Nova Project #1 (21 page)

Every right. This is wrong. This is his
life.

But none of that changes the fact that there's no one he can tell.

“You okay?” Nick asks as they gather in the gaming room and open their cabinets. “Sorry, I don't know why I keep asking you that. Habit. You're fine now. It's working, right?”

“Yeah.” Miguel forces a smile.

He just wants to finish this.

Visor on.

It's midnight when they quit out, another two objects in the display cabinet in the cache: a wooden staff Miguel had wrested from among the otherwise iron bars of a gate and a flame Nick had cached, desperate to claim it, as if that will give him power over the fire that still burns Anna in his mind. As their cabinets fill, he tries again to imagine what the final level might hold and why they need these particular things. If he knew, or could guess, they might have a prayer. Or he could go home, put them in his sim, experiment.

Bad idea. Blake knows about the sim, although how, Miguel still has no idea. He knows, absolutely knows, that Nick wouldn't tell a soul, which means he, Miguel, slipped up somehow. Progressed through the normal game too fast and caught their attention. Maybe it isn't as protected on his computer as he thought.

Anyway, even if he could, that would definitely be cheating.

He won't do that. He told Blake not to help him.

“Tell me something?” Nick asks, his voice low. “Why are you playing like such a demon when you've already gotten your heart? It's all the rest of us can do to keep up with you.”

Miguel stops in the corridor near his suite. He's had to use his practiced blank face on Nick more in the past few days than in the entire time they've known each other.

“It's what I do,” he says, shrugging. “You've never been able to watch me play before this. I guess I don't know how to do it any other way.”

“You weren't like this when it first started.”

“Nothing's holding me back now.”

Nick's shoulders relax. “Yeah,” he agrees. “That makes sense. Well, keep doing it, I guess. We're getting so close. Probably the last couple of levels will be killers.”

“Ha. Probably.”

Nick stops at his door. “I'm gonna go say good night to Anna. See you in the morning.”

“Say hi for me.”

“Will do.”

In his suite, he showers, washing off the sweat of levels where he didn't have to run but ran anyway. The feeling of not knowing how much time he has left is familiar, but knowing it could only be days is strange. He didn't believe Dr. Spencer,
but he believes Blake. He should check his feed, see how far along his rivals are.

He doesn't want to know. It wouldn't change anything. He will still do the same things, make the same choices, one step after another.

He checks his mother's feed, though. Likes a photo she's shared. She'll see the notification, know he's still okay. Like Nick, she thinks there's nothing to worry about anymore, and her images are filled with light, with beauty.

He stands shirtless in front of the mirror. One more scar, neater than the others, in a tangle of them. The best that can be said is that they didn't kill him. He blinks to open a window on his lenses and looks up the exact definition of
irony
.

“Nobody seems to be able to articulate that,” says a voice. Miguel whirls around, sees Blake silhouetted in the doorway. Blake taps his own lenses. “I can see what you're searching for when you're in here.”

Just because it's not a surprise doesn't mean it's not an intrusion. Or that Miguel doesn't recall the other things he's searched for. Information on Blake, for one.

Miguel blinks away a private message from Leah: she'd seen him and Nick talking, left them alone, wanted to say good night. He fights a smile.

“I thought it might be a good idea to check on you, see how
you're doing,” says Blake, closing the door. “You are making good progress.”

“People run fast when they're being chased.”

“Of course. I'm curious about what you think of the new features. The improved graphics, the heightened story aspects.”

“I didn't like seeing my friend being squashed and burned in a glass box, but then, you knew that.”

Blake raises his eyebrows. “Please feel free to say it again if it makes you feel better.”

It doesn't, much, but it's over, and Anna's fine. “It looks beautiful,” he says, because it's the truth. The detail is incredible. “I'm curious about the final levels.”

Blake says nothing.

“I'd like to get to them,” Miguel adds, injecting an edge of steel into his voice.

“You are very close. Three more.”

Miguel inhales sharply, feels the biomech press against his ribs. “What if I said I'd changed my mind, I want help. Nick's noticed the way I'm playing. It's hard not to tell him why. If you make it easier, I won't look so desperate.”

“I'd say no,” answers Blake, amused. “The offer's not on the table anymore. You don't appear to need my help. When I told you I had a bet of sorts with my partner, I meant it. He has a favorite, as you are mine, and we're both aware of this. He
is watching your progress as much as I am, and if it suddenly moves even faster, he will notice. It will be down to the two of you at the end, I am sure of that, but the outcome—” He spreads his long-fingered hands wide. “I'd like to say that I—that is, you—will win, but I cannot say for certain.”

Miguel's hands curl into fists. He can clearly see two different futures. Win or lose. Life or death. He's been used to that feeling his whole life, but only in the past few days has the real disease been outside his body, smiling smugly at him. A thing he can hate that isn't himself.

“You bastard,” says Miguel. Blake doesn't flinch. “I haven't told anyone. I'm doing what you ask.”

“And I am grateful.”

Fighting with Blake is like pleading with a thunderstorm. It doesn't care. Miguel backs away, taking notes on Blake's now impassive face, impervious eyes. He could learn a thing or two.

“The virus,” he asks quietly. “Will it hurt? Will I know?” With his human heart, it had always warned him: You're doing too much. Slow down. Calm down. Breathe. Check your pulse.

“If it comes to that,” says Blake, “it will be painless. Is that the same as not knowing?”

T
hree levels to go. Whether he can do this isn't a question. Whether he can do this fast enough is. He can't explain his impatience to the rest of the team; they all think he already has the thing he wanted.

You are in an old building. It has many rooms. Each room is filled with strange, ancient artifacts.

“It's called a museum, Storyteller,” says Leah. Part of him wants to laugh, it's nice to know he isn't the only one who talks back.

They are standing just inside the front doors. It reminds him a little of the library, which isn't that surprising. This is a different collection of human knowledge and endeavor, but a museum is still a library of objects, a concentration of curated memory across all time.

The marble floors gleam as much as the library's wooden ones did, but instead of shelves, glass display cases and cabinets are spread out at intervals across the room. At the far end, an
archway leads to another room, beyond that to another.

They spread out to peer inside the displays, though it's a pretty safe bet the overworld didn't dump them in exactly the room they needed to find.

“This is just like a bunch of old spoons and stuff,” says Josh, tapping his claw on the glass. “I don't think we need a spoon at the end of all this.”

“There's a save point ahead,” says Grace. Miguel's come to rely on her sight and how well she uses it. Looking in the right places. It's possible he misjudged her from the start.

“Already?” Leah asks. “We haven't even done anything yet.”

“Well, hit it,” he tells Grace, who runs ahead to the button, which is displayed on cloth as if it were itself a relic worth treasuring. Nothing happens when she does, but that doesn't mean something won't soon.

Aside from the save point, the next gallery holds ancient chessboards, with tiny pieces of carved ivory and bone, obsidian and slate. Miguel peers through the glass, impressed by their intricacy. People have always played games.

This could be what they're here for, another inside joke. From one of the earliest games to the most advanced one the world has ever seen. Maybe two of them are supposed to play each other.

“Check these carefully,” he tells the others. He runs his fingers over the cases, looking for weak points, looking for clues. There are always clues, but there are none he can see here.

Through the next archway into a zoo. Not quite a zoo. His parents had taken him and Nick to the only one in their city once when they were little, but those animals had at least been alive, even if they were caged. These stare at him with glass eyes from behind glass walls, and he shivers. A few feet away Josh sees a snake and crosses the room in a hurry.

So he wasn't lying about that. Interesting.

“This is creepy,” says Leah, coming up behind him. He nods. Some of these species have been extinct for a thousand years, or only a hundred, and he remembers the conversation with Nick on the level with the horses. Is this the future they're looking at? Survivors, chimeras full of biomech, will put the most human looking of them into glass cases as both memory and warning.

“Really creepy,” he agrees. This is beginning to remind him of the path of fears, this walk from room to room. The knife had been waiting for him at the end of that, so maybe this level's object will be waiting at the end of this. He is suddenly aware of how much time they've spent wandering, looking, inspecting, which they needed to do, any one of the objects they'd passed could have been the thing they're looking for, but time is no longer a luxury he has.

When the time comes, it will be painless.
No, asshole, that is not the same as not knowing. He knows now that if he doesn't get to the end of the final level before anyone else, it will be the end of him. It's too late for not knowing.

“Come on,” he says, quickening his steps. “We're wasting time.”

Through the next room and the next. Ahead, the light is different, both darker and brighter. He breaks into a run, then skids to a stop on a marble floor under a huge dome of colored glass that turns the moonlight to rainbows. Lights placed every few feet around the circular walls illuminate tall stone statues. They're human, sort of, if humans can have horns or the hind ends of goats or talons where their hands should be.

The others are running toward him. Human, if humans can have cameras for eyes or plastic for skin or claws where their hands should be.

In the center of the circle is another glass box, and Miguel knows without looking that it holds what they've come for. Mentally he goes through the contents of the cache for something that will break glass.

“The ax, maybe?” Nick asks.

It hadn't worked to save Anna, but that was a different level. It might this time.

“Cache,” he says. “Summon ax.” It appears in his hand, the wood solid and reassuring even though his brain knows it is really a collection of pixels, a clever trick. He turns and looks into the display for the first time.

“Uh, Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay with an inanimate silver snake?”

“I'd rather not be the one to claim it.”

“You sure? It's kind of your turn.”

“I'm sure. Go for it, Captain.”

“Okay.” Miguel raises the ax. He needs to be careful, not because the snake is an old, beautiful thing, although it is, scales perfectly cast, ruby eyes gazing up, but because he really doesn't want to break it. There was a save point—so that's why there was a save point—and they can come back, but . . .

Time.

He brings the ax down, not hard enough. The glass trembles and doesn't break.

Around the edges of the room, the statues scrape to life.

Oh, great.

He keeps the ax; it's as good a weapon as anything else in the cache. “Get what you can!” he calls to the others as stone legs thunder over the marble. Someone screams. Leah. She is covering her ears, these vibrations more painful to her than to the others. “Get behind me if you can't fight!” he yells. The statues close in around the five of them. Nick summons a mace, an old-school Chimera weapon Miguel's never found as useful as anything with a trigger.

But guns would be a bad idea in here. There's too much for the bullets to ricochet off, and pulse weapons will be worse than useless against stone.

The ax it is.

He swings at the nearest one, a chimera of its own time, part bird, part something else he doesn't have time to identify. Stone shatters, and he half expects to see blood ooze from the crack spreading up its chest.

Nothing but dust.

Beside him, Josh isn't even using a weapon, just his arm. He throws the statues out of his way, send them flying into the room Miguel just left. Grace doesn't have a weapon either, but she's using one, the best one she has.

“There's a save point in the dome!” she shouts over the noise as Nick lands a particularly successful blow. Miguel looks up for a fraction of a second at the glass fifty, sixty feet above. He's seen things hidden in windows before, but he doesn't know whether he'd have noticed that in a hurry.

And he has no idea how they'd get to it.

A stone punch catches him in the ribs, a blow that would likely have killed him not too long ago. It only winds him, knocking the last ounce of breath from his lungs as he doubles over, gasping.

He's okay.

“Mig?”

“Fine! We need to get that snake! I'm open to ideas!”

He blinks. He's not the only one. Grace, wearing Leah's boots, is climbing up the wall toward the dome. It's slow, he
knows how slow, how weird it is to walk like that, but with every step she moves forward, higher.

“Grace!” he shouts. She wobbles, and his slowly returning breath catches in his throat.

“I'm good! Not afraid! Don't distract me, or I'll drop back down and kick your ass.”

Okay then. He ducks out of the way of a swinging stone ax that makes his own look like a toy, the ax other axes aspire to be.

Aha.

He glances over his shoulder, past Leah, at the display cabinet. Slowly he starts moving backward, taunting the statue, dancing side to side in front of it.

“Don't hit it until I tell you!” he calls to Grace. He'll take the ass kicking.

“Fine!”

This way, statue. Another few feet. Come on. Come on.

Close enough.

“Get out of the way,” he shouts at Leah. She ducks to the side as he feints with the ax.

It works. The statue raises its ax high over its head and brings it crashing down as Miguel dives to the floor. Glass falls around him, slicing his cheek, his arm. He rolls and jumps back to his feet, runs to the shattered cabinet. Brushes the shards away, tiny cuts biting at his fingers.

Where the hell did it go?

A stone arm wraps around his chest in a crushing embrace, drags him backward, away from the broken display. From the corner of his eye he sees Leah trapped the same way, Nick struggling beneath the weight of an impossibly heavy stone foot on his back, holding him to the floor.

“Josh!” he yells. No answer. He looks up. Grace is nearly at the save point, but she can't press it yet. “Josh!”

“Yeah?”

Miguel knows the sound of fear. Josh steps into view, herded by the statues and by a writhing silver snake, undulating across the floor.

Oh, shit.

The snake opens its mouth, bares long, curved fangs. The statues have stopped fighting. Now they're watching.

“Josh,” says Miguel, “you have to catch it.”

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can,” says Leah. “Use your claw.”

Josh shakes his head. His face is pale, sweat visible from here, a sickly sheen. His chest rises and falls much too quickly.

“Josh, I need that snake,” says Miguel.

“C-cache: s-summon g-gun.” The weapon appears in Josh's hand.

“No! Josh, you can't kill it,” Miguel says. The snake has stopped now, trapping Josh up against the remains of its display. Josh ignores him, aims, fires, but is shaking too badly.
The bullet pings off the marble and spins past Leah's shoulder.

“You're going to kill one of us,” she says. “Stop.”

Choices. Josh will never catch the snake, Miguel knows it.

This game will teach you who you are.

Miguel never uses the keypad on his sleeve, he forgets it's there most of the time. He blinks open the private inbox the leaders have been given and types. Everyone else is too busy watching Josh to notice.

[Self: Miguel Anderson] Blake. Help me.

He can almost hear Blake's satisfied laughter.

[Blake] You know what to do. What you have to do.

He needs the snake more than he needs Josh, and maybe it's not venomous. Maybe it'll be okay. “Let it bite you,” he says. Wide, horrified eyes meet his. Miguel feels Nick's and Leah's shock. Grace can't hear him. “Let it bite you.”

Josh nods, kicks out toward the streak of silver. The snake lunges to sink its terrible fangs into his leg. Too terrified to scream, he slides to the floor. The stone arm releases Miguel, and he drops to the ground, running.

Josh tears the snake from his flesh, and in his hand, it returns to inanimate silver. “Cache,” he says with his last breath. High above, Grace is poised, hand over the save point. Miguel closes his eyes, begs forgiveness for what he's about to do. There's no knowing what would happen if he told her now.

What's damaged stays damaged
. He can't turn back the
clock. He looks at Leah, Nick, and puts his finger to his lips. They nod. Tears run down Leah's face.

“Okay, Grace!” he calls, loud enough for his voice to carry all the way up to the top of the dome. It echoes off the glass, the marble, the stone of the statues, which have returned to their rightful places.

She presses the button, begins her slow descent. Miguel, Nick, and Leah gather around Josh's body, shielding it as she crawls down. She hops to the floor and turns to them, grinning with pride, a fear defeated.

Another realized. Miguel steps out of the way.

Josh's body lies still on the sprung floor of the gaming room. The room spins, not quiet now, filled with Grace's racking sobs. Is this what they had seen when the boss had pierced his heart? Is this what the others had felt?

There is no reason for Blake to save this one. Miguel watches dully as the doctors come, carry Josh away. He ignores Leah, Nick calling after him, pushes through the doors, and makes his way blindly along corridors to his suite.

This wasn't what he wanted. He didn't like Josh or the way he played, but Miguel didn't want this.

“Fuck you, Blake,” Miguel says in the quiet of his room, hoping the Gamerunner can hear him. “Fuck you.”