by Azalea Ellis
Her eyes let out a steady stream of tears, though she made no sound.
“You did well. It’s over now,” I said. I led her to stand together with China, who was also free, and turned to Sam.
Adam threw up his hands and turned away from Sam’s cage, stomping back to us with a face twisted in anger and disgust. Our eyes met as he passed, and he shook his head once, a silent explanation of his anger.
I moved to kneel beside Sam, pressing against the buzzing bars.
Tiny hands were dragging him down into the soft stone, but instead of becoming frantic to solve his puzzle, he was holding his head in his hands as if trying to block out the world, hyperventilating.
“Sam. What’s wrong?”
He raised his head, looking bleak and distant, as if he’d already lost. “I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. But if I give in, that person is going to die. I can’t. But, it’s too late for me now, already.” He nodded as if consoling himself, but his face pinched together at the words and he panted faster. “There’s not enough time left. It’s too late already. I already made it. But I’m scared.”
I reached through the bars and took his hand, as Adam had done me and I’d done Jacky. I knew the comfort touch brought, and with that comfort, the increased willingness to listen to whatever the comforter said. To let them guide you. “Sam, I’m here.”
He looked at me uncomprehendingly.
I squeezed his hand and rubbed it chafingly, trying to bring some heat back into it. “I’m here, and we’re all here with you. I’m going to help you, if you let me. We need you, Sam. You’re part of our team.” It seemed he had given up any hope for himself. So maybe, I could push him to have hope for the good of someone beside himself.
“I can’t. And it’s too late anyway,” he repeated, as if those were the only words in his head.
“That person? The one who you’re protecting? He’s trying to kill you. Right now, Sam, he is trying to kill you. And the only reason is so he can live. You know that’s wrong. It’s why you’re refusing to try and win against him. Because you know it’s wrong to sacrifice someone else so that you can live.”
He relaxed. “Yes. You understand. I can’t do that again.”
“You can.”
He stiffened again immediately, and drew back from me.
“You can, because we need you to. You can’t do it to save yourself, but you can do it for me. For us.” I squeezed his hand.
He took a sobbing, heaving breath. “Why are you doing this to me?” he pleaded. “Why are you making it okay for me to do what I know I shouldn’t? I can’t kill that guy. It’s cowardly and wrong.” His voice was firmer, but he hadn’t taken his hand away from mine.
I continued rubbing. “It’s wrong to kill someone else in cold blood. But this isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask to be a Player. The Game is forcing you to act in self-defense, just like it’s forced the rest of us.”
He shook his head, denying me, and closed his eyes.
Slight change of tactics, then? “It’s also wrong for you to stand back and do nothing when someone needs you, Sam.”
His eyes opened, blood shot and blue, and locked on my own. “What?”
“This isn’t just about you anymore. You’re not playing this Game by yourself. You are part of my team. A team of four others who are depending on you, and you…you’re trying to take the easy way out.”
“The easy way out?” his voice rose in indignation. “I’m trying to do the right thing!”
“No. The right thing to do is to live, to listen to me now. I’m right, Sam, and you know it. The team needs you, which means I need you to listen to me, and do what I say. The team is my responsibility, but as a member of my team, it’s your job to follow me.” Not my most subtle work, but I didn’t have much time to convince him.
Luckily, he was terrified, and just selfish enough to hand over his responsibility, along with the power to command him. He focused on me as if I were his last lifeline. As if I were a piece of driftwood in a turbulent sea storm.
I nodded, giving him silent permission. “He is not pleading to be saved. He is not begging for mercy.” I pointed to the boy across from Sam and spoke low and calm, trying to give my voice import. “He is trying to kill you, and it is not wrong for you to defend yourself. You will stop him from hurting the team.”
He hesitated, and then nodded. “But it’s impossible, Eve. There’s no way. It really is too late.” His face crumpled in the despair that comes from having hope for a split second, only to have it ripped away. “There’s only thirty seconds left.”
All around us, people in their cages were panicking, dropping their unsolved boxes, fighting with the liquid stone crawling up their bodies, and clawing desperately at the bars. But the boy across from Sam was still controlled, almost finished with his puzzle. He would make it in time. Shame he wouldn’t live to see the benefits of his efforts.
I dropped Sam’s hand and put my own on his shoulder. “There’s hope, if you’ll do as I say. Listen.”
He nodded, and I gave him my orders, spewing them out quickly as the last seconds counted down.
His opponent completed his puzzle.
As soon as the bars disappeared, Sam ripped away from the tiny stone hands and threw himself forward into the middle of the circle, sprinting toward the other boy, who was also free of his bars. Childlike stone bodies followed Sam with unnatural speed, pumping their little legs in a blur.
I followed at a slower pace, ready to lend a hand if needed.
The timer reached zero, and as the arena erupted into a death circus around us, Sam smashed into the other boy. He wrapped his hands around the guy’s throat and squeezed.
I expected the boy to fight back, but instead he jerked as if in surprise, and then threw himself backward and tripped.
Sam stalked forward calmly. When the downed guy tried to kick out, Sam grabbed his leg.
The boy started to convulse, shaking the leg free from Sam’s grip.
So Sam just moved forward again and straddled the boy. He pressed his palms down hard and flat on the guy’s stomach, where the shirt had ridden up and the pale skin lay exposed.
The stone children reached Sam and crawled onto his body, weighing him down and dragging at him, but he ignored them as if they didn’t exist.
Sam’s opponent shook and screamed, convulsing as if to wiggle free. His skin turned dark and started to split open in a million tiny spots as bloody crystals grew from beneath it, bursting outward like a time lapse video of ice crystals forming on the surface of a lake.
Sam kept pressing and pressing, shaking with effort. A drop of sweat fell off of his nose and dripped onto the boy, mixing with the bloody crystals beneath his hands.
Finally, the guy was still.
Sam grabbed the completed black puzzle from the dead hand and hugged it to his own chest. The granite boys pulling at him paused for a moment, seeming confused, and then melted away.
I let out a sigh of relief that my guess of the winning conditions had been correct. We needed to be in possession of a winning—black—puzzle. Solving it wasn’t enough it we didn’t keep it. Otherwise the girl who’d thrown hers away wouldn’t have died. And the only reason to release the cages of both the winner and the loser was to give the loser a chance to turn the tables.
Sam sat atop the body, staring down at his handiwork.
I moved to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sam.”
He looked up at me, startled. His bloodshot eyes were blank and wide in the growing darkness, but then they seemed to focus on me, and his face twisted in sick anger. “You.”
I frowned. What was wrong with him? “It’s over now. Are you okay?”
“Don’t touch me.” He yanked his arm back and stood up, tripping on the hardened corpse as he turned toward the rest of the group.
I watched in bemusement as he walked away, then knelt to the body of the boy. His eyes were still open, and I closed them with my fingertips. He was warm,
still, and I realized I’d expected him to be frozen. His stomach had two patches of normal skin, in the outline of hands, like a child had traced Sam’s hand on the boy’s skin. Around the outlines, blood crystals sprung up and outward, like magnetized metal shavings drawn towards a lodestone.
I touched them with the tip of my finger, and found them rigidly sharp, and still radiating the warmth from inside the dead body. I remembered what Sam had told me. He was the harbinger of death.
Sam, the healer.
Chapter 19
And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually…it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life…every second of it…Is all we have.
— Anne Rice
I thought the Trial would end, but we waited for minutes on end, and nothing happened. The cube stayed still and gave no message. No instructions came to us, no timers appeared, and we began to grow worried in a whole new way. What if we hadn’t completed the Trial properly, and weren’t allowed to return to our lives?
Then I felt ripples through the soles of my shoes. The black stone turned white in the center of the Trial board, then rippled outward, changing color as it went.
"Get ready, everyone!" I called out, not taking my eyes off of the ground as I tucked my completed puzzle safely into a large pocket in my pants. When the ground beneath us had turned all white, threads burst upward from the rippling stone, thick and so fast I had no time to react.
They surrounded me in sheets so thick I couldn't see anyone else. I screamed for my teammates, but no one called back in response.
Within moments, thick walls of glowing strings enclosed me, twisting and winding together to create a large room, shaped like a smooshed ball. Helixes, columns, and bridges made of the strands filled the inside haphazardly, stretching from wall to wall and formation to formation.
I took a step around a random column, and the floor vibrated outward in a ripple of light and sound. I froze, not because of the unexpected reaction of the strings, but because of the huge woman crawling out of the floor.
She rose and detached herself from the string, standing almost twice my height, maybe twelve feet tall. Her body was made of black stone, and full of holes and strange facets. Tears flowed constantly down lines carved down the middle of each of her cheeks, as if eroded by hundreds of years of crying. She wore a crown upon her head, and had a beautiful, regal face.
She looked around, and then seemed to see and focus on me. "You. You are the supposed descendant?"
"Are you the Moderator?"
She barked a laugh. "I am no such thing, tiny one. In your language, you would call me the Oracle."
"My language? What language do you normally speak? What does an oracle do in the Game?"
She slashed her hand through the air to cut me off, and the sound it made was sharp and commanding. "I will answer no more questions. It is not the time for it. I am here to test you."
She moved to the side and plunged her hands into what looked like a birdbath standing on a musical string pedestal. Another stood across from it a few yards away. If there had been birds, I would have no doubt of their function. But there were no birds, and somehow I knew the pedestal’s purpose was not so innocent. Her tears dripped down into the water like little diamonds. She moved her fingers within the water, and some of the strings connected to the birdbath spontaneously lit up and rang out with sound, causing a ripple effect that ran outwards, transferring to connected strings until it reached me and stopped, falling dim and silent.
A half-formed image of the Oracle split away from her. The shadow's movements caught the air, and its body created a beautiful haunting melody, a thousand different wind instruments harmonizing with each other. The sound of its movements mimicked the sound she'd played through the water. Though it was as large as her, and deliberately ponderous, a few gargantuan steps brought it in front of me. It slammed the back of its forearm into my chest, sending me flying backward.
I slammed into the threaded ground and slid, throwing out light and discordant sound with the friction. I saw the shadow disappear out of my peripheral vision, but she was already playing a new tune and creating a string-path with the birdbath.
My lungs shrieked in silent pain, begging for the breath that had been crushed from me. I cradled my torso with an arm, so, so grateful I wore the banded armor vest beneath my clothes. It had spread some of the impact, which perhaps was the difference between me rising again or being incapacitated by that single blow.
The new shadow was already on me then, and I didn't have time to lie around. I slipped by it, running back toward her original body. I couldn't breathe, and every movement of my arms shot pain through my chest.
Something caught me in the back and I smashed into the floor and slid once again, this time skinning my jaw and ripping my clothes.
The Oracle let out her barking laugh again, somehow still beautiful even in its sharpness, and I knew she had anticipated my movement. No other way would have allowed the huge, somewhat lumbering shadow to hit me.
This time, I stood up faster, and ran toward her before she could sic her after-image on me again.
The room was already filled with music, but I was quick enough, and lead with a low kick to her ankle, and then a hard sideswipe to the side of her knee.
Her leg buckled, but she didn't go down, and with a flick of her fingers, an ephemeral copy shot from her and blew me backward with a lunge and two palms smashing into my chest.
My body caught on a twisting double helix and bounced to the floor, facedown. This time I didn't get back up right away. I couldn't. I hadn't gotten a good breath since the first hit, and stars sprinkled around in the darkness creeping through my vision.
But I had to move, I had to, or the next one would kill me. I crawled to my hands and knees and scuttled behind the helix, gripping it to hold myself off the ground.
She was unfazed by my little attack. Tears still streamed down her face into the water and music poured out of the strings in ripples, moving my way. They were more complex that time, and two different paths played intertwining melodies, coming from either side of me.
I regained some space in my lungs, but two copies split from her, moving toward me in a pincer formation.
I needed to stop her from making more of them, so we could fight one on one. I needed to get her away from the pedestal. I shot forward between the two copies, but they were already moving to intercept me. I skidded to a stop and backpedaled furiously, but one had only been feinting my interception, and had slipped around behind me faster than I could change my direction.
I was falling backward towards its waiting fists. I slipped out my claws, wondering why I hadn't done so sooner, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, plunged a hand into the strings of the floor, while pushing myself sideways with a foot.
My claws gave me the purchase I needed to twist my backward fall into crouching on my hands and knees. I tried to throw myself sideways between the two shadows, but a third one already waited for me to move toward it.
It grabbed me by the arm as I tried in vain to backpedal once again. With a twist, it threw me across the room like a stuffed doll.
My shoulder popped and crunched as the arm twisted, and I couldn't help my scream of agony, even though in truth my scream came from the horror of realizing I'd just been broken like a twig. The pain hadn't hit yet. No, it didn't hit till I smashed into the curve of the ceiling, bounced from it to a branching column, and smacked into the floor like a tenderized steak. The pain hit then, bursting outward from no specific point and flaring bright.
My eyes rolled back in my head, and I lost track of myself for a moment. When I found myself again, I allowed pure terror to take over. It overwhelmed the pain and stood me up, looked for the Oracle and her shadows through the blood in my eyes, and hobbled away from her to give me distance from my attacker, and maybe time to regroup.
/> The shadows had once again disappeared, but she was still playing more intertwining melodies, except with even more complex music.
I had no time, and no power to win against her. I took a quick inventory of my body. A definitely dislocated shoulder, possibly broken and screaming in pain from the weight of my pack’s strap over it. Twisted knee. Fractured ribs, I was pretty sure. Cut on the head bleeding a lot, maybe a concussion. And lots of other small hurts, too many to count. All in all, the worst shape I'd been in yet.
I might die there. The thought slipped into my mind to feed my terror. No, no, no. I wouldn't die. Would not. Would. Not. I just needed to figure out how to beat her. She seemed to literally anticipate my every move, but that didn't mean I couldn't win. There had to be a way.
"Ah," I puffed. The Oracle anticipated my movements? "Stupid, stupid," I mouthed venomously at myself. By name alone, I should have realized the clue she gave me toward her power. I'd been treating this like the other Trials I'd been in. But this one was based on the mental faculties, not my ability to kill monsters. Why had I forgotten that?
But even now that I understood, how could I beat her if she could predict the future? Already the strings around me played in complex interweaving patterns, and soon the shadows would echo through the music. I wouldn't make it through the round.
An arc close to me lit up with a final smash of light and sound, and instinctively I thrust my good arm toward it. I touched my blood-covered fingers to the strands before the sound faded away, and in front of my eyes I saw an ephemeral image of my body dodging one of the Oracle's shadows, only to be hit by a hammer-fist from another. The ragged-looking girl's neck broke downward with a grinding crunch, and her skull caved inward from the impact.
The sound faded away, and with it, the glimpse into my future. "Hell, no." I wouldn’t let that happen.
The shadows came at me, five strong. I dodged them as best I could with my body not working at full capacity. Each movement had my blood flowing faster and my focus deepening. No more panic, only a goal I would achieve, or literally die trying.
