Gamerunner (27 page)

There has been a malfunction. Please tell Crater about this problem.

And as he stumbles out he can smell smoke, and it’s acrid plasticky smoke, not the clean woodsmoke of the demo. He looks down, and yes, there’s a flame. He ought to care, and if he wasn’t feeling so sick he
would
care. That’s good, isn’t it? A flame . . .

He staggers through the doorway and collapses on to his bed. That was the plan, anyway, wasn’t it? Which is just as well, because he can’t do anything else. He wants to be sick and go to sleep and die, all at once. He hears someone breathing in great gasping gouts, and he pities them, because they must feel even worse than he does, right now. Then they start to cough. It’s the smoke, the fire that must be taking hold — so quickly, he never thought it would happen so
quickly
. Must be the chemicals, he thinks. All that
highly inflammable
. . .

I can’t move, he thinks. I want to go to sleep.

I mustn’t go to sleep.

I had a plan. What was the plan? I — had — a —
plan
.

He puts his hands over his face again, trying to concentrate. The smoke . . . too much of it. Why isn’t the alarm going off? What’s happened to the alarm? Oh no. Gods, what a fool I was, why didn’t I
think
of the alarm?

Daed switched it off. Ages ago. Because he wanted to smoke a cigarette. As if — as if he knew . . . Rick laughs, choking on the taste of fire. Oh, Daed. Just for that. Because he wanted to smoke.

And the thought of Daed is something to cling on to: a cornerstone. Daed, he thinks, who sacrificed everything for me. So that I could stay here and be safe and well fed and looked after. Daed, my father.

He opens his eyes.

OK.

The fire . . . well, his plan’s working. That’s got to be good, right?

He stares at it, wondering how he could have thought this would work. It’s dangerous . . . and even with the fire alarms turned off . . . The sheets haven’t caught, yet, but the chemical salts are alight, and the poster is burning merrily. He wants to watch it; the flames flicker and dance. They shimmer blue and green and sodium yellow, as the fire eats through different colours of ink. There’s smoke, filling the room, black and grey and white. It hangs like a veil between Rick and the window. How can the surves not
notice
?

Either they’re all at the party, or it’s already too hot for the hidcams.

Now that he thinks of it, it
is
hot.

He was supposed to wait here until he was sure the hidcams weren’t working any more. Until anyone watching saw the cameras crash. Until the last recorded moment was him sitting on the bed, surrounded by fire.

But he can’t. He hasn’t got the nerve.

He laces his hands together and looks down at them. He can feel the heat on his face. He stays still. It’s a game, he thinks, and I want to win. There’s light flickering on his skin: hot, orange light, shifting from dark to gold to . . . hypnotic. His brain is tired. Or . . . I could stay here, he thinks. Because once those canisters catch light, it’ll be all over. I won’t know anything about it. Quick.

Not exactly peaceful, though.

He stands up. He’s not going to leave, not yet. But he can’t stay still. He feels safer over the other side of the room; which is stupid, he knows. When those canisters —

How long can I leave it?

He blinks smoke-tears out of his eyes and looks at the canisters. They look fairly safe, still. They’re sitting in a nest of flames, like a phoenix before it hatches, but they don’t look . . . awake, yet. Mind you, there’s a lot of fire, now. It’s starting to feel urgent. Rick is starting to think he ought to leave.

Stop doing stupid things
.

This probably qualifies as stupid, doesn’t it? Sorry, Perdy.

But it might work; really, if he does it right, exactly right, it might work.

He leans against the door panel, watching his life go up in flames. Count, he thinks. Just count. One, two, three . . . when you go into triple figures, you can go. But no gabbling; that’s cheating.

And it was a good idea. He has to believe that. They’ll believe he’s dead; they’ll let him go . . .

When the canisters explode, they’ll take out the whole floor. So he needs to be downstairs when they go; those cameras will go down, too. He’ll have time to get downstairs unseen; and with his hood on, he’ll be one more anonymous figure, wandering through the complex on launch-party night. Well. Until they start the evacuation. He wants to giggle; it’s the first time it’s occurred to him, that they might evacuate. That he might cause that kind of chaos.

He’s lost count. He stares at the flames — roaring now, hungry, licking the chemiglass as if they’re eager to get out, too. Sixty, he guesses. Sixty-one. Sixty-two. Sixty-three.

I should get out.

I should get out
now
.

He goes to the door and runs his fingertips down the gap. He can pull it sideways; but when he does, there’ll be more air. He imagines the fire, billowing up in a great rush; and the smoke gushing into the corridor. Would Daed have turned off those alarms, too? Rick prays that he has.

Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-nine and a half.

OK.

Here goes.

Out through the door. The corridor. He’s running like it’s the Maze, as fast as he’s ever run. It doesn’t seem quite real, but that’s OK. It’s easy. He hardly even needs to breathe. Behind him the flames are taking over, calling him back, spitting and roaring. He can hear them. He keeps running.

He’s done this before. He knows he can do it. No problem.

The game, he thinks.
This
is the game. I understand now. And gods, it’s
fun
. . .

Down the stairs — the first few stairs —

Yes, he thinks, almost, yes, it’s going to,
I’m
going to —

And —

Too late.

Epilogue

Wings of Flame

The blast ripped through the twentieth storey of the complex, spitting flame at the sky of Undone. It exploded sideways, in a ball of gold, spotted with red and black, like the sun up close. People on the streets of Undone looked up, wondering. There was a cloud of steam — another explosion, like an afterthought — and a generous spray of shattered glass. Scraps of clothes, a sad little flag of torn bedsheet, a few bloody lumps of shark flesh. The debris spewed out over Undone like largesse. A charred, many-toothed jawbone fell into the gutter, twenty storeys below.

In a way, Rick had done well. He’d been right — for what it was worth. The hidcams
did
go down. All the cameras did, in fact. On the twentieth storey, the nineteenth, the eighteenth . . . No one would ever know what had happened, exactly. Not those last few seconds. The film cut out, just before the blast; although they’d be able to work it out from the rest of the footage, more or less. Give or take a few details. Like Rick leaving, for example.

But he didn’t get far enough. He was only a few storeys below his room. He felt the blast, he didn’t hear it. He knew it was too late. The floor moved under his feet, shifting up and down, like a ship. He looked down and somehow, stupidly, expected to see the sea.

And then the fire boiled down the stairwell towards him, sucking the oxygen out of the air.

He didn’t realise he was screaming, but he was.

And the explosion kicked away his feet from under him. He’d put his hands over his face to shield his eyes, and he nearly dropped to his knees; but there was no time for that. A second wave of fire shoved him forward, roughly, like a friend, one hand on either shoulder blade. Get
out
.

And when he stumbled, it picked him up and threw him, straight through the window ahead of him. He burst into the open air in a knot of scarlet and broken glass and fire. To anyone looking up he was like one of the old gods: glorious, silhouetted against a dying sky. Then he fell.

No one can fall sixteen storeys without dying.

Not straight down, anyway. But Rick landed on the sagging power-cables over the streets of Undone, bounced and jerked like a fish on a line, and then dropped again. The fire in the Crater tower flapped upwards, sending smoke towards the clouds. Anyone unlucky enough to be out on the streets of Undone turned to look, momentarily distracted from whatever they were doing. It was as though someone had trapped a star in the tower, keeping it prisoner. Its fury reflected off the other skyscrapers, far too close for comfort.

And Rick fell, still. His clothes were burning. He hit the top of the Crater fence, where it was curved outwards to stop climbers. The wire hooked into him, ripping him to shreds, but it broke his fall, again. He hung for a moment, between worlds. And then, against all the odds, he struggled, convulsed, and flopped
over
the fence, falling the right way. He landed on the concrete like a dead thing; but he was on the right side. The Undone side, that is.

He should have been dead; but he wasn’t. Not quite.

Not that he’d have been grateful for it, if he was conscious.

And when they found him, later, he was still alive. Just.

The rogue sun had burnt out, at last. The complex was surrounded with flashing lights, evacuation vehicles, the last bewildered party-goers struggling to get out of the Undone air, relieved it wasn’t raining.

Someone stood in front of Rick’s face and nudged at him with one foot; and briefly, before he dropped back into blackness, he opened his eyes. He had time to notice how it hurt to breathe — how everything hurt, in fact. How the darkness was flashing, and he could hear voices, and he didn’t know where he was. How no one was helping him, or calling for a med, and that meant he must have escaped. How he was in agony. How the plan must have worked, and what a stupid plan it had been, after all.

How he was alive.

How he was free.

And how his back, especially . . . how, even through the rest of the pain, he could feel the material of his top melted and clinging to the skin where the explosion had caught him, drawing on him, leaving two terrible burns: symmetrical, running the whole length of his back, like wings.

About the author

B.R. (Bridget) Collins is a graduate of both university and drama school. Her first novel,
The Traitor Game
, won the Branford Boase Award in 2009 and was nominated for the 2009 Carnegie Medal. This was followed by the highly acclaimed
A Trick of the Dark
and
Tyme’s End
. Bridget lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Also by B. R. Collins

The Traitor Game

A Trick of the Dark

Tyme’s End

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

Copyright © B. R. Collins 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408812945

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The Traitor

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by B.R. Collins

WINNER OF THE 2009 BRANFORD

BOASE AWARD