The Energy Crusades (12 page)

"You can," I answered, projecting my will onto him. I wanted him to leave with a clear conscience. "Your hand won
'
t heal if you don
'
t get some rest tonight."

He looked at the floor. It wasn
'
t possible for him to help with the dishes, but he didn
'
t want to leave me either.

"If it was the other way around, you would do it for me, right?" I nudged his shoulder with my own. Athletes helped each other and always would. I
'
d said the right words too, because he relaxed a bit.

"I would, Kaia. You know I would.

"I nodded at him, "I do. Get some sleep."

Atticus left, and I was alone with the dishes. I sighed heavily and put my hands in the hot soapy water, clearing my head and trying not to think about what a long, awful day it had been. After about thirty minutes of working, Ajax appeared. Without saying a word, he picked up a towel and began to dry the dishes. Exhaustion had settled in my bones and his act of kindness almost brought me to tears.

"Please don
'
t help me, Ajax," I said, my voice almost trembling. Of all people, he should not be the one to do Atticus
'
s work.

"He asked me to," he answered. Our eyes met. His weren
'
t as gray as they
'
d been earlier and I studied him openly, wondering if he was telling the truth. I tried to get into his mind, but he guarded it well and I could see nothing.

"Stop that!" Ajax scolded, almost smiling. "I am telling the truth."

"Stop what?" I asked innocently. If Ajax could feel me try to get into his mind, then most likely he could hear me when I spoke to him without words. He could hear me; he just chose to ignore me. The realization stung more than a little.

"He came to my room and said he left you here with a mountain of dishes. He asked if I would help you."

"That doesn
'
t sound like something Atticus would do." I couldn
'
t imagine him knocking on Ajax
'
s door and asking for a favor.

Ajax shrugged. "Well, he did."

I paused for a moment to digest the idea of Atticus asking Ajax for a favor.

"Why would he think you would help me anyway?"

"I guess I don
'
t have to help you, Kaia. I can just stay in my room and wait for you. But I can
'
t go to sleep until you get back to your room. Might as well help."

I asked no more questions, uncertain if Ajax
'
s answer was what I was looking for, or what answer would have made me happy in any case. We worked together in companionable silence until all the dishes were clean and dry.

Upstairs, before our bedroom doors, Ajax picked up my hands and examined them. They were raw from the dishwater. He turned them over gently and rubbed them a bit. His hands were warm and his touch felt good. My hands tingled as he held them.

"Make sure to heal these hands. We
'
re going into a virtual exercise tomorrow, all six of us, and you
'
re going to need them."

"Okay," I spoke quietly but my voice seemed to fill the empty hallway. With the lateness of the hour, it felt like we were the only two awake. He let go of my hands and stepped away but didn
'
t turn toward his room. We both hesitated and the silence hovered between us.

"Why do you hate him?" I finally asked. He looked at the floor, at the walls, at the ceiling, and finally at me.

"Because he has everything," he answered flatly. He stepped toward his room and said, "Goodnight, Kaia," before opening his door and leaving me alone in the hall. His words were unsettling. Besides the irony of it, the fact they each hated the other for the same unfounded reason, I realized Ajax hated Atticus in part because of his status as an Athlete, which meant he probably had the same feeling for me. I left those ugly thoughts in the hall and went into my room to find whatever rest I could.

Virtual Fighting

"I think all of you are familiar with Malik, right?" Ajax asked. The six of us gathered in The Weapons Room for our first assignment as a team. Malik had trained with us on the lawns for only a few days, but it had been time enough for him to take a liking to Tory. He often hung back, matching her pace in order to stay close to her though I was pretty sure his physical capabilities at least matched my own. At night, when we were alone in our room together, Tory would chatter about him excitedly, her cheeks flushing as she spoke of him. I marveled at how quickly the two of them seemed smitten with each other, and fought pangs of jealousy whenever I would see their heads bent together, laughing and talking easily. I didn
'
t know how to be as carefree in my relationships.

"Hello, Tory," Malik bowed to her and she returned the gesture. He greeted the rest of us, but not as sweetly as he did her.

"Today we
'
re going to practice hand-to-hand combat," Ajax continued. "We
'
ll be going into a virtual world and you need to be ready to face a variety of challenges. We
'
ll be looking for a black bag," he pulled up an image on the monitor placed in the Weapons Room for our use. The bag was medium size with two handles at the top and a zipper down the middle. There was nothing special about it.

"What
'
s inside?" Balor asked.

"It
'
s just an exercise," Ajax explained. "I don
'
t think the contents have any special significance, we just want to recover the property."

"Will other teams be given the same task?" I asked.

"Yes," Ajax let his gaze settle on me as he answered my question. "But we need to get the bag first." On that point, we could all agree. We might not meet any other teams during our exercise, but other teams could be competing simultaneously whether we encountered them or not. The Teachers might throw us together in the same virtual world, or put us all in separate worlds, depending on what they wanted from us.

We had many more questions pertaining to the exercise, all of which Ajax patiently answered, but he didn
'
t know much more than we did. We would be staying until the bag was found, either a few hours, several days, or even longer, depending on how quickly we completed our task and what obstacles challenged us. Our packs contained necessary supplies for an extended stay, just in case. The exercise would provide an escape, but Ajax sternly warned us against using it.

"If you find yourself in trouble, you need to rely on your fellow Crusaders and not on the escape." He was adamant.

In addition to our packs, Ajax handed out our staffs and reminded us there would be virtual fighters present. Staffs, when fully extended, were weapons similar in size and shape to what used to be called swords, only they weren
'
t meant for cutting. When retracted, the handle was light and easily concealable. Like orbs, they were energized, and could be used to knock an opponent down, temporarily paralyze them, stun them, or even steal their energy. Every human trained with one, and all of us were adept at handling them. Staffs weren
'
t trainable like orbs, but they could be deadly nonetheless.

"Above all, this is a virtual fighting exercise. You need to protect yourself from their staffs and you need to fight them. We
'
ll probably be outnumbered, and if you get paralyzed, you
'
re out of the exercise, but since we
'
re a team, we
'
ll win or lose as a team. If any of us can outlast them and find the bag, then we all win," Ajax said.

We lined up against the wall and waited as the room transformed. The walls disappeared and a chill settled over us. We found ourselves on an abandoned road, the asphalt ruined beyond repair. It crumbled and cracked away from us, bulging in places and completely non-existent in others, where it had totally disintegrated. The road wound its decrepit way up a rocky hillside, toward an enormous building perched on top. Next to us, an ancient metal sign pitted with rust rose from the ground.

"Looks like we missed the bus," Balor joked, squinting at the sign where a faded image of what humans once used as public transportation was still visible. It
'
d been a long time since any sort of bus passed this way. The whole feel of the place was ominous, from the dull gray sky and the absence of warmth, to the building looming atop the hill, huge and uninviting. It was a wooden structure with non-solarized glass windows, the kind made before the War, boasting steep roofs, rounded turrets and a multitude of dormers protruding from beneath the eaves.
Rocky hills s
urrounded the building, devoid of any greenery to soften the dark gray colors of both rock and sky.

Eerily symmetrical openings in those rocky hills looked like empty windows framed in granite and could not be mistaken for a natural occurrence.

"Cave dwellers." Caden put in words what we all dreaded to acknowledge. Many people in our society believed the existence of cave dwellers was just a myth, much the way humans once believed the same about the presence of aliens. Sightings of cave dwellers were rare and unreliable, but it was said an entire population of humans had created a life underground during the tremendous turmoil preceding the Oil Wars. They planned their escape from the sun-kissed surface of the planet carefully, bringing supplies and knowledge of how to survive underground.

It might have been brushed off as elaborate rumors, except near and far, sightings universally described pale creatures with pale eyes, untouched by the sun and seemingly translucent. Many people referred to them as the ghosts in the caves.

"I
'
ve heard the Resistance has tried to unite them to their cause," Caden continued. He
'
d heard the same rumors we all had.

"Forget about them." Ajax
'
s voice was authoritative. "What we need to do is get to the building and find the bag. Let
'
s not worry about the caves right now. Ready?"

We began to walk. The old road wound its way up and up, broken and lumpy, snaking through the rocks as it zigzagged toward the building. Near the top, the path was blocked. Large boulders formed a wall, and in its center, there was a door that appeared to be as thick as the rocks and just as unbreakable. The obstruction was odd because while the wall was high, it wasn
'
t impossibly so, and we could have easily climbed it. Neither would it have been difficult to climb the rocks from a number of different places, so why bother blocking the path?

"Looks like the door
'
s locked." Ajax was curious enough to try the iron handle.

"Really?" Balor said, stepping up to the door. He brought up his leg and gave the door five ferocious kicks, smashing it until it fell away, broken. "Now it
'
s open," he smiled and stepped through, just as casual as can be. He hadn
'
t even broken a sweat. Tory and Malik followed him through, then Caden and Ajax. I stopped a moment to examine the door, noting it had been at least thirty centimeters thick. Balor had kicked through it as if it were particle board. He turned back toward me and winked, watching as I examined the destruction.

"I
'
ve got brains too you know, Kaia." He held his arm up and flexed while he spoke. "I
'
m not just muscle; I
'
m the whole package, ladies." Malik cuffed him on the head but Balor only laughed and continued up the hill. Ajax caught my eye and gave me a little smile, which I returned.

"An odd place for a door, don
'
t you think?" I asked him.

"An
alarm?" he pondered. The door wasn
'
t there for nothing. Sure enough, as we rounded the last bend and the building was no more than 30 meters away, a line of Virtuals stood in the path to greet us.

"Go ahead, Balor," Caden nudged him, "kick your way through this door."

We pulled
out
our staffs as the guards formed a circle surrounding us. They outnumbered us maybe two to one and we formed our own circle, backs together and facing outwards toward their unseen faces. Virtuals could take on many forms, but these were dressed like Athletes, all in black, tall and formidable. Their faces were covered by the same dark, solarized masks all Virtuals wore, giving them their robot-like anonymity.

"Don
'
t worry about paralyzing them," Ajax instructed. "Get through them; get to the building."

Balor charged toward them and the fight began. I was able to immobilize two of them immediately, having spent years honing my reflexes while dodging tennis balls projected at me from various angles and at dizzying speeds. As I fought the guards, I wielded my staff in front of me and struck side to side, getting in close enough to stab the place where a heart would be, until two of them fell paralyzed at my feet. Their bodies dissolved into the ground. Tory was small enough to break through, and she slipped by the guards, making a run for the building. Malik followed her.

"Two down!" I called out. My staff was drained and I had to be more physical. I pushed on.

"Two more!" called Ajax.

"I got three!" Balor answered.

"One more!" Caden answered. Eight down and only four left.

"Kaia!" Ajax yelled. He was heading for the building. I turned away from the fight to join him, but as I did so, a Virtual cracked me across the back. A thousand needles of electricity stabbed at my skin and I stumbled but stayed on my feet. Caden and Balor protected my retreat, fighting the guards off furiously while easing toward the building. Ajax took my arm and we ran the rest of the way together, stopping once we got inside.

The interior was far more modern than the archaic exterior. Right away we had a choice of going upstairs or down, and several floors stretched either way. Long corridors lined the perimeter, ringed with double rows of rounded metal railings. The corridors formed a giant, rectangular space, and in the middle of the space, there were metal stairways crisscrossed throughout the center of the building, connecting various floors, and making it impossible to see the ground.

We only had a few seconds to take it all in. There was no time to form a plan or wait for Balor and Caden, because the building kept shifting. Staircases going up suddenly went down while the floor shook violently enough to make us stumble and we had to move or else be tossed over the side.

"Down!" Malik shouted from somewhere below us, so down we went. We ran along corridors and past windows, barely stopping to catch glimpses of the inside. When we caught up with Tory and Malik we tried to pause along one of the hallways but the ground rumbled around us.

"Caden!" Malik shouted, hoping to give the same general directions he gave to us.

"What is this place?" Tory asked, her eyes taking it all in. The hallways were lined with classrooms, many of them full of students staring at old fashioned monitors or working at long laboratory tables. They weren
'
t actual Students because they wore regular clothing rather than energy suits. Virtual Guards stood ominously inside the rooms, their presence discouraging entry.

"It looks like a school," Malik guessed. What else could it be with all of those classrooms? The floor shook again, but not as violently, as Balor swung onto the landing followed by Caden.

"Miss us?" Balor grinned.

"C
'
mon," Ajax said, when the ground continued to shake and we had to grab the railing or stumble. We ran after Ajax, down the hallway, upstairs and down, searching for the black bag but never stopping because when we did, the ground would tremble and pull us toward the metal railings.

As I streaked by one of the classrooms, I caught a flash of black in my peripheral vision and I stopped abruptly, causing Balor to plow into me from behind. The force of his body crashing against mine sent us both hurtling to the floor. I tried to grab hold of something, but the tumble sent me skidding over the side, and I was just able to keep hold of the concrete floor. My feet dangled precariously into the maze of stairwells below. Balor wasn
'
t as lucky and the fall sent him over the side with no time to grab anything. His body crashed onto a landing somewhere below me.

"Balor!" Malik shouted.

"He
'
s on his feet," Tory answered, relief in her voice, but Malik motioned to Caden anyway.

"Make sure he
'
s all right," he instructed, and Caden quickly retreated, heading off to find the right staircase in order to get to Balor.

"Hold on, Kaia!" Ajax kneeled down and frantically put his own hands over mine, holding them to keep me steady for the moment. My arms were already burning from the strain of holding on. If Ajax let go, I would surely fall.

"The bag Ajax, I saw the bag! The window behind you," I jerked my head in the general direction. "I saw it. It
'
s in that classroom, go get it." He let his emotions slip, and I could feel his uneasiness by the thought of letting me go.

"I can
'
t leave you here."

"Yes, you can. Go get the bag and I
'
ll hold on."

"No, you won
'
t be able to. Malik, help me pull her up. Tory, go get the bag," he ordered. As soon as Tory made a move toward the classroom, several Virtual Guards emerged, blocking the entrance. They attacked Tory and Malik furiously. Ajax had no choice but to let me go.