When the conversation ends, my mind wanders back to Nicholas. He’s been paying a lot more attention to me than I thought. I’ve been such an idiot around him. Gosh—drunk? I exhale. But one thing I don’t understand is why he kissed me on the forehead. It was so quick, like he wanted to do it before I could pull back and get it over with before I had a chance to respond. Maybe now I’ll never know.
We emerge from the underground tunnel, and the capsule stops at the top of a mountain, overlooking a black desert valley. Even before I get out, I see multiple rows of white disks floating high in the air above something that looks like long, crystallized metal blades. Participants are already hopping from wobbly disk to wobbly disk above the jagged chasm below, white knuckling the edges when they land, and helicopters with reporters are flying above them.
Hot, sticky air enters the capsule when the doors slide open. I step outside onto the wooden platform and read the sign.
Phase 2, Round 1 must be completed in 10 hours. Afterwards, the disks vanish. Each participant’s timer starts when his feet touch the first disk and only the fastest fifty percent will be allowed to continue.
Clearly, I’m not as fast as the majority of these guys and the thought of having to compete against them makes me nervous. I step to the very edge of the platform to see if I can find any clues as to what the shortcut might be. However, nothing indicates that there is a shortcut, so instead, I assess how much force I will need to hop onto the first disk. It’s not too far away, but far enough that I have to jump to get to it. I look down into the gorge and see a body, his limbs bent in unnatural directions. Grimacing, I look at Arthor.
“Is your balance good?” he asks.
“I’ve been known to walk on fences, but nothing like this. You?”
“Not even close.”
Johnny speeds past me, shoving me off balance, and hops onto the first disk, crouching as he lands. “See you guys later…maybe.”
“You mean you don’t think you’re going to make it?” I yell at him.
Johnny stands up and turns around, his feet firmly planted on the disk. “Oh, I’ll make it all right, but I doubt that you two will.”
Arthor looks at me and says loudly, “You’re going to make it, right?”
I nod. “You?”
Arthor nods and looks at Johnny. “There you have it. See you across the gorge. Or maybe we’ll be looking down on you as we pass.”
Johnny gives us a dagger glare and keeps going, hopping from one disk to the next. I don’t want to admit it, but by the way he moves, I can tell he’s an exceptional athlete. Danny, Abe and Fletcher follow Johnny.
“Good luck, you two,” Abe yells.
“You too,” I say.
Another capsule zooms in behind us, and the young man with the huge red birthmark on the side of his face gets out with four others. They fly by us, and start leaping from disk to disk, landing effortlessly, like dancers. I wonder how the boy with the birthmark managed to control his fear, remembering how he was freaking out back at the UVC station. It doesn’t seem like balance is an issue for him at all, so why was he so nervous? On the tenth leap, however, the disk wobbles a little more than the other, and that causes him to lose his footing and slide off the disk.
I bring my hand to my forehead and gasp. I don’t want to watch this, but I’m unable to tear my eyes away. At the last second, his fingers clamp onto the edge and his legs dangle beneath him. Then the inescapable happens: his hands slip and he plummets toward the ground, shrieking.
“No!” My voice echoes across the chasm. His body shrinks the farther he falls, far beyond what I thought he would, still not hitting the ground. Still screaming. Still dropping. When his body crashes into the rocks, the gorge is instantly quiet, like a prayer. I look up to see that many participants have frozen where they stand and are peering down at the fresh corpse. My eyes connect with a young man a few disks ahead of the tenth. For a moment, his face twists in pain, and then he pulls at his neckline and screams.
A friend? A brother?
This is not how I wanted to start this phase—my heart pounding so hard I think it might burst. I need to calm myself before I continue. Trying to balance with shaky hands and knees will get me killed quicker than the boy with the birthmark on his face.
Arthor takes my hand. It’s cold and clammy, yet comforting beyond words. “We’ll be more careful.”
“Any clue as to what the shortcut might be?”
He shakes his head.
“Did you see how that disk seemed looser than the others?” I say.
He nods. “I think they’re all coiled differently. Just in case we needed a little more challenge.” He produces a noise that I think is supposed to be an attempted laugh.
I have to get the falling boy’s screams out of my head before I can start. I close my eyes to try and think of something that might calm me and Gemma’s face appears. I hear her laughter and before I know it, my cheeks are wet and warm. I shouldn’t have left her. I shouldn’t have! And where is she now? Did Master Douglas throw her remains into the lake? Or maybe the mass grave right outside of Culmination made for Laborers? I hear her yelling for me to win this for her. Somehow her words give me the strength I need. I open my wet eyes and press the heels of my hands against them, catching my tears.
“Ready?” Arthor asks.
“Yes. Let me go first.” I force myself to focus on the disk in front of me instead of on the plunging ravine below. The disk’s diameter is about the length of my height—small, but not impossibly so. “I can do this.” Squeezing my hands into fists, I bend my knees, push off the platform, and thrust my legs forward. When I land, the disk wobbles, and knots tie in my stomach. I crouch down quickly, pressing my hands onto the glassy surface, so the swaying ceases. One down—how many to go? Looking ahead, I can’t even see the end of the disks. Slow and steady, I tell myself.
I bend my knees again and leap to the next disk; it barely moves. I keep pressing forward, and by the eighth disk, I feel like I have the hang of it. But before I hop onto the tenth disk, I remember how it wobbled much more. I jump as lightly as I can and when I land, the disk plunges a few feet down and rebounds so quickly that I become airborne. Coming back down, I crouch close to the disk. My palms are sweaty. Not good. The disks are slippery enough as it is. I peer back and see Arthor jumping from one to the next.
“This one’s temperamental,” I say.
He nods and gives me thumbs up.
I wish there was someone directly in front of me so I could watch him, but the others are so far ahead I can’t remember which ones drop and which ones don’t. I’m growing concerned I won’t be in the top fifty, but I’m afraid that if I speed up, I’ll get sloppy and lose my balance.
I continue on, and once in a while there are a few more touchy disks like the tenth, but soon I pick up on the best way to land whether the disk is firm or wobbly. As the day progresses, it becomes increasingly hotter, and my thighs and the bottoms of my feet start to burn. Yet the end is still nowhere in sight.
“Do the disks seem to be farther apart?” Arthor yells to me.
“Maybe a little.” I pause to wipe the sweat off my brow, and automatically my gaze wanders toward the bodies at the bottom. It’s too far to make out their faces, but I hope it’s no one from Culmination. Suddenly, I hear a clap of thunder. I look up, and in the distance I see dark clouds that are headed in our direction.
“We have to move faster,” Arthor says.
“We’re not going to make it before the rain comes.”
I pick up my pace, even though I would rather still go slow and steady. My legs are trembling now. Not from being afraid, but because they’re tired from all the squatting and stabilizing, and my mouth is dry. On the next disk I slip a little and I let out a yelp.
“You okay?” Arthor asks.
“Yes.” But I know I can’t afford to make these kinds of mistakes.
After moving slowly again for some time, the first raindrop taps my f
orehead. And then, another. And then, as if by the push of a button, the heavens open. The rain soaks me in just a few seconds. I slide my shoe across the surface of the disk. It’s slippery—dangerously so. What do I do? Try one more disk and see if I can manage to land without falling? If I wait too long, I’ll never be in the top fifty percent, and though I don’t know exactly for how long we’ve been going, I would estimate that we have about half our time left.
I have to chance it.
“I’m going to try,” I tell Arthor who is one disk behind me.
“No!”
“If we wait, we’ll never make it!” I yell.
“Hold on.” His hands hit his temples and rain drips off his short, red hair. “Let me jump to you and if I slip, you can catch me.”
If he jumps to my disk and he slips, either we will both fall together, or we can hold onto each other, preventing us from falling. If I jump to the next disk and slip, I’ll have no one to catch me. Arthor’s suggestion it better. “Okay.”
“Catch me if I fall?”
“If you fall, I fall,” I say, reaching my fatigued arms out, ready to catch him.
“On three,” he says.
“One…two…” He bends his knees.” “Three!” He flings his arms and legs in front of him, but just as he lands right next to me, not only does he slip, the disk plummets toward the ground. My heart leaps into my throat. I grab Arthor’s arms and open my mouth to scream, but not a single sound comes out. Just when I think I’m going to pass out, the disk stops mid-air, and Arthor goes skidding down the side of it. Still cleaving onto him, I fall flat on my abdomen across the rounded surface, and we end up hanging on either side of the disk—my nails digging into his wet skin and his in mine.
“I’m okay, you okay?” He’s panting.
I manage to belt out a yes, but I’m losing my grasp fast—the rain making his skin smooth and slick.
“We have to climb up symmetrically. Together. Balance it out.” His face contorts into a pained expression. “I’ll swing my right leg up onto the top. You do the same. On the count of three.”
On three, I kick my leg up—digging my heel into it like I did on Devil’s Cliff. The disk wobbles a little. “Pull my arms,” I say, and we come closer. From there we’re able to drag ourselves up to a standing position. We cling onto each other for a moment, afraid if we move, we’ll slip back off the disk. The raindrops fall heavily on the top of my head.
“We’re going to be okay.”
I look at my hands and notice that my fingers are still digging into his flesh, his blood beneath my nails.
“Sorry.” I slowly unclamp my cold, cramped fingers, and any resolve I had to survive this course feels like it’s being crushed in my chest.
“Heidi, we’re fine.” He touches my hair, but I slap it away.
I almost wish we had fallen so there would be an end to this. “How can you say that? It’s still raining and we don’t know how much further the disks go on!” I pause to sob, knowing I’m not angry at him, only at my own fear. “And we’ll never get back up to the disks now! We’ll stay here and then…”
He grabs my shoulders and shakes me gently. “Heidi! Heidi! Just turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around.” I look up at him for a moment, his pale green eyes beaming, and glance in the direction he’s pointing. There, right in front of us is a path. The four-foot wide alleyway looks like it’s made of glass or plastic—some type of transparent material. But with the rain pummeling down over us, I can see the water pool around the edges. Hadn’t we both gotten on the disk, we never would have seen it. Had we not thought to work as a team, we would have struggled our way forward until nightfall. And never made it. I remember Nicholas talking about plateaus, and I’m curious if he actually knew about this or if it was just a lucky guess.
“The only problem is, that the path is about five feet away,” I say.
“And it could be a trap.” Arthor rubs his palms to his face, removing the raindrops.
It could be. “But how would it hold water if it couldn’t hold us?”
“True.”
“We can jump together,” I suggest.
His eyes grow determined. “Let’s do it.”
I instinctively take his hand and he squeezes mine. I notice how remarkably safe I feel with him; he doesn’t expect anything from me other than friendship. “On three again?”
“Yes. One…” Will there be a firm foundation to land on? “…two.” My knees shake and I’m sucking wind. “…three!”
With all my might, I push off from the disk. Mid-air, and about halfway to the path, I don’t know if I’ll make it. I let go of Arthor’s hand and thrust my legs forward. Landing with my toes on the edge, I contract my abdomen and throw my arms out in front of me, hoping that will make me fall forward. And it does.
Once I find my balance, I squeal in delight and give Arthor a high five. We embrace briefly, but know we don’t have any time to waste. We jog down the road, passing participants who have gotten stuck in the rain. Some of them point and yell at us. Should I share my secret with them? It would only be fair. But the instant I see Johnny hovering above, I decide not to tell anyone how to get down here.
Chapter 20
After we have jogged for about two more hours—passing all the contestants—the pathway takes us down to a vast, concrete-paved area. Four long rows of small, white spacecrafts are situated in front of us, and each ship has a number on it and Newland’s flag.
“President Volkov literally meant out of this world.” Arthor’s mouth drops open.
“You mean…” For some reason, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that I would actually be going into space. I don’t like it one bit.
There’s a sign in front of the spacecrafts and I read it.
Memorize this password:
@w3v+04$*13nzZjiJ=?.:<6c4eigh802>1
Then get on a spacecraft.
“This is awesome!” Arthor says, smiling. “My own spaceship!”
“Yeah, but did you read this?” I point to the sign.
The grin on his face melts away as he reads. Tracing the edges of the sign with his fingers, he says, “I wonder what this password is for.”
“I don’t even want to think what we’ll need it for up there.” I look up into the sky. “Everything’s life and death in these obstacles, so I hardly think space will be any different.”
He nods.
I study the password for the next ten minutes, wracking my brain—cramming—to try and remember the order of the ridiculous amount of symbols. Being a prescription delivery driver back home, I had to memorize quite a few codes with both numbers, letters, and symbols, but nothing as long as this.
“I think I have it,” Arthor says after an inordinately short amount of time.
“Seriously?” In school, he used to be a whiz at memorizing preposterously long words, words that I still don’t know what they mean.
Arthor climbs into the first one, his hands running across the panel of buttons—a smile on his face. “I’ve always wanted to go into space.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that from your overenthusiastic reaction earlier.”
“If I were a Master, that’s what I would want to be—an astronaut. What better place to be?”
I can think of a few actually. “Good luck up there.” I reach my hand out to shake his and he takes it, pulling me in for a long hug, his damp suit pressing against mine.
“Meet you back down here,” he says sincerely.
He releases me, and I watch him press his index finger onto a small, red reader, causing the hatch to open. He gets inside and the next thing I know, the hatch closes and white smoke billows out from beneath the spacecraft. I step back and watch him being catapulted into space, vanishing into the clouds. I really hope I see him again.
I study the sequence some more, and when I finally think I have it, I get into the spacecraft right next to where Arthor’s used to stand. The door automatically clos
es at the same time as blue and white lights appear on the dashboard. The spacecraft hums for a moment before a cloud of white smoke swells around it, and two seconds later, my head feels like it’s spinning out of control, my stomach like it’s being wrung inside out. The ship shakes violently, and I close my eyes afraid they’ll come out of their sockets. I repeat the long sequence in my head to keep myself from becoming too nervous.
Slowly, and the higher I climb, the shaking decreases. Once I reach a certain height, the ride is so smooth, it feels like I’ve stopped moving. I open my eyes and see a black sky dotted with thousands of stars. Below me is the Earth—blue, white and green—and for a moment, I forget that I’m afraid. I pass an orbiting satellite, the light gleaming off of it. My spacecraft heads toward a large, gray space station—two identical diamond-shaped vessels held together by three rods—and enters via an oval opening. Was this space station built specifically for the Savage Run?
Gliding inside a circular atrium, I am sucked into one of the many small cells in the wall, and the narrow passageway seems to be lit the same way the inside of the UVC station was: with illuminate walls. I have no idea what this obstacle will be, which makes it difficult to mentally prepare for it, and even harder to stay calm. My spacecraft stops, and when the door opens, I get out in an excited hurry. To my surprise, Arthor is waiting there with a Unifer.
“Follow me,” the Unifer says, and marches down the silver corridor.
“What’s the obstacle?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply.
“Do they control you so much that you can’t even talk?” I ask.
The Unifer remains speechless. After taking a right and up some stairs, he stops in front of an invisishield door. I’ve only heard of these types of shield doors that no one or nothing can get through—not even bullets or fire.
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