Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  “Mmf.” Tina blew her nose into a handkerchief and looked at the cloth in disgust. “Don’t snort wine and baklava up your nose at the same time. That is nasty. Okay, I’ll try to focus.”

  The center of the arena faded into black fog, only to clear a moment later to reveal a desert scene of rolling dunes. Boulders and trees studded the area, and a magical glow surrounded nine caches before it vanished. The one nearest to each team was largest and the next two were smaller.

  “Were there three per team?” she asked. “I guess we’ll know for next time.”

  Justin nodded. The Master of Ceremonies announced the three teams to the sound of cheers and boos. The Twins, unsurprisingly, elicited the most emotion from the crowd. They had a large share of passionate fans and as many who—either as failed contestants or their disappointed fans—seemed to hate them.

  The official saved them for last, of course, and they came up closest to the winners’ viewing section. Justin and Tina leaned forward for a better look, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught the woman watching them again. She was older than he’d first thought with gray hair, and she gave him a smile this time. He smiled in response and waved, hoping he looked enough like a gracious winner.

  She didn’t seem overawed, he realized.

  The match started, however, and he had to direct his attention to the arena. The twins had clearly chosen their battle plan before they came up because they surged in the same direction without consulting one another and bounded over the dunes. The sand was difficult to run on but it didn’t slow their headlong rush much.

  What was interesting, however, was that they avoided the first cache in their singlemindedness. They sprinted to the second, yanked it open, and held a brief exchange to decide who got what. A bow and arrows and two potions, together with their deliberations, were displayed on large screens above the stadium. Justin didn’t recall those from his match and guessed that they weren’t visible to the contestants.

  The woman—Callie, he recalled, having heard their names somewhere along the way— took the bow and arrows, along with a water potion, and her teammate Dexi chose the same black-purple potion Lyle had used and spread it directly onto his hands. He seemed to be in pain, but it didn’t do any immediate or visible damage.

  “Bets they’re not as well armed as the other teams?” Tina asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said in an undertone. He leaned back as the Twins began to run again. They circled toward the middle, a dangerous strategy but one that might win them the element of surprise.

  “It’s reckless,” she pointed out with a note of confusion.

  “Not entirely.” He had listened to many stories from his grandfathers, both of whom had served in the armed forces. “It’s better to make a decision and stay in motion early, even without all the information, than it is to be frozen while you wait for the rest of the information to come in.”

  “Really?” After a moment, she nodded. “Okay, yeah. I suppose that’s what I did in our match, didn’t I?”

  “Exactly. If you’d waited, we would have fought two teams at once while Quartzfire’s assassin picked us off one by one.” He gave her a fist bump. “So, thanks.”

  She returned the gesture. “Thank you. Don’t forget you guys took on the other team all on your own. Oh, look—they’re getting close.”

  The Twins had made a plan that was as sneaky as it was quick. They had circled in a particular way and very obviously chose to approach behind another team. Now, they attacked with absolute ruthlessness. Dexi circled again while Callie fired her bow to drive the other two toward him. His strikes were brutally quick. He struck one contestant across the face with such force that the magical barrier came up at once.

  The second panicked and fell prey to another arrow.

  Dexi and Callie immediately pushed into motion. What they hadn’t seen, however, was that the third team had found and looted two Grade A caches by this point.

  “Ohhh, I wanna see them lose,” Tina said.

  “Hell yeah,” Justin agreed.

  They were on the edge of their seat and mutual anticipation hung in the air between them.

  Unfortunately, they were disappointed. Callie and Dexi separated quickly and she circled left while he moved right. They advanced in a pincer movement and began to close. When she first sighted the other team, she gave a piercing whistle like a hawk’s call and began to fire.

  Cannily, she altered her positions slightly between each arrow to make it look like both of the Twins were behind the dune.

  The other team pushed in too deep and hadn’t realized what was happening. Their strategy—a modified leapfrog—used the rush technique to push closer and closer to her. They thought that if they only got into range, the Twins would be powerless against them.

  Two of the three were felled by Dexi before they even saw him. The third must have caught something out of the corner of his eye because he turned with a gasp and a snarl. Armed with a sword, he charged his attacker but fell to an arrow.

  Half the stadium sank into sulky silence while the other half erupted into cheers.

  “Damn.” Tina shook her head and gave a golf clap. “I don’t want to admit it, but they outplayed them.” She raised an eyebrow at her teammate. “And yet…”

  “They make snap decisions and commit entirely,” Justin said and immediately caught her train of thought. “They miss caches and are aggressive. A team that lays traps for them might make them sign their own death warrants—figuratively, of course.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” she said. “They’re such jerks.” She saw his look and waved her hands dismissively. “Don’t you look at me like that. They aren’t real. It’s okay to wish they would go away.”

  “I suppose there’s that.” He grinned. “Hey, should we get a meal? I, for one, don’t still want to be here when the Twins come for their refreshments.”

  “Good call.” She stood and stretched. “Let’s find Lyle and see what he thinks. Okay, I know what he thinks—he’ll simply charge straight in. But we might as well talk about doing something different.”

  He laughed and followed her. In all honesty, he hadn’t expected his two friends to get along so well but he was glad they did. He still missed Zaara, though. Sometimes, he thought of the jokes she would make or the disgusted way she would have looked at the Twins.

  It was different to have Tina there but in a way he couldn’t describe. He shook his head and followed as he darted a glance to where the woman who had watched them had been seated. She was gone now.

  Justin frowned and followed Tina into the darkness of the stadium tunnels.

  The pod cover was removed and Anna Price opened her eyes as Jacob and Dr. DuBois removed her sensor pads. They helped her sit and the young engineer waited, clearly nervous about her assessment.

  “It was surprisingly immersive,” she told him. “I have to say, I enjoyed myself immensely. It was rather like I imagine the colosseum of Rome—well, in some ways.”

  “It still annoys me that we couldn’t sell them,” he told her. “As a game, I mean, because it is fun, isn’t it? It’s super fun. And there’s so much more to the world.”

  “Now, tell me how the procedural generation works,” Price told him. She stood and slipped her shoes on. “Wherever players are present, the game prioritizes procedural generation and banks some of it for recall and so on, yes?”

  “Yes.” To her surprise, he now looked nervous. “There have to be priorities, you see. Otherwise, it would be too much processing power.”

  This was an incredibly mundane point and one he should have expected her to understand from her previous comment. That, combined with his nerves, meant he was hiding something.

  Anna considered this for a split-second. She was used to people hiding things from her. The end purpose of many of her company’s contracts was not always clear, which led to obtuse requests from Defense Department officials. She was accustomed to arguing for more information, which she often
needed in order to create the deliverables.

  What, however, would Jacob be hiding?

  She had an advantage over him and decided to use it. Rather than continue, she smiled as though she had not seen the look on his face. “Well, you’re doing incredible work and I have to say, DuBois’s hunch about Justin’s friend seems to be accurate. They’re clearly bonding. Now, as much as I’ve enjoyed this, I do have to return to my office. Thank you all for indulging me.”

  The look of relief on the young engineer’s face was all the confirmation she needed.

  He was definitely hiding something. The question, however, was what he could be hiding when the experiment was indisputably going well.

  Price intended to find out.

  The bells in Insea’s gorgeous goldstone spire tolled midnight.

  Unnoticed, Kural shadow-walked through the abandoned arena. The inner corridors and contestants’ chambers were locked and guarded, but the rest of it was open to the public. A few citizens slept on the long, stone benches and others sat in huddles and conversed. Dissidents, perhaps? Amateur philosophers?

  The wizard felt a pang. It had been a long time since he was a young apprentice. He had been in Junor, of course, beyond the strait, but cities tended to have the same rhythms to them. The world had seemed so open to him when he was young.

  He didn’t worry that Zaara would fail as a wizard, not at all. She had the talent and determination in spades. He suspected, also, that it would suit her better to stay in one place and cultivate it rather than adventure the world over. She had never been suited to life as a wanderer and had simply been stifled by her parents’ expectations.

  But being a wizard was a bargain no one anticipated when they made it. To live in the world so long was to grow apart from it. Once you saw the same patterns play out time and again, you began to view them all differently. A human mind behaved differently at four hundred years old than it did at twenty—or even eighty, for that matter.

  For one thing, he had not expected how tired he would sometimes be of himself.

  Ah, well. He quickened his pace as he reached the far side of the arena from the Master of Ceremonies’ post.

  The door was in Insea somewhere, and the more he read, the more sure he was that it was there in the arena, itself. He couldn’t explain the certainty, though. Doors between worlds tended to be remote and well-guarded. It was bizarre that one would be there in the most well-traveled venue in the city.

  With his luck, it would be in the middle of one of the tiers and marked with a hidden rune. Kural rolled his eyes. He had been all around the outside of the arena and had found nothing. Then, he had checked the entire structure for the telltale signs of hidden dwarven doors and again, had found nothing. By rights, he should have given up and gone home.

  However, after four hundred years, one began to learn to follow hunches—and one’s hunches got stronger and better.

  He darted an annoyed look at the podium and stopped, suddenly thoughtful. It extended into the arena somewhat, and the front of it was carved in a beautiful elven pattern. It was remarkable, the wizard thought as his heart rate quickened, how much that large, rectangular panel looked like an out-of-scale door.

  For a brief moment, he considered hurdling the railing to sprint across the arena. No one would stop him but he would be incredibly noteworthy—as would be the fact that his footsteps didn’t make little puffs of dust. He rounded the walkway at a brisk pace instead and took the time to try to recall elven symbology.

  Elves were relentless when it came to organization, which could be hellish when trying to get them to do anything spontaneous but was helpful for archeologists. If the front of the podium were the door, he would see trees on either side and the rune trulya, which brought protection to wayfarers.

  Kural moved closer and waited for the clouds above to drift and let the moon shine through.

  His instincts seemed accurate. Silver light streamed down and illuminated something.

  He wasn’t sure what, though, and leaned forward. Those were dwarven runes, were they not? After a hasty study of the area, he hopped the fence when no one was looking and crept closer.

  Yes. The runes spoke of the edge of the mountain and the edge of the forest, the gate between the sea and the land, the desert and the oasis. They were structured to evoke trees—in a very angular, dwarven way, of course. And at the center, girded by a circle around a triangular keyhole, was the dwarven prayer for the wayfarer.

  The wizard exhaled slowly with a smile. The door was there.

  And he now knew how he would persuade the Master of Ceremonies.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Amber was the first one into the office the next morning. When the door opened shortly after, she looked up to call a greeting which died on her lips when she saw who it was.

  “Good morning,” Anna Price said pleasantly as if she hadn’t committed a faux pas. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “Oh?” She took a bite of toast with the distinct feeling of someone trying to enjoy a last meal and glanced at her desk. With nothing to use as an excuse to avoid the encounter, she stood and forced a smile. “What can I do for you, Ms. Price?”

  “First of all, sit and finish your breakfast.” The woman grasped Jacob’s office chair and wheeled it to the desk. “We’ll have to talk about expectations, by the way. I’m a notorious workaholic, but I keep very strict guidelines for my employees—nothing over forty-five hours per week in the office.”

  “I’ve, uh…” Amber tried to calculate in her head.

  “Last week, you spent a little over seventy hours in the office,” her boss told her. “I always like to work with exact numbers. I understand there’s a certain energy when a project is beginning and that you all needed to bootstrap the operation when you were on your own, but I prefer my employees—especially those in creative areas— to avoid burning out.”

  “Uh-huh.” She could sense a trap closing.

  “However, right now, I wanted to go over some of the financials.”

  “Oh.” Thankful for something practical to do, she began to bring the spreadsheets up, then stopped. “Is there a specific problem you want to address?”

  Price merely raised an eyebrow.

  She sighed. “Look, I’m not an accountant. I did read up on standard practices and I left a ton of notes, but I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if I classified something incorrectly. Whatever your accounting team has asked about, I’d be happy to explain and buy them a pizza.”

  “A…pizza?” The woman looked confused for the first time since she had met her.

  “Oh, sorry.” Amber wanted to sink through the floor. “It’s stupid. Whenever one of us on the team broke something or whatever, we’d bring in pizza as an apology. I probably don’t need to do that here.”

  “Ah.” Her boss leaned back in her chair with an amused smile. “No, but I’m sure they’ll appreciate the gesture. I know our software team does the same with donuts, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find out accounting has a similar practice. Why don’t you take me through what you handed over? I wouldn’t normally be able to digest everything but your company is smaller than most of the ones I acquire.”

  The truth was, although she still felt it was right to have Jacob make the final decision about the acquisition—he was the one facing jail time, after all—she was a little uncomfortable. She swallowed in an effort to move past that and regain a businesslike demeanor.

  Thankfully, she was able to put that aside as she took Price through the financials and pointed out initial investments and Kickstarter funds, outstanding rewards and loans, and the list of equipment with dates of acquisition.

  “Well,” Price said when she had finished. “I have to say, the accountants might make some tweaks but I found that to be very straightforward.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Amber said glumly. “If a non-accountant can understand, it’s not good accounting.”

  The woman was s
tartled into a laugh. She took a sip from a mug that had the Diatek logo emblazoned on the side. “Nick mentioned you had a good sense of humor. It’s good to see it.” She put the cup down and asked delicately, “Would it be accurate to say that I make you uncomfortable?”

  She flushed. Yes, she wanted to say. You’re everything I want to be when I grow up. Price was effortlessly elegant and clearly more invested in her work than her appearance, but still knocked both out of the park. She seemed to know exactly where she wanted her effort to go at any given point in time and never worked with competing priorities.

  When she explained that, her boss responded with a rueful smile and for the first time, revealed a hint of how she had been as a younger woman.

  “I would much rather,” she said honestly, “wear my second-hand t-shirts and try to remember whether or not I brought my lunch. Often, the greatest accomplishments in life come from the greatest pain. I know how many families my work will save but selfishly, I would far prefer never to have undertaken it.”

  Amber swallowed hard.

  “I can’t tell you that I’ve picked the best path,” Price told her honestly. “There are many uses I can think of for the amount of money I’ve made. I don’t know that this is the one that will do the most good. I think that’s the secret to success, Amber. You’ll never know if you did the right thing, but if you aim in roughly the right direction and go with your talents, I like to think you can honestly let go of any guilt.”

  She nodded. “I…didn’t mean to pry.”

  “I know,” the woman said lightly. She looked at her in a quietly searching way. “Do you have any worries still?”

  Amber considered the question. “Well, this feels a little frivolous, but—I was proud of what we’d accomplished even before we found this use for it. Part of me is worried that if Justin doesn’t recover, you’ll drop us and that either way, the senator will forget about us.”