A Sinister Game (11 page)

Black considered the news. In truth, he hadn’t expected Victoria to try to get through this alone. They’d never really set the rules, as he had expected they would. He’d lost patience with her and forced her hand.

As a result, they had both jumped the gun and, other than the basic tenets of fair play, there
were
no rules. Not really.

“What’d you finally say that made her agree?” Storm asked.

“Nothing of cons
equence,” Victor replied
.

“Threaten
ed
to kill Max, then?”

At Victor’s sharp look, Storm laughed. “Aye, that’d do it, I wager. You’re lucky she thinks you’d actually go through with it.”

Victor considered that. “Am I?”
h
e asked
softly. His gaze wandered to the windows again. Did he want the Red leader to fear him as much as she obviously did? On the one hand, it forced her compliance. On the other… fear wasn’t exactly the emotion he most wanted to elicit in her. Something about her distrust of him was disquieting.

“If she’s getting her team to help, then you might as well have us on your side,” Storm suggested.

Victor looked back up at him. He mulle
d this over, too. “This isn’t your Game
.”

Besides, t
here was a chance that she’d told Max to mind his own b
usiness. And if she had,
then five against one was hardly fair.

Victor turned away from him and paced back to the windows. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Approximately five hours until sundown. He would very much like to know what
she was doing at that moment, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to determine.
But he had to give her this time to herself.

Immediately after
sealing the deal with Victoria in the library
, Black
had left the TGB and gone to the nearest communications console. There, he had pulled all of his men – his eyes and ears across the Field – and told them to back off of the Red leader for the
remainder of the day. He did not under any circumstances
want to give Victoria just grounds on which to call the entire Game off.

He needed her.
In so many ways….

It was safe to say that he had been much more than impressed with her display of power in the traini
ng room that morning. T
ruth be told
,
he had been stunned speechless for several minutes.

To rip apart a room
telekinetically was one thing, but t
o do so without the help of a Game band? Bewildering.
To melt metal was even more impressive; it required immense control of atmospheric temperature and an innate
, molecular
understanding of the differences in object states.

But to put it all back
together
…. That was
something else entirely
.

Victoria had destroyed everything around her, in probably every way imaginable. Black had barely managed to shield himself from her power while maintaining his invisibility.

But when she had closed her eyes and set it all right
again, he’d been perpetually blown away
. Reattaching jagged plastic pieces into seamless perfection?
Solidifying
fifty-pound
metal discs into their original shapes?

The air had even been cleared of dust motes.
It was impossible, what she’d done
.
It was…
god
like.

He’d waited four hundred years for someone of her caliber to come along. Individually, the members of Game Control could not defeat Victor in a battle of magic and might. However, collectively, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Black couldn’t beat them
alone.
But he could
absolutely
win with Victoria on his side.
In the training room that morning, she had
more than made that
clear. It wasn’t until everything had been put perfectly back into its place and Victoria had opened her eyes and smiled that Victor at last managed to find his voice and hide his shock. He’d put on quite an act. And when she’d shoved him into
the wall, it had given him
a
n impressive
headache.

A part of him had wanted to congratulate her. Another part had wanted to retaliate by shoving
her
up against the wall,
and then pin
ning
her there beneath him as he ran his hands through her honey
-
scented hair and grazed his teeth along her throat and the smooth, taut skin over her collarbone
….

Now Victor pressed his
hands to the glass of the tall windows and laid his forehead against its smooth, cool surface. He closed his eyes and forced the need in him to back down.

He had to admit that he felt a measure of trepidation
about this Game
. He wanted Victoria alive. What if she fought so hard that
in order to win, he would have
to use too much force? She was like a thorn
y
rose, so dangerous
a
nd so delicate at the same time.

In the end, he knew that
h
e could never truly harm
her.
If she struggled that
much
, he would have to let her go, a
nd then they would probably both be
either rehabilitated or
killed by Game Control
for breaking the rules
.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

He’d pulled them both into a dangerous Game indeed.
He would have to be very careful with her. The next three days would see seven rounds, each possessing
a
ten-hour
time span. Victoria Red would do everything and anything within her power to keep from being captured for those seven rounds.

She was an incredibly bright and determined young woman. Victor had a feeling that this Game was fated to see most, if not all
,
of those seven rounds come to
difficult and trying
fruition.

* * * *

“It’s crazy,” she muttered to herself. “You’ll be caught. You’ll be killed.” She shook her head and continued to pace frantically back and forth across the floor of her master suite. “This is nuts.”

But it was the only way.

She knew that, deep down inside. T
he only way to make certain Victor Black could not find and capture her
was to make certain that she was not
there
to be found and caught
in the first place.

She had to leave the Field. She had to breach the wall.

But was that
even possible? Had it ever even been done? Attempted?

Surely, Game police would be all over the wall. How would she even get close to it?

Victoria ran a furious hand through her long golden hair and then stormed to her chest of drawers, yanked the top drawer out, and moved all of her undergarments aside until she found the small velvet pouch she was looking for.

She picked up the pouch, pulled the straps loose, and shook its contents into the palm of her hand.

A small gold pendant winked up at her in the soft overhead lights of her bedroom.

The necklace con
sisted of a thin gold chain and
attached to it, a small, square smoky quartz crystal.

Victoria did not remember where she had gotten the necklace. She only knew t
hat
after she’d been brought
o
nto the Field and trained
,
she’d been escorted to her room for the first time – and this necklace had been waiting for her beneath her pillow.

It was a beautiful piece of jewe
lry, and the only one she owned. S
he never wore it. She wasn’t sure why, but for some reason she felt it was necessary to hide the ornament. She didn’t want anyone to know she possessed it.

S
he
especially
didn’t want anyone to know about its
secret
. It was a unique crystal
. T
hough it looked whole and seamless, all it required was a touch of
Victoria’s
mental energy and the smoky quartz
would smoothly
split all along its side so that it could be opened.
When opened as one would open a book, it revealed two images, one on each side. The images were laid out in three-dimensional and full-color detail, and portrayed a little girl on the left, and a compass on the right.

The little girl had long, golden hair that fell in ringlets around her shoulders. Her eyes reminded Victoria of her own. She was smiling, but it was a strange smile, a touch sad. Maybe scared? It was a hard smile to pin down. Victoria had been trying for ten years.

The compass on the other side was as different and special as was the locket itself. Unlike other compasses, it was not flat and did not point to four different directions. Rather, it was spherical and possessed five bearings: North, East, West, South – and either Up or Down, depending on its mood. At least that was what Victoria attributed its fluxes to. It seemed to have a personality of its own.

In the end, Victoria had no idea what either of these images meant. She only knew that when she needed comfort, she sequestered herself in private, reached for this necklace, and put it on. Wearing it brought her a sense of peace. It seemed to help clear her mind of clutter and distractions.

It helped her think.

She wanted it with her before setting out to hide for the first round of her Game with Victor Black. If there was a chance she would never again see the inside of this room, she wanted the pendant with her.

Victoria opened the clasp, put the necklace on, and closed it at the nape of her neck.

She took a deep breath. Already, she felt as though she could think more clearly.

A plan was forming in the recesses of her mind. It was sketchy. It wasn’t very nice. But at least it was a plan. And with a great deal of luck, it might actually work.

Chapter
Seven

A fatal error has occurred
,
and the Game has shut down. Would you like to report this error to GameControlsoft?

((Just kidding.))

* * * *

Arthur One was drinking alone. It was the only way he ever drank, so he was used to it. It wasn’t that he was mean or even that he wasn’t nice, per se. He didn’t shoo people away from him and he wasn’t
seven feet
tall and covered from head to toe with ink. No, he was
five feet and ten inches
tall, wiry, and possess
ed
a deep-se
at
ed fear of needles.

It was just that people were… well they were…
not computers
.
They had all of these unreliable emotions and body language and
menstrual
problems – shit like that. Computers, on the other hand, were as perfect as people could get. They never suffered from sugar lows or hangovers or depression. All you had to do was punch in a fe
w lines of code,
and the computer did what it was told. Nice and easy. It almost said “yes, sir.” He loved that obedience.

Loved
it.

No human being in or out of the Field had ever said “yes, sir,” to Arthur. Not one.

With humans, Arthur One felt deficient. Stripped of his lines of code and his technical triggers, he was only a huma
n and not a very impressive one
at that. A computer would not have cared that
he was far less attractive than,
say, Victor Black or Maxwell Blood. A computer would never compare him to them. Instead, a computer would lay back and open its legs and masturbate for him if he told it to.

Computers couldn’t sense emotion or body language. They didn’t mind if you left your quarters a mess or forgot to shower.

They couldn’t
smell. Not anything.
They couldn’t
even sense your fear.

But a human could
smell it a mile away and that, probably more than anything else, was why Arthur was sitting alone in Room 55, drinking a Screwdriver. Or pretending to drink it, anyway. He’d seen one of the Gamers order the drink a few weeks ago before that Gamer had realized he was, perhaps, in the wrong room and left before downing even half of the alcoholic beverage.