14

We step into the pitch blackness of the dome.

There’s a flash. Giant letters type their way onto a screen overhead: MISSION OBJECTIVE: DESTROY UNSTABLES. MISSION TIME: TEN MINUTES.

“Ten minutes?” Oliver’s voice cracks, somewhere to my right.

I hold my breath.

The letters disappear and the blackness warps. Thick green stems rise out of the ground, higher and higher, sprouting purple petals that form curly and spiral shapes. Other plants and trees grow with spiny limbs and weeping veils of leaves. Mud squishes beneath my boots where water seeps into the dirt, more and more of it, flowing and flowing.

“Move it!” Sam shoves the butt of his gun into my arm.

I splash into the trees and bump into Oliver. Huffing, I narrow my eyes as fire slides through my shoulder. “You didn’t have to—”

“Shut up,” Sam says, stopping on firmer ground and scanning the jungle.

Where the water seeped into the dirt, there’s a river now, deep and murky. Members of both teams stand on the other bank. Ariadne’s over there. She’s looking wildly around, backing up into a tree. I have a bad feeling she won’t be okay over there. Some of the boys give her strange looks.

But the river looks too deep, and I can’t swim. I can’t cross it.

“What now?” Oliver says. He’s the only member of the other team on our side.

“You stay away from us.” Sam moves past him roughly. “Joe, you cover inside.”

The brawny boy with the giant orange gun nods and tramples off into the trees.

“Marcus, take the left,” Sam says. “Shorty, stick with me.”

“When does the timer start?” I ask.

“As soon as the Unstables appear.”

I clutch the copper to my chest and glance at Oliver. He’s a little shaky now.

A hollow choking sound reaches my ears, coming from behind.

I spin, pressing a knob on my gun so it’s ready to fire. Overhead, red numbers appear in the sky: 10:00:00, and the team scores: 0:0.

The clock has started.

“First kill is yours, Shorty,” Sam says with a smirk. “Think you can handle it?”

This is all in my head. All of this is fake.

“Of course,” I say.

Sam narrows his eyes. Guess he doesn’t like my confidence.

A broken, strangled sound bubbles up from the river. Strands of hair emerge, then the top of a head, dripping wet. Dark fingers stretch from the water, reaching for the mud of the bank. Eyelids, nose, and a mouth appear, grayish and wrinkled.

“H-help me,” a voice cries.

I freeze with my finger on the blast button. The bags under his eyes are dark, even darker than mine looked before my operation. When his eyes open, they’re the color of dusk. His limbs shake as he digs his nails into the mud and drags himself out of the river not five feet away from me, his bony chest heaving.

I’ve never seen an Unstable this close before—not even the woman I shot in the glass compartment. They’re dangerous, and we aren’t allowed to get this close to them. So why make a game where we have to fight them?

“Kill it,” Sam orders.

Pressing my lips together, I touch my finger to the blast button and start to press.

“P-please…”

The Unstable coughs, choking on phlegm.

An awful realization hits me—

Slaps me—

Shocks me.

He sounds like Laila did when the officials dragged her into the hov-pod, that day they took her to quarantine. She begged them to let her stay. She swore she’d try harder to raise her Promise, but they didn’t care. They dragged her away while she struggled to give me her shoes. Her shoes, her ripped-up shoes. That’s all they let her leave behind.

“I said kill it,” Sam hisses.

“What if we can help him—”

“He’s not real, you idiot. Kill it.”

I ease my finger over the button, readying to press but still staring at the Unstable.

Why does he look so real? His dusk-colored eyes lift to mine, and I see the sky in them. Vast, never ending, gray-blue. Starry-night eyes, like Logan’s.

Sam’s elbow knocks into my face.

Dots—dots—

Teeth clenched—

Stumbling—

A gunshot goes off in the distance.

Oliver catches me with clumsy hands. “Sam, stop it!” he says.

Another gunshot.

When my vision clears, I’m gasping for breath, and Oliver hasn’t let go of me. Sam is in my face. “You shoot them, for krite’s sake, or I will kill you.”

“It’s only a game.” Oliver tightens his hold on me.

“Phantom isn’t just a game,” Sam spits. “It teaches us how to strategize in combat. It trains us, like most things here do, in case there’s ever another rebellion in the outer sectors and we have to fight them.”

I stare at him. He said most things here train us for that. Extraction training, too? Colonel Parker’s obstacle course?

But it makes no sense. There won’t be any rebellion. Every person in any of the sectors who disobeys or seems like a rebel ends up in a detention facility, or marked Unstable. The officials take care of that.

Before I can reply, Sam wrenches me away from Oliver and throws me to the ground. I land hard on my hands and knees in shallow water. His boot smacks into my side.

“I said I’ll kill you if you don’t shoot. Do you think I’m joking?”

“No,” I sputter.

“Then shoot them.”

Through the curls falling over my eyes, I see Unstables everywhere. Piling like dead bodies in the river, staggering from the trees, all of them coming for us, moaning and crying. Lasers and cracks and zaps of guns fill the air on the opposite bank. The Unstables turn to mist when their hearts stop beating. Real people don’t turn to mist, so these definitely aren’t real. This is only a game.

I push off the ground and get to my feet.

“I said shoot them,” Sam says.

I’m already aiming. I press the blast button on my copper. The recoil makes me stagger back several feet, but I get an Unstable in the face. The laser blows her to bloody chunks that sink with a gurgle into the murky river before vanishing.

“Finally.” Sam growls, blasting his sixth or seventh to smithereens.

I stare at the copper in my hand, at the metal barrel that’s smaller than the gun I used to shoot a real Unstable. The welcome ceremony. Would Sam say that was supposed to train us for rebellion, too?

I remember what Ariadne said earlier before we entered the obstacle course: They’re training us to be soldiers.

I laughed at her then. Commander Charlie trains some people to be soldiers, to keep order in the outer sectors. But he doesn’t need to train everyone because there isn’t any war. There’s no one to fight.

And even if there was, I could still refuse. He can’t train me to be mindless.

I don’t know why my hands are trembling.

Stumbling out of the water, I aim at another Unstable and hit it in the leg. It’s much easier when I don’t look at faces. When I don’t see Logan in their eyes.

“Clementine!” Oliver says. Two Unstables lurch toward him. He tries to back up from them and almost trips over a rock. His arms shake when he fires his gun, and his lasers keep missing.

I got him into this. I can’t let him get hurt.

“Duck!” I yell.

He obliges, and I aim at one, then the other. Their blood splatters on his face.

A searing pain shoots through my elbow. I cry out, spin around, and slash an Unstable’s face with my copper’s knife until its teeth loosen their hold on my skin.

“Speed it up!” Sam shouts. “Clock’s ticking.”

The timer overhead is already down to five minutes. The score is 34 to 47 with team one in the lead. We are losing.

Ignoring the soreness in my arm, I turn my head and concentrate on our environment. Giant flowers, jungle plants, turbid river water, weeping trees. There has to be something in here that can help me eradicate a bunch of Unstables at once. Something the other team won’t think of.

A child-size Unstable lunges at my leg. I jump back and blast him. Turning, I knock the butt of my copper into another Unstable and make for the trees.

I don’t know what I’ll find, but I will look regardless.

“What’re you—” Oliver starts, but something distracts him, and I don’t hear him anymore. Moss and jungle leaves muffle gunshots. I hope he’ll be all right without me.

The canopy of branches overhead makes it darker, harder to see where I’m running. I stumble; I pick myself up. A body appears behind a tree trunk, teetering toward me. Then another with an arm outstretched, reaching for my face. I try to shoot it down, but I don’t wait to see if it works.

I search for the tallest tree.

Branches snap beneath my feet. Vines slap my cheeks when I fail at ducking under them. Jungle smells seep into my nose: musk, stuffy air, and the sweet and tangy scents of pollen. If there are silver asters in here, I’ll be crippled and knocked out with fire bleeding through my body when Sam finds me and shoots me.

Maybe that would be for the best.

I duck underneath a web of leaves and spider silk, and the muzzle of the orange mega-gun points straight at my eyes. A scream escapes my lips before I even think it.

“Oh, krite. Sorry.” The muscular boy with the gun, Joe, quickly lowers his weapon.

“Think before you fire,” I say through gritted teeth.

“I think I just did.”

“Barely.” I wipe saliva off my mouth with the back of my palm.

He frowns at me. “What’re you doing here? Sam told you to stay with him.”

“I’m looking for something.”

“Vrux.” He pushes me out of his way, and a loud whooshing sound peals from his gun. A shriek, then the slam of a body hitting the ground.

“Come on, we’ve got like two minutes left.” He tramples off again.

Two minutes, and through cracks in the canopy, the numbers in the sky say we are falling further behind. I press my hands into my knees, doubling over. What can I do? Even if Sam doesn’t kill me, he’s going to hurt me if we lose. I don’t have any doubts.

Think, I tell myself. What do I know?

We’re in a simulation. I don’t know much about this game, but I know simulations of this size often have hidden functions in them—buttons or levers that blend into the environment, which could turn off a simulation or switch it to a different mode.

We’re still inside a dome. If there’s a secret button or lever, the best place to hide it would be some part of the wall or ceiling, since neither is visible while the game is in motion. Maybe, maybe, a different mode would help my team win. If I can even find the switch and set it off.

“Joe!” I yell, stumbling after him.

I’m wrong, no doubt, but I’ll try regardless. I have an idea where a switch might be. However, I need a stronger weapon.

“What?” Annoyed, Joe slows and turns to me, sweat dripping down his forehead. “We’re gonna lose!”

“Switch guns with me.”

“What?”

“Switch guns with me!”

He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Joe, trust me. Switch with me!”

He growls, but his grip loosens on the mega-gun. I grab it from him and push my copper into his fingers.

Turning, I look to the tallest tree in the vicinity. It looms over my head, some thirty feet tall, at least. I heave myself onto the lowest branch. Moss tangles in my eyes, my hair, my face. Back, I tell it.

“What’re you doing?”

I don’t answer.

It’s hard to climb with only one hand. I manage because I have no other choice.

Logan used to say I’m the best climber there is. One time, he tried to race me up one of the trees on the edge of the forest. I told him not to try, because of his limp, but he did it anyway. He was taller; I was faster. I beat him, and he didn’t scowl or laugh or chide me for it. He hugged me. He wrapped me in his arms, in his warmth, like he would never let me go.

Branches scrape my hands. Sweat gathers on my face and under my armpits. With every step, the gun feels heavier and heavier in my hand.

Thirty seconds left, the sky says.

The weapon slows me when I want to fly, but I need it or this won’t work.

Please work. Please work. Please work.

Above, through a break in the weeping leaves, a pair of red-gold wings flies past over the treetops. I can’t see the steel of the dome, but it’s there. I know it is.

Fifteen seconds, the sky says.

There’s no time. I clear the last of the branches that are heavy enough to hold me. I grip the barrel of the orange gun and aim at invisible steel. My finger brushes the biggest blast button.

Ten seconds.

I smash the button.

Squeeze my eyes shut.

There’s a rushing sound and a blast so loud its vibrations rip through my skull. I open my eyes and block out the jungle fading away. I block out everything but the scores in the sky: one is 72, and the other is 97 … 105 … 117 … it’s still rising.

It worked. It worked.

The branches of my tree turn to mist, and my relief shatters in my throat. I have nothing to cling to.

I fall through nothing but air, screaming.