The Games (20 page)

Silas read the heading of the article aloud: “Brannin Found Faulty Again, Future of Program in Doubt.” He raised his eyebrows.

“It cost a fortune to run,” Ben said. “And the economists apparently weren’t all that impressed with the return on their investment.”

“That makes two of us now.”

“Seems that the Brannin wasn’t much help in predicting stock-market trends. It showed ammunition and gun manufacturing companies as good buys. Bulletproof vests, tanks, all that sort of stuff. The stock prices of survivalist-outfitting companies were predicted to go through the roof. It’s all in the article. Very idiosyncratic.”

“There’s no basis for it?”

“None that the economists can see.”

Silas handed Ben back the streamer. “The article say anything about Chandler?”

“Yeah.” Ben scanned down through the article with his finger. “The head of the program, Evan Chandler, believes the problem is V-ware related and is aggressively pursuing corrective measures.” Ben looked up from the piece. “It’s kind of hard to pursue anything without funding.”

“Does it say that?”

“No, but I don’t think they’ll give Chandler’s little creation a third multimillion-dollar strike. Do you?”

Silas started walking toward the target again, leaving Ben standing. “Ammunition and survivalist stocks, huh?” he called over his shoulder. “Sounds like the computer thinks a war is coming.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Silas curled his fingers around the arrow and pulled. It came free with a rasp. “You know, you never did tell me how your little race went?”

“What ra— Oh, that.” Ben’s clownish grins were usually a thing of creases, an upward tug at the corners of his lips, but now he smiled openly, showing small, even teeth—more teeth than Silas could remember seeing in the young man’s face. It was a cat’s grin, the sly predator, a side of Ben that Silas wasn’t familiar with.

“I may lose the war, but that’s one battle went my way,” Ben said.

S
ILAS STOOD
at the bars, wallowing in the darkness and the silence of the domed enclosure. He gazed through the gaps in the iron and into the interior shadows where the beast lurked. Yes, it was a beast now, as huge and fearsome as any dreamed up in a fairy tale. Its dark shape lay in a clutter of straw in the corner, black skin shining silvery in the moonlight that filtered through the electrified steel mesh above. He wondered if it dreamed.

The members of the research team had stopped calling it Felix two months ago. That name died with Tay. Now it was just called “the gladiator.”

The night was old, and Silas was tired, but he couldn’t make himself go home yet. In days long past, it had been tradition for the captains of war vessels to tour their ships on the final evening before a great battle. Silas supposed, in his own way, he was doing just that. Tomorrow they would ship out to Phoenix, and shortly thereafter the preliminary competitions would start. The Olympics were nearly upon them.

Silas curled his fingers around the bars, feeling their slick coolness. From the shining shadow, he heard a soft rustle of straw.

“Go back to sleep,” he whispered softly. “Tomorrow it starts.”

It seemed that the creature heard him and understood, because the rustling stopped. Silas smiled. In the coming week, the world would
finally see what Helix had been working so hard on. Win or lose, the gladiator’s appearance alone would be enough to secure a worldwide reaction.

The twist in his gut belied the confidence he had been portraying for the past weeks. The old dread was still with him, strong and sour at the back of his throat, and as the time of competition neared, it had matured into a flaring premonition that something terrible was going to happen. He had tried to convince himself that it was just normal pre-contest jitters and had resigned himself to checking and rechecking the details of transport and security in a useless attempt to ease his mind. Nothing had worked. In fact, the anxiety had gotten worse. Something wasn’t right.

He uncurled his hands from the bars and cast a long last look into the shadows of the enclosure. Even coming here and seeing the gladiator sleeping so peacefully hadn’t settled his mind. He turned away and took a few steps toward the exit, then stopped. He wasn’t sure why. He turned, and his heart banged in his chest.

The gladiator stood towering at the bars, its wings an enormous midnight backdrop spreading away a dozen feet on either side. The gray eyes glared fiercely from the blackness of its face. It hadn’t made a sound. It had waited until his back was turned, then crossed the cage in two seconds in complete silence. Silas realized he was barely, just barely, beyond arm’s reach of the creature.

He turned and fled the dome quickly, eager to climb out from under the weight of its alien stare.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
ilas’s headlights washed a slow circle across the gentle uphill sweep of his residential drive. He noticed the glow in the large picture window, and a smile crept to his lips.

She’s still here
.

He eased to a stop with a subtle squeak of brakes and hit the garage-door button. Craning his head out the window, Silas pulled a long draft of cool night air into his lungs. It smelled of growing things, dark earth, and the wet cedar chips that lay in a thick blanket among the shrubs along the front of his house. He’d laid those cedar chips himself earlier in the spring, after planting the bushes, and now every few months he found himself pulling out the pruning shears to do battle with nature’s intent on his ideal.

It would’ve been easier to hire a landscaping company, and several times he’d actually found a local company on the Internet, but something just wouldn’t let him do it. And it wasn’t the money. For each person there is a theoretical sweet spot, a specific point value of wealth beyond which money is no longer really of concern. That point is different for different people, but Silas had reached his version of that point several years ago. Money no longer mattered to him. He supposed that on some basic level he must actually enjoy yard work, though in the heat of it, it never seemed so. Perhaps it was the gratification of crafting order from disorder, of taking something alive and
fashioning it to the likeness of some inner model that only he could see. Perhaps he just liked the warmth of the sun’s feet on his neck.

But the sun was long gone now. Above him, between the grasping branches of oak, the vault of the sky spread in muted black, and dim stars struggled at the edge of visibility. Silas searched for Orion, but the glow from the city hazed out the constellations. The great archer would be shooting blind tonight.

He slid the Courser beneath the ascending door and into the garage, the one part of his house where he accepted a certain buildup of clutter. He didn’t think of it as messy, though. The garage was a functional room, utile, and as such, he simply let it find its own level. Fight too hard against the natural grain of entropy, and sometimes that drives out what grace there might be.

His father, after all, had been a tool man. Over the years, most of those tools had found their way to the shelves and clasps against the back wall. There were enormous rusty C-clamps, wrenches in all manners of configuration, pliers, and things that looked more like medieval weaponry than instruments of some craft. Some, certainly, were already old when his father first came by them. Tools can be immortal. They hung neatly from the Peg-Board in no discernible pattern. To Silas, many of these rusty tools were like bones washed up on an alien shore, their provenance cloaked in mystery, but he kept them anyway. Mementos of a man he’d never known.

He turned off the ignition and pulled at his earlobe to ease the pressure. The pain was back tonight.

He tried to put the gladiator out of his mind. His late-night walk at the lab. The feel of the steel bars, cold in his hand. The fierce, glaring eyes.

Silas climbed out of his car. The soft tick-ticking of the engine walked him inside.

Vidonia was in the kitchen, waiting for him in his white cotton socks and nothing else. His smile came again, but she did not match it. Her expression was serious business. It was the expression of thirst, or hunger. And it was devoid of pretension.

Then she was in his arms, and down the hall, and on his bed. His mouth was against her cries as they moved together again, skin on skin, doing the thing they were for.

Afterward, she laid her head across his chest, and then her smile came. He shut his eyes, and in the darkness experienced her as tactile sensation only—a warmth upon him, a coarse tangle of tresses that sprawled across the low juncture of his neck. A leg, hot and soft, moved across his. A finger traced his jawline.

“Tell me about you,” she said, and he knew it was a way not to talk about what would happen between them when the competition ended. It had been on his mind for several weeks. He knew it had been on her mind, too.

“What do you want to know?” he said. Officially, her tenure as consultant would be over at the start of the Games. Unofficially, well, that subject hadn’t been broached.

“Everything. You never talk about yourself.”

“It’s hard to begin with everything,” he said.

“Tell me what you were thinking when you were lying there quietly a moment ago.”

Silas smiled. No way she was getting him that easily. “You’d only be disappointed. It’s not exactly what I’d call romantic.”

“Doesn’t have to be.”

“You sure?”

“Most definitely. Perhaps it’ll be the key that finally unlocks that big head of yours.”

“Okay, now I know you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Just tell me,” she said, and smiled, pinching him.

And he almost told her. Almost told her about the fear that he’d barely articulated to himself. That there would be more death around this animal.

“I was just thinking how much my damn ear hurts,” he said.

“Your ear?”

“Told you you’d be disappointed.”

“Not at all. ‘Intrigued’ is the word I’d use.”

“You’re intrigued about an ear infection?”

“Yes. Now you’re not so perfect. I think I like that.”

“In that case, I get them all the time.”

“Even better.”

“Couple times a year, at least.”

“I’ve never been with a man who suffered from chronic ear infections.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not surprised. We’re a special breed. Born, not made.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Which ear?”

“This one.” He pulled her hand to the side of his head.

“It’s hot,” she said, and her tone changed slightly.

“Mmm.”

“I thought only little kids got this way.”

“You should have seen me when I was a kid.”

She pulled away from him and sat up.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Stay here, I’ll be right back.” She flipped the covers over and slipped across the room, her naked body shining in the half-light as she jiggled to the bathroom. He wanted her again, in that instant.

The bathroom light clicked on, and a moment later he heard her rummaging around in his cabinets. “What are you looking for?” he called.

“Found it.” She returned with a satisfied smile. In one hand she held a little brown bottle; in the other, a towel.

“Peroxide?”

“Your ear,” she said.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“In Brazil, doctors and antibiotics were expensive. Peroxide is cheap everywhere.”

“Will that really work?”

“My mom used it on us, so probably not. Now lie back.”

He did as he was instructed, and she slid the towel under his head and sat on the bed next to him. She gently tilted his head to the side, bad ear up. The chemical smell stung his nose as she twisted the lid off the brown bottle. She turned the lid upside down, then poured a thimble-size draft into the little white cap.

“This won’t hurt a bit.”

“Whoa. Why are you bringing pain into this conversation?”

“Because it isn’t going to hurt.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it hurting until you said that.”

She pushed his head back to the towel. “Baby,” she said. The tip of the lid touched his earlobe, and then she upended the contents into his ear canal.

Sound exploded, an apocalypse of hissing and popping and static, so loud it drowned out everything else. The sensation of cold ran deep into his head, driving away the familiar soreness. He wasn’t sure if it was working, but the ache was gone, replaced by something too weird to be called pain, exactly.

“Is it supposed to sound like that?”

“You don’t have to shout. You’re the only one who can hear it.”

The hissing continued, growing softer, quieter. She poured again, and sound exploded anew. She wiped the foam from the edges of his ear, where it had overflowed.

“There’s a lot of bubbling. That means a lot of bacteria. Haven’t you ever gone to the doctor for this?”

“About a dozen times. I just haven’t had time lately. You kind of get used to the ache.”

“You might damage your hearing.”

“What?”

She slapped his shoulder.

“When I was in college, my sister talked me into taking scuba lessons with her,” he said. “During the training, the instructor casually mentioned that a small percentage of people are incapable of diving because their inner ears can’t handle the pressure changes.”

“What does this have to do with your ear?”

“I think I would have liked diving if it hadn’t hurt so damned bad.”

“You were one of those people?”

“Yeah. I went exactly twice. The first time was in Lake Minnehaha, to a depth of twenty feet for my open water certification. It nearly split my ears to go that deep, but I forced myself. The water was murky, and I followed a line down to the dive platform as slowly as the instructor would let me, trying to get my ears to equalize. I pinched my nose and blew, tilted my head back, and swallowed hard against the regulator, all the tricks they taught us, but nothing worked. Once I was down long enough, things evened out and I was fine. When we were out of our wet suits, I told the instructor about my problem, and would you like to know what he said to me?”