Pulse (22 page)

“Where’d they come from?” Noah had asked her when Liz video-called him. Noah lived twenty-one buildings over, and it took almost an hour to traverse the passageways in order to meet up, which they tried to do at least once a day. But she’d been so excited, she had called him straightaway.

“It says they’re a gift from the Field Games committee. I guess they do this sometimes for newbies like me.”

“What if it’s a hoax? Maybe they’re not even real, and we’re going to get turned away at the gate.”

“Come on, Noah. You know that’s not true. Just embrace it. We’re going to the Field Games!”

The States were very hard on cybercriminal activity, even if it amounted to nothing more than a prank. If they caught you doing things like that, Coin would just disappear out of your account without warning. Your job assignment might go from entertainer to window cleaner. It happened. Liz and Noah were going, and they would be sitting close to the field itself. Still, it wasn’t until they were in the fourteenth row off the field that Noah finally gave in. They were holding hands, which Liz loved, and he leaned in for a long, warm kiss.

“I can see you like these tickets,” Liz said.

“I can’t believe this is real. It’s incredible. They’re going to run right past us.”

It was a perfect summer morning, warm and soft, with a blue sky overhead. They both pulled out their Tablets and reviewed the list of events. First would be a series of men’s decathlon finals, then the women would be throwing in the field in the finals of their decathlon. Liz shook her head, amazed at the turn of events.

“I didn’t expect to see Wade and Clara Quinn in the finals. I had no idea they were this talented.”

“They’re in all the news feeds right now. Everyone’s talking about the twins from the outside.” Noah was scanning through news on the Field Games as he talked. “How well did you know them? You think you could get an autograph?”

Liz didn’t have a clue how to even find Clara or Wade, and she definitely didn’t want anything to do with them. “Honestly, Noah, they’re both class-A jerks. I hope they lose today.”

“Really? Everyone is totally into them. They seem so cool.”

“Trust me on this one. I went to school with them, and they treated everyone else like nobodies. They don’t care about anyone but themselves.”

As they were talking, one of the athletes started jogging up the track in their direction. A roar of cheering rose along their route, and the athlete waved, smiling.

“Speak of the devil,” Noah said, standing up since everyone in front of them was doing the same thing as Clara Quinn approached. To Liz’s surprise, Clara turned at the stands and walked fourteen rows up to where she and Noah were standing. Their seats put Noah right on the edge of the walkway; and when Clara stood next to him, he was awestruck.

“You’re . . . wow, you’re—”

“Tall?” Clara said, but it was more than that. In the morning light and the fresh air, Clara Quinn looked vibrant and powerful. Her newly cut hair was shorter than she’d ever worn it before. Her arms were ripped, and her broad shoulders cast a shadow across Noah’s face. She was easily six inches taller than he was.

“You cut your hair off,” Liz said, suddenly starstruck herself as fans leaned in from every direction.

Clara messed up the blond froth of hair on top of her head and shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “It was getting in my way, so I figured, why not? New home, new look, right?”

“Sure, yeah,” Liz said, nodding nervously. Clara was bigger than life, much more intimidating to look at than she ever had been in the tiny world of Old Park Hill. On the world stage, Clara Quinn was more than holding her own. She was owning it.

“Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and say I hope you enjoy the seats,” Clara said. “I’ll try not to embarrass you.”

Liz couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “
You
sent me the tickets? But why? We weren’t even friends.”

“Really?” Clara said, crunching up her nose, which made everyone who could see her laugh. “I thought we were. My mistake, I guess.”

Before Liz could find a better response, Clara was walking down the steps, signing Tablets with her finger on screens being held out to her. Everyone kept asking Liz what she knew about the twins.
Were they supercool? Were they like normal people? How did they get so good at these events outside the State?

Liz mostly ignored them until the first event was called and everyone sat down, focused on the men’s running finals that were about to take place. Before the first race began, the president of the Western State stood up, along with a group of dignitaries. He waved to the crowd from his box seat, which sat directly across from the seats Liz and Noah were in. Everyone stood, saluted, and began to sing.

“The president is sitting right there,” Noah whispered into Liz’s ear. “Like a hundred yards away. This is crazy cool.”

Liz was glad she’d made Noah so happy, and she was excited to be there; but her heart also ached for her best friend. If Faith had been inside the State, there was no doubt Liz would have asked her to attend, not Noah. Faith would have understood about Clara and Wade. They would have had a good time cutting them up behind their backs, talking about old times. They would have laughed a lot. Noah put an arm around Liz as the music concluded and pulled her in close.

“Let’s get this party started!” he said, all smiles and good cheer.

The first few races blew by in heats of seven runners. Liz and Noah were positioned straight across from the finish line, where the runners were at maximum speed. These were superathletes of the highest caliber, people who had dedicated every ounce of their existence to training for the Field Games. The rules allowed for a maximum of ten competitions, and the year a competitor began was the starting gun. It didn’t matter if they took four or five years off for injuries or whatever; ten years after their first games, competitors were no longer eligible. It was rare to see an athlete over thirty, because most athletes started competing in their late teens.

When Wade entered the starting blocks for his heat of the 100, he waved once to the crowd. He was wearing a black skullcap that covered his entire head, with matching running shorts and a skintight top. The crowd went wild with enthusiasm, a reaction that surprised Liz. She’d been on the outside not that long ago, and she’d always felt like everyone inside the State thought outsiders were nobodies. There were so few people left outside, but the general idea was that being out there meant you weren’t part of the club. She was starting to realize that living in the States was like being chosen—not them choosing you, but you choosing them. When Wade and Clara Quinn stepped into the Western State for the first time, they chose these people. Nothing else mattered. The fact that they’d come from such humble beginnings and found themselves competing in the finals made them superstars. It didn’t hurt that Wade and Clara were both good-looking Amazons. Wade had started the games with a head of long, blond hair held back with a wide black bandanna. Liz thought it made him look like a girl, but she was definitely in the minority. Girls in the State ate it up, gossiping endlessly about the hot young star who had magically appeared from the outside.

Wade went through the motions of warming up, peeling off the skullcap and setting it behind his starting block. He’d shaved his hair into an athletic cut, which produced a gasp from girls around the stadium until the cameras zoomed in and images of Wade appeared on jumbo screens. He flashed a Hollywood smile, and everyone could see that he was even better looking without the long locks that had totally entranced them. Tablets lit up with the Wade hair debate, a ridiculous spectacle that threatened to overshadow the Field Games themselves.

Liz had to admit, the Quinns were a PR machine. They knew how to lather up a crowd. She shook her head with some dismay at the idea of the Quinns looming large over her existence in the State. She could imagine their faces plastered all over the passageways and the Tablets and inside the high-speed trains. They’d probably leave sports behind, become actors and musicians, and lodge into Liz’s life like a cancer she’d never be able to hide from.

“Gross,” she said under her breath as the runners settled into their starting blocks.

“You okay?” Noah asked. Liz nodded and smiled. What did it matter? Soon enough Faith would show up, and the two of them could make fun of the twins all they wanted for the rest of their lives.

The starting gun went off, and everyone in the stands bolted to their feet for a better view. The world record for the 100-yard dash was under seven seconds, so everyone knew it would be over almost before it began. All of Wade’s competitors were like machines, uncanny in their speed and strength, as if some sort of magic had turned them into more than just humans. But this would be a race that no one would forget for another reason. It would be played and replayed, slowed down and put in reverse, forever after. Whole Tablet sites would be dedicated to what would quickly come to be known as “the Race.”

Wade Quinn, the mysterious kid from the outside who had shown up so unexpectedly with his confident smile and good looks, pulled out in front when the gun went off. By the time the rest of the field had gone two steps out of the blocks, Wade was halfway to the finish line. It happened in a flash, like he hadn’t run there at all but had somehow been transported there. But later viewings in slow motion would prove that his legs had indeed carried him to the halfway point in under two seconds. Had he kept up that pace, Wade Quinn would have smashed the 100-meter record, cutting it nearly in half. But later evidence of his facial expressions in slow motion would show that he had seemed to force himself to slow down. He’d slowed so much that all the other runners not only caught up, they passed him, which knocked Wade out of the competition for good without a medal. Still, everyone would say from that day on that no one had ever run a 50-meter dash in double the time Wade Quinn had done it. And there was endless speculation that one day he would return and crush the world record for good.

Wade controlled himself after that, letting himself finish midfield in the rest of his events. The thought of losing when he could have so easily won pounded into his soul in a way that he’d never experienced before. Letting the win slip through his fingers when he could have annihilated every single one of his competitors with ease was almost too much to bear. And yet he knew his slipup in the 100-meter—the way he’d used his powers to force himself down the track without so much as barely thinking about it—had been a scary eye-opener. Had he imagined himself at the finish line instead of the halfway mark, he would have blown the existing record to smithereens in such grand fashion it would have almost certainly caused a wide and endless investigation. It was not the kind of situation that his father or Gretchen would have appreciated.

As he walked off the track, defeated soundly in every event he had competed in, Wade pondered the fact that he’d almost let his sister get to him once again. She’d tried to poison him with thoughts of seizing the Field Games by the throat and choking the life out of every sickeningly normal competitor. Why should they stand by and do nothing? This was their time to shine. They’d earned it, living outside with Drifters and scum and garbage. They deserved to win! Wade had let these kinds of thoughts sink in. He’d held them deep inside and turned them over and over in his mind. He could see himself crossing every finish line first and jumping higher than anyone had ever seen. He could feel the heat coming off the crowd, the power of their adulation. These thoughts made him warm and happy inside. These were things he badly wanted. It was a miracle that he’d been able to stop himself when he did; and really, he didn’t completely understand how it had happened. Not until he saw Clara after, and she smirked at him on her way to the throwing area.

“That was taking it a little far, don’t you think?” she asked him. He understood immediately that it had been she, not himself, who had dropped him to last in the race. Clara had used her own power against him, slowing him down when he’d gone so disastrously out of control.

“Look, brother,” Clara said, wrapping her hand around the center of a javelin and pointing the tip at his chest. “You’re stronger than I am, always will be. But you’re reckless. You might have just shown the world something it’s not supposed to see. Not yet.”

“You were the one who said we should crush these losers. What happened to that idea? Did you lose your nerve?” Wade asked. He hated the idea that she had intervened in the race. It felt like a violation of the rules, an unsaid thing they should never do to each other.

“Your problem is that you have no control,” Clara said, touching the end of the javelin to his chest. A crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand was watching, wondering what the two of them were talking so intensely about and why Clara was pointing a javelin at her brother. “You don’t know anything about subtlety. You’re a loose cannon. And in the end, that’s exactly what might get us killed.”

Clara walked away, but she smiled first for the cameras. She made it look like they had a harmless sibling rivalry going. Wade was totally confused, which tended to be the way his sister always made him feel.

An hour later he would find himself more confused still. The memory of Wade’s brief and unexplainable move to the front of the pack was about to be pounded into the dirt by Clara Quinn.

Clara didn’t think she was smarter than just her brother. That wasn’t saying much. She felt smarter than pretty much everyone on the planet. Her bravado, unlike Wade’s, had as much to do with outwitting people as it did with beating them physically. There was only one person who would later claim to understand all the reasons behind her decision making on the final day of the Field Games, and that was Gretchen. She alone knew the mind of Clara Quinn in ways that no one else did.

Unlike her brother, Clara had no true illusions of grandeur when it came to something as meaningless as throwing a javelin or a hammer. Nothing about athletics had the allure of true power. In the events that followed, Clara Quinn threw an average javelin, raced an average heat in her finals, and threw a below-average hammer into the middle of the field. They were not stunningly bad results for a newcomer from the outside; in fact, they were still quite remarkable. She’d gotten what she had come for—respect—and that was enough for the time being.