by Gina Damico
His face lit up as an idea struck. “I’ll follow her!”
“What?” Lex said.
“You guys keep going up to the top,” Driggs said, now animated. “I’ll go back and make sure they don’t do anything to Elysia. I’ll stay as transparent as I can and keep an eye on her. If they try to hurt her, I’ll—you know.” He shrugged. “Go solid and kick some ass.”
Lex just stared at him. “Go solid and kick some ass? That’s your plan?”
“I didn’t say it was a good plan,” he said, shame creeping up his neck. “Obviously I can’t stay that way for very long anyway, but I might as well at least try to use this rotten superpower for good.”
Lex lowered her voice, all too aware that everyone was listening to them, but needing to say it anyway. “I don’t want to split up,” she insisted.
“Neither do I, but come on, Lex. You know this is the right call. You’re worried about her too, and she has stuck by you all this time, and . . .”
He didn’t have to say it. Lex owed her.
She looked at Ferbus, who was staring at the two of them with his arms crossed, his eyes red. Every time she blinked, she saw Elysia’s face again, desperate, scared.
“Okay,” Lex told Driggs. “Go. But please, please, don’t get yourself killed.”
He smirked. “Again.”
Lex rolled her eyes as he sank into the floor. “See you at the top,” he said with a wave—and then he was gone.
Once Uncle Mort finished bandaging Pandora’s leg, he stood up and pointed his flashlight down the hallway. “Come on, kids. Last push to the end.”
As they followed him, Lex tried to focus on one goal: getting to the president’s office. That was all they had to do. But her hand kept opening and closing involuntarily, as if searching for Driggs’s.
Before long, they turned a corner and spotted a door. As soon as they reached it, the fluorescent lights went out.
Followed by Uncle Mort’s flashlight.
They stood there in the dark, the only sound that of their heavy breathing. “What’s going on?” asked Ferbus.
“The training program is starting,” Uncle Mort answered. “Stand back. And be prepared for anything.”
The door opened.
A wall of solid flame jumped out.
14
It’s not that the Juniors of Croak were poorly trained. It’s just that Uncle Mort came from more of a throw-the-kid-in-the-water-until-it-either-learns-to-swim-or-drowns school of thought.
Evidently, those in charge of training the Juniors in Necropolis thought otherwise. Evidently, they thought that the best way to prepare their Juniors for the sort of horrific extremes they might encounter during their shifts—fires, drowning, plane crashes—was to put them through a series of highly realistic simulations in the hopes that they would eventually learn to stay calm under all kinds of duress.
As if the Croakers weren’t running low on duress as it was.
The moment they’d walked through the doorway, their scythes had vibrated in their hands like video-game controllers. The farther into the room they went, the taller the flames grew.
“Just keep going,” Uncle Mort said as the crew was bathed in another wave of intense heat. “It’s the same as being out on a shift. You guys have got this.”
Somewhere inside Lex, beneath the terror and guilt and general shititude she felt during every waking moment of her life now, she felt a sting of annoyance toward her uncle. Especially when she unfondly recalled the first time she’d been sent to an extreme target, and how massively underprepared she’d been for what she’d encountered. And so, as she ran through the room of fire, spurts of lava spouting left and right, above and below, she was conflicted. She was not particularly enjoying this little sprint through the bowels of hell . . .
. . . but she couldn’t deny that it would have been beneficial.
“There!” Uncle Mort shouted, pointing through the flames at a lump propped up against the wall. “That’s our target!” They dodged more spurts to get to the other side of the room, only to find that said lump was a human body, its skin blistered and burned.
But Lex had seen enough burn victims to know that they didn’t look quite as melty as this, and they certainly didn’t exude the smell of petroleum. The body was fake.
Fake, perhaps—but still technologically advanced. “We have to touch it, all of us,” Uncle Mort told them.
As soon as they did, their scythes vibrated in their hands again. “What the—” Ferbus said.
“Scythe,” Uncle Mort instructed. Shrugging, they tore their scythes through the air, just as they did out on their shifts when jumping from target to target. “We just leveled up.”
***
They were immediately taken to the next room—a jarring sensation, considering that they were so used to being launched into the swirling ether between targets.
They looked at the plain steel walls. “What’s this one?” asked Pip, staying as still as the rest of them. “I don’t see anything.”
“Best just to keep plowing forward, then,” said Uncle Mort. He took a step—
But his foot never touched the ground.
“Ah, weightlessness,” he said matter-of-factly, hovering a few feet off the floor. “Been there, done that, right?”
Lex took a step and lifted into the air, half enjoying the queasy feeling of her stomach floating around inside her body, half hating the memory of her first extreme—when she’d been forced to hang helplessly in the air thousands of feet above the ground to Kill the victims of a plane explosion.
They started to move across the room in a sort of swimming motion, relaxing as they went. This wasn’t scary. Just weird.
“I don’t get it,” Lex said to Uncle Mort, propelling herself through the air. “Why all these elaborate simulations? And why are the targets so far away from the starting point? When we scythe in to actual targets, they’re always right there in front of us. And time is frozen—and our hoodies protect us from the elements—so why use real fire, real everything?”
“Because the human mind is a tricky little bastard,” Uncle Mort said. “When Grims are thrown into scary situations, their brains still tell them to panic, despite the fact that there is really no need. If the training procedures force you to concentrate on the task at hand while being bombarded with danger from every direction, you’ll be all the more levelheaded when you’re actually in a safe environment.”
“Ah. That makes sense, I guess.”
“Of course it does. I came up with it.”
“With what?”
He gestured at their surroundings. “This.”
“Wait, wait,” said Ferbus. “You designed this?”
“Designed it, no. I don’t know what kind of situations these sadistic Necropolitans have cooked up in the time since I first mentioned it. But it was my idea to establish a training program in the first place.”
“Then why don’t we have one in Croak?” Lex asked.
“We do.” He smirked. “You’re looking at him.”
Grimacing, Lex followed as they floated toward the target, a body limply suspended in space. She jabbed her finger into its forehead and even took a moment to appreciate that for the first time in her career as a Grim, she was touching targets without shocks tearing through her body.
To her surprise, she missed them.
***
The blast of cold air that met them next felt heavenly . . . then a bit too chilly . . . then downright excruciating.
Lex concentrated on placing her foot down without slipping on the sheet of smooth, mirrorlike ice. The incline hadn’t been as noticeable in the fire or the weightless rooms, but in here it was obvious: the floor sloped upward and curved to the right, spiraling around the center of the building just as Skyla had described. They were corkscrewing their way up to the top, one vile room at a time.
“Can we—actually—get hurt—in here?” Lex asked through chattering teeth.
“Under
normal training simulation conditions, no,” Uncle Mort answered. “The system adjusts itself based on your performance. If you’re doing badly, it goes easy on you; if you’re doing well, it gets more challenging. Normally there are systems in place to prevent it from getting too dangerous, but you heard Skyla—they’re cranking it all the way up, just for us. So I can only assume that they’ve turned those safeguards off.”
“One can’t help but wonder—if Croak had implemented similar training exercises instead of its delightful learn-as-you-go approach, might we all be better prepared for this little journey of death?”
“Oh, but then we’d have nothing to argue about right now,” Uncle Mort said, breath steaming out of his mouth. “And arguing keeps the blood flowing. So in a way, I’ve saved your lives.”
“Thanks. We’ll chip in for a gift card.”
The icy subzero room took much longer to get through—any false step and they’d tumble down the slope to the bottom and have to start over again—but they all managed to make it to the target.
“Lex, come on,” Uncle Mort said. He and the others already had their hands on the body, but Lex had recoiled at the sight of its frozen hair.
“Oh.” Uncle Mort realized his error. “Sorry, kiddo.”
Keeping her eyes trained on the floor, she jabbed her finger into the dummy with a wince. She missed Driggs more and more with each passing step, yet she said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn’t had to flirt with yet another bout of hypothermia.
***
They landed next on a bed of sand. Lex lifted her head. “What—”
She didn’t get to finish; the water swept over her so quickly it drowned the thoughts right out of her head. She found herself in a swirl of red, underwater, face-to-face with a great white shark.
She forced herself to calm down. Panicking was useless. The shark wasn’t real. None of this was real, except for the water. And she knew how to swim. She’d find the target soon enough, or one of the others would.
But the fear continued to pound as she thrashed. She looked at the direction she thought was up, wondering if there would be space to breathe if she swam to the surface . . .
Or maybe there was no surface. Maybe the water went all the way to the ceiling. Maybe the authorities were trying to drown them.
At this thought, panic really did start to set in. Her lungs and her mind were both screaming, her hair drifting into her face as she whipped her head back and forth, looking for the target, looking for escape.
Driggs’s face swam through her memory. What would he say in this situation?
Probably: Relax, spaz.
I can’t relax, Lex told her hallucination. I’m going to drown, and for all I know, you might be dead already, and we never got the chance to say goodbye, and—
Someone yanked on her elbow. With a great deal of effort she squinted through the water, through the big cloud of bubbles and puffy hair, to see Bang pulling the target toward her, tapping it to her hand.
***
Lex landed on her stomach, rough stone scratching through her clothes. When she tried to get up, she banged her head. Light came from a few small bulbs set into the stone, but only enough to give her the vaguest idea of where they were: a tiny, cramped cave.
“Well,” said Ferbus in a light voice. “This is terrifying.”
None of them could stand up straight. They could barely move; in some places there was enough room to crawl, in others all they could do was wriggle forward on their elbows.
“Target’s gotta be that way,” Uncle Mort said, pointing down a narrow passage. His voice was much less calm and collected than it had been before. In fact, he sounded downright scared. “Hope none of you are claustrophobic.”
One couldn’t help but be claustrophobic under these harrowing circumstances, but the faster they moved, the faster they could get out of there. They pulled themselves forward, desperately digging their fingernails into the jagged rock, scraping their skin—
BOOM!
A blisteringly loud noise rattled through the cave, vibrating the walls. Small pieces of rock clattered to the ground, and for a moment, everything was silent.
“What was that?” Lex said in a throaty voice, her nasal passages still stinging from the water.
Frantic, Uncle Mort scanned the walls. His face fell as he spotted something. “This isn’t a cave.” He stuck his finger into a small, perfectly circular hole drilled into the wall. “It’s a mine.”
“You mean—that blast was an explosion?”
They looked at one another for a moment, then scrambled for the exit, faster than before, their minds a blur as they groped for the target, wherever it was—
“I see it!” Uncle Mort said from up ahead. “Just a few more feet!”
Lex hurried faster but stopped when she heard something.
A faint ticking sound.
Ferbus heard it too. He slowed down to feel around the walls, sticking his finger into another drilled hole right next to his head.
“Oh God,” said Lex.
Ferbus set a grim look of determination and covered the hole with his hand. “Go around me.”
“Ferb, don’t—”
BOOM!
Lex couldn’t see or hear anything after that. She just lay on her back and stared blindly at the top of the cave, her scythe limply resting in her palm.
But something was moving. Uncle Mort was shoving the target toward them, brushing it up against their fingers.
Lex’s scythe vibrated. Slowly, and wondering why in the hell she should even bother, she jerked it through the air.
***
Her hearing was back. Her sight was back.
But Ferbus’s left hand was gone.
Or mostly gone. He stared at the bloody shards at the end of his wrist, his face blank and confused. “I tried to block the hole,” he said in an amused voice.
“He’s in shock,” Uncle Mort said to the others, snapping into crisis mode. He took off his belt, wrapped it around Ferbus’s forearm just below his elbow, and pulled it tight.
Ferbus’s breathing was getting heavier the more he stared at what was left of his hand, so Lex delicately hugged him around the shoulders. He flinched at her touch, then stared into her eyes, insistent. “I tried to block the hole.”
“And probably saved us all,” she said, swallowing. “Good job, Ferb. You win an extra life.”
He puffed out a breath of air, which Lex guessed was a sort of laugh. Appropriate, really. This entire situation was downright hilarious.
“Are we done yet?” Pip asked.
Lex realized with a start that they’d been inside the new room for at least thirty seconds, yet nothing had tried to kill them. “We’re not done,” Uncle Mort said, looking around. “This is the last room, I think.”
Indeed, the floor was no longer sloped; it had leveled out into a perfectly circular room about a hundred feet in diameter. The floor was covered in a checkered pattern, with alternating dark and light steel square panels, as if it were one big chessboard. The Croakers stood on a raised white platform against the wall, and the target lay a few feet in front of them.
A large pole in the center stretched all the way up to the ceiling, ending in a glow of buzzing fluorescent lights. “Elevator shaft,” Uncle Mort said, pointing at it. “If we can get inside that, it’s a straight shot up to the president’s office.”
“Okay,” said Lex, starting to walk forward toward the target. “Then all we have to do is—”
“Wait.” Uncle Mort threw his arm out in front of her. “Don’t move. There’s got to be more to this.”
They waited for a whole minute, but nothing happened. The fake target lay still in front of them. Nothing else in the room moved, either. The only sounds were the hum of fluorescent lights and the drops of Ferbus’s blood hitting the platform.
Lex stared at the pool of dark red forming on the polished white surface, Ferbus swaying beside it, and made a decision. “No,” she said. “We don
’t have time.”
Ignoring Uncle Mort’s glower of disapproval, she rushed forward and pushed her fingers into the target’s cheek.
The lights went out.
Mechanical noise filled the room, the sounds of things moving—robotic things, some kind of machinery. A liquid splashing, too. The crew stayed frozen on the platform, waiting.
After ten seconds the lights came back on. Six new targets lay scattered on different squares throughout the space, but most of the other squares had disappeared, leaving gaping black holes in their wake.
“It’s a multiple,” Uncle Mort said, taking stock of the numerous targets. “One for each of us.” He peered down into one of the holes left by the absent panels. “Elixir,” he said, frowning. “Two, maybe three feet deep.”
“That’s not so bad!” said Pip.
“With all the cuts and scrapes we have?” All of them were bleeding from one spot or another, some more than others. “It’d go straight into our bloodstream. We’d die within seconds. It’s disorienting enough as it is airborne, in large concentrations like this.” He looked up. “We’re not going to last very long in here.”
Yet their scythes still vibrated in their hands, insisting that they try.
Each of them landed on a different square in the room, little islands in the sea of Elixir. In every case, however, their targets sat a couple of squares away, with nothing but Elixir below. They’d have to jump for them.
“Shitballs,” Lex said.
Pip was the first to leap, ever eager at the chance to flex those agile muscles of his. Bang quickly hopped to her target as well, followed by Uncle Mort. Ferbus still looked stoned, but he managed to rally enough to successfully fling himself over the gap. For a second Lex worried about Pandora, but the woman pounced across the panels like a grasshopper.
Lex, of course, was the only one who tended to crash through life without a hint of balance or grace. The one she should really be worried about was herself.
She swallowed. Her target was on a square platform to her left. A six-foot-wide gulf stretched between them, the Elixir sloshing calmly below. There was no way she’d be able to jump that far, especially without a running start.