Daniel X: Game Over (7 page)

I’D SEEN A lot of aliens in my day, but until that moment I’d never seen one wearing Adidas.

The boy who’d just entered the apartment of Number 7 and Number 8 looked to be about my age, with jet-black hair and piercing dark eyes, and wearing a tattered wool sweater and blue jeans. There was something deeply sad about him, like somebody close to him had died and he didn’t want to talk about it. He looked like a decent kid. Which was bizarre considering this was apparently Number 7 and Number 8’s
son.

“Kildare, my boy,” said Number 7, turning away from his computer screen, which right then was filled with engineering schematics of some antennas located on the second-tallest structure in Tokyo, the famed Tokyo Tower. “You’ll never guess who was just here.”

“The Supernanny,” replied Kildare, “come to give you two some parenting pointers.”

“What is he talking about, Colin?” asked Number 8.

“As usual, Ellie,” said Number 7, “I have no idea.” He turned back to his son with a stern expression. “We were just called on by none other than
The Prayer.
”

A flicker of surprise crossed Kildare’s face, quickly masked by a shrug.

“Do you even know who that is?” Number 8 prodded, disgust creeping into her tone.

The boy had looked ready to fire a sarcastic retort but thought better of it. Instead, he turned and headed toward the kitchen.

“I thought not. He’s Number 1, my dear, ignorant child. On
The List.
” No response from Kiladare. “And there’s something else you should know,” continued his mother.

Kildare paused as he reached the kitchen door.

“There’s a
Pleionid
here in Tokyo.”

The boy spun around, a look approaching panic on his face.

“What!? They’re extinct!”

“All but one. One that came here to interfere with our plans.”

“But aren’t they pacifists?”

“That may be, but we think it’s intending to pass on information that our
non
pacifist enemies might use,” explained his mother.

“All of that is immaterial,” Number 7 jumped in. “The
fact is that the hunt for the last Pleionid will be the stuff of legend, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any hunter.”

“In fact,” said Number 8, “your father and I have been talking, and, since your sixteenth colony cycle is approaching, we think
you
should be
hunt leader
on this one.”

“What a glorious first kill it could be for you!” said Number 7. “Much like my own, when I caught and killed the last Reticulated Shandlerite on Guldbrekker 11.”

It looked to me like all the blood had drained from Kildare’s face. “Sure, Dad. Say, I just remembered…” He hesitated, turning back to the private elevator. “I left some equipment at school. I have to go.”

“Kildare! We’ve already talked about your
forgetting
things all of the time. We are not a family—much less a species—that
forgets
things.”

“But I have to go get it or I won’t be able to finish my science project.”

“And then what?” asked his father. “I know we asked you to blend in and learn their ways; but this interest of yours in school—it’s
unseemly,
Kildare.”

“I can’t blend in if I fail out.”

“Well,” said Number 8, looking quite human in her motherly disapproval, “make sure you’re back in time for dinner. The hunt starts in two days, and you’ll need extra rest so you’ll be ready.”

“Your first hunt! Ah, that’ll get you past this school bug!” said Number 7, rubbing his hands together and leaning back in his computer chair.

Kildare grimaced and disappeared into the elevator.

“This will be just the thing to get him back on track,” declared Number 7. “There’s no way he’ll be able to deny his heritage after tasting the thrill of
the hunt.
”

“I hope you’re right,” said Number 8. “Should we put up some fail-safes so he doesn’t get hurt?”

“No, let him prove himself. If he doesn’t rise to the challenge…”

“Of course, you’re right, dear,” said Number 8, coming up behind her husband and rubbing his shoulders. “We can always make another.”

As Number 7 stood and began returning her affections, I quickly turned off my “hearing” and looked away from their window. Not only am I really
not
into watching aliens smooch, but I didn’t have much time to figure out where their son was going. He was definitely up to something.

Fortunately, one thing faster than high-speed elevators is instantaneous teleportation. Of course, you have to know exactly where it is you’re teleporting to or you can find yourself lodged in a solid object, with some pretty unpleasant results. But by now, I’d made a thorough study of the GC building’s layout and knew exactly where the penthouse elevator stopped. In the blink of an eye, I disguised myself as a security guard and teleported myself to the lobby.

Only problem was, when the elevator doors opened up, Kildare wasn’t there.

I PULLED DOWN the brim of my security cap and stepped into the empty express elevator. There was no sign of Kildare, but the panel made it pretty clear where he’d gone. The lobby and the penthouse each had a button, but there was another button to select. It was labeled with the Japanese character for “service,” and, based on its position in the panel, it seemed to be the floor directly below the penthouse. I hit the button.

The elevator rose quickly—so quickly my ears popped—and opened into a space quite different than the one occupied by Number 7 and Number 8. No polished obsidian floors or exotic furnishings here. This was a filthy, fluorescently lit, windowless room filled with all kinds of Dumpsters, washers and dryers, cleaning supplies, and a very tired-looking, stooped old woman in a crisp white cleaning
uniform. She immediately put down her mop and bowed at me as I stepped out of the elevator.

“Did you see a kid come through here?” I asked in Japanese.

“No, sir,” she replied.

I could tell she was lying. Maybe the kid had threatened her? Maybe his parents had?

Just then, a large chute dropped down from the ceiling, and a load of dirty pots and revolting soup bones rained into the middle of the floor. The old woman picked up her mop.

“You have to clean this entire place yourself?”

“Whenever the masters are home, yes, of course,” she said, moving toward the fresh mountain of filth.

My heart went out to her. Getting this place passably clean would have taken a team of professional cleaners a week… or an Alpar Nokian cleaning robot approximately ten minutes.

I quickly materialized one of the compact white machines I’d known from my childhood.

“How did you—?”

“Make a cleaning machine out of thin air?”

She nodded.

“I’m not going to tell you so that you have plausible deniability, okay?”

“What?”

“Somebody comes in here and asks you where that machine came from, and you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know.’ Right?”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, bowing to me over and over again as the white machine zipped around the room obliterating every piece of trash it encountered.

“Can you please tell me where that kid went? I promise I’m not here to hurt him.”

She looked me in the eyes. “Well, if you
promise
not to harm him…. Sometimes he goes through
there.
”

She was pointing at a metal grate—an air vent—in the wall. Judging by the worn hinges, it had been opened and closed many times.

“He’s a nice boy,” she said. “Not at all like his parents.”

I nodded, popped the cover, and climbed down into the dark metal duct.

When I put my mind to it, I can make my nose more sensitive than a bloodhound’s. I’m talking the ability to detect parts per
trillion.
It’s a weird sensation, being able to smell things that strongly—and it can cause some serious nausea if you come across a bad odor like, you know, brussels sprouts—but it can be a huge help in cases like this where you’re climbing around a skyscraper’s branching ductwork in pitch dark.

I followed Kildare’s scent, which was definitely not human, to a small room that was clearly his lair. I knew it was his, because I’m pretty well acquainted with the living habits of my race—not of Alpar Nokians but Teenage Boyians.

The small custodian’s closet was dominated by a dangerous-looking mountain of clothing, shoes, and Snickers
wrappers. To one side, a metal locker plastered with Linkin Park and other rock-band stickers had been turned on its side to support an Xbox 360 console, a flat-screen television, a broken remote control, and a pile of papers and school books.

I picked up one of the books and looked it over. It was a textbook with a close-up of a moth’s face on the cover. I managed to translate the Japanese characters to “Zoology: A Complete Survey.” “Kildare Gygax” was written inside the cover—both in Japanese characters and our more familiar Roman alphabet. Below that was the name and address of a local secondary school.

As I returned the book to the makeshift desk, I noticed that the overturned locker was completely blocking the only door to the room. Did that mean that Kildare came and left only through the vent?

I understood the need for privacy—especially with parents like his—but it seemed like it would be pretty inconvenient to forever be clambering around in those dark, cramped vents to get in and out of here.

And why were there
two
sleeping bags, not one? And why was one so much smaller than the other?

I quickly examined them. They’d each been slept in, and recently. The bigger one smelled exactly like the trail in the vents and must have been Kildare’s. But the little one—it could have been an infant’s sleeping bag, and it smelled like nothing I’d ever come across. I mean, I don’t even know what to compare it to. It was kind of sweet, but not like perfume and not like candy. It just smelled
good
somehow, if that makes any sense.

But there weren’t any other clues, at least that I could find. If the big bag was Kildare’s, whose was the little one? A little brother’s?

I didn’t have any idea what was going on. And what about Number 1? Had he just been checking in on Number 7 and Number 8, or was he here for something else? If he were to join forces with those two, the scales wouldn’t just tip the wrong way; they’d fall right off the counter.

A chill ran down my spine, and I spun around, but no one was there.

Strange. Usually when I have the feeling that I’m being watched, I’m right.

THERE WAS ONLY one reasonable thing to do to ease my nerves: check in to a luxury hotel.

The Fujiya Hotel, a Western-style hotel dating to 1878, is down in Hakone, a mountain resort town south of Tokyo. Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Lennon, kings of England, and, of course, emperors of Japan—you name a celebrity or VIP from the past couple centuries, and if they visited Japan, chances are they stayed at the Fujiya.

You reach it by bullet train, not a bad hour-long hop out of Tokyo, and then take a switchback train up into the hot spring–studded mountains. It’s inviting and beautiful and classy and just the sort of spot where you can escape from the modern hubbub and luxuriate in true old-world opulence, replete with the most deluxe room service you’ve ever seen.