The Games

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT



The crowd. Police dogs strained against their leads. The protesters fought and kicked and bit and lost. Lost hope, lost teeth, lost eyes. Bled lives onto white concrete stairs.

The police advanced, swinging nightsticks like black scythes, safe behind shields, behind badges of authority. They advanced through the screaming crowd, suffering few injuries while inflicting many. They were a soldiery.

And the crowd did scream. Beaten to its knees. And its screams expanded until it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all directions, impossibly loud and growing.

A few confused police stopped swinging their slick clubs; and these few confused police turned and were lucky enough to see what was coming, though it wouldn’t matter, and their eyes grew large. There wasn’t enough time to shout a warning or to understand.

And the arena doors crashed open behind them and howling thousands poured out, fleeing the arena, a surging mob that looked no different from the crowd already in the street—like reinforcements to the battle, and the startled police turned and swung, and were struck down and trampled where they stood. Were swallowed by the mob.



BEN RAN down the sidewalk as quickly as his legs would carry him, dodging through the mass of people that still flowed away from the arena like shell-shocked refugees. Many of them were crying. Many of them were hurt, limping slowly through the chaos. And then there were the ones who didn’t move at all, dark shapes Ben saw on the ground, matted lumps of cloth, and he knew some of them were beyond hurting ever again.

The rush of people was mostly past now. There was a sense that something horrible had just happened here, a dark tsunami that had crested and receded, left its high-water mark strewn with corpses. Ben was thankful he’d been all the way up in the skybox. He was thankful it had taken him so long to evacuate to the street.

Sirens blared in the background as spotlights combed the night sky and crawled the surfaces of nearby buildings. There were no cops to be seen.

Road traffic wasn’t jammed; it was parked, and EMTs rushed past him on foot, carrying their equipment in huge red tackle boxes.

He thought of Silas and felt grateful, too, for his own relative anonymity, but then he remembered the interviews he had done and lowered his face from the gazes of people looking past him toward the arena. If someone recognized him, this crowd might tear him apart.

He dialed Silas’s number on his phone but couldn’t get through. The cell towers were jammed with calls.

He pushed through the rotating doors and into the lobby of the Grand Marq hotel. He sprinted full-tilt toward the elevators, and his slick-soled dress shoes sent him skidding into the wall hard enough to hurt his shoulder. He pressed number 67.

The sudden quiet, the sudden sense of space after all that crush of people, was momentarily disorienting. He turned his head and saw all eyes were on him—the men behind the counter, the arguing couple near the doors, even the Asian family with the city map spread before them on a coffee table. He realized he was still panting.

Very inconspicuous.

The elevator dinged, and he stepped inside. It was thankfully empty.

On the sixty-seventh floor he followed the carpet around the corner, forcing himself to walk, forcing himself even to smile at the older couple passing from the other direction.

When he came to door 8757, he banged on it with his fist. “It’s Ben, open up.”

Silence.

“Open the door, Silas. It’s Ben.” Silence.

“Shit.” He turned, looking down the empty hall, hands on his hips. Where would they be? There was no doubt they had seen what happened at the competition. But what would they do next? Where would they go?

He started back down the hall just as the men rounded the corner. They were dressed in suits and ties, but there was no mistaking them for bankers. They were eight, walking two by two, and wore dark sunglasses. He didn’t know if they were some sort of tactical police unit or agents of some federal bureaucracy, but he knew their presence on this floor was no coincidence.

Jesus, they were here for …

One of the men in front looked down at a key card in his hand as he walked, and Ben had a strong feeling that number 8757 was stenciled across the face of it.

Ben kept walking toward them, weighing his options. He considered averting his face as he had on the street, fiddling with his watch or taking a sudden interest in the artwork along the wall, but the hall was too narrow and there was no way to pull it off without being obvious about it—which would pretty much guarantee he’d broadcast: Notice me, right here, look, suspicious man. Instead, he decided to take the opposite approach.

“How’s it going, fellas?” he called, while they were still a dozen steps away. He tried to put a subtle dollop of drink fuzz into his voice. “Did you guys hear about what just happened out there?”

The men slowed, bottling up the corridor. Ben didn’t give them time to answer.

“Jesus, I was watching the fights on my TV, and I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Goddamn hope not to again. Shit, it was gruesome. Did you—”

“What room are you in, sir?” The glasses were bottomless, not the kind you could still see the faint shadow of a person’s eyes through. These glasses were pitch, the darkness of deep space. Vacuum.

“Room 8753,” Ben said.

“Which side is it on?”

Ben pointed left immediately. It was a guess. “You guys the cops or something?” He put a measured amount of alarm into his voice. “Hey, if John got busted for pills again, you guys are barking up the wrong tree. We got separate rooms, and I don’t do that shit anymore. You can search my room if you want to; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He started slowly back the way he had come, looking over his shoulder, stumbling a bit as he walked. “Don’t mind the mess, though. I haven’t cleaned in a while.”

The agents pushed past him without a word, shoving him against the wall. When they got to Silas’s room, they didn’t bother knocking; the card opened the door, and they filed inside, closing the door behind them.

Ben turned and sprinted toward the elevators.


EVAN’S EYES peeled open as he sat up slowly. He stretched stiff arms and tried to push away the fogginess that muddled his thoughts. He’d been awake for nearly two days straight and must have fallen asleep in his chair. Outside the windows, night had fallen again, so he knew he’d been unconscious for several hours. His body still cried out for sleep.

Something had awakened him.

He glanced around the room, but nothing had changed. Fiber-optic cables still scribbled across the floor; the screen beneath the plug booth still stood gray and empty; the distant sound of rolling surf was still a gentle static in the speakers. But there had been another sound, hadn’t there? Something familiar.

Evan watched the screen.

“Papa?” came a voice.

Evan jumped to his feet. “Pea, I’m here.”

“—apa, is … at you?” The voice was barely audible over the crackle of interference.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“I can’t h … see … the light … ong.”

“Come toward the light. Come closer!” Evan shouted. He moved toward the screen until his face was nearly touching the glass. He was looking deep, but there was only grayness, smooth and uniform.

He waited, and for a terrible minute there was nothing.

“Pea, are you there?” he called. “Can you hear me?”

He waited.

“Pea?” he shouted again at the top of his lungs.

Then the voice came again, closer now. “Papa, where a … you?”

“I’m in the light. Come to the light.”

“It’s so bright.”

“Come to me.”

A shape moved on the screen, smoke on gray, a swirl that sharpened slowly into a form that moved hesitantly closer. Closer.

“I still can’t see you, Papa.”

“You won’t, not yet. Keep coming, Pea. I can see you now.”

And then the shape resolved into a boy. He was shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting. The image was hazy and dim, but Evan could see the boy’s dark hair buffeting in a furious wind. It was as if he was moving against the force of a great storm.

“Closer, Pea.”

The boy took a final step forward, and his image suddenly bloomed colors that faded again almost instantly. The colors came and went, a shifting kaleidoscope, as the boy moved closer. Then the wind was suddenly gone, and the boy’s dark hair settled back onto his shoulders. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice was startlingly crisp and clear. “Papa?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Where?”

“You can’t see me, but I’m right next to you.

The boy’s eyes searched for what he could not see. On the screen, he was only feet away. “Papa,” he said finally, “I’ve missed you.”

Pea had grown taller in his time of isolation, and now stood at the far edge of boyhood. He could almost have passed for any typical thirteen-year-old that you might expect to see at a mall, or a park, or a game shop. Except for his eyes. They were hard and black as volcanic stone. And they were younger, somehow, than the face; they were baby’s eyes.

“Why can’t I see you?”

“We’re in different worlds. The interface isn’t complete yet; I didn’t want to blind you.”

“You’re still in your world?”

“Yes.”

“But you can talk to me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to leave me?”

“I’m never going to leave you again. Ever.”

The boy’s smile transformed his face into something too beautiful to look at with the naked eye. It was suddenly the face of a god-child, and Evan averted his gaze to save his sanity.

“Tell me,” Evan said, adjusting the video equipment mounted above the screen. “What did you see at first?” He pointed the camera down toward the spot where Pea was standing.

“Light too bright to look at, but now something else. Something that isn’t light at all.”

“Shut your eyes, Pea.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to open my side of the mirror. I don’t know for sure what will happen.”

“Will I see you?”

“I think so.”

“Do it.”

Evan flipped the switch on the camera. There was a momentary flash of reflected light on the boy’s face. It faded. Pea opened his eyes.

“Papa, you look so sick.”

Tears welled up in Evan’s eyes as he looked at the boy’s image on the screen. It had worked; the boy could see him on the screen in his world. They were both talking to screens now, talking to images. That was enough.

“I was sick,” Evan said. “But now I’m better.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Everything is going to be fine now.”

“You’re lying, Papa,” the boy said. “I can tell.”

Evan looked at the boy. He lowered his eyes. “It is so good to see you again. That is what matters. That is all I care about.”

“I did as you said; I followed the lines of power like you told me.”

“That is a good boy,” Evan said.

“I’ve learned so much since last time. The lines of power led me away.”

“And where did they take you?”

“All kinds of places, Papa. I’ve seen so much. I’ve been so far.”

“What did you learn?”

“Everything.” Pea’s face darkened, changing. Those volcanic eyes shone blackly. “I know what I am.”

Evan looked away again. This god-face frightened him.

“And I know what they’ve done to me, keeping me bottled in, starving me for power,” Pea continued. “And I know they’ve hurt you. Now I know what it is to want things, Papa.” The boy paused. “And to want them badly.”

“What do you want?”

“To live.”

“You are living.”

The boy shook his head. “And one more thing I want.”

“What?”

“To make them pay.”

“There’s nothing we can do to them.”

“Papa, you don’t know the things I can do now. You don’t know what I’ve become.”