New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (4 page)

He blushed. Old-fashioned, and old.

“Just stop brooding over her,” she went on. “You deserve better than what she’s got for you.”

“Point.”

“So let’s skip dessert, and we can spend some quality time back home.”

“It’s a date.”

* * *

“I just can’t forgive her,” he said as they lay in bed together and she was beginning to drift off.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just can’t.”

Ali really didn’t want to get into it again, not after the last couple of very enjoyable hours. “How about you give it the old college try, hmm?”

“I will.”

“Good.”

If she noticed he was staring into the darkness as she fell asleep, she forgot about it in the morning.

Earth FUBAR, Day One

She didn’t stay a ghost for very long. Her viewpoint shifted wildly, swiftly, and next thing she knew she was looking through a stranger’s eyes.

WTF?

She was lying on something hard. Bleachers. People were everywhere, shouting and cheering. Christine stared up at the sky, somewhere outdoorsy and a bit cold. A teenage dude wearing some sort of school uniform was kneeling over her, sobbing uncontrollably. “Nellie! Oh, Nellie, no!” The cheering crowd all around them made it hard to hear him.

WTF?

Christine blinked and looked down; she was wearing a school uniform herself, and it looked vaguely familiar. Gray blazer, darker gray skirt, long socks. As she craned her head up, she caught a glimpse of a figure on a frakking
flying broomstick
soaring across the sky. Others followed it.

No effing way.

“Nellie?”

The guy stopped crying; he hugged her tightly enough to hurt. “Nellie! You’re alive!” he shouted in her ear.

She lost track of the kids on the flying broomsticks as she tried to disentangle herself from him. Her hair was in pigtails, and it was dark brown, she discovered as she shook her head. She was in an honest-to-goodness Quid… No effing way. She’d died and gone to Hog...

No. Not really. This is my evil twin’s version of the game, of the novels. I’m a fan of the books, so she is a fan of the books. And now she’s making her slaves play the game for her amusement
.

The crowd kept cheering. Christine managed to take a peek over the guy’s shoulder. The broomstick fliers were shooting energy blasts at each other, which she was pretty sure wasn’t in the game’s official rules.

“I saw you collapse when that stray bolt hit you. I couldn’t find a pulse!” the guy went on, still hugging her. He had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the crowd.

“I’m okay now,” she said, ignoring his babbling and pushing him away. She had to see what was happening, to process where she was. Who she was.

He finally let her go and she looked up just in time to see one of the broomstick riders burst into flames. Pieces of broomstick and pilot scattered in every direction and the crowd went wild. Definitely not how the game was supposed to be played. Except maybe in Hell’s version of J.K.’s beloved novels. Which was a good description of this place.

Trapped. I’m trapped here in the body of some poor girl who just got killed
.

Keep the panic down to a dull roar and use what passes for your wits
, her brain suggested.

Sure, why not. What’s the worst thing that can happen next?

She was afraid she was going to find out, and sooner rather than later.

Christine stood up, ignoring the grumbles of the people behind her, and looked around. Her new body was fairly tall, about five nine or so in her sensible schoolgirl shoes, and she could see they were in some sort of coliseum. There were some shallow hills out in the distance, but no other major terrain features.

Her evil counterpart’s words came back to her:
“I’ve got a little preserve set up in Kansas.”
That must be where she was.

This may be Kansas, Toto, but I bet it’s not what Kansas used to be
.

“Can we go somewhere else?” she asked the boy. “Please?”

He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“You know we can’t leave until the game is over! Do you want to get sent to the Goddess?”

He tilted his head toward the boxed seats on the other side of the arena. One of the tiny figures there had a mane of shiny red hair, and was dressed all in black. Christine gulped. What if her evil double could detect her presence?

She set that thought aside. There were plenty of other things to worry about. Like making sure her new friend didn’t find out she was a body-snatcher.

“Sorry,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t remember anything. I can’t remember your name, or my name, or anything.”

When in doubt, pretend to have amnesia. Easy way to excuse your ignorance of current events, local mores, and whatever the eff was going on. And much more believable and convenient than the truth, which might get her and everyone around her in trouble. As in tortured-to-death trouble.

“That wand-blast fried your brain,” the boy said. “Poor Nellie! How are you going to survive without your memories?”

“With a little help from my friends, I hope.”

“I’ll help you, of course I’ll help you! My name is Robinson, Robinson Grace. You always call me Robb, from those books you love.”

“And my name is Nellie, I take it.”

“Yes. Nellie Gomez. Your…” He stopped mid-sentence and started cheering loudly when another flier took a dive into the ground. He’d been moving so fast he
splashed
on impact, and she turned her head from the grisly sight.

“Come on!” Robb told her. “If the Watchers notice you’re not cheering, you’re going to get in trouble!”

Christine faux-cheered, noticing that the big smiles among the people around her were mostly fake, except for a small but distinct minority that was actually enjoying watching people getting killed for their entertainment. She picked that up through her empathy, which was up but much weaker than normal. She also spotted a number of men and women standing by the exits. They wore a combination of hooded robes and body armor, their chests plates decorated with a red staring eye logo anybody who read Tolkien would recognize.

And those are the Watchers, wearing the Eye of Sauron and making sure we enjoy a bout of Harry Potter’s favorite’s sport, played with rules out of the
Hunger Games.
The dark side of Geekdom
.

“Good,” Robb said. “As long as you go along, you’ll be okay. At least in this game we mostly just watch and cheer.” He stopped again for more cheering as someone scored. “Except for the stray magic bolts hitting us.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ll help you, Nellie. I’ll tell you the rules, show you how things work.”

“Thank you.”

He blushed a bit. “And, uh, then we can go somewhere and, you know, like we always do.”

And now he’s lying through his teeth
.

Her empathy might be working at a very low ebb, but it was enough to know he wasn’t telling the truth. Robb was hot for Nellie, but it was pretty clear she didn’t reciprocate his feelings. Nellie had friend-zoned the poor guy. What kind of person had she been before she’d died? Christine didn’t think she’d be around long enough to find out.

“We’ll see,” she said, and by his crestfallen expression that wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words.

* * *

The game ended about fifteen minutes and a dozen more fatalities later, said fatalities evenly split between players and spectators. Christine felt sick. She’d seen plenty of death since her arrival to Earth Alpha, but nothing so cruelly needless as this. Even worse, the crowd kept cheering through all of it. By the time it was over, only a handful of survivors remained, all belonging to the winning team. After the lucky contestants left, it was the Goddess’ turn to put on her own show. Her glowing figure emerged from the VIP section and flew over the corpse-littered field.

“Village People!” she called out, her voice superhumanly loud. “That was fun! You are free to go home and do whatevs. Starting tomorrow, we’re changing games. It’s going to be American Gladiators time. Lots of gratuitous violence, and maybe a little sex, brought to you by yours truly. What do you say to that?”

The crowd chanted in unison.

“WE LOVE YOU, CHRISTINE! WE LOVE YOU LONG TIME!”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

This was Hell.

It was a long walk from the coliseum to the town where Robb and Nellie lived. They walked past cultivated fields, following a country highway, its paved surface marred by dozens of gravel-filled potholes. Once, a car went down the road, forcing people to give way. Four hooded figures were inside, glancing coldly at the pedestrian plebes. More Watchers.

The whole thing looks like a low-budget post-apocalyptic message movie
.

Robb wasn’t very talkative during the walk home. “Not here,” he whispered to her, indicating the people all around them. “You never know who reports to the Watchers.”

So they marched in silence, along with three hundred or so people dressed up as students for that pseudo-LARP session. They were mostly young, ranging from nine and ten-year olds up to late teens and early twenties, about evenly divided in gender. A few older men and women were dressed like teachers; some of them were on the verge of tears, the ones who didn’t have a thousand yard stare. The younger ones seemed less emotional, more jaded; a few were even talking about the game as if watching those kids getting killed had been fun.

How long since my worst half took over? If it’s been years, then this is all they know. What’s that saying Mark told me? You can get used to hanging, if you hang long enough. Father Alex was fond of that phrase: it sort of works as a brief description of Russia’s history. Mongols and boyars and commissars: you can get used to anything, if it lasts long enough
.

It was depressing as eff.

Walking in silence gave her a chance to get a feel for her new body. Nellie was fit and strong, and from the callouses on her hands and the soles of her feet, she spent a lot of time up and about, working with said hands; from her tanned skin most of it happened outdoors. That was true of most of the ersatz students around her. Farmers, living off the land. They probably had to turn over half their crops or more to the Goddess and her minions. Not that she needed minions. Dark Christine could kill anyone, everyone, whenever she felt like it. The only thing keeping those people alive was the fact she’d get bored without living toys to play with.

How can people live like this?

And yet live they did. A few boys and girls were holding hands while walking. She noticed one of the older girls was a good seven months pregnant. People got on with their lives as best they could.

I’m going to set you free, all of you
, Christine promised. She pictured herself leading the oppressed masses, charging the Goddess’ palace, and putting a boot up her nasty ass. The survivors might inherit a world in ruins, but it would be their world, to do with as they chose. Or, if the planet was just too messed up to live in, she could bring them to Earth Alpha.

Maybe things wouldn’t be as easy as all that, but she wasn’t going to abandon those people to the tender mercies of Dark Christine. Not when she bore some responsibility for it. Or felt she did, at least.

Of course, doing anything would be a lot easier if she had her kewl powerz at her disposal. She’d been able to do an empathic reading on Robb, but she had to concentrate and focus on him. As they walked, she tried her empathy on other people, and found she could pick up general emotions easily, and get a decent aura read with some work, much like when she’d first developed her powers on Earth Alpha.

During those trial scans, she discovered something particularly disturbing. Quite few of the auras she examined were tainted with Outsider stuff. The Taint showed up as little barnacles of oozing black matter, barnacles that would grow with every act of hatred and malice their bearer committed. She repressed a shudder.

The Outsiders, the survivors among the inhabitants of whatever had existed before the Big Bang and inflation replaced it with the current universe, were nasty monsters that thrived on hatred. Their energy could disrupt Neo powers. It could also corrupt human souls, although that required some degree of cooperation from the corrupted. To have your aura tainted, you had to do some evil stuff, or embrace the hatred for everything the entities demanded. Nasty, nasty stuff.

She remembered the masses of Outsider stuff in the oceans. The whole planet was being corrupted. At some point, it would become a hospitable place for the Big Bads themselves, and then calling it Hell would be an understatement.

Okay, deal with that later. Limited empathy, check
.

Moving on. Walking was as much fun as walking had ever been, back when she was human. She wasn’t getting tired as fast as she used to, but that was because her Nellie-body was in good shape. Her feet hurt; she didn’t have a Neo’s strength and resistance to fatigue. As a Neo, she could jog a two-minute mile without breaking a sweat. In her current state, she might manage an eight-minute mile, and she’d be feeling every step and breath along the way.

The proportional strength of a Kansas farm girl, check
.

No telekinesis or energy shields; subtle attempts to activate both produced no effects. Why? Maybe being there only as a mental projection means most of her powers got left behind. Or maybe it would take time for those abilities to manifest themselves. When her uncle Adam got his new body, it took a couple of days before his Neo abilities came back. Would that happen to her here? Would being in another universe affect her access to the Source?

If I don’t get my powers back, it’s going to be pretty hard to lead a peasant’s rebellion against the tyranny of my very, very powerful Dark Half
.