Qualify (71 page)

I remain in the water to catch my breath, and watch Zoe, and then I look up.

The sky is filled with Candidates, bodies retreating into dots, like tiny strange specks of rising birds as they approach the available shuttles.

Meanwhile the Candidates who remain on the ground are still jumping into the water, most of them not realizing yet that they are all
done
and out of the running.

And then it occurs to me,
Oh, no! Gracie is the last person left with a baton, she is alone and vulnerable.

My pulse pounds and heartbeat goes into overdrive as I swim the few strokes to reach the shore, and grab the ledge. My rifle is still lying there a few feet away.
I should probably take it now
. . . .

“Gracie!” I exclaim, and my voice is trembling. “What are you doing? Go!”

My sister stares at me, and in a flash she understands. “Where is your baton?” she screams at me. “
Gwen!
Where is it? Where is
your baton?
”

“Shut up, idiot!” I scream back, and then I pull myself out of the water with one good hand, and end up on my belly. “Go! Right now! Damn you, you little idiot,
go!
”

“No! I am not leaving without you!”

“Yes, you
are!
” I grab her, shake her, so that we both end up rolling on the concrete, and her shoe-wrapped baton gets pulled out of the water.

Gracie begins to cry, sobbing wildly, holding on to me.

It’s then that we hear the first shots being fired.

Several late arrivals in possession of Blue Quadrant firearms have gotten the grim picture. And they are firing up at those Candidates who are airborne.

Screams come, from high up in the air, followed by several falling bodies. Automatic weapons on the ground fire volleys of desperate rounds, and many hit their targets. . . .

They’re so focused on the people escaping to the skies that they haven’t noticed yet that there’s
one last baton
here on the ground, next to Gracie.

I crawl on my belly and take hold of the automatic rifle, while holding on to Gracie who is still a weeping mess and in no condition to act. I check the magazine and reload the rifle, make sure the safety is in the correct position, and keep my trembling fingers near the trigger.

I haven’t had to fire it yet, but after four weeks of weapons training I can at least perform the basics—if I have to. This way I can at least buy Gracie a few precious moments once she pulls herself together enough to sing the keying sequence.

Next to us a body falls. . . . A dead boy still holds on to his shoes while the water pours out, and the baton inside it is already smoking—just like Gracie’s.

“
There’s
my baton!” I exclaim. “Quickly, refill the water in yours, and go! I’m right behind you!”

Gracie nods, still sniffling, clearing her throat, and plunges her shoes and baton into the water.

“Go! Go! Go!” I scream, as I toss away the rifle over the ledge into the reservoir, then desperately fling my body forward and grab the fallen dead boy’s contraption with both hands. Meanwhile, Gracie begins singing the keying sequence, her voice cracking a few times, loses it completely, then restarts again.

There’s no time to make my own new “shoe-baton holder.” I plunge the existing one into the water to refill it the best I can, then pull it out, and sing the keying notes as I grab the big rubber shoes of the dead boy, sloshing with water. . . .

Shots ring out all around us, and several other Candidates are running to grab at us as we hover and rise in the air.

I feel someone pull at my own legs, and I kick out . . . and then I am twenty feet in the air and rising, with Gracie directly overhead.

Vertigo takes hold of me, and the world is turning like a carousel. My head goes into a wild spin, while I continue rising, through the explosions and bullets, my eyes narrowed against the sky and sun and only Gracie’s dark shadow directly above . . . while my lips mouth the words, this time directed only at myself.

Go . . . Go . . . Go
 . . .

Just go.

W
e are about seventy-five feet up in the air when I realize the muscles in my arms are erupting in fine spasm-tremors. There’s a sharp ripping agony in my armpits, and my wounded arm cannot fully support me. My hold on both the shoes begins to slip. . . . Furthermore, the shoelaces tying the two shoes together have now burned away, because the middle portion of the baton exposed to the air is red-hot.

That’s when I hear Gracie screaming.

And the next instant, she plummets on top of me.

Whatever has just happened, Gracie is no longer supported by her own baton. Her panic reflex causes her to grasp at me, and as a result I almost lose hold of my baton also.

Gracie screams and holds on to me around my neck and waist. We wobble in the air, like two skydivers trying to share one parachute.

My hold on the baton slips, and I have no idea what I do, but as my one hand slips I grab out wildly, and suddenly there is
no shoe
on one side. It goes spinning down.

Instead, my fingers clasp the orichalcum surface that’s newly exposed to the air, and immediately I feel warmth followed by severe heat and then . . .
white-hot agony
.

I scream from the pain in pure instinct.

The pain, it is
indescribable
. My palm, my fingers, everything is on fire.

This is happening to the hand that’s attached to my one
good
arm.

And yet, because I know it is the only thing holding me—and Gracie—because Gracie is hugging me in a choke-hold,
I do not let go
.

The Atlantean shuttle—one of the last ones hovering over downtown L.A., looms before us.

We are now a mere twenty feet from the hatch opening, a black soothing void against grey-silver. Gracie’s own abandoned incandescent baton is bobbing in the air right near the opening, like a piece of aerial flotsam.

Screaming, I try to force my mind, to force my vocal chords to
sing
. I have to sing the new sequence to change direction and bring us closer in and enter the hatch. If I don’t—we miss the shuttle and it will all be for nothing, and we will plummet anyway.

I force myself to shut up. And suddenly, in my own silence and Gracie’s whimpering, I can hear a crackle and smell my hand smoking, charred near the bone.

I will not let go.

With a gasping breath, I open my mouth and I sing.

I put all my being, all the remainder of my
drowning self,
into the note sequence to stop the ascent and instead move forward.

We pause the rise and slowly hover in the direction of the shuttle opening.

Five feet . . . three feet . . . one. . . . There goes Gracie’s baton. . . . Now, just a few inches more. . . .

My voice breaks. There is now only tearing wind at this altitude, and silence.

Do not let go.

At the doorway a man stands, leaning into the wind, watching us approach. I see him, a wild tangle of long metallic-gold hair, lapis-blue eyes lined with sharp darkness of kohl. A stark chiseled face stilled in intensity. Around his uniform sleeve, a black armband.

Aeson Kass stands before us at the opening of the shuttle. As we levitate within reach, he puts out his bare hand and places it directly upon the incandescent white middle of my baton.

He never flinches as he makes contact with the fire, simply pulls us inward into the soothing darkness.

“You can let go now,” he says softly, staring directly into my eyes.

And as my mind plummets into darkness, I do as he says.

Chapter 41

I
wake up out of a deep mind fog into soothing sterile twilight.

Such an impossible sense of
peace
.

Amazingly there is no pain, nothing at all. It’s as if everything has been erased into a bad dream that happened somewhere far away and long ago.

I lie on a soft bed—or what feels like a bed, or maybe a cot. There’s a comfortable pillow under my head. There’s a soft hum of equipment in the background. What appears to be a hospital curtain on rollers is hanging from overhead on one side to give my bed-space privacy.

My body is relaxed . . . everything, all my limbs, I can feel them.

I feel
both
my arms and my hands.

Oh wow, my hands! My wounded arm!
They are whole and unharmed!

Last thing I remember is the fire agony of a burning terribly charred hand on one side and the dulled ache of a bullet-wounded arm on the other. What happened? How did I regain both limbs entirely?

I stir and make sounds. And apparently it is enough to bring someone by to lean over me, up-close, and examine me. I blink, attempting to keep my heavy eyelids open.

The stranger looking down at me is an unknown Atlantean. He observes me with an impassive gaze, and then moves away.

“What . . . what happened? Where . . . am I?” I whisper, barely moving my lips.

But the next moment I see two familiar faces. George and Gracie are at my bedside, both rushing toward me. George leans in, grins and presses my arm very gently—yes, my fully functional arm!—and Gracie comes around from the other side to rest her head against my chest and hug me with both arms.

“Gently, gently!” An unfamiliar voice sounds, and I see it is the Atlantean man speaking. I am guessing he is a doctor or a med tech, because he comes to check the IV line in my arm—which I notice only now, because again, I have a fully functional arm there, amazing. “Don’t get her agitated, don’t suffocate her, now.”

“Gee Two!” Gracie mutters, raising her head from my chest.

“Finally!” George says. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Gee Two.”

“George . . .” I mumble. “Oh, thank God . . . you made it. What about Gordie?”

“Don’t worry, knucklehead’s here too. He stepped outside to get food. He’s fine.”

I start to smile in relief. “Typical Gordie. . . . So, where are we exactly?”

“We made it! We’re at the National Qualification Center!” Gracie says.

George pats my arm and hand lightly. “Yeah, and the Atlanteans fixed you up real good. See, all perfect.”

“But—” I say. “What about the bullet wound? And the burned hand, I thought it was all ruined—”

“Apparently they have medical technology we can’t even begin to dream of.” George lets go my hand and adjusts the covers around me. “When the L.A. shuttles came in and they brought you in to the NQC, their medical team took you away—”

“They were taking many others too, all the hurt and wounded Candidates who passed the Semi-Finals, hundreds of people—” Gracie interrupts.

“Yeah, and they took you and worked on you for a couple of hours. Then they told us you were sleeping it off.”

“How long?” I lift my hand that was burned to a crisp and look at the healthy skin and muscle and nails, open and close it, flex my perfectly formed fingers, as though nothing had happened to it. “How long was I under?”

“Hmm, let’s see. . . .” Gracie looks around for a wall clock. “It’s close to eight PM now, so it makes it a day plus three hours.”

“A
day?
” I say. “Wait—”

“The Semi-Finals were yesterday.” George grins.

“I was out for
that
long?”

“Yeah, well, you needed the rest, so all good.”

I stir some more, and try to sit up weakly, and feel a sudden stabbing head-rush. Immediately the Atlantean medic who is not too far away, returns. “You need to lie back down,” he says calmly. “Just an hour more, and I take out the IV. Then you’re free to move around or sleep it off—your choice.”

“Wow,” I mutter, and sink back on the pillow. And then I stare at my brother and sister. “So, what happened? Tell me everything.”

I
n the next half an hour, I listen to George and Gracie speak, laboring to keep my eyelids open, even though my mind is clear and hungry for news.

It turns out we’re somewhere in the Eastern Plains of Colorado, or at least we think that’s where the huge National Qualification Center is located. They don’t tell us for sure, and they don’t tell the public, in order to keep all of us precious Finalists safe from any possible terrorist actions or other threats from the turbulent world outside. . . .

The NQC, George tells me, is the size of a goodly city, self-sustaining and completely enclosed from all sides with seventy-five-foot tall impenetrable steel and concrete walls like a fortress. It is supposed to keep us safe for another month until we train and get ready for the Final phase that will determine our Qualification status.

“Right now we’re in the medical building, their hospital, I guess,” George says. “Yesterday as soon as our respective shuttles brought us here, we got sorted into sick and not-so-sick and then assigned to our final dorms. There are only four dorms here, based on the Four Quadrants, and they are huge—I am talking, each one the size of a mall.”