The Arena

by Bradford Bates

  It had finally happened: I had left the realm of the sane. Now I was starting to think that the things I was seeing were real. That’s how you finally lose it; one day you know you are crazy, and the next day you think it is the rest of the world.

  Still confused about my last conversation with Alby, I kept trying to call her. She never picked up the phone, and I could feel my frustration building. The energy inside of me kept building as well. I was now running twelve miles a day, a freaking half marathon. At the end of the day, I still couldn’t sleep. In desperation, I called Alby one last time, hoping that she might have the answer. She didn’t pick up.

  I did the only thing I could do. I went for a run. This time the goal was simply to burn as much energy as possible, to run for as long as I could. Instead of my normal six-mile loop, I mapped out a twenty-mile there and back. Yep, I was about to try and run twenty miles in the hundred-plus-degree summer. If that couldn’t take the edge off, nothing would.

  I was about three miles into my run when my cell rang. A quick look at the screen let me know it was Alby. I was half tempted to not pick it up, but God, I missed her. I walked off to find a shady spot and accepted the call.

  “It’s good to hear from you, Alby.”

  There was a drawn-out silence before she answered. “God, Jackson, could you not take a hint? I can’t talk to you anymore.”

  “I know I scared you the other night when I said those things, but please, Alby, you’re my best friend, my only friend.”

  There was another long silence. It felt like an eternity before she answered. “I just can’t, ok? I’m sorry.”

  “Just tell me why.”

  This time there was no pause, which was almost worse. “Cause you are one of them.”

  I was starting to feel desperate now. “One of who, Alby? What are you talking about?”

  This time she sounded sad when she said it. “Ask your parents.”

  The line went dead.

  I was left with more questions than answers, but at least I had someone I could ask. Hopefully they would know just what was going on. I still needed the run, but it would have to wait until I found out just what was happening. Hopefully my parents had some kind of answers for me. I turned around and started to sprint home.

  The run home was the fastest three miles I had ever run. Thoughts seemed to be springing up from nowhere; they all seemed to be hitting me at once. What am I? What are you? What the hell is going on? Each of those questions burned in my mind; each one filled my steps with speed that I hadn’t felt before. I burst through the door and shouted, “Mom, Dad, we need to talk!”

  They rushed into the kitchen, obviously thinking something was wrong. They came in so fast, I almost dropped the Gatorade I was pulling from the fridge.

  My dad spoke first. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  I looked at him and didn’t know what to say; standing there now in the kitchen, this seemed like a mistake. What if Alby had just been pulling my leg, and telling them about what had been happening to me only made things worse? The words caught in my throat. Finally I managed to get them out. I started at the beginning, back when I first started seeing things, and ended with my conversation with Alby.

  My parents shared a look with each other that only confirmed my suspicions. They knew what was happening, but why hadn’t they told me? What could they possibly be hiding from me?

  It was my Dad who spoke first. “We were never sure this day would come, and if it did, we kept hoping it wouldn’t be so soon. There is a lot we need to talk about, a lot of things we probably should have told you about sooner. Jackson, you are one of the Gifted, born with the ability to control magic.”

  Now I knew something was up. Seeing weird things maybe could be hereditary. I thought maybe they saw them too, or maybe we were seeing something that other people couldn’t, like hidden races. But magic? That was a little far out, even for me. I had never done anything magical. Even Harry Potter started before eighteen. “Come on, Dad, you are pulling my leg. Did Alby put you up to this?”

  He smiled and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “So you can see her, see what she really is?”

  I took a step back, my back bumping into the fridge. “What do you mean, what she really is?”

  Another look crossed between them, and this time my mom answered. “Jackson, she is one of the Fae.”

  I knew they just had to be joking now. I slapped a big grin on my face. “She sure doesn’t look like a fairy.”

  This time it was my dad who answered. “Son, are you telling me you didn’t see the marks on her back? She is definitely one of them, and not all of them are fairies with wings. In fact, some of them can be downright scary.”

  Now I was pretty confused, but it was starting to sink in a bit. “Why would she stop talking to me if I told her that I can see her?”

  Both of them shared another look, this time looking a little worried. My dad spoke again. “Jackson, this is very important: do you think she told her family about what you said?”

  Now I was really confused. “Why would it matter if she told them? It was a little strange that her uncle paid me for the rest of the summer after he fired me. I just chalked that up to Alby working her magic. God knows she has done it to me enough times.”

  They shared another quick look between them. My mom spoke fast, almost frantically. “We have to go now!”

  I was not sure what was going on, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I got some answers. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what is going on!” I shouted back.

  My dad reached out and tried to grab my shoulder. I spun around and ran out the front door. I could hear them calling after me, but I didn’t care. I just needed some time to think. I jumped in my car and took off. I wasn’t even sure where I was going until I got there. When I pulled into the parking lot, it was almost deserted. Not too many people decided that going for a hike in the middle of the day when it was over a hundred degrees was a good idea. I checked the back of the car for some water. I had a few bottles tucked away in the corner. They were warm, but they were going to do in a pinch. I poured the water into my CamelBak and then finished off the rest of my Gatorade. That should be enough for what I had in mind. With my gear on, I headed for the trails, hoping that the heat and the hike would help me clear my head.

  Once I cleared the initial hill, the hiking trail evened out. This was one of my favorite places to run even in the summer. I started jogging, hoping that I could figure out what was going on. Something in me burst, and I could feel all that pent-up energy fighting to get out. Not knowing what else to do, I ran faster and faster. Nothing seemed to be able to curb the flow of energy coming from my core. I had been running at a full sprint for over ten minutes now, something that should have been nearly impossible. I didn’t know what to do; it was like something inside of me flipped the on switch.

  Searing pain ripped through my head, bringing my sprint to a stop. I wasn’t even winded. How was any of this possible? The pain ripped through my mind again, this time so strong it brought me to my knees. I looked up into the sky and screamed for it to stop. The pain was unbearable. I felt it start in the rest of my body; there was this tiny little tingling sensation. Then it started to become more intense. It felt like I had a massive cramp in every muscle of my body. All of my muscles went rigid at once. The energy was trying to rip its way out of me. I screamed again and watched as a blue light burst from my body. Then everything went black.

  When I came to, it was sometime in the early morning. The cool desert air prickled against my skin. The tiniest bit of humidity hung in the air. The sandy ground was cold except for where my body had kept the heat in. I felt normal again; I felt like myself. I stood up and started to wobble just a bit. My legs weren’t ready to support me. The sprint from the day before had taken its toll on my body. With the endless fountain of energy gone, it was going to be up to me to get back to the car. Every muscle in my body ached as though it had been thro
ugh the most intense workout ever.

  Once my legs started to feel a little bit more solid underneath me, I could finally look around and try and figure out just where I had ended up. Horror movies started like this; waking up alone in the desert without a good sense of direction was never a good thing. I needed to figure out which way it was back to my car. My parents must be freaking out. I had been gone all night without calling, after basically running away from them.

  Finally deciding on the direction to go, I let my eyes fall to the ground in my immediate vicinity. There was something wrong with what I was looking at. It just didn’t make sense to me in the slightest. I was standing in a small space of the normal desert ground; the sand was soft, and weeds poked intermittently through the surface. The circle was probably just a little bit larger than how I found myself lying when I woke up. Outside of this circle was where my mind started having problems justifying what it was seeing.

  Outside of my small circle of normalcy was a larger ring. In the fifteen-foot ring around me, the earth was devoid of all life. It had been charred and burned until nothing was left. When I say nothing, I mean it: absolutely nothing. Not even ashes from the plants that would have been burned by whatever happened. The black circle was so complete, its surface was smooth and shiny. There was no way to get back to my car without walking across the black void I had somehow created. With no other options, I took my first tentative step out onto the black surface.

  My breath caught in my lungs as my foot came down on the black sheet of sand for the first time. The surface cracked under the weight of my foot almost as if I had stepped out on a thin layer of ice. People think of Tucson as only a place that is always really hot. That isn’t always the case. It snowed once when I was a kid. Craziest thing I have ever seen, snow in the desert. But we had a lot of mornings in the winter where the temp dipped just enough to form little ice sheets over the puddles made from the sprinklers. It felt like that when I stepped on the crack, just a film of ice covering the water from the sprinklers, except in this case, it happened to be normal sand that found its way out through the spider-webbing cracks made from my steps.

  As I continued to walk across the circle, each of my steps cracked the black surface just enough to show the untouched sand beneath it. When I finally reached the end of the circle and was standing firmly on the normal desert ground, I turned back to take a second look at what I had just walked on. Kneeling down to examine the edge of the circle and the realization of what had happened hit me like a truck. It wasn’t some kind of toxic spill, or even something that could still hurt me. The energy that I had released from inside of me had superheated the sand. The flames had burned so hot and so fast that the sand had turned to glass. I broke off a small piece to show my parents and started the long jog back to my car.

  During my jog, I started to wonder, what if this had happened while I was at home? I could have killed someone. Then it dawned on me, this had already happened at home. I needed to get back home fast. My parents needed to understand that it wasn’t safe to be around me. What if this happened again when I was sleeping, or if I got mad when I died playing a video game? What if I could never control it? There was no way I could put my family in that kind of constant danger.

  It took me four times as long to reach my car as it did to get out to where I had slept. The shuffling, cramping jog got the job done, but I was sure it didn’t look very pretty. Hey, as long as I made it back to my car, it really didn’t matter. The fatigue from yesterday’s wild run was taking its toll on me. It kind of felt good to be tired. This was the first time in months I had not been full of energy since the moment I woke up. Whatever that blast was, it had done what I needed it to do. I finally felt normal again.

  When I reached my car, I opened the door and sat down. It felt good to sit down. Really, really good. Every muscle in my body was sore. Now that I was sitting, my stomach started to growl. It dawned on me that I hadn’t had anything to eat in almost a day. That was something that almost never happened. I loved to eat. I was the kind of guy who liked a big breakfast, followed by an even bigger dinner. I dug into the pocket of my CamelBak and found a PowerBar. I wolfed it down in three bites, and with the help of some water, I started to feel a little bit better. The food helped to settle some of my nerves, and the water helped ease some of my muscle tension.

  I put my keys into the ignition, ready to go home. The conversation that waited for me when I walked in the door wasn’t going to be fun, but it would be interesting. I hadn’t stayed out all night without calling my parents ever. I started to play out different scenarios in my mind about how that conversation would go. “Where were you last night!” “Oh, just burning a fifteen-foot ring of sand to glass, you know, the usual.” I laughed out loud, and some of the stress rolled off my shoulders. That was when I noticed the note placed under one of my windshield wipers.

  I looked around; the parking lot was still deserted. Apparently almost ninety-degree mornings with high humidity also kept the hikers away. That also meant whoever left the note was long gone. I finally found enough courage to stand up and get the note. Something inside of me begged me not to get up, to just start my car and go home. Something else inside of me wondered who would have put a note on my car way out here; I had to know what it said. Hopefully curiosity wouldn’t kill the cat. I plucked the note from under the wiper and sighed with relief as I slumped back into my seat. The front of the note said, “Jackson, I love you, Dad.”

  I wondered when this note was written. It didn’t look like my dad’s normal handwriting. Could your writing change that much in the course of a few years? Calling his handwriting messy would be an insult to messy people everywhere. This handwriting was pristine, almost as if it had been written by someone from a different era. There was nothing to do now but open it and find out what it said.

  I exhaled and slid my thumb through the top of the letter and opened it. There was a moment when I pulled out the folded letter that I thought about stuffing it back into the envelope and heading home. I had to read the first few lines more than once for the meaning to settle in. So it did turn out that even when waking up in the desert with no recollection of what happened, your day could still get worse.

  “Jackson, my son, if you are reading this, then the worst has happened and I am no longer around to tell you this myself. You were born with a gift. Being one of the Gifted is a great responsibility. Our family has worked with the Ascendancy to ensure humanity’s safety for hundreds of years. This responsibility now passes on to you. Pete and his wife, Nina, were entrusted to take care of you if anything ever happened to us. I hope that you have grown up well and they have been kind. I know this is probably too much to take in now, but I have left some of our belongings with Pete that may help to explain a little more of what has happened. Your life is about to change, son. As one of the Gifted, you may not lead a normal life, but you will lead an exceptional one.”

  I almost couldn’t believe what I was reading. If my parents hadn’t told me just enough before I left, I would have thought I was trapped in an elaborate hoax.

  The letter continued.

  “Because of your mother’s nature, it was not a sure thing that you would be blessed with the gift. We asked Pete to wait until you showed the signs before speaking with you about it. Please do not look unkindly on him for following our instructions. You may be asked to do things that you do not understand; please listen to what Pete tells you. There is a plan in place to keep you safe and keep you away from our enemies. Once you have awakened, the Council will be coming for you. Our only hope is that Pete will be able to get you to the Ascendancy before the Council finds you. I wish I could tell you more, but time is now your enemy.”

  It was signed, “We will always love you.” I felt a hitch in my chest and I stopped breathing. My son, what in the heck did that mean? I was sure my Dad did not write this letter. So who was the man who raised me? Who was the man who wrote this letter? I had to get home and talk wit
h my parents and figure this whole thing out. Could the letter be more cryptic? You have a new dad but he is dead, your life will change, it is your duty to protect humanity, and oh yeah, you’re Gifted. What in the hell did that even mean?

  I hoped when I got home I would finally start to get some real answers and not any more of the we need to leave right now crap. It was time to have a serious talk about what had happened, and what was going to happen. I would not be taking no for answer. It was time to go all in, to jump down the rabbit hole. It was time to find out why the insane was possible, and why it happened to me.

  In other words, I’d just swallowed the red pill. I hoped to wake up in a better place than Keanu did.

  4

  Jackson

  When I pulled up to the house, there was a burst of activity. My mom and dad came rushing from the front of the house, and as I jumped out of the car, I was wrapped up in a huge double hug. I felt a rough kiss on the top of my head. A smile broke out on my face. I couldn’t help it. If anything, I had expected to be yelled at. Instead, they just welcomed me home.

  My dad then pushed me back, holding me at shoulder length. “Did you get the letter?”

  I couldn’t speak, so I just nodded my head. His eyes were red and swollen. He must have been crying for a while before I got here. Mom didn’t look much better. Both of them looked nervous and ready to run. They must have still been on edge about what I told Alby. Maybe now I would finally find out why. I didn’t ask him how he knew where my car was or why he left the letter. It didn’t matter. Right now I was just happy to be home. My parents must have been feeling the same way. It was a lot for all of us to process.

  My dad rubbed his eyes and smiled. “It’s good to have you back, son.” The word son hung in the air between us. He placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Go inside, get cleaned up, and when you’re ready, come downstairs. I think a big breakfast and a talk is in order. I’ve left a few of your father’s things in your room.”