by Azalea Ellis
I stood without his help and prepared for his attack once again. A giddy feeling rose within me, a mix of fierce competitiveness and laughter. I breathed deeply and focused on him.
He lunged, and I followed each subtle movement he made, how far his steps took him, and where he slipped his leg behind my own.
The world tilted in a way that was becoming familiar as my feet were ripped from under me. He thrust his good hand at my face to smash my head toward the ground. It would have been a devastating move if there weren’t thick padding below us.
I grabbed his wrist in both of mine and pulled my legs toward my chest as I fell, tucking my head forward so it didn’t land first. When my back hit the mat, I slammed my legs forward into Adam’s chest and pushed upward, using my grip on his arm to swing him over my head and smash him full length onto the mat behind me. As he hit, I released his arm and used my backwards momentum to flip onto my hands and knees. I crouched by his head and snapped my hand to his unprotected neck.
Everything was still except for his heartbeat thumping against my fingers, and after a moment I realized I was panting as if I’d just run a race. Somehow my claws were out, pressed against the skin of his throat. I stood, forced my claws back, and held out a hand to help him up. “Sorry about the claws. I got a little carried away.”
He stared up at me, then slowly grabbed my hand and allowed himself to be helped up.
“Holy…crap,” Sam said from the sidelines.
Jacky walked over and smacked me hard on the back with a grin. “Seems you’re a bit of a natural. Quick to acclimate.”
Adam started to laugh. “That was amazing. Let’s go again.”
After that, Adam wasn’t so careless and didn’t try to throw me again. Instead, he danced around and jabbed at me, light taps on various exposed areas that I knew would have quickly left me dead if he had one of his butterfly knives in his hand.
I tried to learn from his movements, and by the end of our sparring match we were both dripping sweat onto the mat, and I’d gotten a few taps of my own in.
* * *
“Hey, Sam,” I called. “Do you think you could help me out? I think I tweaked my neck a bit.” I rubbed the completely uninjured muscles.
He gave an innocent nod, “Sure,” and followed me to a corner of the room. He put a hand on my neck, then shifted it around and frowned. “I don’t sense anything. Where does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t,” I murmured to him in a low voice. Only China would have the hearing to make out our conversation, and a glance confirmed she was busy getting instruction from Jacky at the moment. “I just wanted to chat with you.”
“What’s wrong?” he whispered gravely.
“Nothing!” I chuckled. “I just wanted to talk about your Skill.”
“Oh.” That didn’t seem to reassure him.
“I know there’s something you held back when you were explaining. I respect your right to privacy, but as the team leader I can see some Game information on you, remember?” I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way. “Will you explain the Skill to me?”
His lips were white, but he nodded. “My Skill isn’t strictly for healing. It’s like a sick joke. Whatever I heal, my body assimilates and understands, to recycle as a morphed attack. And the more horrifying and twisted the injury, the better I learn it.”
I stared at him for a few minutes. “So…that paralyzing saliva?”
He nodded.
“Show me,” I commanded.
He hesitated, but placed his hands on the bare skin of my neck again. Almost immediately, my skin started to go numb. It wasn’t the same as the feeling of the grub-pug’s saliva. Sam’s version made me want to scratch and claw at the numb patch till I ripped it away.
“Okay!” I urged, and he touched my neck again, returning sensation to my skin and stopping the torture.
“Wow,” I said.
“That was mild. It gets worse. Way worse. This Skill is a punishment. I hate it.” He glared at his hands. “I don’t want to use it, Eve.” He looked up to meet my gaze.
“Not even against monsters? You’d fight them anyway, right? That’s a really great Skill, Sam, and if—”
“No! No, I don’t want to use it. Just like with any Skill, it gets stronger the more you use it. I’ll use the healing side, but as much as possible, I want to avoid making it even easier for me to kill someone. I won’t use it.”
I searched his eyes for a second and nodded.
“And…don’t tell the others?” he added hesitantly.
“You’re our healer, Sam.” When he didn’t pick up my meaning, I added, “And that’s it.”
He let out a sigh of relief, and we returned to the others.
Jacky set me up on one of the lighter punching bags and showed me a few simple combinations of punches and kicks she wanted me to practice until I could do them in my sleep. “Your fancy move back there might’a worked, but being efficient and effective is better than being flashy. When you’ve got these moves down by instinct, it reduces the chance of failure.”
She watched me till I started to get the hang of it, and then showed me how to hit with my elbow. “The elbow can do a lotta damage at close range. At the point you’re closest to the bag, start to add that into the combo.” Once again, she watched me attack the bag. “You need practice with combat. But even so, I would trust you to fight at my back.”
I grinned in surprise at the compliment, and used my shirt to wipe some sweat from my face. “You know, aren’t you supposed to start off training me with basic blocks and evasion? Defense first?”
She laughed and cracked her knuckles. “The best defense is an overwhelmingly powerful offense, I always say.”
With that, she left me to my practice. I alternated between starting the combo with my left and right hand, and repeated until my knuckles were raw and bleeding, my wrists wobbly and weak, and my shoulders felt like they were being ripped out of their sockets every time I moved my arms.
Sam placed a hand on the bag in front of my face to get my attention, and jerked his head to China standing on the mat. “Time for cool-down.”
China told us to follow her lead, then ran us through some seemingly easy movements that were in fact anything but easy. Something like yoga, mixed with a martial dance. Each movement was slow and controlled, and she watched us all in the mirrored wall across from the mat, correcting our form when needed.
I was shaking like I had a car battery attached to my central nervous system, and was deeply relieved when China finally had us sit down. We folded our legs, laid our hands on our laps, and closed our eyes. As I breathed deeply, I became aware of the blood rushing in my veins, and the air entering and leaving my lungs. The sweat on my skin was cool, and I could feel the currents of the air moving around me. Heat radiated off my flushed skin in waves. I focused harder, and realized I could hear the others breathing. I could smell their sweat mixed with the piney scent of the cleaning liquid we’d used all over the place. Outside, the wind blew gently. I knew because it made a low, smooth noise as it parted and cut around the corner of the house above. I reached farther all at once, and something different happened.
My eyes were closed, but whiteness fogged the backs of my eyelids. As I concentrated harder, it solidified. My body hurt with cold and fatigue. I felt something come alert then, and then a sense of amazement. My wrists and ankles started to hurt, and I realized that my body was yanking against something, though I wasn’t consciously moving it. The room around me shone with painfully bright light, and as my view changed, chunks of hair fell across my face and blocked some of it out. Dirty blonde hair, not my own almost black strands.
A deep, croaking voice spoke in a language I didn’t know, but that seemed familiar all the same. Adrenaline built until I couldn’t keep my concentration, and I felt my mind ripping away from that place despite something trying desperately to grab and keep me there.
My eyes opened and I jerked violently backward, an awkward h
alf-shout bursting out of me. I looked around at the familiar base again, and held my hands up in front of my face, moving them deliberately. I was there. I was me.
The others stared at me, and Sam said, “Are you okay?”
“Cramp?” Jacky asked sympathetically, stretching her own forearms. “Stretch it out.”
I shook my head. “No, I, um…” I swallowed and lost track of what I was saying for a moment when a window popped up, telling me I’d leveled up Perception and Focus. “I had a mini hallucination, or maybe…a dream? I couldn’t have fallen asleep in that amount of time, right? I saw a white room, and I couldn’t move my arms and legs…”
“You’re probably exhausted. You should go home and get some rest. We all should, actually. There’s only so much our bodies can take in one day,” Sam said.
My head pounded with a headache so strong it felt like something was literally pounding on the inside of my skull. “Yeah, you’re right.” I needed to be strong, not seem panicked and crazy. But I remembered where I’d heard that language before. It had sounded in my head when I was first made a Player. "I’m going to go get some juice. I think I might be a bit dehydrated.” Hey, it was probably true, judging from the amount I’d sweated out.
Instead of getting a drink, I plunked myself down in front of Blaine, who was scribbling formulas onto the screen of a glass pad in tiny, scrawling handwriting. “I need you to figure out what they put in my head, and what it’s doing to me. I just had a hallucination," I said.
He kept scribbling for a moment as if he hadn’t heard me, and just when I was about to repeat myself, he stopped writing, put the pen down, and said, “Great! I have been wanting to do more tests, but the others all seem a bit wary of me, and I haven’t been able to get a willing subject.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, remembering the two sharp pains I'd felt as they inserted something under my skin. "They put something at the base of my skull, and something else a little lower down. From what Bunny's told me, one's a virtual reality chip, and the other is probably a GPS tracker. Can you get them out?"
Blaine pushed his glasses up and walked away to grab some weird device from his supply closet. He mounted its two halves on my shoulders, on either side of my neck, and fiddled around behind me.
I felt a warmth, and then he put something sticky on either side of my neck, picked up a smartglass tablet from the table, and pulled up what looked kind of like an X-ray on its screen, except I could see shooting pulses of energy moving along my spine and into my brain.
"Like you stated, there is one at the base of your skull, and one a little lower down." He pointed to two different spots of discoloration, then pinched and flicked at the screen, and the picture zoomed in to the base of my skull.
A little spider-like thing nestled there, except it had too many legs to be a spider, they were too long, and each of them was digging upward into the base of my brain.
I swallowed.
"I am assuming this would be the Virtual Reality chip. Of course, it is not fully integrated, but those tendrils likely extend into your visual cortex, which is what allows you to see the Game windows," he said.
"Can you get it out?"
"Not without risking serious damage to your brain and spine. It has embedded itself like a tick. Honestly, I doubt you will ever be free of it."
"Well, could you just kill it, then?"
"It is attached to your brain, and has a power source strong enough to control your visual cortex. If I were to risk doing anything to it, I could damage your brain beyond repair. I am not a neurosurgeon, Eve. The most I could offer you would be a signal blocker between NIX and your brain, but I would need some time to make it work."
I lifted my hands and sent a blank message Window to Adam using my new Command Skill, and the nestled spider let out a flurry of small bright pulses.
Adam sent me a message back, and it pulsed again.
--IS EVERYTHING OKAY?--
-Adam-
"Did you just use the Game interface?"
I nodded.
"Well, that proves my theory." Blaine stood and returned quickly with another gadget, a bright smile on his face that kinda annoyed me, seeing as the situation was decidedly not cheerful.
Adam popped his head into the room. "What's going on?"
Blaine waved him over. "Oh, come look at this. We are scanning the implants NIX put into Eve. It is quite fascinating. Do it again, Eve," he said, stepping back and pointing a small curved satellite-like dish at me.
I sent Adam another message, and Blaine “oohed.”
"Interesting. The lower implant, which is definitely a GPS, is sending out timed pulses to nowhere, but I can also see the data transfer between you and Adam. Each of the chips must have some kind of local area wireless technology built in. I wonder if we might be able to do some tracking of this data between you and Bunny." Blaine lifted his head over the device and grinned at me.
That, I could see the cheer in.
We spent the next hour doing little tests on Adam and I, and Blaine came to the tentative conclusion that he might be able to create something to block Game interaction from NIX, while keeping the localized access between me and my team. As for the GPS, it was also imbedded into my spine, but not my brain, and though he didn't want to try and remove either of the implants, he thought he might be able to create a localized shock that would render the GPS useless without much damage to the rest of me.
But he had no idea what might have caused the hallucination, especially as the VR chip wasn't connected to my auditory cortex, and I knew I'd heard things. He hypothesized my problem was too much stress and extended physical and emotional trauma, and seconded Sam's advice to get some rest.
After a while, our resident scientist sat down and began to draw diagrams and make notes to himself while glancing at the videos he'd taken through the gadgets on my neck.
“Do you need a ride home? You ran here again, right? I can take you on my bike," Adam offered. "I have a feeling you'd get a few feet past the door and collapse, in the state you're in."
My eyes widened at the offer. I must look even worse than I felt. But riding home while someone else drove sounded wonderful. No thinking, no moving. “Yes, thank you. That would be great."
“Okay. Wait here while I get my stuff.”
When we were alone, I turned to Blaine. “What plans do you have in place to keep yourself safe if you were ever able to save your niece and nephew from NIX?”
He stared at me from behind his glasses, but then his surprise faded away and he started to talk. We laid plans for a few minutes until Adam poked his head back through the doorway and told me he was ready to leave.
I stood up and made my trembling way to the door. I needed to rest, and then try for a repeat of the hallucination, if that was what it was. I could feel it was significant, and I needed to find out exactly why I believed that.
Log of Captivity 3
Mental Log of Captivity-Estimated Day: Two thousand, six hundred eleven.
I do not know how, but my master reached out to me today, as I have been doing to her, though the blood-covenant is still incomplete. She touched my mind, fairly skin-jacked me! It was only for a moment, and then she withdrew, but I am filled to bursting with these strange feelings I barely remember. Pride and happiness fill me, because I know she is in this way acknowledging our blood-covenant. A Matrix has accepted me, and I can only be selfishly grateful that she must be still too young to know the worth of her bond.
Chapter 18
I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.
— Michael Ondaatje
I spent the next few days worrying fruitlessly about Zed, sparring, endlessly smashing different parts of my body against the unfeeling sandbag till I felt like I would fall apart, learning how to throw knives and darts from China, and then trying to reach that hyper-aware state again. I gained points in Focus from trying so hard, but had no luck. I did level up and gain several other At
tribute points through the sheer amount of work I was putting in, so my efforts weren’t completely fruitless.
On the tenth day, we gathered in the base and waited for the Trial to start. I’d told Blaine about the video I’d taken of my teleportation and asked him to monitor and study our disappearance. We were attached to wireless biometric monitors and under the watch of high frame rate cameras. Tension filled every corner of the room as we anticipated what was to come, checked and rechecked our equipment, and tried in vain to relax.
Finally, after hours of my understandably fruitless attempts to meditate, the Boneshaker played. The five of us gathered together, and left together.
My knees tried to buckle under the sudden added weight after the transfer, but I was prepared, and controlled them. My stomach roiled, and I took a deep breath of the strangely flavored air.
We were all standing together, as we had been. I turned in a circle, looking around. Under my feet lay black, granite-looking stone, reaching far and unbroken in every direction until it met with what looked to be a waterfall reaching into the sky. It was almost as if someone had placed us upside down on a huge black penny, turned on the sink, and placed us under a running faucet. I squinted my eyes, but the light was dim, and I couldn’t tell for sure if the substance that surrounded this huge black disk in a shimmering tube was indeed water.
It wasn’t what I was expecting. There was no greenery, no buildings, no rioting mass of strong colors and strange shapes. Ahead was the familiar black cube that always welcomed us to a Trial, but with a little extra.
HERE YOU WILL BE TRIED, YOUR MEASURE TAKEN. THE WORTHY WILL BE GRANTED THE POWER OF THE GODS.
TAKE YOUR PLACES ON THE BOARD.
Almost immediately, a timer appeared in front of my face, with a three-minute deadline. The other Players milled around the cube, speaking with despair tinged voices.
“What’s going on?” I asked aloud.
Adam’s voice was grim. “It’s going to be an Intelligence type Trial.” Something about his tone put a heavy stone pit in the bottom of my stomach.