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by Matthew Siege

  No, they'd have waited to approach Earthlings with their Trojan Horse of an offer as close to our arbitrary expiration date as they dared.

  Despite the migraine that was pulsing around in my skull, my brain wanted to keep kicking these thoughts around, but there wasn't any point. I didn't have enough information to make educated guesses about the things I didn't yet know.

  All that food I'd eaten was starting to make me nauseous. The last thing I wanted to do was puke it up all over myself. I realized that if I dared to get out of bed, the very next thing that would happen would be me painting the ground with my lunch.

  A cursory glance of the room didn't turn up a wheelchair or crutches, and I was sure that wasn't an oversight. Even though I was able to begin to think of this place as something other than a prison, it was still far from five-star accommodation.

  Shit. Those drugs took a lot out of me, and my laundry list of injuries sapped my strength as well. The Station was part military complex and part scientific experimental compound, but there weren't many people here going out of their way to make the inhabitants comfortable.

  I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. I fought it, sitting up in the bed straighter. I looked down at my legs, at the casts around my ankles. I was skinnier than I should be. When the word cancer had first been uttered by my GP, I'd stopped caring for myself. It was difficult for me to think of my body as anything other than a husk that had needlessly betrayed me, and I repaid the traitor with a strong of sleepless nights and malnourished days.

  I surprised myself by worrying that I wouldn't heal fast enough to get back into the Citadel. "I guess you do still care about something, at least," I muttered, hearing the panting little breath that followed the words. I was winded, and all I'd done was change my position in the hospital bed...

  That didn't bode well.

  The only thing that kept me in the game was my ability to maneuver around the Labyrinth. If I couldn't remain mobile, I had no doubt that the Evvex could demand that I be substituted for someone else.

  "Too bad," I said. "If one of you fucking aliens has to crawl around the Labyrinth on my hands and knees, you've done it to yourself."

  I'd been reaching for my IVs to see if they were loose, but my hand froze as I realized something. I'd been too busy feeling sorry for myself and my battered body to see what was really going on. It had seemed foolish for them to damage their own vehicle, but what if there was more to it than that?

  What if the Evvex were afraid of me? I had been a catalyst of my Faction's success, however small. What if the situation had been reversed? If I was an Evvex, and the Citadel had just tossed in a Contestant who looked like he may be capable of ruining my scheme, what would my reaction be?

  Why, I'd do everything I could to take him out, of course.

  And there it was. Nothing else made sense. Evelyn and Kyun had both told me the other members of my team hadn't been visited by the Evvex while they were in the Citadel, which might mean that the aliens weren't threatened by them.

  And that gave me hope.

  There were a whole bunch of unlabeled switches on the right-hand side of my bed. Whoever was trained in their use no doubt knew what they did by heart, but I sure didn't. I doubted they would put a switch over there that would kill me, but two weeks ago I wouldn't have believed that anyone would design an elevator with a button that would launch you into the sun, either...

  There was an inviting green switch set aside from the rest of the row, right above a speaker. I trusted it, flicking it up and hearing the familiar sound of an open line crackling into life.

  "Yes, Mr. Harris?" an attentive male voice buzzed at me.

  "Um..." I said. As usual I'd acted before thinking everything through, which meant I had to stall for a second. "Is Evelyn out there? I mean, Dr. Riscatelli... Do you see her?"

  "No, sir."

  "Oh. Kyun, then?"

  "They are both awaiting Isaac's return. Is there something else I can do for you?"

  I blinked. Was there? The room was starting to spin, and I wondered if I should let him know. Maybe there was some other medicine they could give me, or something.

  "Sir?"

  I jumped at the sound of his voice, pulling stitches and hissing in pain. My finger came off the switch, and it snapped back down and closed the connection. I reached over gingerly and opened it again.

  "The Evvex are trying to kill me," I told him, though I didn't feel any dread. If anything, it was funny. "Can you believe that shit? Fucking impatient assholes..."

  As clinically professional as he'd been before, now he didn't know what to say. That made me laugh even harder. "Right now?" he stammered, clearly at a loss.

  "No. In the maze, dummy. But why bother?" I asked him, even though I kept on talking. It didn't matter. He didn't have an answer for me. "All they have to do is wait. But no! They have to cross an inconceivable amount of space and expend an unknowable amount of energy just for the privilege of climbing behind the wheel of my mind and smashing my body against the Labyrinth for thirteen straight days. Doesn't that sound desperate to you?"

  "I've been in contact with Dr. Riscatelli, sir. She's authorized me to remotely administer a stronger dose." I heard the machines hiss and felt my veins overpressure as they obediently dumped chemicals into my body. "Try and stay calm. I'll send someone to check on you now."

  I felt sleep coming and fought it as best I could. I'd slumbered for far too long already, but it dragged my consciousness down anyway.

  I settled for simply closing my eyes, hovering in a strange place so near to slumber that time skipped around. I didn't dream though, and I was aware of the sliding door opening and then closing a few times. Equipment was moved, and more was brought in. People spoke in hushed whispers to each other, most likely to avoid waking the sleeping guy who probably already had a well-deserved reputation for yelling at people without much cause.

  I recognized both Kyun and Evelyn's voices in the low tumult. There were others, but they spoke like doctors and nurses and I assumed that they'd stopped waiting for Isaac to finish in the Labyrinth and prioritized me instead.

  When someone finally did purposefully nudge me, I was able to open my eyes right away. Sleep had never fully claimed me, but my headache was a throb instead of a roar and I felt numb instead of achy. I probably should've been taking this opportunity to strategize about what I'd do when my time in the station was finished and I was inserted back into the Citadel, but I didn't have the discipline to force my thoughts down the roads they needed to go.

  Even now, despite me not being asleep, whoever had prodded me needed to bump me even harder. My eyes had been open, but they'd flickered closed already. It took a third push on my arm, so hard that it bordered on a punch, to make me cast off the strange, lukewarm hibernation I'd surrounded myself in.

  "You need to wake the fuck up, man. You and me have some words to trade."

  Whoever he was, he didn't sound happy. I rubbed at my eyes and tried to sit up. When my vision finally cleared, I was staring at a big, black guy standing beside my bed.

  No, not just big. Fucking huge...

  "I don't think we've met," I groaned. "So how have I managed to piss you off already?"

  "I got told you made Miss Evelyn cry. Is that true?"

  "I was upset," Evelyn answered quickly from down near the foot of my bed where she'd been checking my charts and the casts of my broken ankles. "Adam didn't know the whole story and responded with anger." She glanced around, and my eyes followed her gaze. There were an awful lot of doctors and nurses in here. "Remember how it was when you were told, Atlas. It's even worse for him."

  "If you say so."

  "I do." She changed her tone and addressed the medical staff. "All right, our patients are as healthy as we can make them, right now. Let's get out of their way and let these four talk."

  Evelyn led the way, and everyone else in a lab coat obediently scurried off after her. I noticed that my room was now layered with scr
eens and projectors, the sort of thing we'd need if we were going to go over strategies. I must have still been foggy, because when I looked around I only saw Atlas and Sabine, even though the blonde doctor had said there were four of us in the room.

  "Are we missing someone?" I asked.

  Sabine shook her head, and I noticed that the only visible injury she'd picked up in the Labyrinth was a long scratch down the side of her face. Atlas looked even less damaged, which led me to believe that I was right about the Evvex singling me out for punishment.

  Sabine looked exactly as she had in the Citadel. That probably shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I wasn't used to the astral projection or whatever it was that got our minds there, and the nanite cloning stuff that gave us new bodies once we arrived was completely alien technology, too.

  It may have been foreign, but that didn't mean it wasn't effective. Try as I might, I couldn't spot a difference between her here and her there.

  "Sabine," I said to her, feeling awkward at having to make introductions even though we'd already met. "Good to see you again."

  "You too."

  "And you're Atlas?" I said to the big black dude, even though I'd heard Evelyn use his name.

  He just nodded. The doc might have told him to go easy on me, but it sure didn't look like he was very happy about it.

  If he wasn't going to say anything, then I might as well. "It's really Ben though, yeah? Not that you look like a Benjamin Stathakis. Isaac told me in there that you'd spent some of your experience to get the Citadel to acknowledge your nickname."

  "I'm adopted. My skin color might not go with the Greek surname, but the family that took me in deserves to be honored for sharing it with me," he said solemnly. "But to you, it's just Atlas."

  I shrugged. I had picked enough fights with people around here to last me a lifetime, not that 'a lifetime' counted for much with me. Even so, I found it harder than I would have liked to back down. "I wasn't taking a shot at anybody," I assured him. "That's just what I heard."

  Atlas shook his head. "Isaac needs to keep his mouth shut in the game. Just because he can get in our heads doesn't mean he needs to gossip."

  Sabine laughed. "Come on, big guy, cut him some slack. Isaac's a jabbermouth, and that's saved our asses countless times. At this stage, it'd be pretty lonely without him around."

  "Thank you," said a low, electronic voice from the other side of the room. I practically jumped out of my skin, and I was sure I busted some more stitches as I scrambled to turn fast enough to work out who it said that.

  Were they using medical robots on the Station? It sure sounded like it.

  "Over here," the voice said, and that helped me to focus on the skinny shape strapped in to a sort of ATV crossed with a wheelchair. He was frail, his head angled towards the ceiling even though his eyes were looking down his nose at me. I couldn't imagine that he could see the panels that his twisted hands were manipulating, but he managed just the same.

  "Hey, sorry, man," I said, embarrassed. "I didn't see you. I thought you were more of the..." I let my voice trail off, because my actual thought was just about as big of an insult as I could consider making, and I was trying to turn over a new leaf.

  Atlas chuckled. "You hear that, Isaac? Your new buddy thought you were a chunk of hospital equipment. How's that for friendship? Maybe that's what you get for spilling our secrets to stone-cold strangers."

  Isaac didn't react. He just watched me, and since it didn't look like he had full control over his musculature it was difficult to work out what emotion he was feeling.

  "I really am sorry," I told him. "I didn't know."

  Isaac tapped a few buttons and the voice said, "No apology needed. I'm a mess, but this isn't the death sentence it would once have been. It's only a temporary jail, and I get to escape it fairly often. You're the one with the ticking clock, I'm afraid. I have a long road yet to roll. Lucky me, huh?"

  Even though the voice had been electronically generated, there was a quality to it that spoke to our shared experience, telling me quite clearly that Isaac and I had taken part in something the others could never really understand. We'd been in the room when someone else had told us that the world had arbitrarily passed judgment on our future.

  And then we had been expected to find a way to cope with that news.

  I smiled. "Lucky me. You want to trade? We'll talk to the doctors and see what they can do. I'll shovel a big glop of carcinoma into your brain pan and then we'll strap my carcass into that monstrosity of yours so that I can see how many swear words your computer knows."

  Isaac himself laughed, a wheezing, almost painful noise that rattled out of his throat. Atlas and Sabine's eyes both lit up as they watched him. It looked like we were all experiencing something rare, if not profound. They were shocked, but I chuckled along with Isaac.

  "Gallows humor," the electronic voice informed them once he was again ready to push the buttons. "I like Adam. This will work well. Let's make use of him, before he kicks the bucket."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I was glad to see that my interaction with Isaac had calmed Atlas down. I didn't want to get into any more strife with someone who was supposed to be on my team, and rehashing the way I'd been dragged into the Station wasn't going to do anybody any good.

  Instead, I let the laughter die a natural death and then steered the conversation back to the Citadel, the only thing that mattered. "Why are you hurt?" I asked them. "Evelyn said I was the first one they'd bothered to inhabit."

  Sabine shrugged. "I guess you gave them a taste for it. They hate us all, now. You're still Evvex enemy number one though, obviously."

  "Great," I said. "Sorry for bringing you guys into this."

  Atlas shrugged.

  I cleared my throat and kept it moving. "It seems like I was in there only yesterday, but it’s been almost two weeks since the XAR called for a duel. What's our status in the Citadel? Have we found a safe place to lick our wounds and raise our skills, yet?"

  Predictably, the other two let Isaac be the first to respond. The way Atlas and Sabine watched him while he typed out his answer proved that his job of keeping the team together inside the contest carried over to life on the Station, despite his disability. "Lucas is the only one in the Citadel at the moment, unfortunately. There's no such thing as a live feed of our current status, but I've spoken with the rest of the team. Unless a lot has changed in the past couple of hours, we've managed to push to a place on the second floor called the Strands of Grass. It's a wide, rough place. The closest thing we have to it on Earth is the African Savannah, though the vegetation in the Citadel is waist high and there are many more rivers and streams in there than the lions and elephants here would be used to. The only feature that breaks up the huge expanse of space are massive plants that stretch into the brightly lit sky."

  "Like Jack's beanstalk?" I asked.

  "Close enough, though these things are as wide at the base as the Station itself. They're composed of a mix of everything we've found in the Citadel, though. Some parts of the bark are metallic, and some of the thorny vines wrapping around the branches are made of stone. There's enough non-organic material that they manage to survive the fires, which is good..."

  Sabine pulled up a chair and sat down heavily, hugging herself closely. Atlas shivered and glanced away. "We got caught in the firestorms, a couple of times."

  Isaac's voice kept going. I was watching his hands, though. There was no way he was typing every word. Either the machine had some brain interface as well, or some of the keys represented complete phrases or sentences and not just individual letters or even words, because otherwise I had no idea how he was keeping up. "Yes. The fire is becoming a problem. I can't detect a pattern, and once we see the smoke the flames move so quickly that we have mere minutes to save ourselves. I got lucky. All three of my teammates were healthy, when we first arrived at the Strands. They managed to get me high enough in a tree before the flames arrived."

 
I frowned. There was no delicate way to ask, and I hoped our earlier rapport would carry over. "In the Citadel, are you still..."

  "Not exactly. I am able-bodied, though much slower and weaker than the others."

  "Oh... Good." Nice one, idiot.

  "I suppose it is. Once the first wave of flames destroyed the area, we wrongly assumed that the danger had passed. I remained behind at the safe place once we'd established it and the others scouted around."

  Atlas jumped in. "I headed back down to the ground. Everything was ash. The fire'd been so hot that there weren't even pockets of it still burning. Anything it'd used for fuel was totally destroyed, so I figured I was safe." He chuckled. "I was hoping to find some easy upgrades to our equipment."

  "No good?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "Very much no good. By the time I'd gotten back down to the surface, the ash had blown away and the ground was just scorched soil. It crunched when I walked on it. I explored a little, and a few minutes later the grass started growing again. We've seen a lot of weirder happenings in the Citadel than that, so I didn't think much of it."

  "I think I see where this is going," I said.

  Atlas made a face. "I probably should have, too. If I hadn't been so caught up in the joy of finally being in a new place for the first time in so long, I might have. Instead, the whole Savannah was full of shin-high vegetation before I realized that the fire may not have been a one off. I tried to get back, but there's no outrunning that inferno."

  No wonder he'd looked so haunted. I thought back to both times I'd died in the Citadel. The pain had been incredible, and the fear had been all too real. There was no way for a sane person to tell your brain that your own extermination was somehow 'okay', and I didn't envy the lasting psychological damage these guys would suffer from.

  And if it was bad for them, how much worse was it for Neve and her team, trapped in there for decade after decade?