by Kailin Gow
Nobody clapped now that more than half the places were gone. Instead, a low sound of disappointment came with each new announcement, as the remaining students realized that their own chances of being one of the ones chosen had shortened once more. Wirt wanted one of those places now; wanted it almost more than anything. The trouble was, he suspected that merely wanting it wasn’t enough. Not here.
More names, and the number of places left shortened. When there were five, Wirt still dared to hope. When there were four, he tried thinking that maybe he, Spencer, Alana and Roland would all go through in a rush, rewarded for what they had done together. When it got down to three places remaining, Wirt decided that he could live without Roland. After all, it wasn’t as if he even liked the other boy that much.
Then the headmaster called out another name that wasn’t one of theirs, and Wirt realized that one of his friends would be going home. Either that, or he would, only he didn’t have a home to go to. The headmaster had slowed things to a crawl by now, looking between them and obviously savoring the moment. Finally though, he spoke again.
“Alana, step forward.”
Wirt heard Alana’s sigh of relief right across the room, and watched as the girl hurried forward. Wirt couldn’t help being a little happy that she had gotten in, even though it meant that there was now only one place left that he could take. Roland didn’t seem to share the feeling, glaring at Alana’s back as she approached the headmaster.
Ender Paine nodded to her as he handed over a scarf. “Alana here was well in front at the start of the term. She has studied well, and has obvious talent in areas including glamour.” That was, Wirt suspected as close to a compliment on her work in the headmaster’s class as Alana was going to get. “She did, however, allow herself to get injured in the last task, and more than that, she failed. It is only because of her high marks in our first quest, that of finding the princess, that she has earned her place in the elite.”
Alana didn’t seem to care that she had only just scraped through. The point was that she was through. She took her place at the back, hugging Priscilla quickly as she went past. Wirt kept his eyes on the headmaster, who stood there in silence for long seconds. Finally he barked out a name.
It wasn’t Wirt’s.
Wirt felt his world contract, crushing him utterly. He was going to be thrown out? He had failed?
Then Ender Paine snapped another name. Two boys of the remaining six looked up in confusion.
“Both of you get out. You have no place in this school.”
In the seconds it took for them to leave, Wirt hardly dared to breathe. There were just four of them remaining now. Wirt, Spencer, Roland, and a slightly built boy who wore over-large glasses.
“You remaining four are on the edge of selection,” Ender Paine said. “Oh, I imagine I could find some small difference if I tried, but personally, I don’t care which of you gets the final spot. In any case, the instruction from the governors is clear. The final place will be decided by the quantum games. Assuming you wish to compete?”
Ender Paine looked straight at Roland. Roland barely hesitated before nodding. He looked at Spencer, who glanced up at the stage to where Alana was standing, then across at Roland, and then nodded as well.
The boy in the glasses shook his head and practically ran for the door.
Which left Ender Paine staring at Wirt. “What about you, boy? Will you play?”
Would he? Instinct told Wirt not to do it. He shouldn’t take part in some potentially lethal set of games just to earn a spot in the elite class. He certainly shouldn’t do it when that meant competing against his closest friend. When it potentially meant killing him. And all for what? For a better chance at a good job?
No, not just that. For a place to belong, too. For the right to stay just a little longer in the closest thing to a home Wirt had possessed in years. For a chance to finally understand the talents swirling within him too, and maybe, just maybe, for a chance to get closer to Alana.
“Well?” Ender Paine demanded. “I don’t have all day, boy.”
Wirt looked up at the headmaster, met his gaze coolly, and nodded, just once.
*****************
Wirt and his friends’ adventures continue in:
THE QUANTUM GAMES
Alchemists Academy Book 3
Fall 2011
EXCERPT FROM
RISE OF THE FIRE TAMER
Wordwick Games #1
by
kailin gow
Prologue
The deadline slipped past, as deadlines tend to. Around the world, hungry eyes pinned themselves to computer screens, waiting for news. When it came, it came in the form of a simple video file, which when opened showed the familiar head and shoulders of Henry Word, the owner of Wordwick Inc. As heads went, it was not too bad. Although he had hit forty, there weren’t any signs of gray in the sandy-blond hair, and the cleft chin was still as defined as ever. In the second or two before he started speaking, there was a twinkle in the green eyes that said that Henry Word was enjoying the suspense.
“Well,” he began, “you’re probably all waiting with baited breath for me to announce the winners of the Wordwick Games Contest, designed to find our ultimate fans. After all, you probably want to know who’s getting the prize of spending a week in the castle you all know and love from the game.” A mischievous smile flickered across his features for a moment. “Well, simply telling you would hardly be much fun, would it? Instead, I think I’ll keep you all in suspense just a little while longer, and our winners…” Henry Word raised a remarkably old-fashioned pocket watch to eye level and spun it like a carnival hypnotist. “Well, our winners should be finding out very soon indeed.”
Tumbleweed didn’t twist its way across the ranch, because that would have been too much like something happening. Stieg Sparks had learned many things in the past seventeen years, and one of them was that nothing much ever seemed to happen on days when you really wanted them to. Particularly not on his parents’ ranch. A few cattle, though not as many as there once had been, stood and stared at Sparks as he sat on the front porch, and he stared back, more for something to do than from any particular interest in them.
The cows were probably getting the better end of the deal, since underneath his sandy-blond hair Sparks had the casual good looks that came with being his school football team’s star quarterback, while cows were just cows.
Of course, Sparks knew could probably find something to do, if he set his mind to it. He could do most things once he set his mind to them. He could, for example, go and take a look at the broken crop sprayer that his father had sworn would never work again, before they ended up paying out more money the ranch didn’t have. He would probably find a way to get it working. Or he could go inside and log on to the Game, though his mother had started to say he was spending too much time on it.
He could even hurry over to football practice. It was certainly what he was supposed to be doing. He might even make it in time not to earn any extra laps from the coach, if he really rushed. Somehow, the thought didn’t spur him to action. In fact, put like that, even staring at cows seemed better.
It occurred to him that they weren’t staring back at him anymore. Instead, they were busy watching a figure that had somehow managed to walk halfway up the drive to the house without Sparks noticing. Sparks couldn’t blame them. The figure wore what could only be described as a robe, the cowl up and obscuring their face. Sparks was so surprised by the arrival that he didn’t say anything until the figure was just a couple of feet away.
“Hi. Are you lost?”
In answer, the hooded figure held out a hand. It took Sparks a moment to notice that there was an envelope in it. Sparks took it without thinking. It was an odd kind of envelope, jet-black and sealed in a very old-fashioned way, with a blob of red wax that had a seal pressed into it. The seal formed a capital W. A very familiar capital W, since Sparks had seen it online practically every day for months now.
/> He ripped it open and read the contents in one go, then looked up to ask the hooded figure about it. Sparks found himself staring at empty space. Well, not exactly empty. There were still the cows. There were always cows. There just seemed to be a complete lack of any gray robed figures to go with them.
This apartment was a lot smaller than any ranch, and there certainly was not room for any cows, except possibly in the refrigerator. There was hardly space for Rio, his little brother and his grandmother. Sometimes, especially when his grandmother started saying things like “Riordan Roberts! What trouble have you got yourself into this time?” he thought that there might not even be enough room for all three of them.
Or at least not for him. The dark hair and olive skin he’d inherited from his mother were fine with his grandmother, but the piercing blue eyes he’d got from his father weren’t so ok. Not after what happened. It didn’t strike Rio as very fair that she’d bring it up whenever there was trouble, especially when it was never Rio’s fault. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It certainly was not down to him that practically everything in East LA seemed to be trouble in Nana’s opinion. As far as Rio could see, taking a few things for Nana and Tomas shouldn’t really count. He was only looking out for them.
Currently, he was sitting in front of about the only luxury the apartment had, a tiny computer that Nana had insisted the two of them should have for their schoolwork. For once, Rio was using it for just that, and not the Game. He looked up at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, expecting to see Tomas. It was not.
“Hey, who are you?”
The figure in gray didn’t say anything, and Rio lunged forward to try and wrench the hood of the robe back. If someone was going to break in, he wanted to see their face. He got a brief glimpse of a face almost completely hidden by wraparound sunglasses, before the robe pulled out of his hands, leaving Rio trying to keep his balance and failing. He looked up from the carpet, and the figure was gone. All that was left was a black envelope left precisely on the floor in front of him like the figure had known where he would fall.
It occurred to Rio that, in Grams’ book, this would definitely count as trouble.
Somewhere in the blare of music that was her bedroom, Kat was taking a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was already right, or at least it was a chin length bob of dark hair with streaks of blue and red that her parents tried very carefully not to disapprove of, but the rest of it hadn’t been easy. There had been the red and black plaid to pick out to go with her combat boots, along with exactly the right amount of black makeup. It had taken ages to get right. The makeup aged her a year older than her sixteen years, but didn’t help fill out her slim figure. She had even cut short her session on the Game to work on it more.
Let’s see Them think I’m ordinary now, Kat thought. She always thought of her parents as Them, especially when they insisted on calling her Katherine instead of Kat, which they did a lot. They seemed to have evolved a policy of ignoring the more extreme things Kat did, in the hopes that eventually she would fit in, or that she would become the Katherine Kipling they wanted her to be. Well fat chance.
Kat surveyed the results of her efforts in her bedroom mirror. Despite her Dark Girl outfit, she still looked like a pixie or what people think pixies should look like, the child-like Tinker Bell version. An independent observer might have suspected that black eye shadow, and black nail polish, and black lipstick was probably overdoing things a bit, or was at least a look better suited to someone tall and brooding, not petite and, frankly, cute. Kat loved it.
She was so busy admiring it that she almost didn’t notice the reflection of the gray cloaked figure- the one who laid an envelope on the edge of the dressing table but vanished the moment she looked round. It could almost have been a dream, except that the envelope was there, sitting rather smugly, Kat thought, as though it knew exactly how worrying its sudden appearance was.
Still, Kat recovered enough to think after a moment, at least the black went with her nail polish.
Up in Jackson Zusak’s home in Alaska, things were a little brighter, mostly because his parents insisted on filling the place with the color that the cold tended to leach away outside. Some days, he could hardly get to his computer for the brightly colored throws and coverings that his mom kept leaving around the place.
He was not at his computer now, for once. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair busy reading a book on the history of the Vikings. That had amused his mom and dad when they had seen it before heading off to the store to buy groceries.
“You could be a Viking yourself,” Jack’s mom had said. “You’ve got the red hair.”
They had all laughed at that, because even Jack knew that the image of his small, scrawny figure setting sail across vast oceans just didn’t work. Besides, they didn’t have glasses back then, and a Viking who wandered into things, as Jack tended to do when he lost his, probably wouldn’t do very well.
“You’re only fifteen,” his mom had said, hugging him. “You’ve still got time to grow to be Viking-sized.”
Jack hadn’t pointed out that, because people tended to be shorter in the past, he was probably already Viking-sized, for much the same reason that he didn’t tell his dad the answers to the crossword before he’d officially given up on it. Thinking of which…
Jack found the newspaper in its usual crumpled up heap, smoothed it out a little, and finished off the crossword in a couple of minutes before returning to his book. He’d forgotten to mark his place, and it had closed on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in. He went to open it again, and almost dropped it when the black envelope fell out. Out of the window, Jack got a brief glimpse of a gray robed figure, hurrying away too quickly to catch.
Gemma James caught the sound of the doorbell just as she was finishing an assignment for her private school. She was pretty sure she’d aced it. She thought about ignoring the disturbance to go through it once more, but then remembered that there was not anyone else home in her family’s Manhattan house. It might be a delivery, and since her dad was a lawyer, there was every chance that it might be something important that she would need to sign for, assuming that they’d take a sixteen-year-old’s signature.
Sighing, Gem stood up and made her way through the place’s expensive furnishings, pausing automatically to check her appearance in the hall mirror. It was one of those habits she had picked up from cheerleading, because you never knew when the universe might have found ways to make you look a mess. As usual, she looked perfect, not a hair of her long blonde hair out of place as it framed a face with porcelain skin and deep green eyes. She smoothed out her skirt, then checked the door’s spy hole, because appearance was not the only time you couldn’t be too careful.
There was not anyone there. Or rather, there was not anyone standing at the door. There was someone walking away, dressed in the kind of robe that didn’t make sense unless Franciscan monks had started making deliveries, but he was gone in a second or two. Gem waited a moment longer before opening the door. She looked around, and found no one there, so she looked down. When she saw the envelope, she smiled very slowly, because some moments deserved to be drawn out, then she picked it up, ripped it open and read it so quickly that it probably set some kind of record.
Other Middle Grade and Up Series from the Author of The Alchemists Academy
Harold the Kung Fu Kid
Harold may be the neediest kid in high school, but he's just like every boy in school when it came to Francesca, the hottest girl in school. There's something about her that draws boys to her like bees to honey. When she suddenly expresses an interest in him, life takes on a bizarre turn. Something strange yet amazing is taking hold of his life, and he must find out what before everything and everyone he cares for is destroyed.
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