Qualify (65 page)

“Crap, we’re gonna die . . . I’m gonna die,” Jared mutters, but he too is standing well away from the board, next to Zoe. The two of them stare upward, cringing. Zoe looks white and close to fainting from fear.

“Help me!” I say meanwhile, as I am done untying Sarah. “Help me move her down from this thing, quickly! Please!”

Jared comes alive and moves in, and together we pull Sarah down—she is cool to the touch and heavy now—and I feel bile or something else rising in my gut, and I am about to retch and cry at the same time—but I don’t. . . . We get her down.

And then we stand and watch the ocean of drones arriving and passing overhead.

About half of the Candidates have listened to me, and they too stand, cringing, hoping, while their hoverboards levitate nearby like docked boats.

The others who continue fleeing on their hoverboards—we hear more screams and more scorching fire, as the rearmost Candidates are eliminated, one by one, as soon as the drones reach them.

However, we are now living proof that my lucky hunch was right. And eventually more and more of the fleeing riders in the front get the hint and dismount from their boards.

The drone array flies over the Huntington grounds and beyond, hunting those who are unaware of the means to stay safe.

For the next ten minutes, we stand listening to distant screams.

And then the array of drones returns, and passes over us again, as it is heading back to its place of origin at the other end of this hot zone.

We are ignored completely.

W
e carry Sarah’s body through the visitor parking and past the front building into the botanical gardens walkway, and leave her there at the foot of a white lovely statue near a small pond.

It is green and soft and silent here, only the warm wind moving leaves of the tall trees, and the dappled sunlight on grass. It is so easy just to go still, to space out, close your eyes and forget what
this
is, what day this is, and only know the moment of peace, here in a natural spot. . . .

I sit down for a moment, a few feet away from Sarah as she lies there, her stringy reddish hair mingling with the grass. I tell myself she looks peaceful. We’ve taken off her Green Quadrant weapon, the small armor vest that didn’t protect her from the bullet in the chest—it was never fastened properly. Zoe ends up putting it on and keeping it, since she’s the smallest of us, and it appears to fit her best.

The two boards hover nearby, while Jared lies on the grass and Zoe sits, her feet tucked sideways under her, and her arms around her knees. The armor vest is loose around her and she does not bother to secure it properly either, so it gaps open on one side. A sheen of sweat covers most of our exposed skin, and more sweat stains our uniforms, as the day is heating up.

Finally I get up and force myself to put my hand out and gently close Sarah’s eyes with my fingers. Then I turn away from her face with its freckles, think a prayer, or maybe just think
peace
, and never look at her again.

“Okay, I am ready to go,” I say softly.

We start walking back, while I call the two hoverboards to move beside us. We pause at a running fountain and wash our faces, then drink some of the water, cupping it with our hands, not caring how safe or drinkable it is.

Other Candidates scattered all over the lawn and the grounds, are doing the same thing. They are walking, with their boards moving at their sides like well-trained animals.

We are all heading south, by foot now.

It’s a long way to go.

A
n older teen who calls himself Ethan Jamerson starts walking with us. He is lanky and tall and skinny, like a beanpole, with dingy pale brown hair, a slightly disjointed nose and a sharp jawline. There’s a green armband around his arm. If he has any Green Quadrant body armor, it’s not visible.

“Hey, you all are, what, some kind of team or something?” he asks me warily at first. “I saw you get off the board first—smart move. Is it okay if I join you guys?”

Jared gives him a sideways look. “Hey, as long as you don’t plan to kill us in the next five minutes, yeah, sure.”

“But in about thirty minutes, that would be okay, right?” Ethan says with a crooked smile.

I give him a tired sideways glance as I trudge along, feeling lines of pain shooting through my arm and into my shoulder. “Yeah, sure. In thirty minutes, you can put me out of my misery, if you like. And if you
can
.”

“Unless you get to me first, eh?” Ethan says, glancing over at the automatic firearm I’m carrying. He raises his non-existent faded brows.

But at that point I decide that he is probably okay.

“So how screwed are we, anyone know?” Jared says a few minutes later, as we walk down some street in the suburb headed south toward downtown. “How much time do we have left?”

Ethan pops a small gadget out of his pocket. “It’s close to nine AM, Pacific Time. Not too bad.”

“We got lucky because of the time zone factor,” Zoe says.

“Yeah.” I sigh. “The three hours we gained we lost being driven in the wrong direction by the drones.”

“Well, guys,” Ethan says cheerfully. “Back in that botanical gardens place I saw a large visitor map, one of those ‘you are here’ things, and it had some info about the Huntington being located
twelve miles
from downtown L.A. So it’s not as bad as you think. We’re more than halfway there! Just need to keep moving southwest.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jared rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Okay, then.”

We trudge forward some more. Or at least I trudge, while the others are walking at a brisk pace and I am barely keeping up. My wounded arm is numb almost completely, and it has swollen, I think. I really need medical attention. Or at least to sit down. Or—no, yeah, I
need
medical attention.

“I am going to try to get back on the hoverboard,” I say.

Zoe nods. “Might as well.”

“If the drones show up again, we’ll just see them and hop off the boards immediately.”

There are four of us, and three boards. Zoe and I straddle Zoe’s original board, while Jared gets on the one that carried Sarah’s body.

“Hey, Gwen, how about you un-key this board or whatever it is you did to it, so that I can command it myself properly?” Jared glances at me in expectation.

I nod tiredly. Then I take a deep breath and sing a sequence that releases the Aural Block on the second board. Of course I don’t tell him what it is I am actually doing.

Jared then sings in a light tenor a new keying sequence, and gets on the board, straddling it like a horse. “Why stand when you can sit?” he mutters tiredly, shrugging to excuse himself, but no one cares.

Ethan meanwhile gets up on his own board and rides it properly, standing up, like a skateboarder. From the lanky looks of him and the effortless way he balances it, he has ridden boards before.

Regardless of our riding form, we soon make the hoverboards rise up about five feet from the ground.

Then we all fly in a close formation, one after the other, at street level, at about twenty-five miles an hour.

W
e are somewhere in Alhambra, a few blocks away from Atlantic Boulevard to the west and the I-10 San Bernardino Freeway to the south, when the hurricane sound returns.

In seconds, the southwest sky is blackened out with drone shuttles as they rise from their launch sites and start moving at us.

Oh, but they are moving fast!

“Drones! Get off the boards!” Zoe cries wildly, giving me a loud earful.

As quickly as we can, we sing the hover stop commands and jump off, with not a moment to spare.

We stand away from the boards as the drones pass directly overhead, ignoring us. Instead they keep moving north many blocks beyond us, where once again we hear screams and firing, as other Candidates are caught unaware.

“I bet the end of this hot zone is just up ahead,” Ethan says.

“Yeah, I can’t wait,” I mutter tiredly, as I resume walking.

Ethan’s right. We get to the intersection of Atlantic and the I-10 Freeway, and the street is marked with four-color beacons every thirty feet. The beacons are installed along the freeway and along Atlantic Boulevard, this time on street level, so all we need to do is cross the barrier in either direction to be out of this hot zone. The red stripe is painted on our side of the barrier, as though to remind us.

And the barrier itself is a simple chain link fence. Except it is at least fifteen feet tall, with barbed wire on the top.

And, judging by the “Danger, High Voltage, Do Not Touch” and the skull and crossbones sign, and—as if that’s not enough—the lightning zigzag, this is an
electric
fence.

“Great, just what we need,” Jared says, wiping his forehead streaked with sweat and road dust, and remainders of Sarah’s blood.

We stand at the corner, evaluating the situation.

“Okay, so what options do we have?” Ethan says. “Fly over? Climb over? Find a door or a hole in the fence? Disable the electricity?”

“That pretty much covers it. . . .” I stand next to Zoe and our hoverboard. I sway slightly, feeling a head-rush from the heat of the merciless SoCal sun overhead, and from the fact that I can barely remain upright due to approaching shock and loss of sensation in my arm.

“Which fence should we try to cross? The freeway or the street one?” Jared nods at the Freeway side. “I think if we follow along and find an I-10 overpass we might be able to just walk under?”

“Not so easy.” Ethan points down along the fence boundary to where the closest overpass is to our left. “The Atlanteans stuck a pesky fence continuation under the overpass too. The entire way is blocked.”

“How quickly can we saddle up and fly over the fence?” Jared ponders.

“Not quickly enough,” I say. “There are drone launch sites hidden all along this street, there, can you see? There are more drones waiting to fly up and incinerate us.”

And I point to the dark convex spots in the concrete of the street where the tops of the drone shuttles show, sitting like recessed mushrooms. I just saw them, just made out what they are. . . .

Holy crap, they are all around us! Like, there’s one two feet away on the sidewalk next to my feet!

Good thing I said something because Ethan was about to get on his hoverboard.

“No! Stop! Don’t touch your board!” I exclaim.

Ethan whistles, and quickly backs away. “Wow, thanks.”

“Okay, so much for flying over.” Zoe looks sullen and hopeless.

As we continue standing, not knowing how to proceed, more Candidates who cleverly avoided the drones the same way we did, gradually arrive. We gather at the corner of the zone, milling around.

“Hey, what are you all waiting for?” an older teen girl with dark hair and an arrogant expression says. Her token and armband are red, and she’s carrying not one but
two
long, impressive swords. . . .

Apparently, very sharp swords.

Because she stands back, then swings powerfully, and her sword crashes against the chain links.

There is a hissing sound and sparks fly. . . . The girl screams, then starts arcing with the electric charge, and is unable to drop the sword. A few seconds later, her burned body falls down on the concrete, at the foot of the fence.

A strong horrible smell of burning flesh is carried on the hot wind.

“What a stupid idiot!” some freshman-age kid says. “Couldn’t she see the ‘danger, high voltage’ sign?”

“Shut up! Just—shut up!” another girl Candidate says, holding her hand across her mouth. “That was awful!”

“Yeah, it was. But she’s still an id—”

“She
was
. She’s gone now. Have some respect, man,” Jared says. “We’re all in this screwed up crap Semi-Finals together, you might say we’re all idiots.”

Chapter 37

A
bout twenty minutes later, as we still have no solution to getting past this hot zone boundary fence, I risk doing something a little crazy.

I approach one of the “recessed mushroom” drones that’s cleverly resting in its launch pad—or whatever the hole-in-the-concrete thing underneath it is. And then, taking a deep breath, I put my foot down on top of the drone.

“Hey! Watch it, there, careful,” Ethan says to me. He’s been observing me silently for the last few minutes.

But, nothing happens to me. So I press down harder with my foot, then take a step and stand on top of the slightly curving surface.

“Oh, no! What are you doing?” Zoe says. “What if you activate it and it explodes or starts firing?”

The drone is circular, curved slightly like an upside-down plate, or a classic warrior shield, only about four feet in diameter, like an oversized large manhole cover.