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ANYMA STARED AT ME, hoping I knew where to begin. I stared back at her and hoped for the same thing. But the simple fact was that neither of us had any clue where to start. Titan was a big moon, and we only had one Titan day to get off it or else our nanobots would explode.
“It’s getting dark,” I said. “Do you think we should rest and continue again later on?”
When I said those words, it reminded me of the same conversation I had with Jayde during the first game. But Anyma’s response was nothing like Jayde’s.
“Sure, I’m pretty tired too. We haven’t had a proper rest in a while,” she answered.
“Let’s just sit and watch the stars,” I suggested. “Just look how gorgeous the universe is.”
“We need to talk, Fate,” she said with seriousness in her tone.
I pretended to not hear her because I wanted to have a moment to rest my bones. Once I sat down, I realised that all my muscles were aching. I wrapped my hands around my knees to keep myself upright and watched the sky as the stars slowly became visible. The stars didn’t feel the same as they did on Second Earth or on the real planet Earth. I didn’t want this moment ruined by a meaningless lecture from Anyma, and although I knew she meant well, I was too exhausted to hear it.
“The sky looks nicer than it did on Earth,” Anyma said as orange clouds split evenly and revealed the abyss of outer space.
I doubted her opinion. The sky on Earth was much nicer than Titan’s. I found Titan’s sky to be too orange for my liking, and it drowned out some of the stars.
“I thought my whole life was headed in the right direction two years ago. It amazes me how quickly that all changed,” I said.
“Nothing is permanent, Fate. Even our shadows leave at night. The only difference is that yours will come right back the next day.”
I had no idea what she meant by that, and it scared me a bit because she wasn’t usually philosophical.
“I can’t believe how cool the stars look from here,” Anyma said to change the topic of discussion again, and she leaned back onto her arms. “Sometimes, they don’t feel real from Second Earth.”
“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not sometimes. The games have fried my mind,” I said.
“I know exactly what you mean. None of this feels real at all.”
“Sometimes, I look at my life back on Second Earth and wonder what the purpose of it all was.”
“Do you think... I am real?” Anyma asked.
I looked at her with furrowed eyebrows, expecting an explanation. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Fate,” she said softly, “go to the lights.”
She looked at her hands as her body slowly disintegrated like ashes in the wind. Her fingers were the first to disappear, then the rest of her body. The last thing I saw was her doe eyes staring into my soul and reaching for me to bring her back, but I couldn’t save her. There was nothing to save in the first place. Anyma wasn’t really there.
I remembered back to when Moirai announced that there were sixteen players, but I had counted seventeen including Anyma. Every time I mentioned Anyma’s name, Jaaspar didn’t know who I was talking about. None of the players did. It explained how Anyma and I got away with breaking the rules in the first game and why her name wasn’t on the roster of players. Anyma’s memory would live in my head and heart forever, but it was time for me to move on without her. My mind was no longer her home.
I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘go to the lights’ until I noticed a tiny luminescence far in the distance that flickered as if a star had fallen to Titan’s surface. I had seen it before but completely ignored it. Titan was lifeless, so I ruled out the possibility of fireflies or any other bioluminescent organism. The lights were at the bottom of the mountains where the methane river flowed. It looked very far away, but I promised myself that I was finished letting doubts overpower my will to survive.
I no longer wanted to rest. I needed to find out what those fallen stars were. At this point, they were probably the only things that could get me off this moon, even if the possibility was extremely low.
I followed the edge of the methane river towards the mountains, occasionally running when my legs allowed it. Although my muscles ached as if all the life inside them had been drained, my mind was sharply focused on reaching the lights. The methane river flowed in all sorts of strange bends, but my eyes were locked onto the mountains.
It didn’t hit me at first, but as I continued running, the realisation of this being the final game entered my mind uninvited. There were no other players left in the Exogames. All of Second Earth knew that I was the final player if they’d watched the previous four games. This was the only game that wasn’t broadcasted to the audience or even to the game makers. I felt strangely alone without the hovering camera. When Thebe died, I was responsible because it should have been me that the lava swallowed. And Jayde saved me from the ice wall in the third game. Jaaspar wasn’t ready to die; he was supposed to win the games with me. Anyma wasn’t even a real player, but she was a part of me, and losing her meant losing part of myself.
I came to a screeching halt where the river expanded into a large lake, separating me from the mountains. I almost didn’t see it because the sun was no longer in the sky, but the air was at its thickest now, and the lake reflected Saturn.
The lights looked more artificial now that I was closer, but I still couldn’t make out exactly what they were. There wasn’t an easy way for me to get across to the other side. I required a boat or needed to build a makeshift raft, but without any proper materials, it was impossible. Before I had time to figure out a safe method, my head was enveloped with a black cloth, and the world went dark.
* * *
NOBODY ELSE SHOULD HAVE been on Titan. I was meant to be the only player in the final game. I couldn't see who had restrained me because my head was still covered with a sackcloth. For all I knew, it could have been aliens who’d found me, planning to digest my body. My hands were tied up behind my back, and I was no longer outside. I knew this because it was much warmer where they kept me.
Someone whispered in the room, but I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking. I didn’t know if they were speaking to me, so I coughed to get their attention. The whispers stopped, and there was complete silence for a few seconds. I was dead; there was no other ending I could think of.
“Where am I?” I asked.
Nobody answered, but footsteps crunched the dirt in front of me. Something grasped the sackcloth on my head and pulled it off. My eyes needed to adjust to the new lighting, and after a moment, a face was visible. A human face. It was a woman, middle aged, with dull brown eyes and slightly tanned skin. Her hair was tied up with a fraying string, and she wore a black suit. Lines creased her forehead when she looked into my eyes, as if she were examining my soul.
The room was a simple cut-out into the terrain. The walls were made from the orange rock that dominated Titan, and it was completely sealed. It looked like a prison cell of sorts, but nothing as daunting as the facility on Mars which I had been sent to a few years ago.
“What is your name, and why are you here?” she asked intimidatingly in a hoarse voice.
“My name,” I hesitated. “Fate Artemis.”
Her lines of worry disappeared, and her eyes widened.
“And why are you here?” she asked.
“This is the final game in the Exogames,” I said, unsure if she was familiar with the event. “I need to get off this moon immediately.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. I am the only survivor.”
I had just met this woman, yet it was so natural for me to give her all the information she requested. She turned to another person in the room, who I hadn’t noticed was there, and stretched her hand out. The man who guarded the door pulled out a knife and handed it to the woman. She grabbed my shoulder with one hand and pulled me forward as she flicked the knife open.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked.
“Shut your whining,” she said as she cut loose the rope that bound my wrists together. “Take him to my office,” she said to the male guard.
She pulled me up and handed me off to the man, who was well built and walked with his hands behind his back.
“Aries will take you,” she said to me.
“Why are you two here? How are there humans on Titan?” I asked, requiring answers almost as immediately as they came out of my mouth.
“All will be explained soon, Fate Artemis.”
Aries took me through narrow passageways with artificial lights along the walls in the mountains of Titan. He fit perfectly through the tunnels, but I had to hunch over slightly because my head scraped against the ceiling.
“Hey,” I whispered. “What is this place?”
I assumed he would be able to answer the question because the woman wasn’t with us anymore — the woman who I had definitely seen before, possibly in photos, because a younger version of her lingered in the back of my mind.
“Libra already told you. You’ll find out shortly,” he answered firmly.
The name rang a bell. Libra was the name of the leader in the expedition to Titan thirty-five years ago. But Second Earth never heard back from the original crew.
The tunnel opened into an enormous room with no ceiling. As I looked up, I saw lights climbing to the very top of the room. It was a hollowed-out section of the mountain with scaffolding that stretched to the top. There were multiple entrances to different tunnels the higher the scaffolding went.
People moved about, entering and exiting tunnels. Some even came all the way down to the floor Aries and I stood on. I thought I recognised a few people, but it might have been my mind playing tricks on me again.
Aries took me up the stairs on the scaffolding, and everyone who passed by looked at me with surprise. Perhaps it was because I was the only one in white, while everyone else wore dull clothes. Or maybe it was because nobody had seen me before. But I was just as surprised to see them because there was no known civilisation on Titan.
Aries left me in another room, which had wooden furniture, contrasting with the metallic stuff back on Second Earth. I sat in the chair in front of the desk, while the chair behind it remained empty. There was a lonely bookcase with no books, just a few useless trinkets unevenly spread on the shelves. There were no windows for ventilation, but there was no point because Titan had no oxygen in its atmosphere. Luckily, I had the force field around my head to protect me from the outside elements. I placed my hand between my collarbones to double-check that the device was activated, but it wasn’t. The button had been smashed, and there was no light to signal its activation.
I knew I was dead. Without oxygen, I was guaranteed to be dead. I slapped myself across the face to make sure, but I felt it. Maybe I was still alive.
The wooden door opened horizontally, and the woman from before, Libra, walked in. She sat in the empty chair with her back straight, and she rested her elbows on the desk.
“One question before we get started. How are we not dead? There is no oxygen here,” I asked without giving her the opportunity to speak first.
“Right you are. There is no oxygen outside. In here, in this giant bunker of ours, we have plenty of oxygen farms. We’ve been able to grow plant life on this moon. We are completely safe down here.”
“What is this place?”
“We are Titan. This place was built from the ground up more than thirty-five years ago,” she answered.
“Were you part of the expedition?” I asked, suspecting the answer to be true.
“Yes, most of us here were part of the original crew,” she confirmed.
“What about all the people, where did they come from? Surely the entire population isn’t part of the original expedition.”
“Some of us are from the original crew, myself included. But the rest, hundreds of them out there, came from the Exogames, just like you. And of course the people had children amongst themselves which added to our population.”
“They were all players?” I asked.
“Precisely. A lot of them came at the same time, not just one by one, which is why we have a large population. We haven’t had a player come through in a while, which is why we are all surprised to see you.”
“Why haven’t you gone back to Second Earth? You do want to go back, don’t you?” I asked with concern because they had become too comfortable away from home.
“Our mothership cannot be operated anymore. And the smaller shuttles were all damaged upon entry. I came to an agreement with the other leaders to not return to Second Earth. We built a great life here, sustainable too. There’s no need to return to Second Earth.”
“So, are you the leader of this place?”
“You could call me that. There’s nobody higher than me if that is what you are asking. We are all basically on the same level. Although, I have this fancy office, and I call a lot of the shots around here,” she answered, smiling with her bright teeth.
“Why didn’t you communicate with Second Earth that your crew made it here?”
“Our communication system malfunctioned and stopped working. We couldn’t contact Second Earth, and they couldn’t contact us. And since our mothership was damaged, and the shuttles were not functioning, we couldn’t get back home. Honestly, we preferred it; to not have Second Earth contact us was a dream come true.”
“Nobody repaired the communication system or the ship?”
“They were instructed not to repair the communications. We have a team working on the shuttles, but it will be a while before they’re able to be piloted.”
“I need to get off this moon,” I said seriously.
“Now why would you want to do that? You are more than welcome to stay.”
“The nanobots inside me will explode if I’m still here after one Titan day.”
“Nanobots?” she asked.
“There are tiny trackers under my skin for the Exogames.”
“The game makers must have changed the tracking system for the players. The old tracker was a marble-sized device implanted into the player’s ankle. They were easy to remove, and the players didn’t need to return to Second Earth.”
“How long until the day is up?” I asked, afraid my time was almost over. “How long was I knocked out for?”
“You were out for a few Earth days. Was the sun still up when you landed on Titan?”
“Not for very long,” I answered.
“There is still some time. Don’t stress. We have a solid team of engineers that are repairing the shuttles as we speak. Hopefully, they can mend everything in time. They repaired some of the other mechanical devices we have, so it should be simple for them to fix the shuttles faster.”
“Do you think it will make the flight to Second Earth, the shuttle?” I asked.
“I’ll get one of the other leaders to take you to the workshop. You can assess the shuttles there and choose the best one to take you home. Your department on Second Earth was aerospace, correct?”
“It was. How do you know that?”
“I was aerospace too. Your father is Scorpius Artemis, yes?”
“You knew my father?”
“I know your father,” she corrected. “He is one of the best employees the aerospace department has ever had.
Libra had been here for thirty-five years and was unaware of my father’s death. She probably didn’t even know that he was incarcerated and that he had entered the Exogames.
“I’m sorry, but my father died about a decade ago. He didn’t make it out of the Exogames.”
There was a knock at the door — more so a light tap than a pounding strike.
“Come in,” Libra said.
“You called for me?” the man who entered said.
I didn’t need to see his face to know whose voice it was. I swung my neck around so quickly, I almost got whiplash, and I rose from my chair immediately. When I stood up, I didn’t move. I stared into the man’s blue eyes, which watered slightly. His mouth quivered as if he were going to say something, but nothing came out.
“That’s right, Scorpius. I thought you might want to see your son again,” Libra answered.
“You’re... alive,” I said as my throat tightened.
He threw his arms around me and held my head close to his shoulder. I hoped he wouldn’t disappear like Anyma had, but I knew he was really there.
“How are you here?” he asked as he let me go and parted his sandy-brown hair which had begun to recede.
“The Exogames. You were right. I got your video message, finally. They did try to frame me, and successfully, I might add. I thought you died ten years ago.”
“It seems to be a running trend that the final game is here on Titan. I made it through all four games, until I was left here with some other players. We knew there was no way out. We had accepted our deaths until this civilisation found us and we were brought here,” he said.
“I thought I would never see you again.”
“Your father has been trying to repair the shuttles to go back to Second Earth. He was the only one that wanted to return. To see you,” Libra said.
“Is it ready to fly again?” I said eagerly.
“Nowhere near ready. Why?” my father asked.
“I need to get off Titan.”
“You just got here, Fate. There’s no need to run away so quickly,” he said, laughing as if it were a joke.
“You don’t understand. If I stay here, I’ll die,” I briefly explained.
“The tracking system the game makers use has changed,” Libra said, hoping my father would understand.
He raised his leg onto the chair and lifted his pants up a few inches to reveal his ankle. He had a scar deep under his skin which looked like it still needed to heal.
“Your tracker isn’t in your ankle?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nanobots. I have nanobots underneath my skin.”
“Nanobots was early tech, still in development last time I was on Second Earth. They must have advanced since then. Can we filter them out?” he asked Libra.
“We don’t have the right equipment to do that. And it is new technology none of us are familiar with. If we left even one nanobot, it could be lethal when it exploded,” she answered.
“I have until the end of the Titan day to get back to Second Earth. We should have enough time to get one of the shuttles up and running. Don’t forget, dad, I’m ten years older than when you last saw me. I can help the engineers fix the shuttles,” I said, even though I had no engineering experience, only software knowledge.
“Scorpius,” Libra said. “Rearrange Sage’s and Uilliam’s rosters. They’re our two best engineers. Get them to help Fate fix the shuttles. Now take your son to the workshop.”
She sounded abrupt when she spoke, and I was taken aback. My father wasn’t fazed by her reaction at all, probably because it was her natural personality.
“And Fate,” she continued as she rose from her chair, “when you get off Titan, don’t tell anybody on Second Earth about us,” she warned.
“What should I tell them?” I asked.
“Make something up. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Tell them you stumbled upon the wrecked spaceships from the expedition, and one of the shuttles seemed to work. But nobody can know that we are alive, or there will be a great war between Second Earth and us. And Second Earth will surely win.”
“A war?”
“Precisely, and it will be very terrible. Not only for us, but for them as well. The High Judges desire total control. Once they know a select number of their population live away from them, they will do anything in their power to make us pay for it, with our lives. We will fight back, but they will win.”
“You have my word,” I said as I crossed my heart and smiled weakly.