by Mary Weber
It almost too perfectly matched the music—with the stadium’s cascade of red sun-drenched banners rippling on the steamy breeze. Like bloody tendrils reaching from the railings of all thirteen stories in the sloped amphitheater that had been set as a symbol of glory in the middle of Old America’s Manhattan electric metropolis. Sofi’s bones shuddered with the rhythm, and life, and soundtrack pouring off the levels.
“Like the open mouth of a parasite,” she’d once described the white marble event center. To which her brother had laughed and suggested that, if her assessment were true, what did that make her, seeing as she worked at the bottom of it?
She’d given him the glare.
But it was true. As true as her brother’s goodness and her own icy heart. It was like some creepy nod to what the audience represented. With their glittery couches and cabana-lined levels leading upward to enormous telescreens slanted over the entire place. And beyond those, the rich blue sky. Wealthy human leeches soaking in their organic money, kissing up to the Delonese, and always suckling for more amid a resounding musical opus.
It didn’t matter that today’s games marked eleven years since the aliens had shown up. Sofi’s mouth still turned sour at the thought of them. All human-looking and freakishly tall, with their endless secrets and expansive technology that ended Earth’s Fourth War.
She sniffed.
And yet . . .
She laughed sharply—and yet here she was like all the rest of them, in her geek room glancing up through floor-to-ceiling windows to study the Delonese’s private placement on level two. She inspected the curtain that covered most of their cabana, but the only glimpse she got was the hem of a sheer green dress above neat black boots.
After a second, she returned her gaze to the rest of the famous audience, only to squirm at how many faces she knew, before drifting on to where the Corp 30 entourage was seated. Looking for the umpteenth time today for one person in particular.
Her mother.
As expected, the woman’s stately employees were there in her stead. Just like Papa had been when it came to raising her and Shilo. Until he wasn’t, because he was dead.
Sofi felt the cool disdain creep up as the FanFight’s glorious soundtrack faded and the crowd’s yells reemerged to rival the entire vibrant scene surrounding them. That sky. Those fluttering banners. The 3-D scrolling advertisements mounted between each of the thirteen floors, spouting the latest tech and drugs from the thirty Corporate Nations. Because apparently sport-fighting with their finest was the perfect way to sell luxury droids and cancer creams and prepaid flights to Delon. When said flights became available.
The crowd was growing louder again, shouting down from their GMO-free custom couches and juicing cafés docked along every level within. Even with so many thousands of spectators yelling, one couldn’t miss the requested specifics. The acoustics and those giant audio-fed telescreens singled out comments and attached them to zoomed-in shots of the live action in the arena below. Giving Sofi an earful of what they wanted.
“More power! More blood!”
“More drama.”
She smirked and pulled her focus back to her vid-gamer room and the holographic screen floating between her and the giant windows overlooking the interactive arena.
“What’s up with the other gamers this round?” Heller murmured. “It’s like they’re lazy.”
Sofi didn’t turn in the dark-eyed guy’s direction—just nodded as both on the screen and through the glass she settled in on Shilo. Still making his way through the virtual desert in there, at the heart of where all thirteen coliseum levels were focused.
Her fingers tightened. Keep going, bud. He was now a good quarter klick in front of the majority and headed toward the final obstacle of this round: a metal poison wall that the three faster players had just reached.
Except—
What in heck? Before Sofi could react aloud, two of the three players had jumped onto the twenty-foot-tall wall and attempted to climb its long, needle-thin spikes. The next moment, electrical currents snaked out, throwing them to the ground just as the spikes bristled like a sea urchin and doused them with poison.
“Ah, those guys are toast.” Luca swore.
The players’ screams filled Sofi’s headphones while the acid ate holes in their suits and skin, and their faces morphed into masks of paralyzed pain.
“Bad play, dudes,” Heller said.
Two seconds later the poison hit the third kid’s back as the girl tried to scramble away. Fast. But not fast enough. Sofi swiped up the vid on her screen and zoomed back to rewatch what precisely they’d touched on the spikes and metal.
“Okay, Shi, when you reach the wall,” she said after a pause into her com, “the spikes bend and there’s a current that runs through them at ten-second intervals as soon as human contact is made.”
“You got all that from one replay?” Luca said.
“Soooo . . . you’re saying my body is literally electrifying.” Shilo shook his hip in a dorky-sexy dance move that was actually impressive, considering he was running.
“Very funny. Focus,” Sofi growled as two of the triplets snickered.
“Will you listen to that crowd?” The announcer’s voice sud denly came over the room’s speakers. “Corp 30’s player, twelve-year-old Shilo, has now taken the lead and there’s nothing being done about it! Only the second day in and the audience might just be headed for boredom! With two days left, is it too early to call the winner?”
“Nice, man,” Luca groaned. “Way to rile them up.”
“He’s right, though,” one of the tech triplets said. “The other gamers are making this section too easy.” She mirrored an image of aborted game-code onto Sofi’s screen. “Annnd here we go.” She promptly followed it with a refreshed page showing the others immediately responding to the announcer’s challenge. “Now they’re in a panic.”
Sofi snorted and typed in a search on her virtual dashboard. “Of course they are.” She knew the gamers who were playing them: Tor, Celine, and Daja, along with a host of others. She could feel them looking out from their glass windows, calculating the next few moves just like her—monitoring their players who were hightailing it through the half-virtual, half-real desert sandscape of dunes, catacombs, and heated atmosphere in a circular game field so vast, it could only be seen in its entirety from the audience above.
Sofi swallowed and checked on Shi again. Still fine. Still safe. “Heller.” She paused. Debating. Before she nodded and turned. “Strengthen the firewall.”
“Oh girl, you know it,” Heller whooped.
Biting back a smile, Sofi flipped a switch and yanked her headphones on. Turning up her scrapp music in one ear and her team’s breathing in the other.
More drama, my loves?
“Shi, I’m putting codes in play.”
“About time,” he panted.
She cracked her middle knuckles as her gloved fingers tensed with the music’s off-key voice and pulsing build.
In this enclosure of side-by-side game rooms, high enough to jut out over the arena but low enough to encircle it beneath the stadium seats, they were the maestros. Sure, the skill and energy might be the live players, just like the tech belonged to the Corporations and Delonese. But the coaching, suit abilities—minus the cloaking capacity that had been banned from the Games—and defensive maneuvering? That was the gamers.
That was Sofi.
And at age seventeen, she was the best.
She had to be. For Shilo’s sake.
A few seconds later the music bass dropped and her hands vibrated to the thumping rhythm, moving the screen aside and enlarging the one next to it with her gloves. Zeroing in on the arena and players who were now 160 feet behind Shilo.
What drama would you like, pray tell?
“Sofi . . . ,” Luca cautioned from his station beside Heller.
She grinned and typed in coding for a gust of acid wind. Followed by the calling up of the sandworms she’d cre
ated. “How about we release the beasts?”
2
MIGUEL
UP ON LEVEL THREE, MIGUEL WAS LOOKING DOWN ON THE ARENA from his lounging couch when Nadine, as she simply went by on her i-reality show, walked into his already-packed cabaña. She was wearing a yellow variation of this year’s Poverty Threads—a disturbing look Corp 12’s FashionBaby had come up with to show solidarity with the world’s enormous homeless population. Never mind that the homeless couldn’t afford them.
He’d meant to move before she arrived, blast-it. Now she was homing in on him like a meat-wasp in summer, stinger out and ready to pounce.
Getting slow, Miguel.
He chewed his lip. Served him right for having led her on at last May’s Corp 24 skin-renovation premiere. As their goodwill spokesperson to the public, she possessed a gift for beautiful words as well as a penchant for prying. Something he knew a little about. And with long silky legs, gorgeous eyes, and a colorfully inked full-body tat so delicately painted, she could confidently work it. Except so could he—even down to the tattoos that stretched from midcalf up to his neck with swirls and pictographs and inked poetic words that all the ladies loved.
Miguel glanced around to summon help, but in true form the others were busy screaming at the arena players or making handscreen vids to humblebrag about the Games to their online followers. He smiled and stuck out his tongue for one vid being made by a kid, to which the boy squealed and waved a thank-you.
Ignoring the chuckle drawing close behind him, Miguel shifted his attention to drift a dark, carefully practiced lazy eye down to the arena where the fourth of the players was about to make it to that poison wall, far ahead of the others. Hopefully he wasn’t about to get acid-burned like the three before him. The announcer on the overhead television was already talking about getting in final bets and votes for FanFight favorites before tomorrow.
“Yesterday we started the Games with thirty players!” the guy shouted. “One from each of Earth’s thirty Corporate Nations—and we ended with seventeen! Today, four more have already been eliminated—which begs the question, who will be left by this evening? Because remember this, whoever wins tomorrow goes on to the Fantasy Five. To fight four challengers from around the world—challengers of your choosing, from professional sport-stars to i-reality victors—in the ultimate match!”
Miguel narrowed his thick brows, pursed his mouth, and peered upward past those telescreens overhead to the rich blue sky, and to the planet just beyond the barely noticeable day-lit moon. Amazing how some things stayed the same.
The Fantasy Fighting Games had been the result of Earth’s unquenchable thirst for virtual fun, violent sports, and citizen-elected superstars. Created eighteen months ago, the biannual Corporate Nations–produced FanFights had brought the world together in a way not quite seen before. And they’d emerged to the tune of heavy technology, a whole lot of Delonese influence on players’ suits and arena materials, and the legal testing of any Corp-produced enhancement drugs.
Not to mention the bucketloads of blood spilled. Despite the fact no one actually died, the FanFights could be brutal—the gamers and Corporations saw to that. As if the Fourth War hadn’t satiated the people enough.
Except for the kids who played and won. To them, the Games were far more than entertainment. They meant life. Relief from poverty, barely affordable medications, and a severe lack of jobs. Something Miguel was reminded of every time the tele showed the star players who’d made unbelievable dinero off the wallets of those cheering right now. As well as every time they squandered those millions and ended up sold in the black-market alleys.
His stomach squeezed.
The cabaña sides fluttered in the breeze just as a finger trilled down his neck, sliding to his linen-shirted chest and belly. Miguel shifted away but kept that easy smile on his face. “Eh, Nadine. What a surprise.”
“Miguel.” She bobbed her red curls in his face as she deftly made room for herself on the cushions beside him. The rare smell of natural almonds wafted off her tattooed skin in a fog and mixed with the cinnamon scent, thanks to the air coolers overhead. Its smell, let alone the edible nut from which it was made, was a luxury barely enjoyed anymore, even at his status.
He sniffed. “Been traveling, I see.”
The strawberry hair bounced again. “Corp 24’s new i-realities are set in Old Europe. The food there is so wholesome and unfettered, and”—her voice tinkled—“far more available than the teles would have one think.”
Miguel pursed his lips. Corp 24’s show being “reality” was about as true as the hair color of every person on the dais. And Nadine’s assessment of the natural food availability even more so. “So is that what you’re in town for, then? To advertise the show?”
“I’m here for their latest unveiling.” She nodded to one of the screens directly across the stadium, displaying Corp 24’s logo. The large telescreen was showing an ad of a tiny, square hand device being waved over a row of six actors. It blinked green on all but the sixth—at which point it flashed Altered in bright red. “Our first public use takes place tomorrow. It’s a prototype that tests for other-than-human genetic influences.”
Miguel batted away a gnat. He’d heard rumor of the device—and assumed that by “other than human” she meant Delonese, who, aside from their generous technology and environmental assistance, kept most other aspects of their culture and race religiously to their own planet. Earth’s thirty Corporate Nations had long ago taken to issuing continued reassurances of the visitors’ limited human contact, but the doubt and unease of enough people had still urged the testing of such claims.
Huh. He wondered how that’d go over. He may only be a second-year ambassador, but even he knew any DNA mixing was extremely unlikely, mainly due to the immense arrogance the Delonese held regarding their genetic superiority. But what if any anomalies came up?
That’d be interesante, as his mother used to say.
The telescreen blanked, then moved on to advertise an energy invention of Corp 13’s, the first new product they’d put out in years. Rumor had it they’d been too busy making backroom investments into another Corporation.
Nadine bumped a thin arm against his chest. “And you? From the news-port pics, you’ve been traveling yourself.” She tipped her head toward the amphitheater’s section reserved for the Delonese attendees one story below. All of whom, as a delegate, he’d already schmoozed with over the past two days.
He loosened his smile and caught the eye of the girl seated on the velvet couch across from him on Claudius’s left. His friend either didn’t notice or didn’t care she’d been flirting with Miguel all day.
Instead, Claudius just blasted Nadine with his grin. “Oh, we most definitely have.”
“And?” Nadine looked from him to Miguel. “How is it?” Her tone turned breathless. “I’ve simply been dying to know. Are you like a god up there?”
Miguel waved nonchalantly. “Ambassadors.”
“Same thing. I bet they adore you.” She examined his white mid-buttoned collar with her nails. “I’d imagine they’d adore anyone close to their height—probably makes them feel more normal.”
He almost smirked. It was true that the Delonese were notoriously tall—averaging close to six feet five—even the women. He suspected his own sizable frame had helped gain their respect in some weird way. Either that or his age. At nineteen he was Earth’s youngest delegate, and the Delonese had their super-weird fascination with youth.
“Is it true they’re hiding something?”
Miguel slipped his brown manicured hand over her fingers and turned his tone playful. “In my experience, mi amor, everyone’s always hiding something.”
The stadium vibrated with the abrupt roar of the crowd. The overhead screens focused in on two of the competitors, broadcasting the plans they were making while they ran. They were going to catch up to the Corp 30 player, who’d finally arrived at that metal wall, and crush him.
“So,
have you taken anyone with you? Surely they’d allow you a friend?” Nadine moved her hand to his arm. “I mean, can you imagine the i-realities we could make? We’d be showing people what they want—the truth in the common way I can give them. Not just what the visitors want us to see.” She lifted a brow at Miguel and leveled her voice. “You should take me.”
He left her hand on his arm, aware that they’d suddenly gained the attention of the entire lofty cabaña—even as the flickering ads and arena drama continued in the background. He flashed the group his compelling smile and winked. “My dear lady, I think we both know I’d never get anything done if I took you. Am I correct, compañeros?”
Her laugh rang out loud against the crowd’s yells and was promptly joined by the laughs of his acquaintances as the wind flapped the curtained sides harder, pushing heat up from the arena. She flipped her hair. “Always the player these days, but never the lover.” She pouted. “Tell me.” The electric air breezed her almond breath over him. “Who is she?”
Three seatings down, the female music-artisan Bex let loose a smooth laugh. “Who says it’s a she, Nadine?”
“Ah! Ratting me out already.” Miguel laughed. “I see how it is.”
“Who says it’s human?” muttered another, lounging on a periwinkle mat with two sisters in front of him. “Miguel’s tastes are ever expanding, from what I hear.”
One of the sisters let out a loud shush at the group, and Miguel pushed away the recollection of waking up beside her some years ago. “Did you guys see that?” she said. “There, in the arena! Look at the sand darkening behind the winning player. Something’s morphing.”
Miguel glanced down at the kid now kneeling in front of the wall. He was trying to figure a way through it rather than climbing over the thing from what Miguel could tell. Except headed his way was something beneath the sand, turning it an uncomfortable shade of red.