Gamerunner

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Gamerunner Page 19

by B. R. Collins


  He pulled at the nearest canister, and as he tried to get hold of it the metal slid under his hands and the labels came into view. Corrosive, poisonous, highly inflammable. Excellent. He picked it up, and heard the salts shifting about inside. This one had already been opened, so he took it into the studio and tipped the salts out on to the floor, making sure he scattered it around a bit. That should help the fire get going.

  He piled the other canisters in his bedroom, a few ems from the studio doorway. He was afraid it looked a bit calculated, so he kicked them, afterwards, and found a few more bits and pieces to chuck into the pool. The shark had seen the pillow and was nosing at the glass, as high as it could go. When it saw Rick’s shirt sinking to the bottom, the arms waving, it flicked its tail and moved towards it. It looked purposeful, hungry; Rick had to remind himself that it wasn’t real. He crouched and wiped his face with some of the pool water, trying to get the sting of chemicals out of his nostrils. It was worse than the smell of rain. Tears ran down his face and dripped into the pool, and every time he blinked his eyes felt full of pepper. Gods, he’d better be careful, when he started the fire . . .

  It was dark outside; he hadn’t noticed, but suddenly there was a clear, white light shining in through the window. He looked up, and there was a disc of silver slipping sideways through a gap in the clouds. At first he thought it was some kind of ship. Then he thought: The moon.

  Had he ever seen moonlight before? Real moonlight, not in the Maze? He didn’t know. He’d never noticed, never cared. It wasn’t like sunlight; it didn’t make his spirits lift. But it made him feel cool, sure, fatalistic. Now, somehow, he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  It was like a code word. Moonlight.

  Let’s go.

  He got up, letting his shoulders sag, like he was tired, finally defeated, like he was wondering how the hell he was going to explain this to Housekeeping tomorrow. He made sure he didn’t glance at the hidcams.

  He slouched past his bed, dragging his feet. He looked for a long time at the bare mattress; then rubbed his forehead, and made his way through the doorway to the studio. It all felt stupid, so exaggerated he could hardly believe they hadn’t come to interrogate him already. But no one came.

  And there was the iTank; innocent, going silver under his touch, like a pet wanting to be stroked. And when he opened the door and went in, it said to him, Hello, Rick.

  Thank gods it wasn’t connected to the Maze; he wasn’t barred. He could still use the demo.

  He took a deep breath. Was everything ready, outside? He ran through it in his mind, trusting that there weren’t any hidcams in here — or that if there were, no one would think it was odd for him to stop and close his eyes. The greasy paper and the poster, where the flame should start; and the cigarette lighter, ready to melt and catch fire, ready to explode and spit burning lighter fluid everywhere. The sheets, draped in a loose curve, to give the flames room to breathe . . . the scattered chemical salts, the scented bath oil. He thought: Well, at least it should smell nice.

  And I need to be in the tank long enough for the wires to overheat. Until it malfunctions. The same as last time.

  Just the idea of the malfunction made his skin crawl. But it wasn’t the same malfunction that had killed Daed: it was only the wiring on this iTank, just the wiring. Nowhere near as bad . . . Anyway, he’d survived it before, and there was no reason why it should be any worse this time. Except that he’d be expecting it, of course — but that might make it easier. You never knew.

  Oh, gods . . .

  But it was too late to change his mind now. Just stay logged in, he thought. Just until it overheats. Then you leave the tank, you pretend not to notice the flames, you collapse on the bed like you’re feeling ill — and you wait. Got it?

  Of course I’ve got it, you prat, I thought of it. Stop talking to me like I’m thick.

  He opened his eyes, half grinning, in spite of himself.

  He said, ‘Open demo, please.’

  Chapter 26

  Night, in the ruins.

  Rick stands where he is and looks round, wondering if he’ll ever see it again. The moonlight glints off pen-and-ink trees, shines through the gaps in the walls. The thin flags of clouds in the west are blazing at the upper edges, silvery and soft below. The rest of the sky is deep uncompromising black, sprinkled with stars. The ruins are silhouettes.

  Rick thinks: It’s as though someone took death and made it beautiful, made it a place you could live in.

  Daed understood death, then.

  How could they think that the party decorations even came close?

  But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what they do. They take real life and make a shoddy version of it, an easier version, to suck you in.

  Not that this is real life, of course.

  He realises, suddenly, that he must still be a bit drunk. It’s not the most reassuring thought he’s ever had.

  And the sky soars above him, the clouds low and long, the stars cold and fiery. It’s freezing; Rick shivers.

  Come on. Pull yourself together. Remember why you’re here.

  So the demo environment does change in real time, then. He tries to be interested in that, but it’s not easy.

  He waits.

  He takes a few steps forward, a few steps back, trying to get rid of the cramping feeling that’s started to come into his forehead. Any moment now . . . but the malfunction doesn’t come.

  He thinks: If it doesn’t come, at all, ever . . . oh damn, I will have to explain the mess to Housekeeping tomorrow. He giggles, weakly.

  But he needs the malfunction. He’s dreading it; but if it doesn’t come . . .

  What did I do before? he thinks. Setting fire to things. Flying. He doesn’t have the heart for that, now. He runs his hands over his scalp, feeling the prickle of growing hair. Moonlight and ruins, he thinks. The last leaves, clinging to the branches. Silver. Oh, for gods’ sake, I don’t care, just get on with it . . .

  He sets his gaze on the tree that’s growing out of the wall. He likes it. It’s the nicest tree he’s ever seen.

  He thinks: Burn, burn, burn. He imagines gold and red bursting into this black-and-white world. Fire; the fire that will be his way out. Go on, please. Burn. Fire that will translate into real fire, somewhere.

  He closes his eyes; but it isn’t the tree he sees, it’s the wire. He sees plastic — melting, bubbling a little — and a tiny cushion of flame inflating around the copper. He tries to think of the tree, but he can’t. Just the wire. It has to catch fire, it has to. Please.

  He smells smoke. When he opens his eyes the little hanging tree is blazing. He laughs, watching it. And then looks at the other trees, focuses on them, and sets them alight too. Magic. He’s going to miss this.

  And then —

  The malfunction —

  Black and shining, like a bullet in the head —

  No — please no this is worse this shouldn’t be as —

  Gods —

  This is no this no black not black dark like fire burning the inside a brain sucked out through — hole in the universe this is — how Daed died like this is it — please please log out log out log —

  ‘Log out — log out — log out —’

  And thank gods he’s said it. Thank gods.

  It’s stopped. He’s back. He takes a deep breath.

  The iTank is white and flashing red. He can’t stand straight.

  There has been a malfunction. Please tell Crater about this problem.

  And as he stumbles out he can smell smoke, and it’s acrid plasticky smoke, not the clean woodsmoke of the demo. He looks down, and yes, there’s a flame. He ought to care, and if he wasn’t feeling so sick he would care. That’s good, isn’t it? A flame . . .

  He staggers through the doorway and collapses on to his bed. That was the plan, anyway, wasn’t it? Which is just as well, because he can’t do anything else. He wants to be sick and go to sleep and die, all at once. He hears someone
breathing in great gasping gouts, and he pities them, because they must feel even worse than he does, right now. Then they start to cough. It’s the smoke, the fire that must be taking hold — so quickly, he never thought it would happen so quickly. Must be the chemicals, he thinks. All that highly inflammable . . .

  I can’t move, he thinks. I want to go to sleep.

  I mustn’t go to sleep.

  I had a plan. What was the plan? I — had — a — plan.

  He puts his hands over his face again, trying to concentrate. The smoke . . . too much of it. Why isn’t the alarm going off? What’s happened to the alarm? Oh no. Gods, what a fool I was, why didn’t I think of the alarm?

  Daed switched it off. Ages ago. Because he wanted to smoke a cigarette. As if — as if he knew . . . Rick laughs, choking on the taste of fire. Oh, Daed. Just for that. Because he wanted to smoke.

  And the thought of Daed is something to cling on to: a cornerstone. Daed, he thinks, who sacrificed everything for me. So that I could stay here and be safe and well fed and looked after. Daed, my father.

  He opens his eyes.

  OK.

  The fire . . . well, his plan’s working. That’s got to be good, right?

  He stares at it, wondering how he could have thought this would work. It’s dangerous . . . and even with the fire alarms turned off . . . The sheets haven’t caught, yet, but the chemical salts are alight, and the poster is burning merrily. He wants to watch it; the flames flicker and dance. They shimmer blue and green and sodium yellow, as the fire eats through different colours of ink. There’s smoke, filling the room, black and grey and white. It hangs like a veil between Rick and the window. How can the surves not notice?

  Either they’re all at the party, or it’s already too hot for the hidcams.

  Now that he thinks of it, it is hot.

  He was supposed to wait here until he was sure the hidcams weren’t working any more. Until anyone watching saw the cameras crash. Until the last recorded moment was him sitting on the bed, surrounded by fire.

  But he can’t. He hasn’t got the nerve.

  He laces his hands together and looks down at them. He can feel the heat on his face. He stays still. It’s a game, he thinks, and I want to win. There’s light flickering on his skin: hot, orange light, shifting from dark to gold to . . . hypnotic. His brain is tired. Or . . . I could stay here, he thinks. Because once those canisters catch light, it’ll be all over. I won’t know anything about it. Quick.

  Not exactly peaceful, though.

  He stands up. He’s not going to leave, not yet. But he can’t stay still. He feels safer over the other side of the room; which is stupid, he knows. When those canisters —

  How long can I leave it?

  He blinks smoke-tears out of his eyes and looks at the canisters. They look fairly safe, still. They’re sitting in a nest of flames, like a phoenix before it hatches, but they don’t look . . . awake, yet. Mind you, there’s a lot of fire, now. It’s starting to feel urgent. Rick is starting to think he ought to leave.

  Stop doing stupid things.

  This probably qualifies as stupid, doesn’t it? Sorry, Perdy.

  But it might work; really, if he does it right, exactly right, it might work.

  He leans against the door panel, watching his life go up in flames. Count, he thinks. Just count. One, two, three . . . when you go into triple figures, you can go. But no gabbling; that’s cheating.

  And it was a good idea. He has to believe that. They’ll believe he’s dead; they’ll let him go . . .

  When the canisters explode, they’ll take out the whole floor. So he needs to be downstairs when they go; those cameras will go down, too. He’ll have time to get downstairs unseen; and with his hood on, he’ll be one more anonymous figure, wandering through the complex on launch-party night. Well. Until they start the evacuation. He wants to giggle; it’s the first time it’s occurred to him, that they might evacuate. That he might cause that kind of chaos.

  He’s lost count. He stares at the flames — roaring now, hungry, licking the chemiglass as if they’re eager to get out, too. Sixty, he guesses. Sixty-one. Sixty-two. Sixty-three.

  I should get out.

  I should get out now.

  He goes to the door and runs his fingertips down the gap. He can pull it sideways; but when he does, there’ll be more air. He imagines the fire, billowing up in a great rush; and the smoke gushing into the corridor. Would Daed have turned off those alarms, too? Rick prays that he has.

  Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-nine and a half.

  OK.

  Here goes.

  Out through the door. The corridor. He’s running like it’s the Maze, as fast as he’s ever run. It doesn’t seem quite real, but that’s OK. It’s easy. He hardly even needs to breathe. Behind him the flames are taking over, calling him back, spitting and roaring. He can hear them. He keeps running.

  He’s done this before. He knows he can do it. No problem.

  The game, he thinks. This is the game. I understand now. And gods, it’s fun . . .

  Down the stairs — the first few stairs —

  Yes, he thinks, almost, yes, it’s going to, I’m going to —

  And —

  Too late.

  Epilogue

  Wings of Flame

  The blast ripped through the twentieth storey of the complex, spitting flame at the sky of Undone. It exploded sideways, in a ball of gold, spotted with red and black, like the sun up close. People on the streets of Undone looked up, wondering. There was a cloud of steam — another explosion, like an afterthought — and a generous spray of shattered glass. Scraps of clothes, a sad little flag of torn bedsheet, a few bloody lumps of shark flesh. The debris spewed out over Undone like largesse. A charred, many-toothed jawbone fell into the gutter, twenty storeys below.

  In a way, Rick had done well. He’d been right — for what it was worth. The hidcams did go down. All the cameras did, in fact. On the twentieth storey, the nineteenth, the eighteenth . . . No one would ever know what had happened, exactly. Not those last few seconds. The film cut out, just before the blast; although they’d be able to work it out from the rest of the footage, more or less. Give or take a few details. Like Rick leaving, for example.

  But he didn’t get far enough. He was only a few storeys below his room. He felt the blast, he didn’t hear it. He knew it was too late. The floor moved under his feet, shifting up and down, like a ship. He looked down and somehow, stupidly, expected to see the sea.

  And then the fire boiled down the stairwell towards him, sucking the oxygen out of the air.

  He didn’t realise he was screaming, but he was.

  And the explosion kicked away his feet from under him. He’d put his hands over his face to shield his eyes, and he nearly dropped to his knees; but there was no time for that. A second wave of fire shoved him forward, roughly, like a friend, one hand on either shoulder blade. Get out.

  And when he stumbled, it picked him up and threw him, straight through the window ahead of him. He burst into the open air in a knot of scarlet and broken glass and fire. To anyone looking up he was like one of the old gods: glorious, silhouetted against a dying sky. Then he fell.

  No one can fall sixteen storeys without dying.

  Not straight down, anyway. But Rick landed on the sagging power-cables over the streets of Undone, bounced and jerked like a fish on a line, and then dropped again. The fire in the Crater tower flapped upwards, sending smoke towards the clouds. Anyone unlucky enough to be out on the streets of Undone turned to look, momentarily distracted from whatever they were doing. It was as though someone had trapped a star in the tower, keeping it prisoner. Its fury reflected off the other skyscrapers, far too close for comfort.

  And Rick fell, still. His clothes were burning. He hit the top of the Crater fence, where it was curved outwards to stop climbers. The wire hooked into him, ripping him to shreds, but it broke his fall, again. He hung for a moment, between worlds. And then, against all the
odds, he struggled, convulsed, and flopped over the fence, falling the right way. He landed on the concrete like a dead thing; but he was on the right side. The Undone side, that is.

  He should have been dead; but he wasn’t. Not quite.

  Not that he’d have been grateful for it, if he was conscious.

  And when they found him, later, he was still alive. Just.

  The rogue sun had burnt out, at last. The complex was surrounded with flashing lights, evacuation vehicles, the last bewildered party-goers struggling to get out of the Undone air, relieved it wasn’t raining.

  Someone stood in front of Rick’s face and nudged at him with one foot; and briefly, before he dropped back into blackness, he opened his eyes. He had time to notice how it hurt to breathe — how everything hurt, in fact. How the darkness was flashing, and he could hear voices, and he didn’t know where he was. How no one was helping him, or calling for a med, and that meant he must have escaped. How he was in agony. How the plan must have worked, and what a stupid plan it had been, after all.

  How he was alive.

  How he was free.

  And how his back, especially . . . how, even through the rest of the pain, he could feel the material of his top melted and clinging to the skin where the explosion had caught him, drawing on him, leaving two terrible burns: symmetrical, running the whole length of his back, like wings.

  About the author

 

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