A Sinister Game (17 page)

Or was it because I want
ed
to lose?

Victoria pinched her eyes shut.
Oh hell,
she thought
.
The man
wants me to help him overthrow Game Control.
Losing and joining him in that venture would have
disastrous consequences.
And all I can think about
is the fact tha
t he wants to bed me
.

At the unbidden thought that snaked so insipidly through her brain, Victoria paled. Max noticed the change in her immediately. His furrowed brow and narrowed gaze intimated as much.

“This isn’t good, Victoria
.
” He shook his head.
“I think you and I need to have a serious talk.” He rose then and moved back to his pack, where he pulled
out two foil wrapped protein
bars in
the thick chocolate coating
that Victoria loved so much.

He tucked one smoothly into the interior pocket of his black leather jacket
.
The other bar, he held up in front of him by its wrapper. “Bar for your thoughts
?
”

Victoria stared at the food.
She realized with some horror that she actually
hadn’t planned on where she was going to get food for the next three days. In fact, she hadn’t really done any logical planning at all.
She had simply run, l
ike an utter idiot. It wasn’t like her at all.

She’d
thought of Black and his power and his eyes and his voice and the fact that he was coming hard for her and she’d taken off like a terrified animal. Victor Black had
effectively
turned her into a moron.

“Fine,” she
said. “I’ll fill you in
. I owe you t
hat much. B
ut we have to talk and walk. We can’t stay in one place for long.”
She moved forward with incredible speed, ripped the bar from his grip, and tore into it before he could blink.

He watched her for a moment, lowered his hand to his waist, and then asked,
“Where are we going?”

“I have no idea,” s
he
said around the bite she’d just taken.
“What is there around here?”

“You know as much
as I do, Victoria. Gamers aren’t exactly edu
cated on the sectors outside
the Field, are they?” He was watching her intently
as she ate
, something unspoken flitting behind the
piercing blue of his
eyes.

“No,” she replied,
simply. That was definitely true. Game Control wanted Gamers to
forget
e
verything
. They claimed it made it easier for Gamers to accept their roles within the wall, and to cope with the fact that their loved ones in the outside sectors would die long before they did.

“It doesn’t matter,” she finally said
, folding up the second half of the bar and slipping it into her pocket for later. Her stomach was
already
rebelling a bit from its previous ordeal
. “We’ll just walk.”

She
turned and waved her hand at the
campfire. It instantly went out, smoke and all.
Despite everything, it was liberating to use her powers as she was then, moving with inhuman speed, waving fire in and out of existence. It felt good.
“Where there’s a transporter outlet, there have to be people to ride in it, right?
There was an outlet near here and it must not have always been under water. So we’ll walk until we find the people who once used it.
”

Max
seemed to consider that
.
Then h
e sighed, retrieved his sword from where it rested against the boulder
, and
slid the w
eapon into its scabbard. H
e then strapped
that
to his back, lacing the leather over his shoulders and around his waist.

“You have a lot of explaining to do,” he told her as he finished tightening the last straps and then fasten
ing
the dagger sheath to the inside of his forearm. “And I trust you’re going to do it.”

With th
at, he grabbed her by the wrist
and began to walk her out of the clearing.

Victoria was a little startled at the sudden contact. His hand was cold, reminding her of Victor’s.
She couldn’t remember him being cold before
.
The other thing that surprised her was that
his grip slid from her wrist to her hand, where his fingers then laced themselves with hers. His hold was firm and unyielding.

And very, very personal.

Vic
toria considered pulling away. But a
s if
he could read her thoughts, Max’s
grip tightened. Some kind of dark thrill raced up Victoria’s spine
,
and warmth coiled once more in her belly.

He turned to peer down at her as they walked. “I’m listening,” he prompted, pulling her a touch closer with the hand that held hers.

“Okay,” she start
ed hesitantly. “The deal is this
…
.
”

You didn’t run a team on the playing Field for four hun
dred years and not learn a trick
or two. One of the many tricks
Victor Black had learned was how to extract codes from various computer consoles located throughout the Field.

Doing it while invisible was an added measure of security. Doing it while invisible and time had been temporarily stopped around him ensured that he was virtually undetectable.

So, it didn’t take long for him to retrieve the code he wanted to get into Arthur One’s private lab.

As soon as the sun had go
ne down
, Victor’
d flown into action, calling in his contacts throughout th
e Field. Within minutes, he
received word that Victoria Red was last seen with Game Control’s head tech, making her way to the TGB transporters.

The strange thing was – no one knew where she was now. It had been just over three hours since she’d stepped into a transporter cube with Arthur One, and no one had seen Victoria since.

Was she foolish enough to have remained with Arthur One in his lab? Would she seriously think that she was safe from Victor there?
B
lack doubted it. She wasn’t
stupid.

The mystery of her location remained.

Victor stepped into
another transporter cube and let the doors slide shut behind him. He entered the code to Arthur’s private lab and waited. The cube whirred to life, blurring around its edges as it skated through space to bring him to his destination.

When it stopped and the doors slid open again, Victor faced a vast empty lab – and a wall on the other side, completely covered in stacked furniture and computer parts.

“What the hell
?
” His brow furrowed and he scanned the area beyond, not only with his eyes, but with the feelers of his power.

Arthur One was in the room beyond that blocked wall and doorway. Black could sense his mind,
angry and vengeful
. The man was not well.

At once, Victor
was on alert and
ready to fight. Something had gone extremely wrong here
,
and the last pe
rson to be seen with Arthur
was Victoria.

With one strong gesture of his gloved hand, Victor waved every item, large and small, away from the wall across the room and sent it flying to the side, where it slammed loudly against the adjacent wall. Some of the items split or cracked before they fell to the marble floor below; others shattered completely. Victor paid them no heed. With a few long strides, he was across the room and standing before the double sliding doors that led to the inner sanctum of Arthur One’s lab.

Again, h
e reached out and grabbed hold of
Arthur’s mind
,
this time
ruthlessly extracting the code from its depths. As he did so, snippets of other images raced through his thoughts, a side effect of his search through Arthur’s
fury-
fevered brain.

What he saw
there
darkened his
handsome visage
into a dangerous mask
.

Victoria…
.

Victor bared his teeth and punched in the code on the pad to his left. The doors slid open.
Arthur One was hunched over in his white leather chair mumbling about “fire” and “crazy bitches” as Victor walked in, but he spun to meet Victor’s gaze as soon as he realized he was no longer alone.

Arthur shrieked as
Victor strode to the chair,
grabbed him by the lapels of his white jacket, and knocked the chair
aside so that it went sailing back into the wall.

“You think
Red
is scary
, mate?” Victor hissed.

Arthur stared d
own at him
, and a
pitiful
whimper escaped his throat. “Wh-what?” he stammered, his brown eyes
wide
.

Victor smiled a dark smile. “
What she did to escape you was nothing.
Wait until I’m done with you.” With that, he focused his energy on Arthur’s wild eyes and delved deep.

He was fast and furious and merciless. Every terrifying image he could muster, he sent hurling through the man’s brain, forcing the waking nightmares to take form with terrible detail. He built upon them and dug deeper; the maws of laughing demons grew bile-dripping fangs, bottomless waters darkened with the swimming forms of giant, waiting sea creatures,
and
the walls of Arthur’s mind dripped with blood. Somewhere in the recesses of the techie’s subconscious, he was running from swarms of snakes, insects, and spiders. Ghosts inhabited his robots, changing them from the inside out; the faux women’s fingers sharpened into claws, their hair became a mass of flames that melted their skin, and their perfect vaginas developed rims of slicing, razor-sharp blades.

At length, the light of sanity drained entirely from Arthur One’s eyes and they
lost
focus, still open but staring at nothing. His breathing became the mumbled mutterings of irreversible psychosis
,
and his body went slack where Vic
tor held him several feet off
the ground.

When drool pooled in the corner of Arthur’s open mouth, Victor let him drop. He took a step back from the prone form of Game Control’s now useless head tech and tried to get himself back under control.

He closed his glowing green eyes and took a deep breath. His head was aching and his hands were shaking. The connection he’d shared with his victim had inadvertently filled his own mind with the images of Victoria’s demise.

And the barely tamped fury that now rushed through his veins like liquid fire was nearly painful. He opened his eyes again and glared down at the fallen techie. It wasn’t enough. Madness wasn’t enough. He wanted to do it all over again.

With a roar of rage, Victor spun around and shattered every glass screen on the floor-to-ceiling console of the TRF’s mainframe computer. The console began to spark and h
iss. S
moke billowed out in thin streams through the seams in the metal. At the same time, a thin coating of rime began to cover the buttons and gauges, spreading across the co
mputer with rapid determination
until it dove through the cracks in the screens and iced the computer over from the inside.

The damage would take a long time to repair.

It
still wasn’t enough.
But it would
have to do for now, b
ecause
one of the most
alarming bits of information he’d pulled from Arthur’s
brain was the fact that
Victoria
had been sent into the Mare Ocean.

Right now it was night. Victor knew that the darkness would make it that much more difficult for Victoria to make her way to the surface of the water once the transporter
cube
opened. She could very well drown.

He didn’t have much time,
if any at all. She could have pulled herself out long ago. Or she could be dead.

* * * *

Victoria walked in silence beside Max. Her mind worked overtime. Something about what Max had shared with her felt out of place. It gave her that strange sensation that one gets when they know they’ve
left something behind on a trip
but can’t recall what it was.