by John Dixon
Minutes later, she was two floors down, hustling along the horizontal pipe. When she’d fled the bathroom, she’d expected shrieking alarms, but she’d heard none, and the hallways appeared empty . . . which all made sense, really. Where would she go? Where could she go? They would expect to apprehend her as she reentered her apartment or to find her lying broken at the bottom of a vertical shaft.
Arriving at a vent, she peered out through its slats—all clear—popped off the grate, dropped into the luxurious hall, and started running, hiding the knife blade alongside her forearm in case she passed anyone not looking for her. To the casual observer, a girl might run past in a toga for any number of reasons . . . but a girl running with a steak knife tended to arouse suspicion.
She flitted along the tapestried hall, turned the corner, and sprinted past the massive statue of the seated fighter, thankful once again for the way they’d changed her blood on Phoenix Island. She had always been a good runner, but now she could run faster than anyone she knew and could keep running for hours without tiring.
She turned another corner, and there, at the end of the hall, was the mouth of the tunnel, where the train sat, still as a sleeping beast.
Yes, she thought, I’ve made it.
An icy breeze sighed from the dark mouth of the tunnel, chilling her enthusiasm. She was going into a blizzard wearing only a dress and sandals?
Yes, you are, she thought, because there is no other option.
Explore the train, look for clothes or blankets . . . something?
No. She couldn’t afford the time. She hoped SI3 reached her before she froze to death.
She was almost to the tunnel when someone stepped from the shadows.
She lurched to a stop, started to bring the knife around, and then stopped, recognizing Carl’s friend, the one with the big mouth. Tex, she thought, remembering the name easily because it was so strange, short for Texarkana, which was even stranger. She relaxed. Carl must have told him and Davis to meet them here.
“Hey,” Tex said, smiling. “Where’s Carl?”
“Something happened,” she said. “He can’t come yet.”
Tex looked past her. “You got people chasing you?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. Where’s Davis?”
He shrugged. “That boy’s moodier than a pug.” He grinned, walking toward her. “Know what I mean? Little dog, built like a toaster, got a pushed-in face? Moody little things . . .”
She started to say, Isn’t Davis coming with us? but then noticed something that chilled her more deeply than had the icy wind. “Where’s your parka?”
He stretched out his hand. “I don’t think we ever really met. I’m Texarkana Reginald Dubois.”
She stepped backward—this wasn’t making sense—and even that small retreat set her internal alarms clanging. Something was wrong here. . . .
He dropped his hand but kept walking slowly forward. “You’re Octavia, right?”
“Margarita,” she said, and gripped the hidden knife, thinking, Carl would never have told this guy my name. . . .
“I’m not talking code names, honey,” he said. “I’m talking your real name . . . the one you used back on Phoenix Island.”
Okay, she thought. That’s it. Get around this guy, run fast, and leave him in the dust. She glanced right and left.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.” Suddenly, his voice was completely different . . . cold and flat as a knife blade, no hint of his trademark twang. “I must say, your English has improved remarkably.”
So has yours, she thought, but what she said was, “Who are you?”
He spread his hands, and his smile changed, too, losing its goofiness. “Maybe it’s easier to say who I’m not,” he said, still creeping forward. “I am not, as you seem to be realizing, some brick-witted hick. Honestly, I’m surprised it took you so long. I mean, didn’t it ever strike the two of you as strange that Stark would send a green recruit to the Funeral Games?” Then his voice did twang. “Y’all’re slower than a turtle with a limp.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, terrified now. She didn’t care who this guy was. She just wanted to get away from him . . . but she’d been backing in the wrong direction, away from the tunnel.
“Turns out, I’m not so green after all,” he said, and chuckled. “I’m no cage fighter. But Stark didn’t send me to fight. He sent me to watch.”
“Watch the fights?” she said, talking to talk, trying to figure her next move. She couldn’t run backward—alarms or no alarms, guards would be hunting her, and as soon as they spotted the vent covers, they would charge in this direction—but she couldn’t run forward, not with him blocking her.
He shook his head. “Stark sent me here to watch for you. I suspected you were Octavia when I saw you two together that night down by the lake, but you made me second-guess myself when you got so angry after Carl beat up your fighter. I didn’t really know for sure until Carl asked you to dinner tonight. Little reckless, don’t you think?”
“You have me confused with someone else,” she said, angling left.
He mirrored her, stepping to his right, cutting her off. “Who got you out of the hospital, anyway? SI3, right? That’s what Stark thinks . . . and the man is seldom wrong. He’s the one who said if you two got together, you’d likely duck out before the mass exodus, so I figured I ought to come down here and make sure that didn’t happen.”
“You could never stop Carl,” she said, moving to the right. He mirrored her again, blocking her way. She couldn’t slip past him and certainly couldn’t go through him. As one of Stark’s mercenaries, he wouldn’t even blink at her steak knife. So that meant . . .
He took a step forward. “Oh, I would have stopped him. See, I know his Achilles’ heel. He’s too nice. Good old Tex would have put on a puppy-dog face and said, ‘Please don’t leave me behind, boss,’ and Carl would’ve taken me. Then I would have pushed both of you off the mountain and seen which one hit first. Where are you going?”
She ran back the way she came, away from the tunnel, but not too quickly. She heard him laugh, heard his footsteps coming after her, but more importantly felt him drawing nearer. Once again, fear and adrenaline sharpened her sixth sense, and as she slowed her retreat and twisted her wrist, she could feel him—all of him, every plane and angle and its exact relation to her own planes and angles—so distinctly that even without looking, it was nothing for her to swing her arm backward and plunge the blade handle-deep into the meat of his thigh.
He grunted but still grabbed her, one hand digging into her shoulder, the other yanking her hair. She swung into him, scared witless yet not needing her wits, needing only the courage to fight and the amazing awareness that flooded her mind and body as she shook her shoulder free and drove her knee into the knife handle.
He jerked and howled and clubbed with a thumping blow that hit her somewhere—the shoulder or the neck . . . she didn’t know, didn’t care, just had to fight now, fight and run—and she screamed, raking his face, scratching at his eyes.
He cursed and hit her again, but she twisted her body away from him.
Growling, his face streaked with bloody scratches, he yanked her long braid, trying to haul her back to into his grasp, but at the same moment, she gritted her teeth and thrust her head in the opposite direction.
A hard tug, a painful tearing away, and she snapped free, turning and sprinting for the tunnel.
Feeling his distance behind her, she risked a glance and saw him limping in pursuit, twenty feet behind, thirty, with blood draining from the handle jutting from his thigh. He shook his fist, still clutching what looked like blond roadkill. “I’ll kill you!” he shouted, staggering doggedly after her.
Entering the tunnel, she ran along the narrow gap between the tunnel wall and the train itself until she passed the final car, where she hopped over the rail and started sprinting up the center of the t
racks.
Stark had known about SI3, anticipated her coming here, and sent along an assassin.
Should’ve buried the knife in his gut, she thought. One less killer hunting me. Since joining SI3, she’d mistakenly assumed she’d escaped Stark’s reach—but she understood now that SI3 had underestimated him. Worse still, despite everything she had seen and endured on Phoenix Island, she had underestimated him. Vastly. No matter how this ended, could she ever be safe again?
Forget it, she thought. Just run. Get away from this psycho and you can ponder life’s mysteries later . . . if you live that long.
Yet as she pounded uphill, thoughts tortured her. What were they doing to Julio and Carl? Were the Few slipping out some back door, flying to safety? Was the Cauldron about to explode?
She imagined a thunderous boom and a wall of flame rushing up the tunnel, burning her to ash, the idea so terrifying that she could almost feel . . .
No . . . could feel.
No explosion, no flame, but a faint rumbling.
The tracks were moving.
Shaking.
Then, in a moment of dawning terror, she understood . . . the train.
No!
In the bright screaming clarity of that nightmare microsecond, she heard and felt the onrushing train—the soft purr of its approach, the vibration of the ground—and then light panned around the corner behind her, growing brighter.
There was no safe place, no walkway or platform on either side. Sure, she could flatten herself against the wall, but with such a narrow gap, the train’s vacuum would suck her straight under the metal wheels and chop her in half.
She sprinted uphill, wild with fear, running like she had never run before, throwing every fiber of muscle into the effort, pounding up the incline, growling with effort, but there was nowhere to run, no way to escape, and she could feel the train, could feel its massive, undeniable bulk hurtling inexorably closer, bearing down on her, louder now, the light breaking fully into the tunnel, the ground shaking beneath her, and suddenly, flight seemed so pointless that hopelessness filled her legs, making them heavy, slowing her until it felt like she was being sucked backward into the train.
She cast her mind forward, scanning the tunnel walls for some recess or alcove or door, anything into which she could duck, but found nothing, nothing at all to save her from the mass of approaching steel that filled the tunnel. . . .
Or rather, almost filled it.
And in that second, she felt the crucial difference defined by this almost in a way she never could have perceived, had she relied simply on her eyes and brain, which prior to the chip would have analyzed the moment in a three-dimensional myopia of objects and absolutes. Yes, cowering in the gap between train and tunnel wall, she would never escape the suction of the passing train, but she didn’t just feel the gap. In a flash approaching Bleaker’s coveted prescience, she felt the static and the dynamic—gap, train, wall, herself—felt everything simultaneously and four-dimensionally, not just the objects in relation to one another but the objects in relation to one another in time.
She stopped running, turned downhill, and ran straight at the train, which roared into view, rushing toward her.
Within the illuminated engine cabin, Tex—or whatever his real name was—hunched over the controls, leering at her with wild eyes and the toothy smile of a crazed clown. He pounded the dashboard, blasting her with the banshee wail of the train whistle, then threw his head back with grotesque laughter.
The train raced toward her—thirty feet away, twenty, ten . . .
At the last second, she jumped.
Not at the train but at the wall, which she hit just as the train whooshed past. Before the deadly vacuum could seize her, she sprung up and away, kicked off the train, rebounded off the wall again—higher this time—climbing as she ricocheted back and forth, train to wall, wall to train, feeling the necessary timing, until she kicked off the wall once more, harder this time, and dove stomach-first onto the roof of the train.
“Yes!” she shouted, her voice a mad shriek of triumph, and for several seconds, she just lay there, insane with adrenaline and the surging joy of having so narrowly escaped death. Then she shuddered out a prayer of thanks and started crawling forward, inching toward the engine.
THIRTY-SIX
CARL PACED THE CELL, scanning for weaknesses or resources but finding nothing. No cot, no sink, no window, no toilet. Only a cement floor with a recessed drain—the drain bothered him for reasons he couldn’t quite untangle—three walls of solid concrete, and the sliding wall of thick plexiglass that served as a floor-to-ceiling window onto the empty corridor.
Where was Octavia? What were they doing to her?
He lashed out with a powerful kick. The plexiglass didn’t even wobble.
Would Decker wobble? He had certainly wobbled when they’d fought back on Phoenix Island. Carl had head butted him into La La Land, then knocked him clean over the cot with an uppercut.
But they weren’t forcing him to fight that Decker. They were forcing him to fight the mutant, Fighter 47. Why? Less for sport than spectacle.
Stark had told him about the ancient Romans, who, when glutted with blood sport, infused excitement by importing unlikely opponents from around the world: boars against hyenas, wolves against apes, tigers against bulls. Tens of thousands of animals killed, whole species going extinct, all for the twisted novelty of a crowd desensitized to human suffering.
Now the bearded man had slated an exotic finale certain to delight even the jaded Few . . . two chipped opponents fighting to the death.
So be it, Carl thought. He might be stronger than me, but I can out-think him. He put his back to the wall, slid into a crouch, and did what he hated to do, replaying the memory of Agbeko’s fight with Decker. Agbeko, he thought, watching his friend fade again, and felt a sinking sensation in his chest, sorrow and guilt weighing down his heart.
If only he had stayed with his team, Agbeko would be alive and well. But that was a foolish and pointless line of thought, like saying if only his father hadn’t been shot or cancer hadn’t killed his mother. Fate dealt you cards, and you had to play them, not waste time wishing for aces.
Make Decker pay, he told himself. Don’t waste time feeling sad. Get it together.
Easier said than done, he found, wrestling with remorse as he replayed the memory again.
Focus on Decker, he told himself, and played it again. And again. And again . . . on and on, for an hour, two hours, pausing and rewinding the clip to analyze every second of its grisly footage, paying special attention to Decker’s position throughout, studying him for even the slightest vulnerability . . . until he realized that, like this cell, Decker would reveal no weakness, leading Carl to the ultimate conclusion . . . he couldn’t beat him.
Shouldn’t, he corrected himself, not couldn’t—for no boxer dealt purely in absolutes. In a fight, everyone had a chance.
Carl might have an edge in speed—might—but his only definite edge was brains. The error code had stacked Decker with muscle, making him incomprehensibly, irrepressibly strong, but it had also punted his brain back into prehistoric savagery. Carl expected no subtlety or surprising strategy. Decker would charge straight at him.
He’s the bull, Carl thought, and I’m the tiger. A troubling analogy . . .
In the Roman Colosseum, he had been shocked to learn, bulls beat tigers every time. It didn’t seem possible that a tiger, with its speed and strength and variety of attacks, could lose to the bull’s straightforward charge, but it did . . . without exception.
But of course tigers, despite their terrible strengths, were limited to instincts, locked into a style dictated not by what they thought but by what they were.
He was not so limited. The chip in his head did not define him the way instincts defined a tiger. The chip would not carry him to victory—only his mind could do that.
He had to blind Decker or crush his windpipe or break his knees—but understanding these ta
ctics was not the same as seeing a way to make them happen.
Think, he told himself, and shut his eyes. That’s your only shot. Think.
But there was nothing. Only the undeniable reality of the thing Decker had become, the same unsolvable riddle.
Maybe there is no answer, he thought, and even if you do win . . . what then? Sooner or later, he would float and burn. He had no illusions that they would revive him as they had the others.
Yet he felt no fear. A wonderful gift, the absence of fear, and he said a prayer of thanks for the calm that had settled over him. Ironically, when he’d had the opportunity to challenge Decker, a panic of possibilities had seized him, but now, out of choices, with the fight set, he feared neither Decker nor death.
The fact that victory ultimately meant nothing—for he had no illusions concerning his fate, should he miraculously defeat Decker—might have crippled the resolve of some fighters, but in Carl, it only served to strengthen. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to distract or weaken, should the tide turn against him. He would fight to win, to destroy.
And as to his inability to find a workable plan, so be it. After all, wasn’t that what he had learned atop the mountain . . . to stop clinging to guarantees? Yes, he would need to think to win, but he had to trust himself to do that thinking on his feet, in the moment, during the fight.
To fight his hardest, he needed rest—not sleep, but the deeper, more efficient rest afforded by the chip. Kneeling upon the hard floor, he downshifted his systems, slipping quickly into his inner darkness, where respiration and circulation practically ceased.
When he opened his eyes again, someone in a red toga stood on the other side of the plexiglass, staring in at him.
Carl jumped to his feet. “Agbeko!” They must have sucked the life-force from some poor steward in order to save him. A repulsive thought, but Carl was overjoyed to see his friend standing there before him.
Agbeko smiled strangely, looking sheepish, almost embarrassed. “I’m sorry, sir. Things aren’t precisely as you’re perceiving them,” Agbeko said, and his voice was odd—still deep but . . . different. A new accent?