by Dima Zales
Its body hits the ground, revealing two more of its cousins about to catch up with me. Behind those two, I see something that makes me pause.
A cloud of bugs—my guess is locusts—streams from Jeremiah-Owen’s bug-infested body. The man—and I use that term loosely—is flying parallel to the bottom of the ravine. Where his bugs pass, any remaining snake-spider people scream like rabid banshees. Great. The bugs must not be real locusts; according to what I’ve read, those were herbivores, and these grasshopper-looking things are obviously flesh eaters.
“See, Why-Odor, we’re keeping you alive,” says the anti-intrusion creature’s Owen-head in a voice so loud it even silences the dying screams of the locusts’ victims.
“So we can do what we decided,” Jeremiah’s head pipes in just as loudly. “Then he can come out and die.”
“Of course,” Owen agrees. “And what a genius idea we had, if we do say so—”
I ignore the rest of their nonsensical conversation, because the two eight-limbed attackers are right in front of me. The larger one swats a curved blade at my side.
I bring my shield-disk up to absorb the blow.
The smaller attacker thrusts its sword at me. I parry with mine.
I know I have to do something to turn the situation in my favor. I can barely fight one of these things, so two of them will kill me twice as fast.
The larger snake-spider swats its sword at my legs, while the smaller one strikes at my left shoulder.
I jump. The larger enemy’s sword slices a thin gash into my white Guard boot. Simultaneously, I smash the disk into the larger creature’s face and clink my sword against the smaller attacker’s blade.
The larger enemy is stunned, but the smaller one manages to grab my left wrist in one of its spare limbs.
Though I’ve thought of it as the smaller one, I meant it purely in reference to its currently stunned cousin. Compared to me, the thing is huge. Its grip on my wrist is like a vise.
With all my remaining strength, I bring the shield down on its limb. As soon as its grip loosens, I twist my wrist, cleaving off one of the arms in a splash of blue blood.
I see movement out of the corner of my eye and instinctively meet it with the shield. It turns out to be the larger opponent. It clearly recovered. Hoping the block stunned it, I strike out with my sword. It catches the blade with two of its hands. The blade leaves streaks of blue blood on the creature’s palms, but it doesn’t let go. The smaller creature seizes the moment, drops on its remaining legs, and kicks me with its leg-like hind limbs. It hits me in the chest, and the impact is so powerful I fly backward, landing painfully on my back. The agony is overwhelming, forcing me to drop both the sword and the disk.
The creatures approach me, menace gleaming in the slit pupils of their green snake eyes.
I roll over to where I dropped the disk and jump on it, scrambling to my feet. The adrenaline rush makes me forget about my injuries.
The smaller snake-spider takes its bow from its shoulder and reaches for an arrow.
The larger one throws its sword at me.
I attempt to duck under the projectile but feel a blast of burning heat in the side of my head. The sword clanks far behind me, so I assume it just grazed my head, though it feels like I got scalped.
Through the pain and as though in slow motion, I watch the smaller snake-spider pull the bowstring, aiming at my midsection.
It doesn’t get a chance to let go of its bowstring.
The smaller snake-spider screams, and its larger comrade joins in.
The locusts only take a few seconds, but they leave nothing of my attackers behind as they continue their flight. I use those two seconds to recover my sword from the ground, but I don’t get a chance to activate my disk.
A swarm—though the proper term may be a plague—of locust-like insects flies toward me.
Their buzzing reverberates in the metal of the disk under my feet. They form a circle around me, blocking the sky.
Then a large locust—perhaps the leader—zooms toward me and takes a bite out of my cheek.
Nauseated by terror, I swat at him with my sword.
The rest of the bugs screech-buzz excitedly.
My sword misses the tiny attacker, and his friends take that as a sign that I’m edible and harmless.
As one, they swarm toward me.
23
“Stop, little ones,” Jeremiah’s head booms.
The locusts stop an inch away from my skin. Their mandibles click in a collective cacophony of hungry frustration.
“Yeah,” Owen’s head agrees. “As fun as it would be to see you eat this intruder alive, allowing him to die means his real-world self won’t remember any of this.”
“Right, which is why we have something more permanent in mind,” Jeremiah’s head says.
“Minds,” corrects Owen’s head. “As in plural.”
“We’re part of the same entity, so singular,” responds Jeremiah’s head, but he doesn’t sound certain.
“But you said we have something in mind,” Owen’s head objects.
“Irrelevant,” Jeremiah’s head says impatiently. “Make way for your friends,” he says sternly—to the locusts, I assume.
The locusts form a small opening in their plague.
A new kind of buzzing ensues in the distance, and within moments, the inner circle of locusts is filled with flies.
“Do your job,” Owen’s head says in his excited hyena voice.
I assume he was talking to the flies, because they attack me.
When they land on me, I don’t feel any pain. Maybe the existing sting and burn of my wounds is masking the damage they’re inflicting. However, panic and disgust kick in when I feel a dozen flies crawling into my throbbing ear.
I extend my hand, palm up, and activate my disk. As soon as I’m floating, I judder my hand in random directions. As I fly through the locusts, I swing my sword around to clear the way.
The locusts can’t keep me trapped without eating me, so I push through their wall and come out on the other side in an explosion of angry buzzing. The locusts don’t pursue me en mass.
Frantically, I fly toward the volcano. In an ancient book, I read something about insects, specifically bees, not being fond of smoke. Since the fiery mountain is still spewing smoke, it seems like a good destination.
Even before I enter the smoke zone, the number of flies on my body greatly decreases. They’re having trouble flying as fast as me.
Maddened by the few flies still crawling in my head, I increase my speed. If the smoke doesn’t get rid of them, I’ll have to stick the sword in my ear.
When the smoke envelops me, the flies in my ear finally exit, buzzing loudly as they go.
The flies are pretty much gone, and the locusts don’t want to pursue me into this smoggy area either. I breathe in a sigh of relief, but the feeling is short-lived. The insects didn’t follow me here for a good reason. I do my best to cough out the copious amounts of smoke I inhaled, my eyes watering as I fight a wave of dizziness.
“It’s done,” Jeremiah says from somewhere nearby.
Through the smoke, I spot my two-headed nemesis and get an unwelcome look at his bug-infested body. He followed me here. Looking at the disgusting mess of insects, I find a rare reason to be grateful to live in Oasis: those critters are absent from our little habitat.
Fortunately, the smoke is forcing the creepy crawlies to hide in the folds of Jeremiah-Owen’s torso. Unfortunately, that same smoke is threatening my survival. Even worse, my enemy is holding a curved sword that must’ve belonged to one of the snake-spiders.
“He doesn’t understand. He probably thinks he’s out of trouble,” Owen’s head complains annoyingly. “We should tell him.”
“True,” Jeremiah’s head responds. Then, turning to me, he says, “Those flies you came into contact with are our interpretation of the bot variety. If it isn’t clear, they laid their eggs all over your body.”
My hands and
feet go ice cold, and bile rises in my throat.
“That’s right,” Owen’s head echoes. “Unlike your regular dermatobia hominis, the larvae of these beauties take seconds to form and wake with a voracious appetite.”
My overwhelming revulsion and horror temporarily suppress my ability to speak.
“I think he’s beginning to get it,” Owen’s head says. “But not fully, I think.”
My body itches all over, though the reaction could be psychosomatic.
“I’ll be happy to explain,” Jeremiah’s head says. “Don’t worry about them spreading throughout your body. There’s a specific task we’re having them take care of. We instructed them to eat specific regions of your brain. The damage will stay with you when you exit the Test. That is how the synchronization between your current state and your physical neurons works.”
Though I heard his words, they’re so terrifying I don’t want to accept their meaning.
Owen’s head adds excitedly, “Right now, they’re munching on the parts of your brain responsible for face recognition, starting with the so-called fusiform face area. And before you ask, you won’t feel them doing this. Unfortunately, the human brain doesn’t have pain receptors, but rest assured, they are—”
I don’t wait for him to finish. Despite his assurances, I do feel something crawling inside my head. With a violent, animalistic roar, I point my hand at the two-headed creature and torpedo the disk forward.
My plan is simple: I need to kill Jeremiah-Owen before my brain is irreparably damaged. If I kill him, the Test will register that as a score.
“He wants to have fun as we wait for the damage to set in,” Owen’s head says with a giggle, and the two-headed monster flies toward me on his disk. The trail of smoke and bugs behind the creature makes him look like a nightmarish comet.
As we get closer, I focus on the path of his sword.
When we’re almost at the striking range, I expect him to stop, but he doesn’t, so I don’t bother braking either. It looks like this will be a surreal flying version of a jousting match.
In the fraction of a second it takes us to pass each other, I look for an opening.
Only the two necks, the hands, and the feet of the creature look human enough to injure. The right arm is controlling his flight, so I strike it. My blade touches something soft, followed by a clanking of metal on metal as we zoom past each other.
“That hurt,” Owen’s head whines as I turn around.
A streak of blood stains Jeremiah-Owen’s wrist, but the wound isn’t bad enough to impede him from controlling his disk. My opponent cautiously circles around and gesticulates at me, droplets of blood spraying in every direction. I swerve and propel my disk forward, my sword ready. Our swords meet with a painful ricochet, but neither of us injures the other.
Despite not hurting Jeremiah-Owen, I did glean something important: my enemy can’t turn his disk at as steep of an angle as I can. It’s probably because he’s standing barefoot, without the magnetic assistance I have. I tilt my hand sideways, which translates to me flying with my body parallel to the ground.
I whoosh past my opponent and strike his left shoulder, killing a number of bugs without damaging their host in any noticeable way. The key thing is that I come out unscathed, proving that flying sideways is indeed a promising strategy.
An extreme bout of nausea and lightheadedness hits me. Did I inhale too much smoke? Am I about to pass out? Should I make my way outside the volcano’s reach?
I look at my opponent, and my stomach fills with solid mercury.
The two heads are unfamiliar.
No, that’s not true. It’s their faces that are unfamiliar.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?” says the gray-haired head with Jeremiah’s voice. “You can’t recognize me, can you?”
I look from one unfamiliar face to the other. The feeling I have is different from looking at faces of people whose names I don’t know. It’s as though the faces are illusory and blurry. The facial features don’t add up to make a face, rendering their countenance unrecognizable as faces. I know the round circle with leathery skin and white hair is Jeremiah’s head and the other one is Owen’s, but that’s not what I experience when I look at them.
Did Phoe’s control over the anti-intrusion algorithm fail? Did it simply change its faces to worry me? It doesn’t seem likely, because if the thing could shape-shift, it would first change our environment to unleash new elemental forces against me. Which leaves only the explanation he gave me.
Part of my mind is now damaged, and I won’t be able to recognize faces anymore, even outside the Test.
This concept is as strange as it is horrifying. I imagine what it would be like to walk down the Institute and not recognize any of the Youths. I’ll seem rude to my acquaintances. When they speak to me, I won’t know who I’m talking to. With a sinking feeling, I think about not recognizing Liam and Phoe. The idea that I’ll no longer enjoy looking at Phoe’s face is—
“Now that you know what our larvae can do, let me tell you how you’re going to die,” Jeremiah says gleefully. “You see, in your mind, we saw your condition on the outside world. You’re falling, and you’ll need to act swiftly with your hands to save yourself.”
“Let me tell him the best part.” Owen’s voice is brimming with excitement. “Our hungry little friends are now eating the parts of your brain that control your arms—”
“—so you’ll die within seconds after we send you back,” Jeremiah continues. “You’ll try to use your hands to prevent yourself from falling, and you’ll fail.”
“Even your friend can’t move your arms if your motor cortex is damaged. She can only work with what’s there,” Owen finishes.
Trying to suppress my terror, I look at my Screen-watch. My outside self is still falling. If Jeremiah-Owen is telling the truth, I won’t survive the fall.
The Screen goes blank, and Phoe’s words appear: Your only chance is to kill him before the larvae do what he said. I’m sorry I can’t help. If I let go on my end, the anti-intrusion algorithm will become impossibly powerful again, making an already-bad situation worse.
I look away from the watch, my jaw muscles like coiled springs.
Knowing I’m on the brink of real death awakens something ugly and primal in me. I scream and direct my disk to fly at the epicenter of my growing hatred: the two-headed thing I’d like to rip to shreds.
Like a flying virtuoso, I swerve left and right as the distance between me and Jeremiah-Owen shrinks. I stay sideways to make it hard for my opponent to strike me. In a blur, he rotates his right arm, ready to thrust it forward. His sword hand goes for my ankle. I let his sword connect with my flesh and channel the resulting blast of pain and adrenaline into my strike. My sword cuts into his right wrist, screeching against bone, and comes out on the other side.
Both heads yelp in pain, and as I fly away, I watch the severed hand plunge into the volcano’s depths.
My opponent has two choices: he can let go of his weapon and flee—assuming he can use his left hand to control the disk—or he can stand his ground and fight me as I circle him. I don’t let him choose the cowardly option. Gritting my teeth against the overwhelming pain in my calf, I fly up, then down, swooping in on Jeremiah-Owen with my sword raised.
I feel bloodthirsty excitement as my sword cuts deep into my foe’s neck. Both mouths scream, but the younger one quiets in a gurgle of agony. With grim satisfaction, I realize I’ve severed it. With a clank against the metal disk, Owen’s head rolls over and falls down into the depth of the volcano below. A fountain of red blood gushes from the stump of his neck.
My elation at the sight of blood and Jeremiah’s screams frighten the sheltered Oasis part of me, but the wild ancient inside me revels in the knowledge that I’m about to kill my enemy. All I need to do is cut off one more head.
A bout of nausea hits me again.
I try to turn my right wrist sideways.
My arm doesn’t respond. Th
e larvae must’ve already damaged the part of my brain responsible for its control.
Frantically, I test my control over my left hand. This hand is still mine to wield.
Time slows down. Faster than the speed of thought, I form a truly desperate plan. Not giving my rational side a chance to raise any objections, I let go of the sword in my left hand to navigate the disk.
Nothing happens. The disk control must be a right-hand thing, which makes sense. How else would the disk know which hand to obey? Adjusting my plan, I grab my right arm with my still-functioning left and point it at the one-headed monster.
Jerking my right hand with the aid of my left, I propel forward.
Jeremiah’s head stops screaming.
He clumsily readies his sword.
I increase my speed.
Though I don’t recognize Jeremiah’s face as a combined entity, I do recognize individual features. His eyes, wide with dilated pupils, stand out.
I raise my arms high and slam into him, ignoring his sword. The sword enters my side, bringing with it an unbearable coldness.
There’s no pain, but I know it’s coming, so I hurry. I grab my enemy in a bear hug, pushing the sword deeper into my side. My hands meet behind his back, and I use my left hand to collect all the fingers of my right into the disable-magnet gesture.
When my fingers come together, the pain from the sword impaling my side spreads through my body with the intensity of the tornado I escaped.
Before the pain undoes my will, I clasp my hands in an unbreakable grip and jump off my disk with one last powerful push of my feet.
I fall like a rock, bringing my enemy down with me. Our disks hover serenely above us as we plummet.
The pain starts in earnest, and I scream, my vision blurring.
Jeremiah’s head is screaming louder than I am. His bugs separate from his torso and sting me wherever they can.
