by John Dixon
Forget Octavia, screw the tournament, spare the Brazilian, and deny Stark ten million bucks and bragging rights. Then, after he got settled in, he could buy a prepaid cell, make some anonymous calls, and let the world know about Stark.
Out in the main room, Tex shouted over the TV and Agbeko roared with laughter. Eventually, they would wind down and head to bed. Then . . .
Carl stopped pacing, went to the closet, and grabbed his parka.
I’m going to do it, he thought. I’m going to run.
NINETEEN
OCTAVIA WATCHED AS JULIO twisted his hand before the ID pad, then opened the door with the red X. They slipped inside. A light popped on automatically, illuminating a long, behind-the-scenes utility room. She saw pipes and wires, electrical boxes, and a large blue tank.
“Neat trick,” she said. “Do you have a chip in your hand?”
“Simpler than that,” he said, turning the back of his hand to her and pointing to the base of his thumb. “Skin graft. Only it’s not real skin. It’s a synthetic patch that captures the thumbprint of any hand I shake.”
She smiled. “That’s why you’re always shaking Valdez’s hand.”
He shrugged. “Well, that and I have good manners. Come on. It’s back here.”
She loved the way he kept his sense of humor despite his fatigue. “That’s it,” she said, thrilled at the sight of the silver ductwork running vertically up the back wall. Her mind had correctly registered its location. She placed her hands on its flat surface, closed her eyes, and focused her mind. At once, she could feel it shunting away, up through floors and branching out and out and out, like the circulatory system of the volcano complex.
She opened her eyes. “I can feel it.”
Julio looked at her, no doubt in his eyes, only curiosity.
“It’s big,” she said.
“How big?”
“It goes all the way to the top.”
“Through the upper floors, even?”
She nodded.
“Is it blocked? Any type of gate or fence between the lower and upper floors?”
She closed her eyes again and cast her mind up, along the shafts. She couldn’t see them—that kind of full-blown remote viewing, which Bleaker expected her eventually to master, wasn’t available to her yet—but she could feel them stretching along, feel their geography, like riding a blueprint. “I don’t think so,” she said, and opened her eyes again. “I can’t say for sure, but I don’t feel anything.”
He smiled. “I don’t need guarantees.”
Working together, they removed the access panel. Warm, sweet-smelling air flooded the small room. She twisted her med-kit penlight to life and leaned into the shaft. The galvanized steel interior shone brightly for the first few feet, then faded, then went black. She could feel the long tumble of that deep darkness stretch away like an empty well.
“You’ll never fit,” she said.
He moved past her and leaned into the space, gauging its dimensions, then came out frowning. “It’s not big enough.” He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his swollen nose. He looked very tired.
“It’s big enough for me,” she said, and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go.”
“No. It’s too dangerous.”
She fixed him with her eyes, unsmiling. “You really think I’d be here if I needed a protector? Look out. You’re too big.”
She thought he might protest, but then, looking utterly exhausted, he shook his head.
Good, she thought. Mission beats macho this time.
“You don’t even know what to look for,” he said, not putting much into it.
“I’ll just snoop a little. Anything up there says bomb on it, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Look for wires,” he said. “Any sign of trouble, come straight back. And be quiet. If you thump around in the shaft, they’ll hear you.”
“Quiet as a mouse,” she said.
Then he wrapped her in a hug.
She pushed against his chest, her face suddenly hot. “No need for that. We’re not in public, remember?”
He gave her the tilted smile. “I just wanted to say thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, the feel of his rock-hard chest lingering on her fingertips like a taste. “We’re in this together, right?”
“You bet. Hold on a second.” He crossed the room, opened a supply cupboard, and pulled out an orange extension cord. Working with impressive dexterity, he twisted and looped the cord. “Step through this,” he said, “now this,” and once he had the cord wrapped around her thighs, he looped it around her waist and drew it all tight at her beltline. “Snug?”
She tugged, did a squat, and tugged again. “Snug.”
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t fall. I’d rather not test this.”
She managed a smile. “Sounds good to me.”
He tied the loose end around a metal water pipe, then took the middle of the cord in his hands and around his waist.
“We good?” she asked.
“Good. Belay on.”
She took the flashlight in her teeth, stood sideways, and leaned into the duct, pressing her back to the sidewall. She swung her left leg in, jamming it against the opposite wall. Then came the moment of truth. Pushing hard with this leg, she lifted her right leg from the floor and swung it into play, pressing it, too, against the duct’s interior.
“Don’t let your butt drop below your feet,” Julio said.
“I won’t,” she said. “Duh.”
“Just be careful.”
She laughed. “No matter how I do this, I don’t think you can call it careful.” Pressing with her feet, she slid her back upward. Not far, just a few inches. Then she walked her feet up. The key was always keeping pressure on both sides. Shimmy up, walk two steps. It was much easier than she anticipated.
And yet . . .
She hated the way gripping the light in her teeth made her snarl like a cornered animal, hated the unnatural sound of her breathing through that snarl, and hated the constant movement of the light’s beam and how it flashed so brightly off the near walls but broke apart and dissipated higher up. Her sweaty fingers slipped against the smooth steel.
Relax, she told herself. You don’t need to see it. Feel it.
She closed her eyes, embracing the darkness. Instantly, her sixth sense sharpened. At once, she could feel the shaft around her, feel it rising above her and dropping away to . . . what? Some heat source.
Far below, something huffed like a dragon exhaling flame, and warm air rushed past, making her even hotter.
She pictured a massive furnace filled with flames, pictured herself slipping, scrambling for a mad second, her legs hammering into the metal sides, her sweat-slick palms sliding as she tried and failed to stop her fall—a terrible dislocation, the shape of her coming unjoined with the shaft walls—then dropping faster and faster, a brief and jolting jag, as she hit the end of her homemade safety line, a snap, a scream, and her final tumble straight into the flames.
Stop, she told herself. Keep it together. Feel yourself within the space. That was the key, she understood, just as it had been back in the Bunker, during parkour lessons. Feel yourself as an object, moving in relation to other objects.
There was an architecture to the world—the ever-shifting relationship of things to other things, all the way down to the atomic level. Static and dynamic. Push and sit, pull and sprawl. Trick shots in pool and middle school kids sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with their butts in chairs, typing “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” and a rain-pierced feather of mist lifting from a mossy stone back in the forests of good old Washington State. Here and now, she became very much aware of the planes and angles of her body and her points of contact with the sides of the ductwork. She made small adjustments, lifting one of her feet an inch higher, spreading her legs slightly, and flattening her shoulders against the steel. She let her hands fall away from the walls. She only needed her back and f
eet, back and feet.
Slide, step, slide, step . . . up and up she climbed.
At last, she arrived at the junction where horizontal ductwork branched away from this vertical pipe, carrying heat and fresh air to the first restricted level. She brought herself even with this section, leaned her upper body into it, and pushed off with her feet until she was lying on her stomach, completely inside the horizontal ductwork.
To go farther, she had to untie the extension cord safety line, which wasn’t long enough. She also took off her shoes—a clumsy affair, especially because she had to be careful not to thump around—and used them to weigh down the extension cord.
Flashlight or no flashlight? she wondered.
No flashlight. It might be seen through the heat vents. Feeling the pipe stretch straight away, she crawled forward as quietly as possible on hands and knees.
Moments later, she arrived at an intersection. The main duct continued before her, but to either side, smaller ductwork through which she could not pass branched off in both directions.
No, she thought, immediately imagining the simple design: the big pipe running between and across floors, the smaller pipes branching off to the rooms she needed to see. But she was learning to ignore her imagination and trust instead her sense of space. She shut her eyes, and her mind trotted off like a hound with nose to ground, and she could feel the path of the ductwork cutting straight across this level. Here and there, she felt the branching away of smaller channels, but the main avenue continued, and occasionally along its walls, her mind detected rectangular patches of grooved incompleteness that she understood at once to be louvered vents opening directly from the main line onto spaces she very much needed to investigate.
Yes, she thought, and moved along on her hands and knees until, drawing near to the first vent, she heard faint beeping sounds—familiar in a way that raised the little hairs along her forearms. She heard voices, too, a woman’s voice speaking in the tone of one giving directions and a lower voice murmuring in response.
Moving very carefully, she crept closer.
“This one is ready,” the woman’s voice said, “and this one as well.”
Octavia slid the rest of the way forward, peered through the louvered vent into the large room, and went rigid with terror.
TWENTY
THERE WAS A KNOCK AT THE DOOR, and Carl said, “Come in.” He was expecting Agbeko, but Davis walked into the room with his med kit, saying he wanted to take a look at Carl’s injuries. Carl took a seat on the edge of the bed, and Davis examined his forearms, then said, “Take off that shoe.”
Carl didn’t understand for a second. With the pain dialed down, he’d forgotten all about his damaged toe. He dialed pain back up, and sure enough—his toe was throbbing in pace with his forearms. Once again he was struck by the inconvenience of pain. Other than letting him know something was wrong, it served no good purpose. He took off his shoe.
There wasn’t much swelling, but the toe was already black-and-blue. Davis knelt and pressed the top of Carl’s foot. “That hurt?”
“No.”
“That?”
Carl shook his head. “Only the toe.”
Davis stood. “It’s broke.” He tossed Carl a roll of medical adhesive. “Tape it to the next toe. That’s all you can really do.”
“Thanks,” Carl said. He ripped off a length of white tape and started winding it around the toes, drawing them together.
“The first teardrop burns,” Davis said.
Carl looked up at the dark, haunted face and its tattooed tears. Hooded eyes stared back at him as flat and lifeless as pennies. There had been no accusation in his voice this time, no taunting. More than anything, he sounded weary.
“I was eleven when I got my first one. Little Leaguer, you know what I’m saying?”
Carl nodded. He’d known lots of kids growing up who’d signed on to some gang’s junior division. Half-play, half-business. Sixth-graders trying out gangbanging like other kids might try soccer. It’s geography, Stark would say.
“How many they burn tonight?” Davis asked.
“Seven.”
Three of the day’s twelve fights had ended in death. The other four dead had held on from the first day’s bouts only to die between the first funeral and the second night’s burning.
Davis shook his head. “And there’re more lying in the infirmary, waiting to die.”
Alexi, Carl thought.
Davis gestured toward the door, the apartment beyond. “Those guys need you.”
“They’re all right.”
“Man,” Davis said, and his face contorted, shifting through anger to disgust and finally settling on disappointment. “What happened to you?”
Carl filled with a curious foreboding. Intuitively, he knew that he didn’t want to hear what Davis was about to say, and yet, as people so often do in moments like these, he said, “What do you mean, what happened to me?”
Davis said, “Back on the island, when you stood up to Parker? It was beautiful, man. I mean, that took real nerve. You knew what would happen, but you still gave it to him. You earned my respect. There’s guys would take a bullet to earn my respect, you feel me?”
Carl shrugged. He saw where this was going and just wanted it over, just wanted Davis out of here so he could get this place and Phoenix Island and everything else behind him.
“That’s why I jumped in,” Davis said. “They locked me up, locked my boys up, then said, Okay, you hunt Ross, we’ll let bygones be bygones. Everybody else signed up, but I looked Parker right in the eyes and gave him the same answer you gave him the day they dragged you out of the sweatbox.” He demonstrated, raising his middle fingers. “Yeah, that caused me some hard times. Sweatbox, beatings, segregation. Dropped me in Camp FUBAR.”
“Where?” Carl had never heard of the place.
“Never got to see Camp FUBAR, huh? Makes the rest of Phoenix Island look like Disney World. Half prison camp, half brainwashing center. Anybody said no to hunting, they dropped them in. Sanchez, Lindstrom, that girl Tamika, and that nervous boy, Soares . . . the one talked all the time about his pet iguana? They worked us, beat us, starved us, didn’t let us sleep, tried to get us to turn on each other. Hard time, man. Real hard. Then they’d switch it up, go easy, talk to us all nice, tell us why the hunts were good. Crazy stuff. A few people gave in, went with the program, hunted Ross.” He frowned. “That kid had real guts.”
“He did,” Carl said, and grief woke in his chest. A painful thing. So much easier to block out loss rather than deal with it. “He had real guts.”
“They were going to hunt that girlfriend of yours next. Then everything blew up. I heard them shooting at you, man, and they told us if we didn’t hunt you, they’d hunt us next. I told them they might as well quit asking. See, I don’t just give out my respect. It’s real, you feel me? I wasn’t going to punk out, no matter what. Then I heard you was dead, then not dead, then they marched us over to the beach to watch the Old Man finish you off.”
Carl remembered Davis standing there in handcuffs, and the memory was suddenly very sharp, very real to him. He could feel the heat of the sun, the sand clutching at his feet, and the weight of desperation crushing down on him. With a surge, he remembered the bitter determination he’d felt, too, the way he’d harnessed his fear and gone at Stark.
“Man, I screamed my lungs out,” Davis said. “I never thought you’d beat him. Nobody did. He was so huge. But then”—he grinned—“you did it. You beat him, man, and I knew right then, everything was finally going to be okay. . . .”
Carl realized he was shaking and sweating. Stark had hunted him, huge and fast, inexorable. But Carl hadn’t given in. He’d hung in there and focused his mind, and when he’d finally spotted his opening, he’d gambled everything. His fists throbbed now with the memory of pounding the big skull, and he felt again the jolt that had gone up his arm when he’d knocked the giant warrior unconscious.
Davis’s grin died. “But
it wasn’t okay. They sent me away again. It got worse. Way worse. As they say in church, I descendeth into hell. They tried to break us, but the whole time I was suffering, you know what kept me strong? You know what kept me going?”
Carl shook his head.
“You, man. I remembered the way you stayed tough, and I stayed tough, too, and I kept thinking maybe there was a way. . . . But then I finally made it out of there, and who did I see standing next to Stark?” Davis’s voice quaked with anger, and his finger pointed at Carl’s face like a gun barrel. “You, man.”
Davis’s words hurt worse than a punch. He didn’t understand what Carl had done, what he was doing—or had been doing until now. Nobody understood. . . .
“You sold us out,” Davis said.
Carl came off the bed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Davis nodded toward the parka and snow pants. “Looks like you’re getting ready to punk out again.”
“Who are you to judge me?” Carl said, and found none of the surly toughness he’d wanted in his voice. “You want to put it all on the table, where’d you get the new tattoo?”
Davis tensed, and Carl wondered if he would break again, run out. But he just stared at Carl with those haunted eyes and said, “Sanchez.”
“You killed him?” Carl’s heart tumbled. Sanchez was a great guy. Kind, motivated, athletic, decent . . . all the things that got you killed on Phoenix Island.
Davis’s eyes dropped to the floor, and he spoke in a low murmur. “Had us in a cage together. We was both weak. Dying. Told us we had one night. Dropped in a knife. Said one of us wasted the other, they’d train him in whatever he wanted. Either that, or they’d kill us both come sunrise.”
Carl stared, horrified.
“Neither one of us went for the knife,” Davis said. “We just sat there and talked. We’d been through a lot together. He was the best friend I ever had.” Then Davis started crying again, only this time, it didn’t seem weird. Not at all. Carl knew he should comfort him somehow . . . but he’d never been great at that sort of thing.