Nova Project #1 (27 page)

Nod your heads if you can hear me,
he thinks. Blake and Lucius do. It looks like fear.

He has an idea.

“Wait,” he says, taking one step toward the horseman. “They both built you, right?”

The horseman half turns, irritated. It nods.

“So you'll happily kill us, or them, but there must be some sense of good in you. Something . . . Fairness.” Lucius wouldn't
have let Blake get away with making the thing entirely evil.

“Death is the fairest thing there is,” says the horseman. “It happens to everybody.”

“Okay,” he says. “Then give us—and them—a chance.”

“What are you doing?” Leah whispers.

Playing.

“If we fail, we die. The boss we couldn't beat. That's fair.”

“You will not beat me.”

“Then you have nothing to lose,” says Miguel.

The horseman appears to consider this. Nick and Leah are staring at Miguel wide-eyed. They don't know what he knows, haven't lived his life. Every day certain that he was going to die. He's been moments from it. Cheated it once, with Blake's help.

He remembers the ledge. Okay. Twice, with Blake's help.

“Lock the doors,” the horseman orders. Blake waves a hand, steel shutters slide down over the windows, bars over the door.

You are in a room.
He's spent so much of his life in gray rooms.

“Is that the only way out?”

“Yes,” Blake tells the horseman. “We didn't want people getting in. More entrances only mean more weak points.”

That's a lie. Miguel glances at Blake.

“Excellent.” The horseman turns to Miguel. “I will stay here. You have five minutes to get into position, and then the
game is on. This will be fun, I haven't played in too long.” It folds its arms across its chest.

“This way,” says Lucius. “Come, quickly.” He leads the way to the tile; the five of them squeeze on and rise, up over the head of the counting horseman.

“What did it mean, it hasn't played in too long?” Miguel demands. Suspicion burns in his belly.

“You mean
he,”
says Lucius. “It was a
he
once.”

Blake stops the tile on the third floor. Miguel steps off and turns to them, Nick and Leah beside him. “You didn't completely build that thing from scratch,” he says, another nonquestion to which he wants a truthful answer.

“Were you listening to me before?” Blake asks, a tiny smile twitching his lips. “What we could do is nothing compared to what you can do to one another. When we designed Chimera and all the biomech, we realized a secondary benefit. We didn't need to construct the horsemen, we needed to
find
them.”

Miguel's mouth opens. Closes. Get your words in order. “I thought nobody had ever finished the game.”

“You thought what we wanted you to think. Everybody did.”

“So I just challenged the best, most experienced Chimera player—the best, most experienced
chimera
—in the world to a game.”

“You did.”

“Good job, Captain,” Nick jokes weakly.

“You could have warned me,” Miguel says. But they couldn't have, not really.

“Your impulsiveness is sometimes in your favor,” says Lucius. “It was certainly in ours, as it kept us alive. Thank you for that.”

“It won't drag this out,” says Blake. “It wants to get this over with and get on with what it's really supposed to be doing. Although part of what it's really supposed to be doing is killing us, but after that, it has a lot to do. It's going to be busy. It will make this quick if it can.”

He snaps his fingers. The air changes, the room changes like an overworld. The banks of computers disappearing, replaced by a familiar scene: the open square on which they defeated their first boss in the competition. Skyscrapers of glass and metal surround them, the concrete underfoot sparkles in artificial sunlight. Cars line the streets around the square. Empty crates litter the sidewalk. Reality and Chimera blur. Like the game, he knows his body is in a room, he can see the doorway, the corridor, but the air that fills his lungs is fresh, clean.

“How did you do that?” Nick asks.

“We're
gods
, Mr. Lee.”

There's really no reply to that. “Will these things work?” Miguel raises the weapon in his hand.

“They're what we have,” says Lucius. “We invented them . . .
just in case. They'll fuse out its circuitry, we think.”

“Why didn't you shoot it when you had the chance then?”

“It's not that simple.”

Because they'd be in trouble with their superiors if they did. Miguel catches Blake's nod from the corner of his eye. Fine. But he won't be in any trouble, at least not any
more
trouble than he's in already.

The end of the world changes your perspective a little.

“Can we touch . . . that horseman thing?” asks Nick.

“Yes.”

“I mean, without dying.”

“Laying a hand on it won't kill you, but if you get close enough to do that, it's probably too late.”

“He's coming,” says Leah. He still trusts her hearing.

“Okay. You two”—Miguel points at the Gamerunners —“get behind it.”

In that first level, Josh and Grace had been behind it. Distracting enough that Miguel had been able to fire off a shot just in time. It would have gone a lot smoother if Josh hadn't spotted the thing with the arm, but they got out of it in the end. They'll get out of this one, too.

“Don't get shot,” Lucius cautions. “The bullets kill biomech on contact.”

His heart. Good to know. But he wasn't planning on getting shot.

“It's almost here,” Leah whispers.

The replica is perfect, the same things to hide behind. Miguel crouches behind a car, peering around the bumper through the doorway and down the corridor, waiting for the huge dark monster to come. Cleverly, it didn't take a tile up, it must have used stairs somewhere. The tile would've given him an easy shot at its head.

He sees the glint, light on metal. The horseman strides into the square, footsteps heavy enough to shake the floor. Its—his—eyes cast around, seeking out its—his—five enemies. Leah is a few feet to one side of Miguel, Nick a few feet to the other.

Miguel lifts his gun. Aims.

Movement behind the horseman catches his eye. For a split second he thinks Blake and Lucius are aiming, too, but it isn't only their guns rising, it's them. They wait until the horseman has locked its gaze on Leah.

And they run. Through the door, down the corridor, out of sight.

“Cowards!” Miguel screams. “Come back here!”

The horseman screams, too, its rage echoing off the rendered buildings. He spins rapidly back and forth, wanting all of his prey.

“They're going upstairs!” says Leah. “Chase them or stay here?”

“Here!”

Nick springs to his feet, runs, seizing his chance. He advances on the conflicted horseman, meeting it in the middle of the square. They are only a few feet apart, Nick's back to Miguel and Leah. Miguel wants to scream no!, but his voice dies in his throat. The horseman dodges the first fired bullet, a dark blur. Leah raises her gun, but there is no safe shot. Miguel won't, can't risk Nick.

“Get out of here, Mig,” says Nick lowly. “You can't just die now, after everything.”

“No.”

“You think you have a chance? At all?” The horseman taunts him, recovering its wits, refocusing on the three of them. “I'm not saying this isn't fun, but I have places to be.”

“You won't get him.”

Miguel stands. Leah's strong fingers wrap around his ankle.

“You seem to be laboring under a mistaken impression,” says the horseman, “that I care who I get. Fair is fair. I have no preferences, make no judgments. I have only orders.”

“Then what's taking you so long? Come on!” Nick fires again. The bullet smashes a pane of glass. The room is fake, but the rain of shards looks so real.

Damage. Not the right kind.

“Oh, enough,” says the horseman. It grins widely, metal
teeth in its black skull. A long arm reaches out.

Time slows. Stops.

The horseman strikes.

Miguel jumps up, dives over the hood of the car. The gun slips from Miguel's slick, trembling hand as he lands, slides across the floor, comes to a stop close enough to see every agonizing detail.

Nick's feet rise into the air, tossed as easily as an insult by the dark hand that closes around his throat. His body falls with a sickening crunch.

“Nick!” Miguel screams. He thinks he hears Leah, too, but a roar fills his ears as he drags himself over in time to watch the life disappear from Nick's eyes.

Miguel can't breathe.

Cannot. Breathe. He wraps his arms around Nick, waiting for the blow he's sure is coming. It will probably be painless.

He's heard that before.

But nothing happens. Miguel drags his forehead from Nick's chest, looks up. Leah is standing, frozen in shock, mouth twisted in horror. The horseman is still grinning.

“Kill me,” he says. Leah shakes her head. Maybe she's just shaking. “Do it.”

But Death has taken its price, sated its thirst. “Where are they?” the horseman asks. “I have orders. I must find them. You may live for now, I will have you in the end. You will see me
again, Miguel Anderson. Enjoy the show.”

In an instant it is gone. Miguel can't move. He grips Nick tighter, feels Leah's arms wrap around him from behind.

For long moments neither of them speaks. Finally Leah does.

“Those fucking cowards,” she says. “They escaped on hoverboards from the roof, I heard them. They were lying about the front door's being the only way out.”

Miguel nods dully. There was the vent, too. They'd had contingency plans, even for this. He had lied, cheated to save his own life. He shouldn't be surprised that the Gamerunners would do the same. They are not human, but maybe for some things that doesn't matter. Survival above all.

They are alone. The horseman is gone, though he will be back for them. He will be back for everybody in the end. Blake and Lucius have escaped. Nick is gone in the most final sense.

Slowly the square fades around them, the room returning to its normal state. Blake and Lucius could be too far away by now to control it, if that's how it works.

He doesn't really care how it works. His eyes skim over the banks of computers, their screens forever darkened. There was a time when he would have given every other one of his organs for a glimpse into this room, for the chance to dig into the secrets those computers held about Chimera.

The game that wasn't really a game, or was the truest game
of all. Designed to test them, divide them, sort them. To link up with their Presences and label them, thumbs up or down.

He never wants to play again.

Slowly he releases Nick, turns into Leah's embrace. She feels real, the only thing that does, the only thing that isn't a nightmare. Outside the windows, artificial trees wave in a wind that is only the precursor to the storm that is about to come. It is tempting, so tempting, to stay here, on this floor, and watch it all burn.

He has been wrong, and wronged, and wrong again.

This is how the game really begins. Right now.

For their help and support on a thousand fronts, I would like to thank the following:

My family, who are understanding even when they don't quite understand.

Britt and her pointy shoes.

Tom Pollock, for the light-hearted chats about humanity, math, and the nature of existence.

Den Patrick, sanity provider and coffee buddy.

James Bennett, and his library of niche research books.

Virginia Duncan, the fairest, smartest, and toughest editor a writer could ever hope to have, and all at Greenwillow Books.

Brooks Sherman and everyone at The Bent Agency.

William Gibson, for a sixteen-year-old girl who discovered
Neuromancer
and was never quite the same.

All of London's genre scene, for the open arms.

And you.