Arena (4 page)

Returning her attention to the ceramic pieces scattered before her, she immediately found two that fit together—a clear, five-inch-long rod, and a short thick elbow about two inches wide, one leg flattened into a tab, the other pierced with a hole at its end. The hole was just the right diameter for the rod, which seated itself with a click when she inserted it, then refused to come out again.

She held the resulting implement up to the light, noting the slight depressions on the tab, as if to accommodate thumb and forefinger. So what was it, then? A writing stylus? A key of some sort? A temperature probe? Part of some other construction altogether? She had no idea. It did slide nicely into the slim pocket along the seam of her left thigh, though, so that’s where she left it.

She fiddled with the rest of the pieces for a few more minutes, then opened the book. It smelled of fresh ink, and the pages stuck together. Turning to the title page, she read:

Instructions for Participants

Below the title glowed a holograph of a crystalline arch marked with the same three interlocking circles as the cover.

Several pages of introduction followed, then a list of five rules jumped out in boldface:

1. S
TAY ON THE WHITE ROAD AT ALL TIMES
.

2. P
ROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE NEAREST GATE
.

3. A
VOID DISTRACTIONS
.

4. F
OLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN IN THE MANUAL
.

5. A
UXILIARY
S
UPPLY
B
OXES WILL PROVIDE ANY ADDITIONAL NEEDS
. D
O NOT LEAVE THE WHITE ROAD
.

“Guess I won’t leave the white road.”

The next page offered a thicket of text explaining the rules. She skipped it, paging randomly. Tissue-thin pages displayed numerous construction diagrams plus paragraphs of fine print explaining how to use the strange stew of ceramic pieces.

After the diagrams, however, the remaining three-quarters of the book was indecipherable gibberish. “How useful,” she muttered. “An instruction manual I can’t read. Why would they give me a manual that makes no sense? Why are they doing any of this?” Instead of getting answers, it seemed she was just accumulating more questions.

The pack’s lower section held only a plastic liter bottle of water and two foil Snak-Paks whose use was obvious. As she restowed her “supplies,” the plant encasing the shelter shivered again, its chiming sounding lower and louder. She frowned at it. Had those filaments been sticking through the wood slats before?

Uneasiness stirred. Maybe it was time to go.

At the corner of her eye, the blue letters suddenly flared fluorescent magenta. She began to gather up the ceramic pieces.

A loud buzz made her look up as another of the plant’s glassy arms slipped between the roof slats, bobbing in the air above her head, golden spines sparkling. With a gulp she tossed the manual in her pack and continued fumbling with the rest of her scattered supplies.

The magenta letters began to flash, and the buzz changed pitch and silenced. Then the shelter vanished along with the spongy white circle on which she crouched. Their support gone, the plant’s arms slapped the sandy foundation in successive, hissing clinks, spraying her legs with tiny spines.

A rootlike tendril wrapped around her foot. With a cry, Callie jerked back—off-balance, clutching the pack to her chest. The runner clung, winding with startling speed around her ankle. She hopped backward, wrenching at it, but the tentacle stretched and held, as another curled over her toe.

Panicking, she fell backward and, in a burst of wild strength, kicked herself free, then scrambled for the path three yards away. Once she was back on the spongy surface, well out of the plant’s reach, she stopped, heart hammering, and watched the tendrils grope over the equipment parts she had been forced to leave behind. New dread tormented her. What if she couldn’t get out of this place without those pieces? What if— The six-inch-thick pavement beneath her vanished as if a light beam had switched off, dropping her onto its sandy foundation with a jolt. She stumbled backward and turned to see the path disappearing section by section. Worse, all the bits of shattered arm that had sprayed the grotto were now taking root, sprouting new arms and runners with impossible swiftness.

Horrified, Callie sprinted for the path, gained it, skidded around the grotto wall, and raced into a wider canyon. When she stopped and turned back, the grotto opening was still there, but the path no longer entered it. Holding the day pack like a shield, she shoved her glasses back up her nose and wheeled slowly, taking in the black-streaked red canyon walls, the blue sky, and the utter stillness. It looked astonishingly real.

Thankfully she spied no more of the cactus grass. Her boots and jumpsuit, though coated with red dust and stained with yellow plant juice, had shielded her legs and feet from the spines. Her hands were another matter. Patches of short golden prickles bristled from the backs of them, and the skin was already burning and reddened. Having no tweezers, she pulled them out with her teeth, hoping they weren’t poisonous.

She was about to open her pack for the water bottle when an ear-piercing screech shattered the quiet and froze her in midmotion. The sound bounded back and forth between the cliffs, fading into a growling grunt and then to silence. . . .

Pulse pounding, she bent to pick up the pack she’d dropped. Mountain lions screamed—but that was no mountain lion. That was nothing like anything she’d ever heard in her life. Almost running again, she followed the undulating path downstream, past sheer walls on one side and a crumbling talus slope on the other. The canyon hairpinned frequently, preventing her from seeing more than a few hundred yards ahead, and she was uneasily aware that if anything awaited her, she had no hope of evading it.

As time passed and she encountered no more unpleasant surprises, her pace slowed, and she relaxed, her mind returning to questions of how and where. It was all so convincing. She could almost swear she’d been transported to the Utah canyon lands. She’d backpacked there only a year ago with Meg and Jack, Meg’s ex-fiancé, so she knew the area. Rugged and sparsely populated, it was traversed by few roads. The aliens could have easily set up a course there with no one the wiser.

However, that theory didn’t explain how they had transported her the length of Arizona in the drawing of a breath. Was their technology so advanced such a feat was no problem for them? The orientation room
had
vanished from around her. . . .

No, that was too farfetched. More likely she was in a carefully constructed set, with complex machinery lurking behind clever façades. Computer-generated imagery could give the impression of the orientation room dissolving. And that
would
explain the rule about staying on the road. Step off and you’d see the wires, cords, and gears that made it all run, just like on those behind-the-scenes tours at Disneyland.

She grimaced. Disneyland did not evoke happy memories. Her father had taken her there for her seventh birthday, a year after he’d divorced her mother. It had been the first time Callie had seen him since he’d left, and she had looked forward to it for weeks. Only to ruin everything.

After their behind-the-scenes tour—her father had insisted she understand it was all a fake—they’d boarded the Skyway. As the little cable car bore them quietly above the crowds she’d at first enjoyed seeing everything from such a lofty vantage. But halfway across, dark demons had fluttered up around her, plucking at her clothing, threatening to wrench her from the car and hurl her to the pavement below. Screaming in terror, she had clutched the railing so desperately the ride operators had had to shut the machine down to get her off.

Patrick Hayes did not take embarrassment well. Furious, he’d brought her home and suggested her mother take her to a shrink. Callie cried herself to sleep that night, and hadn’t seen her father since.

The incident precipitated a spate of phobic attacks, and finally her mother dragged her to a doctor, then to a series of disagreeable therapists who smiled too much and asked too many questions. She remembered little of it now, mainly recalling the sickening dread that always preceded her appointments. The attacks had finally ceased on their own, and in retrospect, everyone blamed it on the trauma of her parents’ divorce. No one except Meg knew her fear of heights had lately returned—with frightening intensity. What would they say was the cause now? The trauma of a nowhere life?

A shadow flicked across the path in front of her, bringing her up short. Overhead a large, pale flying-something disappeared beyond the canyon’s rim. It didn’t come back, though, so she moved on.

“Can’t say life’s boring anymore,” she muttered. “Nothing like the last time, huh, Meg? Oh, brother! Just wait till I catch you!”

Memory of her friend’s chirpy assurances made her boil. Meg had become such a flake since she’d dumped Jack. All this experience-life-as-an-adventure stuff—hang gliding, dream exploration, yoga, seeking after a higher consciousness. . . . If they hadn’t known each other so long, and if Meg wasn’t her only real friend, Callie would’ve dumped her long ago.

How
could
Meg have known Alex all those months—lusted after him, for crying out loud—and not notice he wasn’t human?

A fork in the road interrupted Callie’s thoughts and brought her to a stop. Angling off what looked to be the main path, a branch headed up a boulder-clogged cleft, looping around the rocks like a casually thrown rope. She pushed up her glasses and frowned. Deeply cut and shadow-swathed, that cleft held promise of gaining altitude swiftly. Which meant she might soon find herself in a place where the exposure would goad her slumbering acrophobia to life.

The branch’s very lack of appeal, however, argued for its being the correct choice. Unless there wasn’t a “correct” choice. Maybe one route was simply shorter. Or offered different obstacles.

Dared she stop to consult the manual? Whatever had screamed, she hadn’t heard it again. Nor had the flying thing returned. She glanced around, rubbing the tender welts on the backs of her hands. No sign of any of those cactus-grass things, either. Surely her captors wouldn’t begrudge her a rest and a drink and a handful of trail mix. If they’d supplied the food and water, they must intend her to use it.

She settled cross-legged on a clear stretch of road and pulled out the water bottle and foil Snak-Pak, which turned out to contain a cupful of tan pellets.

“I fed some of this to my rats just this morning!” she muttered, wrinkling her nose. Lifting a handful in mock salute, she tossed a few of the pellets into her mouth—and was surprised to find they tasted like oatmeal cookies. “Okay, so maybe it’s not rat food.”

She crunched a few more, washed them down with the water, and then got out the manual and turned to the introductory material.

Welcome to the Arena. We hope you enjoy your stay. As you will discover,
we have engineered the playing field to conform to your homeworld
parameters—

Homeworld? Did that mean she was no longer
on
her homeworld?

Gravitational forces, day-night cycles, and atmosphere have been tailored
to meet your biological needs. In addition to many of your homeworld
species, a number of innovative bioforms have been engineered to add excitement
and interest to your journey
.

The light, fluttery feeling returned. Innovative bioforms? Like that thing that screamed?

For your comfort and safety, please stay on the path and follow all
instructions
.

She skimmed ahead. The section closed with—
We appreciate your
participation in our project and hope you’ll have an entertaining adventure
.

“Entertaining adventure?” she squeaked. “Give me a break!”

The next page reiterated the “initial objective” Alex had given her:
Follow the white road to its end, and there pass through the First Gate,
pictured on the title page
. The manual said nothing about splits in the road.

She turned the page, reviewed the five rules, and launched into the paragraphs of elaboration that followed. As Alex had said, the white road was a safe zone, undulating through a treacherous countryside whose engineered bioforms could be downright deadly. The plant that attacked her would have eaten her if given the opportunity, and its spines carried a mild poison that would produce discomfort for at least a day. The scream she’d heard was probably the territorial call of a rock dragon—six-foot-long lizards said to frequent canyons such as this. An unarmed woman would make easy pickings for a big female, but the path supposedly repelled them, so she’d be safe as long as she didn’t leave it.

The material accompanying rule number two, “Proceed immediately to the nearest gate,” was informative but not reassuring.

To encourage forward momentum, portions of the track have been
engineered to disappear after an elapsed interval of time
.

“Which you neglect to specify,” she noted sourly.

It is wise, therefore, not to linger, especially at the beginning. Should
the worst happen and you do stray off the road, we have provided fourteen
identical gates located at equidistant intervals around the Arena. No matter
where you are, there will always be a safe road in the vicinity that will take
you to one of them
.

“So long as the ‘innovative bioforms’ don’t get you first,” she muttered.

Safehavens have been provided for your comfort along the roads. You
may stay in each up to twenty-four hours. Food, water, energy cubes
— whatever they were—
and first-aid supplies are available there for your
convenience
.

She skipped ahead to rule three, “Avoid distractions.”
Antagonists
within the Arena are at work to prevent you from attaining your—

Something moved at the corner of her eye, and Callie looked up.