“What are the tokens?” Ira asked, his beatific features drawn and pale.
Good question. Maybe they were items we could obtain some other way.
Annoyed that anybody actually had a question to ask, Schotz spat, “Each of you idjits must bring me the feathers of a seagull, a crow and a vulture. A whisker from a catfish. And a hair of a hyena.”
“Great,” Kali muttered. “A scavenger hunt featuring real scavengers.”
Ignoring my friend’s comment, I did a mental calculation: seven students, six each of five items, that’s . . . My eyes crossed and I bit my tongue. That’s, uh, not enough. Somebody wasn’t going to graduate. I bit my tongue harder, vowing it wouldn’t be me.
“Lastly, it’s every man, woman and whatever for themselves. No partnering up. No helping each other. One man is an island. Got it?”
Oh, skeg. He’d not only forbidden cooperation but he’d encouraged competition. If someone got more tokens than they needed, would they share with the less fortunate? Would they fail for doing so?
“So you all know your assignment, then.” His eyes darted from face to face, inviting exactly zero questions this time.
“Sir! Yes, sir!” we shouted in unison.
I gulped, surveying my classmates. A god, an angel, a smart young woman with total recall, two smart men. Me. Rod. How the skeg was I going to accomplish this? Who was going to lose? Rod glared at me. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
“Oh, wait. I almost forgot.” The sergeant grinned in a predatory manner, which suggested that he hadn’t forgotten anything at all. “I’ve also hidden a crystal skull in a secret location. The person who finds it graduates head of the class.” He giggled. Actually giggled! Sadistic skegger. “Get it? Skull? Head? And no skullduggery! Bwahahaha!”
He sounded insane, except I would have made the same joke.
M’Kimbi raised his hand. He was either very brave or very . . . no, he was very brave. “Question, sir.”
Sergeant Schotz scowled. M’Kimbi had spoiled his big finish. “What is it?”
M’Kimbi pointed toward the map, staying well out of the reach of the sergeant’s Magic Marker. “I would like to inquire what the large black section at the center of the forest is, sir.”
“That is a government-restricted facility. You just stay away from that. You hear me? Under no circumstances are any of you to go anywhere near that black hole. You could be charged. You could end up doin’ time.”
The rest of the group looked terrified and confused. Only I knew what lay within the restricted area. I’d wandered into it before by accident and despite my friendship with Lord Seiko, I didn’t plan on dropping in unannounced again.
Chapter 8
Doesn’t Prey Well with Others
AS SOON AS we were out of sight among the trees, Kali, Amber and I hooked up and made plans. We convinced one another that this, too, was part of the test—to ignore his edict forbidding collaboration and immediately partner up. After all, once we were on the job, we wouldn’t turn each other away when we requested help, right? Right? And if the sergeant had really wanted us to work independently, he would have taken away our phones.
Amber, of course, had the map memorized, so it was her job to keep us on track to each of the five token stations. Kali and I would have our eyes on the ground looking for dropped feathers. We doubted we’d find a hyena or a catfish, but maybe we could beat the odds by adding to the supply of tokens.
“You’re a god, Kali. Can’t you just conjure them up?” Amber asked.
“Sadly, no,” she replied. “I’m much better at making things go away. Death and destruction, remember?”
One of my earrings plopped at my feet.
“And earring backs. Sorry.”
Amber nodded. She had turned out to be pretty cool once she’d been stripped of her friends. She was even letting her dyed hair grow out. Thanks to the weirdness of time, it was now black with yellow paintbrush-tip ends drifting around her shoulders. I liked it.
“We need to split up. Let’s each take a checkpoint, grab three of the tokens and call in.”
“That’s great for you, Amber. But how do Kali and I find our checkpoints?”
“I can talk you in, like an air traffic controller, dudes. I’ve got this, like, mental map.” She tapped her temple. “Plus, I can do that thing with the three angles.”
“What the skeg?” Kali looked confused. “Ira already left.”
“No, not angels. Angles. Three angles,” Amber clarified. “You know. Triangulate.”
“Why bother?” I asked. “The phones now have built-in GPS.”
“Right. And that’s good. It’ll show me where each of us is so I can tell us how to get to the checkpoints.”
“I get it. Amber, you’re brilliant. Skeggin’ brilliant.” Kali punched Amber in the shoulder. I winced in sympathy. Amber rubbed her arm.
“My phone has a walkie-talkie function. Do yours?” I asked. They nodded. “Good. We need to stay off the main channels. Open channel D.”
“B?”
“Did you say P?”
“No D. D. As in death.”
“Who’s Beth?”
I grabbed each phone and set it on Channel D. Then I set the GPS functions so we could pinpoint each other’s locations.
Amber closed her eyes and concentrated. Opening them again, she pointed left. “Kali, head that way. I’ll keep an eye on your position via my phone display and let you know if you go off course. You should reach checkpoint alpha in about twenty minutes. Or, you know, yesterday morning.” She rolled her eyes so hard I could hear it. “Contact us when you get there. Go. Go. Go!”
Kali swelled up to her full height and maybe some added extra. “Who do you think you are, giving me orders?”
Amber cowered. And, I admit it, so did I. Had Amber gone too far?
Then Kali punched her in the arm again, maybe a little harder than last time. “Just kidding.” She took off through the trees, branches snapping and flying out of her way as she went, entire trees ripping from the ground in her wake. “Death and destruction. Death and destruction!” she called back over her shoulder as she ran.
My other earring fell to the ground. I stuffed it in my shirt pocket with its mate.
Next, Amber pointed straight ahead. “Kirsty, I’m giving you checkpoint delta. It’s the farthest away, but the straightest route. You should get there in about forty-five minutes, time willing. By then, Kali and I will have looped back and hit the remaining checkpoints. We should all arrive back in this clearing in about two hours. Or thereabouts, time being irrelevant.”
I knew what she meant. What could you do? Given the way things were, we might get back before we left. I drew a deep, unnecessary breath and was about to charge farther into the forest when I heard a weird tearing noise.
Like fabric giving way. Where had I heard that before? “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what? We don’t have time for this. Are you going or what, Kirsty?”
“Right. Right.” And off I went.
As I raced down a well-worn path toward checkpoint delta, I opened channel D and yelled, “Can you hear me now?”
“Roger that,” Amber responded.
“Who’s Roger?” Kali asked. “Is he dating Beth?” Sometimes even the most up-to-date immortal missed cultural references. “I’m there. Er, here. Time must have folded in on itself, ’cause I’ve only been running about ten minutes.”
I checked my hellphone. The digital readout differed from Kali’s by thirty-five minutes.
“Anyway,” Kali continued, “I’m at checkpoint alpha, but I can’t find any feathers or whiskers or fur here. There’s just a cord hanging from a branch that may have . . . Wait! What the skeg?”
“What?” Amber and I said in unison.
Kali lapsed into a language I didn’t recognize. Blue smoke drifted from my phone. “There’s a nice little carving in the tree. It says ‘Rod was here.’ Damn. He grabbed all of the . . . seagull feathers.
There’s a small piece left on the ground that must have torn off when he yanked them down. He’s probably going to share them with Horace and let everybody else fail. Son of a skeg!”
I heard Amber sniffling over the sound of Kali’s swearing. If Amber flunked out without a chance to take the course over, she’d be permanently separated from her friends. Much as I believed she would be better off without them, it wasn’t my place to tell her that. And besides, we were a team. We’d pull each other through. Each of us had something to offer that the others didn’t, and that made us stronger.
“No, wait!” I said, the lightbulb coming on over my head. No, not literally. “Rod isn’t going to share the tokens. He’s going to trade them! We all will. Amber. Kali. Pull yourselves together and get to the next location. Grab all the tokens you find there, not just enough for us. We’ll trade for the rest. And keep an eye out for the crystal skull. That’ll be our ace in the whole shebang.”
“More orders from mere mortals.” Kali sighed. “I remember a time when humans begged and prostrated themselves to us gods. There were offerings. Sacrifices.”
“Grow up, Kali,” I snapped, worrying just a little about the range of her powers. But I was the next best thing to dead already, and my backless earrings now resided in my pocket, so what else could she do to me? “That skull is the ultimate trading card. As long as we all pass, who cares about being head of the class?”
The silence was telling, but after a long pause, the begrudging responses of “right” and “yeah, okay” let me know I’d chosen my friends wisely. Perhaps figuring out I was a lousy judge of character had been the first step toward learning how to be better at it.
“Okay, I’m signing off and continuing toward my first checkpoint. Amber, give Kali her new marching orders. And guys? Hurry the skeg up!”
I sprinted along the path, confident (mostly) that Amber would give me a shout if I strayed too far off course.
Nearly an hour later, Amber’s voice squawked over the phones. “I’m almost there. When I find the hyena skin or whatever, I’m supposed to take, like, the whole thing, right?”
“Yeah.” I felt cold inside. I hated to do it this way, but Rod had left us no choice.
I reached checkpoint delta too late. Three catfish lay on the ground, covered in dirt, each one shaved clean of its whiskers. The small clearing reeked of dead fish.
I didn’t know who to feel sorrier for: the slaughtered fish or myself and my friends, who weren’t going to graduate. And my poor aunt.
I hunkered down and stared at the fish, mesmerized by the rainbow light glinting off their opalescent scales.
I flailed and landed on my ass when one of the fish flopped about in the weeds. It—the fish, not my ass—was still alive! I grabbed it around the fishy equivalent of its neck, mindful of the barbed spikes on its sides. (And for the record, can I just say, Ewww!) I plopped it back in the small stream nearby, tossing in the other two in the vain hope they might be alive as well. They didn’t float back up to the surface so perhaps they’d survived.
Maybe being a Reaper didn’t mean everything I did had to be about death.
I rinsed and rinsed my hands in the stream, murmuring, “Out. Out damn slime.”
After a while I felt cleaner. At least my hands, anyway. I hoped the others had found and taken all the other tokens.
I hated to play dirty. But sometimes you had to. And if I had anything to say about it, that skegger Rod was going down.
Chapter 9
Time Well Bent
SEVERAL MINUTES—OR HOURS—LATER, I checked in with the gals. Kali had found both her checkpoints, but it was the same story: no scavenger bits to be had. Amber reported no better luck. They’d run into M’Kimbi and Ira. Both of them had come up empty, as well. We were well and truly skegged.
“Let’s head back to the clearing. Maybe when Rod shows up with everything, Sergeant Schotz will give us a do-over.” Static hissed and sparked. I could hear the disappointment in Amber’s voice even over the bad connection.
“Not likely,” I said. “He’ll probably fail us all and give Rod the highest commendation.”
“I’ll destroy them all!” Kali shouted. A blast of scorching wind nearly fried my ear.
“No, you won’t.”
“I know, but I feel better when I say it.”
I understood. I wanted to wring Rod’s weasel-like neck, so the god of death and destruction must want to rip his head off. I compared my position on the phone’s map display with the position Amber had given me and began to jog back toward the clearing where we’d met up before. “Maybe we can lay in wait for Rod and . . . Oof!”
I fell face-first onto the path and something smashed into my shin, but I kept my death grip on the phone. “Ow! Ow!”
“What?” said Amber.
“What?” said Kali.
“What?” Ira’s voice. He must have stumbled onto our channel.
“Nothing. Ow! Nothing. I just tripped.” Great. Not only was I going to fail the class, but I was going to do so with a massive bruise on my leg. I rolled into a sitting position, brushing dirt and twigs and not a few bugs off my jeans.
“You okay?” Amber asked.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“What did you trip over?” Kali asked.
“What the skeg does that . . . ? Oh, God!” Like Kali had a short time ago, I fell back into old habits, using a Coil swear word. Stinky blue smoke colored the air before me. “God,” I murmured a second time.
“What?” said Amber.
“You talking to me, girlfriend?” said Kali.
“I’m homesick,” said Ira.
“We might as well go check in.” I deliberately didn’t answer their questions as I picked up the object I’d tripped over and used my shirtsleeve to wipe some of the grime off its crystal surface. “Gather everyone, including Rod, and meet me at the clearing just inside the woods.”
“Even Rod?”
“Yeah. Especially Rod. Horace must have his hellphone number. It was on the class list.”
We all met up in the clearing, straggling in one disappointed classmate at a time. We shared our experiences in the forest and before long, I’d pieced together a picture of how Rod had accomplished the impossible.
Rod must have been watching from nearby because he waited until we’d all assembled to make a grand entrance, his backpack bulging with dead-animal artifacts.
“Hi, losers.” He took gloating to a whole new level. “Come to congratulate me on my triumphant triumph?”
Kali rose. And rose and rose. Seven feet looked good on her. It spaced her three pairs of arms nicely along her torso. Good thing she favored stretch fabrics. “You cheated, Rod.”
“Hey, who let the gods out? Woof! Woof!” he taunted. When she refused to rise to the bait, he pasted a look of mock innocence on his face and said, “Cheated? I did? How did I do that?”
“You got someone else to bring you all the tokens,” I said. “It’s the only way you could have managed it.”
“Not someone, something. Flying monkey demons, if you must know. Nobody said you couldn’t hire outside help. But we were told, very specifically, that we couldn’t partner with each other.” He glanced meaningfully from Kali to Amber to me. “I saw you guys in this clearing about half an hour ago, making plans.”
Something about that statement irked me, but I had bigger catfish whiskers to fry. “So you’ve got all of the tokens. What are you going to do with them? Will you get to choose who fails the course?”
“Are you kidding? You’re all flunking out. Finders, Reapers. Losers, weepers. The key word there being looooo-zers! Ha! I’m going down in history as the only being in our whole class to graduate.” He did an embarrassing little dance. I think it had something to do with football, but I couldn’t be sure. I only ever played hockey, and hockey players don’t dance. Wrong kind of skates.
“Even me, Rod?” Horace, who had been Rod’s only friend through the program, stepped forward.
/> “Yeah, buddy. Sorry. You coulda done the same thing. But you didn’t. So just me. I’m the only one who’s gonna make the final draft pick this round.”
“But, Rod,” I crooned, “I really need to graduate. I could make it worth your while.” I sidled up to him, doing my best to make promises with my eyes and my body. I was willing to do almost anything to save my aunt. Like make promises I had no intention of keeping.
“Well, baby. This is unexpected, but I think not. I’m not interested in a coma victim who’s all pasty and saggy back on the Coil. Now, if your goddess buddy wants to get handsy with me, maybe we could work something out.”
I clamped my teeth together before I said anything I’d regret, but stood my ground. He danced about some more. “The only thing that would make this moment better is if I could get my hands on that crystal skull.”
Bingo. Now I had him. “You want the skull, do you? Then how ’bout we talk trade?”
I yanked the crystal skull from my backpack, drawing oohs and ahs from my colleagues.
“I’ll trade you this crystal skull for the remaining five of each token, the ones you don’t need. That way you can still be king of the class and all but one of us can graduate. Think about it. You’re still number one all the way. First round draft pick. Star player. Um . . .” I was running out of sports terminology. I knew from my PR days that you needed to relate to people in their own language. “You’ll be the quarterback from Hell!” I shouted. “MVP of the team! But you need a team to be star of, right? Right?”
His eyes gleamed and his lips pulled back in something that would have been a smile if it weren’t so nasty. He wasn’t stupid by any means and I knew he was considering my offer.
“C’mon, Rod.” Kali stepped forward. She’d sized herself down to a petite five foot two, twirling her hair around one finger and sucking on another, making herself look all sexy and corruptible. “Wouldn’t you rather have me as a friend than an enemy?”
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