Meritorium (Meritropolis Book 2) (23 page)

Charley shook his head, trying not to laugh. He snaked the candy dust in trails extending outward like spokes, and then with a stream of muttered gibberish in his best imitation of what he guessed a spell might sound like, he smacked his hands together and poofed the remaining candy dust into the air above the Circumcellions.

Watching the fine saccharine-sweet grit float like a softly descending cloud, Charley took a step back and admired his handiwork.

Orson looked at Charley and nodded his approval. “The ants will be swarming in no time.”

“Yep.”

Grigor looked over Charley’s shoulder and whispered. “You need to ditch that armor right away. That guard will wake up any minute, and the others will be patrolling over here soon.”

“Over here.” Hank gestured to a curtained shanty that someone had constructed as a rough privacy barrier for a makeshift toilet.

Quickly, Charley walked over, and disrobed as circumspectly as possible.

“What do you want me to do with the armor?” Hank asked.

Charley stretched his arms wide, basking in the early-morning sunrise. It was already scorching-hot; he was glad to not be wearing the armor anymore.

“Charley, the armor?”

Charley smiled, the corners of his mouth twisting to expose his canines. He was definitely fully awake now. Today he would see the czar face to face for the first time, and he would give him what he had coming.

For Alec.

He walked away from Hank, calling out over his shoulder. “Put the armor on Carter.”

It was a day for revenge.

CHAPTER 14

Don’t Leave Me

C
harley stared at the ground, forcibly trying to calm his pounding heart. He took a deep breath and looked up, but it caught in his throat.

A pinprick of light, growing larger as he walked forward, illuminated the end of the tunnel. The sounds of the arena pulsated back to him, rippling along the tunnel like a current of frenetic energy that threatened to sweep him up and carry him away.

His fingers tingled; he fought the sudden urge to draw a weapon, before remembering that he had none. For the sake of the reenactment, Charley and the rest of the Low Scores were totally unarmed—with the exception of Grigor, the stolen dirk hidden in his boot. Charley agreed that their solitary weapon was best utilized by Grigor, both for his expertise and because of people’s reticence to search him all that thoroughly.

Ever since being herded from the pen, none of them had uttered a word. In the tunnel behind them, Sven, Rico and his other new friends, followed by the other Low Scores from the pen, were eerily quiet. Charley felt as if he had lost a friend, but it’s not like Charley could have helped what had happened to Sven while Charley was captured. He knew he needed to say something, but each of them had bigger things to worry about, so he just kept walking silently, leaving Sven to his newfound companions.

No one would say it, but everyone knew. This wasn’t a reenactment. It was an execution.

Charley walked toward the ever-expanding, ever-threatening light at the end of the tunnel. The other tunnels housed Carter, the prophet, and the rest of the ant-bitten Circumcellions, the Meritorium Honor Guard, scores of animal combinations, the other contestants in the Venatio—in fact, all those who had survived until this, the last event. Based on what Hank had seen earlier, Sandy was still alive, and given her unaltered status as High Score, likely stood the best chance of them all for surviving the day.

Charley understood that one of the tunnels also contained the czar, the creator of the System. The thought of revenge for Alec spurred Charley on. He quickened his pace, his mind racing.

The czar might think that he could implement a method for quietly ridding society of the unwanted—the disabled, the poor, the helpless—but Charley would not quietly look the other way. Evil done in the dark must be brought into the light. Today, the czar would pay a public price for his sins.

Heat flushed up Charley’s neck; they were almost to the mouth of the tunnel. The roaring of the arena felt like it threatened to swallow him whole. Even standing next to Grigor, Orson, and Hank, he could hear nothing but the crowd. Not wanting to be blind-sided by a warrior, wolverator, or worse lying in wait on either side of the tunnel, Charley sprinted the last few steps out of the tunnel and into the arena.

The blazing noonday sun blinded him, and he squinted against the glare. He swiveled his head from side to side. His eyes failed to adjust to the light, unless they just playing tricks on him.

All he could see in either direction was water, its depths seeming to go down forever. The arena floor had been strategically retracted and filled with water from the immense aqueducts below. A sense of vertigo overwhelmed him; his feet shifted on the sand and he swooned, his knees buckling, before Grigor’s strong hand hoisted him up.

He was standing on a narrow sandbar hardly wider than his shoulders. On either side was deep, dark water that lay smooth as black glass. The ominous stillness unnerved him.

The sandbar pathway led to the center of the arena, where it expanded into a manmade island—a mountain of volcanic rocks that jutted into the air, the summit large enough for the final battle.

There was only one way to go: forward.

Hesitantly, he took one step, then another. With every footfall, the sand cascaded down on either side of the slender walkway, slipping and sliding into the placid water, disappearing into the depths with a burble. Something about the stillness of the water gave Charley goose bumps; the way its surface was so preternaturally calm, yet underneath unfathomably deep, sent a warning prickle up the back of his neck. The glassy patina of the halcyon exterior was like a shell threatening to crack open and birth something of unspeakable terror.

The lizard part of Charley’s brain screamed a warning. It wasn’t something he could describe so much as he could feel, like someone was watching them. He quickened his pace.

Not that there weren’t already many people watching him. It didn’t seem possible, but the decibel level of the crowd ratcheted up another notch. It wasn’t the eyes of the crowd on him that gave him pause; it was something else entirely.

Something big.

He could feel it in the vibrations of the arena, in the buzzing of his ears, in the blood rushing to his head. He could feel it in the tens of thousands of miniscule sensory inputs firing electrical pulses to his overloaded brain synapses. He could feel it in some deep, primitive part of his being: the part that had kept his ancestors alive, long before his father’s father’s father had walked the earth, a time of saber-toothed danger by land, flapping winged danger by air, and spiky serpentine danger by water.

From the periphery of his vision, he saw something move.

He turned, as if in slow motion, Grigor colliding into his back. Falling to one knee, he twisted his neck toward the spot he had seen movement.

The water was still.

Charley couldn’t be sure, but were those ripples expanding outward? Little concentric rings, slowly multiplying in increasingly larger circles. Or were they just a product of his overactive imagination and heightened senses?

He must be imagining things. He hopped up again, his eyes focused forward. They were almost halfway to the island platform in the center. He could now see that they were walking along just one of a multitude of sandbars that extended spoke-like from the island. There were people traversing the other pathways, en route from the arena tunnels to the island. Charley was piecing together that the platform must be their battleground for the reenactment.

As he placed one foot on the ground, it slid to the side, coming dangerously close to the water’s edge. He quickly righted himself, but again his foot skirted across the sand. The sandbar felt unstable; it was almost as if something big, deep below the surface, was slamming against its foundations, something caged that wanted to be free.

Suddenly, something broke the surface.

Charley whipped his head toward the movement, and a creature no larger than his fist shot out of the water and zinged directly at his face. Half-ducking, half-slipping, he fell awkwardly to one side, narrowly avoiding a fall into the water. The leaping creature seemed to float just in front of his face. It had the wide grumpy face of a bullfrog, big moist lips and bulging eyes, wings like a bat, a smooth legless underbelly, and a curly slender tail with a scorpion’s bulb-like stinger on the end. It splashed into the water on the other side of the sandbar. The first arrival to the surface of those released from the depths.

A hush came over the arena: the quiet before the impending storm.

“Run!” Hank screamed out behind him.

Charley didn’t need further encouragement and he ran, his feet slipping and sliding on the grainy sand.

The water erupted. Hundreds of tiny water leapers rocketed out of it as one, falling like hail on each of the sandbar spokes.

Charley heard screams. After a moment, he realized some of the noise was coming from him.

The crowd roared.

A stinging pain pressed into his flesh, lancing his forearm like a hot poker. He jerked his arm violently, whipsawing the little water demon that was attached back and forth. The creature slapped wetly against Charley’s arm, but the stinger remained embedded. Absurdly, the hideous creature turned a wart-covered face toward Charley, parted its broad slimy lips as if to attempt a princely kiss, and then croaked directly in his face.

Without thinking, Charley gripped the little monster around its fat neck, squeezed until its eyeballs bulged and tongue lolled out, and then ripped the stinger out of his arm. With a shriek that was decidedly less than manly, Charley hurled the creature back into the now roiling water.

A large red welt immediately bubbled up on his arm. Ducking and crawling, he tried to scuttle forward as quickly as possible while twisting away from the leaping creatures that now popped out of the water from both sides of the sandbar. Some of the slower-moving ones, gliding on the wind with their translucent bat wings, were easy targets for a good hard overhand spike back into the water.

The pro was that the only dangerous part of the strange flying toads seemed to be their stinger. The con was that there were scores of them rocketing out of the water, endlessly popping back up as soon as they submerged.

They were small, but even hundreds of them, clustered together underwater like a school of fish, could not have collided against the foundations of the sandbank with the force needed to jostle the entire thing like an earthquake under Charley’s feet. But now the sandbank was still.

Even amidst the chaos of trying to maneuver down the pathway while avoiding the leaping, stinging toad-bat-scorpion creatures, Charley felt that same warning tickle creep up the back of his neck. Something bigger than a flying toad was in the water.

An enormous whooshing sound filled Charley’s ears. Turning his face to the left, Charley felt the whipping of a manmade wind licking at his shirt, tugging him closer. The water churned into a whirlpool, swirling round and round, gaining momentum as whatever mechanism beneath the arena cycled it up. He felt even more unsteady; the whirlpool was like a wind tunnel, lapping at his clothes, and threatening to suck him into its center.

He felt Grigor’s massive hand pushing him down close to the ground. He could barely hear Grigor’s shout over the noise. “Stay down! Crawl forward!”

He hugged the sandbar like someone riding a trick pony, only to find that he was mounted on a bucking bronco. The sandbar was moving again.

Something was rising from the depths on the right side.

Charley turned. A scaly, serpentine upside-down U the width of his waist broke the surface before slithering back below.

He fought the urge to close his eyes and hoped he had simply imagined the giant sea snake.

A scream pierced the air, decreasing in volume before abruptly cutting off. Charley jerked his head back to the left, just in time to see a teenage girl flung through the air, her limbs scrambling furiously, before disappearing into the vortex of the ravenous maelstrom. His fingers dug into the shifting sand, clawing for purchase. The pull of the whirlpool was significant, even lying prone on the ground. If he was still standing, there was no doubt he would have found himself flipping along on the wind right behind the girl.

He looked ahead to the island. No one from the other spokes had made it to the center yet. He pursed his lips together to avoid getting a mouthful of the grit swirling through the air and military-crawled his way forward.

He looked again to the right. A large sinister head, mouth full of spiky teeth, bobbed out of the water just inches from Charley’s face. Both Charley and the snake-like water beast remained motionless, as if considering each other. Breaking the stillness, a long forked tongue flicked directly at Charley’s right eyeball. Charley screamed.

Grigor shoved Charley forward roughly, batting the snake creature’s head to one side with a single explosive movement. “Go, go, go!”

Grigor bear-crawled forward, half-pushing, half-carrying a stumbling Charley with just one of his massive arms. Grigor moved forward on the sand like a running back, low to the ground, cradling a hysterical Charley with one arm, the other arm extended straight ahead in a stiff arm.

Orson gave an undignified yelp as he peeled a flying toad’s stinger out of his leg and then pegged it at the water beast’s diamond-shaped head. The toad bounced off the side of the snake’s head with a wet splat, spraying water like an exploding water balloon. The snake whipped its head around to face Orson. Narrow yellow slits for eyes focused in on him.

Another head rose out of the water. Then another. Then three more, all identical to the first.

Hank looked at Orson. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve made its brothers angry, too.”

Orson cursed under his breath. “Actually, those aren’t its brothers.”

“Then what—”

As if in answer, the beast rose higher out of the water, the waves swelling around it and then crashing back, the overspill lapping onto their feet.

Hank’s eyes widened. He stared at the beast, transfixed. “Oh …” he said dumbly, his mouth gaping open.

“It’s one monster,” Orson said dryly, gazing upward as the creature swayed back and forth. “It just happens to have six heads.”

Droplets of water fell from each of the heads towering above them. The heads twisted in and out, writhing in a strange interplay of scaly, greenish-purple-hued savagery. Charley was unable to tear his eyes away from the creature looming above him. Looking closer, the heads were all connected to the same body, but each seemed to have a mind of its own. One head brushed too close to another and was met with a snap of lightning-fast jaws.

“It’s Scylla!” Grigor shouted. “And the whirlpool is Charybdis. They’re recreating the Greco-Roman myth.”

Orson swallowed, the pallor of his face lightening. “Then my dad is definitely here. He always used to tell me this story when I was just a boy.” He grimaced, his eyes fixed on the polyheaded creature. “This has got to be his doing.”

Charley glanced at Orson’s ashen face and then back up to the Scylla monster again. It amazed Charley that surrounded on either side by actual sea monsters, Orson still appeared more frightened of his father’s upcoming appearance.

“So, should we keep moving forward?” Hank asked. “It’s kind of just swaying back and forth up there. I think it’s waiting for us to move, and then it’s going to strike.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Grigor said, pointing at the sandbar, which was now disintegrating more rapidly and falling into the water. “Better to run for it, than to try to swim for it.”