by C. J. Farley
Table of Contents
___________________
Book One: The Game Changers
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book Two: The Great Web of Anancy
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Book Three: The Queen of the Dark Interval
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Book Four: Groundation: The Final Battle
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Glossary
Recommended Reading
About the Author
Copyright & Credits
About Black Sheep and Akashic Books
“Are you a Game Changer?”
At 8:23 a.m., Dylan spied Emma coming up to him at his locker. He looked around but there was no place to hide. Winston Macintosh Middle School was filled with yawning kids trudging grudgingly down the grungy hallways to their boring morning classes. Emma was Dylan’s little sister, but she wasn’t so little—she was almost the same height as him, and he was one of the tallest kids in sixth grade. She was also really smart, so even though she was three years younger, she had skipped up to Dylan’s grade, and he found this so embarrassing he tried never to be spotted with her on school grounds. But now here she was, standing right next to him for all his friends to see. Not that he had that many friends.
Dylan tied back his dreadlocks and tried to act cool. “What do you want?”
As usual, Dylan and Emma were dressed like they were from two different families, maybe even different planets. Dylan was wearing ripped black jeans, skater sneakers he had bought used online, and a T-shirt with the name of a band that had broken up before he was even born. Emma had on a school uniform—blue blazer, white knee socks, and a black skirt—which was weirder than you might think because Winston Macintosh was a public school that didn’t have uniforms. They barely had classrooms.
Emma leaned in so close her braids brushed Dylan’s ears. “Are you a Game Changer?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Chad Worthington is telling people that if you are, he’s gonna beat the snot out of you.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Dylan replied, although he did not, in fact, know that.
“He told Anjali he’s gonna turn you upside down and mop the cafeteria with your dreads.”
“So?”
“You’re not scared or anything? Want me to walk with you to language arts?”
“Like I want to be seen in public with Viral Emma. No offense.”
“Whatever,” Emma shrugged. “Just remember what the philosopher Sun Tzu said . . .”
Dylan knew what was coming and covered his ears. “Not listening! La-la-la-la!”
“Winning without fighting is the ultimate martial art,” she quoted anyway.
Dylan, his fingers still in his ears, rushed away from his sister as fast as he could—and nearly slammed right into Ivan, a spiky-haired seventh grader so big he looked like he had swallowed a couple sixth graders.
The hulking kid pretended to throw a punch and when Dylan jerked back to dodge it, Ivan laughed. “You’re no Game Changer! For real, though, at three p.m. the Chadster is gonna end you! Sucks to be you right now, don’t it, Loopy?”
Ivan, who was chewing a wad of gum the size of a hamster, popped a bubble, faked another punch at Dylan’s head, and lumbered away.
Dylan was officially freaking out. He often felt like he had sixteen browser windows open in his head all at once. Now it felt like he had 160. Why did Chad think he was a Game Changer? Was this a Loopy thing? He and Emma were both in the accelerated group at school—technically it was named the Learning Outlier Opportunity Program, but in reality everyone called them Loopys. Other kids, even members of the glee club, were constantly tripping Loopys in the hall, knocking lunch trays out of their hands, or locking them in their own lockers.
Maybe there was something to Emma’s warning. But Dylan barely even knew Chad, a sofa-sized seventh grader who hung out with gum-chewing goons like Ivan. And after the whole Viral Emma thing, Dylan tried to steer completely clear of Chad and his crew, who were the kind of jerks who spent the school day in the parking lot, bullying scrawny kids, torturing small mammals, and seeing who could fart the loudest. If passing gas ever became an Olympic sport, Chad and his goons would be gold medalists. So why were Chad and his butt-trumpet bunch gunning for Dylan?
At 12:05 p.m., Dylan reported to language arts in the Loopy wing, a cluster of rooms tucked away in the school’s leaky basement, which, depending on the day, smelled like old roadkill, wet sneakers, or public transportation. As Dylan walked into room 103, up on the blackboard, scrawled in red chalk, he saw this message:
GAME OVER LOOPY.
I’M COMIN FOR YOU AT 3.
THE CHADSTER
The language arts teacher didn’t even do anything about the threat until halfway through the period—and then she didn’t erase it, she just added a “g” to the end of “comin.” As Dylan scurried out of the room, trying to figure out how he could escape Chad and his goons, Eli Marquez, another sixth grade Loopy, rolled up in his wheelchair.
“Hola! I’ve got some intel on Chad,” Eli announced, whipping out his computer and peering at the screen through his glasses, which magnified his sea-green eyes to a cartoon size. He had a shock of straight black hair he never combed except with his fingers, and he carried around this plaid thingy he called a snuglet that was a cross between a sweater and a blanket and guaranteed nobody but Dylan would ever sit with him during lunch.
“How did you get info on Chad?” Dylan asked.
“Dude, how long have we known each other?” Eli replied.
“Don’t tell me you hacked into Chad’s computer.”
“Then I won’t tell you that. ’Cause I hacked his phone.”
Dylan bumped fists with Eli. “Sweet! So why does Chad want to murder me?”
“Because he thinks you’re a Game Changer—and he’s afraid he’s not.”
“Seriously? This is really about a video game?”
Everyone at the school was into a video game called Xamaica, and there was a huge tournament coming up. Only the forty-four best players got to enter—the Game Changers, they called them. So the question running through the halls was, Are you a Game Changer? Nobody knew the answer—yet.
“They’re gonna announce who made the Game Changers tonight,” Eli explained. “Chad wants to kill you before that happens.”
“That’s insane! I couldn’t afford a ticket even if I was picked!”
“Xamaica is a stupid game from an idiotic company, but you’re a beast at it. And if you’re awesome at something, morons like Chad try to eat you alive. You know the way zombies are stupid but they always devour people’s brains? It’s the same principle.”
Dylan felt his forehead get hot. There was a secret to why he was so great at Xamaica—it was something he hadn’t even told Eli and that he could never let Chad find out. “This is a nightmare.”
“It gets worse. If he catches you, he’s gonna give you the gas.�
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This was bad. Chad had a habit of sitting on his enemies and farting on them. Once he did that you were basically so humiliated you had to change schools. “What’s my move?”
Eli smiled. “Well, I have a plan.”
Dylan frowned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
* * *
Thirteen minutes until the Chad Attack. Whenever goons came after Eli, he would say his asthma was acting up and get a pass to leave school. At 2:47 p.m., taking Eli’s advice, Dylan went to the nurse’s office, a small windowless room that seemed purposely designed to be no fun at all.
Ms. Barett, the school nurse, was a tiny woman with small eyes that darted around her face like scared mice. “What are you here for?” she asked.
“I’m not feeling well,” Dylan wheezed. “Can I get a note to go home early?”
The nurse looked skeptical. “You seem fine.”
“But you know I have—that condition. It’s acting up again.”
“Your attention problems?”
“You know I take stuff for that.”
“Your insomnia?”
“That’s because of the stuff I take.”
“The bouts of rage? The nail-biting?”
“I’m trying, okay? Anyway, I mean the other-other-other thing.”
The nurse flipped through a manila folder stuffed with Dylan’s medical records. “I see from last time that you got those nasty scratches on your chest when you were playing a video game. Are you having another episode?”
“Yeah, I guess kinda,” he sorta lied.
“Hmmm. I can’t read this chicken scratch for your emergency contact—should I call your mother . . . father . . . other?”
“I tell you this every time! I don’t really have a family. I live with the Professor . . . I mean my aunt. She’s definitely more of an other than a mother.”
The nurse picked up the phone. “Well, we can contact her.”
“Do you have to get her involved? Can’t you just write me a note?”
She put down the phone. “This wouldn’t be about Chad Worthington, would it?”
Dylan nearly fell off the white stool he was sitting on. “Why does everyone know about this?”
“Chad is the new school superintendant’s son. News travels. He’s gotten into lots of fights—even with his buddies. Whatever you do, don’t let him give you the gas.”
“You know about that? You have to help me!”
The nurse’s rodent eyes stopped scampering, like they had been caught in a trap.
“I can give you a head start,” she said.
Nurse Barett let him go to his locker and get his stuff, but it was already 2:55 p.m. and classes were letting out in just five minutes. Dylan ran at full speed down the empty hallway. As he passed the gym, he saw some of Chad’s thugs pressing their faces against the windows of the double doors, chewing on wads of gum and pointing menacingly at him. Dylan reached his locker with two minutes to spare—and then the bell rang early. Did nothing in this crummy school work right? Kids spilled into the hall—Chad would be somewhere in the spillage. Dylan looked around. Maybe in all the confusion he could slip out the east wing side doors, near the science labs. Then it would be a straight shot to Webster Avenue and freedom.
“Dylan! I’m coming for you, Loopy!”
Too late. Chad burst out of Spanish class like a bull charging a matador. Dylan got a quick glimpse: his bonfire of red hair, his freckled face, his left cheek eternally bulging with a glob of gum. He had a little crimson fuzz on his lip, and word was that he sometimes even shaved his chin. As Chad passed, the crowds in the hall parted like a zipper unzipping, letting him roar by. Three of his crew, blowing bubbles as they ran, were right behind him.
“Game over, Loopy!” Chad bellowed. “That’s right, I said it!”
No way could Dylan outrun this jerk. But maybe there was another way.
He grabbed his skateboard out of his locker. He didn’t have the cash for a new board, so over the last few months he had built this himself from secondhand parts. He hoped all the work paid off now.
Dylan skated down the hall, weaving around students. A couple goons tried to grab him, but he slid right by them. The main door to the school was coming up, and Chad was closing fast, only two classrooms away. “I have you now!” he yowled.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the students all around started chanting.
“Get ready for the gas!” Chad reached out and managed to get a paw on Dylan’s ankle. Just then, Dylan heard a sound like a trumpet crossed with an elephant and something streaked out of nowhere and crashed into Chad’s legs. Dylan stumbled off his skateboard and kept running out the school’s front door; Chad lost his footing and went crashing to the floor along with whatever it was that had taken him out.
Eli had tripped up Chad. Anjali—who was also a Loopy but was weirder than most because she was always lugging around a French horn—had helped out by pushing Eli and his chair right in front of Dylan’s pursuer.
Chad, getting to his feet, turned angrily toward the pair, and Dylan kept running, too far ahead now to get caught.
“Keep going!” Eli shouted at Dylan. “What’s he gonna do, put me in a wheelchair?”
Should he stay? Should he go? Dylan glanced back over his shoulder at Chad, who was on a rampage, kicking Dylan’s abandoned black, gold, and green skateboard, tossing Eli’s laptop into a wall, and picking up Anjali’s French horn to slam it into the sidewalk. Anjali opened her mouth in a silent scream.
Dylan turned away from the school and kept running up Webster Avenue toward his house, as pea-colored clouds rolled across the late-afternoon sky.
Was he really a Game Changer?
Dylan was trying to get up the nerve to ask the Professor about Xamaica, and Emma was loving every moment of it. They were all in their cramped apartment sitting at the card table eating a dinner of burnt toast, burnt bacon, and this horrible lemonade made from powder the Professor bought in bulk. One sip tasted worse than sucking on a yellow marker. Two sips were as bad as eating yellow snow. Nobody made it to three.
“Gross!” Dylan grumbled, pushing his half-empty glass to the side. “You know, just because they sell it in bulk doesn’t mean we should drink it in bulk.”
“Forget that, ask her about the Game Changers!” Emma said.
“Shut up!” Dylan shot back.
At Dylan’s outburst, the tiny apartment, which was crammed with birdcages, suddenly came alive with the sounds of all the birds locked in them. The Professor taught avian studies at a small college and she regularly took her work home with her. Unfortunately, her work tended to squawk, chirp, and hoot round the clock.
The Professor sighed. “We talked about this,” she said to Dylan in the kind of calming voice that made everyone tense. “You’ve got to control yourself. You have to grow up.”
“Ask her about the thing,” Emma prodded Dylan. “You need parental permission.”
“Will you stop?” Dylan growled. “She’s not my parent and neither are you.”
“You don’t even remember Mom and Dad,” Emma huffed.
“I remember more than you,” Dylan countered, even though in truth he only had scattered memories of the accident, like tiny pieces of a puzzle, and not only did he not know how they fit together, some of them were missing.
The Professor, who had been reading Birdbaths of Ancient Rome: Volume Seven, slammed the book down on the card table, which nearly buckled under the weight. The glass of lemonade fell to the floor. Dylan and Emma stopped arguing, and even the birds shut up for a moment.
“Let’s not argue about your parents,” the Professor said. “Your father—my brother—wanted us all to be a family. And I know your mother would have wanted the same thing. She was a mysterious sort; there was something magic about her.”
“Why don’t you ever tell us stories about them?” Dylan asked.
“The tales can wait,” the Professor replied. “What’s all this about a game?”
“What kind of tournament? Chess?”
“Not exactly. It is a game—a video game.”
“A video game tournament?” She said the last three words the way you’d say Aliens on Mars? or Cats speaking Italian?
Emma, who was at the sink rinsing out the glass Dylan thought he just saw break, interrupted: “It’s tonight—tickets are mad expensive.”
“Will you shut up?” Dylan said. He turned to the Professor. “I never ask for anything. But I’m good at this game called Xamaica. So that’s why I want to go. I just need to borrow . . .”
“Xamaica? I’ve heard of this game. I know it inspires truancy—and perhaps worse.”
“But . . .”
“Enough,” the Professor gently commanded, and something about her tone let Dylan know it really was. She took off her horn-rimmed glasses, wiped them on her blouse, and put them back on a little smudgier than they were before. She resembled a bird in many ways: she had a beaklike nose, a spindly cranelike figure, and a voice like a squawk.
“I have some news,” the Professor announced after several moments. “And it’s time you both heard it.”
“What kind of news?” Dylan asked.
“You’ve both been strong for so many years. Dylan, I know you wear your ripped jeans and T-shirts because you know we can’t afford more. And Emma, I appreciate that you wear a uniform because it’s less expensive than sporting the latest fashions like the other girls. I’m grateful for your sacrifices. But this tournament is out of the question. We’re out of money and out of time. In fact, we have to move.”
“What? Why?” Emma and Dylan cried out together.
“My work is controversial and the college eliminated my department to save money.”
“What’s controversial about birds?” Dylan asked.
“I have been on the hunt for a rare species—the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. My colleagues say it’s a myth, that I’m crazy—and now I’ve been forced out.”
Dylan was surprised but not shocked. Social services had paid the apartment more than a few visits, saying that there were too many birds and not enough space. The neighbors were always complaining about the Professor’s constant bird-watching because they were totally creeped out when they saw her late at night peering out the window with binoculars. But maybe it was the fact that she wore a bird costume while doing it that made it really seem nuts. Plus, she refused to explain to anyone why she needed heavy rope, tranquilizer darts, and a shark cage to watch birds. It had only been a matter of time before all the weirdness got back to her bosses at the college.