Game of Flames

  “Uh, that doesn’t feel like nothing,” Gabriel pointed out as the stairs shook and shuddered.

  Dash scrambled around for something to grab hold of, but the walls were too smooth. He didn’t know what was happening, but he did know they had to get out of there, fast. “I think we’d better—aaaaaah!”

  The ground dropped out beneath him. The stairs flattened themselves into a slick metal chute, and Dash and Gabriel plummeted down and down.

  There was a deafening whoosh, and suddenly, Dash felt himself buoyed up by a cool cushion of air.

  “It’s like the tubes on the ship!” Dash cried, the wind stealing his words out of his mouth.

  “Only faster!” Gabriel shouted, shooting past him. “Wooooo!”

  Dash felt a surge of pure joy as he whipped along the steep chute, the walls a blur of silvery motion. Gabriel was right, this was several times faster than the tubes on the ship, and he probably should have been frightened, or worried, or preparing himself for whatever came next—but it was too much fun. He couldn’t help himself: he gave in to the ride. The chute veered up, down, spiraled upside down, then plunged again. Dash’s stomach ping-ponged against his lungs, his face stung from the blasts of air, he didn’t know whether to scream or laugh or puke, and he loved every minute of it.

  After what seemed like forever and not nearly long enough, there was a rush of warm air at his feet that slowed his motion, and he popped out of the chute, landing on the ground with a soft thump. Gabriel was already there, shaking his head in wonder. Piper and TULIP brought up the rear. “Is that what riding the tubes in the ship is like?” Piper asked, her face split open by a wide grin. “No wonder you spend so much time in there.”

  “They’re not like that,” Gabriel said. “Man, nothing’s like that. Who wants to go again?”

  Dash said nothing. All his joy drained out of him as he caught sight of the other chute, the one they’d almost taken. It was dropping sloggers straight into the lava river.

  Exactly as Chris had warned them.

  Before Chris came on the radio, Dash had been ready to choose. And he would have chosen wrong. He would have incinerated his entire team. He’d been so determined to do things on his own, but why? One bad decision—his bad decision—and it would all have been over.

  Dash knew that he couldn’t let himself second-guess every decision he made. That was no way to lead. It was no way to live. He couldn’t let himself think how close he’d come to disaster.

  But it was hard not to.

  Carly spoke into their earpieces. “What’s going on down there, guys?”

  “Oh, not much,” Gabriel said. “Just the greatest ride in the history of the universe, that’s all. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Yeah,” Carly said, a strange note in her voice.

  Before Gabriel could ask her what was up, Chris cut in with new instructions. This time, he used his own voice.

  “You’re going to need to tweak TULIP’s programming a bit more before you collect the Magnus 7. The sloggers are only programmed to hold the molten lava for the amount of time it takes them to transfer it to the factory. If this programming is not altered, TULIP might well self-destruct before you can make it back to the ship. I will direct you on the alterations.”

  “How do we know doing that isn’t going to make the thing blow up?” Gabriel asked suspiciously.

  “Why would I want to blow up my own slogger?” Chris asked. “Why would I want to blow up my crew?”

  He had a point.

  Dash wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. Maybe Chris wasn’t the most trustworthy guy at the moment, but he was their best chance at getting off Meta Prime alive. He’d just proven that. Dash glanced at his team, asking them a silent question.

  Piper nodded. After a moment, Gabriel nodded too.

  “Tell us what we need to do,” Dash told Chris. “We’ll do it.”

  Following Chris’s instructions to the letter, it only took Gabriel a few minutes to alter TULIP’s circuitry again.

  Nothing blew up.

  “This almost feels too easy,” Piper said as they pressed themselves into a crevice of Lord Cain’s wall and watched TULIP march toward the riverbank.

  “Never say that!” Gabriel warned her. “Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?”

  TULIP didn’t seem to notice the cannonballs of lava flying overhead. A thin tube protruded from her chest and sucked in the molten lava.

  “It’s like she’s drinking through a straw!” Piper exclaimed. “You think she likes it?”

  “I know I like it,” Dash said, watching in amazement as TULIP’s belly lit with an orange glow. A robot full of Magnus 7—he couldn’t believe it. They’d actually gotten the second element.

  “Two down, four to go,” he cheered.

  “Never say that either!” Gabriel urged him. “Not until we’re safely back on the ship. However safe that is.”

  “When did you get so superstitious?” Dash asked.

  “Maybe since I found out the guy I beat in Ping-Pong last week is an ancient alien who built a planet-sized video game that did its best to kill me?” Gabriel said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to feel safe until we get off this planet.”

  “Speaking of…,” Dash began. Now that they had the element, there was nothing keeping them here. “Ready to make a run for it?”

  “More than ready,” Piper said. “Let’s get out of here!”

  They raced for the Cloud Cat, dodging sparks and lava, looking back every few seconds to make sure TULIP was following behind. The little slogger with a belly full of Magnus 7 had suddenly become the most important member of their crew.

  Soon enough, they were strapped into the Cloud Cat.

  “Permission to take us up?” Gabriel said, slipping on his flight glasses.

  “Permission more than granted,” Dash said, holding tight as the engines roared to life.

  The Cloud Cat shot off the ground and sliced through the air—then shuddered.

  “What was that?” Piper yelped. The air was alight with molten lava as Lord Cain fired everything he had across the river. “Were we hit?”

  “I don’t think he’s aiming at us,” Dash said. “I think we’re just in the way.”

  “It doesn’t matter who he’s aiming at—it only matters who he hits!” Gabriel said as a gush of lava came dangerously close. The Cloud Cat bucked beneath them, losing altitude. Gabriel gritted his teeth, intent on finding a path through the fire. “I can’t get clear of it.” He took the ship into a shallow dive, then veered sharply away from a stream of lava. He searched desperately for empty air, but couldn’t find a clear path through the heavy rain of artillery. The shuttle bobbed and weaved, but it was no use. Globs of molten lava splattered the hull. The shuttle’s control panel started flashing red.

  “Don’t panic,” Dash told him, his own heart thumping a million times a minute. How much of this could their little shuttle take? “Just stay calm, you got this.”

  “Of course I got it,” Gabriel said, but he wasn’t so sure. They needed to get above the fighting, into the safety of the alien orange clouds. But the sky was so dense with flame, he didn’t know how he could do it. He was going to fail his crew, fail his mission.

  “Come in, Cloud Cat. Come in!” It was Anna’s voice on the comm.

  “Not now,” Dash snapped as the shuttle took another hit. If this ship was going to crash, no way did he want Anna Turner’s gloating to be the last words he ever heard. “We’re kind of in the middle of something.”

  “Yeah, we can see that,” Anna said. “You want our help, you have to ask.”

  “What, you can shut down a war?” Dash asked. Not that it was much of a war. Only Lord Cain’s side was firing.

  “Oh, just send them the flight path already,” Niko’s voice said.

  “They should say please first,” Anna said.

  “Anna.” That was Siena, and she didn’t sound happy.

  ??
?Whatever,” Anna said. Then, “There’s a pattern to the lava ball trajectories. I’m sending you our flight path. Program it in, that’ll get you to safety. We’re two klicks to your east. You can follow us out of here.”

  Dash couldn’t believe the Omega team was actually trying to help. “How do you even know—”

  “You losers want out of here or not?”

  “We want out of here,” Gabriel said, dodging another barrage of fire from the surface.

  The Omegas sent the data packet, and as the ship’s computer uploaded the information, Gabriel’s view of the sky lit with a glowing route to safety. “Here goes everything,” he murmured, steering the ship carefully along the course. His fingers twitched at the touch pad, his gaze riveted to the iridescent trail. The Omega’s safe corridor was just wide enough for the ship to pass through the firefight—there was no margin for error.

  “That must be them!” Piper cried as a black shuttle came into view. “Anna and the others.”

  “On it,” Gabriel said, all his concentration funneled into steering the ship. Even with the flight path and the Omega shuttle to follow, this was nearly impossible. Like threading a needle—at a thousand miles an hour. The tiniest of false moves would turn them into a fireball.

  The two shuttles sliced through the smoke, up and up, lava scoring their hulls and heat pulsing at their windows, until, finally, they broke into the clouds. The firestorm died away beneath them.

  Gabriel let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. His limbs went weak with relief. “We made it,” he said, switching over to autopilot. It was the first time he’d ever been grateful to give up the controls.

  “Yeah, and you’re welcome,” Anna said in the radio. “Maybe next time you should just stay up in orbit and let us handle the tough stuff.”

  “Oh yeah?” Dash said. “Maybe next time you should—”

  He stopped when he realized the line had gone dead.

  “Also, thanks, I guess,” he added. The words were a lot easier to say when he knew Anna couldn’t hear them.

  —

  The Cloud Cat limped into the Cloud Leopard’s docking bay. There would be a lot of repair work to do before the shuttle was planet-ready again. But Dash, Gabriel, and Piper weren’t thinking about that as they bounced out of the Cloud Cat. They were eager to get to the navigation deck, where Carly was waiting. It felt like they hadn’t seen her in a month.

  When they made it to the bridge, they found Chris hunched over the controls. Carly was at his side, shouting suggestions.

  “Get him on his left flank!” she shouted. “Yeah, and another one! Light that sucker on fire!”

  “Everything okay up here, Carly?” Dash asked.

  “Fine, fine.” She gestured for him to shush. “Let him focus.”

  “I am very glad you made it safely back to the ship,” Chris said, without taking his eyes off the view screen. His hands flew across an elaborate control panel that Dash had never seen before. His fingers were a blur of motion, and with each move, more destruction rained down on the surface of Meta Prime. “As soon as I tie up this loose end, we can be on our way.”

  Dash grinned. That was just like Chris, to call a no-holds-barred fight to the death a “loose end.”

  “You really think it’s that Light Blade guy, Colin, at the controls for Lord Cain?” Gabriel asked.

  “I see no other option,” Chris said, through gritted teeth. “And I’m going to make him wish he never left Earth. This is my game. My world. And if he thinks he’s going to take it from me? He’s sorely mistaken.”

  They cheered him on. Even Piper got into the spirit. It was impossible not to. They’d never seen Chris so determined—and they’d never seen a battle so furious. Cain and Garquin were unleashing everything they had against each other.

  “Go, Chris!” Dash shouted as balls of fire carved an enormous crater in Cain’s kingdom.

  “Bring it, Garquin!” Gabriel cried as two fleets of sloggers charged the river. They faced off, spewing lava back and forth across the stream of fire.

  The fighting stretched on and on. The surface of the planet was littered with scorched sloggers. All across both kingdoms, flames spurted into the sky.

  “How will you know when you’ve won?” Dash asked. “Is there a point system or something?”

  Chris glared at the screen. “I win when there’s nothing left of him.”

  —

  “Yeah, Colin, you can do it! Blow him away!” Ravi shouted.

  “Silence,” Colin snapped. “I need to concentrate.”

  The Light Blade crew fell silent. They watched Colin manipulate the controls like a machine. They watched the surface of Meta Prime erupt into flame. It wasn’t just lava cannons anymore. Drones swooped through the clouds, dropping bombs that exploded on impact. Sloggers the size of tanks rolled along the river, blasting holes twenty feet wide. Garquin’s and Cain’s sides were exactly evenly matched. Which made sense, Anna thought, since Chris and Colin were exact copies of each other.

  “If you keep this up, you’re likely to destroy the whole planet,” Siena pointed out.

  Colin snorted. “What do you think I’m trying to do? He thinks he can beat me with his little toy? See how he likes it when I take his toy away.” He shifted one of his joystick-like controls and down below, a mile-wide quadrant of Garquin’s kingdom turned to ash.

  “Seriously?” Niko said. “You don’t mean literally, though, right?”

  “Yes, Niko, I mean literally,” Colin said snidely, without looking away from the screen. When he wanted to, he could make you feel like the world’s biggest idiot. “Chris doesn’t understand what it takes to win. But he will.”

  —

  The war stretched on as both sides tore each other to pieces. A whirling storm of fire swirled across the planet’s surface. Smoke choked the sky. Metal screamed. Machines twisted and burned. Geysers of flame erupted, spitting columns of lava into the sky.

  And then…silence.

  There were no weapons left to fire.

  There were no sloggers left to battle.

  There was nothing left on the planet, nothing that could fight. Nothing that could move. Nothing but scorched land and smoldering heaps of twisted metal. Strewn limbs of sloggers torn to pieces. Deep craters of scored and blackened dirt and rolling dunes of ash. Broken, crushed, dead machines.

  Everything Chris had built was gone. Meta Prime was nothing but a lifeless rock. The only evidence it had ever been more were the sloggers on the Cloud Leopard and the Light Blade. The only two who had escaped before the carnage.

  Piper thought about how the sloggers had sculpted the face of their master. Did they do that because Lord Cain demanded it? Or was it possible that they had built the sculpture on their own, simply because some tiny piece of them wanted to? Was it possible that the sloggers actually had some sentience, a sliver of a mind of their own?

  Piper hoped not. Because now they were all gone.

  “Did you…Do you think you won?” Gabriel asked.

  “Of course he won,” Carly said. “Lord Cain is dust.”

  “But so is Lord Garquin,” Gabriel pointed out. “The whole planet is dust.”

  “Guys, stop,” Dash said quietly. Chris had left his spot at the controls and was walking slowly toward the wall-sized view screen. He pressed his palm to it, covering up one of the burning piles of rubble.

  “It took me four years to build this,” Chris said, sounding a little lost. “I was bored and, I suppose, a little lonely. I wanted something to keep me sharp. A game, like the training games you have on the ship. So I built little mazes for myself. Small puzzles to solve and, gradually, larger ones. And eventually, it became more than that. Garquin and Cain, they became real to me. When I pitted them against each other, it was a way for me to push myself. To be better, faster, smarter. But Meta Prime grew to be so much bigger than me. It was an entire world, a civilization. I built it. And—” He turned to face his crew, face pale. “And now I?
??ve destroyed it.”

  “It was Colin,” Dash said hotly. “It’s his fault. You only did it because of him.”

  “Yeah, what were you supposed to do?” Gabriel asked. “Not fight back?”

  “I could have let him win,” Chris said. “I could have let him have his victory, and let Meta Prime live on. In all the universe, there was nothing else like this planet. And now there is nothing at all.”

  “We got the Magnus 7,” Dash told Chris, hoping to cheer him up. “That’s the important thing. And we couldn’t have done it without you.”

  It was like he didn’t even hear. “I simply don’t understand how I got so caught up in the game,” Chris said. “Why didn’t I stop myself?”

  “I get it,” Gabriel said. “When you’re playing, like, the galaxy’s best video game, you’re not going to shut it down before you win.”

  “But to what end?”

  “To the end of fun,” Gabriel said. “You’ve heard of fun, right?”

  Chris shook his head. “I’m supposed to know better.”

  “Why, just because you’re older than us?”

  Piper nudged him. “Because he’s not human,” she reminded Gabriel.

  “Oh. Right.”

  There was an awkward pause. In the excitement of the battle, they had all nearly forgotten what came before. Now Dash looked more carefully at his friend, trying to wrap his brain around the fact that Chris wasn’t human. Though maybe he was more human than he thought. After all, weren’t they on this mission because humans had got so caught up in having fun—with their cars, their factories, their luxuries of modern life—they’d nearly destroyed their own planet? It just took a little longer.

  He studied Chris from head to toe, trying to figure out what he had missed. Surely there was something about Chris he should have seen. Something that marked him as nonhuman.

  Gabriel and Piper were thinking the same thing. All three of them examined their extraterrestrial crewmate, searching for clues.

  “Why are you all staring at me?” Chris asked.

  “Are you wearing, like, a costume?” Gabriel asked. “Does the real you have two heads?”