Qualify (23 page)

“Not all that different from what we’re doing now,” I say. “Qualify or die.”

“Oh, no!” Nefir makes a short sound that might be a laugh. “If you think your Qualification is even remotely similar—okay, maybe only in the most technical sense of having life-threatening high stakes—in that case, yes, I suppose it is. But, no—the Atlantis Grail is
brutal
. The Games include events and tasks of unspeakable difficulty, contests between world-class competitors, master fighters and athletes, master scientists and artists. People train for years before attempting to enter the Games. If any of you refugees from Earth were to enter, you would first have to train—which would take months, years. And even so, you would
still
lose your lives.”

The class has grown so silent that I don’t think anyone’s breathing.

To bring his point home, the Atlantean finally looks away from me, and now his gaze scans the room. He pauses to consider. “Let’s see—next year’s Games will take place just as you arrive on Atlantis, which would be about fifteen of your Earth months from now. I suppose you could use the time on-board our starships to train, in time for next year’s event . . . in which case, my sympathies are with you in advance.”

Nefir pauses again then puts his fingers on the rim of the golden grail. “Natives of Atlantis die every year in the Games. Even though we do everything to actively discourage participation, thousands of them die—people of great talent and resourcefulness. Good, solid non-citizens who sacrifice themselves for a remote wild dream. Because, out of thousands of entrants, only Ten can win each year. Ten lucky winners who are called champions can gain the laurels of citizenship and all the high tech luxuries that come with it. Furthermore, all the champions’ wishes are granted automatically—anything within the scope of possibility. To be in the Top Ten each year is the fulfillment of everything imaginable.”

“If so many people die, then why do they even bother entering?” someone says from behind me.

“Because the rewards are extraordinary. And because it is human nature—to try and prove yourself.” Nefir shakes his head. “There are exclusive luxuries. There are unique and expensive high-end technologies such as advanced medicine that can work miraculous cures. Basic medical resources for the general population do not offer such treatments. But a champion winner of the Atlantis Grail can demand access to any and all procedures. Some past champions have used their newfound privilege to achieve complete physical transformations, while others have used it to cure family members of all diseases—”

“Can you cure cancer?” I interrupt suddenly. My gut is suddenly churning with a cold strange feeling. . . .

Nefir glances at me. “No. Because what you call ‘cancer’ is not a true disease. It is DNA-level cell damage, an imbalance. A body’s general loss of control over its mechanisms, cell function, and resources. The causes are varied, including genetic predisposition, environmental stressors, and lifestyle choices. But the end result is the same—a body’s surrender to itself. There is no ‘cure.’ What our medical technology can do is remove the cancerous cells already present and then restore your body’s control and general immune functionality—you might say, reset the internal immune clock. But the fight against any new damage remains up to the individual.”

“Sounds like a cure to me.”

“Perhaps.” Nefir looks away from me and faces the rest of the class. “Any other questions on the Atlantis Grail?”

Candidates watch him back with dimmed expressions. I glance to one side of me and see Laronda frowning. And on the other side, a boy is shaking his head in disgust. There are many stunned faces. For the first time, it seems we’ve all suffered a strange blow to our confidence, to our very hope.

This new reality about non-citizenship, now that we know about it, really sucks. I should be dazed and depressed as everyone. And yet—for some reason, my mind is racing. . . .

I am thinking what might happen if my Mom underwent treatment with this advanced medical technology, had all her cancerous cells blasted away, her immunity reset—or whatever it is they would do to renew her body’s defenses.

To make it happen, all I’d need to do is first Qualify, then train and enter the Games of the Atlantis Grail.

And then, finally, I would need to beat out thousands of highly skilled native Atlanteans in unspeakable contests of skill, strength, and endurance, and
win
the Atlantis Grail.

Naturally I would also need to do all this
before
the asteroid hits Earth. Then, as a champion, I can make all my demands to have my parents saved and brought over to Atlantis, and Mom can get her treatment.

I start laughing quietly at my crazy self, and end up having to put my hand over my mouth.

T
he rest of the day is a blur of pain and overextended stretched muscles. After Atlantis Culture I say bye to Laronda who heads to a different class. And then I haul my butt downstairs to the basement for torture—ahem, Agility Training. Here I discover that it is possible to feel even more agony and humiliation.

Oalla Keigeri, the Atlantean drill sergeant, makes us run seven laps instead of five. This time the widely spread-out snake of Candidates barely dragging themselves along the perimeter of the gym is even longer than yesterday. A few athletic types make good time around the room—including Claudia Grito who’s once again in my class. I watch her pass me several times—on her third and fourth lap while I am still on my second—and try to keep a wide berth between us. But after this morning’s incident she’s ignoring me completely, and instead showing off her great runner pace.

Everyone else who is not a jock is barely huffing along, and once again I come in dead last, and earn a demerit.

“Have you been running like I told you?” Oalla asks, scanning my yellow token.

“Yes . . .” I gasp, bending over to catch my laboring breath. “But it’s only been . . . one day. I . . . ran this . . . morning.”

The Atlantean girl looks at me hard. “You will run again tonight, and then again tomorrow morning.”

Then for the next forty minutes we practice a combination of hoverboarding around the room, and climbing the scaffolding.

“You will climb all the way to the top tier, run across it, then climb back down to the ground,” Oalla tells us. Then you will climb back up halfway, run across the middle tier to the other end and climb back down. Repeat this until I tell you to stop.”

The class groans. Even guys like Chris who are in reasonably good shape, don’t look too happy.

We start climbing the scaffolding. It’s only been a few moments and I can already barely feel the rungs of the ladder with my fingers as I enter a kind of weird disembodied state of exhaustion. It comes over me as I drag myself up and then barely run across the tall scaffolding strip, trying not to look over the edge down. There are people ahead of me and behind me, and occasionally we collide as someone runs too slow or too fast, and all I see is the back and legs of the person before me. . . .

I lose track of time completely. There is only my labored breathing, a weakness in all my extremities and a dull ache in my gut. At some point I think I am going to throw up, as I stagger and barely hold on to the rungs on my umpteenth way down, almost losing my grip and falling.

Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly see Blayne Dubois. He is also in this class today apparently, and I haven’t noticed, because he is body-surfing the hoverboard high up overhead, higher than the highest level of scaffolding, almost near the ceiling.

Wow. . . . In my daze of exhaustion it occurs to me—how easily he handles the turns, and he is flying
fast
, super-fast, like a pro, easily, fearlessly. His dark hair is sleeked back from air resistance, and I see his body is arranged flat and compact on the hoverboard, his legs and feet fixed straight, without slipping.

For someone who cannot walk, this boy has remarkable balance. And the sleek way his hands extend at his sides resemble an Olympic skeleton rider hugging the sled with his body.

I stare at Blayne flying overhead and almost get knocked off the scaffolding as the person behind me runs into me, because apparently I’ve stopped to gawk.

“Sorry . . .” I gasp to the boy behind me and then continue my teetering run forward to the end of the scaffolding where the ladder begins.

“No slacking! Keep going, everyone!” On the ground Oalla is looking up at me, and her voice rings through the Training Hall.

This goes on for several more interminable minutes.

Next up, Oalla gathers us on the ground and calls down the hoverboards. We stand upright, some of us looking dazed like zombies. Jack Carell, the large heavy boy with blond curly hair, is wiping rivulets of sweat from his reddened face.

“This time you will ride the hoverboards in a wave pattern,” Oalla says, looking at the sorry lot of us, while the hoverboards line up, levitating in rows, six inches above the floor.

“Huh?” Mateo Perez says gruffly, blinking sweat away from his eyes.

“Yesterday you rode the boards along a flat plane, never rising or falling,” Oalla says. “Today we ride a vertical wave, constantly rising and descending, so that you learn to keep balance on an incline slope.”

Oalla then looks around and up, noting Blayne Dubois who is making a circle pass about twenty feet up in the air, near the ceiling. “Blayne!” she says loudly. “Please come down here for a moment.”

We all stare, some in greater amazement than others, as the “wheelchair guy,” as some of the whispering Candidates refer to him, calls out a series of confident commands. Suddenly his hoverboard nosedives, at the same time as it is sliding closer to our group. In the next blink he comes to a stop before Oalla.

Blayne raises himself up on his hands, so that his upper body is elevated while his lower body and legs remain stretched flat on the board. I can see the muscles in his upper arms tense up. He then looks up at her in expectancy, head turned to the side, with a cool expression on his face. His hair is falling over his blue eyes, and his breathing is elevated, but only slightly. “Yeah?”

It occurs to me, Blayne does not seem to be particularly affected by the hot Atlantean girl’s stunning good looks. . . . He appears to be rather indifferent, and you might even say, annoyed. Not much surprise there—Blayne is apparently annoyed by most people.

“Blayne, please demonstrate the wave pattern as I showed you earlier,” Oalla says, looking down at him. Her tone of voice actually goes mild compared to what she uses with the rest of us. Does she feel sorry for him, I wonder?

“Ride the hoverboard from here to the end of the room and back. Use the Rise-Descend-Level command pattern on repeat. Candidates, observe!”

Oh, yeah, the sergeant bark is definitely back in that last sentence.

“Sure,” Blayne says. He lowers himself flat, chin to the board, arms and hands stretched out at his sides, tight against his body, assuming an aerodynamic position—and I can see from up-close he is in fact gripping the edges of the board with his fingers.

Then he commands the hoverboard to do a 180 turn to face the back of the room. And then, “Go! Rise!” The board pounces forward and immediately starts sloping up until it is ten feet over our heads—“Descend!” The board is now falling—“Level!” It levitates forward for about five feet.

And then Blayne repeats the command sequence. He is rising and falling like a moving sine wave, a vertically undulating snake, a sleek dolphin gliding through an airy ocean. . . .

Candidates watch with slack jaws as he travels the length of the hall, comes to the end, then returns.

“Nicely done!” Oalla points to the other boards hovering at ready. “Now, all of you, do the same, except you will be standing up.”

“Yeah, right,” a girl mutters.

The class lines up and we begin. The first few hoverboard riders flail wildly, and there are undignified yells as teens barely hang on during the rising and falling stages.

There’s one boy ahead of me in line for the hoverboard, and I stand waiting, with quaking knees, and think about how
I am afraid of heights
.

This is about to get really bad.

My turn is here. I get up on the hoverboard and find my basic stance. The rubber soles of my sneakers dig into the charcoal gray surface of the board, as if that’s going to help once I start the up-and-down rollercoaster. . . . Ugh.

I take a deep breath. “Go! Rise!”

The board underneath me lurches, and I feel myself lifting up, and at the same time moving forward. I lean in, pressing forward, with my knees bending to maintain the horizontal balance. Three feet, five feet, eight. My sneakers dig into the board and I am wobbling like crazy, hands apart for balance. “Descend!” I speak through my teeth and at the same time squeeze my eyes, as I feel the floor drop out from under me as the rollercoaster plunges. . . . The rubber soles of my footwear begin to slip. . . .

Hold on, hold on, hold on . . . just hold on!

I open my eyes, and it’s a good thing too, because I am about to crash into the floor—“Level!” I cry out in panic, then take deep calming breaths, as I now glide on even ground, six inches above the floor.

And then I do the whole thing over again.