Downburst (9 page)

The Aerie is a floating stadium. Tiered, metal seating is built into three-quarters of the arena’s sides, but the segment directly across from me is open, covered only by a camouflaged net. Next to the net is a large scoreboard.

The Aerie roof stretches over the top of the stadium with large gaps in the sticks and branches revealing the sky above. The floor is overlaid with mats. It’s flat where it meets the net, but as it reaches the opposite end of the stadium it curves up in a rounded quarter pipe, extending almost to the nest roof. Perched at the very top of the quarter pipe is an enclosed observation box. There are other doors on the perimeter of the stadium, but all of them are marked “Emergency Exit Only.”

I follow Lila to a seat on the front row. Other people file in behind us, all wearing the masks and padding, all chattering loudly, and I feel my pulse match the buzz in the stadium. Within fifteen minutes, almost all of the seats are filled.

At two o’clock on the dot, a door underneath us opens, and a large group of initiates marches into the arena. All of them wear digitized camouflage—fitted gray body armor and full-face helmets. A blue stripe marks half of the players; a red stripe, the other half. As I watch, two large, glowing circles appear on their chests, one over the heart and one over the stomach.

A rack of automatic rifles emerges from both sides of the arena wall, and I grip the armrest on my seat as the contestants march toward the guns. The first person raises her Quil to a scanner attached to the rack. A metal latch pops open, and she takes one of the rifles and a belt containing clips of ammunition. The scoreboard displays the girl’s face, along with her team color and the number “100.”

“There’s Rye!” Lila points at the board when a boy’s face appears. I look at the screen and feel my eyes widen. For a split second all I see is sun-kissed chocolate hair, olive skin, and a pair of startling green eyes. Then he’s gone, replaced by another image.

I look at the arena and watch Rye as he falls in line with the other blue players. He leans over and says something to one of his teammates, slings the belt around his chest, feels the weight of the gun. I realize I’m holding my breath.

Soon everyone has a rifle, and the empty racks return inside the walls. The words “
Kauna 1
” appear on the screen. Then someone hits a gong, and all sixty contestants turn. Almost as a single body, they run up the quarter pipe and leap into the air.

They don’t come back down.

As the air reaches the condensation level, it forms a cloud. In unstable conditions, the air will continue to rise, and the clouds will grow to enormous sizes. Strong updrafts prevent the rain from falling.

Once a man wanted to locate the origin of thunder. He traveled north until he found a large plain and a gathering of wigwams. Nearby, some people were playing a ball game. When the game ended, they ducked into the wigwams and put on their feathered cloaks. The feathers turned into wings, and they flew away. This is how the Passamaquoddy found the home of the Thunderbirds.

I must have stood up, because when I come to my senses, I’m leaning over the railing, gaping at the people in the arena. At the people
flying
in the arena. Some of them are upside down, some of them are sideways, but all of them are in the air, whipping around the stadium.
How? How!
I want to scream.
How are you doing this?

The scoreboard flashes wildly overhead as the players spin and lunge and soar around the Aerie. Guns fire in every direction, but the players aren’t shooting bullets. They’re shooting paintballs. The balls pelt the players in splashes of blue and red, the spectators too. I duck as a round streaks over our row. They’re everywhere, whirring past my face and under my legs. Every time a contestant is hit, his or her face appears on the screen, and their number drops. A timer counts down from five minutes.

I stare at the blinking screen, at the whirling teenagers, at the hurtling shells.
This isn’t possible.
There has to be an explanation. Their suits? Something in the arena? But I don’t see any jetpacks or propellers, can’t hear any motors.
What then?

“Look out!” Lila yells. But it’s too late. The barrage of pellets drives under my arm where there’s no padding.
Ouch!
I grab my side and sit down with a thud.

“Oh man, that got you good!” Lila shouts over the bursting guns and screaming crowd. She laughs. “Sorry, I tried to warn you.”

“I’m fine,” I say hoarsely. I press my hand into my torso. Then I look down, prepared to see paint dripping from my fingers, but I don’t see anything. I lift my hand to my nose. I can smell the fumes, but there’s no color, just a clear substance sticking to my hand.

I look back at the mayhem below me, at the raging paintballs. The blue and red splatters are only showing up in one place: on the players’ armor. The paint must be engineered to react to a certain type of fabric.
Or maybe it’s the fabric that reacts to the paint.

A girl on the red team zooms directly in front of me, and I follow her with my eyes, grateful to have something to focus on. She soars up the quarter pipe, nearly scraping the top of the nest, and dives back down near the netting. While diving, she aims her firearm at a boy in blue and pulls the trigger. The recoil makes her body twist slightly, but she recovers easily and loops around the ring. Her target is not so lucky. The ball hits him squarely in the circle over his heart, and his score drops by ten. He staggers back, clutching his chest, red trickling from his fingers. Even though I know it’s paint, my stomach tenses.

I look for the girl again and see her pull a clip from her belt and load it into her rifle. Then, arcing and twisting around a series of bullets, she drops below the spray and fires directly up at her opponent, costing someone another ten points. She rockets into the sky, straight through one of the gaps in the roof.

When she’s a full ten-story distance above the arena floor, she pulls herself up in a wide, graceful back flip. With her head pointing down, she drops back through the branches, plummeting in absolute free fall and spinning tightly, raining paint on red and blue players alike. Scores drop like crazy on the screen. With just ten feet to spare, she pulls up short, rotates her body, and pushes off the ground.
Tornado
,
I name her.

A girl on the blue team zooms off the quarter pipe and flies along the Aerie roofline. Then she hurtles toward Tornado, coming from above and behind. Tornado doesn’t see her. The blue girl takes aim.

All of a sudden, the blue girl falls. She screams until she lands on the ground with a sickening thwack.

“What happened?” I shout over the noise.

“Dead air,” Lila shouts back. “The wind was weak up there. She should have seen it. It’s her own fault.”

The wind? I suddenly pay attention to the lusty breeze that’s whipping around the arena, entering through the opening with the netting and channeling up the quarter pipe. I watch the movements of the contestants and realize they aren’t just flying anywhere they want. There’s a pattern. They’re only going where the air is moving. My mouth drops open.

They’re riding the wind.

I begin to remember all of the wind references I’ve heard this weekend, and everything starts to make sense. The kayaking, Charity pointing to the sky, her fast speeds only once a breeze was blowing—she was using the wind. All of those kids were. This is why Jeremy said we had to show up
with
our kayaks, why Lila wasn’t concerned about the lost campers. They could fly out of trouble whenever they needed to. They just weren’t allowed to fly to the testing grounds.

Who the heck are these people?

Around me, the initiates scream and pummel the metal bleachers with their fists while the paintballs explode in all directions. The noise is overwhelming, but I lean into it, soaking it all up. I have to know more.

When the timer runs out, the gong sounds again. The contestants stop firing and drop to the ground. The two teams line up, and the faces of about twenty-five players appear on the scoreboard, along with their scores. None of them has fewer than seventy points.

I see Rye again. His score is eighty-nine. Both red and blue paint stain his armor.

“They’re allowed to shoot their teammates?” I ask Lila.

“That was the free-for-all round,” she says. She gives me a funny look, and I remember I’m supposed to know the rules.

“Oh, right,” I say quickly.

While the eliminated participants file off the field, the twenty-five contestants walk to their respective corners of the arena. Large showerheads spray them with a fine mist, and the paint almost instantly vanishes from their armor.

Doors open in the walls, and the weapon racks extend back into the ring. This time there are a variety of options. Assorted rifles and handguns. Knives. Tomahawks. Spears. As the players line up, scan their Quils, and select three items, the scoreboard displays their choices.

Tornado chooses a standard automatic rifle, a Carbon 15 Type 97S pistol, and a long-blade combat knife. The screen shows her serious face, blonde hair pulled back from her forehead—and something else. Her energy level. A green bar on the bottom indicates she’s at eighty percent.

Rye’s energy level is also at eighty. He selects an M16, a Glock 18, and a tomahawk. I want to ask Lila how they’re going to play paintball with knives and tomahawks, but I’ve asked too much already.

After the players have chosen their weapons, the racks retract, and the two teams gather in huddles on opposite ends of the field, the red team outnumbering the blue team fifteen to ten. Then the arena begins to change. Trees and rocks rise out of the ground. Vines drop from the ceiling. Two large metal circles slide out from the wall by the net. There’s a whirring sound, and suddenly converging streams of air are rushing down the center of the Aerie.
Bladeless fans
, I realize.

The scoreboard flashes two faces: Tornado and a boy with sandy hair from the blue team. Because they have the most points, they’re the team captains.

“That’s Buck,” Lila says, nodding at the boy.

“Who?” I ask. I notice one of his weapons is a spear.

“Rye’s cousin. They’re best friends.”

Looking down into the arena, I try to pick out Buck and Rye from among their teammates, but then my eyes snap to the players’ armor. The circles are transforming. A small ring appears on each of the players’ backs, and the two rings on their fronts shrink in size. The stripes of color also shrink until they’re nothing but thin lines.

The players fan out on either side of the field, separated for now by the obstacles and blowing air. I watch as one of them raises his Quil to a tree. He lowers his arm again and pushes something on the tiny monitor. A second later, the gray camo on his armor becomes a mottled brown, an exact match of the tree’s bark.

“Are you serious?” I gasp.

“What?” Lila says, turning to look at me. “Did you say something?”

I shake my head, and she looks back into the arena while I continue to gape at the players melting into the leaves and rocks. Ten seconds count down on the screen. Then the words, “
Kauna
2: Instant Elimination,”
flash across the board.

When the gong sounds, the blue players catch a current that takes them up to the Aerie roof. They stay close to the trees, and for a moment I can’t tell them apart from the trunks. Then, while four of them stay put, Rye and two other players catapult into the sky—their armor turning gray again—while Buck and another three dive into the crossing currents. The conflicting jets send them tumbling one way and then the next.

The red players open fire, but the blue players who remained behind shoot back, providing cover for their teammates. And a distraction. Rye and his wingmen dive down into the other side of the arena, bypassing the fans entirely and catching the red team off-guard. Rye and a short boy each get a kill. The two red contestants fall to the mats below. They lose ten points, and they’re out of the game. But now Rye and Shorty’s points go up by ten.

As the blue team keeps firing, Tornado and three other red players leap off the ground and land mid-air in a crouch. They zip around the curving arena walls. Tornado blasts a shot at the blue players crossing the wind currents. One of them is hit in the foot. Losing his balance, he fires his gun wildly. The kickback sends him into a tight spiral as he releases bullets in all directions. Then he slams into the mats and lies still.

By this time, Buck has made it across the dangerous current. He hurls a spear at a red player’s back. The blunted tip hits the small circle, leaving a streak of blue, and Buck earns ten points.

Tornado scoops up an abandoned pistol and fires at Buck with a gun in each hand, grazing his arm. Because the paint didn’t hit a circle, he’s still in. Buck ducks behind a tree and answers Tornado’s volley with his own. Tornado somersaults away from him, landing on the ground. She breaks into a sprint and runs right through the current. When she reaches the other side of the arena, she leaps back into the air and catches the other blue players by surprise. One of them goes down.

Suddenly, Rye launches off the quarter pipe and, grabbing a vine, swings over the dangerous blasts of air. He sends a shot at Tornado as he passes, and blue paint speckles her shoulder. The scoreboard takes three points from Tornado and gives them to Rye. He lands on the other side and helps Buck take out two red players.

Rye tosses aside his spent rifle and pulls out his Glock. Then he holds out an arm to Buck, and his cousin spins him around, releasing him into the air. Rye twists on his side and rolls past a player in red, firing bullets at both kill spots on her chest. The crowd screams as he earns twenty points.

Now the two teams are more evenly matched. The players whip around the arena in a frenzy, and I can’t tell if they’re using any kind of strategy or not. One thing is for sure—their energy levels are dropping dramatically. All of the indicator bars have changed from green to yellow.

One of the blue players gets caught by the fans and crashes into a tree. He isn’t shot, but his helmet smacks the trunk hard, and he tumbles to the ground unconscious. Two medics run into the arena and carry him off the field, but the battle doesn’t stop.

As Rye dives to the floor to retrieve his former teammate’s rifle, a girl in red barrels down on him. From the ground, Rye does a backflip into the air and shoots the girl in the visor. But she’s not out. She slams into a wall then spins away, clutching her arm.

The gong rings again, and the teams regroup, getting a two-minute respite to plan their next move. No new weapons this time. One of the bladeless fans retracts, and the circles on their armor shrink even further while another shows up on their right thighs.

There are only ten players left, and each of them gets a bonus for making it to round three, putting most of their scores in the nineties. There are four people on the blue team: Rye, Buck, Shorty, and a girl with brown hair. The red team has six players: Tornado, a boy with glasses, a girl with blonde hair, a heavyset boy with dark hair, a tall boy with blue eyes, and the girl Rye shot in the helmet—the one who hurt her arm. From the way she’s cradling it, it looks like it might be broken.