He was not another alien after all, but human, like her. And his eyes didn’t really glow—they were just so blue, they contrasted dramatically with his beard and tanned skin. Dirty brown hair curled over his shirt collar, and he wore a scratched leather vest above filthy jeans and sturdy hiking boots. A sheathed knife as long as his forearm hung at one hip, a holstered gun at the other. He carried a rifle with a rubberized stock and a white ceramic barrel encircled with wire rings.
Was he another participant? Or one of the distractions that rule three instructed her to avoid?
“What’s down there?” she asked.
“Swarm of harries.” His voice was low and pleasant, at odds with his appearance. He dropped lightly to the ground before her. “Believe me,” he added, squinting at the trees, “you don’t want to stir them up.”
She inspected the cottonwoods doubtfully. He pointed past her, sleeve and forearm layered with dirt. The smell confirmed his need for a bath.
“There in the tallest tree,” he said. “That blob hanging in the middle.”
She finally saw it—a pale mass suspended from a stout, bright-leaved branch. Other smaller shapes hung scattered around it. She shaded her eyes. “Harries, you say?”
“They look like flying manta rays. Paralyze their victims with the venom in their stingers, then suck the blood out of them.”
Callie shuddered. Suspicion swirled through her. She turned back to him. “I thought the white road was a safe zone—a place where things like that can’t hurt you.”
“It is.” He eyed her appraisingly. “I figure you left it, oh, on the first or second branching.”
“Left it? What—”
“Look back the way you’ve come.” He gestured over his shoulder. “It isn’t white, it’s pink. You’re on a sucker path.”
She was well aware of the road’s dinginess, but the manual had said nothing about sucker paths. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Just another ‘participant.’ ” The man’s lips twitched bitterly.
“So why are you off the road?”
He shrugged. “After you’re here long enough, you realize there’s no point to it.”
“But if it’s a safe zone—”
“It goes nowhere.”
She regarded him with renewed suspicion. Antagonists within the Arena work to prevent you from attaining your goal . . . avoid all distractions.
“So, uh, where do you think I ought to go?” Callie asked.
“I’m headed for camp now. You can come with me, or go back and try to find where you went off. I wouldn’t advise that, though.”
“Naturally not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. You say you have a camp? There are others of you, then?”
“Yeah, we have a good-sized group.” He glanced past her shoulder. “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get going. I’ve got fresh meat with me.” He pointed up the rock, and Callie saw his backpack leaning where he’d left it. Twice the size of hers, it had a dog-sized lizard tied across its top. Rock dragon, perhaps?
“They’ll be hunting soon,” he added. “I’d rather not be here when they break.”
The old pressure-sale method, Callie thought wryly. Pitch your product and give the customer five minutes to decide. Come on, Alex, do you think I can’t see through that?
She motioned toward the canyon walls. “By all means. Don’t let me stop you.”
He frowned, regarding her with those intensely blue eyes.
She waved him on. “Go ahead. But thanks for the warning.”
“Those things will kill you, miss.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Callie headed toward the trees, feeling his eyes on her back.
Ahead, the pale blob fluttered and rippled.
Avoid all distractions, the manual said. Don’t leave the white road.
Except . . . he was right about the first branching. She’d avoided the whiter path because of her fear of heights. A fear Alex must have known about, since she’d mentioned it to the receptionist.
She glanced back, but the stranger was gone.
Surprise gave way to smug assurance. See? He was a distraction. If these things were as bad as he said, he wouldn’t let me walk right into them. She’d nearly reached the grove now, the gray blob differentiating into pale lavender wings and flat manta-ray bodies. Layered onionlike, they slid over one another in a writhing mass, a translucent wingtip occasionally stretching out from the huddle. The sphere began to pulse.
She slowed, staring up at it. Fear needled her extremities. Her intended route passed directly beneath the throbbing mass.
So what’re you going to do? Go back? Callie chewed on her lip, waffling again, her stomach quivering. Irritation overwhelmed her fear. He was just trying to scare you off. Now get on with it.
Resolutely she forced herself forward. A comb-and-waxed-paper trilling danced around her, and the breeze carried a sweet, musty odor. She walked faster.
The old cottonwood loomed above. As she drew under it the trilling mounted. Then the quivering blob contracted, throbbed, and burst like a grenade, flinging pale, purplish manta shapes into the air. They flapped up through the branches to the open sky, whirling like debris in a dust devil.
Callie wanted to run for the rocks, fifty feet away now, but that would take her off the path. Doggedly she followed the pavement as it curved away from safety. Her scalp prickled, and her hands shook. She broke into a trot, rounding the hollow and coming out into the flat.
The stranger’s voice rang out from the rocks across the clearing. “Here they come!”
A pale shape dove by her. She dodged sideways, glimpsing shiny, jointed appendages dangling wasplike from its posterior. A turquoise beam shot from the rocks to the beast, now a yard in front of her. Thwip, thwip, thwip. Its body deflated in a puff of purple smoke, fluttering to the path like an empty sack. Two more beams burst from the rocks, downing two more harries as they swooped.
Ahead, the stranger rose from his hiding place and told her to run. Again she was tempted to leave the path. But nothing had touched her yet, and she wasn’t convinced anything could.
A series of beams slit the air in a succession of rapid thwips. Callie was aware of more hits, more puffs of purple gas, more falling sacklike bodies. Car-sized boulders loomed ahead on the left. Maybe they would afford some protection.
But then a harry caught her from behind, tentacles slapping along the left side of her back in lines of tingling heat. She staggered, crying out more from shock than pain.
The lavender shape skimmed by and imploded in a puff of purple. She dodged the plume as best she could, coughing on the sickening-sweet smell.
But I’m on the path, Callie protested, looking down through watering eyes to be sure. Nausea and dizziness churned in her. The heat on her back gave way to numbness.
More thwips. More beams. Tentacles came at her face. She spun away into another attack, and fire tracked along her upper arm. After that, reality devolved into nightmarish chaos. Shadow shapes whirled around her—malevolent wing flaps, hirsute tentacles, bulbous bodies bursting into purple at the ends of blue-green lines of light. Dead rays littered the ground, tripping her. One burst over her head, dowsing her with the eye-watering, stomach-turning gas. She doubled over, staggering on wobbly knees. Tentacles slapped across her back, and new waves of hot numbness sent her reeling. As she sought to regain her balance, a harry clamped on to her right hip, tentacles winding down her leg like a tetherball round its pole, a thousand burning needles pumping venom into her flesh. The wing flaps clutched her leg. The mouth bit through fabric and skin into her waist.
Panicked, Callie beat at the leathery body, white light spreading in amebic splotches across her vision. Someone was screaming hysterically.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die here, and I don’t even know where I am!
She saw her mother. Lisa. Daddy . . .
Suddenly the stranger was looming over her, firing the rifle with one arm as he ripped the harry off her leg with the other. He lifted her effortlessly. Her legs and left arm were numb and useless, but she clung to his neck with her right arm as he carried her among the rocks, firing as he ran.
It grew hard to breathe. The white splotches swelled. Something slapped her ear . . .
The next thing she knew, she lay on her back at the rear of a low-ceilinged cave. The stranger crouched by the entrance, shooting at the harries outside. Beside her lay his pack and the rock dragon, dried blood caking its pointed teeth. A milky eye stared at her alongside a serrated blue face crest. It stank of sour socks.
Thwip, thwip, thwip. Turquoise light flared pink and faded.
The man drew back, opened a panel in the rifle’s side, and pulled a small pink cube out of it. Tossing the cube aside, he slapped in a replacement and resumed firing, all one-handed. His left arm dangled at his side, his shirt sleeve slit in several places to reveal a bicep scored with red welts. Another welt seared across his cheekbone, and his eyelid drooped above it.
Thwip. Thwip—thwip.
Callie knew she should help him, but it felt as if a boulder lay atop her chest. She couldn’t feel her left arm or either of her legs. Was the poison spreading? Would the numbness soon creep to her heart? And if it wasn’t spreading, would it wear off? Or would it leave her paralyzed for life?
The amebic lights returned to carry her into oblivion.
When she came to, she was alone in full darkness and still unable to move. She thought the dark bulk beside her might be the pack with its smelly burden, but where was the man? Had the harries gotten him?
Panic rattled through her, and she fainted again.
When she awoke for the third time, the man had lit a small three-legged lamp and was laying sticks for a fire. The pile of branches to his right revealed where he’d been earlier—collecting firewood.
Her mouth was cotton dry, her head ached, and her stomach felt as hollow as a dead tree. But at least she could sense her limbs again—cold and tingling unpleasantly. Her pack lay at her feet, but her attempts to reach it only proved she couldn’t even roll over, much less sit up. After a brief struggle she sagged back onto the dirt, gasping.
The stranger squatted beside her. “Want some help?”
“A drink,” she croaked, shocked at the inhuman sound of her voice. The smell of him was strong as he lifted her to a sitting position against the wall. His nearness made her uneasy, and she kept her eyes off his face, concentrating on the water pouring over her parched lips and tongue. Seeing she could handle the bottle on her own, he let go and eased back. She drank eagerly until he stopped her, then licked her lips and dropped her head back against the rock.
When she opened her eyes, he had returned to arranging the firewood into a small teepee. Her glance flicked to the scarlet welts on his face, the clumsiness of his left arm.
“You saved my life,” she rasped.
He didn’t look up. “We’re not out of this yet.”
“Surely the worst is past.”
Silence.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“I’m sure you are.”
She frowned, her good feelings toward him evaporating. “Well, it’s only my first day—”
“That’s obvious.”
Callie snapped her lips shut. All right, forget it. She let him work in silence for a few moments, then said, “I don’t suppose you have a name.”
“Pierce.” He positioned another stick.
“I’m Callie Hayes.”
No reply.
Great, Callie thought. A macho male with a chip on his shoulder. Well, two can play this game.
She drew the manual from her back pocket and started to read. But she’d lost her glasses in the harry attack, and the dim light made the print too fuzzy to see without a struggle. In the end she had too many questions and not enough patience to ignore him, so presently she tried again.
“You said there was no point staying on the white road. What did you mean?”
Pierce laid the last stick onto his teepee, then drew a long-barreled handgun from his holster and fired a burst of green light at the wood. Yellow flames licked greedily upward.
“The gates are there,” he said, pulling two metal stakes from his pack. “You just can’t get to them.”
“You know this for a fact?” She pushed a lock of hair out of her face. “You’ve actually seen one?”
“Of course.”
“Well, maybe it was an exception.”
“I’ve been to all fourteen.” He began to pound a stake into the hard earth on one side of the fire. “The routes to reach them are different, but the gates are all identical—and all identically unattainable.” Rocking back on one knee, he met her gaze. “This place is like a doughnut—the Inner Realm’s the hole, the Outer Realm’s the cake, with a ring of cliffs between the two. All the gates stand atop those cliffs, and all the roads end at the bottom. So while you can see the gates just fine, you can’t get up to ’em. Though believe me, many have tried, long and hard—myself included.” Grimly, he finished pounding in the stake.
Callie watched him, frowning. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he really is a distraction and this was all staged.
But she couldn’t believe that anymore. He seemed too bitter, too frustrated, too much like her—another victim trapped in the same nightmare. A sick feeling settled into her middle. Fourteen gates, but not one was accessible?
“Why give us a task that’s impossible?” she wondered aloud. “Why give us a manual—”
“Who knows?” he snapped. “As for the manual, obviously you haven’t read it. The thing’s about as useful as your boots.” He pounded the second stake into the ground opposite the first. “The part you can read is cryptic or flat wrong, and the rest’s gibberish.”
“Maybe it’s some sort of code, and we just need to find the key.”
“If there is a key, I’ve never heard of it. And I’ve been here long enough, I should have.”
She frowned. “How long have you been here?”
He gave the stake one last blow, then sat back on his heels, staring at the flames as they crackled among the sticks. “Five years this summer.”
Not five days, not five months. “Five years?” she whispered.
Bitterness twisted his lips. “Some experiment, huh?”
“But . . . how? They said . . .” She’d long ago stopped believing she’d get out of this mess in a few hours. But five years?
“Like I said, it’s not for lack of trying,” Pierce added. He got up and drew a haunch of meat from a tarp-covered pile near her feet. As he impaled it on a spit, she realized the carcass of the rock dragon had disappeared.
While the meat cooked, he went through the jumble of components in her pack, noticing right off that she was missing some pieces. She told him about the cactus grass. He listened without comment, and she trailed off to a halt, feeling embarrassed and stupid. “I do have this, though.” She showed him the key-stylus-pen she’d made.
He took it from her, turning it between his fingers.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked.
“No.” He handed it back. “I had one, too, once. Never did figure out what it was for.”
“Then maybe it is significant.”
“I doubt it. They gave us a lot of useless stuff. Probably to confuse us. They’re like that.”
Pierce surveyed the remaining parts from her pack, then began fitting some of them together. Swiftly, one of the long-barreled hand pistols took shape. She didn’t recall seeing instructions for that in the manual.
“It’s a SLuB 40,” he said, handing the weapon over. “See here?” He pointed a grimy finger to the inscription at the barrel’s base.
Callie peered at it. “Those aren’t letters.”
“No, but it looks like ‘SLuB 40,’ so that’s what we call it.”
He started to assemble a rifle similar to his own, but ran out of pieces before he finished.
“Looks like the SLuB’s gonna be it. At least you’ve got plenty of E-cubes.” He scooped up four of the blue boxes. “They power everything else. Mind if I take a few?”
“Go ahead.”
Balancing two cubes on his thigh, Pierce slid another pair into his rifle’s side chamber, then replaced the cubes in his SLuB. By that time their dinner was ready.
The lizard meat had a strong muttony flavor. Callie would never call it tasty, but once she’d tantalized her stomach with the first bite, she all but inhaled the rest, even ate a second slice. As she wiped her greasy fingers on her jumpsuit, the comb-and-waxed-paper trill of a passing harry drew her gaze to the dark opening.
“They won’t bother us in here,” Pierce said. “Not at night.”
“And in the morning?”
“They’ll hunt a few hours past dawn, then swarm again for the day. We should be able to move out after that.”
They lapsed into silence. After a few minutes, Callie leaned her head against the rock and closed her eyes. “I assume I’ll be able to walk in the morning?”
“Should be, yeah.”
She sighed. Five years. Were there others who’d been here as long? Longer?
Her thoughts drifted to home. Lisa’s party would be well underway, her sister waiting with her latest stockbroker prospect for Callie. Eventually she’d call Callie’s apartment, and Mom would begin preparing her lecture on being considerate. By evening’s end they’d be miffed. But not worried. They knew Callie disliked the glittering, semiformal bashes. Even aside from the matchmaking, she resisted getting dressed up, had no taste for mingling over cocktails, and loathed the incessant one-upsmanship. Her conversations—if any—were brief, dribbling into awkward silences as she and the other party struggled to find a way of escape.
No, her family wouldn’t start worrying until morning, and the police wouldn’t start searching for twenty-four hours. By then Dr. Charis’s experiment would have vanished, likely leaving no clues and no one to question. Even if there was, what could the police do against beings who defied the laws of physics and zapped bodies through space in the blink of an eye?
Her throat tightened. Tears blurred her vision. What she wouldn’t give to be home painting right now—her cockatiel pacing along the bookshelf—to hear Meg’s bubbly laugh and endure her latest dumb fad, to be able to clean the rat cages on Monday. Right now, she’d even prefer Lisa’s party.
Because deep down she knew there was a real possibility she would never attend another of Lisa’s parties again.