by Murray, Lee
“The team from Sileen are eliminated,” the announcement booms over the screams of the crowd. “The Silici have broken the first rule of Conclave in which no species may have more than four team members. Since the Silici now have 27,454 participants, they have been summarily removed from the amphitheatre. The judges’ decision is final.”
Mathilde covers her mouth with both hands. “That’s not fair,” she whispers. “They were just babies.” Tonya feels a pang of annoyance. Mathilde’s compassion for the other competitors is getting boring.
“Do you think they’re dead?”
“I’m sure just they’re fine,” Tonya says, trying hard to keep her sarcasm in check. But how can she know? How can any of them know? No one has ever bothered to explain to her what happens to disqualified teams. Were the Silici eliminated permanently? Or were they simply taken from this amphitheatre, back to the stadium? And, if that had happened, would the infant Silici survive out of water? Suddenly, Tonya feels extremely tired, as if she’s stayed up three nights running to watch back-to-back episodes of Dead Planet. As the iSplay fades and the brilliant azure of the sky returns to view, Tonya wishes more than ever that this whole thing was over with.
14
When the iSplay has evaporated, they paddle on, Rowan getting more and more irritated with every stroke. He’s tired and peeved and bloody Ari won’t stop. Their exulted leader seems intent on killing them before they even make it to the point of challenge.
Up front, Rowan can see Tonya stealing glances at Ari. He wishes the guy wasn’t so built! Earlier, he’d taken off his shirt and his lat muscles are rippling as he drags his oar through the water, sweat glistening gold on his skin. Rowan watches as Tonya pants through pink lips. He glowers, certain her panting has nothing to do with the exertion of paddling. She wets her top lip with her tongue, its moist tip sliding slowly across cupid’s arch, before she withdraws it. The tiny movement is so sensual, Rowan nearly loses it.
“Ari,” she purrs. “Do you mind if we stop a moment, please? I could really do with a drink.” Languid, Ari pulls his paddle from the ocean, droplets falling from the shaft. Does he have to do everything in slow motion? Fucking show-off.
“Good idea,” Ari says. “We’re getting close to the white water, and we might not have time to refuel later.”
Now he wants to stop? Because Tonya asks him? Smiling, Tonya lays her paddle down and lifts her arm, dragging her hair away from her face, and exposing the milky skin under her arm and along the length of her neck. Rowan feels his brows knit. What does she think she’s doing? Is she flirting with Ari?
No!
Everyone knows that girls start out mad as hell and then fall in love with you. It’s an age-old thing. All the great stories have that love-hate thing going on. And Tonya started out mad with Rowan, not Ari. She’s crazy about him. She must be. It’s just that all the bare skin Ari is showing off has got her confused.
Why did the Council have to make Ari their leader, anyway? What’s so special about him apart from a few ancient genes and a decent set of abs? He hasn’t been the one to come up with the ideas that have saved their hides time and again throughout these challenges.
Using the Xrlf as bait for the spider. Whose idea was that? Rowan’s.
Finding the labyrinth’s exit. Rowan again.
Bowling the Clickers off their feet. Rowan’s idea.
Twisting the seed pods off the trees? Even making the discovery which turned the water weed into paddles. Rowan, Rowan, Rowan.
And what has Ari done? He’s waved a stupid stick around. Anyone could do that, so why do they even need Ari? He’s a total waste of space. Rowan would be doing them all a favour if he just pushed him overboard.
“Rowan?” Mathilde asks, passing him the gourd of fresh drinking water. “You okay? You look a bit…preoccupied.”
“I’m fine,” says Rowan through pursed lips. He lifts the gourd to his mouth, his head thrown back, but his eyes still fixed on Ari. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He hands the gourd back, wiping liquid from his face with the back of his hand, then picks up his paddle.
Up in the pod’s bow, Ari and Tonya giggle over a joke: Tonya’s followed by her quirky little snort and Ari’s hearty and cheerful. Rowan remembers how upbeat Ari was after Rowan ate the bananas the first time. It was Ari who’d offered him the fruit, Ari who’d mentioned the possibility of poisoning. Did he hope Rowan would die? Is that why he was happy? Eliminating the competition with poisoned fruit, like the crone in the Snow White legend. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Well, Rowan isn’t about to give him the satisfaction. He’ll fucking kill him first!
“Ari!” he roars, raising his paddle in the air, ready to strike. “Did you think you could get rid of me so easily? Did you? You bastard!”
“What?”
“You’re trying to get me killed. Knock me off. Eliminate me.”
“Don’t you touch him,” Tonya shouts. “Put that paddle down now!”
“I won’t. I know what you’re about, too. You’ve been fucking flirting with him all day.”
But Ari comes at Rowan, his own paddle raised, his weight causing the boat to pitch.
“Don’t you dare speak to her like that. You piece of shit!”
“I’ll talk any way I like, you miserable Spawn of Spartacus.”
Mathilde hits them both with the flat of her paddle. They drop to the bottom of the pod, causing the little craft to sway precariously.
“Stop it now! Something is happening to you. You’re both fighting over Tonya and she’s encouraging it. I don’t know what’s happening, but it isn’t normal.”
“Normal. You’re the one who gets all weepy over a few tadpoles,” Tonya snipes.
“Tonya, I will hit you with this paddle too if you don’t shut up. You all need to listen to yourselves. Your emotions are all out of whack. It has to be part of the challenge.”
She stops talking, the paddle still raised at the ready. The crucible bobs on the waves.
Tonya stares wide-eyed at Mathilde. “I knew this challenge was too easy.”
Ari reaches for his t-shirt. He puts it on. “I was feeling angry, too. I felt Rowan was undermining me. It was driving me crazy.”
Rowan shakes his head. That’s just like Ari, trying to blame it on Rowan. But now that they’ve stopped paddling, and he’s feeling calmer, he can see that he has been carried away by his emotions. He’d still like to push Ari overboard, but the desire to decapitate him has waned, as if now that his heart rate has fallen, his emotions have dissipated too. He digs deep and tries to comprehend what might have made him so angry. After all, he likes Ari. The guy’s a fan of Praxel Cyrus, after all.
Tonya’s eyes fall on the remaining bananas. “Do you think it was the fruit? We all ate them.”
“And Rowan ate three. He had more than anyone else,” Ari says. His face is grave, and Rowan can tell he’s struggling to get his feelings under control.
Tonya sighs. “I bet it was the sap.”
“Sap?” Mathilde asks, lowering the paddle.
“The sap from the pod,” Tonya explains. “When we cut the pod down, it went everywhere. Sticky pale pink stuff. The boys were covered in it, and I got some on my hands.”
“It can’t have been that. I washed it off in the sea,” Rowan retorts. “And afterwards, I went diving in the stream for the paddles.”
“It must have absorbed through our skin before we made it back to the beach.”
“It’s the only explanation,” Ari agrees.
“I’m not sure,” says Mathilde thoughtfully. “I think the Silici might have been affected by something too. After all, they stopped to spawn.”
“But they didn’t have a pod, so they can’t have been affected,” argues Ari.
“And we don’t know if there’s any emotion involved in Silici reproduction. It might just have been a coincidence. Maybe the water was the right temperature, or it was a timing thing.”
“Well, I’d like to think there was some
emotion involved,” Mathilde insists. “Those colours were too beautiful to have been simple biology.” Rowan wonders if Mathilde hasn’t been affected too, her compassion for other species is so extreme.
“I can think of another explanation,” Tonya says, coyly.
They look at her expectantly.
“It’s quite simple, isn’t it? I’m irresistible.”
15
For hours, every stroke of the paddle has been an agony for Rowan, icy jealousy still surging in his veins. From the grim looks the others have plastered on their faces, it seems he’s not the only one battling personal demons. It hasn’t helped that the act of paddling has intensified the effect on their baser sensations. When Rowan and Ari had almost come to blows a second time—Mathilde using her paddle to douse them both with seawater—Ari had announced that they would stop every half hour to rest and allow the feelings to pass. A wise decision, since at the time Rowan had been intent on murdering him. Hopefully, whatever it is that has heightened their emotions will wear off soon.
Please let it wear off. And before he kills Ari…
It’s a relief when they finally reach the white water, that is, until Rowan looks over the edge and takes in the reality. Their little pod is bobbing up and down on the edge of a whirlpool, a massive gaping vortex. Rowan would have expected a rush of sound. A roar of water, wailing as it drains from the world, down the biggest arse plughole Rowan has ever seen.
“What the fuck?” Rowan whispers, although it’s not really a question.
Ari drops his paddle, his mouth agape.
“So, do we go in?” Tonya asks.
“Go in?” Rowan is incredulous. “Into that whirlpool? Are you crazy? That’s the sap talking. We go in there, we’re dead. The sea will swallow us up.”
“I don’t see any markers,” Mathilde says nervously. “Or any monsters…”
Of course not, Rowan thinks, because the monster is the sea itself.
“I don’t get it,” Ari says. “What are we supposed to do? What exactly is the challenge?”
They sit in the bottom of the boat under the baking sun and pass the gourd around.
Finally, Ari says, “I think Tonya is right: we have to go in.” It’s the answer Rowan has been dreading. Ari goes on, “Otherwise, we’ll be like the last Terrean in Conclave Four, won’t we? That poor girl sitting motionless on the sand, too scared to move least she be discovered by the centipede.”
“At least she died on her own terms,” Rowan says heatedly.
“Did she?” Tonya says, rounding on Rowan. “And what terms were those, Rowan? The way I see it, that girl had a choice between death and death. In the end, she chose to die of thirst. If you like those terms, then fine. We could do that right here.” She tips the gourd upside-down, the last drip rolling out and plopping ceremoniously onto her foot. “Or, we can take on the unknown,” she stretches her arm out and points at the churning eddy, “and give ourselves a chance.”
“Oh, yeah? You call that a chance? What chance did that girl have against the giant centipede? It’d already skewered her team mates. That whole challenge was a set-up by the Conclave organisers. They meant for the Terreans to die.”
“Maybe. We don’t know. We have no idea what might’ve happened if she’d chosen to face the centipede. And we’ll never know, will we, because she didn’t try. She just sat there and died.”
Rowan thinks back to the Clickers, stuck outside the tunnel system in the first amphitheatre, desperately trying to get in. They hadn’t given up. The options had seemed hopeless, but they’d tried anyway. And they’d come so close to succeeding…
“Rowan’s point is valid, too,” Ari says. What point? Rowan sits up to listen. “The set-up is key. Let’s think about this amphitheatre for a minute: the actual tasks haven’t been that hard.” Rowan nods. That’s true. He’d thought that himself. “The biggest difficulties have been the battle against ourselves. To control our jealousy, our pride, even our lust. This whirlpool is no different. I think the organisers meant us to battle ourselves.”
“What do you mean? We’re sitting on the edge of a whirlpool. How is that a battle against ourselves?”
Tonya drops her voice. “Well, look at us: we’re fighting now.”
Mathilde gives a little cough. “I think the battle we’re doing is with our fears,” she says, which stops them all in their tracks.
Once they make the decision, it’s easy enough to do. They don’t say goodbye—there are no hugs and last words—they just push off, paddling peacefully into the hush of the swirling abyss. A tiny spaceship entering a black hole. Rowan’s hands grip his paddle, his knuckles white with fear. Sweat beads on his forehead and his heart bounds like a deer. The silence is the thing. It’s terrifying. Rowan holds his breath. Within seconds, the current has picked up the little vessel, spinning them downwards into the interminable silence.
16
The sea had indeed swallowed them up—fortunately, it has also spat them out, only somewhere else. Dazed, Rowan has no time to consider his new surroundings. No sooner does he stand up, he’s nearly thrown off his feet as Tonya flies into his arms, hugging him tightly. Is the sap still playing havoc with their emotions? Rowan doesn’t care. He clings to her, drinking in the salty scent of her hair.
They’re alive. They’re fucking alive.
Tonya pulls away as Mathilde launches herself into their circle. She’s crying, the shock of their survival hitting home. It’s a moment before Rowan realises that Ari isn’t part of the huddle. He finds his friend standing apart, looking out over a canyon, still holding his damned paddle. Rowan claps a hand on his shoulder, says: “You did it, man. You got us through. That was a gutsy call.”
“I could have killed us,” Ari croaks, his eyes still focussed in the distance.
Rowan grins. “Yeah, well, don’t worry too much. I could’ve killed you plenty of times.”
17
The third amphitheatre is a plateau, which drops off in a yawning chasm as much as half a kilometre across. A tiny marker flickers on the far side.
“I might have known,” groans Rowan when Tonya points it out.
“How are we going to get across there?” Mathilde asks. No one answers her. The question is rhetorical. There can be only one way.
The box-cage on the edge of the canyon is no bigger than a Terrean studio apartment, but large enough to contain a Conclave team of four. Windowless, the cage is completely opaque. Inside that box is their means of getting across the canyon. It’s not marked anywhere, but why else would there be a box perched here on the edge of this gorge? Ari yanks on the door. It’s locked. He puts his ear to the surface.
“Anything?”
“No talking, but there’s definitely something in there. Looks like we’re just going to wait our turn,” he says, stepping away from the door. In the meantime, let’s spread out and see what else we can learn.”
They move away from the box-cage, heading left along the edge of the canyon.
“Maybe there’s a swing bridge down lower? Or the cage could house an elevator?” Tonya suggests.
Lying on their stomachs on the rocky ground, she and Rowan snake their way to the edge of the canyon and peer over the side. Rowan’s head reels and his stomach lurches. The chasm is sixty, maybe seventy, stories deep. Tonya nods to her right and Rowan, marvelling at her lack of vertigo, cranes his neck for a glimpse of what she has seen. Bodies. The Crons are down there—the three remaining team members—broken and twisted on the rocks, their pelts gleaming in the sunlight.
“And look over there.” Rowan follows her eyes to the spot.
The Gyptors too are scattered on the cavern floor, like bits of toast thrown to the birds. To make things worse, two enormous raptors swoop in, pecking great chunks off the corpses, and squabbling over the spoils. Rowan shudders, pleased that the predators’ attention is focused on the carrion. Quickly, he scans the sides of the canyon, but there’s no sign of any lift, and nothing obvious on the other
side either. But it occurs to Rowan that if they move further away from the box to where the canyon curves, they might be able to look back and see the front of the box, the side facing the edge of the chasm. Maybe there’ll be a clue. They scuttle back to join Mathilde and Ari.
“Whoever’s in that box, we can eliminate the Gyptors and Crons,” Rowan announces, indicating that they should move further along the ridge and away from the box. “They’re spewed out on the bottom of the canyon. Dead meat.” Tonya gives him a swift nudge, reminding him of Mathilde’s sensitivity to that kind of thing. But for once, Mathilde seems not to notice. “Could it be the Sceets who were in the box?” she says. “They don’t make much noise.”
Rowan shakes his head. “I reckon the Sceets would have flown directly over the canyon to the marker.”
“I agree, although I don’t think we’ll see them now,” says Ari, rubbing his chin. “We already know two of them didn’t make it: Tonya found one in the tunnels, and there was another one in the spider’s lair. The remaining two probably drowned in the vortex, since they didn’t have the protection of a pod.”
“Well, the Clickers and the Silici are definitely dea... out,” Rowans says, correcting himself at the last second. “And the Fhageans.”
“So, who does it leave?”
“I can think of the Xrfls, Phemeres, and the Vauxhons.”
Mathilde adds, “Don’t forget the Taikarions—although they may not have made it this far…they’ve already lost two members.”
