A Sinister Game (15 page)

“Breathe a word of this to anyone, Arthur One, and I will come for you. You have no clue as to the extent of my abilities. Fire is child’s play
,
”
s
he told him. She leaned in even closer so that her lips were mere inches from his. “And if you think that Game Control will stop me before I get to you, just remember this, Arthur.” She smiled and she knew it looked as nasty as it felt. “If I have to, I will
die
trying
to kill you
.”

With that, she slowly rose and took a step back.

The color had completely drained from Arthur’s face and his eyes were the size of
teacups
.

S
he’ll kill me… let her die outside the wall…
good riddance
…
.

He was sending her outside the wall.
That was good enough for her.

She turned away from him and strode out of the room. When she was in the hall beyond the mainframe lab,
she expende
d a bit more telekinetic energy
slamming
the door shut behind her and then
moving at
least a dozen
large scrap computer parts down the hall to lodge them against the closed door.

For the tim
e being, Arthur was locked in, a
nd from the mess she’d made outside of his only exit, she figured it would take at
least
another
l
ight leader to get him back out again.

Once
she was back in the transporter and closing
the door behind her, she slumped against the far wall and stared down at the key in her hand.

Her hand was shaking around the metal key.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she whispered.
I can’t believe I did any of it
at
all. That wasn’t me. I set a man on fire. I told him lie after lie. I threatened him and stole from him and locked him in a room without food or water.

She exhaled a shaky breath and dropped her face into her hands. “What have I become?” she muttered into her palms.

You know what you’ve become,
she told herself
. Why else would you be able to hear his thoughts?

Tears built swiftly in her eyes
,
and she hurriedly brushed them away, using a touch more force than was necess
ary. She felt angry suddenly, i
mpatient.

“Pull yourself together
Victoria,” she hissed. She never accepted regret or guilt from her team members
in the middle of a Game. She w
ouldn’t
accept it from herself, either.

One does what one must
.
Max had told her that once. I
t made sense to her
more
now more than ever before.

She pushed herself
of
f
the wall and straightened her uniform. She smoothed her hair, touched her smoky quartz locket.

Then she strode to the transporter’s console and inserted the small key that Arthur had given her.
At once, every button on the console flashed red and the transporter blurred into impossible motion.

Victoria forced he
rself to take a few deep, calming
breaths.

By the time the transporter slowed again and the walls solidified once more, she was feeling a little better and ready to face the next challen
ge in Victor Black’s
Game.

She turned toward the doors and waited.
They slid open with a quiet hiss that was instantly drowned out by the mad rush of water
blasting
through the opening and into the transporter cube.
Victoria gasped as the impact shoved her hard against the back wall. When she did, she inhaled not only air but a painful amount of water.

She coughed violently and tried to inhale
again, only to get another mouth
-full of water. The cube was already full.

Salty
,
she thought vaguely
as the water filled spaces in her body where water was never supposed to go.

H
ope she drowns…
.

Arthur’s mental words came back to her now as her lungs began to scre
am at her and her head started to
pound. Without thinking
, she
awkwardly
punched at the controls, trying
to
close the doors
again as she treaded water
, but the doors wouldn’
t budge.

T
he console began to spark, and c
urrents of electricity
arc
ed
through the water. She could vaguely hear them, though they sounded different than they would have had they b
een moving through air rather than
water.

She tried to jam the doors closed telekinetically, but could barely concentrate through the pain, and the doors weren’t obeying anyway.

Pain throbbed through her lungs, up into her neck, and surrounded her like a cloak. Desperately,
Victoria left the console and dove through the open doors in
to the unknown water beyond. Somehow, maybe out of sheer desperation, she
managed to hold her breath even though
every fiber of her body
was telling her to cough and inhale.
Cough and inhale!

As she propelled herself through salty brine she could barely see through, she imagined her lungs full of air instead of water.

But that
didn’t work
either. There was nothing to heal, really. There was just pain.
They still hurt and they were still
partially
filled with salty liquid, caustic and
un-breathable
.

And she was drowning. She swam and swam, but
her muscles were seizing up, thick and heavy and corded with agony. T
here seemed to be no surface to this ocean. Stars swam in her stinging vision. Her toes were going numb in her boots.

Arthu
r One was going to get his wish
after all.

The first thing Victoria noticed was sound. It was a crackling and popping and a slow whoosh-shoosh kind of sound. The whoosh-shoosh was distant. The crackling
and popping, however, was very close, and Victoria
recognized it
as the sound of a fire
.

She tried to open her eyes, but when she did her vision was a mass of blurry orange and black
,
and the air burned her eyes. She closed them again, blinking rapidly to wet the sting away and clear her sight.

“It’s the salt,” a man said. He was somewhe
re to her left, beside the fire.

A
campfire
. She could feel something like grass and sand beneath the fingers of her right hand.

“Go slow, Victoria. Take it easy.”

She knew that voice.
Max
. She tried to say his name, b
ut when her lips peeled apart,
she found her throat
swollen and incapable of sound. All she managed was a raspy
sort of
gasp.

“
Shhh
. It’s okay,
I’m here.”

It
was
Max. She felt the cool brush of his fingers against her cheek, then her forehead. He was moving the hair out of her face.

“That was close, Victoria.” He sighed and seemed to move away, perhaps sitting back. She still couldn’t tell because her eyes were shut tight. Her world was nothing but feeling and sound. Not even her sense of smell was working right; it was as if her nostrils
had been seared by the salt
.

“You were almost at the surface, you know. Another few feet and you’d have made it. You just didn’t know because it’s dark
right now
.” He was moving again
. S
he heard the creaking of leather. A
downtime uniform jacket? Th
ere was a muted
clunk
of thin metal, followed by the sound of pouring liquid.

“Here, drink this.
Slowly.
”

Max wrapped a strong arm around
her shoulders and helped her
sit up. She could tell by the feel of him that he’d positioned her back against his chest and was kneeling behind her.

He placed a metal cu
p of some kind to her lips. She inhaled but
still could detect no scent. She hesitated.

“It’s water,” he said, “and not salt water this time.” His voice was very slightly reprimanding, and perhaps a bit impatient. But
it was
gentle, nonetheless.

Victoria took a sip. It hurt to swallow and almost instantly turned her stomach. It
was
just water. Why did it have that effect?

“You almost drowned,” Max told her as he gently laid her back down.
He moved away, and she again tried to open her eyes. This time she
managed to see the outline of the fire a few feet away and the dark shadow of Max’s tall form as he moved about the camp.

She
lifted her arm. It felt heavy, but it worked normally. Gingerly, she
rub
bed her eyes, ignoring the burn
.
After a bit, they felt cleansed by tears, and her vision was much clearer.

A gleaming
long sword
rested
against a boulder on the other side of the campfire. It was Max’s sw
ord.
Its scabbard lay on the ground beside it, along with a
sheathed dagger and a small metal canteen,
Field issue.

A few feet closer to Victoria, M
ax was bent over a leather sack
searching for something. As if he could sense her eyes on him, he stopped what he was doing and peered at her over his shoulder.

Eyes like blue topaz speared through her with almost tangible force
. He was wearing black, which sh
e had never before seen him wear
. The dark color caused his w
avy shoulder-length hair to appear
darker than normal and his
eyes to look lighter.

Victoria’s heart thumped.
He looked good in black.

He had a bit of stubble on his chin, the way he always did after they’d been on the Field a few days in a battle against another team. It lent him
a rugged and careless air.
Just then, it
made him look like a rogue.

It almost didn’t fit his demeanor. He was always so careful and capable and responsible. But
at that moment
, he
honestly
looked like he could easily bed a woman and leave her in the morning.

Victoria blushed at that thought. She could feel the heat of it rush across her neck and up into her cheeks. She knew that Max had seen it when the blue in his eyes sparked with perceptive interest and the corners of his mouth drew up in
the
slight
est
of
smile
s
.

Victoria
looked away, embarrassed. She
tried to sit up
, and her ribs and lungs objected
. She winced
as Max
made his way back to her side.

“Why
are you moving? You should rest,” h
e
said even while he
helped her s
it up as if he knew
arguing
was pointless
.

She wanted to ask him what had happened. The last thing she remembered, she was in a transporter cube and the doors had opened into what could only have been the ocean. She had been trying to find the surface
, but she’d been drowning instead
.

And
now she was
here
,
on solid ground – with Max.

Her throat was tender and probably seared by the salt, but not worth expending the energy to heal. Instead, she took another slow sip of water
from the canteen he’d left beside her
and carefully
cleared her throat. This time, there was
n’t quite as much
pain.

“What happened?”
s
he asked. She looked around, but all she saw was night beyond the blinding flames of the
campfire
.
“How did you get here, and where are we?”
A cool breeze rustled some tall grass in that darkness and then moved through the small clearing to breathe against her exposed skin. She looked down to find that her downtime uniform had been removed. All she wore was a white tank top and matching underwear.