by John Dixon
“But that’s exactly what this will become if you fight tomorrow,” Baca said, “a suicide mission. Especially given the championship cesti.”
“What are you talking about?” Davis said.
“The switch to gladiatorial cesti for the final round,” Baca said matter-of-factly, panning their faces. Then an incredulous smile spread across his face. “Stark didn’t tell you?”
Carl had a sinking feeling. “Tell us what?”
“Finalists wear the true cesti,” Baca said, and brushed his own forearm in an upward sweep. “The wrists are wrapped in leather, but the knuckles . . .”
In the man’s brief pause, Carl understood—not in words, but in image: the blocky death-dealing fists of Theogenes.
Baca smacked fist into palm. “. . . are dressed in iron.”
And Carl knew with absolute certainty that the Z-Force commander was telling the truth. The Few would finish their blood sport with a fatal flourish.
This realization stunned him all over again, so that he was only numbly aware of Agbeko reasserting his intention to fight, and of Baca and his lightweight moving away.
Carl watched them go, a siren of dread wailing in his skull. He was so rattled, in fact, that he was halfway back to the apartment before he discovered the square of folded paper in his jacket pocket. He waited until he was alone in his room to open it.
Dear C, the familiar handwriting began. Same place, same time, tonight. Please come. O.
A short time later, the apartment door chimed, and Kruger, seeming uncharacteristically excited, strode in, carrying two black satchels, each emblazoned with a red phoenix.
Carl wanted to hit a magical pause button and stop time. His brain had chain saws to juggle: Alexi’s death, the tough talk he needed to have with Agbeko, Octavia’s note—Why did she want to meet with him again?—the impending fight with Romeo, and Baca’s all-too-believable claim.
“Gentlemen,” Kruger said, with his trademark smile and subtle bow. He handed one bag to Agbeko and the other to Carl. The bag looked empty but felt heavy, something small but weighty inside.
Kruger asked them to unzip the satchels.
Carl opened his bag and chilled at the sight of its contents: coiled strips of leather attached to what looked like brass knuckles on steroids . . . four metal rings attached to a slightly curved plate of brass.
The championship cesti.
“Please check the fit,” Kruger said.
Carl slipped his fingers through the rings. Brass covered his fist from knuckles to mid-finger in a plate half an inch thick. The back of the plate fit his hand perfectly. The face was ornamentally grooved into thirds to resemble the tri-strap design of the leather cestus. Two shorter metal ridges ran perpendicular to these, completing the facsimile.
“Amazing craftsmanship,” Kruger said, again with a touch of pride in his voice. “How do they feel?”
“Deadly,” Carl said, pulling the barbaric gauntlets from his hands.
“I should suppose so,” Kruger said, smiling again, as if Carl had said something funny. Then Carl realized their silver-haired steward was having a difficult time containing himself.
“What are you so excited about?” Carl asked, irritated.
Kruger straightened, looking surprised, then smiled warmly. “I am excited for you, sir. Oh, I’ll admit a touch of pride—being steward to two Funeral Games finalists—but I am primarily excited for the two of you. What a moment. You have earned your way to the final stage of the most challenging fighting tournament in the world. Such an amazing feat—and here you stand, on the eve of your destiny, prepared to secure your legacies by your strength of mind and talent, your fortitude and preparation, your magnificent bodies.”
He grabbed them both by the biceps and squeezed. “Yes, you’re both injured and fatigued, but you are also young and resilient. In my youth, I could march all day with a hundred-pound pack on my back, hiking up and down mountainsides, then get up and do it all over the next morning.” His eyes grew wistful. “Eventually, however, one reaches an age where exercise no longer maintains the muscle, and calcium no longer strengthens the bones . . . where a slip, a fall, and a broken hip terrify a man more than the combat of his younger days. Bullets were never so frightening as the whimpering terrors of the nursing home. This is no way to live, my boys, and I’d give the world to be back inside a young body.”
Kruger gave Carl’s arm another squeeze and stepped away, looking almost embarrassed. “At any rate,” he said, returning to his default formality, “I am terribly proud of you both. If you are satisfied with your cesti, I will return them to the officials.”
“Mine are good,” Carl said, thinking, If I wanted to kill somebody. How could he avoid ruining Romeo forever?
“Mine are also good,” Agbeko said.
But there’s no way I’m going to let you use them, Carl thought.
They replaced the cesti, zipped the satchels, and handed them to Kruger, who looked suddenly sad. He sighed and said, “Gentlemen, it has been my pleasure to serve you, but I am afraid that I must now bid Team Phoenix Force adieu.”
“Wait,” Carl said, picking up on Kruger’s tone. “Like . . . forever?”
Kruger nodded. “Yes, sir. No worries, of course; my replacement, Jones, will introduce himself first thing in the morning, and should you need anything sooner, your call buttons will connect directly with him.”
Agbeko nodded, stone-faced. Kruger had treated all of them like royalty, but Carl suspected Agbeko was remembering atrocities committed by Kruger’s mercenary unit in Africa.
“Why now?” Carl asked. “You’ve been with us since day one. Why not stick out the rest of the tournament?”
“Something has come up,” Kruger said, and his eyes twinkled with excitement. He set the satchels aside. “An opportunity that I’ll have but a moment—this moment—to seize. Timing is everything, gentlemen. That’s what I will leave you with, that and the best of luck in all things, and my thanks, as well.” Turning to Carl and pumping his hand with that surprising grip, he said, “Especially to you, sir. Especially to you.”
Kruger squeezed Carl’s hand once more, fixing him with such intensity that Carl felt not only confused but uncomfortable, and was pleased when the steward released his hand to shake Agbeko’s, picked up the satchels, and departed with, “Rage in your youth, gentlemen. Strength and determination will bear you up. But when you see what must be done, don’t waste a blink—jump . . . and the world will be yours.”
TWENTY-THREE
HER HUG SURPRISED HIM. This time, Octavia embraced him fiercely and held him to her for several seconds before stepping back and telling him to follow her. When she led him upstairs to an abandoned locker room, he was confused. When she led him into a supply room in the back corner, he started to wonder if she’d lost her mind.
He wanted to be nice, wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but he still felt bitter about their last meeting, about her playing games, and how she’d spent the entirety of his hardest fight staring across the arena at the opera box, so as he closed the door behind them, he said, “What do you want, Octavia?”—and then, with an unintentional edge—“I have a fight tomorrow.” He didn’t bother to add, Against your boyfriend, wearing metal cesti.
She frowned, then said, “Look, Carl, I know you’re mad. All right? And I’m sorry I was so weird last time, so secretive. I was still shocked from seeing you here.”
“I thought you were in Mexico,” he said, “but that didn’t make me all suspicious of you.”
“Not fair,” she said. “I didn’t show up leading Phoenix Forcers.”
“No—you showed up with your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
Yeah right, he thought, but he said, “And I’m not leading Phoenix Forcers. Not really.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
“I’m not,” he said. “Not the way you think.” Stop, he cautioned himself, realizing that he had tiptoed toward some k
ind of confession. Despite all that had happened and all that had changed, despite her new face and boyfriend, despite everything, she still had power over him. His enduring fondness for her softened him in some subtle yet fundamental way, made him want things to be right between them and made him want to divulge everything to her, explain what he’d been doing since she’d left, what he was planning to do, and—oh, yeah—how he had surrendered his freedom to buy her safety. But this was just weakness, he knew, impatience and the need to unload his wagon. Dangerous and stupid. He couldn’t afford to trust her with all of this now. For all he knew, she was working for Stark.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I worried that you had become one of them, but when I saw your last fight, I stopped worrying. You could have knocked him out, but you didn’t want to hurt him. You waited and got hurt for it, but you didn’t destroy him. You haven’t turned into some kind of heartless wrecking machine. I saw that and I knew: you’re still you.”
“Great,” he said, and resisted the urge to ask her how she’d happened to notice all this while staring at the opera box. “I’m glad I’m still me.”
“Drop it, all right, Carl? It wasn’t just the Phoenix Forcers. You were so tall and big—and so vicious in the ring. The chips can cause problems—anomalies.”
“That’s another thing,” he said. “How did you know about my chip? And what—”
“They chipped me, too,” she said, and stared into his eyes.
“What? You? When?”
“Stark wanted to give you the newest generation of the chip, but Vispera”—she hissed the doctor’s name—“worried it would ruin you, so he put you in a coma to heal and tested it on us. Me. A lab tech. Decker. I went last, because Vispera . . .” She trailed off, her jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.
Tortured you, Carl thought, remembering her horrible wounds and vacant eyes. Someday he would make Vispera suffer—and not just a broken nose this time.
“The lab tech died,” she said, and snapped her fingers. “Just like that. Something went haywire with Decker’s chip, too. ‘An error code,’ Vispera said. He worried that mine was messed up, too. Blabbed about it the whole time he was prepping me for surgery. Not that he was worried about me, of course. He was worried about you—and what would happen to him if your chip failed. I was just one more lab rat.” Her eyes narrowed. “But I wasn’t afraid. I just wanted the pain to stop. And then it did.”
He thought he understood then. “You can turn off pain?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing—you said the pain stopped, so . . .”
“No,” she said, “I—wait . . . can you turn off pain?”
He hesitated, feeling suddenly ashamed. The ability to mask pain was an enormous advantage in this tournament . . . the same tournament through which her “friend” was no doubt suffering.
“You can, can’t you?” she said, a knowing smile coming onto her face. She smacked her fist into her palm. “I was right. It’s just what Bleaker suspected. They gave you the sigma chip.” She uttered a short laugh. “Of course—Stark wanted you as the ultimate warrior, not a remote viewer.”
“Hold on,” Carl said. “What’s a sigma chip?”
“We both received the newest generation, but our chips are different,” she said. “Your sigma chip is designed to turn you into the ultimate soldier. Faster, stronger, immune to pain.”
“And yours?”
“I’m a gamma, so my chip works on different parts of my brain. The hippocampus and the parietal lobes, mainly.” She laughed. “Dr. Dougherty would flip if he heard me talking like this. He hates it when people oversimplify brain science, say this lobe does this, that lobe does that. Whatever. The gamma chip works on my spatial centers.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“I have a killer sense of direction,” she said, and smiled, excitement lighting her face. “And I can do some really cool stuff. It’s amazing.”
He heard the same enthusiasm in her voice that he’d felt, discovering his new abilities. “Like what?”
“Ever hear of remote viewing?”
He shook his head.
“That’s all right. I’m not there yet anyway . . . but I can feel stuff. Places and objects.”
“With your mind?”
She nodded. “Contours and angles, relative positions. Interspatial relationships. It’s like I have this three-dimensional map in my head,” she said. “I can’t really see it, but I can feel it . . . like a blind person touching someone’s face and getting a picture of what they look like.”
“All right,” Carl said. What she was saying didn’t make sense, but neither did the speed of his brain or rewinding photographic memories or only having to “sleep” for an hour a night.
“Most people have a touch of this—it’s where our sense of direction comes from—but the chip enhances those parts of my brain. If I concentrate, I can probe areas with my mind. I can feel spaces. Edges, angles. Walls and ceilings. Furniture. People, even.”
Remembering her saying something about feeling his approach the other night, he gestured toward the door. “So if somebody walked into the locker room now, you’d know it?”
“Only if I was concentrating on it,” she said, “or if I knew the person. I don’t know why that matters, but it does. Bleaker says I’m like a bird now, or a butterfly, something migratory that has a heightened sense of the world around it. Fly a thousand miles south for winter, then come all the way back to the same spot in the spring.”
“That’s another thing,” he said. “You keep name-dropping, like I know these people. Bleaker. Is he your b— your friend?”
“Bleaker’s a dorky smart guy back at the Bunker. A scientist. We work for the same agency, SI3.”
“Never heard of it,” Carl said, feeling vaguely stunned. It was a lot to take in.
“Few people have,” she said. “Think the CIA or Cybercom, only way more secretive, way cooler, and way weirder.”
“This whole time, I thought you were in some Mexican hospital.”
“Like I said, I was, until a few months ago. It was so strange, waking up with no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. I was holding a crayon, my hospital bed was covered in all these crazy drawings—maps, actually—and that guy I told you about was sitting there, staring at me.”
“Stark sent an assassin,” Carl said.
She gave him a confused look, then shook her head. “SI3. Apparently, I’d been in a coma for weeks. Toward the end, my hand started making all these deliberate jerking motions. One of the nurses thought it looked like writing, so on a whim, she gave me paper and a crayon. When I started cranking out map after map, one of the other nurses shot video and posted it on YouTube. SI3 showed up a few days later. Luckily, they have people surfing the Web twenty-four/seven, looking for weird stuff. SI3 focuses on the three ‘SIs’—science, cyber, and psionics.”
“Never heard of the third one,” Carl said.
“Neither had I. Psionics is the study of superhuman brain powers. ESP, telekinesis, remote viewing, that sort of thing.”
“That stuff’s real?”
She smiled. “Some of it is. I am.”
“What else can you do?”
Another smile. “Watch this.” She grabbed a hand towel from one of the supply shelves, handed it to him, and turned her back. “Blindfold me.”
He covered her eyes with the towel and tied it behind her head.
“Step aside,” she said. She squared her shoulders with the open aisle and launched into a series of backward flips that carried her down the aisle like a gymnast doing a floor routine.
He grinned—but then, realizing she was going to hit the block wall, he shouted, “Look out!”
She laughed as she reached the wall, springing off her hands at a different arc and bending her legs. Her feet hit the wall, and she sprung away, arching in midair. Her hands hit the floor, and she propelled herself into a series of incredible flips that carried her back down the aisle
, until she planted herself in exactly the same spot where she’d been standing when she started the demonstration. Laughing, she removed the blindfold.
“That’s amazing,” he said, meaning it. “So you—what?—felt the wall there?”
“Yup,” she said, grinning harder. “It’s fun.”
“And where did you learn to flip like that?”
“SI3,” she said. “They’re teaching me all types of stuff.”
“You work for them now? Like an agent?”
“Right,” she said. “They’re good, Carl. Most of the Bunker Bots—that’s what I call the lab types—are pretty dorky, and Bleaker has a lame sense of humor, and this one guy, Crossman, has no sense of humor at all, but they’re good. They’re constantly fighting, constantly protecting people—though the people they’re protecting don’t even know SI3 exists.”
“Why send you here, though? What are you doing?”
“Spying,” she said, “Once I get the information I need, SI3 will strike.”
A new hope flickered to life. “Stark?”
“No—way bigger . . . and way more dangerous . . . the Few.”
“The Few? They’re just a bunch of rich jerks.”
She frowned at him. “Let me guess: Stark told you that?”
“Yeah,” he said, and remembered Stark saying, A small group of enormously wealthy elitists who happen to love blood sport. “But—”
“Well, he lied. Look, it doesn’t matter if you believe me. You asked what I’m doing, and I told you—spying—but I’m almost finished. That’s why I wanted to meet you tonight. We’re leaving soon. Probably tomorrow, maybe before your fight.” She put her hands on his arms. “Come with us.”
It was his turn to stiffen. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The shock was plain on her face. “What? Why?”
“I’m going back to Phoenix Island. I waited this whole time”—suffered, he thought—“because I knew that if I did anything . . .” He stopped himself, realizing he’d once more tiptoed up to a confession. He knew what he had to do.