by P. J. Hoover
It’s actually kind of funny how different Owen and I are. I had begged my parents to let me take programming courses at FIT over the summer because the ones at the high school weren’t enough.
“Anyway, I don’t think either of us are becoming astronauts,” Owen says.
Given the state of the world and how much repair needs to be done, he’s probably right.
The stars and galaxies pass by, but as we get deeper, a stream of data appears and begins to take shape. I’ve seen it before.
“You recognize that?” I ask, pointing at it. It swirls from a source, spiraling out like a work of art. I tilt my head and music fills my ears, like a symphony composed to go along with it.
Owen looks to where I point then nods. “The Creators.”
“Yep. They’re destroying the world to create this stuff,” I say.
“They’re not destroying the world,” Owen says.
“Have you seen the world?” I ask.
“I don’t need to.”
Which means he hasn’t. I try to explain what I saw when Taylor and I had gone back to Florida, from the destruction to the dead crawling from the earth.
“You’re being overly dramatic,” he says.
Overly dramatic? My blood almost boils inside me. Who is Owen to tell me I’m being overly dramatic?
I stop moving and spin to face him. “You haven’t seen it, Owen. I have. And let me tell you. It sucks. Everything is gone. Everything we knew growing up. The beach. The ocean. It’s been turned into ruin. And I can’t believe you would do that.”
“I would do what?”
“Destroy the world. I mean, I know you’re kind of an asshole, but I can’t honestly believe that you think that’s the right thing to do.”
Owen looks at me like I’m missing an important part of my brain. “What do you mean? I’m not trying to destroy the world.”
Does he really believe himself?
“Yes, you are. You told me you are.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not going to destroy the world.”
I cross my arms. “You said you were going to. If you got the key.”
“No,” Owen says. “What I said was that the world needed to change. Needed to be different. And to make any changes, some things have to go.”
“That’s destroying the world.”
“That’s reshaping the world,” Owen says. “Can you honestly say that everything is perfect and great in the world? Would you seriously not want to change anything?”
“No. I would put it back just how it was,” I say. “And I would let it take care of itself. It’s not my job to decide how things should be.”
Owen laughs. “Not your job? Then whose job is it? The old gods? Chaos? Don’t you see? They’re the ones who have been messing up everything to this point? You think humans just made all these messes themselves? Even after all this? No. It’s the old gods. They played all sorts of games among themselves, and if the world or humans happened to get in the way, oh well, so be it? That’s why we’re here. The old gods are dead.”
“Not all of them,” I say.
“Almost all of them,” Owen says. “And once the final one is gone, it will be up to us to make the world a better place to live. I’m not going to just settle for how things were. I’m making it better.”
“You’re going to ruin things,” I say, trying to ignore what he’s saying. But the thing is that Owen is right, at least about the old gods. If I’ve learned anything so far it’s that the gods love playing games. The world had plenty of problems, and I am willing to bet that the gods were involved in many of those problems. But I don’t want to admit to Owen that I might agree with anything that he says.
“Look, Edie,” Owen says. “When we get to the end, no matter how this works out, all I’m saying it that it’s your responsibility to step back and at least consider all the options. That’s part of having power. You can’t just believe everything that other people say. You have to listen to everything and make decisions on your own.”
I push away his words. Or I file them away in the recesses of my mind. “We need to keep going.” And I set off, back in the direction of the wormhole. I don’t look at what the Creators are making, because all it signifies to me is the world that is being destroyed.
We’re getting closer to the wormhole. We pass through a huge open area but then we stop, and here I realize what our true enemy is in this zone. The easy part is behind us. We’re now at the edge of a field of asteroids. They move erratically, bouncing into each other, shattering. Somehow we need to cross them.
XXXIII
The asteroids move fast, bouncing into each other, sending shards of rock everywhere. A small rock hits me on the shoulder, cutting into my skin. Blood wells to the surface. But instead of making me want to run away, it only reaffirms to me that I have to get past this. If it was easy, everyone would be able to do it.
Everyone . . .
How many of us are left? From what I’ve seen, there are still plenty of us remaining in this simulation.
The thought hangs there in my mind. This whole time I have been sure that I will get the key, get to the end. But in every zone thus far, we’ve each collected the piece of the key, because the only way to leave a zone is to collect the key at the end of it. In my mind, I’d always figured this meant that each level would eliminate more and more until at the final level, only one was left. It was a truth I hadn’t wanted to face. But what if it isn’t the truth at all?
“You’ve collected the pieces of the key so far, haven’t you?” I ask.
“Of course,” Owen says.
He doesn’t ask if I have. He knows the answer. Thus far, I have. So has Taylor, Hudson, Cole. Most likely Abigail.
I’m about to ask him about Abigail when a ball of fire flies through the open space and hits one of the asteroids, careening it off course. It lurches forward and comes directly for us.
“Come on,” I say, and I grab Owen’s arm and drag him into the field of asteroids.
We balance and land on one of the larger asteroids. Then I realize I’m still holding his arm. Immediately I let go.
I’m sure Owen will make some comment about me grabbing hold of his arm, but instead he looks in the direction the fire ball came from.
“What was that?”
Meaning he doesn’t know about the person who’s been hunting us this entire time. Unless he’s trying to trick me.
“Don’t act like you don’t know.”
“I don’t,” Owen says, but then a different asteroid hits into ours, sending it flying. We’re still pressed against it, but it spins, and if we stay where we are, we’re going to be smashed into one of the giant rocks.
I push off the asteroid and aim for a different one deeper into the field, but I overestimate how much force I need and slam into it. My hands scrape along the rock as I try to get hold. When I finally do, I don’t have time to relax. Another asteroid is coming.
From one to the next, Owen and I cross the asteroid field. We’re almost out when a huge rock hits me in the back, knocking the wind out of me. My face slams forward onto the asteroid I’m pressed against. Stars spin in my head.
“Are you okay?” Owen asks. He pulls my head back and turns it to face him. “Shit, that’s a lot of blood.”
There is actual concern in his face. True concern. And I hate it. I don’t know if it’s real or if he is faking it to trick me into believing him more. I push away the pain. There is plenty of time for pain and recovery later. If I let up now, I will die, and Owen will be the one to get through. Alone.
“I’m fine,” I say, and I launch off the rock, heading for the edge of the asteroid field.
We battle through the field of asteroids. Owen nearly gets crushed by three of them closing in together. One of the fireballs comes within four feet of me. I lose sig
ht of Owen twice as the giant space rocks move around, blocking our path, keeping us from the end. There are more and more the deeper into the field we go. Just when I’m sure we can’t avoid them anymore, we pass through an invisible barrier of space and leave the asteroids behind.
Owen is there, about twenty yards away, and we meet in the middle. And ahead of us is the glowing blue mouth of the wormhole.
“Edie, your head,” he says.
I put my hand to my forehead. It comes back covered in blood. I can worry about it later, once we’re through.
“It’s fine.”
“You sure?”
I glare at him. “Can you stop that?”
Confusions clouds his face. “Stop what?”
“Stop acting like you care.”
His face shifts the smallest amount and fills with . . . hurt?
“Why is it so hard to believe I care?” he asks. “Why do you hate me so much?”
Blood rushes through me. This. I knew it was coming, even though I never wanted it to.
I glare at him trying to send my anger directly into him. “You tried to force yourself on me. Don’t you remember that?”
He shakes his head. “I . . . I know, Edie. And I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”
I know exactly why he did it. He’s a sociopathic liar. He can’t possibly believe himself.
I harden my gaze. “And then in the labyrinth. You tried to kill me. And in Simulation Avine. You and Abigail. With her lightning.”
“That was her,” Owen says. “Not me.”
“You were with her,” I say. “And then you actually have the nerve to act nice? To act like you didn’t try to force yourself on me? To act like you don’t want to kill me?”
The muscles in his face shift around in an internal struggle. “Edie . . . sometimes it’s like someone else is in my brain, telling me how to act. It’s like I’m only standing back and watching. Maybe I did those things.”
“You did,” I say.
He nods. “Yeah. Okay. But I didn’t want to. And what I really want is to act like they never happened.”
I press my lips together and try to calm myself because rage is seriously threatening to boil outside of me. “You can’t act like they never happened,” I say.
A few moments pass before he says anything. He tries to process my words. Tries to deny them. But I will not back down from them. I am never going to ignore what’s happened.
“Then what can I do?” Owen asks. His voice is soft. Not pleading, but filled with a quiet resignation.
I want to tell him there is nothing he can ever do. That his past defines him. But I’ve done things that I’ve regretted before also. Not to the same degree, but still, there are choices I would change, given the chance.
“You can try to do better,” I finally say.
Deep down, I know Owen will never do better. It’s not who he is. He may think he wants to change, but I don’t think he really does.
“I can do better,” he says, balling up his hands into fists. “I will do better.”
I don’t believe him. But a small part of me wishes his words were true.
I look away from Owen, back to the wormhole.
“You ready?” I say, ready to leave this other discussion behind us in the field of asteroids, wishing it could get crushed to nothing.
He blows out a long breath. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
And we move forward into the blinking mouth of the wormhole.
XXXIV
The blue sucks us in. Once inside, there is no thought of turning back. The sides fly by in a stream of endless moving shapes and colors. Other zones. Other simulations. There are hints of all of them. A giant wooden horse. Metal spikes filled with games that try to draw me back. A river of lava. It’s all there. And then it’s gone and we’re through the wormhole and on the other side.
Space is gone. We’re back on a ground of black glass, one of the tracks of the simulation. Off to the sides are the other color choices we could have taken. Red. Green. Yellow. They angle in together and come to a point, and where they meet, a giant column rises from the ground.
“The key,” I say, and we both take off running. I don’t see any chance that Owen won’t get the key also. And maybe that is how it was always meant to be.
When we reach the column, Owen stops and grins at me. He’s forgotten our conversation already.
I haven’t and never will. But I smile back and act like we’re friends. Like we’re in this together. Because having him believe that may be more valuable than him knowing that I will never trust him.
We step up to the column and the ground begins to rise. The four colors of the track fill the sky in solid stripes like a reflection of what is below. But when the platform we stand on stops moving and we come to the top of the column, unlike before, there are no glowing symbols to collect. No piece of the key.
“Edie?” Owen says, slowing walking around the perimeter of the column. “Where’s the key?”
I do the same, trying to find it. But aside from the carvings on the column, there is nothing. No symbols. Nothing to collect.
Nothing to collect.
“Wait,” I say. “That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
I scramble through my inventory and transfer the letter Omicron to the forefront of my heads-up display. Instantly a menu item appears.
Transfer item?
Yes
No
“Omicron,” I say. “It’s what I picked.”
I select Yes on the heads-up display, and immediately a string of silver glowing symbols appears on the column. It’s the fifth piece of the key. I transfer them quickly to my inventory, and the second I do, they vanish from the side of the column.
“Wait, I didn’t get them,” Owen says.
I shake my head. “Your Greek letter. Grab it from your inventory and transfer it to the column.”
Owen does what I say, and a different set of symbols appears there on the column. I try to mentally capture them, but they’re gone before I can.
“I got them,” he says.
Logic pushes at my mind. If there were various Greek letters to use to grab the pieces of the key, and if Owen and I chose different letters, then there is a very likely chance that the string of symbols we collected here are different.
And both necessary.
“Share your symbols with me,” I say.
Owen laughs, and immediately whatever invisible wall that was weakened goes back up between us. “No way.”
“But they’re different,” I say. “And we need them both.”
Owen crosses his arms. “Maybe. But I’m not sharing with you. Why don’t you share your symbols with me?”
The thought is laughable. And also makes perfect sense. I don’t trust Owen and he doesn’t trust me, and yet we both have something the other one needs. Maybe each of the Greek letter options parses out a different part of the key. Maybe we need all of them.
A black path extends out from the column, and at the end of it, I spot the moving wall of silver.
“I’m getting out of here,” I say, and I start forward, down the path.
“Come on, Edie,” Owen say, catching up to me. “You have to let me see your symbols.”
I step directly in front of the silver barrier. “I don’t.”
“But the key isn’t complete,” Owen says.
I know this. And I also know that it will be a problem . . . for both of us. But I’ll figure that out when the time comes. I got the piece of the key I came into Zone Epsilon for. It’s all I was able to get. And maybe it’s enough.
“See you on the other side,” I say to Owen. Then I press my hand to the silver barrier and it pulls me in.
DIGAMMA
XXXV
&n
bsp; The silver barrier encompasses me and spits me out. There is no talking to Chaos between zones. No selection of the zone. No choices. There is only the transition.
This is Zone Digamma. The last zone. The hidden location of Main Control Room Alpha and no doubt of Chaos himself. Before I reach the control room, I’ll have to face him. And if the prophecy is correct, I’ll have to kill him. I’ve killed a god before. I have to hope that I’ll be able to do it again.
I stand in a world of darkness. Far off in the distance, orange glows in the sky, flickering like fire hidden deep inside the earth. Hills and rough terrain make up the ground, and I stumble as I try to steady myself on uneven footing. From the sky hang black vines. They curl down and tickle my bare shoulders. They tangle in my hair.
I’ve seen this place before. In Raven’s vision, I’ve been here. Thomas is here. I am more sure of this than I have ever been of anything in my life. I don’t know why he’s here, but after the vision, I’m certain he is. I have to find him, because if I don’t . . .
No, I can’t entertain any negative thoughts. But almost like the world knows what I’m thinking, a wave of terror rolls over me. Something is here, in this zone with me. Something that is determined to kill me.
I don’t move. The wave passes through me and is gone. Only then do I survey my surroundings. The flickering orange sky illuminates shapes. Mixed in with the vines are black columns that stretch up as far as I can see. There must be a ceiling or some upward barrier, but with the vines climbing down, I can’t see it.
I try not to make a sound as I step forward, and I call up my heads-up display to see if any options appear. There is only one.
