30

Evazee walked blindly, feeling her way forward with her toes. She kept hoping her next step would be a bump into Kai. Something shifted in the air and invisible heaviness dropped over her like a cloak. Standing upright was hard. She felt exposed, vulnerable. A bug kept in a glass jar. Thoughts like eels probed her mind. She knew this silent voice. A shudder ran through, and she nearly tripped. Each step took her closer to where she didn’t want to go. But she couldn’t abandon Kai.

She touched her throat where her imprint had been, felt the empty chain where her amulet used to hang. She’d been stolen from, cut down, and shoved aside. Right now, she was nothing but a blob of fear with a bunch of hang-ups and issues thrown in.

She couldn’t bear the darkness any longer. She had to run. Kai was nowhere in sight. She rounded a bend and smacked hard into a muscular arm. It snaked around her, covering her mouth and pulling her into the shadows. She fought like a crazy person, elbows aiming for soft targets.

“Shh! Stop fighting me. I’m trying to help you.”

The voice in her ear was familiar and brought back an instant memory of stolen peaches. She stopped struggling and his arms relaxed. The moment they did, she swung around and rammed her fists into his chest. “You’re a traitor! Get away from me!”

Elden coughed at the impact to his chest. “There’s a trap and Kai and your precious OS kids have walked straight into it. Stop fighting me.”

Cold fear ran through Evazee. “How do you know?” A shockwave of panic washed through her, and she didn’t wait for his answer. “We have to get them out. They should never have come. They’re not meant to be involved in this mess.”

“You have to trust me. Now is not the time.” He held a finger against her lips.

Evazee’s skin crawled. Between letting her be marked and abandoning the other guys, she didn’t trust Elden as far as she could throw him.

“I can read your eyes, Zee, and I understand. But I don’t think you have any other choice right now. Your marking got you in the door. Think about that for a moment.”

“Touché. But it doesn’t excuse what you did.” She was torn. Her thoughts and feelings were a tangled mess, a ball of thread left at the mercy of a bored cat. She wouldn’t figure it all out right now. She shut down that train of thought and flicked her fingers at the darkness ahead. “What is out there?”

Elden met her eyes for the first time since grabbing her. “Let’s just say, it’s not safe. Not safe at all. Kai is out there, we have to try find him.” He held her hand in his and together they walked into the darkness, following the faint glow of the line at their feet.

~*~

Shasta towered over Kai with his arms folded as if mulling over his options. His phone beeped once and he took the call. He listened without blinking, a slight lift in his eyebrows the only indication that he was hearing what the other person had to say.

Kai watched the subtle play of emotions on Shasta’s face.

Roland eased himself between Kai and Shasta.

Shasta ended the call and rubbed his hands together. “I needed some volunteers and what do you know? They came to me. If the universe is giving you a sign like that, you’re on the right track. Don’t you agree?” He chuckled at his own joke. He flicked his head towards Roland. “Take him to the amphitheatre. I’ll be along shortly.”

“The amphitheatre? But we’re not at that stage yet. Our deadline is still weeks away.”

“I decided to speed things up a bit. Don’t question it, just do what I tell you.” Shasta didn’t hang around to make sure that Roland did his bidding. He walked off into the dark in the direction of the Crux.

Kai watched the conflict play across Roland’s face. If he spoke carefully, he might just be able to get through to this man. Harmless question first. “What is the amphitheatre?”

Roland didn’t answer, but the fine sheen of sweat across his forehead spoke volumes.

Kai patted his shoulder, and Roland roused as if he’d just woken from a nightmare.

“What?”

“The amphitheatre. What is it?”

“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. Please don’t resist. I don’t want to have to restrain you.”

“But he’s bullying you. You’re the expert, and he should be listening. Not doing his own thing in your area of specialty. Surely?”

Roland hunched as he walked, looking sinister by the glowing green light that lit their path. His shoulders bunched tightly as brown stained his cheeks.

The sand was hot enough for Kai to feel it through the soles of his sneakers. Temperatures dropped rapidly in the desert at night but this place was different. The midnight dark dome of sky curved away from where he stood and for the first time. Kai realized there were no stars. Under different circumstances, his mom would have loved taking this walk.

“Why did you do it? Why did you abandon me?”

Roland kept his gaze down and stayed silent long enough for Kai to think he hadn’t heard the question. “That’s not what happened.”

“From my side, that’s exactly what happened. You dumped me at St Greg’s and left. Never to be seen again. Who does that with their own child?”

“What you could do scared me. You were a baby, and you had healing powers. That’s terrifying. It’s not like you’d been to Bible school or had any proper training. You just did it. That’s not how it works.” He shook his head. “I found a school where you’d be safe, and I offered my services as a researcher, hoping that I’d find a cure. All I wanted was for you to be normal so that I could fetch you and go back home.”

“You abandoned TrisTessa.”

“I tried to go home, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She threatened to get the police involved, and that would have been an enormous mistake. I tried to make her see sense. I wouldn’t tell her where you were, I just told her that you were in good hands, but she wouldn’t believe me. Sometimes I know what’s best for my family. This was one of them.”

Kai stopped walking and stared at the man. He wore a green turban of brokenness around his head. The glow was so large, that it looked like his neck might snap. “You are completely deceived.”

~*~

“Here it is.”

Evazee squinted into the blackness. The moment they’d stepped off the end of the green line, it had faded away to nothing, plunging them into deeper darkness.

“I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”

He led her over a sandy rise and down the other side. At the bottom of the mini-hill steps disappeared deeper into a tunnel under the sand. As they followed the short flight down, Evazee could see light glowing from below. It grew brighter as they got lower. The stairs bent to the left at the bottom. Evazee nearly tripped over her feet from shock.

The amphitheatre was just that—a huge, hi-tech underground arena, with the seating area blocked off from the open space in the middle by what looked like one-way glass.

Elden led Evazee away from the door, and they crouched down behind a wall. They huddled there, trying to be invisible in the hollowed out, empty venue.

Evazee’s foot started to cramp. She eased her weight off, overbalanced, and fell. She caught herself.

Something in her back pocket poked her. The scroll she’d picked up from the dry riverbed. She slipped her hand into her pocket to take it out. No longer a scroll, now it was a small book. A Bible. She opened it to where someone had slipped in a bookmark. A single paragraph was highlighted:

“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

One of her favourite verses. She hadn’t thought about it in a long time.

Elden seemed distracted by what was going on down on the floor of the amphitheatre, people were leading in and being separated into groups. But he must have noticed because he turned back and asked, “What have you got there?”

Evazee quickly closed the book and slipped it back into her back pocket. “Nothing. Just a book.” She stared ahead, wishing he’d focus on something else. As much as Elden seemed like the old Elden she remembered, she couldn’t bring herself to trust him. Sure, the branding on the back of her neck had bought her entrance into this place, but he couldn’t have known that she’d need it. It was all too convenient. She sat with adrenalin pumping through her veins, waiting for him to betray her again.

Rivers of living water will flow from your innermost being. She could do with some of that right now.

Jesus, help.

~*~

Kai was seeing spots from staring at the glowing green lines in the sand—the only light in the deep darkness of the desert. The lines stopped abruptly, and Roland led him past two stairways going down into the sand and came to stop at a third.

“I have to get back. This is your entrance to the amphitheatre. Head straight on down, and there’ll be people to help you.” Roland was twitchy, an ant on a hot plate.

“Can you at least give me a clue what happens here?”

“It’s a simulation, just on a bigger scale than what you’re used to. You’ve been through them at the OS. Just keep your wits about you, and you’ll be fine.”

“I was never in a sim. I was trapped in the spiritual realm. If I died there, there’d be no regeneration, no resetting of my mind and moving on.” He passed a hand across his face. Trying to get through to Roland was like trying to speak clearly with one’s cheeks full of marshmallows—it just didn’t work. “I can see why TrisTessa was frustrated with you. You won’t hear anything that doesn’t fit with the messed-up picture in your head.”

Roland winced. “You’ve got this. Go do what you came here to do. Now get down there. I’ve got things I need to get back to.”

Kai took the stairs two at a time, just to get away from Roland. A single narrow passage led away from the staircase, and Kai kept walking. The buzz of conversation grew louder as he walked. The passage was dimly lit but better than the absolute darkness of the desert. It opened out onto a holding room full of people. It didn’t take much to pick out Ruaan. He stood head and shoulders above the rest. Zap was next to him, but all Kai could see of him was the top of his head bobbing up and down. In between them stood a swaying sea of OS kids.

Kai began to push his way through to get to his friends. As he walked, he checked the necks of those he passed. Most of them seemed to have found their amulets and were wearing them happily.

He managed to push through to his friends. Bree stood with her arms crossed just behind Zap, thunder on her face.

“Guys! What are you doing here? You should be on your way back home. What happened?”

Zap’s shoulders sagged. “We came so close to making it out. They stopped us at the last gate.”