by Azalea Ellis
A weariness like the weight of an ink ocean crushed me, suffocating me in dark silence. I’d crossed one more line tonight, created another barrier against my naivety, my normalcy, and my original invisible self. I felt like all the soft parts were being squished out of me, both mentally and physically. When the Game was done with me, all that would be left was a hard, jagged knife of a girl, able to cut through anything and everything. It would shave everything that wasn’t survival away. If I didn’t shatter in the process, that is.
I hugged my legs and rested my head on my knees, speaking into the darkness. “Don’t you ever get tired of it, Bunny?
OF WHAT?
—Bunny—
I’d known he would be there. “Of what you do. Kidnapping, human experimentation, murder…knowing how your Players live in fear?” When I paused, silence reigned. “How do you do it? Do you just not care? I know that’s not true. So how do you do it?” Maybe if he explained it, I could do it, too.
More silence, and then a bright window appeared against the darkness of my room.
I DO THIS BECAUSE IT’S MY JOB. AND THEY WOULDN’T DO IT IF THERE WEREN’T A GOOD REASON. I KNOW IT MUST SEEM LIKE NIX IS EVIL, BUT THIS IS ALL NECESSARY. THEY’RE WORKING TOWARD SOMETHING.
—Bunny—
“What could possibly be important enough to make this okay?”
I DON’T KNOW. THAT’S ABOVE MY SECURITY LEVEL UNTIL I PASS MUSTER AS A MODERATOR. BUT I’M JUST HERE TO MONITOR AND GUIDE YOU. I MAY NOT LIKE WHAT HAPPENS, BUT I DO WHAT I CAN TO HELP. HAVEN’T I DONE THAT FOR YOU?
—Bunny—
“You don’t know why this is supposedly necessary, and you just blindly believe? You’re saying you’re not directly involved, just a bystander, so that makes it easy? That’s how you deal, how you cope? That makes it okay in your head?” I laughed. I took it back. I couldn’t take any lessons from him. If I was dirty, I at least wanted to see the truth of it clearly in the mirror.
“Listen to yourself, Bunny. ‘They’ and ‘you’ are the same. You work with them! Those people kidnap children, inject them with microchips, force them into a game of death and abomination while experimenting on their bodies and having them monitored by cameras and microphones and…you!” I ran out of breath. “Do you realize what they did to China’s sister? They turned her into a literal flesh-eating monster, and then took her and others like her somewhere to experiment on them. But it did double duty, since they let us watch, to give the survivors extra incentive to use the Seeds and play their Game even better, because we’re afraid to end up like the losers. Chanelle wasn’t even human anymore…” my scrambling voice petered off.
IT’S HORRIBLE, YES. DO YOU THINK I DON’T REALIZE THAT? BUT WE HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE FOR URGENT ADVANCEMENT. WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?
—Bunny—
I took a shuddering breath and let it out, the weight of everything too tiring for me to continue. It was late, and I was tired. “I just want you to face the fact that maybe you should be doing something about it, even if you don’t know what it is yet.” The anger had left me, and left behind only crushing loneliness. “You’ve been decent to me, Bunny. But you can’t keep hiding behind your intentions. Inaction is an action, too.”
* * *
I let myself into Blaine's house the next morning, breathing hard and dripping sweat after running from the closest bus stop. I wanted to come early to get a full day of cleaning and then training in with the weekend still in full swing. Soon, class would be out for seniors, and I'd be graduating. It's funny how the relative importance of graduating from high school had plummeted so abruptly.
The others were already cleaning our new base, and Blaine was still fidgeting in the quarantine box.
I helped clean, using a rag and bucket of already cloudy water to wipe things down. None of us had noticed anything unusual or worrying from NIX, which reassured me that Bunny had kept our actions to himself. Or if he’d written a report, no one had read it, like he grumbled about.
Sam, up above cleaning the spider webs from the loft area, leaned down to call a greeting. "Did you run here?"
"Yeah. Part of the way, anyway. I don't have a car." I shrugged. "Good exercise, and God knows I need every extra bit I can get."
Adam frowned. "It's best to have a vehicle. What if there's an emergency and you need to get somewhere fast, or get away fast? Except for China, who’s too young, you're the only one of us who doesn't have a ride."
"Both you and Jacky own motorcycles, right?" Sam called down.
"I have one," Adam said. "Not sure what you'd call what Jacky does."
Sam cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean?"
Jacky pursed her lips. "I may have...borrowed that bike."
Really, now? I considered for a second if that bothered me, but I didn't find anything inside except a bit of curiosity about what skills that might entail, and if they could be useful. Things like the law were another thing that mattered so little now.
Sam smiled, innocent. "Oh. That's nice of your friend, to lend their motorcycle to you.”
China, who'd been silently cleaning beside him in the loft, stopped and stared at him incredulously along with the rest of us.
"What?" He looked back and forth at our faces.
"When she says borrowed, she doesn’t mean borrowed," Adam said.
"Borrowed?" His mental dialogue showed clearly on his face, changing from “I'm totally lost,” to “Oh!,” to “Oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-it,” to “I'm worried,” over the course of a few seconds. "But what if you get caught? Won't you get in trouble with the law? And your parents?" he said aloud.
Jacky smirked at him. "I'm an orphan, chico. And I've already been in trouble with the law enough it doesn't really matter. I'm living in a detention center already. What more are they gonna do to me? I'm a minor." Her voice was hard and challenging.
Sam froze, horror and then shame washing over his face, along with a dark blush. "I—I’m sorry. I didn't—I... God, that was so rude of me."
Jacky stood staring up at him expressionlessly for a few seconds, and then busted out laughing. She laughed loud and hard, a sound that reminded me of the braying of a donkey. After pounding at her knee and gasping for air, she finally calmed down enough to say, "Oh, Sam. You were just..." she slipped into mirth again. "I say that, and you just stand there looking at me so horrified. Like you just said... Like you just told me my baby was ugly. And then you look like you don't know how to apologize because I'm not even the mother. It's not my baby, I'm just fat!" She broke down again, wobbling over to the wall and leaning on it for balance.
Sam looked like he wasn't quite sure what she was saying, but was relieved all the same by the fact she wasn't angry. He cracked a smile, and a laugh of his own slipped out.
I thought about what Jacky had revealed. An orphan, and living in a detention center. "Jacky, how is it you're able to meet up with us at all hours of the night if you're in a detention center? Don't they have curfews and restrictions and things like that?"
She straightened, the residual mirth slipping from her mouth. "The warden has a soft spot for me. He lets me go out for some 'extracurricular classes', and beyond that, I just don't get caught." She grinned her cocky grin again.
But the look that had twisted her features for half a second when she spoke of the warden's soft spot was revulsion, maybe even hatred. It made me remember how she'd panicked when Adam had landed on top of her after saving her. I gave her a searching look that she resolutely ignored, and returned to my cleaning. We weren't close enough for me to probe further, and maybe I was just reading things between nonexistent lines.
After I judged the water in my pail dirty enough, I took it back to one of the sinks in Blaine's lab. Instead of returning to the others, I opened the door of the smaller quarantine room.
"Oh, God, thank goodness. I've been dying to get out of here," Blaine said.
"If you do anything stupid, I'll slice you up a bit, then I'll knock you out an
d lock you right back in here," I replied, sitting down at one of his lab tables. "Or I might kill you, if whatever you do is extra stupid."
He swallowed. "I want to help. But if I ally myself with you, and NIX discovers my duplicity, I may be putting the kiddos in danger.”
“This is your chance to get them out of danger, for good, not just until the next time you can come up with something valuable to give to NIX. How long do you think your current situation can last? What if they decided that killing one of your ‘kiddos’ would be even better incentive for you to try and keep the other alive?”
He paled.
“And it’s too late for you to go back now, you know. You’re already our accomplice.” I let my voice go gentle around the threat, but my gaze stayed hard and locked on his. “The only option is to get your family hidden, somewhere far away and safe.”
“I am not going to do anything nefarious. Believe me, I fully understand the situation I’m in. And like I said, I want to help. But," he looked me up and down. “You may be tall, but you're still a girl, and I don't see any weapons. How would you kill me?” he referenced my earlier threat. “Are you crazy strong, like that—”
I knew what he was asking, and since that's what I wanted to talk about anyway, I decided to just show him. I held my hands up and let the claws slide out. They’d grown sharper and more menacing since the first time they’d appeared, and I saw his eyes dilate as he sucked in a choked breath.
Instead of scrambling back like I half expected, he stepped forward and grabbed my hand to examine my fingers, pushing and prodding at the tips and around the base of the claws. “A weaponized biological mutation, under active control…” he muttered aloud.
“Have you seen something like this before?”
“No, not in person. I mean, there’s speculation, DNA splicing and all that, but no one’s been able to figure out how to feasibly implement it.” He drew a deep breath. “Would you mind if I…I’d like to study this. Study you.” He waved his hand to encompass the whole team.
I grinned. “Glad you’re on board. I want to know exactly what the Seeds are doing to us, and how NIX is causing all this to happen.”
We sat down at one of his tables and chatted while he took samples of my blood, spit, hair, and skin, and shavings of both my claws and my normal nails, then prepared the samples for examination.
“You said they knew who you were, when they attacked and made you a Player?” he asked.
“Yeah. From what I’ve gathered it’s more or less the same with everyone. They take you, inject you with a VR chip, tracking device, and a Seed. You get sick, and then you wake up a Player. Or you don’t wake up. The ones who turned me said some things that make me think not everyone survives the process.” I recounted the five minutes of helplessness that had concluded with me becoming a Player.
When I was finished, he frowned. “So the question that stands out to me is, ‘Why you?’ Other than the fact you’re all young, I don’t see an obvious pattern. I speculate there might be some genetic marker they are looking for. Something that increases your chances of adapting to the Seeds.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Then the next question is ‘What do they hope to accomplish?’ It’s got to be something big…” I thought about everything Bunny had told me, and what Vaughn had said. “Every Trial, we’re trying to gain the power of the gods, the incentive being fear of death…” I mused. “Which means that’s what NIX wants, too. They use fear to push us toward gaining it.”
Adam walked through the open door and pulled out a stool to sit on. “Heard you talking and thought I’d join in. Next question, what would you do with the power of god if you were NIX?”
I frowned. “Before that, what exactly is the power of gods?”
Adam rubbed a hand through his floppy hair and came away with a few sparks jumping from hand to hand. “Miracles, right? Things we shouldn’t be able to do, but we can because we gained something extra special as a Trial reward. Like this.” He snapped his fingers and a spark jumped at me, stinging lightly where it landed. He grinned with childish smugness at my scowl.
“Which leads back around to two questions,” Blaine held up a finger. “One, why do they want that power—what are they hoping to accomplish through their actions? Two, how are they doing this?” He bent over a microscope, peering at a slide of my blood. “Your blood has the Seed organisms floating around in it, but…something is off. Oh.” He looked up at me, then back down to the slide, and started to mutter to himself. “Fascinating, never seen something like this before.”
“What?” My voice sounded strained. “What do you see?”
He looked reluctantly away from the eyepiece. “The Seed organisms seem to have modified some of your blood cells. The majority are still normal, but a few seem to have been…enhanced. What I wouldn’t give to know how they made those Seeds.”
Know thine enemy. “Blaine, I have a present for you.” I said. “Adam, do you still have that energy cartridge?”
“Of course.”
“Lend it to the good doc.” I turned back to Blaine. “I heard you had some issues with high energy requirements on one of your inventions. We’ve got something from the Trial world with enough capacity to power a single person’s teleportation. It might help your research. Though it likely won’t work, after coming back to Earth. The Boneshaker seems to have a deadly effect on electronics.”
“Are you serious? An artifact from within the Game? Wait. So where exactly are they transporting you? What is the Game world?”
Adam and I exchanged a glance.
“That’s a great question,” I said. “Wherever it is, it’s a real place. I mean, I’d considered it being a hallucination, or some sort of Virtual Reality simulation. But bringing back both injuries and objects…it wouldn’t make sense.”
Adam nodded, looking down. “I’m thinking…maybe an alternate dimension? Or maybe we’re being beamed away to an alien planet. Or they’re sending us way into the past or future. Some of the things we’ve seen would make sense, if the Trials are the future of Earth in a few thousand years. If NIX could gain advancements from the future, the technological and genetic advancements, they’d have a monopoly on…everything. They could take over the world.
“But what about the double moons?” The question popped out of my mouth as I thought it. “Earth has one moon.”
“I don’t know, maybe we got crazy and decided we’d build another one up there as a resort destination or something.” He snorted. “But I was thinking, maybe something happens in the future. Some extinction-level event. That might explain an extra moon, and why there’s no sentient life, despite evidence of humans.”
“Giant humans?”
“Yeah. Which also makes me think it’s thousands of years in the past. We have a few fossils of extremely oversized humans. Maybe before the dinosaurs, when the Earth could support life that large. Or maybe it’s Atlantis.” He snorted again.
I frowned, trying to understand the implication of any of his theories.
“Wait,” Blaine said. “If it’s the ancient past, that means bipedal, humanoid life evolved on Earth…Twice. The ramifications of that…”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s an alternate dimension. Or it’s not Earth at all. It kinda feels like Hell, to me.” He grimaced at his own quip. “This really isn’t my area of expertise. I’m just speculating.”
Blaine’s eyes had grown even brighter with fascination. “So where is this energy cartridge? Perhaps I can gain some clues through examination!”
Adam rolled his eyes. “Not here. I’ll bring it for you, tomorrow.”
I decided to interrupt Blaine’s impatient eagerness. “I don’t want you to give NIX complete projects any more. Withhold as much as you can from your best effort, keeping it at the point where they won’t notice. And keep the real product for us. Can you do that?”
“Maybe…I don’t think they’d know the difference, either way. If they were intelligent enough
to figure that out, they wouldn’t need me. But why?”
I ignored the question, knowing both men at the table were more than smart enough to work it out. “How soon do you think you can have something ready to hand over to NIX?”
“If it doesn’t have to be perfect? Maybe…two weeks?”
“Okay. Make it happen.” Two weeks. I hoped it was enough time for the team to prepare, and me to turn a plan into reality.
It would have to be.
* * *
I called Adam and China to my house the next day when I was alone, to stop all the monitoring equipment in my house from giving NIX accurate information. They hopefully wouldn’t know the difference, but I would be able to speak and act a little more freely. My mind was still consumed by our lack of information, and Adam sent me a video from the net to the new ID sheath my mom had reluctantly bought me. “Take a look at this. I think he might be one of us,” he said.
I sat on the chair next to my bed and flicked up the video.
A young man stood in the midst of a kneeling group, brushing his fingers against their outstretched hands. His body was surrounded by a faint glow, and when his skin touched theirs, a ring of light pulsed from the joining, and for a second they joined him in glowing. He walked through them toward a large stone chair sitting on a pedestal, and sat looking out at his supplicants with a grim smile. His eyes flicked to the camera. “I am your god. Let those who recognize my power join me.” The video clip cut out.
“What do you think? That thing about being god, and the light…it might just be fancy tricks, but maybe not,” Adam said.
I shook my head. “No, it’s not a trick. I know him. Vaughn Ridley. See what you can find on him, and let me know. ASAP.”
“Got it. Give me a couple minutes.”
