by A. L. Davroe
“Is-Is there someone else?”
I shake my head. “No, Gus. Nobody but you. Only you…” Ever. “I just…I can’t. We can’t.” Stop with the words. “No. The answer is no.”
I hear his exhale, can almost taste the argumentative air that overcomes him, but he doesn’t speak. He just stares at me, hard and long. I can feel his disappointment, as thick and choking as dragon’s breath clogging the air. Eventually, he gets to his feet. “If that’s what you want,” he says. “Then you can have it. You can have anything you want…even if it’s not within reason.”
I bite the inside of my lip, determined not to cry.
He steps away from me, as if the distance might heal the wound. “We’d better go. The Knights will catch up soon and we’re already going to be dealing with enough of those when we get to where we are heading.”
I chance a glance at him. His face is implacable. “Where’s that?”
He points in the direction of the wall around the tallest building in the middle of the city.
A grimace fights its way across my face. “How did I know you were going to say that?”
“How are we going to get there?” Opus demands.
I spin around. I hadn’t noticed he and the others had come to stand behind us. I feel my cheeks warm and hope that they weren’t there to hear me turn Gus down.
Disappointment temporarily sidetracked by a new challenge, Gus’s eyes light up and he points into a corner where a number of pods like the ones outside are parked in a small lot. “Who’s up for a little flying?”
I shake my head. “Oh no.”
He playfully pouts, letting me know that he’s willing to forgive me for not wanting to see him outside of the game. “Why not?”
“It’s stealing.” I say, but he’s already walking toward the nearest pod.
“It’s not stealing, it’s borrowing,” he reasons. “Besides, this is why I’m here. At times like this, you need a good thief.”
Gus parks the pod in an alley just underneath one of the glass walkways. Above, the Aristocrats are too busy with their daily frivolities to notice five airsick Naturals creep out onto the street. One of them catches my eye, making me pause. It’s Quentin Cyr, lovely as always, but nothing compared to my Gus. He’s with Carsai Sheldon. They’re kissing. I guess she found her cheat code.
“Good for you,” I whisper to her.
“That’s disgusting,” I hear Gus say beside me. He’s staring up at them, his eyes and mouth pinched tight in disgust and anger. “I’m going to vomit.”
I smirk at him. “It’s what she wanted from the game,” I reason.
He turns that expression on me, and for a long moment I see something wrestling inside him. He turns away. “Doesn’t make it right.”
Confused, I follow after him. Why does he care what Carsai gets in the game? Maybe he knows her. It would make sense—they’re both Elite.
We crouch beneath a couple of metal storage containers for a long time, waiting for our stomachs to settle from Gus’s badly executed flight into the city.
“Next time, I drive,” Morden grumbles.
Gus shrugs. “Give me some credit, that wasn’t bad for my first time.”
“Would you two shut up, you’re gonna get us caught,” Opus hisses.
We begin watching the road and the flow of foot traffic. After the sixth person has walked by, I draw back. “Have you noticed that the only people on the streets are all wearing those blue uniforms?”
Gus nods.
“What are those?” Nadine asks.
“Looks like some kind of service uniform? Maybe those are workers?” Opus offers.
Gus and I glance at each other and both say “androids” at the same time.
He grins and looks down the road. “If this is modeled after home, that would mean that everything on the ground level is robotic. Which means these people passing us aren’t people but androids in service uniforms.”
“Right,” I add. “So does that mean you’re thinking disguise?”
He nods. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
We trail in single file, Gus in the lead, then me, then Morden, Nadine, and Opus. The uniforms are stiff and smell of machine oil, but that only helps to mask our identities.
“Mord,” I hear Nadine whisper behind me. “I don’t think robots swagger like that.”
“I don’t think they look as pretty as you, either,” Morden replies.
Nadine giggles.
Gus turns. “Can you take this seriously, please?”
Morden harrumphs. “I can’t take anybody seriously, ’specially you with that stupid pair of goggles on.”
Gus reaches up and pushes the goggles up onto his forehead, his eyes revealing just how annoyed he is. “Shut up or I’ll shoot you.”
Morden doesn’t say anything.
“He sure showed you,” I hear Opus say.
Morden maintains his silence.
We keep walking along the wall. High above us, Knights are stationed at regular intervals, looking hauntingly similar to the security droids back home. Except here, there’s no G-Chip to tell one not to shoot me. In fact, I’m fairly certain they want to shoot me. These things hold a grudge. Gus and I killed a few measly Knights, and they are dead set on revenge. Why else would they have followed us across the whole of Nexis?
We keep walking, stiff and jerky, looking for a door. We go around once, twice. Gus’s pace begins to slow, uncertain.
He lowers his head and speaks so low that only I can hear him. “There’s no way in. What should we do?”
I lower my own head. “I don’t know.”
“Try digging a hole?” Morden suggests from behind. Apparently he can hear us.
I can almost imagine Gus rolling his eyes behind those idiotic goggles, but he doesn’t humor Morden with an answer. He just glances at the wall. “There has to be some way in,” he whispers.
I wrack my brain, trying to think of ways to open doors. I’ve learned of many here in Nexis. Keys, pads with special codes, secret words. “Maybe it’s pressure or heat sensitive? Like the storage closets at home?”
Gus shifts his head, his gaze going to the wall just a foot to our left. “You think?”
I wince, my nerves on edge. “Well, it can’t be as simple as ‘Open Sesame,’ can it? Try?”
Biting his lip, Gus reaches out. His fingers skim the blank wall, brushing a rivet. And then the sirens go off, a loud keening whine that refuses to die or take a breath. The noise is accompanied by a flashing white strobe light that seems to emanate from the very sky.
“Oops,” Gus whispers.
It’s as though the Knights were just waiting for us to make a wrong move. They pour out of every alley, every street and crevice, appearing in windows and on top of rooftops, spilling out like a biblical plague and surrounding the entire circumference of the wall. We back up against the wall and hold our breath, but they don’t fire on us. They seem frozen in some kind of defensive position.
“Don’t move. No one move,” Gus whispers.
“What do we do?” Nadine whispers.
To my far right I see Opus throw up his hands. “Dag nab it, you bunch of brats, this is not how I wanted to die,” he yells. Almost as soon as he speaks, the shots come. A hundred laser strikes that fry him to black and brittle.
For a moment, I can’t see. I can only smell the putrid stink of burned flesh and ether, can only hear Nadine’s surprised yelp and the distinct shink of The Reaper. I blink, trying to orient myself, trying to see so that I might fight or flee, but no one fires on us again. When I can see, I refuse to look, though a massive soot mark haunts the area at the corner of my eye.
There’s a second flash that seems to reflect back at the Knights, through the cracks of the crevices in the road and up the wall. The Knights lift their hands, shi
elding their eyes as familiar strands of code explode forth. Numbers, letters, and symbols seep from under the wall and cascade across everything like a ghostly holographic projection.
Behind me, the steel bulkhead grows hot against my back. And then it moves. An inch at first, making me jump, and then it suddenly buckles inward with a hiss.
The earth bucks, and we all tumble backward. Backward and down a long incline, head over heels, grabbing out and calling for one another in the darkness. And then we hit bottom. I hear Morden’s groan of pain first, then Nadine’s soft grunts as she struggles to get to her feet.
Gus’s fingers find my shaking hand. “You okay?”
“No,” I whimper, my throat tight with oncoming hysterics. “They killed him.”
He drags me to my feet and wraps his arms around me. “I know,” he whispers into my hair. There’s something raw in his voice, a tenderness that lets me know that he feels Opus’s death as keenly as I do. “But,” he says, raising his voice so the others can hear him, “it’s just a game. Don’t forget that he’s not really dead, he’s just not playing with us anymore.”
“Which means he might as well be dead to us,” Morden retorts, voice angry.
“Just think of it like he just moved far away,” Gus says. “He was going to leave us anyway.” When he’s met with silence he adds, “Look, you can’t let this get you down. They’re trying to demoralize us. But we can’t fall apart now. We’ve come too far. We can still win.”
Biting my lip to keep it from trembling, I blink tears out of my eyes and step away, forcing the pain of loss back into a corner of my mind. “He’s right.”
Nadine’s voice says, “You’re enabling again.”
I close my mouth and frown. “Just because I happen to truly agree doesn’t mean I’m enabling. I want to get out of here as much as you do. And I want to win. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? That’s why Opus just died.”
For a long moment, no one speaks. Then Morden says, “Where in the blue blazes are we anyway? Does someone have a light?”
“Yeah, I—” I begin, but Gus stays my hand.
“No, not yet,” he says.
“What?”
He tugs my arm. “Let’s get a little bit away from here.”
Still aware of Nadine and Morden judging my acceptance of everything Gus says without question, I confront him, because it makes no sense to stumble around in the darkness. “Why?”
Gus lowers his voice, barbing it in a way that tells me he’s aware of my sudden self-consciousness, and it annoys him. “Because what’s left of Opus’s body didn’t disappear when The Reaper appeared. And I’m pretty sure he fell down here with us. I don’t want to see it, do you?”
I shake my head, ashamed for even doubting him. I trust Gus. He’s smart, and he’d never do anything to harm me or his friends. That’s why I accept what he says so easily. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I knit my brows, though I know he can’t see me. “How will we keep from getting separated?” And nearly as soon as I say it, I feel the threads. I can sense the three threads trailing away from my body, one to Gus, one to my left, and another behind me. I let out a long exhale, grateful. “The threads are here,” I whisper, my relief obvious in my tone. “Nadine, take three steps to your right. Morden, walk straight ahead; you should find each other.”
I hear them bump into each other and Morden says, “Well hello, stranger.”
“Good, now both of you come forward.”
A moment later, a hand brushes my arm. I take it, feeling the delicate smoothness of Nadine’s thin fingers. Taking a deep breath, I steady my own shaking nerves so that I can be strong. She said she had faith in me to get them out alive; I have to live up to her expectation. “Okay, let’s go.”
Gus at point, we walk forward. “Be careful where you step. The ground is uneven here.”
I try blinking to adjust my eyes, but the darkness is absolute. It smells of deep earth and decay. The air tastes like something musty and cool. There’s a claustrophobic closeness here, something that makes me feel that there are things standing close by. It’s eerily silent, only the sound of our breathing and our feet scuffing along on the bare dirt. This place feels closed in, as if we’re in a small box. “Where are we?”
“Inside,” Gus says hesitantly. “I think.”
“H-How’d we get in?” Nadine asks, her voice wavering for the first time since I’ve known her. She’s scared. But of course she is, death does that. Real or not, she just lost a friend. We all did.
Morden sighs. “Opus. Did you see the way that code just came spilling out of his body? Almost as if The Reaper released it or something.”
Without meaning it, my fingers tighten around Gus’s hand. “I know that code,” I say softly. “I wrote it myself.”
No one responds to me. For a moment, I wonder if perhaps I didn’t speak loud enough for anyone to hear. When I feel Gus’s thumb gently stroke the back of my hand I know they’ve heard me, but no one knows what to say. What could they say? A moment later, his voice breaks the uncomfortable silence. “There’s a wall.”
As he leads us along the wall, I reach out and touch it. It’s rough, cold, and damp. Grains from each block rub away on my fingers, and the cracked mortar in between crumbles at the touch. I can feel bare, hairy roots and dried bits of leaf. “It’s a building?”
“Dunno,” Gus says. “I feel an opening. Give me the light, it should be safe now.”
I drop Nadine’s hand and reach into the pocket of the utility overalls I’m wearing. I picked them for their deep pockets—a place to store the contents of the small pack I was wearing when we hastily escaped the Fief of Lau. I hand him the flashlight, and he snaps it on.
Half blinded, I look around. We’re all bumped, bruised, and caked with dirt, but no one seems to be too badly hurt from our tumble. I can see little in the small circle of light encasing us. What I see is what I already know. Naked earth, ancient walls, complete entombing darkness.
Gus shines the light down the break in the wall. It reflects off another wall at the far end.
“A dead end?” Morden says. “Who’d bother building that?”
“No,” I reply. “Look at the way the light doesn’t reflect off that one side wall—there’s a turn down there.”
Nadine says, “Should we go down it?”
I glance at her. Eyes red and dark trails where her tears left muddy tracks down her pale face, she looks like the darkness has half possessed her. I bite my lip and look to Gus; he must have lost his goggles in the tumble, and there’s a bloody gash over his eyebrow. He frowns and flashes the light around some more. There are more openings farther down and in the other direction.
He lets out a heavy, uncertain breath. “We’ll have to go into one at some point.”
Morden takes a step toward the opening. “Better now than never, right? I want as much distance between me and all those Knights as possible.”
I reach out and take Nadine’s hand once more. “You all right?”
She squeezes back. “Yeah, it’s just a shock.” She smiles, bitter. “Least he died being defiant and sassy. I’m sure he wouldn’t have accepted it any other way. Still, he just went so…easy.”
I turn my head away, not wanting her to see my uncertain expression. There’s an unsaid accusation in her voice. Maybe it’s really there, maybe it’s imagined. I barely helped with the dragon, and I couldn’t do anything to help Opus back at the wall; the threads didn’t come. They’re here now, but what about when I need them again? Will I let someone else die? Will I let them down again? I don’t want her faith; it’s too much of a burden.
Besides the lack of threads, the image of that code haunts me, making my fingers clench around Nadine’s as if I could deny my role in Opus’s strange fate. Why my code? What’s it doing here? Maybe it’s just a fluke—one project
that somehow got tangled in with all of Dad’s other projects. Still, every breath burns ominous, and my stomach feels sour.
I creep after Morden and Gus as they move down the long passage. It’s the type of place where I feel creeping is warranted. We can see now, so I know there isn’t anything standing close by, but it still feels like there is. “Anybody else have the feeling like we’re being watched?”
I feel Nadine’s body shift as she examines the darkness behind us. “More like being followed.”
“Try not to think about it,” Gus says. There’s uneasiness in his face and body. There’s no crazy-as-a-fox smile on his face, and that worries me. The stakes are too high now to smile, even to grin, in challenge.
We move on, corridor after corridor, sometimes right, sometimes left, sometimes backtracking when we hit a dead end. We go until my shoulders ache from the tension and my eyes burn with trying to see into the shadows. My skin itches and prickles, sensing touches and phantom breaths that don’t exist.
When I hear a yelp out of Morden and he disappears as if the very earth has swallowed him, the shock makes both me and Nadine scream in fright. The shriek echoes far and wide, going on and on and on for what seems like forever.
A moment later, Nadine comes to her senses, runs past Gus, and skids to her knees at the mouth of a huge pit. “Mord?”
A grunt replies.
I get to my hands and knees beside her and motion for Gus to shine the flashlight down the pit. “Are you all right?”
He glances around and grimaces at the grinning skeleton of an unfortunate soul who found one of the spikes at the bottom. “Well, I’m better than that guy.” He kicks at the shards of a shattered spike at his feet. “Good thing I’ve got buns of steel.”
I let out a relieved chuckle as Gus kneels next to me. “Any ideas on how to get him out?”
I scratch my head, my dirt-caked fingernails finding all manner of tangles. “Rope?”
“That would work if I had my pack, but it’s still tied to the vivacycle back in the Fief of Lau.”
I chew my nail as Gus sweeps the flashlight around the pit, examining the edge and the respective drop.
