Still no takers.
“Fifty,” I add. Nothing.
“One hundred?” She ups the volume. “Trillion here will pay one hundred clips to whoever sits at his table. And he’ll do all your homework for the next three—”
“Lyssa Van Buren has promised to snog anyone who joins our team. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter. Believe me, it’s worth it.”
Her half-scream, half-laugh—while pulling at her own hair—leaves me in stitches. She’s about to jump across the table and probably beat me to a pulp when someone catches her eye, and she composes herself.
“Hey, Tall Guy,” she yells to a gangly, good-looking boy from Rhea—I can tell that from the elaborate pattern of his hair, designed with areas that are bald (the roots removed) and others that are close-cropped, so that it resembles something like the image of a swan, or some winged creature from his homeworld. He must spend hours keeping it trimmed and in-shape like that. It’s really pretty amazing. “Come and sit with me.” She pats the seat beside her, less forcefully this time, and bats her eyelashes for good measure.
The poor guy fends off a couple of rude shoulder barges from passing boys. He doesn’t seem fazed by them. Then, after making sure Lyssa really is addressing him and not someone else nearby, he makes his way over to us.
“I’m Lyssa, and this is Jim. We’d like you to join our team.”
He shakes both our hands in a completely relaxed and natural manner, as if he’s done this a thousand times before. “Lohengrin. Pleased to meet you both.”
“Why did those guys shove into you like that?” asks Lyssa.
He sits next to her. “I think it was an accident.”
“No it wasn’t,” she tells him. “They did it deliberately. And I’ve seen others do it. Why are they being jerks to you?”
“I didn’t realise they were.” He sighs as gently and politely as he can. Those are the words that best sum Lohengrin up so far—gentle and polite. The way he over-pronounces every word, the way he sits up straight, the way he smiles and looks you square in the eye when you’re talking, as if he’s going out of his way not to offend: he’s not like the boys his age I’ve met in the oases resorts. He’s more like some junior ambassador from his homeworld, under orders to be extra-friendly to everyone, even those who push him. In other words, he doesn’t belong here. He’s way too easy to like.
“I see. Tell me, are they all pushovers on Rhea?” From the way she’s smirking, Lyssa intended that to be charming. It wasn’t. Even Lohengrin doesn’t appear to know how to react.
“It’s his first day,” I set her straight. “What do you want him to do? Pick a fight with every grid-licker who can’t see where he’s going?”
“No. But he’s on our team now. The next bully who tries it...I’m gonna make sure they chew sand.”
Lohengrin smiles but looks away from her. A part of me admires Lyssa for sticking up for someone who’s being bullied. Another part of me says she’s embarrassing him more than she’s helping him.
“Lohengrin. I’ve heard that name before,” I say. “Can’t quite place it.”
Lyssa tuts and rolls her eyes at me. “Duh. It’s only the Royal family, genius. Lohengrin, son of Mircalla? Queen of Rhea? Any of this ring a bell?”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I lie. It’s really a total shock—a prince—a genuine, heir-to-the-stars prince—sitting at my table!
“Yeah, sure.”
Not only is she blunt, she’s also kind of infuriating when she isn’t being funny. And I hate the way she talks down to me. This is our first day. We’re here to mingle, to learn about each other. We can’t all be know-it-all geniuses right off the bat.
“So what do you think about this place—the Hex? What are we going to be doing here?” I ask him.
“Some sort of competition, I guess—I mean I think.” He glances over his shoulder at the nearest apparatus. “Physical activities. It seems to be a hi-tech gymnasium. Maybe these are simulators of some kind.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I reply. “So do you want to join our team—if it turns out to be a team competition?”
“I’d be honoured. And thank you for inviting me.”
“Our pleasure, Tall Guy,” says Lyssa. She then gazes over my head and clears her throat. “Oh, have a seat, Whitey.”
“Rachel.”
“Sorry. Rachel. Come and join us.”
“What? Who?” I almost spill out of my seat as I spin round, hearing, seeing, but not really believing who’s here. How did she get here? How did she get here?
Rachel Foggerty. The girl who saved my life at the Sights by outwitting the Sheiker insurgents. The girl who can swim and run like no other girl I’ve ever seen. A Lunar girl, with long, ivory-white hair and long, almost-as-white legs. The freckles. The big, kind-of-sad blue-grey eyes that light up whenever she’s running or swimming. It is Rachel Foggerty.
“Hey, Jim.”
“Hey, Rachel. How did you swim here? Get—how did you get here?”
She sits next to me. I shuffle away a little bit. “Mr. Thorpe-Campbell invited me,” she says. “He showed up at my grandparents’ hotel room, just after I won my event in the Games.”
“You won? That’s awesome.”
“Yeah. I figured that’s why he invited me. He said this was a great education program—physical fitness and academic learning. More like a scholarship really. And at the end of it I might get to do something important for the colonies. My grandparents talked it over with him in private, then they talked me into it. They said I’ll never get another chance like this.”
“Pretty much what he told me,” I say. “Weird that we’ve both wound up here.”
“I know, right? What are the odds?” She looks across the table. “So is this your squad or something?”
“Something like that,” I reply. “Lyssa, Lohengrin, this is Rachel Foggerty.”
They’re both friendly to her, and vice-versa, and I can sense right away that this is a squad—a unit—that gels. It’s an instinct I have, sharpened by dozens of jobs in dozens of resorts, where I’ve had to get to know people in a hurry, figure out who they are and if they can be trusted, and if not, why not? I’m guessing most of the people here in the Hex don’t have that kind of experience. They might be richer, smarter, better educated, better athletes, but they’ve probably not had to fend for themselves, or seen Mars the way I’ve seen it, or saved the life of a teacher at this facility. And they don’t have my instincts.
That, right there, makes me feel better than I’d ever imagined it would.
Actually, this is the happiest I’ve been in days. The four of us are very different, but we’re easy in each other’s company. Especially Lyssa. Whenever she aims her snark outside the group, it’s pretty damn funny. I almost don’t want to invite anyone else in. We’re good as we are, thanks.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from life in the oases, it’s that nothing stays the same for long.
A heavy thwump from the middle of the Hex makes everyone jump. The sound reminds me of a giant rotor blade starting its spin, like the ones that give lift to the huge crop dusters over the plantations. It repeats. We get up and follow the crowd to the centre. Everyone in the room gathers there, inside the walled enclosure, watching, awed, as the first apparatus started up by a student spins into thrilling life.
It’s a simulation of our solar system made up of large, light-emitting, gravity-defying balls that orbit the central Sun at crazy speeds and angles. They don’t correspond to the motion of the planets at all but they’re clearly meant to represent them. Mars glows pink. Saturn is a silvery-blue. Jupiter a fiery orange. Earth is blue-green. On the surface of each planet is a puzzle made up of hexagonal panels of varying hues and brightness.
One student is walking around on the surface of Mars, totally safe and secure, despite its insane orbit and rotation. Up and over the Sun. Then hula-hooping it. Then a combination of the two. He’s having a blast trying to
find the right balance and change the pattern of hexagons and watch us watching him spin every which way. Another boy is crawling around Jupiter. He looks a little woozy, as if he’s going to throw up at any moment.
Once they’re in full rotation, the heavy spinning balls no longer thwump; each one gives off a kind of wiry, high-pitched zip, distinct to its size and speed. The overall effect is pretty loud.
But right here, right now, these two guys are the celebrities of the Hex. They might be in way over their heads, but they’ve done something so outrageous it’s made every boy and girl in the room jealous, excited, and a little dizzy. Word circulates that their names are Orkney and Sarazzin.
No one will forget those names.
There’s a mad dash for the other apparatuses. Despite having staked out the flashy-haired thingamajig first, Lyssa, Lohengrin, Rachel and I have lost possession of it. People are swarming around it, trying to figure out how it works, what it does. So we go to the next apparatus, and the next, looking for one we don’t have to share with anyone else. We have our team already. But there isn’t a free machine left by the time the central attraction finally stops.
So the four of us regroup near the drinks fountains and take stock of what’s happened. Lohengrin is the first one to notice a change has occurred on the scoreboard up on the wall.
“Two of them are no longer zero values,” he explains, pointing to the respective names. “Look, Orkney is at 0.001. Sarazzin is at 0.003. The rest are still at zero. That can’t be coincidence.”
“He’s right. And a few of the others are changing too.” Lyssa swiftly tosses her hair as she strides out at the head of our group. “So it’s beginning. Whatever it is, it’s beginning.” She turns to face us with a scary-looking scowl. “Let’s kick some ass.”
She might never have met Sergei, but she’s just spoken unmistakable Sergei-ese. I stop her before she marches off. “Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we find out how the scoring works before we join in?”
“What? Their scores are going up, ours aren’t. That’s how the scoring works.”
She has a point. And just like that, we’re in the free-for-all along with everyone else, pushing and shoving our way onto the next available apparatus. No one wants to be the only grid-licker left with a zero value next to his or her name at the end of the session. It’s that simple.
I’m amazed the four of us manage to stick together in this crazy, giddy, sometimes hostile hurricane of competition. Rachel dubs it the Hexalation, and that’s a pretty good description. Groups form all over the place, bonded by triumph or embarrassing failure on the apparatuses, or through bullying, or being bullied, or their sense of humour, or being from the same homeworld, or having a similar temperament, or even simply because they’re the best-looking. There’s so much going on here, I don’t know where to start.
One of the apparatuses is a kind of trampoline—a “gee-up”, as someone calls it. You walk out onto a sheet of elastic, see-through material so thin you can’t see it until it starts to stretch under your weight. When you bounce up above a certain height, you experience this weird slow-motion effect. It feels like you’re moving at half speed, or a quarter speed. The higher you jump, the stronger the effect. It leaves us all a bit queasy the first few times we try it, but that soon wears off. When you get used to it, it’s like flying in a dream. A part of your brain’s telling you it’s impossible, that it can’t be reality, but another part of you can’t get enough of the sensation of letting go, of surrendering to the slo-mo.
It’s thrilling. We all try our best to show off on every apparatus, but on the gee-up it takes practise to look good in mid-air. The natural gymnasts dominate in groups, using the slow-mo in all sorts of clever ways the rest of us couldn’t do even if we wanted. It’s a bit like synchronized swimming when you watch it from ground level, or those dance numbers from old black-and-white Hollywood musicals, the ones with elaborate choreography. Lyssa and Rachel are pretty good at it, but they don’t stay long, except to laugh, because Lohengrin and I are about as coordinated as two pineapples in a blender.
Another popular activity takes place inside a red pyramid. Four sides, one player on each side. There’s another, smaller pyramid or mountain in the centre. Each player faces it. Then, by some ingenious virtual lensing or holography, it appears as though you shrink to microscopic size and the mountain grows to the size of Olympus Mons. There was a similar attraction at the Big Red theme park, based on that old science fiction story, The Incredible Shrinking Man. That was more family friendly, though; you had simple tasks to solve, in various scenes like a garden or a basement or the galley of a spaceship. It was more fun than scary, apart from the giant spider.
But the object of this game is to survive whatever the mountain throws at you, by “climbing”, which is really just staying in one spot and reacting to the virtual simulation that scrolls ever upward under your feet. It can be pretty hairy because it moves so quickly: you have to dodge falling boulders and widening crevasses, duck to hide from monstrous flying creatures or icy blizzards, or improvise your way through rocky mazes with little time to think.
No one ever reaches the top, but Rachel and I get higher than most. One guy screams his head off when he imagines he really has fallen into a bottomless chasm. He gets teased mercilessly for that, but the simulation is so damn real.
One game I keep coming back to relies even more on reflexes and problem-solving. It takes place inside a large copper-coloured enclosure, shaped like a conch from the outside. It’s totally dark inside. We can’t even see our hands in front of our faces. Again, the floor moves under our feet, like some kind of intelligent liquid conveyor, so that we can run as fast as we want in any direction and not really move from our spot. Similar to the mountain climb.
One gamemaster sits on top of the conch outside and looks down through a virtual lens. He sees what we can’t—a live, rolling game board made up of the wildest, most dangerous landscapes of Mars. He directs us as if we’re dumb, blind robots, which, in a way, we are, past various obstacles like gorges, avalanches, narrow bridges over raging rivers, and predators. All virtual.
There are scary sound effects, so it's tempting to guess which way to move. But because we can’t see anything, we have to wait for the gamemaster's instructions. If that sounds simple, let me tell you, it isn’t! The slightest hesitation on his part or yours and you could end up being crushed by an avalanche, drowning in white water, or getting sucked up by a tornado. You don’t feel any of that, of course. You’re just immobilized for a few seconds, then the floor carries you out to the antechamber, and you’re free to leave. The gamemaster, however, sees you die. The more people he keeps alive, and the longer he keeps them alive, the more points he gets.
It’s one of the hardest games in the Hex. It starts off slowly, like a chessboard, but because he has to direct everyone verbally, one at a time, differentiating them by the colours of their virtual clothing, it quickly becomes a coordination nightmare for the gamemaster. You can rack up more points than on the other apparatuses, but it’s that hard and that stressful, no one does very well in the director’s chair. Those who do slightly better than others are encouraged to keep coming back as gamemaster. The quicker and clearer their instructions, the longer their pawns stay alive; and that’s a good deal if you’re a pawn, earning points every time you react in a timely manner.
It sharpens your reflexes like you wouldn’t believe. By the end of the first hour, I’m a pretty sharp pawn, having dodged more falling boulders and raging river rapids than Indiana Jones. But it’s Lohengrin, who’s the politest gamemaster by far—he never swears at anyone when they mess up—who keeps us alive the longest. Unfortunately, he’s not popular among the other buggos. At all. They throw sand at him whenever he gets in the Director’s Chair, and after a while he stops climbing up.
Pity, that.
His points total speaks for itself, though. By the time we move on to the next apparatus, he’s leading the entire class
with 0.047 points. That doesn’t sound like much, but the nearest one to him, Sarazzin, has only 0.029.
I’m quite chuffed with my middle of the class 0.016 until I see that Lyssa and Rachel have both hit 0.02. That makes me antsy, and I’m determined to prove myself on all the games from now on. Whatever they are. As I watch the other kids, I can’t believe how much their behaviour has changed since Orkney and Sarazzin wowed us all with their brave show. It’s amazing how much a clear, simple goal motivates everybody. We’ve transformed from a herd of bemused buggos into mercenary squads of pioneers and points-gatherers. We have a mission. We have apparatuses. And between us, we’re making this thing up as we go.
At least now we know what the Hex is.
Six sides of excitement. One game at a time.
“This place is a blast,” yells Lyssa as she hops around like crazy on Jupiter’s red spot, shifting the hexagonal puzzle panels under her feet, not really knowing what the heck she’s doing on the central apparatus christened by Orkney and Sarazzin, but loving the sensation.
Rachel runs rings around Saturn. Lohengrin performs a running slide across the Pacific Ocean of Earth. And me—I lie on my back on the smooth, hard surface of Mars, watching the chaos of the Hex wheel by, feeling in complete control and out of control at the same time, wondering who I’ll be when the time comes for me to leave my homeworld, and what that will be like.
The alert for first period flashes around all the walls. Then everything in the Hex shuts down. All except for our names on the scoreboard, and the classes we’re supposed to go to.
My first one is in Room 3H: History.
CHAPTER 7
Interrupted
After first period we hit the running track. All seventy of us at once, around the entire tenth and eleventh floors. It’s a green tunnel that never seems to end. Uphill, downhill, even upside-down during a dizzying high-g corkscrew curve that really saps the energy from my legs.
Lap times flash up on the left hand wall at the end of each circuit. We’re all ranked according to average lap time and fastest lap. I’m somewhere in the bottom half. Lohengrin is several places higher, about mid-pack, while Lyssa blasts into the top five, having lapped us both by the end of the session. And Rachel—our triathlon medal winner? She comes in first, over thirty seconds ahead of anyone else, including Orkney and Sarazzin.
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