by Azalea Ellis
I caught a glimpse of the pilot frantically manning the controls as it tumbled toward one of the nearby buildings and disappeared out of sight. I would have cheered, if not for the arrival of one of the other ships, which looked a little scuffed up, but otherwise perfectly fine. Either it had given up on chasing Blaine and Bunny, or they were downed.
The new arrival shot directly at the kids. It blasted them back over the edge of the roof, and they didn’t stand up again. I screamed once more, and sent my awareness lashing out toward them, desperately pleading with anything out there to have mercy, and not let them be hurt over some stupid little contest.
Birch was crouched over them, yowling at the new airpod, real snarls managing to make their way out of his tiny voice-box.
—Sam, the kids!—
-Eve-
I sent him a Window with a map of their location along with the message, and immediately turned my gun toward the new airpod, shooting off air-burst rounds in an attempt to draw it away from them.
I felt Gregor stir, and together, he and Birch worked to pull Kris back toward the stairwell. Not fast enough. Gregor wasn’t using one arm, and Kris lay limp.
I shot at the new airpod frantically, reloading clumsily when I ran out of ammo.
It wove in the air and avoided most of my shots, but didn’t even bother to turn and shoot back at me. I sprinted toward the edge of the roof. I wasn’t Jacky, but I thought I could make the jump to the airpod. I had to, because the kids were exposed still, and I had no idea how badly Kris was hurt. I could only pray that it was her top layer bodysuit keeping her limp, and not a serious injury or concussion.
That was when the side of the target building, where the others were traveling with the hostages, exploded.
I didn’t have a chance to figure out what caused it, because afterimages of a man’s body flickered in front of me, between me and the edge of the roof.
I skidded to a stop as Vaughn solidified in front of me, and then he broke into transitory multiples again, and something hit me, and tore at me, and I spun through the air, my outer bodysuit kicking on and enacting the electrical immobilizer.
I lay on the graveled rooftop and watched helplessly out of the corner of one eye as Jacky fell back, one arm already hanging limply at her side. Her head turned, and I saw the crushed cheekbone and eye socket, and her eyeball trailing out, connected only by a fleshy string. I wasn’t sure if she was still conscious as her opponent smashed her literally down through the roof.
It was only a couple seconds later that the klaxon blared, declaring an end to the mock battle.
Chapter 5
Farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear.
— John Milton
I got three Seeds for my performance in the mock battle. I wasn’t sure I actually deserved them.
Adam got two, apparently for some impressive Skill work.
Despite not being a Player, Gregor got one.
This shocked Blaine at first, and then drove him to quiet rage.
Gregor agreed to give the Seed to Chanelle when Blaine explained to him that they might help heal her brain damage. Blaine and the carrier airpod had been downed, and his suit had immobilized him while he was out in the middle of the city, with no way to check in or see what was going on. Sam was already busy healing Kris and Gregor by the time Blaine learned what they’d done. He berated them, white-faced as he watched Sam assume Gregor’s broken arm and second-degree burns, and Kris’ broken ribs and minor concussion.
We all gathered together in the barracks, after NIX’s medics and Sam had done what they could for everyone. Jacky was more withdrawn than I’d seen her in a long time, and when I sat beside her, she murmured, “I’m really sorry, Eve. She just . . . she was better than me.” Sam had patched her eye socket back together, but it was still fragile enough that she had to wear a bandage around her head to keep everything in place.
I shrugged. “She was better than me, too.” I was just glad she was alive. I’d wondered for a moment, when I saw her injuries.
“But I’m supposed to be the fighter, no? It’s my job to . . .” She hunched her shoulders. “I’m gonna train more, I promise.”
I bumped her with my shoulder, ignoring the throb it caused my bruises. “We’ll all train more. Don’t worry about it.”
She nodded, but didn’t smile.
Adam was suffering from the exhaustion of Skill overuse, to the point that he could barely move, and he fell asleep in his chair.
Zed drew on Adam’s face with a marker while he slept, but his mischievous smile didn’t ring true.
Sam flopped back on his cot and went straight to sleep, but even in repose his face was pale and strained. We relied on him too much. But he almost demanded to heal what he could, with a sort of intensity that wouldn’t be denied.
Before the end of the day, what had been wary watchfulness in some of the Players turned to open hostility in almost all of them. I made sure the team knew to travel in groups of at least two or three, and turned my mind to making sure something like this never happened again.
The next day, Blaine and I went down together to one of the battle observation rooms and watched a replay of what had happened. His knuckles went white around the edge of the table when the kids left the cover of the stairwell, and when the airpod shot and hit them whatever he’d been containing snapped out of him. He smashed his fist into the table and the sides of the station’s walls, glasses flying off and getting crushed mindlessly under one of his now-bloody fists.
I didn’t try to stop him. I knew what it felt like to need a release, even if it hurt a bit. Sometimes, things built up to the point they were unbearable.
Still, every time his knuckles slammed down into something harder than they were, with another panting, desperate breath just on the edge of tears, I flinched. I had taken the kids, and I was supposed to keep them safe. I’d been the one to give them weapons. Maybe they would still have gotten hurt if I’d kept them unarmed, or left them with Blaine, but it seemed obvious that the way they had actually gotten hurt was almost entirely my fault.
When Blaine tired himself out, he dropped into one of the chairs and sat silently for a few moments.
Tentatively, I picked up his broken glasses, and handed them to him.
He put them on, though they were lopsided on his face, and one of the lenses had been shattered and was missing. “The rest of us need VR chips,” he said, almost conversationally.
I was surprised enough by this that I didn’t respond.
“Ones that aren’t,” he paused, and almost whispered, “accessible by ‘outside sources’ like the modifications I made for your team. Except we should all be able to communicate with each other freely, rather than needing to route messages through you.”
I nodded slowly. “That’s a good idea.”
“And the kiddos need to start learning self-defense. And working out. Maybe they won’t ever be able to stand up to one of you, but I want them to at least be able to fight back enough to escape.” He paused again. “I’m going to start doing that, too. And training with the battle technology. I can’t be useless if I’m going to be an . . . active part of this . . .”
I reached out awkwardly and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t push it off, but I struggled to find words. “Blaine . . . I’m so sorry. I’ll help you in any way I can. We all will, you know.”
He nodded, and stood abruptly. “I am going to my lab. If you wish to join me, I will see if there is anything I can do to help you.” He gave me a meaningful stare and strode off.
I followed him. Technically, the area was off limits, but Blaine ignored the alarms and the guards that responded to them, and eventually things settled down.
Something about the irritating sirens reminded me of the klaxon blowing to signify my team’s utter defeat. I’d been out-strategized, our technology had been eclipsed, and on an individual basis, we’d been outclassed by the Players of the other team.
Blaine had a sma
ll lab, adjacent to the huge one, which contained the alien spaceship. He entered it and immediately began to putter around, muttering to himself and drawing diagrams on the smartglass screen that covered one of his walls. He’d turned on some ambient water sounds, the volume high. He took samples of my blood, claws, hair, and the inside of my mouth. While he got to work, I sat in an armchair at the corner of his lab, crossed my legs, and leaned back. I was so tired. “Blaine,” I murmured, “I’m just going to close my eyes for a moment.”
He didn’t even acknowledge my words.
I breathed in deep and exhaled my awareness. It filled the room, and then drifted out through the vent in the ceiling. NIX had huge airshafts running through the entire base, as far as I could tell. I’d thought things like that were a cliché from the films. There was always the whirling fan blade that the character had to time and jump through at just the right moment to avoid being cut in half . . . or flames that shot out periodically, something like that.
But any sufficiently large industrial system that needed to cool machinery or transport air deep into the ground needed an extensive ventilation system. From what I understood, NIX also had an oxygen-scrubbing fail-safe, but it was too expensive to put in place unless we were on lockdown due to a nuclear war or some sort of airborne biohazard.
I was deeper in NIX than I’d been since Commander Petralka had taken me to see what our world was up against. Maybe . . . I took another deep breath, trying to calm my body, and pushed out, reaching downward through the vents, farther and farther, level after level. I passed plenty of interesting things along the way, but the thing that almost distracted me was the number of Seed-imbued people as I went farther. I was pretty sure they weren’t Players. Not per se, anyway. Maybe, they were Moderators, like Bunny?
I felt my attention straining, so I ignored them and continued on till I reached a sterile holding cell with enough fail-safes to contain a herd of rabid elephants. Or an alien, I guess. Since that’s what it was actually containing.
I slipped in through the small vent in the ceiling, trying not to let the strange buzzing vibration that filled the room distract me, and snap my concentration. Conversely, the clarity of my senses seemed to sharpen. I reached out tentatively to the angled metal slab in the middle of the room, and felt the huge creature shackled to it. Power radiated from him, flowing in his veins and brightening him in a way that had nothing to do with sight, and everything to do with whatever non-sensory Perception the Oracle had given me. I had to consciously hold myself back from thinking of him as a man, and remind myself that though he may look like a larger version of us, he wasn’t human.
I focused my attention on his face, which was half-obscured by an unkempt beard, observing him in secret as he slept. Or maybe he was drugged into sedation. He looked sick enough. I pushed forward, touching the gaunt skin over his cheekbone, mentally almost tasting the clammy sweat there.
His eyes snapped open, staring out into the empty air of his room as if he knew I was there.
We had met before, in my mind.
When I had first been injected with a Seed, I’d had glimpses of this room, and thought they were a hallucination. When I was dying after my Characteristic Trial, and after my younger brother injected himself with a Seed and I’d broken down from despair, I’d met him twice more. After I’d solved the Oracle’s first puzzle, I’d had a vision of Behelaino, and then a dream. And I’d worn his body in that dream. Or maybe it was also a vision. I didn’t know. I felt almost as if I was slipping into his skin, the sensation dizzying, as my paradigm of the world shifted.
I still was reeling when his rage slammed into me. He shoved my existence away with a white-hot anger, and I crashed back into my body with a searing headache.
He hated me. It wasn’t just anger. He loathed me, and me specifically.
Blaine didn’t react to my muffled gasp as my attention returned fully to my body.
I reeled mentally for a second, almost nauseous. I stood and moved to the doorway. The scientists were so caught up in their work that they didn’t notice me, despite the dark color of my bodysuit indicating I was a Player.
I waited at the door for a while, just watching them work and looking around at the crazy inventions. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, the skin prickling. I rubbed at it. My eyes lingered on the alien spaceship. It really was damn cool, even if it was from a species determined to wipe us humans off the face of the planet.
Something prickled at the back of my mind. Maybe it was discomfort at what I’d just experienced. But instead of dissipating as time passed, it grew as I watched the scientists, and thought back to the almost ant-like crawl of people though the underground tunnels and rooms of NIX.
I realized once again that NIX had some amazing technology and resources.
But this time, that realization scared the feeling out of my fingertips.
If NIX had been better prepared, we might not have won when we attacked. They constantly drilled us, preparing us to fight against people as strong or stronger than us. How could they have been unprepared to fight against Players, their own cultivated weapons? I didn’t trust Bunny even as far as I could no doubt throw his scrawny frame, but he’d mentioned that NIX was worried I might be a Player from somewhere else. If that was true, they would have been prepared for Player-level attacks. If they’d used their technology . . . If they’d sent out Players to fight Players instead of weak soldiers . . .
I’d been cocky, sure. But I knew now we weren’t the strongest, so why hadn’t they sent out a group of people like Vaughn, with armored suits and some heavier weaponry, to neutralize us? I could almost feel my brain buzzing against the muffling nature of a building headache.
Had they been afraid I really would be able to win against them, and then escape? Maybe . . . they wanted me to feel like I won. Why else send expendables out to fight me?
But if so, why? What did they gain? I looked up, and around at the chaos as scientists milled around the huge lab, working at personal stations or tables, or entering and exiting the auxiliary labs that filled this whole level of the base. There I was, standing among them, having just resolved to train harder for NIX, after getting my ass handed to me in a mock battle they orchestrated.
I stumbled back, letting the wall support me, as my legs were too weak to do so. It felt as if these questions may have been hiding in the back of my mind for a while. I had been deliberately ignoring them. And that wasn’t like me. Maybe Bunny had more influence than I’d thought. That was a terrifying thought, that I resolved to explore in detail. But even so, why would they do this?
If I looked at the outcome, and worked back from there to find the answer, it was easy to see that NIX got what they wanted. They now had stronger Players with special Skills under their control, and I and my whole team ended up beholden to them. When NIX was first preparing to fight off an alien invasion, they must have realized the stupid tropes in the sci-fi films weren’t realistic.
No human could successfully hack an alien computer with only their link. The aliens wouldn’t have some specific weak spot so obvious a five-year-old could point it out, which one man could exploit to bring all the invaders to their knees. An alien race that had achieved interstellar travel would probably outnumber us, would definitely outgun us in every way, and lastly, outsmart us. We couldn’t just increase army enlistment and train soldiers, funnel resources and fund military research. We had to get smarter before any of that would yield quick enough results.
I’d bet my life that when NIX first discovered the possibilities inherent in the Seeds they supercharged the Intelligence of every compatible candidate they could get their hands on. Those people would be working on everything from technology, to battle tactics likely to prove successful for humans, to ways to manage Earth’s population up to and during an attack.
There was no way they would have botched my recruitment. I suddenly recalled Nadia saying to me that I’d escaped almost all of their methods of monitori
ng me, praising me for my trickiness. I groaned under my breath, a low, sick sound with a hint of a whimper. How could I have missed that?
Bunny. He’d come off as a bit of an ignorant rookie, working for the bad guys but just a normal person who was a bit weak-willed. But he’d been a Player all along. Or maybe, I should say that he’d been a Moderator, all along. I knew they had psychological evaluations done on all Players before even injecting them with the initial Seed, and they probably continued to develop those evaluations afterward. It would make sense for them to pair Players with a master manipulator who monitored their every move. Someone literally built to control the weak-willed. Bunny had been chosen to be my Moderator, and even now that master manipulator was on my squad, under my “protection” from NIX’s retribution.
And if Bunny had been a plant, what about Blaine? Why would a genius like him, who was supposedly being forced to work for them, have been allowed outside of NIX? Another valuable asset, ripe for me to acquire and turn on them. He was perfectly situated to subtly guide my choices, leading us to his masters, acting as another spy, all the time. I shook my head in denial, even as I had the thought. I didn’t want that to be true.
I realized what Blaine knew, NIX might know. The side effects of the Seed of Chaos might not be at all secret. My find filled with horror like a glass fills with water, to overflowing.
I wanted to deny it. I was jumping to conclusions, I must be. There had to be another explanation. And maybe there was. But I knew that no matter what truth came to light, things weren’t how I’d thought them to be, and I couldn’t trust anything around me. It would be illogical to do so.
How did I even know the others on my team came to me organically, that NIX had not been guiding my every action with an unseen hand? Chanelle, made important to me as the person to help me when I was alone and frightened, sending me to her sister, the girl who became my first ally and even a friend after that? Jacky, obviously stronger than the rest of us that first Trial, enough so that I would notice and remember her? Adam, who Bunny had me “save” from being caught in possession of a knife. Then Sam, who Bunny sent to save me when I was about to die, furthering my trust in the both of them.
