by Dima Zales
“I can give you things you encountered in the past,” Phoe explains as I whoosh down, heading toward the screaming people. “Like how I gave you the watch.”
I do my best not to dwell on the flight down or that the real-world me is actually in a worse situation than I am here, and look back toward the top of the cliff.
Instantly, I wish I hadn’t.
The giant is flying behind me. His disk is a copy of mine, but given his size, I wonder if it would be able to carry him in the real world.
Looking forward—or down, if I wanted to be a stickler—I note that the ground is approaching faster than I anticipated. I tense, cold sweat sliding down my back. When we’re about six feet from crashing into the railroad tracks, I hear a roar to my right.
I turn toward the sound, thinking my giant pursuer has already landed, but it’s worse. The train is literally seconds away from steamrolling over us.
My heartbeat almost drowns out the rumble of the train. In what I assume are my last moments in the Test, I focus on our original targets: the five unfortunate people tied to the rails. I notice details about them that I hadn’t before, like how they’re tied together by the same thick rope.
“We’re jumping off,” Phoe informs me when the bottom of my disk is about two feet off the ground.
A bunch of actions happen so fast I have a hard time keeping up, even though I’m the one performing them. I put my fingers together to disable the magnet and jump off the disk. Then I grab the disk by its edge and rush toward the soon-to-be victims. I can’t help but notice the handle on the very bottom of the disk, which I didn’t see there before. The handle makes the disk look like an ancient shield.
“I improvised a little,” Phoe explains.
The train is getting closer.
Stopping next to the tied-up people, I manage to grab a couple of the loose pieces of rope binding them together and tie a tight knot around the shield’s handle.
The train is a leap away, and the noise is teeth shattering.
I hover the disk right above the five people, handle down. In a continuous motion, I jump on top of the disk, and as soon as my feet connect with it, I point at the sky.
With five people attached to its bottom, the disk doesn’t rocket upward as fast as it usually would, but it does move. Someone below me screams as the chimney of the engine whips by.
Behind me, I hear something that sounds like a mix between a maniacal laugh and a 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
I dare to glance back and see that the giant is about seventy feet away from us.
“I was hoping you would do that and you did.” His words sound like tectonic plates colliding. “Now you have no escape.”
To highlight his words, he raises his ginormous arms to the sky, and lighting strikes two inches away from my right shoulder.
“He might have a point,” Phoe whispers in my ear. “I was hoping that saving these people would register as a pass, but we missed a step: him getting killed. I bet the bastard didn’t know that until it happened, but—”
“So we kill him,” I think desperately. “That’ll get us out.”
“You can try,” the giant booms, and at the command of his arms, two giant tornados form in the distance. “But you will fail.”
To punctuate his words, he flamboyantly gestures at the tallest mountain, and its peak explodes in a savage, volcanic eruption, with lava, smoke, and debris spewing all around it. Some of the volcanic rock flies into the nearby tornadoes, changing their color from cloud white to murky black.
“He’s too powerful, and he can read my thoughts,” I scream at Phoe as I zoom away on my disk. “How can he read my thoughts?”
Before Phoe can answer, I look back. The giant figure is shimmering and warping as his disk closes in on us. My passengers scream below me, their heavy bulk slowing my disk.
“Oh no. He’s accessing the resources that the Test allocated to emulate you.” Phoe’s the most worried I’ve ever heard her. “He just performed a preliminary scan of your memories and is changing his shape in response.”
“I will be your worst nightmare,” a familiar voice shouts from behind me.
“And I will make you wish you were dead,” yells a different, yet also familiar voice.
I glance back again, and my stomach sinks. The giant is gone—or more accurately, a creature more savage and terrifying has replaced him. Its arms look like they’re made of burned meat, and it possesses two heads. The faces on these heads explain the familiar voices. One is Jeremiah’s white-haired visage, while the other wears the canine scowl of my second-least-favorite person in Oasis: Owen. Below the lesions and boils of that horribly twisted double neck, the being shimmers as though its body is made out of small particles that move about.
“Bugs,” Jeremiah says with malice that’s extreme even for a man who tortured me.
“Centipedes, maggots, locusts, bot flies,” Owen adds in his signature hyena voice—a voice now twisted with the same uncanny malevolence. “You name it, I’ve got it.”
“Shit. I knew this thing was buggy, but I didn’t expect it to manifest so literally,” Phoe says, her mental voice drowning out whatever else the Jeremiah-Owen thing might’ve said to frighten me. “This is bad, Theo. If I allow him to keep leveraging your resources, he’ll know your every move before you make it. He’ll use your worst fears against you, as he has already begun to do. We’ll lose in minutes, if not seconds.” Before I can completely panic, she says, “I want to do something, but I want you to be okay with it. Since part of him is inside your allotted resources, I can fight him there on an algorithmic level, but it would eat up my measly share of those same resources. That means you’ll have to fly away and figure out how to kill him on your own. My hope is that battling me on that second front will also limit his control over our surrounding environment.”
Pushing aside my panic, I study my nemesis as we streak across the sky. Jeremiah’s face looks concerned, proving that the creature can and did read my mind and knows what Phoe proposed. He waves his hands at me, and two things happen at once: the distant tornadoes move toward me at increasing speeds, and multi-armed creatures that look like a cross between snakes and spiders swarm the nearest ravine. Thousands upon thousands of the freaky things appear, each holding various weapons in their many appendages.
My breathing goes into hyper speed as I focus straight ahead. “It’s not a real choice, Phoe,” I manage to say out loud. “Do what you have to do. Just give me something to fight with before you disappear.”
Even before I’m done speaking, an object appears in my left hand—a sword that looks like a bolt.
“I guess I didn’t have to experience something for real for you to be able to grab it from my memory,” I think at Phoe, but she doesn’t reply. Her abstract battle with the anti-intrusion thing—Jeremiah-Owen—must’ve begun.
I peek back at my pursuer to see if there’s a discernible change. Owen’s face—the face I’m most familiar with—looks like it did long ago, when we were little, after Liam ripped out a huge chunk of the would-be bully’s hair. That expression, plus the fact he isn’t waving his arms to make new forces of nature appear, is a good sign.
Unfortunately, the tornadoes he manifested are getting closer, as is my terribly disgusting two-headed enemy. The people hanging from my disk scream again, and I realize I have to lighten my load to increase my speed.
Swerving, I fly toward the nearest ravine, ignoring the guttural screams of the snake-spider ‘people’ that Jeremiah-Owen created. To keep my passengers alive, I have to get within a reasonable range of the ravine before I drop them off.
That’s my first mistake, because even flying six feet above the snake-spiders’ heads is too low for my safety. With a whirl of slimy skin, a large snake-spider specimen jumps up, and a few of his smaller friends follow.
In a flash, I take in the abomination. It has eight limbs like a spider, with two hind ones that are longer, serving as makeshift legs, while the front six are more like arms.
Its skin looks slimy like a snake’s, but its head makes it look like a typical member of the arachnid family. The creature grazes the side of the disk with his mandible, sparking the unpleasant sound of teeth against metal. The smaller half-breeds grab onto my passengers, whose voices are now hoarse from screaming.
“Don’t kill those five patsies,” Jeremiah’s head orders the snake-spider team from a distance. “That will let our guest escape.”
He’s right. If I get these five people killed, I’ll fail this Test, but at least I’ll be out of this mess. But what if failing this one scenario is all that’s required for the Test to kick me out completely? Then we’ll have accomplished nothing. Gritting my teeth, I sit down on the disk. With a careful swing, I use my sword to cut the rope connecting the cargo of scared people to my disk.
With one final ear-piercing cry, the people drop into the almost-caressing tentacles of the snake-spiders. The monsters pass the people along to one another, like the ancients did with stage divers at rock concerts. The five people inevitably make their way to the Jeremiah-Owen creature, which takes them by the rope and flies off. I assume he took them somewhere safe, because he doesn’t want the Test to end just yet.
I look down, assessing my next move, and realize the second reason that getting close to the ravine was a potentially fatal mistake.
Bows and arrows are among the many weapons the snake-spider monstrosities are wielding. They have their bows raised in my direction, and sunlight is glinting off a myriad of steel-tipped arrows.
“At least I looked,” I think at Phoe out of habit and, suppressing my fear of heights, I point my hand directly at the sky with a pumping motion.
As the disk propels me upward, I hear the whoosh of thousands of arrows. It’s as though a giant waterfall is chasing me. My harsh breathing drowns out the sound as I increase my speed with another spasmodic jerk of my hand.
Despite my whiplash-inducing velocity, the arrows are quicker. A hundred or so fly by me on every side, and I hear dozens of them hit the bottom of the disk with a loud metal-on-metal thump.
And just when I think I’m in the clear, pain sears through me.
22
My eyes tear up, and a twisted scream escapes my throat. With inhuman effort, I resist grabbing my head, knowing that doing so with my left hand will cost me the sword, and doing so with my right will send my disk into a violent tailspin.
In a haze of pain, I understand what must’ve happened. An arrow clipped my ear. I don’t have a mirror to check, but given the severity of the pain, I have to assume the arrow took a chunk of my ear off, if not the whole thing. I fight my body’s instinct to go into shock, because that would send me plummeting into the horde of monsters below.
The arrows that missed me fly high into the sky, blotting out the sun and turning the world above me dark, an impression heightened by my agony. As they begin to fall, I understand the new danger: I have to make sure the arrows don’t turn me into a porcupine on their way down.
My left hand clutches the sword in the proverbial death grip—which should really be renamed to a ‘nearly getting killed’ grip. With my right hand, I make a movement that can best be described as attempting to touch my right elbow, something that’s more impossible than licking my elbow or touching it with my nose. The impossible gesture translates into a half-summersault that is so violently sudden I would’ve thrown up if I’d had a morsel of food in my system.
Blood rushes into my head as I fly upside down. The arrows come down, sounding like hail banging against the bottom of the disk. As the arrows continue their downward path, the snake-spiders raise a sea of shields to protect themselves.
The train roars in the distance. I guess the tracks below are still functional.
My blood fights gravity as it tries to leave my face. Putting down their shields, the snake-spiders raise their bows again. I get a good view of every single one of them aiming at me.
The rumble of the train gets louder—too loud given how far we are from the tracks.
The nightmarish archers release their arrows, sending another volley of wooden missiles toward me.
I prepare to reverse my earlier maneuver, when the sound of the train becomes thunderous, and I finally understand.
It’s not the train; it’s the first of the tornadoes.
In a savage jerk, I’m sucked into the twister, my disk and I instantly spinning like a kamikaze leaf. The arrows get half pulled in, half dispersed by the force of moving air.
I see the world in small slices: a glimpse of snake-spiders flying and screaming inside another twister—the one that’s on a collision course with mine; a glimmer of Jeremiah-Owen, watching from the safety of his disk as he flies out of the path of the forces he unleashed; and in my peripheral vision, I see an actual metal train car, as well as ripped-out tracks and rocks twice my size, all randomly swirling around the deadly circle.
The noise is beyond deafening, and the constant rotations make me dry heave.
My knuckles are white from holding on to the bolt-sword through all of this. The only reason I don’t let go is my fear that the wind will plunge it right back into me.
My world becomes a game of dodging gigantic, deadly debris. If it weren’t for the magnetized shoes, I’d be separated from the disk long ago. As is, I’m glued to it, but it’s actually making me thrash around more violently due to its flying capabilities and shape.
I dodge a boulder the size of my head, but a broken arrow whips by and slices my left thigh. I clutch at the bleeding wound, and a burning pain explodes in my right calf muscle. I twist my body and swing the sword, then glance down at my leg. A snake-spider bit into my flesh, but it now has the sword in its eye. I think it’s screaming, but it’s impossible to hear over the noise of the tornado. As a consequence of it opening its mandibles, my calf is freed, and we instantly fly in different directions.
In the next second, a piece of rail misses my temple by two inches, and I forget all about the pain and my multiplying wounds.
I have to get out of this tornado, or I’ll die.
In a desperate attempt to get control over my fate, I even out my hand and the disk by association. Just to make myself fly in a standing position requires all my effort. When I manage it—and by that I mean when my hand goes from shaking violently to only having subdued tremors running through it—I gesture forward.
I bet this is how an ancient surfer would feel like if he ever tried to ride a tsunami. Eventually, though, I get the knack for riding the wind and fly up and away from the eye of the tornado. Only when I reach the very edge of the wind tunnel do I realize my miscalculation. As I rotated inside the whirlpool of air, its centrifugal forces—or whatever the right term is—increased my speed. This becomes especially clear when I exit the horrid wind tunnel and get propelled toward the ravine at the speed of an overzealous bullet.
Arrows fly at me. Not in a cloud like before, but a few stray ones. Down below, I see that I’m approaching the ravine. I clench my fingers into a tight fist—a stopping gesture Phoe taught me. Sparks fly as the edge of the disk connects with the rock.
If Phoe weren’t busy, I’d suspect she was doing the next move for me. I touch all my right fingers together at the same time as I let go of the sword. The result is that the magnetic pull of the disk goes away and the inertia of the impact makes me slide down and fall on my side. I tumble and scrape the skin on my hands and arms as I try to stop the momentum from carrying me forward. It occurs to me that if I hadn’t gotten separated from the disk, the jerk of the crash could have broken my legs. If I’d held on to the sword, I probably would’ve skewered myself like a human shish kebab during this already-unpleasant roll.
I finally come to a stop. Blood pounds in my temples, and my body feels like it’s gone through an ancient meat grinder. I’m tempted to lie here and let something kill me, but I can’t let that happen.
I struggle onto my feet and look around.
The disk is at least a dozen feet away, me
aning my tumble away from it was longer than I realized.
Unfortunately, twenty or thirty feet away is a small group of snake-spider creatures, and they’re running toward me. The tornado did a number on them too. They don’t have all their usual weapons, they’re missing their shields, and they look flustered. Then again, I have no idea what these things look like when they’re nice and calm.
Jeremiah-Owen is flying my way. He’s near the smoke of the volcano he unleashed.
I will the volcano to explode again, but it ignores me.
At least the tornadoes are traveling away from us, though it would be better if one of them took Jeremiah-Owen with it.
I launch into my best approximation of a sprint, suppressing a cry every time I step with my injured right leg. To make matters worse, blood is oozing from the bite in my calf and the million cuts all over my body, and the pulse of agony from what used to be my ear is only increasing.
The fastest snake person is two feet away from me when I reach for the disk, grabbing it by the handle that Phoe created to tie the rope to.
The snake people stop and pull back their arrows.
I again raise the disk like a medieval shield.
Two arrows hit it and fall harmlessly to the ground. The rest of the arrows overshoot me.
I don’t get a chance to celebrate not getting skewered, because the first attacker is already here, its breath smelling worse than that pile of fecal matter from Owen’s prank. Without much thought, I hit the snake-spider’s head with the disk. The metal-on-mandible impact sends pain ricocheting down my right arm. My attacker staggers back, giving me a window to grab my bolt-sword off the ground.
Seeing my weapon, the wounded monster readies its curved blade.
I catch its strike on my makeshift shield and bring the bolt-sword down on its wrist.
The good news is that the snake-spider is now missing an arm. The bad news is it has five more left. The worse news is that one of those arms is attempting to catch the falling sword.
In a flurry of motion, I smack my shield into that arm. I can’t let it get the weapon. Then, capitalizing on the creature’s momentary daze, I cleave off its head. A fountain of pale blue blood gushes out of its neck. I guess in that way, the creatures are more spider-like than snake-like, since a snake’s blood would be red.