Qualify (88 page)

And then the familiar grinding sound begins as the floodgate starts opening. The usual black fountain of water gushes in through the growing slit from the next chamber.

We wait, ready to plunge forward.

But the top of the gate rises about a foot over the opening and then it just
stops
.

It sits there, making an awful deep grinding noise, as the wall of water flows and flows into our chamber, with no way to squeeze through because of the force of current and water pressure. . . .

The damn thing is
stuck
.

We watch the stalled lift-gate. As the reality of our situation sinks in, I feel a stabbing cold pang of absolute despair in my gut.

“Oh, no, oh, sweet, dear lord, no!” Laronda mutters, clutching her hoverboard with trembling ice-cold fingers.

“Oh crap, oh crap!”

People begin to cuss. And then someone says to Jack, “Well, f— you, man, just f— you! You jinxed it! If you hadn’t said anything about these tunnels breaking down, you stupid ass—”

“Oh, we’re so dead! We’re
dead!
” Claudia exclaims not too far behind me. Her voice, it sounds terribly high, on the verge of crying. It’s the sound of a terrified lonely little girl, and I have never
ever
heard Claudia like that. . . .

Me? I am numb. The cold fear spreads like a paralyzing agent in a drifting cloud to make me barely able to breathe.

“Oh lord! Oh, mama, please, oh, please, help us! Sweet Jesus, help us!” Laronda is crying. She is not the only one.

People cry and people cuss.

A few throw stuff at the walls, watching it bob away in the current. Because, who cares now? Water bottles and gear and dead flashlights are no good now; nothing matters anymore.

We watch the water fill our chamber and slowly equalize with the stuck lift-gate between this and the next chamber.

“Is there anything? Anything we can do?”

“Un-jam the gate?” I say in a dead voice. “I don’t think so. We could try to squeeze through that slit, but it’s tricky with all that water current. I don’t think it’s possible.”

Laronda turns her face to me suddenly with a crazy light of hope in her eyes. They glitter black and wild in the twilight. “Gwen! You have to come up with something! You’re
Shoelace Girl!
”

“I—I don’t know—”

“But you have to!”

“I said, I
don’t know
, okay?” I yell back at her in a sudden burst of fury that is caused by numb despair. “I don’t have an answer! I just don’t!”

But Laronda, and a few of the others have all turned to me. I see their eyes like blinking jewels in the near-darkness.

I think, then. Feverishly think. . . .

“Okay,” I say. “Maybe if we wait it out, and try to squeeze through when the current is at its slowest?”

“Can’t we un-jam it somehow? We can try pushing up? All of us, together?”

And in the next few seconds, we all get off our hoverboards, and wade through the icy horrible water toward the gate and try to raise it all together.

We give it our all.

It does not even budge. Not with a dozen or more of us pushing and lifting.

“Okay, so much for that exercise in stupidity. Anyone else want to try squeezing through?” Derek says, after straining his thick muscled neck in an attempt to lift, and then trying to stick his feet through the slit.

A skinny tiny girl wades forward, her teeth chattering, and tries to go through the opening. Her body makes it halfway, and then she is stuck. So we end up pulling her back out with some difficulty.

“Damn it, the space is just too small,” Emilio mutters. “Just a few more inches could’ve done it—”

We get back on our hoverboards and out of the cold water. And yeah, we are out of options. The water continues to flow into our chamber and now it is higher than the beacons and a foot over the slit between the top and bottom gate halves.

In about ten minutes this chamber will be flooded completely.

And then we will drown.

Chapter 53

M
inutes later, I am lying flat on my back on top of my hoverboard, relaxed in that weird painful way that can only come from absolute despair added to absolute exhaustion. My eyes are closed, and I am listening to the water rise around us. What else is there to do?

“I really didn’t think I was gonna die like this,” Laronda says, lying on her stomach against the hoverboard, propped up by her elbows. “I mean, I knew I was probably gonna die, but not like this. Drowning is a crappy way to go.”

“Every way to go is a crappy way to go,” Jack mumbles.

“It’s like, I wish we could plug this seeping hole in the gate somehow?” Laronda rolls her eyes and coughs. “Wish we could just board it up somehow and, well, you know, keep this air in this chamber, until maybe we can figure a way out—”

With a start I open my eyes.

“What did you just say?” I mutter, turning my face to stare.

Board
it up.

Board, as in hoverboard!

A strange crazed sequence of thought explosions happens in my mind. Bam! Bam! Bam! Idea! A chain of ideas!

I sit up, then stare wildly around us—at a bunch of other dazed, freezing people levitating on top of their boards, as we slowly inch up toward the tunnel ceiling, forced by the inevitable rising water level.

“Holy crap!” I say. “We can use our hoverboards! We can use them all kinds of ways!”

Laronda whirls to me. “What? What! Did you come up with something?”

“Yes!” I exclaim. I am suddenly shaking. “But—but it’s kind of insane, it’s gonna be a bunch of weird things, and I’ll need everyone’s board for this—” I continue speaking in a crazed rush of words, as the idea takes hold and flowers, and other “baby idea” offshoots come, rapidly, wonderfully. . . .

Oh, if only I’d thought of it ten minutes earlier, it would have been so much simpler!

“Okay, everyone, first, I need you all to look around at the tunnel and find the deepest largest bubble pocket in the wall with a kind of small opening, just enough to squeeze through, but not bigger than the length of a hoverboard! Also it should be enough to hold several people with air to spare,” I chatter in a crazed voice. “But make sure it’s above water!”

“Okay, so, what are you thinking here?”

But other Candidates are already looking around, and moments later we have found a large, deep, cave-like pocket that recedes into the wall of the tunnel like a small appendage or auxiliary tunnel. Water has almost reached it, but not quite.

“Okay,” I scream. “Everyone get off your boards and get inside! Hurry! I have work to do!”

“What? What?”

“Just trust me on this, damn it! Go! Go! Go!”

“
Listen to her!”
Laronda picks up. “She is Shoelace Girl!”

Candidates start hovering closer to the bubble pocket, and teens get off their boards, and huddle against the soggy slimy surface of the bubble. I stand on the ledge and look out, and make sure that the last reluctant person gets inside, including Claudia and Derek, who are no longer protesting, because, pretty much it’s this or die.

“What next?”

“I am going to board us up here,” I say. “For the next half hour, we will wait out this cycle and then Team D will be here and this chamber will have air again.”

“But how are you going to board us up? That’s crazy!”

“And what about the next cycle? Even with Team D here to help or whatever, we’re still just gonna drown because that gate will still be stuck!”

“No, it won’t be!” I say. “Because we’ll use hoverboards to lift it!”

“Oh, crap, yeah!” Emilio says, as the idea finally dawns on him. But then he adds, “Wait, how come you can’t do that now?”

“Because hoverboards can’t accept voice commands when fully submerged underwater. No sound!”

“Oh. . . .”

“Yeah. But once the water level cycles again, and it’s back down to its starting position, the gate opening will be exposed to the air. Then we can send hoverboards in there from our side and give them voice commands. Makes sense?” And then I step back. “Okay, now quiet please, I am about to board us up.”

“Wait! How will the boards keep the water away? Who or what will hold them tight enough to seal the opening?”

“The force of directional vectors!” I exclaim. “I will voice-key each board to be moving in a certain direction against immovable objects, and it itself will create a tight seal!”

“Huh?” a boy says.

But I ignore him and look out into the tunnel where a whole herd of riderless empty hoverboards now levitates in the dwindling air. I start by setting individual Aural Blocks on every one, so that no one but me can move them out of place and accidentally mess up the crazy toothpick-and-house-of-cards structure I am about to erect. . . .

And then I start singing each board into place.

First, I call all the boards inside the great big bubble cavity in which we are huddling. And then I begin by lifting them one by one so they “stand up” and hover upright. Next, I stack them vertically with a “go forward” command so that they advance, smack hard against the walls, and cover the opening. Basically I am forcing them to move away from me and fly—while still in a vertical position—in the direction of the opening.

Each board hums with angry force as it strains against the rock holding it back from its direction of movement, snagging it around the top and bottom ends. As the rows fill, I make sure the boards are as tightly squeezed against each other horizontally as they are against the edges of the cave bubble, so that there are no slats or openings for water to get through. But of course it’s likely insufficient to keep the water away, so I erect a second row of boards as an additional insulation wall, and then a third layer.

When I am done, boards are pressing tight against each other, each one programmed to move, and unable to comply. The force of each board trying to
move forward
holds them all in place and against each other.

“Okay,” I say, turning to the others. “Hope that holds. I think it will. Cross your fingers. . . .”

“How the hell did you do that? What did you do?” a girl asks.

“Hello? Shoelace Girl,” Laronda says. As if that explains everything.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I say with a sigh. And then I add, “Now we need to shut up, conserve air, and wait for the cycle to complete.”

“But—how will we know when the water is gone again?” Claudia asks with a frown.

“Easy. We will hear Team D in the tunnel. That should be a dead giveaway.”

“Ugh, please, don’t say the word ‘dead,’ girlfriend,” Laronda mutters.

W
ell, so far so good. After about ten minutes of trying to breathe slow and shallow, we hear only an eerie silence on the other side, which means that water has completely filled this chamber of the tunnel.

And then we see tiny droplets and rivulets starting to seep through and creep down at the edges of the bubble opening where the boards struggle to “pass” and so keep the water out.

“Oh, no! Water is coming in!”

“Not too badly. It’s just a few drops. Should be enough to last us till the gate re-opens.”

“You’d better be right,
chica!
” Claudia says. But her tone has grown milder, significantly so. I think Claudia is too frightened out of her head to do the alpha mean girl crap.

And so we wait.

Ten more minutes later, we hear the first voices outside, and the sound of rushing current.

Team D has arrived, and so is our chance!

I sing the command to remove the Aural Blocks and release all the hoverboards back to their “owners.”

As it happens they all start falling, like a suddenly broken house of cards.

As the boards fall away, ending up levitating inches off the floor, the tunnel is revealed. We see a whole bunch of Candidates flying past. The moment they see us, there are a few startled screams and a collision or two.

And then we all come out and explain what happened. “USA Team Fourteen-C, here! You guys are Team D, aren’t you?”

As we get back on our boards, Team C people start re-keying them, while everyone stares at each other. Team D looks exhausted as much as we are, and possibly more.

And then I see Gracie.

“
Gracie!”
I scream, as my bedraggled shivering little sister moves forward, lying flat and hovering low over the water.

“Gwen!”

And then we come together, and hug ridiculously across our boards, hands wrapped awkwardly around each other, patting down, checking each other’s limbs, making sure we’re all in one piece.

But there’s no time for a proper reunion.

Hastily I explain everything again, this time to Team D, about what’s going on with the defective lift-gate in front of us.