Arena (6 page)

It grew hard to breathe. The white splotches swelled. Something slapped her ear. . . .

The next thing she knew, she lay on her back at the rear of a low-ceilinged cave. The stranger crouched by the entrance, shooting at the harries outside. Beside her lay his pack and the rock dragon, dried blood caking its pointed teeth. A milky eye stared at her alongside a serrated blue face crest. It stank of sour socks.

Thwip, thwip, thwip
. Turquoise light flared pink and faded.

The man drew back, opened a panel in the rifle’s side, and pulled a small pink cube out of it. Tossing the cube aside, he slapped in a replacement and resumed firing, all one-handed. His left arm dangled at his side, his shirt sleeve slit in several places to reveal a bicep scored with red welts. Another welt seared across his cheekbone, and his eyelid drooped above it.

Thwip. Thwip—thwip
.

Callie knew she should help him, but it felt as if a boulder lay atop her chest. She couldn’t feel her left arm or either of her legs. Was the poison spreading? Would the numbness soon creep to her heart? And if it wasn’t spreading, would it wear off? Or would it leave her paralyzed for life?

The amebic lights returned to carry her into oblivion.

When she came to, she was alone in full darkness and still unable to move. She thought the dark bulk beside her might be the pack with its smelly burden, but where was the man? Had the harries gotten him?

Panic rattled through her, and she fainted again.

When she awoke for the third time, the man had lit a small three-legged lamp and was laying sticks for a fire. The pile of branches to his right revealed where he’d been earlier—collecting firewood.

Her mouth was cotton dry, her head ached, and her stomach felt as hollow as a dead tree. But at least she could sense her limbs again— cold and tingling unpleasantly. Her pack lay at her feet, but her attempts to reach it only proved she couldn’t even roll over, much less sit up. After a brief struggle she sagged back onto the dirt, gasping.

The stranger squatted beside her. “Want some help?”

“A drink,” she croaked, shocked at the inhuman sound of her voice.

The smell of him was strong as he lifted her to a sitting position against the wall. His nearness made her uneasy, and she kept her eyes off his face, concentrating on the water pouring over her parched lips and tongue. Seeing she could handle the bottle on her own, he let go and eased back. She drank eagerly until he stopped her, then licked her lips and dropped her head back against the rock.

When she opened her eyes, he had returned to arranging the firewood into a small teepee. Her glance flicked to the scarlet welts on his face, the clumsiness of his left arm. “You saved my life,” she rasped.

He didn’t look up. “We’re not out of this yet.”

“Surely the worst is past.”

Silence.

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

“I’m sure you are.”

She frowned, her good feelings toward him evaporating. “Well, it’s only my first day—”

“That’s obvious.”

Callie snapped her lips shut.
All right, forget it
. She let him work in silence for a few moments, then said, “I don’t suppose you have a name.”

“Pierce.” He positioned another stick.

“I’m Callie Hayes.”

No reply.

Great
, Callie thought.
A macho male with a chip on his shoulder.
Well, two can play this game
. She drew the manual from her back pocket and started to read. But she’d lost her glasses in the harry attack, and the dim light made the print too fuzzy to see without a struggle. In the end she had too many questions and not enough patience to ignore him, so presently she tried again. “You said there was no point staying on the white road. What did you mean?”

Pierce laid the last stick onto his teepee, then drew a long-barreled handgun from his holster and fired a burst of green light at the wood. Yellow flames licked greedily upward.

“The gates are there,” he said, pulling two metal stakes from his pack. “You just can’t get to them.”

“You know this for a fact?” She pushed a lock of hair out of her face. “You’ve actually seen one?”

“Of course.”

“Well, maybe it was an exception.”

“I’ve been to all fourteen.” He began to pound a stake into the hard earth on one side of the fire. “The routes to reach them are different, but the gates are all identical—and all identically unattainable.” Rocking back on one knee, he met her gaze. “This place is like a doughnut— the Inner Realm’s the hole, the Outer Realm’s the cake, with a ring of cliffs between the two. All the gates stand atop those cliffs, and all the roads end at the bottom. So while you can see the gates just fine, you can’t get up to ’em. Though believe me, many have tried, long and hard—myself included.” Grimly, he finished pounding in the stake.

Callie watched him, frowning.
Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he really
is
a
distraction and this was all staged
.

But she couldn’t believe that anymore. He seemed too bitter, too frustrated, too much like her—another victim trapped in the same nightmare. A sick feeling settled into her middle. Fourteen gates, but not one was accessible?

“Why give us a task that’s impossible?” she wondered aloud. “Why give us a manual—”

“Who knows?” he snapped. “As for the manual, obviously you haven’t read it. The thing’s about as useful as your boots.” He pounded the second stake into the ground opposite the first. “The part you can read is cryptic or flat wrong, and the rest’s gibberish.”

“Maybe it’s some sort of code, and we just need to find the key.”

“If there is a key,
I’ve
never heard of it. And I’ve been here long enough, I should have.”

She frowned. “How long
have
you been here?”

He gave the stake one last blow, then sat back on his heels, staring at the flames as they crackled among the sticks. “Five years this summer.”

Not five days, not five months. “Five years?” she whispered.

Bitterness twisted his lips. “Some experiment, huh?”

“But . . . how? They said . . .” She’d long ago stopped believing she’d get out of this mess in a few hours. But five
years?

“Like I said, it’s not for lack of trying,” Pierce added. He got up and drew a haunch of meat from a tarp-covered pile near her feet. As he impaled it on a spit, she realized the carcass of the rock dragon had disappeared.

While the meat cooked, he went through the jumble of components in her pack, noticing right off that she was missing some pieces. She told him about the cactus grass. He listened without comment, and she trailed off to a halt, feeling embarrassed and stupid. “I do have this, though.” She showed him the key-stylus-pen she’d made.

He took it from her, turning it between his fingers.

“Do you know what it is?” she asked.

“No.” He handed it back. “I had one, too, once. Never did figure out what it was for.”

“Then maybe it
is
significant.”

“I doubt it. They gave us a lot of useless stuff. Probably to confuse us. They’re like that.”

Pierce surveyed the remaining parts from her pack, then began fitting some of them together. Swiftly, one of the long-barreled hand pistols took shape. She didn’t recall seeing instructions for that in the manual.

“It’s a SLuB 40,” he said, handing the weapon over. “See here?” He pointed a grimy finger to the inscription at the barrel’s base.

Callie peered at it. “Those aren’t letters.”

“No, but it looks like ‘SLuB 40,’ so that’s what we call it.”

He started to assemble a rifle similar to his own, but ran out of pieces before he finished.

“Looks like the SLuB’s gonna be it. At least you’ve got plenty of E-cubes.” He scooped up four of the blue boxes. “They power everything else. Mind if I take a few?”

“Go ahead.”

Balancing two cubes on his thigh, Pierce slid another pair into his rifle’s side chamber, then replaced the cubes in his SLuB. By that time their dinner was ready.

The lizard meat had a strong muttony flavor. Callie would never call it tasty, but once she’d tantalized her stomach with the first bite, she all but inhaled the rest, even ate a second slice. As she wiped her greasy fingers on her jumpsuit, the comb-and-waxed-paper trill of a passing harry drew her gaze to the dark opening.

“They won’t bother us in here,” Pierce said. “Not at night.”

“And in the morning?”

“They’ll hunt a few hours past dawn, then swarm again for the day. We should be able to move out after that.”

They lapsed into silence. After a few minutes, Callie leaned her head against the rock and closed her eyes. “I assume I’ll be able to walk in the morning?”

“Should be, yeah.”

She sighed. Five years. Were there others who’d been here as long? Longer?

Her thoughts drifted to home. Lisa’s party would be well under way, her sister waiting with her latest stockbroker prospect for Callie. Eventually she’d call Callie’s apartment, and Mom would begin preparing her lecture on being considerate. By evening’s end they’d be miffed. But not worried. They knew Callie disliked the glittering, semiformal bashes. Even aside from the matchmaking, she resisted getting dressed up, had no taste for mingling over cocktails, and loathed the incessant one-upsmanship. Her conversations—if any—were brief, dribbling into awkward silences as she and the other party struggled to find a way of escape.

No, her family wouldn’t start worrying until morning, and the police wouldn’t start searching for twenty-four hours. By then Dr. Charis’s experiment would have vanished, likely leaving no clues and no one to question. Even if there was, what could the police do against beings who defied the laws of physics and zapped bodies through space in the blink of an eye?

Callie’s throat tightened. Tears blurred her vision. What she wouldn’t give to be home painting right now—her cockatiel pacing along the bookshelf—to hear Meg’s bubbly laugh and endure her latest dumb fad, to be able to clean the rat cages on Monday. Right now, she’d even prefer Lisa’s party.

Because deep down she knew there was a real possibility she would never attend another of Lisa’s parties again.

CHAPTER

4

“I wish I had a comb,” Callie muttered, pulling her fingers through the tangled locks of her waist-length hair the next morning. “They provided all this other stuff—why not that?”

Pierce sat across the ash-filled fire ring, scraping the lizard hide. “What’d you say?”

“Nothing.” She tilted her head, and he disappeared behind a curtain of red hair. Her captors hadn’t supplied sleeping bags or toiletries; why expect a comb? Besides, they had claimed their obstacle course would take only a few hours. Issuing overnight gear would have made their victims balk.

Pierce’s knife rasped across the rough hide, and a fresh wave of sour-sock smell assaulted her. She flicked the curtain of hair over her shoulder. Sleep and the harries’ attack had made it a rat’s nest. It wouldn’t take long before it was greasy, matted and—considering how filthy her companion was—vermin infested.

The thought made her squirm.

Well, I don’t intend to be here that long
. Dividing her hair into three sections, she deftly plaited them together, wincing when she touched the still-tender spots on the backs of her hands.

Pierce continued to scrape the hide, fastened now to a wooden hoop. Once he’d satisfied himself she’d be able to travel this morning, he’d turned to the lizard skin and his own silent thoughts.

His welts had disappeared, and his eye and mouth no longer drooped. In the morning light Callie saw he was only a few years her senior. The brown, scraggly beard obscured his features, but cleanshaven, bathed, and wearing decent clothes, he might not be bad looking. He looked up then, right at her, and she averted her gaze, face warming. Behind him the harries swooped through the emerald glade, their kazoolike trills rising and falling.

“It’ll be about an hour,” Pierce said, glancing over his shoulder.

Cautiously Callie drew her legs beneath her to stand and, forced to crouch beneath the sloping roof, walked the four steps to the cave’s mouth. Muscles quivering, she sagged onto one of the boulders, blinked away a swirl of dizziness, and peered into the glade. She blinked again. “It’s gone.”

“The sucker path? Nah. It’s still there. It’s just not even close to white anymore.”

“Yes, but—” She broke off.
I didn’t believe you
.

“My friends are camped up on the mesa, like I said. You can come with us.”

She twisted round to face him, hissing as the movement pulled the bite in her side. “I’d rather find the road again. I don’t suppose you’d help me?”

He snorted. “It’s miles out of my way, and I should’ve been back last night as it is. Besides, I told you—the gate roads are a waste of time.”

“I’d like to check that out myself.”

“Well,
I’m
not taking you back. The most my friends can wait is one more day.” He set aside the knife and picked at a fatty spot on the hide. “And there’s no guarantee the section you’re headed for even exists anymore.”

Callie hugged her legs to her chest, unwilling to admit aloud that he was right.

“Traveling the Outlands alone is a dangerous proposition,” he added, picking up the knife again.

“You seem to be doing well enough.”

“I don’t usually travel alone. And I’m not a rookie.”

Chewing her lip, she turned back to the glade. Harries swooped back and forth through the trees. They’d have killed her if not for Pierce, and distraction or not, his course of action did sound the most sensible. If there were as many gate roads out there as the manual indicated, sooner or later she’d cross another one, no matter which way she went.

There was the alien watcher to consider, as well.

An hour later the harries swarmed, their matlike forms turning the sky gray. One by one they glided in ever-tightening circles around the quivering knot of bodies in the middle tree, each finally jerked in to the others like filings to a magnet. In twenty minutes the sky was clear. Pierce waited another ten, and then they picked their way up the boulder-strewn slope to the canyon rim.