by John Dixon
Agbeko ran forward, keeping low, and Carl mimicked him, running low with squinted eyes and gritted teeth until he hopped up into the Black Hawk.
The crew chief shouted, “Pack it in!”
Agbeko dropped onto a bench seat and started pulling together the belts of an elaborate harness.
Carl watched and imitated, pulling a V of belts over his head. He was lifting another belt up between his legs when Tex slammed into him from the side.
“Sorry, boss!” Tex shouted over the roar of the blades and immediately started belting himself in—smoothly and quickly and without even glancing toward the others. How did Dubois know what to do?
Whatever. Carl pushed it aside, excited and jumpy, like a kid buckling into his first roller coaster.
He’d just finished snapping and snugging his five-point harness, when the crew chief shut the door and said, “Belt in tight. We’re flying map to the ground.”
Agbeko started re-cinching his belts.
“What’s he mean,” Carl shouted, “map to the ground?”
Before Agbeko could answer, the helicopter rushed upward, lifting into the air like the world’s fastest elevator, and leaving, Carl felt, his stomach back on the ground.
Tex shouted, Davis looked like he might hurl, and the copter shot forward in a curving arc that gave Carl one last glimpse of Phoenix Island. Down on the ground, sunlight winked off Stark’s mirrored shades, flashing up at them like gunfire.
FIVE
“FEELING WARMER, RITA?” Julio said, pulling her against him.
She gritted her teeth. Margarita wasn’t her real name, and yet she was so sick of being under this guy’s arm that even his use of the diminutive “Rita” annoyed her.
She wanted to say, It’s Marga-rita, and then shove him away.
But she didn’t push him. Not now, not in this unbelievable cold.
The wind blew fiercely, blasting the group of perhaps one hundred hikers with ice and snow, stinging her eyes and lips, the only parts of her directly exposed, thanks to her parka, ski mask, and mittens. From this high ridge, mountains spilled away in a jagged chain of rocky peaks swirling in windblown snow. Far below, beyond the point where the mountains met the leaden sea, a shattered peak jutted, steaming, from the dark water, blurring the air over it with billows of roiling heat.
A volcano, she realized, and instantly wished it would erupt. In this cold like she had never known, she would risk anything, everything, for warmth.
A week of travel by train, boat, and bus had carried them over thousands of miles to this place, what felt like either the southernmost tip of South America or even farther down the globe into Antarctica. They’d been walking for hours, ever since the mountain road had grown too steep and icy for the buses. The men in gray-and-white camo had marched them the rest of the way up the mountain, where they had begun their long hike across this snowy ridge trail, buffeted by icy winds, spectators to a landscape both beautiful and terrible.
With the constant gales, the snow was thin, but ice made the trail treacherous, and it was a miracle no one had slipped and tumbled into one of the chasms flanking the path. At least she didn’t think anyone had fallen. With the howling wind, it would be hard to hear someone scream.
If an underground fighter falls in the mountains, she thought with an inward grin, and no one is able to hear him, does he make a noise?
Enough, she scolded herself. You’re loopy from cold. Keep it together.
Then, at last, they reached . . . something.
The trail ended at an enormous metal door set into the cliff of sheer stone that was the flat and battered face of the final ascent to the only peak rising above their position. Painted in gray-and-white camo not unlike the winter camouflage of the overseers, the door was big enough for an airplane hangar. Overhead, someone had immaculately chiseled words into the stone: LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE.
“Is that Italian?” Julio asked, speaking not in Italian or English, of course, but in Spanish. They were supposed to be from Mexico, after all.
“Latin, I think,” she said.
Right now, she didn’t care if it was written in Swahili. She just wanted the door to open and allow them inside. Even if the space beyond the door turned out to be a refrigerator, it would beat standing in the icy wind, with snow blowing all around.
The fighters and trainers, vaguely ghostlike in their white parkas and white ski masks, hunched in huddles of mostly threes and fours, though a few groups seemed, like Julio and she, to be comprised of only two members: one combatant, one trainer. They shivered, grumbling in dozens of languages, and flicked glances beyond their groups, so many packs of freezing wolves, snarling incoherently as they waited to enter the den. Between these groups circulated the men patterned in gray and white. She didn’t need her viewing skills to know the bulges at these men’s sides were firearms. Pistols, probably, or maybe submachine guns. In the end, did it really matter?
So far, no one had shouted, much less drawn a gun, and yet the firearms disturbed her. After the things she’d seen over the course of her not-quite-eighteen years, she didn’t think that would ever change.
The mountain gave a metallic clank, and the overseers backed people away from the heavy camouflage door, which rumbled slowly upward with a grumbling, grinding complaint.
Yes! Finally!
The roar of approval rendered all linguistic differences momentarily inconsequential.
“Come on,” Julio said, steering her with his arm.
Annoyance leapt up in her again. She didn’t need him telling her where to go, and really, wasn’t it safe to say they’d made the boyfriend-girlfriend thing clear enough? They’d been in constant physical contact, Julio either holding her hand or draping his arm over her shoulders, since they had donned their parkas and ski masks, come off the steamer, and joined the others.
An overseer moved forward, and lights snapped on, illuminating the tunnel.
She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting to see behind the massive gate—a cave, perhaps, or maybe a crude alcove outfitted with burning barrels over which they might warm their hands—but whatever she might have expected, she never could have imagined the reality unfolding before her now.
It stopped her. It really did.
This was no crudely chiseled chamber but a huge tunnel of polished stone, with a set of glimmering train tracks at its center and, waiting there, a shining engine and three passenger cars, bright and new and almost incomprehensible.
No, not a train, she corrected herself. A subway.
A subway tucked away inside a mountain, a million miles from the world. No trash, no graffiti, just gleaming rails and bright lights shining down on the burnished silver train cars.
Overseers beckoned them inside.
Fighters surged forward, momentarily forgetting the distance they’d been tending, as they gawked and laughed and shouted.
She advanced with a laugh of her own, feeling the temperature inside the tunnel—not warm, exactly, but also not the frigid air through which they had hiked all day.
The men in camouflage asked in Spanish and English and several other languages she could not understand that the athletes please move quietly forward and enter the trains.
“This is unreal,” she said, and Julio nodded, apparently struck speechless by the spectacle.
When they reached the train, he stepped aside and motioned for her to enter first, making her wonder again if he really was some kind of macho gentleman or just a consummate actor. She grabbed the rail, hauled her snowy boot onto the first step, and felt his hand on her back, boosting her, as if she needed help, as if she were either a small child or an old woman.
Whatever, she thought, and entered the train.
The passenger car shone just as brightly inside as it had out, everything new and polished and well lit.
Something like reverence came over the fighters, who moved slowly down the aisle and spoke in whispers as they chose their seats.
> She and Julio sat down beside each other, and Julio slid his hand onto hers.
She barely registered his intrusion as the question came into her mind.
Who would build a brand-new subway here in the middle of nowhere?
The train had obviously never been used before, and since every tournament location was destroyed at the conclusion of the Funeral Games, none of this would ever be used again.
The time, effort, and money that would go into creating all of this within a mountain in this wild and inhospitable land—all for a single event—was mind-boggling. Like carving a goblet of purest diamond, then smashing it after the first sip. Who thought that way? Who had that kind of money, that kind of power?
Then came the shiver—one of those ironic shudders that come not from cold but when a long period of cold is finally broken—and she realized she didn’t care who had built the train or why they’d done it. At least not yet. For now, she was just happy to escape the wind and extreme cold. She would engage Nancy Drew mode after she’d thawed.
There was a chime, and the doors slid shut.
“Here we go,” Julio said, his excitement plain.
Something clunked and hissed beneath the car, which gave a slight lurch, then started moving, sliding smoothly ahead. They built speed rapidly. The tunnel dimmed, angling downward, and the train flashed along underground, the occasional light flickering by like yellow passing hyphens on a highway.
As the train gained speed, its passengers seemed to thaw, chatting excitedly and laughing again, their eyes bright within their ice-crusted white ski masks.
In that moment, she thawed, too . . . or at least her brain did.
Masks.
She could have slapped herself for not thinking of this earlier, but she’d been preoccupied by the brutal cold, trying not to fall to her death, and fending off Julio’s constant hugs and pats.
All these masks represented a perfect opportunity to test her new—and soon to be crucial—ability. She took a deep breath, hoping . . .
“Feels good to sit down,” Julio said, and started rubbing her thigh. Despite his thick glove and her heavy parka pants, she wanted to bat his hand away.
Don’t, she told herself, remembering Crossman’s warning: “All of this falls apart if you’re not a believable couple. Why else would this fighter bring along a second-rate cut man?”
“Cut woman,” she had said.
Crossman had spread his hands. “High-stakes stuff, lady. If you’re not believable . . .” It was funny, the way somebody like Crossman, with his close-set predator eyes and hawk nose, could imply life-or-death stakes simply by trailing off.
Once he’d explained the stakes and accepted her demands, she’d agreed to play the role. Now, sitting here with this stranger pawing her, she hoped she hadn’t gotten in over her head.
She closed her eyes, drawing her nose full of air, trying to focus. She smelled the sharp new-vinyl smell of the seat in front of her, and thought of school buses, an absurd idea here in this place that had never known schools or children. The train slid steadily deeper into the stony ground, and she could feel the enormous bulk of the mountain range rising overhead. They were shuttling along beneath the saw-backed main range, hurtling onward toward . . . what?
The ocean. They were angling downrange toward the ocean.
Another thought to block. Outward geography, like Julio’s intruding hand, was merely a distraction now. She needed to map nearer topography—the landscape behind those masks.
She focused on a ski mask in an adjacent row. The boy’s red patch read 18. Otherwise, he looked like everyone else, except his leg bounced continuously and he never stopped talking to his teammates.
“Not just a cheerleader,” she heard him say. “The head cheerleader . . .”
She wished she were back in the lab with pencil and paper. It would be easier to sketch him—but that would be an obvious mistake here.
Don’t push too hard, she reminded herself. Puking in a ski mask would be decidedly unlovely. She cleared her mind, letting go of the boy’s shaking leg and nonstop blabbing and even that red 18.
She closed her eyes, and almost instantly, an image—the curve of his cheekbone, she thought—came into her mind. But it struck her then that it would do no good to map his face so closely. Without her sketchpad, she had no way to reproduce the simulacrum. She needed to try something new, needed to pull back, gain a point of reference, and see not just the trees but the forest. Her mind’s eye drew back with a dizzying tilt, and a familiar line of fire shot across her skull. This time, it was there and gone—a fierce but fleeting laser pulse—and she could see the rough outline of the boy’s face.
Amazing.
The image was blurry and unsteady like her old card ghosts, but she found a rhythm, dipping back in to pat around with her mental hands before drawing back out, and after several repetitions, she drew him into clearer focus.
A shaved head. Close-set eyes. A small pugg nose. He needed a shave.
“This is really something, huh?” Julio said, and squeezed her thigh.
Her connection to the masked stranger broke instantly, and the laser beam of pain sizzled again through her skull.
“Shut up,” she said, and batted his hand away.
“What? I—”
“Stop,” she said. Some part of her mind cautioned her, remembering Crossman’s warnings, but she zapped it immediately. Real girlfriends got mad at their boyfriends sometimes. If anything, she thought, I just improved our cover.
Julio crossed his arms and slumped away from her.
Good.
Her head pounded steadily now, and she felt a little sick, but it was still nothing like she’d experienced during that first session back in the Bunker. She was getting better, stronger. Mapping still hurt and often left her feeling sick and shaky, but less so every time, and she was getting faster, too. Returning her attention to the adjacent block of seats, she focused not on Fighter 18 but the guy sitting silently across from him.
Fighter 19.
She closed her eyes, ignoring the throb building like a drumbeat at the center of her skull—my parietal lobe, she told herself, remembering part of Bleaker’s explanation—and the fog cleared quickly, bringing the angle of a strong jaw sharply into view. She pulled out, swooped back in, and scaled upward, moving as smoothly over his features as a traveler over familiar ground, the face coming clear to her as effortlessly as remembered topography: the scowl, the crooked nose and high cheekbones, the eyebrows intersected by thin scars.
She could have screamed, could have laughed, could have shouted his name . . .
But in that thunderclap moment, she instead pulled back and sat staring not at the simulacrum but at the red patch, the 19 there, with her heart pounding and her mind reeling.
It couldn’t be true . . . but it was.
It was him. . . .
It was Carl.
SIX
AS THE TRAIN SLOWED, Carl noticed the others dropping hoods, removing mittens, and peeling off ski masks. Must be warmer here, he realized, and dialed his temperature sensitivity back to normal. He removed his mask and mittens and unzipped his bulky parka. The train came to a gentle stop.
Fighters pressed against their windows, murmuring with excitement. Carl felt frustrated—from his aisle seat, he could see nothing—but the train gave a mechanical hiss, and guards motioned toward the open doors.
Tex whooped, Agbeko grinned, and even Davis looked less displeased. Still no smile from the emaciated medic but a look of something like relief. Whether from the warmth or the long trip coming to an end, Carl didn’t know and wasn’t going to ask. For the several days they’d been traveling—going by copter, horse cart, container ship, bus, on foot, and finally onboard this train—Davis had utterly stonewalled Carl, avoiding eye contact and answering only in quiet monosyllables.
Everyone stood, filling the aisle with that strange politeness so common in fighters, and filed slowly off the train. This was the
first Carl had seen these people—my future opponents, he thought—without ski masks, and yet they were familiar to him, as types. Boys with scarred faces, drawn and angular from cutting weight and cloudy with fading bruises that bespoke the brutal training they had endured in preparation for this event.
Across the aisle was the couple he’d dubbed “Romeo and Juliet.” He’d noticed them during the long trudge across the mountains, largely due to the long blond braid that had hung from her ski mask. She was the only obvious girl in the bunch—he thought he’d noticed a couple of others but couldn’t be certain—and she’d spent the whole time attached to her boyfriend, the two of them jabbering away in Spanish. What a stupid idea, bringing your girlfriend to work your corner. Between rounds, a trainer needed to work as calmly as a machine. How could these two possibly put their emotions on hold once the blood started flowing?
Filing off the train, Carl’s own whoa joined the fighters’ chorus of awe. An incredible space opened before them. The tracks ended at a high-domed concourse of polished stone that reminded Carl of New York’s Grand Central Station.
Older men in good suits appeared, moving singly among the fighters and attaching to groups. A trim silver-haired man in a wine-dark suit came toward Carl’s group. Offering a slight, somehow proper smile, he said, “Team Phoenix Force.”
It wasn’t a question.
“My name is Kruger,” he said. He was spotless in every way: perfect suit, perfect hair, perfect posture. “I will be your personal steward here at the Cauldron.” He shook their hands, giving each of them a subtle bow, and a “very pleased to meet you, sir”—his accent not quite English, but not Australian, Irish, or Scottish either. Similar yet different from all of them.
Addressing Carl last—the guy with a good grip, a remarkable grip for his age—Kruger said, “And you, sir, would be the team captain if I’m not mistaken.”
Carl said that he was, and Tex said, “Don’t remind him, Jeeves. Goes to his head.”
Carl ignored him. Tex had been a constant annoyance, but he hadn’t disrupted things nearly as much Carl had feared. He’d started and quickly lost a fight with Agbeko, and had almost gotten them killed on the container ship by talking smack to a guy with dead eyes and an AK-47, but in the end, he’d done no significant harm. Yet.