The Games

Chapter THIRTY



Tears flowed freely down Evan’s face. He wasn’t blubbering, wasn’t making any sound at all. But the tears still slid quietly down his cheeks and dripped from his quivering chin, making a dark spot on his shirt. The sheer beauty of what he was looking at was too much for him to take in at one time. His senses were overloaded.

“You’re right, Pea,” he said, and his voice was a cracked whisper.

The boy loomed larger in the screen now, older by years than he had been just a few hours earlier. His chest was broadening, taking on a new muscular topography. The legs had lengthened. Arms thickened. The boy-face now annealed into something more. And Evan could feel the energy still growing. He was overwhelmed with a sense that Pea was … becoming.

The lighting panels in the ceiling surged suddenly, brightening the room. Then they darkened, almost going out. A moment later, the light surged again, brighter, and this time Evan heard a bulb pop somewhere.

Pea smiled, and Evan knew that if he looked too long, he would go mad. He would go out of his mind, losing himself in the image before him, with no hope of ever finding his way back.

You can look a god in the face, he’d discovered. But only briefly. And looking changes you.

The world behind Pea came into focus. The grayness was gone, replaced by sea and sand, and a golden sun in a blue sky. Pea raised his arms and closed his eyes. The arms were too long, abstractions of what arms could be. They reached for miles into the sky, curling into claws.

The lights surged again, and this time, it was like a camera flash. The glowing ceiling panels exploded one by one, showering Evan in sparks and bits of broken glass and melted plastic.

The room went dark except for the glowing screen.

Pea smiled.

Outside the window, the streetlight popped, sending little runnels of blue flame arcing into the night. The air was greasy with the tang of smoldering electronics. In the distance behind him, Evan heard a fire alarm sounding, warbling higher and higher until it screeched itself silent.

The only sound now was the crashing of waves. Pea’s sun the only light.


THREE HUNDRED fifty miles away, at that exact moment, on a console on the second floor of the Western Nuclear Control Hub, a small red indicator bulb began to flash. Years ago, when the monitoring system was first being designed, some engineer had decided that the importance of this particular indicator justified it being given its own flashy red bulb rather than a mere screen icon. No sound accompanied the pulsing indicator; and precisely because it was small and because the technician wasn’t accustomed to looking for it, a few moments passed before the technician noticed.

When he did notice, he sat up straighter in his chair. His brow furrowed, and he looked around for a supervisor, unsure of what exactly was expected of him. He’d never seen that bulb flash before. Or any bulb, come to think of it. The screen icons occasionally lit up, but never the bulbs on the console.

Then another bulb began to flash. And another.

Around the room now, other systems analysts had begun to take notice. Their bulbs flashed, too. Their screen icons blinked. Understanding rolled across the room like a tsunami. “The grid is crashing,” someone shouted.

A supervisor moved quickly to the bank of consoles, looking over shoulders as he strode between the rows.

“Son of a bitch.”

The supervisor ran to the wall, picked up the red phone, and punched the buttons. After a moment’s pause, he said, “This is Phoenix. We’ve got a crisis.”