by Ramy Vance
Alex nodded to show that she understood. They weren’t much different from Tarot cards then. She needed to do something to wake these guys up. Jollies was in full panic mode, and Brath wasn’t far behind.
Panic meant being stupid.
She shook her head. “I’m going to show you some human magic now. I’m going to read your fate.”
Brath scoffed. “Humans don’t have magic.”
“That’s not true. We humans have magic. Maybe not blow-‘em-up-with-a-fireball magic, but we are powerful divinators.”
Gill looked up and stared at Alex for a moment before going back to checking the camera feeds.
Brath laughed before realizing he was making noise and covering his mouth. “You didn’t even know what those were a minute ago,” he growled. “Why do you think you’re going to suddenly know how to read my cards and my future with your human magic?”
Alex thought back to her Aunt Maisy, who used to read fortunes for fun. Maisy would read Alex’s future, vividly describing the cards to her as she turned them over. When she was in Middang3ard’s VR world, Alex had looked them up, wanting to know what Aunt Maisy had been doing. It was incredible how good Aunt Maisy’s descriptions had been.
And how fun her tarot card readings had been.
Maisy had said that the most important thing with divination was confidence. You could say anything you wanted, all you had to do was sell it. Brath hadn’t challenged her on the divination part, so she had a chance.
As she shuffled the cards, she did her best to channel her Aunt Maisy. She thought about how, when Maisy spoke, it sounded as if there was no doubt in her mind. “Yeah, I am going to read your fate. I used to be quite the card reader on Earth.”
“How did you learn when you can’t see?”
Alex looked up from the cards for a moment. She couldn’t tell if Brath had said that with the intention of hurting her or if she was just sensitive due to all the prior teasing. “Special cards with ridges,” Alex lied. “Just because I was blind, it didn’t mean I was helpless.”
“So, you read with ridges?”
“Yeah, same as with books. You get that I know how to read, right?”
Brath shrugged as he tried to look uninterested. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he muttered.
Alex cut the cards and then shuffled them again. “On Earth, we have a special written language called Braille. It’s just for blind people. It’s a series of raised dots that mean certain letters or words, and I had cards with that.”
Alex watched something she had never seen before. She couldn’t have put it into words even if she wanted to. Brath’s face had changed slightly. It wasn’t as if he had raised his eyebrows or smiled, but as she spoke, Alex saw Brath’s eyes soften a little bit and his face loosen up.
Alex passed Brath the deck of cards. “All right, choose three cards,” she instructed. “Any three cards you feel drawn to.”
Jollies floated down and took a seat next to Alex’s foot.
Brath chose three cards from the top of the deck and handed them to Alex, who took them and put them on the floor. Alex looked over her shoulder at Gill, who was watching. She winked at him before turning back to the cards.
Alex flipped the three cards and leaned over them as she clasped her hands together, her chin on her knuckles.
The first card was a raven, the second a burning building. And the third was a black circle.
Alex nodded theatrically as she picked up the first card and stared at it, pretending to draw some meaning from it. “This right here represents your past,” she said mysteriously. “It looks as if your past was filled with anger. Anger about things you couldn’t control.”
Next, Alex picked up the card depicting the burning building. “But something changed,” she went on. “There was a sudden shift, and everything fell apart. You had to start asking questions, inspecting the foundation, figuring out why things had collapsed.”
Alex looked up to check if Brath was buying it.
The gnome was silent, and his brooding eyes peered out from behind his scruffy beard.
Alex took up the last card. She stared at it for some time, drawing out the anticipation. “Ah. The sacred ring is your future.”
Brath leaned forward but caught himself quickly and tried to downplay his interest. “Oh yeah?” he asked.
“That means your future is…well, I guess the best way to say it is that you have infinite possibilities with where you go from here. After the past and present stuff that I said before, you get to choose what your future is after you’re done asking questions.”
Brath chuckled as he leaned back. “You could have said that about anything.”
Alex took the three cards and put them back into the deck. “True,” Alex admitted. “I could have said them to anyone. But I said them to you and only you. Right now. So, take that as you will. But I see that today will not be your last.”
After shuffling again, Alex had Jollies draw cards. Hers were dove wings, dragon fire, and a skull. “Oh, that’s bad,” Jollies said. “The skull means I’m dead.”
Alex shook her head and gave the pixie a sly smile. “No, you misunderstand. It means that you are the bringer of death.” She looked at the two recruits and saw them both emboldened, their panic subsiding. Good. She had gotten through to them.
No panic meant they were thinking again, and that gave them all a chance.
Gill, the only one who had been calm the whole time, raised his finger to his lips, turned off the lights, and motioned for them all to get closer.
Gill threw up a holograph from his HUD that showed their hall. There were more orcs walking down the hall, but this time, they were kicking open every door. The orcs were only a few doors away.
Gill shifted the view to another hallway. Dead bodies covered the floor.
Alex grabbed her mouth to keep from yelping. She had never seen anything dead before. She wanted to look away more than anything else in the world.
Gill changed back to their hallway. “There’s worse going on right now,” he said. “Fights throughout the Nest and they’re coming our way. Real soon. Any ideas?”
Brath jumped to his feet and pulled out a knife hanging from his waist. “We fight them,” he whispered. “Better than sitting here and waiting for them to find us. At least we choose how we die.”
Jollies was shaking her head as she tried to fight back tears. Alex could see that the pixie was terrified, and there was a part of Alex that was scared too, but she felt the same way Brath did. If there was going to be a fight, it should be on their terms.
The images of the dead cadets in the hallway flashed through Alex’s mind. Her desire to fight instantly dissipated. She could be one of the corpses in the hall. Her parents would never know.
Gill stood up and turned off the holograph. He walked over to Brath and coaxed him into putting away the knife. “I know you’re looking forward to using your father’s blade for revenge,” Gill said softly. “But there’ll be a better time. We need to figure out what we’re going to do to stay alive.”
Alex pointed up to the unlit light bulb in the middle of the room. “Can you get into the systems and turn off the lights for the whole place?” Alex asked.
Gill looked at the lightbulb and then at the darkness of the room. “I can try.”
Chapter Two
Gill attempted to hack into the entire Nest system. His brows were furrowed as he tried to figure out how to get past the firewalls. Alex wondered how such a young kid had managed to acquire that much hacking expertise.
Manny sat quietly in the corner. He hadn’t spoken a word since they had been ushered out of the mess hall. Alex wondered if Manny was panic-stricken, but that seemed unlikely. It wouldn’t have made sense for Myrddin to assign Manny to Alex if he spooked so easily.
The desire to walk over to the dorm room’s door and peek through the peephole was overwhelming. Alex pushed it down along with her fear, which was doing its best to take over her reasonin
g. She kept imagining the orcs breaking into the room and tearing them all to shreds.
The lights in the hallway flickered. Alex could see light through the crack where the door didn’t quite touch the floor, but they still remained on.
Outside, there was another explosion. This one was big enough to rock their room. Orcs started yelling in the hallway. Alex couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she assumed that it was something violent in Orcish.
Brath sighed as he started to pace and finger the knife hanging from his waist again. Once in a while, he would stop and look at Gill, who would glance at his visor and shake his head.
Alex had never missed the HUD in Middang3ard so much before, not even when she was on Earth, trying to stay awake during her homeschooling lessons. The HUD she had received when she got her armor was noticeably different.
The HUDs in Middang3ard had an amazing feature that allowed their users to gauge what their likelihood of success or failure was going to be. All you had to do was look at a situation that you were thinking about, and the HUD gave you your success ratio.
Over the last few months in VR, Alex had become extremely dependent on that little percentage. It made all the difference in whether or not she would engage in a battle. She wished that she knew what her likelihood of survival was right now.
Gill groaned, frustration dripping from his voice when he spoke. “Damn it, there are so many back ends, I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I should just try to isolate the hallways. No, that doesn’t make sense…”
Alex walked over to Gill and took a seat beside him. “What if you just knocked out the whole network? Just kill the whole Nest.”
Gill rubbed his cheek as he thought it over. “I guess I could do that,” he admitted. “But I don’t know how it’s going to affect the Nest as a whole. The fact that no one has done it before makes me unsure if it’s a good idea.”
“No one else has done it because they don’t have an ace up their sleeves like I do.”
“What do you mean?”
Alex pointed to her eyes. “You kill the lights, I can lead us out of here,” Alex explained. “I don’t need to see anything. Old habits die hard, I guess. I’ve been memorizing every corridor since I’ve been here. I can get us around the orcs.”
Brath nearly sneezed and caught himself. “Have you seen what the orcs are wearing? They have night vision for sure.”
“But we have another ace up our sleeve. Manny can cast Darkness, right?”
The Beholder nodded. “I can.”
“Night vision or not, they’ll be blind, and unable to navigate the corridors like I can.”
Brath nervously tugged on his beard. “Okay, but that only solves one problem. How are you going to get around the orcs? If we accidentally bump into one of them, we’re dead.”
Alex pulled out her blindfold and wrapped it around her eyes. “Trust me,” she assured Brath. “I lived my entire life moving through darkness. I can do this. We get out of the room and make our way to the stables. Then we take back the Nest.”
Gill and Brath exchanged glances before Brath nodded.
Taking the cue, Gill spoke up. “All right, you heard the lady. Let’s do it,” he said before pulling his visor back down and starting the hack.
Manny floated forward, his tentacle eyes moving about rapidly. “I’ll cast Gloom. That way, it won’t be total darkness. Then I’ll link everyone’s eyesight together so you can see through my eyes. We should be able to make each other out. That way, we can follow Alex easier, but we’ll have to stick together. Real close.”
Gill cleared his throat and said, “I can help too. Drows have darkvision. Mine isn’t that strong since it matures with age, but I should be able to pick up on the heat signatures of the orcs if they’re close by. I’ll take the front with Alex. And you guys better get ready. It’s going dark in three, two, one.”
The lights in the hallway flickered again and then went off. There were startled sounds from the orcs outside, followed by another flurry of words that Alex couldn’t make out.
Manny floated in the middle of the circle of kids. “All right,” he whispered. “Jollies, Brath, you two ready?”
“Ready,” they both replied.
Manny’s body started to vibrate, and beams of light shot out of his eyes. The same beams shot out of Jollies’ and Brath’s eyes.
Brath leaned forward, his hands out in front of him, and yelped as he caught himself. He slammed his hands over his mouth and tried to keep his balance.
Gill stood up from his seat and walked over to Alex. He slid his hand around Alex’s and squeezed tightly. “This way, we won’t get separated,” he whispered in her ear.
Alex’s heart was racing. She wouldn’t have thought it could have beaten any faster than when she’d first seen the orcs, but she was wrong. “Yeah, that works perfectly,” she mumbled.
Get it together, Alex, she thought . You can have a crush later if you survive this.
Alex reached out as she had her entire life and inched toward the room door. She knew exactly where it was without realizing it, since her and Jollies’ room was the same. Glad to know that muscle memory didn’t go to waste, she thought as she instinctively concentrated on the door opening slowly.
The crystal door pulled apart, hardly making any noise. To the untrained ear, it was probably not even noticeable.
Alex scanned the hallway. It was a habit she’d acquired since she had been able to see, but it was pointless in this situation. She knew the orcs were close. They hadn’t been too far off in the video feed.
Alex didn’t need to see to know exactly where the orcs were, though. She could smell them since they didn’t smell like anything else in the Nest. A sour, acrid scent rose off of their skin, and Alex was happy she didn’t have to see them up close.
It only took the slightest tug on Gill’s hand to guide him. The drow stepped lightly as if the lack of light didn’t bother him at all. Alex could hear Brath struggling to walk forward behind Gill.
Alex assumed that whatever Jollies and Brath was seeing, it wasn’t too different than the sight Manny had first given her. It should have been more than enough to make their way through the hallway.
But Alex was saying that as someone who knew how to navigate the dark.
Brath and Jollies were probably struggling to pick up what little detail they could using Manny’s vision. You’d think for someone with so many eyes, his vision would be better, even in the dark, Alex thought.
The smell of the orcs faded as Alex guided Gill and the rest of them down the hall. Alex had a fairly good idea of where they were. Even with how mazelike the Wasp’s Nest was, she had been able to develop a sense of location and proximity by walking down the halls due to the crystal walls.
Hopefully, the confusion of the Nest would work to their advantage. Cadets had a hard enough time moving around and finding where they were trying to go. The orcs must have been having an even harder time navigating the Nest.
What were they here for, though? The only thing Alex had seen was murder. Jollies had said orcs had attacked training camps before, but was it really as simple as murdering all the new cadets? They could be here for the dragons, Alex thought.
But what good were dragons to the Dark One? It wasn’t like any of them would have followed him, even though Alex had been told he’d had at least one dragon. Maybe he was trying to get more.
Alex squeezed Gill’s hand, signaling for him to stop. They all stood very still in the darkness. She could smell orcs ahead. She knew that they were at a four-way intersection in the hallway. That made it impossible to tell which way the orcs were coming from.
Alex pulled Gill up against the wall, and Manny and the rest of them followed. They stayed there as the smell of the orcs approached.
Gill guided Alex’s hand upward. He pushed down all of her fingers except for her index and pointed to the left, signaling which direction the orcs were coming from.
All five of them
froze and held their breath. Alex squinted, tempted to pull off her blindfold and see if her dragon eyes granted her any abilities to see in the dark. It was too much of a risk, though. The sudden shift from being blindfolded to being able to see might be too much.
Alex didn’t need to see the orcs to know they were walking past. Her nostrils filled with the smell of rancid meat and decomposing bodies. How could any living thing smell this bad? Alex thought. Are these orcs or the undead?
The orcs continued past Alex and the rest of them. Apparently, orc eyes were just as bad as human eyes in the dark. They didn’t take any notice of the gnome, drow, pixie, or human who were squashed against the wall, nor did they smell them.
Alex could see the outlines of the orcs through the gloom. She saw that they were holding very long, curved scimitars and had what looked like rifles across their backs. This surprised Alex, but she was growing used to weapons other than medieval fantasy warfare.
They were still a ways from the dragon stables, and if there were going to be this many orcs in the halls, it was going to be slow going. There had to be a faster way to get from point A to point B.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best time to discuss that. The orcs were still lazily walking down the hall. It didn’t seem as if they were in any rush. This made Alex wonder again what they were doing at the Nest.
If this had been as simple as “kill all the cadets,” you would think the orcs would be acting with more urgency. The way they were slowly moving through the corridors didn’t support that, though. So, what were they here for?
Once the orcs were out of earshot, Gill and Alex moved the group forward. Alex thought they needed to take a moment to regroup. Their initial plan was going to get much more complicated.
Alex guided the group to the mess hall. Gill checked to see if there were any orcs in the immediate vicinity, and Alex was certain that she couldn’t smell any of them. All she could smell was the food in the hall.
They reached the door of the mess hall, and Alex extended her hand to open the door with the crystal datapad. When the five of them were inside the mess hall, Alex guided them to a table and sat down.
