Ellie felt the cramps begin again, starting as a pinpoint of burning, like a match head pressed to her insides. It would get worse. “I’m a mess. It’s over for me. But the others just left, maybe you can catch them. Take Tom and Cy with you. They can help! Go!”
Pyper walked up to her and grabbed her hand. It was clammy and her fingers flopped like strings of yarn with Pyper’s touch. “The cramps are terrible, I know. They hit with any sort of lower abdomen shot, but they’re worse for women, I think.”
“Just go! Please! Take this fight from me. I was never meant to have it in the first place.”
“You still don’t see. White, Silver, they were running away just like us, before you came. Everyone was running away except you three.”
Ellie crunched into a little ball, her knees up to her chest, her teeth clenched, and she gripped Pyper’s hand.
“Ian,” Pyper said, and Ian stepped forward and Pyper nodded at where their hands clasped and offered Ellie’s up to him. His tremor was heavier than usual as he took it, but then it stilled completely. Ellie looked up at him through bloodshot eyes and in an instant she was taken back to the helicopter, to their beds there. She remembered the thumping of the blades. His eyes were the same color of soft green, like moss. There wasn’t a hint of the madness she’d seen before.
“I can offer you something,” he said, haltingly. “Something that will make you feel better, instantly, but it comes at a price. It will change you.”
“What?” Tom cut in. “Are you pushing drugs now?”
“I suppose it is a drug,” Ian said, nodding. “It makes sense that way.”
“What is it?” asked Ellie.
Ian held out his left arm. It was thin and ridged with prominent veins and the mark of Green licked out darkly from the edges of the bandage. “It’s me,” he said, and his words hung in the confused silence.
Cy stepped in. “What are you talking about? Nothing but time can heal a diode coma.”
“Well, technically that’s true” he said, gently setting Ellie’s hand down and pulling a red vial from his jacket pocket. “But this can take the pain away.”
“Please tell me you didn’t just pull a vial of your own blood from your coat,” said Tom.
“No, no. Well, sort of. It’s an enzyme replicated from my blood. Or so Walcott told me when he handed it to me just before I got on my flight.”
Ellie stared at the vial as the light from the machines cut through it and made it glint a dark, plasma red. Cy sniffed. Tom squinted at Ian.
“Is he all there? Mentally?” Tom asked Pyper.
“It’s true. He’s been with Baxter Walcott for the past week.”
“So you have some sort of special blood?” Tom asked.
“I don’t feel the after-effects of a diode coma like any of you. I never have. I’ve always sort of bounced back.”
“We thought it was the booze and his stubborn head for years,” Pyper said.
“So you’re immune to diodes?” Cy asked.
“No,” Ian said, cutting the word with his hand. “I take the hits like all of you. I get thrown into a coma like all of you. I just come out of it feeling better than you do. A lot better.”
“What’s the catch?” Ellie whispered.
Ian grasped her hand again. It just happened, before he knew what he was doing, but Ellie allowed it.
“What you’re feeling, the sickness, the pain, the dreams—you’re supposed to feel that after you’ve been hit. That’s your body working the poison out. It means you’re healing. It takes time, and rest, and peace. With this,” he held up the vial, “the damage doesn’t go away. Just the pain. You keep going when you shouldn’t.” Ian stared at the vial like it was a snow globe. “It’s not good for you.”
“It’s terrible for you,” Pyper added. “Imagine laying your hand on a hot stove and not knowing when to pull it away.”
“Except instead of your hand it’s your whole body. It’s your heart,” said Ian.
“Your heart on a stove,” Tom said, incredulous. “Jesus.”
“There’s scarring, internally,” Ian said. “And eventually you stop healing.”
“As in full stop?” Tom asked, and Ian nodded. Ellie tried to find his eyes again, but he had looked away, focusing on their hands in a distant, hazy gaze.
“Have you stopped healing?” she asked him. She noticed that Pyper was watching him keenly.
Ian recalled Walcott’s ultimatum: One more diode coma, and you’re dead.
“Walcott doesn’t know,” Ian said vacantly.
“But surely he looked at your platelet count. Surely he could see if—”
“It’s not that easy,” Ian said quickly, and then, “the point is if you take this, you’ll be like me forever.”
“Or until she drops dead,” said Tom. “Ellie, I know what you’re thinking. But take a second here. This is your life we’re talking about.”
“This is bigger than any one of us,” Ellie said, breathing through the clenches in her body. “You know that. Just like all of us. If we don’t hold our ground, it’s his Tournament. Forever.”
“And nobody else will stand up unless you stand up first,” Pyper said. “I think that much has been made clear.”
Ellie was about to argue when all five pagers in the room buzzed at once. Momentarily, nobody moved, as if a small bird had flown in the window and landed on the bed. Pyper reached for hers first. The screen was bright pink and showed a countdown. It was already under twenty four hours. The others reached for theirs.
“Unbelievable,” said Tom, looking towards the corners of the room as if he expected Mazaryk himself to be lurking there.
“One day?” Cy asked. “Is that normal?”
“I’ve never seen it,” said Pyper. “The moratorium is one week, always has been. One day isn’t enough to get everyone cleared by medical, much less checked in.”
“He doesn’t care about checking anyone in,” said Ian. “This is Mazaryk’s doing. This is his day.”
“What happens at the end of the twenty-four hours?” asked Tom.
“We get a Draw,” said Pyper. “We get matched up for the rounds.”
“It’s his doing,” said Ellie, nodding. “Mazaryk offered something to the bettors, to the Council, a wager that they couldn’t refuse. That’s the only explanation.”
“I’d guess it’s our seat at his table for his seat. He either brings us all under his roof, or he brings his own house down,” Ian said.
“So this is it,” Tom said. “It’s happening.”
Ellie turned to Ian, rolled up her sleeve, and nodded. “Give it to me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
LOCK RECOGNIZED THE ROOM the second they pulled the bag off his head. The moon shone through the red glass window above as if it was a great demon’s eye. It hit the twin windows by the fireplace like they were the flaring nostrils of an immense bull. A fire burned low between them, casting a faint ring of light that died quickly and didn’t reach the corners of the room, where Lock sensed several figures moving about quietly.
He was sitting in a chair in the center of the room, but he wasn’t bound there, nor were his hands or feet tied. He scratched at his face where the bag had rubbed him and his eye found the exact spot on the floor where he and Frank had been pinned mere months ago. He felt he was doomed to repeat his failures again and again and he knew that Mazaryk had brought him here to demoralize him, but he fought against it. Despair threatened to wash over him and he cleared his throat and shook his head to keep it at bay. He tried to think of something funny. His mind stopped on Frank’s bulging eyes and raucous whisper when he tried to warn him about Claudia back at the kebab shop. How he’d bobbed around for Lock’s attention like a kid needing a bathroom. He laughed. Guess Frank was right, after all.
“Something funny, Allen?”
Eddie Mazaryk walked from the shadows to a seat at the far side of a large, round table of thick wood. He wore a trim black suit and a thin necktie
, his fine hair banded behind his head. His features were smooth and delicate in the firelight and his eyes were encompassing and eager. He sat silently.
“Where is she?” Lock asked. “Claudia. I know she’s with you. Frank knew it all along.”
“Of course she’s with me. Your every move was watched.”
“We saw something we weren’t supposed to see, I gather.”
“What were you doing in that graveyard?”
Lock tried to read him, but it was like looking into a well in the dead of night. Still, he felt that he should play his cards close to his chest. There was no sense in giving the man anything or in assuming he had everything already.
“We were paying our respects.”
Mazaryk moved very fast then. One moment he was sitting, the next he was grabbing Lock’s collar with one hand and pushing up on his brow with the other, as if to open up his face and read his brain. Lock didn’t struggle; he only clinched his teeth and fought to blink.
“What are you doing, Allen? You and your friend?”
“My job,” Lock croaked.
Mazaryk released him and found himself again. He brushed his black jacket down and walked to the fireplace with slow, easy steps. He took a gun from the broad marble mantle above the fire and checked its chamber with a soft slide and click. “No matter. Everything is already in motion.”
“It’s always in motion with you, Eddie, isn’t it? Don’t you ever get dizzy?”
From the fireplace Mazaryk tossed his own pager across the room and directly at Lock. It made a pink arc in the air and Lock caught it with one hand. It was counting down. The screen read just over twenty-two hours.
“What’s this?” Lock asked. “How is this possible?”
“All things are possible.”
“But the Council would never have agreed to—”
“They did.”
“Even Greer Nichols?”
“Even Mr. Nichols.”
Lock narrowed his eyes and threw the pager back, harder than he needed to. Mazaryk caught it lightly and set it spinning on the hard table top.
“Ellie Willmore gets badly hurt and you engineer the sixth cycle of the Tournament one day later. What a coincidence. She can hardly stand.”
“That was unfortunate. I did not want that. I had hoped they might all challenge me at once.”
Lock was skeptical, but Mazaryk was not gloating. He sounded genuinely disappointed.
A few gears clicked in the spinning engine of Lock’s mind. “You wanted the alliance against you to work?”
“Of course. I admire them. Those that rebel often prove the strongest allies when they are brought back into the fold. They are the prodigal sons and daughters. It was my hope to bring them all in at once, but since that hope died in Mexico, I will try to bring them in one at a time. Take young Ms. Willmore and her team, for instance. They needn’t fight me. They need only take their seat right here next to me. That is a victory for us both.”
Lock shook his head slowly back and forth. “What kind of Draw are you putting together here, exactly?”
“I am ending this division that is keeping us from the new order. The order that the world deserves. That’s all you need to know. Which brings us back to you: specifically, what we will do about you.” The fire reflected dully off the dark metal of his handgun. He checked the countdown on the pager on the table, blazing pink in the darkness.
“Just get it over with, Eddie.”
Lock thought of how all these years he’d been the only courier the Tournament dispatched to find Mazaryk and Black. He was the only one Eddie Mazaryk would deal with. To the other couriers he might as well have been a ghost. He thought of all the time he’d spent figuring out how to deliver to the man, and it seemed only fitting that in the end he was delivered to Mazaryk. He refused to look away as Mazaryk approached with the gun. Lock wondered if he had always been this way. When he’d first found the man and his team in St. Petersburg all those years ago, delivering sleeves of the most recent diode, of all things, Mazaryk was impressed. At the time he seemed like nothing so much as a fastidious general, taking in all the angles. All Lock remembered was feeling uncomfortable under his gaze, and perhaps that should have warned him of the true nature of the sociopath behind the stare. But he was a new courier at the time, and he assumed all of the captains would be as unsettling. He should have trusted his gut. But what would he have said? What could he have said? As far as Lock could see, all roads led to this chair.
“What if I told you that you are part of the equation, Allen?”
Lock wasn’t prepared for the question. He refocused.
“When the dust settles here, all of the couriers will be working for this house. You and I, we have a history. I want to make you my personal courier.”
Lock blinked several times. He swallowed and choked on his own spit, so dry was his mouth that it hitched in his throat. He’d been expecting pain and then darkness. Not a job offer.
“You would have every asset you required. Every comfort! I would say you could name your price, if I thought money mattered to you. Instead I will offer you a chance to become a historical figure. One of a very small number who gets a chance to knit together the future.”
Lock didn’t doubt the offer. He’d stopped questioning Mazaryk’s ability long ago, and for a moment he allowed himself to be pictured as Mazaryk said. He had an absurd vision of his old high school classmates reading about him in books, the ones who had laughed at him, the ones who had thought him strange. He imagined running and carving a wake for the rest of the world. He imagined himself frictionless, coasting forward, the mark of Black upon him, every door open.
But then he thought of Frank. He thought of the shaking thrill he got whenever the two of them made a breakthrough in this case, no matter how small. He thought of the eerie clarity that gripped him before he received a new assignment. He thought of how his stomach dropped at the unknown of it all, and he realized that was where his love of his job stemmed from. He wanted the current to fight against him. He wanted the friction. He wanted to knock down doors.
“Before you speak, know this,” said Mazaryk. “The alternative is banishment. Complete exile from the life you lead. Think carefully. I rarely give anyone second chances. Each is a gift.”
“You have quite a knack for making people believe that they are free to choose.”
Mazaryk smiled, red in the moonlight and flickering in the firelight. It was a terrifying smile.
“I’ll give you until the end of the moratorium. When the countdown ends, you must make your choice with the rest of them.”
Eddie Mazaryk again receded into the darkness and Lock was left alone in the shifting shadows with a glowing pager on the table in front of him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ELLIE WILLMORE HAD BEEN drunk only three times in her life. The first two times were at a family reunion. She availed herself of several glasses of wine, since nobody was looking her way. When nobody questioned why she stayed in her room all the next day, she got drunk again in the hopes it would make the reunion pass more quickly.
The third time Ellie was drunk it was because she had gone an entire day at school and when she got home she didn’t remember having a single conversation with anyone. She had to clear her throat at the drive-through when she placed her order for dinner. It was a Friday evening and she had nothing to do and felt dangerously aware of herself, of her thoughts and her breathing and her heartbeat as things that were finite and slipping away. So she went to her sister’s old soccer bag, where she found an ancient bottle of Schnapps that Kelly had forgotten about when she went back to college where, Ellie presumed, things like Schnapps rained from the sky for girls like Kelly. She took a quick slug and gagged, but forced herself forward until, after a time, she became euphoric on the sugar and the liquor. She walked upstairs from her room in the basement and spun silently on the carpet in the middle of the night.
The next morning Ellie could barely move.
She thanked God there was a bathroom in the basement. She felt like a fool for dancing though nobody was watching. She fought the hangover until around noon, when she gave up and fell asleep again until three in the afternoon. When she awoke this second time she felt the headache and the nausea as a muffled fog, like traces of a brash song on the wind, held at bay, but just barely.
That was how Ellie Willmore felt now, after taking Ian Finn’s serum. She’d fallen asleep again and when she awoke everything was at bay. Just barely.
Cy and Tom watched her warily, ready to catch her when she fell down, ready to hand the bed pan to her when her stomach rejected itself again. She looked at Cy and at Tom and then over to Pyper, who stood up from the couch, and finally to Ian, who stood in front of her, studying her.
“Get your shit together,” she said, her voice scratchy but sure. “We’re going back to Mexico.”
————
This time when she walked to the gates of the Diego compound she was flanked at every angle and everyone had guns out. This early in the morning there were very few Gamers at the base camp outside of the fence. This time she surprised the press, or what was left of the group that had arrived with them the first time: eight vans and a handful of field reporters. This time, when she reached the gate, she didn’t have to knock. The gate swung open and out walked Diego Vega himself, Ortiz and Lilia Alvarez on either wing. They didn’t shy away from any camera, and the flashbulbs, although fewer, lit the gloaming around them like ground lightning. Diego spoke and Ortiz translated.
“You should be under,” Ortiz said, letting Diego finish.
“Yes I should,” said Ellie.
“How?”
“Blood and sweat.”
Ortiz translated and Diego eyed her under the brim of his hat.
“He says you look different,” said Ortiz. “That you have a touch of... here we call it cambiaformas, it means a—”
“—shape shifter,” said Lilia, cocking an eye at Ellie.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 80