Devil's Pocket

by John Dixon

  I hope so, Carl thought. This is our last chance.

  But he didn’t want her drawing the wrong kind of attention, so he nudged her. She came out of her stupor, blinking, then raised her glass as the bearded man said, “To victory.”

  Along with the other guests, Carl echoed their host’s words. Then he sipped his glass—the stuff tasted awful, like the world’s worst soda—and set it back on the table.

  “I would like to propose a toast as well,” the blond-haired woman said, and everyone took up their champagne flutes again. This woman had been giving Carl looks all night—strange, eager looks, like she wanted to eat him or something—and now she looked directly at him, saying, “To champions.”

  They completed the toast, Carl uncomfortably aware of the woman’s lingering gaze, and the bearded man started talking about their accomplishments, winning the Funeral Games—“and,” he reminded them, grinning wolfishly, “ten million dollars apiece.”

  Directly across from Carl, Fighter 47’s toga looked ridiculous draped across his misshapen muscles, as did the crown of laurel tilted atop his boxy, bald head. With his hairless mask of reddish scar tissue and deformed features—his nose was a stunted snout of gnarled flesh with slits for nostrils—he looked like a burn victim who had subsequently sliced every inch of his melted face with a straight razor. Carl glared, hating him, his stupidity, his brutality, his leering stare, and the rank animal smell of him wafting so pungently across the table. Registering Carl’s glare, he smiled, revealing a jagged range of broken teeth. His uncannily bright blue eyes, so unsettlingly familiar, lingered a second on Carl before swinging back toward Octavia.

  “I hope the champagne meets with your approval,” the bearded man said, and smiled. “Juglar cuvée,” he said slowly, as if savoring the name. “Eighteen twenty.”

  “A very good year,” one of the masked men said, and the Few laughed.

  “Sixty thousand dollars a bottle,” the bearded man said.

  Sixty thousand dollars for a bottle of booze? Carl thought. A quarter of a million going around the table right now? It made no sense—or wouldn’t, rather, anywhere but here.

  “Divers rescued these bottles from a shipwreck in the Baltic,” the bearded man said, “at a depth that provided ideal consistency of temperature and light, perfectly preserving them for nearly two centuries.” He raised his glass again. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please hold your glasses to the light. Observe the bubbles.”

  No matter what it costs, Carl thought, staring at his glass, it still tastes like crap.

  “Now,” the bearded man said, “if you’ll further indulge me, hold the glass close to your ear.”

  Carl leaned close and heard the snapping of effervescence.

  “Each of these bubbles,” the bearded man said, sounding reverent, “was trapped inside a bottle for two hundred years. Now, as we watch, they race to the surface and burst, gone forever. This is their moment in time . . . and ours, as well.” He looked around the table, then raised his glass. “To impermanence, then. . . . Let us savor its terrible beauty.”

  “To impermanence,” the blond-haired woman said, and the phrase echoed around the table.

  Carl pretended to sip his, then set it down.

  “Tonight, we share a most excellent feast,” the bearded man said, “cuisine even kings and queens would covet.”

  Good, Carl thought. Maybe once everybody started feeding their faces, this guy would shut up. He wanted to get out of here.

  Straightening in his throne, their host said, “Before we summon the celebratory meal, however, we must first ensure that the Funeral Games have, indeed, concluded.”

  What did he mean? The tournament was over. . . .

  “Each year,” the bearded man said, “we give the champions the opportunity to challenge one another.”

  Challenge another champion? Carl thought, and pictured his ironclad fist smashing Fighter 47’s disfigured face.

  “If challenged, you may accept or decline,” the bearded man said. “If one accepts and loses, he will retain his prize money. You fight only for honor.”

  Do it, Carl told himself. Challenge him. Punish him for what he did to Agbeko.

  But that was ridiculous. He couldn’t fight again, not with a broken arm.

  “Fighter 45, you first,” their host said. “Would you care to issue a challenge?”

  Baca translated.

  The Zurkistani lightweight, who’d been scowling at Carl all evening, leaned forward eagerly, but Baca shook his head, and the little hammerhead declined, then leaned back in his chair, regarding Carl with simmering contempt.

  “Fighter 19?” the bearded man said. Both he and the blond-haired woman stared expectantly at Carl. “Do you issue a challenge?”

  Carl hesitated. Fighter 47 needed to pay for what he’d done . . . but now wasn’t the time. As soon as dinner was over, he and Octavia would join Julio and Davis and maybe Tex—Carl still hadn’t decided—and escape the Cauldron. He couldn’t hang around to fight another match. But there was something else, wasn’t there? Another reason not to issue the challenge, a reason he didn’t want to admit to himself . . .

  With his pride screaming, Carl shook his head.

  The bearded man gave an as-you-will nod and turned to Zurkistan’s heavyweight. “And you, Fighter 47?”

  The apelike fighter grunted and turned toward his host with his mouth hanging open. From this angle, he had no discernible neck, only massive shoulders of humped muscle.

  The bearded man asked, “Would you care to issue a challenge?”

  Fighter 47 just stared.

  Baca leaned close to his fighter. “He’s asking if you’d like to fight again,” he said, using English, not Zurkistani, Carl was surprised to notice.

  Fighter 47’s head bobbed up and down. “Hah-ee-wuh,” he said, his voice low and garbled, like gravel in a blender.

  Baca chuckled.

  Hah-ee-wuh? Carl thought, feeling unexpectedly jarred. Some Zurkistani phrase?

  Fighter 47 fixed Carl with his icy blue eyes, pointed a thick arm across the table, and growled, “Holly-wuh.”

  Carl jolted out of his slouch.

  Hah-ee-wuh.

  Holly-wuh.

  Suddenly, in a moment of bright terror, he understood everything—the unsettlingly familiar eyes, the brutality, the impossible muscles and insane aggression . . .

  He was saying Hollywood.

  “Decker,” Carl said, feeling like he’d plunged into a pool of ice water.

  Fighter 47 showed his broken teeth again.

  Vispera had chipped Decker, and something had gone horribly wrong, as it had in Octavia’s story about the mutated psycho rabbit, and turned the redneck he’d fought back on Phoenix Island into a monster.

  “A challenge,” the bearded man said, his voice suddenly excited.

  The Few leaned in, bright-eyed. The blonde stared at Carl, tracing the rim of her goblet with a manicured fingertip.

  “And how do you respond, Fighter 19?” the bearded man said.

  Carl was so shocked by his realization—Decker!—that it took him a second to unstick his thinking.

  He had never backed down from a challenge in his life . . . and this was Decker, the guy who’d ruined Agbeko, the guy who’d pushed Carl back on Phoenix Island, causing all the trouble with Parker, the guy who’d hunted Ross, the guy who’d killed Medicaid and blamed it on Octavia . . . who sat beside Carl now, oblivious, still staring at the table. Lost in her secret world, she couldn’t interfere. Decker had challenged him, and this was his chance to set things right.

  But his arm was broken, and they had immediate escape plans, and there was the other reason, the thing he didn’t want to admit to himself.

  His mind replayed a painful clip: Agbeko sailing across the ring like a man stuffed with straw.

  You’re afraid, he thought bitterly. For the first time in his life, he was terrified of someone. A wave of self-loathing washed over him—coward!—but his
broken bones throbbed, reminding him of his limitations. He couldn’t let hatred for Fighter 47 or contempt for himself goad him into a fatal mistake.

  “Well?” the host asked.

  Hating himself, Carl shook his head.

  The bearded man frowned. “Are you certain? The match promises singular spectacle.”

  “Yeah,” Carl said, burning with shame. “I’m certain.”

  Decker laughed—a sound like a dog vomiting—and pointed at him.

  Baca smiled, his dark eyes glittering.

  Seeing their faces, Carl felt like an emotional piñata, simultaneously beaten by bewilderment, rage, fear, and self-loathing. . . .

  The bearded man sighed dramatically. “Our loss,” he said, “but never let it be said that I forced opponents into the octagon. And so we conclude another Funeral Games.” He smiled, then gestured toward the other end of the meadow, where dozens of servers in red togas appeared, laden with trays heaped with food. “Let the feast begin.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  OCTAVIA WAGED WAR.

  Outwardly, she slouched, appearing sullen, but inwardly, she attacked.

  Several courses came and went. When nudged, she emerged from her private world to sample food, actually tasting none of it, consumed as she was by frustration and burgeoning fear and the steady salvo of artillery rounds thumping and bursting inside her skull.

  Something was wrong.

  In the arena, the bearded man’s features had simply evaded her, rapidly shifting beneath the probing fingertips of her mind. At this range—if she were much closer, she could reach over and rip the frigging mask off his face—she’d expected to map him with ease, but no . . . every time she penetrated the mask, her mind’s hands sunk into the target, at which point she would feel a subtle drawing inward, as if the face were made of quicksand.

  Carl elbowed her again, breaking the connection and bringing her back as a server leaned close, placing a blurry plate before her. Booming howitzers bloomed flame in her brain. She gritted her teeth, bunched her toga fabric in white-knuckled fists, and nodded to the server, who spoke softly and stepped away. When the food came into focus—meat smothered in sauce, other stuff on the side—she sawed off a small corner, put it into her mouth, chewed mechanically, swallowed, and dropped back into herself . . .

  Where she finally made contact.

  With a surge of excitement, she felt resistance, an actual surface, the hidden topography unfolding beneath her sweeping perception. She felt skin and bones, the rise of a nose—long and thin and unexpectedly feminine—and her touch slipped away over smooth skin, crossing a high cheekbone that gave way to a slightly upturned eye, over which arched an eyebrow trimmed to a fine line.

  Bewildered, she realized that she knew this terrain. It was the face of the blond-haired woman.

  Had she misfired, targeting the wrong person?

  It didn’t seem possible, stress or no stress, headache or no headache. She’d never missed a target, not even when she was new to mapping and thought Bleaker was a complete madman and didn’t yet understand that this was science, not mysticism.

  She sipped her water, trying to still her trembling hands.

  Forget it, she told herself. You can wonder what happened later, after you map him.

  She remembered her role, cast a withering glance in Carl’s direction, and went back in.

  This time, the sucking liquid formed quickly beneath her probing . . . and seconds later, feeling a familiarly crooked nose, she realized that she was mapping not the bearded man but Carl.

  Again and again she tried, passing through puzzlement to frustration, from frustration to fatigue, and finally from fatigue to fear, not just fear of failure, which loomed large in her now, but fear of the moment itself. She was in the grips of that most ancient bogeyman—ignorance—for with each attempt, she encountered a different face, cycling through everyone at the table, save for the bearded man, until, at last, in a moment so terrifyingly unnatural that it filled her with revulsion, she was mapping her own face.

  She jolted upright in her seat, shocked and nauseated.

  The humongous fighter across from her snorted laughter, and she was thankful that her unsteady vision kept her from having to see his incomprehensibly ugly face.

  In her skull, countless fireworks detonated simultaneously in a grand finale of pain.

  Carl stared at her with concern. Even reeling as she was with pain and confusion and terror, she knew she had to scowl him back into his all-important act, but her face tingled with numbness, and her mouth didn’t seem to want to cooperate with her mind.

  Someone said something, and people laughed, and then someone in a red toga was leaning over her, apologizing in Spanish as he dried the table where, exiting her nightmare moment with a spasm, she had apparently tipped over her water goblet.

  Dinner’s nearly over, she realized, smelling the untouched cup of coffee not quite steaming before her. My last chance . . .

  But the idea of what she’d just felt stopped her cold.

  How had she mapped her own face?

  Did the bearded man’s golden mask contain some kind of high-tech defense that reflected psionic probing?

  “And finally,” the bearded man said, his voice distant and strangely dislocated in position, seeming to come from the left . . . then the right . . . and then farther off at an angle, anywhere other than his actual location, “we wish each of you safe travels and a fortuitous future.”

  He’s sending us away, she thought, and her unwillingness to fail surged. For years, other people had ruined her life, abused her, turned her into a loser. This was her one shot at erasing all of that, her one opportunity to stick it to the organization that had tortured her, killed her friends, and turned her into a freak, her one chance to strike back at everyone—not just the Few, Stark, and Vispera but even her stepfather and her mother, who, despite loving Octavia, had made a series of horrible choices, failed to protect her, and then left her in the lair of a monster. Succeed here, and she would wipe away the past, save countless people, and start a new life not as a loser on the run, some shadow-dwelling fugitive one traffic stop away from incarceration, but as an agent for good, someone with an incredible talent that would only grow more impressive with SI3’s help.

  Do this, she told herself. You’re in control of your own future.

  She dove back in . . .

  Where she found not the bearded man’s face but Carl’s, only this time, something was horribly, horribly wrong.

  She was suddenly terrified.

  Oh, Carl . . .

  His face was badly disfigured and lifeless.

  Covering it was a thin membrane engulfed in flame. Carl was gone—beaten or tortured to death—and wrapped in a burning shroud. . . .

  She slammed backward in her chair with a scream, toppled to the grass, and crawled frantically backward several feet before realizing the face had vanished.

  Around the table, people gawked. Carl was coming toward her, leaning to help. Seeing his face—his real face, his living face—she nearly cried out in relief.

  Gathering her wits just in time, she slapped his hand away and shouted at him in Spanish to keep his filthy hands off or she would kill him.

  Carl froze, plainly too shocked to pick up his side of the act, so she hauled herself to her feet before he could do something stupid—like show concern or courtesy.

  Brushing angrily at her toga, she shouted, “¡Cabrón!” Then she turned toward the Few and said, “Tocador de señoras, por favor.”

  The bearded man smiled knowingly, then turned to her server. “Please assist the lady to the powder room.”

  She forced a polite nod and shot Carl another glare for good measure.

  What had just happened?

  Shortly after her arrival at the SI3 Bunker, Bleaker had explained the ultimate goal of remote viewing: not just global projection that disregarded space—but also temporal projection that ignored the obstacle of time. According to some theori
sts, a full-blown remote viewer could scout not only across distance, locating and observing someone halfway around the world, but also across time, locating and observing a target hours, days, or even years in the future. Time and distance are inextricably linked, Bleaker had said, and he’d laughed and confessed his serious doubt that remote viewers would ever conquer chronology. She, of course, had agreed. Psychic stuff was cool for comic books, but in the real world, it seemed utterly ridiculous.

  Until now.

  Now, with the feel of Carl’s battered and lifeless face fresh upon her mind’s fingertips, the concept of prescience was utterly terrifying.

  Had she glimpsed one possible future? Had her mind shot forward along hypothetical trajectories and bounced back with this grisly warning?

  When the server offered his arm, she declined, following alongside him as he headed for a break in the hedges.

  “No,” the bearded man said, bringing them to a halt. “Show her to the other powder room.” He pointed to a tall archway of carved marble at the opposite end of the glade, beyond which, she knew, comatose pairs lay in unholy union facilitated by tubes and wires and circuitry.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  CARL ROSE TO FOLLOW OCTAVIA, but the bearded man insisted he stay. “She’ll be fine,” he said, his voice light and friendly. “The feast was apparently too rich for her.” He beckoned to a server, who leaned close, nodding as the bearded man whispered, and then hurried off through a side door.

  Dinner broke up, and the bearded man bade Z-Force good night. Decker showed Carl his broken teeth one more time before he swaggered after his departing teammates.

  “Prepare the evening ritual,” the bearded man told the Few. “I will join you shortly.”

  They bowed and left, the blond-haired woman pausing to look Carl up and down one more time before saying, “I do hope to see more of you, Fighter 19.”

  Carl said that would be nice, thinking, Thanks, but no thanks, lady, and lingered beside his chair, glancing across the glade to the arch through which Octavia had disappeared. Why had she screamed and fallen? What had gone wrong with the mapping? Was she okay?