Z 2134 (20 page)

The orb hummed beside her, lending Ana
mercy with silence, allowing her to focus. Unfortunately, her reprieve lasted
seconds. Once Ana had righted herself, the Orb’s TV screen returned to vibrant
life, the crowd loudly chanting.

“Die! Die! Die!”

Clearly, Ana wasn’t the crowd favorite
her father had been. Being labeled a traitor in the Underground gave the
audience fuel to hate her, and they were clearly rooting for her ruin. Her
father
was
in the Underground, but the Network had said nothing of the
sort, not even mentioning rumor, revealing only his wife’s cold-blooded murder,
which, Ana supposed, was somehow more acceptable to the audience than treason.

She glared at the screen, hating the orb
and the horrible world inside it. Cody was maybe six seconds from the platform.
Her death a given unless she started to run. Ana planted her heel harder
against the bridge, then launched herself forward.

Just then, Cody reached the platform,
then slipped, screaming as he fell out of her view behind the pedestal. Ana
wasn’t sure if she heard him scream, or if his cry was lost amid the squealing
from the boars below, but she figured he must be dead. She took another long
step toward the platform, feeling the pedestal within her reach.

The moment her feet found the platform,
she saw Cody hanging onto the edge of the platform by his fingers, his eyes and
mouth both open wide in horror. Then he saw her, and his eyes narrowed in anger
as he somehow managed to swing his leg onto the ledge.

She considered running toward him and
shoving him off, but was terrified that he’d either get up before she reached
him or grab her leg and yank her over the edge. Instead, she grabbed the sword.

As she raised it, Cody found his footing
on the other side of the pedestal and brandished a knife he must’ve had with
him when he fell down the chute.

He swiped the blade at her, but his reach
was too short.

She stepped back, then remembered she
didn’t have but a few feet to move before she’d fall into the pit. She jabbed
the sword forward, trying just to scare him back because she hadn’t quite
committed to murder.

“Go!” she shouted, gritting her teeth.
“Go, and I won’t kill you.”

“No way!” he sneered. “You go, and I’ll
let YOU live!”

“I’ve got the sword,” Ana said, taking a
swing, again purposely missing. Part of her reason for not striking him was a
fear that if she missed and the sword was close enough to him, he’d be able to
wrest it away from her. Then she would be a dead girl.

“Yeah, but I don’t think you’ll use it,”
he said, taking a brave, or maybe stupid step forward.

“Just go!” she screamed. “I swear I’ll
kill you!”

“You know I can’t do that,” he shook his
head, holding his knife out in front of him. “If you go, they’ll leave me down
here to die! We both know how it ends for whoever doesn’t take the platform
back. So get off and let me on. You can take your chances with the boars and
your sword.”

Maybe Cody is right.

Maybe she
could
make it up without
the platform. It wasn’t impossible, though you did have to get through the
boars and find the alternate route. It had been done once in Games history, she
thought.

She didn’t have time to realize the
lunacy of her logic. Cody charged. Ana shocked herself by raising the sword,
waving it in a wide arc, swiping him with a long gash across his chest, and
painting the already-red button with a splatter of blood. He fell a step back,
eyes wide and dazed, his mouth open in a capital O of surprise.

Ana shoved the sword deeper, then hefted
it up and through his guts as he screamed.

She pulled it free from his body, as if
his skin were its scabbard, then fell another step back, expecting him to fall,
maybe even over the edge. Instead, Cody did the impossible by lurching forward,
blood drooling from his mouth, and waving his knife madly through the air.

He missed, but his surprise attack sent
her sword to the ground. Ana ducked, then jumped at Cody, aiming for his waist
and sending him hard onto the ground. She straddled him, curled her fingers
into his hair, then lifted his head and sent the back of his skull into the
platform’s metal bottom over and over as she unleashed her pent-up rage.

Rage at City 6.

Rage at The Games.

Rage at the orb and Kirkman’s incessant
chatter.

And rage at Cody for forcing her to kill
him.

The orb hovered beside her, filling the
air with a play-by-play.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Kirkman
said, clearly giddy. “Little Miss Jonah Junior is 114 pounds of RAGING FURY!
Look. At. Her. GOOOOO! City 6 might want to consider laying odds on our
brand-new favorite!”

Tears streamed down her face as blood
spilled out, soaking the knees on her coveralls, as Cody’s dead eyes stared up
at her.

Applause filled the cavern, the fickle
fans suddenly finding their new darling underdog. She didn’t dare turn to the
orb and let the vultures see the tears in her eyes.

She allowed her hair to fall into her
face, masking her pain as she climbed off Cody and turned back to the pedestal
and smashed her fist down onto the button.

The platform lurched forward with an
angry grinding sound as she headed back to the surface, sword in hand, hoping
she could find Liam.

After a long moment, she finally raised
her eyes and met the stare of the orb, with Kirkman’s smiling face filling the
screen.

“What do you have to say for your fans
back in City 6?” Kirkman asked.

Ana stared into the orb, and then, to her
surprise, she raised her fist and said, “To Jonah!”

J
onah opened his eyes just as Father’s
needle pinched his flesh of his neck again.

A sudden rush, followed by a swimming
mind, led to seconds that fell into minutes while he searched for a focus that
didn’t want to be found.

When his vision finally cleared, a man
from Jonah’s past was sitting across from him — Charles Egan, who was staring
at him with heavy lids over red-tinged eyes. Jonah wasn’t sure if the man’s
eyes were red due to rage, tears, alcohol, or all three. Egan was thin, his
dark hair thinning, and his face haunted looking. He looked like a shell of the
chubby man of a decade ago.

Jonah’s mind flashed back on the last
time he’d stared into the man’s eyes, as Watchers were dragging him from the
courtroom. Egan had been begging Jonah to just do one thing — tell the truth.
The truth that Jonah had sworn to uphold as a Watcher. A truth that Jonah had
turned his back on, no different than his corrupt bosses. Egan’s unfortunate
end in City 6 ran in miserable parallel to Jonah’s own, honing a blade of guilt
so sharp that Egan didn’t even need to wield it for Jonah to feel its edge.

“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, swallowing hard
and wishing he could disappear. He was almost willing to die if it meant not
having to meet the man’s eyes.

It wasn’t as though Jonah had anything to
live for, not with Ana and Adam and the all of his life still stuck behind The
Wall of City 6.

Egan said nothing, keeping his gaze fixed
on his enemy.

Jonah tried again. “I swear,” he said,
shaking his head. “I had no idea. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Egan ignored him and started in with his
line of questioning instead, as Father Truth stood behind him, arms again
folded across his chest.

“Who set you up?” Egan asked.

“I don’t know,” Jonah said, telling the
truth, knowing that whatever was rushing through his veins would prevent him
from lying anyway, even if that was where he most wanted to go. There was no
longer any reason to lie. There was no way on Earth that Egan was a City Watch
spy.

Egan made Jonah stew in his guilt for
another minute before asking his next question. “Why were you set up? Why would
they need to silence you?”

Jonah said, “I don’t know,” then
whimpered another apology. His earlier euphoria was nowhere to be found, only a
thousand pounds of shame and guilt. “I’m so, so sorry,” he continued to cry.

“How does it feel to watch your life torn
apart piece by piece?” Egan asked. “Oh wait, I don’t need to ask you, do I?
Tell me, Jonah, why did you set me up? How could you lie, knowing your untruths
were tearing a family apart?”

“Because I didn’t know,” Jonah insisted.
“I
thought
I was doing the right thing. They told me, Keller told me,
that you were part of the Underground.”

“I wasn’t,” Egan snarled.

“I didn’t know! I wouldn’t have lied if I
had known you were innocent!” Jonah couldn’t get his head to stop spinning.
“I’m sorry.”

“Tell my wife and son you’re sorry,” Egan
said. “Oh yeah, you can’t, can you? My house was seized, and they were banished
to the Dark Quarter, weren’t they? And we all know what happened then, don’t
we?”

Jonah shook his head, not wanting to
remember, or stare into the eyes of his past.

“Say it,” Egan said, his voice rising
almost into a scream. “Say it out loud. What happened to my family? Tell me
what happened to my wife and daughter!”

“You already know,” Jonah said, only half
understanding what Egan wanted him to say.

“I want you to say it,” Egan said, almost
whispering now. “I want what you’ve done to ring in your ears.”

Jonah swallowed, then drew a fresh breath
and said, “Your wife was raped and murdered.”

Egan’s eyes met his. “And? My son?”

Jonah swallowed the lump in his throat,
tears streaming from his eyes as the drugs continued to play havoc with his
emotions.

“Your son was sold into sexual slavery.
He killed himself one year later. No one knows what happened to your infant
daughter…Is that her? Calla? How did you get her back?”

It took forever for Egan to speak, and
when he did, he neglected the question.

“I’ve hated you for so long,” he said.
“I’ve wished you dead for so long that it had become as automatic as a daily
prayer.”

Egan fell silent while Jonah struggled to
maintain eye contact, but more often than not, found himself staring at the
ground.

“I wanted to find you and kill you. What
I finally chose instead, with the help of Father,” he gestured toward the dwarf
standing to his right, “was to focus on the life we had together, before
you
conspired to take it away. Father helped me see that blaming you would
never bring them back. And so I went, going about my life, almost forgetting
you. But then, imagine my surprise when fate conspired to bring you here! Oh,
what poetic justice, indeed, that you would be framed for your wife’s murder.
That you’d be outcast! That you’d be put into The Games, and win them no less!
And then you wind up here, as if God Himself hand delivered you to me.”

Egan laughed, though the cackle sounded
forced enough to be brittle. The swirling rush of drugs, thick inside Jonah’s
blood, forced a ragged laugh from his mouth.

Egan met Jonah’s eyes, holding his stare.

Jonah suddenly longed to hear Egan
condemn him further. He deserved everything he got. He wanted to hear how awful
he was and how he deserved every horrible thing that had happened. He was ready
for whatever punishment the man thought he deserved.

It was time to pay for his sins.

Jonah was ready.

Deep inside Jonah knew it was true. Every
word of it.

Egan stood up, set a hand on Father’s
shoulder, then left the room without saying a word, leaving Jonah alone with
the dwarf.

Father stood before Jonah, arms still
crossed across his chest, saying nothing as Jonah wallowed in his guilt and
misery.

Egan returned a few minutes later,
carrying an orb in his right palm. “Look familiar?” he said, returning to his
seat across from Jonah. “It doesn’t fly or record any more, I saw to that. But
what it does do, it does wonderfully.”

Dread slivered down Jonah’s spine.

He wondered how they would use the orb to
torture him. Egan cracked a panel on the orb’s back, then flicked a switch
inside the robot. Moments later, its screen lit like a parade, showing the
familiar, always-on feed of The Darwin Games.

The display showed a green nighttime
image of a young girl with long dark hair, crouching low behind a tree as a
group of zombies ambled by in the midnight black.

“Why are you showing me this?” Jonah
asked, confused.

“Patience,” Egan said, smiling for the
first time. “Just watch.”

Jonah waited another minute, wondering
what the hell could be so important that Egan had to show him. Suddenly, the
scene on the screen changed, showing him what Egan wanted him to see — his
daughter, in The Games, racing along a bridge.

Jonah screamed, then bucked and shook,
trying to tear himself from the chair and its bindings.

“What the fuck!” he screamed. “Why is she
in The Games?”