by John Dixon
She squeezed his arms. “No, Carl. You can’t go back.”
“Can’t? I have to,” he said, anger rising in him as he pictured Stark’s face. “Stark has to pay for what he did to you, to me, to Ross and Campbell and everyone.” All at once, ashes smoldered within his nostrils. “He’s going to pay for turning me into a killer.”
“You’re not a killer.”
“I hate to break it to you,” he said, “but I am. In fact, we attended his funeral tonight.”
She shook her head. “He’s not dead.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked up.
Carl followed her eyes over the shelf of stacked towels to the block wall painted institutional yellow and a rectangular air-conditioning vent near the ceiling.
Then she asked, “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
TWENTY-FOUR
CARL LEANED CLOSE to the louvered vent and peered into what looked like the eerie combination of a science lab and a hospital room. From the floor-to-ceiling bank of beeping, blinking machinery, tubes and wires snaked to smaller machines that sat atop wheeled carts between the beds and gurneys. Bed-machine-gurney, bed-machine-gurney, bed-machine-gurney, on down the row, a dozen trios in total. Wires and tubes emerged from the smaller machines and coiled onto beds, where they attached to webbed caps worn by the old men lying there, their formerly silver-haired heads shaved to accommodate the caps’ many electrode points. Other wires and tubes descended to the gurneys, where they plunged into younger flesh.
Fighters.
Carl recognized the Korean, one of the Argentines, and the Gypsy lightweight. Their heads, too, were shaved beneath what looked like mesh swimming caps.
These were fighters who’d died, whose boats Carl had seen burn.
But they weren’t dead. Each lay upon a gurney, connected by wires and the wheeled machine to a similarly comatose man in an adjacent bed. And he recognized these men, too. They were stewards. They were all stewards.
He glanced down the row and jerked with a dull thump off the ductwork.
Octavia, who had entered the duct first, gone past the vent, and turned around so that they were now face-to-face on either side of the louvered rectangle, raised a finger to her lips.
He gave her the okay sign, then looked again, just to make sure he’d actually seen what he’d thought he’d seen toward the end of the row. He sharpened his vision, drawing in the unconscious boy whose chest rose and fell subtly, slowly.
Alexi.
He was alive. Alexi was alive.
I didn’t kill him, Carl thought, and a wild gladness rippled through him.
But they’d held his funeral, burned his boat. Why?
They had done all that but kept him here, attached to this machine, which connected on the other side to the Zurkistani steward, in a state resembling that of Alexi, both of them sleeping . . . or comatose. Something.
What was happening to these stewards? He remembered Kruger bidding team Phoenix Force farewell, citing his big opportunity, thanking Carl, and giving his big seize-the-day speech.
What were the Few tricking the stewards into here?
A door opened, and a woman dressed in a white lab coat entered, trailed by two men dressed in green scrubs. The woman stopped briefly at the first gurney, glanced at the steward on the adjacent bed and consulted an electronic tablet. She scrolled down the screen, and said something Carl couldn’t hear to the two men, who made adjustments to the machine.
The trio moved down the row, sometimes making changes, sometimes just observing. They adjusted one steward’s cap. When they reached the Argentine, the woman said, “He is nearly ready.” Then she checked the tablet and leaned over the steward for a few seconds. “So is he.”
One assistant checked the tubes and wires, while the other began adjusting machine dials.
What were they doing?
Octavia motioned to Carl, then started crawling backward farther out the shaft. Carl followed. They were face-to-face again.
“What’s going on back there?” he whispered.
“I’m going to show you,” she said.
They passed other vents through which Carl glanced.
One opened onto the largest, fanciest bathroom he had ever seen. Thankfully, despite its size and splendor, it was empty.
The next opened onto a kitchen that stretched away like the main floor of a department store. Men and women in white uniforms and cylindrical chef hats worked at stations, cutting, grilling, carving . . . and everywhere bustled hatless helpers, washing dishes and lugging stacks of plates, cleaning spills and hunching over prep stations. These helper-types moved smoothly—and had the broad shoulders and battered faces of fighters.
Then he was following after Octavia.
They shimmied around a bend in the ductwork, went a bit farther, Octavia moving as naturally going backward as someone else going forward, quickly yet never bumping into the ductwork.
“We’re almost there,” she whispered, looking him in the eyes. “Be very quiet.”
He nodded, and then things got strange. He detected surprising smells—freshly cut grass and flowers in full bloom—and then heard a sound at once instantly recognizable and absolutely unexpected: the delighted cries of small children running at play.
The sound of children playing was so uncanny here that their laughter sent goose bumps racing over his flesh.
Reaching the vent, he peered out onto a space that made no sense whatsoever: a brightly lit summer scene, a grassy meadow with trees and a large fountain spraying water. Farther back, past an orchard of fruit trees interspersed with classical columns of white marble, a crystalline lagoon sparkled against a backdrop of dark stones, over which cascaded a shimmering waterfall, misty at this distance. Nearer, in the emerald-green meadow, several small children flitted between weathered marble statues that looked like they belonged in ancient Greece. The children wore togas cinched with golden ropes and ran barefoot upon the bright green grass, the girls with flowers in their hair, the boys with crowns of laurel, all of them wearing tiny little golden masks.
A window onto Olympus. Little godlings at play.
One golden-haired little girl squealed with glee as she tagged the shoulder of a boy with an inky mop of jet-black hair. He tumbled across the grass, rose up laughing, and shouted, “Now I’m the minotaur!”
None of it made sense. Somehow, the Few had cultivated summer here in the stony heart of this wintry volcano and populated it with playing . . .
“Children,” the woman called, coming into view, her voice like a musical instrument, beautiful as the perfect body wearing only a short toga now, perfect as the blond-framed face that he recognized from the arena opera box. “Come and eat.”
Some of the children protested. Some cheered. All obeyed. They flocked to the woman, who looked over her shoulder as the server appeared.
Another jolt, but Carl was ready this time—ready for anything—and a good thing, too, because he might otherwise have shouted in surprise.
The server with the oddly shaped head stooped so that the children could reach the silver tray heaped with grapes. He, too, wore only a toga, exposing the bulk of his muscles, including the cannonball shoulder emblazoned with a bright red triangle.
TWENTY-FIVE
CARL HELPED OCTAVIA out of the vent and down to the supply room floor, where he realized an embarrassing truth: she’d let him assist her but hadn’t needed any help at all. The girl could do gymnastics in a pitch-black cave.
“I told you he wasn’t dead,” she said.
He nodded. Alexi lived. A huge relief, but . . . “What did we just see back there?”
“You know what we saw.”
“The Russian was dead,” Carl said, remembering the vacant look in Fighter 32’s eyes when they’d carried him into the locker room. “I saw him.”
She spread her hands. “Maybe he just looked dead. Either way, he’s made a pretty amazing recovery in just two days, huh?”
&
nbsp; “What are they doing up there?”
“They’re sucking the life out of the old guys and using it to heal the fighters,” she said.
“Life-force isn’t blood,” he said. “You can’t just swap it out.”
“The Few are way ahead of us. They’ve been developing stuff in secret for a long, long time. That’s how SI3 knows about them. Spend any time in the world of underground science and technology, and you start bumping into rumors. Investigate the rumors, and you uncover countless half stories going back hundreds of years. Sinister legends of a shadowy international cabal, centuries old. Their goal: to evolve, become more than human.”
The pantheon, he thought.
She shivered and folded her arms. “Last night, I watched them do it.”
“The swap thing?”
She nodded. “That woman and her helpers? They used a machine. Took ten minutes. They just kind of . . . dimmed the old guy down . . . drained him. Completely.” She shuddered. “Then the fighter sat up and started talking. Good as new. Excited. He didn’t even seem surprised.”
Carl thought again of Kruger and his strange parting earlier this evening. Were the Few tricking him into surrendering his life-force, too? How could he find Kruger and warn him without raising an alarm? The old guy was fanatically loyal to his precious Few.
Octavia smiled, looking both proud and determined. “My whole life, bad people have pushed me around,” she said. “Finally, I’ve found a way to push back . . . hard.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out papers, and unfolded four intricately drawn sketches, each depicting a different person. Two handsome men and two beautiful women.
“You drew those?” He took them from her, studying each sketch, marveling at the incredible detail. “They’re amazing . . . like photos.”
“It’s them,” she said, her eyes hard. “The Few.”
“Really? But how . . . did you see them through the vent?”
“I use my chip. Remember me saying I could feel things I couldn’t actually see?”
“Like a blind person touching a face,” he said.
“I can penetrate their masks and feel their faces—the contours and angles, the landscape.” She pointed to the drawings. “Those aren’t sketches. They’re maps.”
“So,” he said, blinking at the pictures, then looking up at her, “you feel what each part of their face looks like, then copy it onto the page?”
“Yes,” she said, taking the sketches from him and returning them to her pocket. “That’s why SI3 sent me. The Few have been around in one form or another for a long time, but no one has ever figured out their real identities.” She slapped her pocket and smiled. “Until now. I just have to get one more.”
“The bearded man,” Carl said.
She nodded. “I haven’t been able to map him. Maybe I was exhausted—whenever I push too hard, I get these horrible headaches, like migraines with an attitude—but when I tried to probe behind his mask, there was no shape or form, just a blur. I’m hoping tomorrow, during the lightweight match, I’ll have better luck.”
“What if you don’t?”
She looked suddenly uncomfortable, and he knew she was thinking of his fight with Romeo. “Let’s just hope I do,” she said.
“And if you do ‘map’ him . . . what then?”
“We sneak out of here. The Cauldron’s shielded from satellites, all the way back to where the buses dropped us, but once I’m out of the mountains, I’ll signal SI3. They’re in the region, but they don’t know precisely where we are. Once they pick up my signal, they’ll send teams.”
“Why wait? Why not go now?”
“SI3 wants the bearded guy worse than all the others put together. Julio won’t leave until I finish the final sketch.”
Julio, Carl thought, registering the name. Not Romeo, Julio. “But if you signaled SI3 now,” he said, “wouldn’t they catch the guy?”
“No. The Few always have an escape plan, and they wire every venue with explosives. Julio’s been hunting for the explosives, but no luck so far. If SI3 showed up now, the Few would slip out the back door, push a button, and blow up this place and everybody in it.”
“If the Few are so secretive,” he said, “how do you know all this stuff?”
“SI3 has been chasing leads, recruiting assets, and sifting data for decades. Two years ago, they finally managed to slip three agents in the Games. One died fighting. Another, the Few caught snooping and tortured to death. The final agent fled into the forest. Just after he escaped, he saw a bright flash and watched a small jet fly away. Seconds later, the entire facility exploded, explaining why every lead they’d gotten in previous years led only to shattered ruins.”
He took it all in. A year earlier, any piece of this would have seemed completely insane—the Few, a fighting tournament in a volcano, everything wired to blow . . . let alone Octavia’s mapping and whatever it was they were doing in the lab upstairs—but now, standing here thousands of miles from Philadelphia with a chip in his head, he believed every word of it.
She said, “Meet me after the lightweight bout, all right?”
“Where?”
“The lake. If I can ID him during the fight, we’ll leave right after.”
“Take Davis with you,” Carl said.
She looked at him like he was crazy. “Davis? As in the gangbanger you hate?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “People change—and not always for the worse.”
She nodded. “Tell him to be ready. What about the other two?”
“Not the big guy,” he said, and felt a pang of sorrow. Poor, lost Agbeko. “He’s one hundred percent loyal to Stark.”
“And the other guy, the one with the mouth?”
Carl thought for a second. Tex had no clue about Phoenix Island, where his attitude would get him killed in a week. But still . . . the idea of Tex trying to sneak anywhere . . .“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
“All right,” she said, and slipped her hands into his. “Come with us, Carl.”
And all at once, he felt the old connection. He sensed her there behind the disguise, sensed the real her, the Octavia he had known back on Phoenix Island, where they had stolen spare minutes to swap stories and laugh and just be. A flash flood of emotions rushed through him—fondness, sorrow, hope, doubt—but then Stark marched into his mind, attended by the things he had done to her, Ross, Davis, Campbell, Sanchez, Medicaid, and countless others.
He shook his head. “I have to stop Stark.”
She growled with frustration. “Forget Stark. SI3 could crush him right now. He’s on an island. A small island.”
“Why don’t they, then?”
“And lose the Few? They’d cover their tracks in about five minutes.”
“But think about what he did to us,” he said. “Think about Ross.”
“None of that would have happened without the Few,” she said. “Don’t you get it? The Few own Stark. They supply everything he needs to build his super soldiers. They tell him where to go and who to kill.”
“Geopolitical chess,” he said.
“Exactly,” she said. “Playing games with the world, with people’s lives. They’re so rich, they’re not even really human anymore. They’re beyond our dreams or hopes or fears. With no connection to humanity, they can feel no love . . . only lust. And they’ll drain every last one of us to get what they want.”
“Stark has this fantasy,” he said, “where society comes tumbling down and almost everyone dies. He and his favorites are chipped, but for everybody else, it’s back to the Stone Age.”
She looked neither doubtful nor surprised. “Straight out of the playbook of the Few. The chips, the blood virus . . . they’re perfecting those things for themselves. They want to be young and strong and fast, immune to pain or sickness or fatigue, with high-speed minds that can see through walls and maybe even into the future. That would leave only one fear.”
It took him a second. “Death.”
She nodded. “
That’s what they’re working on upstairs: beating death. They don’t just want to be superhuman. They want to be gods.”
TWENTY-SIX
CARL DIDN’T GET BACK to his apartment until three in the morning—the long hour of the soul, his grandmother, reduced now to a dark effigy in the furthermost recesses of his memory, used to call it, conjuring notions of life’s very essence at low tide, a fragile, fleeting hour of fading away—but as he came through the door, his own soul was soaring. He was leaving this place, likely in six or seven hours.
Good-bye to the Cauldron, farewell to Phoenix Island. No more Stark, no more suffering. Where next? He didn’t know—and it didn’t matter. For now, leaving was enough. Octavia was enough. And the knowledge that together, remotely, they would ruin Stark was enough.
“My brother,” said a deep voice in the darkness.
Carl jerked sideways, tucking his chin and raising his hands—the conditioned response of every startled boxer—then relaxed with a laugh. “Agbeko. You made me jump.”
A massive shadow moved in the dining room. “I have been waiting for you.” Something strange in his voice. “Is it true?”
Panic scrambled in Carl’s chest. Did Agbeko know about Octavia? About their plans?
Impossible.
He tapped the wall mount, filling the main room with light. “Is what true?”
Agbeko emerged from the dining room, looking like he’d just left his best friend’s funeral. “You will not allow me to compete in the finals?”
Davis, Carl thought bitterly, then remembered the medic’s warning . . . Either you tell him or I do. “Yeah,” Carl said. “It’s true. But I sure do wish I’d been able to tell you myself.”
Agbeko walked to Carl, put his big hands lightly on Carl’s shoulders, and stared down with bruised and swollen eyes hollowed by grief. “Please do not do this to me, Carl.”
“You fought bravely,” Carl said. “You brought glory to Phoenix Island.”
Agbeko’s hands fell away. “There is no honor in surrender.”