Rush (7 page)

I stumble and scream, my cry of agony reverberating through the room, echoing inside my head.

The pain, my fear—they piss me off. This is
not
the way I plan to make my exit from this life, kneeling on the floor, shaking and gasping. If I’m checking out, it’ll be on my terms—just like my mom. Near the end, every doctor agreed that there was no hope and every test confirmed it, so she signed herself out of the hospital, declined heroic measures. For the longest time, I’ve been angry with her about that, too. But maybe, in this second, I understand her motivation just a little. She couldn’t change the destination. All she could do was pick the route. When she closed her eyes for the last time, she was in hospice with my dad and me by her side and AC/DC rocking on.
Her
terms. Yeah, so maybe I get it now. What a time to have a revelation.

A fresh wave of pain assaults me. This time when I scream, it’s the way my grandfather taught me, loud and true, a
kiai
shout that focuses my energy and my will into the attack and the weapon cylinder in my hand. The metal chills until it’s like ice against my palm. A high-pitched hum starts, and vibrations run up my arm. Darkness arrows from the cylinder’s open end, instantaneous and forceful, packed with power, like water shooting from the end of a fire hose. My arm jerks back with the recoil.

It worked. The weapon worked—

The Drau zips aside. My shot wavers and then disappears.

—I missed.

It’s as if I hear my grandfather’s voice in my head:
Mamoru
. Defend. Protect.

I won’t just defend, because I have a feeling that won’t be enough to keep me alive. I’ll attack. I need to hit this thing where it has no defense.

I move on instinct, diving forward, belly to the floor, because I know my legs are too rubbery to hold my weight if I try to stand. I go sliding through the alien’s spread legs, roll onto my back, and shoot directly up.

For a frozen millisecond, nothing happens.

The Drau reaches down, glowing fingers curled and clawlike, smooth and reflective as glass. My heart slams against my ribs.

Then the black hole spurting from the muzzle of my weapon sucks in the alien’s hips . . . legs folding up alongside its torso . . . shoulders . . . arms. Gone. Its light is gone. Extinguished.

I did that. I killed it.

Bile burns the back of my throat.

I have no chance to puke. Or to celebrate. Another bright form comes at me. But I’ve learned from my mistakes. I don’t look at its eyes, and I don’t hesitate. I push to my knees and shoot. The hum starts; I realize now that it’s the sound of the cylinder powering up. My weapon’s darkness sucks out the Drau’s light. I have a handful of seconds to lurch to my feet before another zooms at me. They don’t just want me dead. They want to make me suffer. They want to enjoy it. Somehow, I
know
that, and it horrifies me.

Adrenaline surges. I spin. Shoot. Spin again. Shoot. I don’t know how many there are or how long we fight, but then I’m spinning and aiming and there are no more targets.

I’m panting, gasping, feeling like the whole world is out of control. It takes me a second to orient myself. When I do, I see Luka by the far wall.

“I thought you guys said they’re slower at night.” The words that come out are not the ones I mean to say.

“That was slow,” Luka answers, his voice tight. “You don’t want to see them during the day.”

He’s right. I don’t. I don’t want to ever see anything like them again.

Luka sags back against the wall. He’s holding his arm across his abdomen, supported by his opposite hand. There’s blood dripping from a ragged gash in his forearm. “I’m going to lose points for this,” he says wanly.

I stagger toward him, barely able to stay upright, but the look of sheer horror that creeps across his features stops me cold.

“How many times were you hit?” he asks, trying to push off the wall and failing.

“I don’t know.” I glance down. I see nothing to justify his expression. And then I do. First, I see my thigh. My jeans are sliced clean through, and the cloth is wet, saturated with my blood. I don’t remember getting cut.

Then I see my wrist. The screen on my black band’s no longer green. It’s an orangey red.

Don’t let it turn red
. That’s what Jackson said to me back in the lobby.

“It’s not red,” I say to Luka, though I don’t know if I’m reassuring him or myself. “It’s orange, not red.” I’ve barely finished saying that when my legs drop out from under me and I slump to the floor. Fatigue hits me like a truck. I’m tired, so tired, and colder than I’ve ever been. And every inch of my body screams in pain.

“You looked in their eyes,” Luka says, every word dripping horror.

I look at Luka’s con. It isn’t the dark green we started with, either. It’s more of a greenish yellow.
ROY G BIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
. I can almost hear Mr. Clement’s voice droning out the spectrum over and over again as he handed out the prisms back in eighth-grade science class. I don’t know why, but thinking about it now makes me want to laugh.

Then it makes me want to cry.

I’m so tired.

I force my eyes to stay open even though they want to close. Luka tells me to hang on, his voice tinny, echoing like it’s coming to me through a very long tube. I see him try to move toward me, but his leg buckles. He’s hurt. There’s blood. The uneven shards of his arm bones are poking through his skin, so white against the red, red, red.

There’s a low, keening moan beside me. I turn my head and see Tyrone crouched on the ground. There’s something in front of him. No . . . not some
thing
. Some
one
.

“Richelle,” Tyrone rasps, and holds out his hand toward her. But he doesn’t touch her. Why doesn’t he touch her? Why doesn’t he help her?

She’s not moving. She’s just lying there, her limbs at awkward angles.

Pushing my hands against the floor, I try to leverage myself up. But I can’t. I’m too weak. The screen on my con’s a very dark orange, and the skin of my arm looks gray. My gaze shoots back to Richelle. I can see her legs, though Tyrone’s back blocks the rest of her from my view. The skin of her legs looks gray, too.

“Why don’t we make the jump?” Luka asks, his tone edged with panic.

“Luka,” I whisper. He’s slumped to one side, barely upright. The smile he sends me is a shadow of itself. His lips are bloodless, his skin chalk pale. I know he means to reassure me, but that smile scares me.

“I don’t know,” Tyrone says, his voice dull. “They’re terminated. We did the job. We should jump. I don’t know why we don’t jump.” He moves a little to the left, and I see Richelle’s arm stretched across the cold floor. Her con’s red. Completely red.

My stomach drops.

“Hang on, baby. Hang on,” Tyrone says, and lays his palm against Richelle’s cheek. Then he snarls, “Where the hell is Jackson?” Even as he finishes the question, the light in the doorway flickers out, then returns, but dimmer than it was before. A dark silhouette fills the rectangle of light. It’s Jackson.

“There was a problem,” he says. I’m guessing he means there was another alien or two. “It’s taken care of. We’ll be pulled in thirty.”

In three strides, he’s beside Richelle, but he’s looking at me. He’s still wearing those shades. I can’t see his eyes, but I feel his gaze.

Tyrone’s breathing too fast, and I can hear each breath catch on a sob.

Jackson squats down beside Richelle. His lips draw thin, his head bows, and a tiny shiver shakes his shoulders. His head lifts, his expression blank. He’s every inch the aloof, arrogant asshole he’s been since the first second I met him, but something in his posture makes me want to lay my hand on his shoulder.

Then he rises. “Ten seconds.”

“No.” Tyrone shakes his head back and forth, very fast. “No. We can’t leave her.”

“We can’t take her,” Jackson says, his tone flat. “You know that.”

“No. We can’t leave her!” Luka pushes to his feet.

One side of Jackson’s mouth twists. “What makes you think we have a choice?”

THE PAIN IN MY HEAD IS BACK, BUT NOT AS BAD AS BEFORE. Three headaches in one day. I’ve hit a milestone.

Last thing I remember, it was night, but now the late-afternoon sun shines down, hurting my eyes. So I close them. Carly screams my name, the sound shrill and panicked, but
off
somehow.

Snap
. My eyes open. My focus sharpens. I’m falling, and there’s no way to stop it. I see the truck, so close I can make out the chunks of rust on the grille. I see the pavement, flat and gray, coming up to meet me. I hit hard and slide along the rough surface, layers of cloth and skin scraping away.

There’s the endless screech of the brakes and the smell of burning rubber. My head jerks up and I try to scramble out of the way. I can’t find my footing.

Terror clogs my throat.

Then there’s a hand on my arm, tight as a vise, yanking me to my feet.

Luka.

He pulls. I pull. Opposite directions. Our dance is all wrong.

He lets go abruptly. Stored momentum propels us away from each other. I tumble back and land hard on my ass and my elbows.

Music blares. Brakes scream. I feel a rush of air as the old pickup truck surges through the space between Luka and me. It comes to a screeching stop about five feet away.

Sprawled on the ground, I stare at the truck, my elbows stinging where they scraped along the pavement. A quick inventory tells me I’m not seriously hurt. My gaze jerks to Luka. He’s on the ground, limbs splayed. The sight makes me think of Richelle, lying so still just before we got pulled.

Luka pushes to his feet. His arms are whole and smooth—no blood, no shattered bone, no torn skin. Other than a fresh scrape on his knee and another on his hand, he’s all in one piece. And I’m in one piece, not broken and bloody. There’s no gash on my thigh. Even my jeans are in one piece—no rip in the fabric, no bloodstain.

Luka and I are both fine. Just like Richelle said, we respawned: rematerialized miraculously healed. That must mean that wherever she got pulled to, Richelle is okay, too. And Tyrone. And Jackson. I exhale a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

I stare at Luka. “The others—”

He slices the air with the edge of his hand and stalks toward me. “Not a word,” he insists, low and intense, as he hunkers down beside me. “We don’t talk to each other about it outside the game. And we don’t talk to anyone else about it. Not ever. Not if we want to live.”

The game. He’s going to keep calling it that? The Drau, the fight—they felt real to me. If it’s a game, it’s one I don’t want to play again. But Jackson was pretty adamant when he said it wasn’t a game, and even if I wasn’t willing to take his word for it, what I’ve seen today was pretty convincing.

I rub my forehead. I’m so confused.

“They’ll know if we talk about it,” Luka continues. “And they’ll terminate us.”

Our eyes lock. I can see that he believes everything he’s saying, and he’s afraid. I shiver. “Who are
they
?”

“Not a word,” he snarls.

I nod. I know how to pick my battles. Defer. Distract. Wait it out. Right now, Luka won’t spill. But some other time, when he’s more relaxed, when his guard’s down . . .

His lips compress in a tight line. His eyes are dark and fathomless.

Wait. What? His eyes are
dark
? They’re not blue; they’re the rich black-coffee brown I always thought they were until that moment when we were both lying broken on the ground after the truck hit us.

Except it never did hit us.

I glance at the truck, and then squint up at the late-afternoon sky. We’re in exactly the same place—and time—as we were before everything happened. Before the lobby and the weapons and the aliens and the battle. Richelle said the hours were banked. I guess we just made a withdrawal.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“We live our lives.” There’s an edge to Luka’s answer, a tinge of bitterness.

We live our lives. That’s what Richelle said in the lobby . . . something about getting to go back to our regularly scheduled lives. Until next time.

Carly screams my name again, the syllables dragged out, ridiculously slow. I turn my head and see her running toward me, but her movements are almost comical, like she’s part of a film moving in slow motion. It takes me a second to realize that
everything
is in slow motion, except Luka and me.

I have so many questions, and none of them get answers because Luka clearly isn’t willing to offer any and because I never get the chance to ask. The pain in my head grows until it pushes against the backs of my eyes and makes the joints in my jaw ache. My ears pop, and the pain is gone.

“
Bam
. We’re back,” Luka murmurs a millisecond before something changes and the world speeds up. Carly’s no longer in slo-mo. She’s running at me full tilt.

“Miki! Oh my gawd, Miki! Are you okay?” Carly skids to a stop and drops to a squat by my side. She runs her hands along my legs, then my arms. I glance down, expecting to see the con on my wrist. It’s gone, just like the pain in my head and the pain in my ribs and the blood that should have been all over the ground.