by Vic Connor
“Yeah,” Niko said. “I think this is why Hunk disappeared. I think…the experiments went too far. At best they’ll hurt him, and…at worst…”
Cal’s nostrils flared. Her deadpan expression was slowly replaced with another look: one of steely determination. “Come on. I remember now, it’s this way. Let’s go get him.”
Cal led the way then, still unsteady but more determined than before. They turned a corner, and there it was—a grey door, printed with big, block letters that read: “STAIRS.” Cal pushed the door open, and they emerged onto a concrete stairwell.
Cal collapsed on the stairs with a wet flop of her suit. “Give me a second,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” After a minute or two, which Niko spent bouncing on his toes, she stood. “Up or down?”
“Uh…” Niko looked around.
“We’re on floor 6.” Cal pointed to the number next to the door.
“Hunk was on my floor. Four.”
Cal nodded. They descended the concrete stairs, slowly, because Cal had to grasp the railing. Obviously, muscle atrophy was just another side effect of the game. Like the memory loss, which the Territoria team didn’t seem intent on fixing.
“What about your Mythic?” Cal asked after one flight down. “The weird, unfinished one.”
“I didn’t pick it,” Niko said. “When it got to that part in the onboarding, the game, it…glitched, kind of. I’ve been seeing glitches all over the game. I think me waking up here when I die is a glitch too.”
“What kind of glitches?”
They reached the fourth floor. Cal cracked the door open, peering out, then emerged into the hall.
Niko followed. “Like… The room will be unfinished, or animals will walk on air, or part of the environment will be missing or fragmented, or the sound or smell would be all wrong.”
“What, like the weird happenings around the Stingers in the Phaeton League?”
“Yeah. Exactly like that. Remember the glitch during the Stingers vs. Enders game? I think it was meant for me to see. It referenced a Bible verse. No one in Territoria would remember the Bible except me.”
“So the glitches are from someone trying to communicate with you?”
“I think so. I just don’t know who it could be.”
Something large, soft, and warm barreled into Niko’s shoulder with a squawk of surprise. He stumbled back, and saw a mass of short twists and pink, cat’s-eye glasses.
“Who are—oh my…oh my God!” the woman exclaimed. “You’re kids from inside the Vats!”
“Run!” Niko yelled to Cal.
“Wait! Stop!” the woman cried, but they tore down the hall, Niko holding Cal up and nearly dragging her along. The woman was still calling them, but Niko couldn’t make out what she was saying over his and Cal’s labored breathing.
They burst past lettered doors and flashing screens. Niko spared one look back. A security guard ran up to the woman, and Niko remembered it was Catherine—one of the Territoria employees who had experimented on Hunk. The one who’d mentioned immortality. He swore, wishing he’d tackled her and demanded to know where Hunk was. The lights in the facility dimmed to red, and an alarm started to blare. Cal shouldered a door open, grabbed Niko by his suit, then pulled him inside. Throwing her entire weight into it, she slammed the door behind them.
“What was that? Greuber, report!” came a voice in the same room with them, but distant. “Was that you? I just heard the door.”
Niko dropped to the ground, pulling Cal with him. “Do not leave your post,” came an answering voice on the radio. It took a moment for Niko’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was another long room with a low ceiling, holding Vat after Vat in a row. Halfway down, he made out a figure in a two-way radio sort of pose, standing between one opened Vat and one closed one.
“Si-Sr,” Cal gasped, out of breath and looking like she might keel over. “That’s where you should be, right?”
Niko looked out across the screens. She was right. In the midst of her dull shock, Cal still managed to think much more clearly than him. The guard in here was stationed at his and Hunk’s Vats.
“There’s test subjects loose on the floor,” the voice radioed in. Outside, the alarm wailed in a steady, anxiety-inducing rhythm.
“How is that possible?” asked the guard as he started tapping on the computer console near the closed Vat. “Only this kid can wake up, and we’ve been stationed here the whole—” he stopped as the Vat lid opened.
“Whole what?” came the voice on the radio. “Franklin, report!”
“He’s gone! He’s not here, the Vat’s empty. How…?”
“You idiot. I knew I should have stayed at the post and had you go see what this fuss was about. He must have crawled out when your back was turned.”
“That’s imposs—”
“Scan the north side, I’m coming in south now.”
Booted feet pounded from outside in the hallway, getting closer. The guard up ahead sputtered and started walking away from them, searching the ground near the Vats with a flashlight. Niko and Cal ran down the line, keeping their distance and following the alphabet until they reached the SO names. They stopped at the pair of open Vats. Cal looked inside one. “It’s empty,” she whispered.
“This one too.” Niko rounded the Vat to look at the diagnostics screen. The name listed was SOHBI, HASSAN. “This one’s Hunk’s Vat,” he said. “They took him.”
Down at the end of the dark room, the door they’d come in from opened. “Franklin. You find them?” The voice echoed, both in the room and over the radio, an authoritative woman’s voice.
“Still scanning down here,” Franklin answered, now a dark-blue dot farther down the long room.
Cal and Niko were pincered between the two guards. They ducked behind Hunk’s Vat.
“Listen,” Niko whispered to Cal. “I’ll go to my Vat and log on. Then you climb in here. They already know I can log in and out. Hopefully…they’ll be too focused on me to notice you go inside.”
“No way,” Cal said, her tone flat.
“Cal, they’ll catch us—”
“I don’t care,” she hissed. “I’m not going back in there.”
“What? No, Cal, you don’t understand. This is—”
“—a prison. I know. I remember now. I was in the Queue.”
Niko swallowed. He suspected her memories had mostly returned, but to know for sure was different. What could the brilliant, indomitable Calloway Jones have done to land herself on death row? “Then…you know you can’t get out—”
“The only way someone’s ever going to put me back in one of these things is if they force me,” Cal said. “I can’t go back, Niko. Not now that I know. Every time I think about it, that they stole my memories from me, I…” Cal screwed her eyes shut, lips quivering. “I can’t go back to sleep, Niko. I won’t.”
“Who’s there?” The guard’s flashlight beam hit the lid of Hunk’s empty Vat. Niko and Cal ducked lower.
“You got something, Greuber?”
“Maybe,” the female guard—Greuber—said in her walkie. “You keep looking. Last thing we need is the brat sneaking away out the north door.” The flashlight flickered just above their heads, shadowed by the Vat, as the guard moved closer.
“You know how to log out,” Cal whispered, almost mouthing the words rather than speaking. “Get in your tank, and help these people from inside the game.” Cal gestured at the long row of Vats. “I’ll take my chances here, and help them from outside, if I can.”
“Hunk—”
“I’ll find him before I go, I promise. I’m the team captain, remember? Follow my calls. I need to know you have my back from the inside, because this? It’s bigger than both of us.”
Niko sucked in a gasp of air, then nodded. “Look for an experimentation room. It’s where I last saw him. That woman we ran into—with the glasses and frizzy hair? She might know where he is.”
“Got it. Now get into the tank.” Cal peered out aro
und the Vat toward the approaching guard, Grueber. “I’ll distract them.”
“Cal—”
But she was already up, stumbling down the line of Vats, her feet slapping on the tile.
“You there! Freeze!” Grueber started running. “Franklin, turn around, you flatfoot!” A door, midway between both guards, slammed open, light flooding into the long, squat room. Cal’s shadow danced on the floor between the line of tanks as she hobbled into the hallway. The guard ran past Niko, baton out, missing him hunched in the blue glow of his open tank. She rushed out the door after Cal, the second guard following at her heels.
Niko wanted to follow them, to protect his friend in her weakened state; to find Hunk, or Kiele, or Jeny.
But Cal was right. This was bigger than all of them. If he really was special, like Clark said, then he was going to use that to help as many people as he could. When he was sure the guards were gone, Niko padded over to his own tank, tapping the interface to open the lid. It clunked, drained, then hissed open, showing the pool of liquid and blue light. The alarm still blared outside. Niko spared one last look back at where Cal had run to, then hefted himself into the tank and lay down in the goo.
Steeling himself, he shoved the tube down his throat, then pulled the lid closed. He checked the printed name before the lights went out: SOMOV 000003.
Cal had been JONES 000004, but Jones was a pretty common last name. Both Kiele and Hunk had been the first with those last names in the number systems. Were there really two other Somovs before him, and if so, why were neither of them here beside his own Vat? Why was SOMOV 000002 in his childhood home?
The answer seemed obvious, except that he’d seen his parent’s bodies. If they were dead, then who was trying to use the glitches to talk to him?
Niko tried to swallow but choked on the tube as the blue lights went out.
“Oh, my sweaty socks,” Jeny’s squawking brogue was the first thing Niko heard when he started awake in his bed. “N-Niko?”
He gasped, shut his eyes, steadied his breath. He was back in his dorm in Ravenscroft. In Territoria. “I’m okay. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not bloody okay. Where’s Hunk? Where’s Cal? We were talking, then she went all stiff, then she vanished before my own eyes.” Jeny was pacing now. “Just the same as you did when you jumped out an ever-loving window. And now you just…just popped into existence!”
“Yeah,” Niko said. “That sounds about right.”
“Whae on the two spinning worlds is going on, Niko?” Jeny roared. “Where’s Hunk?”
Niko squared his shoulders. “I don’t know. But Cal’s on it.”
Jeny stopped in the middle of the room and stared at Niko, wide-eyed. “On it? Where is she? Where did she go?”
“Jeny, listen. I know all of this is a lot, but I need you to trust me. Help me. Because this thing that’s going on? It’s big,” Niko said. “Bigger than all of us.”
25
The Split Pine
“Where…are they?”
Not long after returning to the game, Niko was called to the Headmaster’s office to discuss the morning’s incident. Now, Niko was huddled in the overstuffed, lavender chair, staring down Clark’s furry avatar. The tall man sat behind his broad, ghost-pine desk, arms folded, tall and stocky, nothing like Clark’s actual starved, hunching human coat hanger of a figure. Niko found it interesting that so far, Clark was the only person he had met in both worlds who had changed his physical appearance to the point of being nigh unrecognizable.
Niko didn’t like looking at him, but a part of him was studying Okonjo, trying to see the man behind the altered face. It didn’t help that he was about 15 minutes into one of his hot headaches, which meant Clark—or rather, his scientists—were experimenting on him.
“I don’t know. They just disappeared,” Niko lied, warring between looking away and looking Okonjo directly in the eye as he said it. He settled for, “Hunk’s roommate before me disappeared like this too, I heard. Maybe something’s wrong with…” The game. “…the campus.” The heat in his head surged, and Niko winced, sweat dripping down his brow. Maybe that was the real reason Clark played the part of the Headmaster: He wanted to look him in the eye as they experimented on him, as if to say: I know you know what’s happening to you.
“Please, my boy, there’s no need for pretense…between us. Everyone on the campus saw you leap out the window. And yet, my guards reported no misadventure at that time. Not until later. Do you care to…explain?”
“Not really,” Niko said.
Another half-smile twitched across Clark’s altered features. “All right, then. We’ll…put resources into locating Ms. Jones and Mr. Sohbi,” Clark said. Did he mean in the game, or in real life? “In the meantime, your team…will be unable to qualify for Hunts until you find replacements.”
“You really think I still care about your game?”
“Everyone in Territoria cares about the game, my boy.” Clark chuckled.
Niko clenched his fists. “Okay, then about the game. Is Alonso getting expelled?”
“Despite some pushback, he is transferring to another…school, yes. The safety of our student body comes…first.” Clark said this in a light way, not sarcastic necessarily, but as if reciting it from a pamphlet.
Niko’s breath shook, thinking of Hunk on the experimentation table; of Cal, weak and dull-eyed as she slowly remembered the life they’d made her forget. Sure, Clark is concerned about their safety, he thought bitterly.
“If I killed you in the game,” Niko said in a flat voice, “Would you die?”
Clark laughed, full-throated, leaning back in his chair. “You…kill me in my own game? Ah-ha, you can try, my boy.”
Standing, fists clenched, burning with fury, Niko was ready to do exactly that. Then, heat exploded through his brain, radiating down to his torso. He fell back into the chair, sweating.
“Niko, my, boy, are you…all right?” Clark asked it in a smarmy tone that told Niko he knew exactly what had just happened.
“I’m fine,” Niko said through his teeth, shakily getting back up out of the chair, then stumbling to the office door. He clutched the handle, leaning on it for stability.
“Niko, my boy,” Clark called behind him. “Try…if you must. But as long as you’re in here, you belong to us.”
Niko sucked in a breath, pulled open the door, and forced himself not to run from the office.
The crisp winter air outside helped ease the hot pain in his head. It held him off until he could stumble into the woods, away from prying eyes, and find an icy stream out on his and Jeny’s running route. The survivalist in him barely held onto the threads of his burning, foggy mind, forcing him to bring the water up to his hair in one hand, instead of dunking his head full under. The shock could only give him trouble. His hands felt frozen, but his head was soothed. Even then, he still struggled not to pass out.
“You’re going tae have icicles fer brains, you keep that up.”
Niko looked up, water dripping down his face to his chin. Jeny stood on a boulder in her running gear and leather jacket, arms folded, legs crossed, head tilted. He smiled, then realized he ought not to smile, and scowled.
Jeny jumped down, swinging her arms as she walked over to him. She flopped beside him on the ground. “Yer head? Those…experiments.”
Niko nodded, making drops of water plop down onto the grassy bank.
Jeny hummed. “I still cannae believe it all. I want to believe you, Niko, I do, and I saw you and Cal disappear, but…how can all this...” Jeny gestured to the ghost pines, the frozen grass, the stream. “How can it be fake? I mean, why does that—” she gestured to his wet hair “—help if it’s all just…a dream?”
“I don’t know,” Niko said. “I don’t know how to prove it to you either. I could log out, try to get to your Vat, but…I don’t know how I ended up in Cal’s wing of the facility in the first place. In Kiele’s Vat, of all places. I don’t know how to control it. And�
�” I don’t want you to shut down like Cal did. “I don’t know if you’d even remember any of it when you came back in the game, either. I think that’s what Cal was afraid of.”
I don’t want you to come to the same conclusion she did, he thought, sulking. I don’t want to be here, and do this, alone.
Jeny kicked the heel of her boot against the frozen ground, not looking at Niko. “What’s it…like? The Earth you speak of.”
Niko ran his wet hand down over his face. “Bad.”
“Bad?”
“Yeah. There’s a bad water shortage. It’s crazy expensive now, and there’s a ton of restrictions on citizen use. Many people get sick, more than they used to, according to the newspapers. Some think the problem is that there’s not enough regulation on corporate use, or that some countries are hoarding water. Others say it was the result of overpopulation and genetically, like, modified farming that had spread over to the wildlife. It gets hotter every year, y’know? That’s what I see. The forests are disappearing.”
Niko paused, remembering his life before the game. “Jails restrict water use even more than normal citizens, so they jail people for any petty crimes. The…death penalty’s become real popular again. Fewer throats to wet, y’know? They call it the Queue.” Niko wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Jeny that’s why they were in the game.
“You weren’t kidding.” Jeny tugged her jacket closer around her shoulders. “When you first came to Ravenscroft, I mean. So then…why do you want to get oot, then? I mean…isn’t it better here?”
This surprised him. Jeny sounded like Clark. How could she even think that way? “What about Hunk?” Niko said, defensive. “I saw them hurting him, Jeny. He and Kiele might be dead, and Cal… She lost it when she found out. She refused to come back.” Don’t make me do this alone. “This project, whatever they’re doing, is…massive. It’s got to cost a boatload of money, and they wouldn’t fund something like that if they didn’t have a motive. Don’t you want to know what that is?”
