outside of Meritropolis, and maybe it did, but the more I thought about it, I wondered if it’s something similar to this chip or ink or whatever that’s just embedded right in our forearms. Or, maybe the chip is embedded somewhere else in us and there’s just a little display sensor of some kind in our arms that interacts with the stamp. Or, maybe this is just a really old model of a tracking chip. Or, maybe it’s a longer-range tracker that is better suited for animals. I don’t know. Either way, there is definitely something in or on us, and it is entirely possible that it could be something very similar to this. Maybe it’s just simply that the Score ink is like a newer-generation tracking device or something.”
“So, whatever it is that’s on us can probably also be used to track us?” Sandy wondered aloud.
“Yep.”
“So, it’s not like we necessarily have computer chips embedded in us …” Sandy paused and then said slowly, “The Score ink itself is a kind of tracking device …” Her voice trailed off.
“Yep, certainly seems possible,” Charley said.
“Great,” Sandy uttered dejectedly.
“Why so glum? Planning on going somewhere? An overnight camping trip in the forest, maybe?” Charley asked innocently.
“Ha, yeah. I guess I’ll have to change my plans.” Sandy’s freckled nose crinkled up in a little smile. He was starting to adore the way she laughed, like she didn’t even realize that she was hot.
Suddenly, Sven spoke again. “I know how we can find out.”
They both turned to look at him.
“Find out what?” Sandy asked.
“Find out what this chip does. Or, more importantly, I know how we can find out what exactly is used to make the ink, or any other tracking devices originating from within Meritropolis.”
“How?” they said in near-unison.