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IT WAS STRANGE HOW DIFFERENT my life had become over the last few days. Instead of our regular dorms between levels seventy-one and seventy-seven, we were given gigantic luxurious rooms to spend our days in. There were eight rooms in total, and the seventeen players decided on their roommates. Jaaspar and I chose the first room in the hallway, and it expanded over two floors. A single glass staircase joined the lower level with a smaller mezzanine mostly filled with old paper books nobody would have touched in centuries.
The gazers allowed us to go to our old dorms and collect any important belongings we wanted to have with us. I grabbed as much as I could physically hold because I wasn’t sure if I would have gotten a second chance.
“I’m so pumped. This is going to be so fun,” Jaaspar said as he tossed his belongings on the couch across from the giant window overlooking planet Earth.
I charged up my dusty tablet after years of a dead battery and unpacked clothing from my bag. Jaaspar and I decided to divide the wardrobe into two sections, but we knew that we would eventually use the wardrobe as if we both owned everything inside it, even if we didn’t fit in each other’s clothes.
There was a small area behind the glass staircase with gym equipment, and to no surprise, Jaaspar ran to it as if his life depended on the physical activity. I expected nothing less from him; he was the same way on Mars. I kicked off my boots, slumped myself on the couch after moving his bags out of the way, and rested my legs on the fluffy ottoman. The couch was softer than my bed back in my original dorm; this entire room was fantastic. It was primarily an open floor with luxuries fit for a king, an indulgence neither of us deserved. I wondered how many players before us had spent their last days here, and I pondered how many times this room was the mediator between life and death.
My mind raced, thinking about what Jayde and I had discovered earlier and the idea of forming alliances with the other players. Jaaspar would want to know for sure, and I’d definitely known him long enough to share such vital information. I forced my body up from the couch and paced around the room, touching every object I passed: the metal bowl of fake fruit on the dining table, which glimmered in the light; the light strip underneath the kitchen benchtop, which was surprisingly cold; and the hanging pendants above my head, which swung slowly back and forth.
“Fate, are you alright? You seem bothered by something,” Jaaspar said between reps of sit-ups.
“I am worried, actually,” I responded as I tossed him a clean towel to wipe the sweat from his body. “You might need to sit down for this.”
I leaned against the kitchen bench-top with my arms crossed, and he sat on the lowest step of the glass staircase opposite me.
“You’re scaring me, Fate. Just spit it out.”
“Earlier, Jayde and I explored the level where we had our vitals examined,” I said.
Jaaspar leaned further forward, and the glass step creaked slightly.
“We found a control room, and we believe it was a subsection for some of the game makers,” I continued as I rubbed my neck, still wondering if this was the right thing to do. I walked to the window opposite the couch and stared at the planet below. “On the screen inside the room were images of Earth, the real planet.”
“Do you think it has something to do with the games?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, I think it must; otherwise, the game maker wouldn’t have had it on the screen.”
“But nobody has been to Earth in a really long time. It was destroyed, literally. It’s uninhabitable.”
“Exactly. That’s why we found it strange. Then we got caught, but I don’t think the gazer recognised us. It was too dark to see.” I laughed nervously.
“Hopefully, it doesn’t backfire on you two. You wouldn’t want any disadvantages in the games. They’re already going to be difficult as it is.”
“So, after that,” I said, looking back at him, “Jayde came up with a plan to get as many of us to work together as possible. That way, more of us can get through the games.”
“A rebellion?” he asked.
“That’s what Anyma said.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. But do you think we’d be able to get the numbers?” I asked.
“There’s sixteen of us, Fate. There are tens of thousands of gazers, and the population may not be on our side,” he responded in a strange tone.
“I’m not talking about a rebellion. Do you really think we’d be able to go against the game makers and High Judges? I’m talking about an alliance between the players so that we survive the games.”
“Well, you definitely have me, and I’m sure we can get Thebe on our side. We know Jayde will be with us. What about that Kuiper guy?”
“I’m not sure if he’d be open to joining a team. He seemed pretty set on playing the games by himself, but we can try convincing him,” I said. “Neon was keen when he introduced himself. What do you think?”
“No, he was weird. Let’s talk to the players who came from Mars with us and then focus on speaking to the others. It seems like a promising concept, but I’m not convinced that the games are going to be a walk in the park, even if we have the numbers. Sure, we’d have each other’s backs, but it just takes one person to hesitate and potentially take the rest with them,” Jaaspar said, trying to hide the concern in his voice.
“Even if that happens, both of us can still get through the games.”
“And what if an opposing team is formed with more numbers than ours?” he asked with more obvious concern.
“Have a little bit of faith, Jaaspar. Don’t be so negative. Tonight is the dinner. We can try to convince everybody to form an alliance. But we have to be subtle about it because I promised Jayde I wouldn’t bring it up to anybody yet, and I don’t want to be on her bad side.”
“Alright, done. We don’t know what time this dinner is, so we better take a shower beforehand. You go first,” he insisted.
I hadn’t taken a shower in days. Back on Mars, water was limited for all of us. It was no secret that there was no water on the planet, and we had to suffer because of it — that was part of our punishment. I had to remember that Mars was my original prison, and the Exogames were still part of my sentence.
The warm water washed over my aching body and soaked into my hair. For a moment, my worries lifted from my shoulders and disappeared down the drain. I scrubbed my dirt-stained skin several times because I still didn’t feel clean, and I washed my hair twice over just to be sure it wouldn’t be too oily. I must have spent quite a while in the shower because Jaaspar knocked a few times to check if I was alright. I just needed the time to relax my bones and feel the sorrows wash off my body.
I threw the soft cotton towel around my waist and left the shower for Jaaspar to use. By then, my tablet’s battery was charged, and I was able to go through the information on it. There wasn’t much that I had saved. I rarely took any photos, and half of my inbox was insignificant updates on the projects I was working on back in my aerospace department. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I used my tablet for my work, coding software for the spacecrafts.
I noticed plenty of unread messages I must have skipped past before. I would have been too busy to see them back then. But to my surprise, I saw one from almost a decade ago — from my father. I wished I had seen it earlier, but my tablet had glitched over the years, and it was becoming ancient technology.
My finger swiped across his message, which had a linked video file at the very bottom. I scanned my eyes across the capitalised bold words with shock and read:
IMPORTANT! OPEN THIS NOW!
It seemed extremely urgent, and my heart was beating quite hard and fast because, somehow, I was only just seeing it. How important could this message be? I tried to convince myself that perhaps it was a funny video he sent me ten years ago, but he was never the type to be into humour.
I long pressed on the video file, and it popped open into a smaller window on a separate page. Immediately, I saw my father running down flights of stairs. The footage was shaky, but I noticed a few gazers chasing after him even in the poorly lit video. The audio cracked when he spoke, and the running and background noise didn’t help.
“Fate, listen to me,” he shouted as he looked behind him every few seconds. “I’ve been caught.”
The recording must have been moments before his prosecution. I looked at the date it was sent and confirmed that this was two days prior to my father entering the Exogames. He had skipped the bullshit of going to prison and just joined on the spot. If I remembered correctly, his sentence would have equated to five lifetimes in prison. He took the chance at freedom, but clearly, it hadn’t been in his favour.
“Fate, they know what I’ve done,” my father continued as he panted down more flights of stairs and eventually through narrow corridors. “They might think you helped me.”
My curiosity was piqued when I heard those words come out of his mouth. I wanted to know desperately what my father’s crime was. During his hearing, the High Judges hadn’t mentioned what he had done; they simply sentenced him without proper reasoning.
“Stay alert, Fate!” he warned. “They think you helped.”
I knew I hadn’t helped my father commit any crime. I was only twelve years old at the time, and children aren’t criminals. I didn’t even commit the crime I was later accused of.
“Pay close attention to those around you, Fate. Drop your guard for one second, and the gazers will be on your back.”
If I’d opened this video message eight years prior to my sentence, then I could have been more aware of the people around me. I probably would have noticed any suspicious activity in my surroundings, and I could have prevented this whole mess.
“They might ask you questions. Don’t say anything without me there!” he said as the camera shook and his words crackled more. “Don’t let them interrogate you. They might blame you for my crime or even frame you for another.”
A lightbulb flickered in my head like a dying firefly trying to catch its last breath. Nothing about my trial had made any sense: the message from my tablet to Halley; the reason the stop switch was missing from the ship; and the rushed feeling of it all. Stop switches just didn’t disappear into thin air, and I was confident that I hadn’t typed out that message to Halley. If only they believed me. But it was my word against whoever was in charge — the High Judges, of course.
“Fate, be careful,” my father said before the screen dimmed.
Those were not his last words, though. I remembered when I last saw him at his hearing; he told me that he was going to do whatever he could to see me again.
My eyes welled up with tears, and my vision blurred slightly. I tried to blink away the haziness, but that wasn’t working how I expected it to. Jaaspar hopped out of the shower and noticed my wretched face pouring out tears all over the couch. I forgot he was still in the room. I forgot about the Exogames, for a moment at least.
“Fate, are you alright?” he asked as he rushed to my side.
I admired his willingness to comfort me, but it wasn’t a conversation I felt I was ready to have with him.
“Nothing. I just miss a lot of people,” I half-lied. I really did miss a few people, but that wasn’t what bothered me.
“I’m sure they miss you as well.”
Nobody missed me in reality because all my friends in aerospace had turned their backs on me and pretended I was the enemy. Their betrayal was like a knife penetrating my back, but the knife was blunt, and I was stabbed repeatedly.
A two-tone doorbell rang, and Jaaspar sprinted to answer the door. I had never seen someone so eager to answer a door in my life.
“Nobody is here. Oh, wait,” he paused as he leaned over to pick up something.
He walked back towards me with two large boxes in his arms, cradling them as if they were a child. The boxes were almost bigger than he was. They were white with a black lid, decorated with a silver bow, and labelled with our names handwritten on a high-quality card. The box wasn’t as heavy as it looked, but maybe it was because we were both nervous and excited to see what was inside.
“What do you think it is?” I said, hesitating before opening mine.
“I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it has to do with the games,” he responded as he untied the bow and lifted the lid.
“Obviously, it has something to do with the games; nobody else is allowed on this floor.”
I pulled away some of the tissue paper and let it float elegantly to the floor. There was too much wrapping, although it was beautifully organised. Underneath the paper was a printed note that read:
A SUIT AND TIE FOR AN IMPORTANT OCCASION.
The note inside Jaaspar’s box was different from mine. His read:
A SUIT AND TIE FOR AN IMPORTANT ADVANTAGE.
“An advantage?” Jaaspar questioned in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to accept it.
“Perhaps you get the first advantage in the games. Congrats, man. That’s something to celebrate,” I said encouragingly.
“Yeah, I guess. Depends what the game is,” he said.
“That’s huge to have in the first game. I wonder how many players will have an advantage.”
We put the notes aside and lifted out the neatly folded suits. Mine was a dark grey with tiny white lines that weren’t noticeable from afar, and Jaaspar’s was a very dark blue, almost navy. The ties matched our corresponding suit colour, and we had gold cufflinks to clip the excess material of our buttoned-up shirts.
We tried on our suits to make sure the sizing was correct, and surprisingly, it was spot on. The game makers had thought of everything.
“I don’t know how to tie a tie,” I said, laughing, hoping Jaaspar was the same.
“Really?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
“I only went to a few events before my father died, and none after. My father used to tie my tie for me. I just never learned to do it myself.”
“Here, I’ll help you,” he insisted as he picked up my tie from the box. “I’ve done this too many times.”
Jaaspar wrapped the fabric around my neck and adjusted the length. He hadn’t styled his black hair yet, so it hung in front of his forehead. It was the first time I’d been this close to him. His eyes originally looked brown, but now that I was closer, they were more of a very dark amber and more orange than I initially thought. His light-olive skin tone complimented his eyes and his sharp bone structure. He had a sharp jawline, a sharp nose that was slightly turned up, and his brow ridge was naturally defined.
He tucked the skinnier length in the loop of the larger piece and tightened it around my neck. I assumed we were finished, but it felt as though he was waiting to ask me something or hesitating to get any words out.
“I’m not very confident,” he said.
I needed more of an explanation. It was a very vague thing to say, and I wasn’t sure I was on the same page as him when he spoke.
“As in, talking to new people? Because I can help you get to know some of the players,” I said.
I hated meeting new people because I was an introvert, and I often had to force myself to be more confident.
“Not confident in playing the Exogames,” he explained.
“Are you seriously having doubts about entering the games?” I asked, confused and frustrated.
“These games feel rushed, and it’s all happening too quickly. I’m not ready to die, Fate.”
“Does that scare you?”
“It does if everyone dies alone,” he answered, looking down at his shoes. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Stop it. You’re not going to die. I can promise you that. We have an alliance forming with some of the players. Plus, I entered because you convinced me it was a good idea. There’s no backing out now. Even if we wanted to, the game makers wouldn’t allow it. If we forfeit our position in the games, they will terminate us. We have to play,” I said.
“It’s not just that,” he began. “Before I was sentenced to Mars... no... I can’t.”
“Jaaspar, it’s alright. You can tell me.”
“Before Mars, I had a girlfriend. I loved her with all my heart. But when she found out that I had to stand before the High Judges... she... took her own life.”
“Oh, Jaaspar, I’m so sorry.”
“She died alone. I haven’t been able to get over it. My whole life, I’ve known death. My girlfriend, my mother, everyone around me dies, except me.”
“Do you mind... if I ask how it happened?” I asked softly.
“Overdose.”
Jaaspar hadn’t mentioned his family before or much of his past, but it was a small step forward for him to let me into these hidden memories.
The boxes and tissue paper were scattered across the floor in front of the couch. I picked up the scraps and scrunched them into a pile of rubbish, but I felt something hard as I crumpled them. A tiny white pouch fell from the pile and landed heavily on the floor with a thud. We must not have noticed it was there because it was camouflaged by the tissue paper. There was another one pushed against the bottom corner of my box. It was a double surprise.
“Hey, Jaaspar. Look what I found,” I said as I tossed him one of the pouches.
“What is it?” he asked nervously.
“Not sure. I guess we will find out.”
I pulled open the strings, loosening the opening of the pouch, and inside was a small and shiny piece of metal. Jaaspar received a similar one. There was a tiny etching in the centre, and with proper lighting, it read:
A CLUE FOR THOSE WHO LOOK FOR CLUES WHERE THEY ARE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND.
“Maybe this is my advantage,” Jaaspar said.
“I don’t think so because I got one as well,” I said, holding our pieces together.
They were pretty similar, both with jagged edges and the same inscription.
“A clue? How is this a clue?” I asked, looking at the piece in the air above my head then towards the ground to come up with any possible answer.
We pondered what it might have meant, but we ended with no reasonable conclusions. The game makers wouldn’t have made it easy to figure out the first game before it had even begun. After all, Moirai said that none of the players would know the game beforehand.
“Do you reckon they are testing us?” Jaaspar asked.
“For what, though? Our skills in finding tiny pouches?” I responded with a laugh.
“No. Testing to see who is smart enough to figure out the first game. Maybe that is the advantage. Those tests we did earlier for our heart and cognitive health, perhaps they tested whose brain can figure out this clue,” he theorised.
“I understand what you mean, but they wouldn’t have just given us these metal pieces. I can only assume that everyone else got one as well. The people who don’t find it in the box will be at a disadvantage,” I said as I paced up and down the room, dragging my feet across the floor.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“But your note said you have an advantage. And the advantages are usually way more significant than a simple clue.”
“What if... this is the first game? What if we are playing the first game now,” he said, lowering his voice to a hush.
“No, traditionally, they announce the commencement and conclusion of the Exogames. Plus, we still have to attend tonight’s dinner. We don’t play the games in these fancy formal suits.” I shook my head, still hoping the answer would magically appear in my brain.
The more we spoke, the less convinced I was that Jaaspar had watched any previous Exogames. I stopped watching them after my father’s year, but I still recalled the general rundown of the event. I had assumed Jaaspar knew what he was doing when he entered, which was what convinced me to join him.
“Maybe it’s where the games are. No, that doesn’t make any sense. It’s a scrap metal piece, not a map,” he laughed. “That sounds stupid.”
I laughed for a moment with him and looked out the window to the Earth below. The sun was behind us, so the planet was illuminated with sufficient lighting. I stared at my metal piece as I held it with two fingers, then glanced at the planet outside.
My eyes caught the green land masses behind the transparent clouds as they were engulfed with water around the edges.
“No, Jaaspar, you’re right! Look,” I exclaimed as I held up my piece to the window.
The jagged edges on my metal piece matched perfectly with one of the continents on Earth. Jaaspar held his piece up next to mine, and it matched another landmass: a larger island in the northern hemisphere. His eyes lit up in realisation as he fell back onto the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. His mouth was open but he breathed through his nose, loudly as he tried to fill his lungs with as much air as he could.
“You were right. Jaaspar, you are a genius. These pieces tell us where the first game is,” I said in disbelief. “It’s on Earth.”