Game of Flames

  “And it’s all random,” Gabriel said, scanning the tiles, searching for some kind of pattern in the dizzying array of color. There was none.

  There was some kind of structure here, Gabriel could feel it. The problem was, he couldn’t see it. And if he didn’t see it fast, he was going to be a pancake. He slumped against the yellow wall.

  “Whoa!” Dash yelped as the yellow flared bright. “What was that?”

  Piper hovered toward the green wall and stretched out a hesitant finger. The moment she made contact, the green flared.

  “This has got to be part of it,” Gabriel said excitedly. “Part of the game.”

  Suddenly, Dash punched a fist in the air. “Simon!” he shouted.

  Gabriel and Piper looked at him like he was losing his mind. Gabriel pointed at himself, then Dash. “Me Gabriel. You Dash. No Simon here.”

  “No, Simon,” Dash said, adrenaline flooding through him. He knew this whole setup had seemed familiar. “It’s some old game my little sister got from a yard sale.”

  “And that helps us how?” Gabriel said dubiously.

  “It’s got colored tiles that light up,” Dash said. “Red, green, blue, and yellow. Sound familiar?”

  “But what do you do with them?” Piper asked urgently.

  Dash tried to remember. Abby had played with the Simon game obsessively for about a week. Then Dash got so tired of its beeping that he stole it and hid it under his bed. After a few days, they’d both forgotten it existed. “It’s like Simon Says, but with colors, I think,” he said slowly. “A bunch of colors light up in a random order, and then you have to remember it and hit the colored tiles in the same order. If you get the pattern wrong—”

  There was another loud buzz, and the walls moved in again.

  “—it buzzes!” Dash said triumphantly.

  Now the room was only fifteen rows by sixteen. And the timer was down to six minutes.

  “So if we hit the right walls in the order of the tiles…,” Gabriel mused. It made sense. “But there are two hundred and forty tiles—that’ll take forever.”

  “Maybe it’s just one row?” Piper said. “Every time the walls move in, a row disappears. So maybe that means we get a chance to try the next row. Until…”

  “Until there aren’t any chances left!” Dash said in alarm as the walls buzzed and moved again. “And if we don’t move fast enough, it must count as a wrong turn. So let’s do it!” He dashed toward the yellow wall to hit the first color in the pattern, then across the green, then back to yellow, then red twice, then—

  The walls buzzed, and the row disappeared.

  “This is crazy,” Dash complained. “The room is way too big to get this done in time.”

  “It won’t be for long,” Gabriel pointed out in a gloomy voice.

  “Let’s all do it,” Piper suggested. “I could take the yellow wall. Dash can take the green one.”

  “I can stand in the corner and get red and blue from the same spot,” Gabriel said, getting excited. This could actually work.

  “Okay, go!” Dash said.

  It was total chaos. Dash touched the green wall and Piper hit the yellow one, but then Gabriel hit the blue one before she could hit the yellow one a second time, and all too soon…

  BZZZZZZ.

  “This isn’t going to work, not unless someone’s in charge,” Gabriel admitted. “Dash, you do it.”

  “What?” Dash was surprised. Did Gabriel really just say that? Gabriel was usually the last person to want him in charge.

  BZZZZZZ. The walls seemed like they were moving faster now. Almost as if Lord Cain knew they’d figured out the rules and wanted to make sure they didn’t win.

  Actually, Dash thought, it was probably exactly as if Cain wanted to make sure they didn’t win.

  “You call out the colors,” Gabriel said. “We’ll hit the walls in order. Come on, hurry!”

  Dash focused on the next row. “Blue, blue, yellow, red, blue, red, yellow, yellow, green, red—”

  BZZZZZZ.

  “What happened?” he asked, irritated. “Who didn’t hit the—oh.” He’d been so intent on calling out the colors and watching the walls light up that he’d forgotten he had a color of his own to take charge of.

  “Forget it,” Gabriel said. “I’ll just do it.”

  “Wait,” Piper said. “It’s not his fault—it’s too confusing to call out the colors and have to remember your own color. Dash, you stand in the middle of the room. Gabriel and I can each take a corner. We can each hit two walls from the same spot.”

  BZZZZZZ.

  “Okay, but if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it fast,” Gabriel urged them. There were only two minutes left on the timer.

  It took a few more false starts—once Gabriel forgot that red was on his right and blue was on his left. Once Dash said yellow when he meant green. All the colors were starting to look alike to him.

  They tried not to get mad at one another.

  And they tried not to notice that the walls were closing in. Only six rows left. Thirty seconds.

  BZZZZZZ.

  BZZZZZZ.

  BZZZZZZ.

  “Red, yellow, yellow!” Dash shouted frantically, trying not to trip over his words. “Red, green, blue, yellow, red, red, red, yellow, green, red, green, yellow, YESSSSSSSS.”

  The lights all flashed at once, blindingly bright. Then the whole room went dark. Dash couldn’t see anything—and he couldn’t breathe.

  What if they hadn’t made it in time?

  What if this was it?

  “Sorry, guys,” Dash murmured. He didn’t know whether he was saying it to his crew, for getting into this mess, to his mom and his sister back on Earth, or to his entire planet, for letting them all down.

  He just knew he was sorry.

  “Cain’s the one who should be sorry,” Gabriel crowed. “Sorry he picked the wrong team to mess with. Look!”

  He pointed at a wall, which was slowly but surely sliding up into the ceiling.

  They were free.

  “Yes!” Dash cried, pumping his fist in the air.

  “In your face, Cain!” Gabriel shouted.

  Piper was apparently the only one who remembered that they were still trapped in the middle of an alien overlord’s mechanical kingdom. They’d solved one puzzle and saved themselves from getting smashed—but that didn’t exactly make them home free. “Um, guys, maybe instead of celebrating, we should, you know…get out of here. Now.”

  “Great idea, Piper,” Dash said. “Except…”

  Except, without Lord Garquin to guide them, they had no idea where here was.

  Dash deflated. “We’re totally hosed,” he said. It was surely only a matter of time before Lord Cain decided to throw another “game” at them. “I really am sorry, guys. I should never have gotten us into this.”

  “We all agreed,” Piper said firmly.

  “Yeah, but I’m the leader,” Dash said. “If we get stuck in here forever, it’s going to be my fault.”

  “Shhh,” Gabriel hissed.

  “No, it’s true, this is my responsibility—”

  “No, I mean, shhhhh,” Gabriel said. “I’m trying to listen.”

  There was a long silence. Then—“Listen to what?” Piper whispered.

  A satisfied smile crept across Gabriel’s face. “Power,” he said. “And I can hear it.”

  “What do you mean?” Dash asked.

  “All the power it takes to run this place? It puts out kind of a hum,” Gabriel said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Dash said.

  “Me neither,” Piper agreed.

  “Just trust me,” Gabriel said. He could hear the complex humming like a lullaby. And he knew if he followed that sound as it got louder and louder, he’d reach its electronic heart. The place that generated all the energy. Probably the place they’d find Cain’s communication hub—and TULIP, the spy slogger who would get them all out of here.

  Dash and Piper looked skep
tical.

  “Look at the walls,” Gabriel said, pointing at the lengths of cable winding between the dials and gears. “See how they get thicker in one direction, and they kind of branch off in the other?”

  “Uh, sort of?” Dash said, in a voice that meant no.

  “Trust me,” Gabriel said again. “This place is nothing but one giant machine. And I know machines.”

  “What about”—Piper pointed up at the ceiling—“you know, him?”

  As she spoke, a line of sloggers marched by. Dash got an idea. He stripped off his Mobile Tech Band, then gestured for Piper to take hers off too. “This is how Garquin followed our signal earlier, right?” he whispered. “So…” He hoped they would get it. He didn’t want to say any more, in case Cain could listen in on their conversation now.

  Piper grinned and handed over her MTB. Gabriel kept his but switched its power off. That way, if they ever did get out of here, they’d have some way to communicate with the ship.

  “Here goes,” Dash muttered, and crept up behind one of the sloggers. The MTBs had a magnetized strip—they stuck perfectly to the back of the slogger’s head.

  Have fun tracking us, Cain, he thought.

  Then, quietly as they could, he and Piper followed behind Gabriel. Gabriel followed the hum of power.

  They burrowed deeper into Cain’s nest, weaving left and right, following the tunnels and corridors into the heart of the beast.

  Finally, they reached a large doorway. Even Dash noticed the hundreds of cables snaking beneath it. Gabriel tapped the door and gave them the thumbs-up.

  This was the place.

  Dash eased the door open, revealing an enormous domed chamber. It was nearly stadium-sized, its walls lined with displays and switches. Long steel girders supported a massive column at its center. The column stretched from floor to ceiling, every inch of it covered in screens. Each screen showed a different part of Cain’s complex. At the base of the column sat a shimmering throne, encrusted with gold.

  The throne wasn’t empty.

  The creature was nearly ten feet tall and seemed to be made of shadows, blurry and flickering at the edges. He had no face; he swallowed the light. He was terrifying.

  He was Lord Cain.

  And he was flanked by nearly a hundred sloggers. All of whom turned toward Team Alpha as they entered the room. All of whom obeyed their master when he barked out a single word: “Attack.”

  The door slammed shut behind them.

  The sloggers advanced.

  It turned out those muzzles poking out of the sloggers’ chests were laser guns.

  And this time, they fired.

  Gabriel, Dash, and Piper ducked behind a large bank of servers. They could hear the sloggers clomping toward them. They were slow, and they were clumsy, but there were a lot of them.

  And there was no escape.

  “What now?” Gabriel said.

  Dash had no answers. He’d failed his team. He didn’t know how they were going to get out of here. He didn’t know how the three of them could defeat a hundred sloggers and Lord Cain. He didn’t know whether the sloggers would fry them to a crisp or just trap them so Lord Cain could do something worse.

  He didn’t want to find out.

  The sloggers rounded the corner on their hiding place. Laser shots zapped and sparked all around them.

  One thing, at least, was clear.

  “Now we run!” Dash shouted.

  Piper skimmed away from the sloggers, her air chair much faster than their stumpy metal feet. Dash and Gabriel raced in the opposite direction, laser beams sizzling toward them—it was safer to split up. Dash and Gabriel were faster than the sloggers too, but the sloggers were machines. They would never tire.

  They would never give up.

  “Dash, behind you!” Gabriel shouted, and Dash dove out of the way. The shot missed him by an inch, maybe less. He spun around to see a line of sloggers advancing. They nearly had him surrounded.

  “Over here, you clumsy tin cans,” Gabriel called, crouched behind a large silver console. The sloggers turned toward him, a second of distraction that let Dash slip away. But now they had Gabriel in their sights, firing as they marched toward his hiding spot. “Great, I got their attention,” Gabriel mumbled. “Now what?”

  “Hey, sloggers!” Dash yelled. “Slog this!” He grabbed a rusted old bolt from a pile in the corner and threw one as hard as he could at the slogger closest to Gabriel. The pitch was low and fast, perfected in a hundred baseball games back on Earth. The bolt thudded into the slogger and knocked it onto its side. Its shot fired wild, slamming into another slogger. The wounded machine sizzled and sparked, its own laser beam firing out of control.

  Dash threw another bolt and then another, knocking down more sloggers. One whirled around, spraying the room with its laser. It was a chain reaction of chaos. Slogger after slogger took a hit, sparking and screeching. Laser shots careened toward the ceiling and burned holes in the machinery lining the walls. Dash raced over to the console where Gabriel crouched.

  “Nice one,” Gabriel whispered, giving him a high five. The slogger army was tearing itself to pieces. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “You’re looking at last season’s MVP,” Dash boasted. “I’m missing the All-Star game for this.”

  “At least this is way more fun,” Gabriel said as a monitor exploded over their heads.

  “Yeah. Way more.”

  “Focus!” Lord Cain boomed at his sloggers. “Fire at the enemy, not yourselves!” But it was no use.

  “Wait, where’s Piper?” Dash asked, alarmed to realize he couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Gabriel craned his neck, scanning the control center for her. There was a glimmer of movement in the corner of his eye. He caught his breath and nudged Dash. “Up there,” he whispered.

  Piper had easily sped out of the sloggers’ reach—but there was nowhere to hide, and there was nowhere to go. She couldn’t exactly crawl under a piece of equipment and hide until the robots gave up looking. Thanks to the bulky air chair, she couldn’t hide much of anywhere.

  At least—not anywhere on the ground.

  And that’s where the sloggers had to stay: on the ground. Piper, on the other hand, had options.

  As Dash played pitcher with the sloggers, Piper rode the narrow steel girders supporting the central column. Just as she’d done before. And when she rode them all the way to the top, safe from laser beam fire and sloggers and whatever Lord Cain could throw at her, she had time to look around.

  She spotted something interesting.

  Something near the top of the central column that looked like a large red switch.

  This was the communications hub, and Lord Garquin had told them there was something here that could shut down Lord Cain’s control.

  If I were the main power switch, where would I be?

  She thought she’d be up high, out of anyone’s reach, for safekeeping.

  She thought she’d be big and red, so as to say important, stay away.

  She looked down at Gabriel and Dash, trapped by a storm of sizzling laser beam fire, and thought: What’s the worst that could happen?

  She leaned out of the air chair as far as she could without falling. She stretched her fingers as wide as they would go. The very tip of her middle finger found purchase on the red switch.

  She flipped it.

  “Noooooo!” Lord Cain screamed—and then vanished.

  The sloggers stopped in their tracks.

  It was as if someone had yanked out their batteries. They stood motionless, waiting for further commands. Dash and Gabriel couldn’t believe it. One second, a ten-foot-tall creature of shadows had been cackling down at them—the next second, the throne was empty. The sloggers were harmless. They were safe.

  “It must have been a hologram,” Piper said, gliding back toward the ground. They’d seen plenty of those back at Base Ten. The holograms had been terrifying, even when you knew they couldn’t hurt you. Maybe this on
e couldn’t either—but she was glad she didn’t have to find out. “The real Lord Cain’s probably miles away. And now there’s nothing he can do to us.”

  “Thanks to you!” Dash said, giving her a celebratory fist bump. “You saved our lives.”

  “That was amazing, Piper,” Gabriel agreed, switching his MTB back on. “You’re a rock star.”

  Piper could feel the heat rising to her cheeks. “It was nothing,” she said. “Anyone could have done it.” But they all knew that wasn’t true. Only Piper could have done it. And that made her feel so good she didn’t even mind that her face was probably red as a tomato.

  “It was everything,” a familiar voice said in their ears.

  “Lord Garquin?” Dash said in surprise. He’d pretty much given up on the guy.

  “Piper has disabled Lord Cain’s control over the interior of his kingdom,” Garquin said. “He can’t jam my signal anymore. We can continue where we left off.”

  “That’s it?” Dash asked, incredulous. “Don’t you even want to know if we’re okay?”

  “Yeah, or how about thanking us, for risking our necks for you?” Gabriel complained. “Cain almost turned us into pancakes!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lord Garquin said, and he sounded surprisingly sincere. “You’ve done me a great service today, and for that I thank you. But I assumed you would be eager to continue, since now it’s your mission that you may turn to. I am eager to repay you.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s okay, then,” Dash mumbled. Between the smashing and the running and the army of sloggers, he’d almost forgotten what they were here for. “So what do we do? How do we find this slogger you say can help us?”

  “It should be somewhere in the hub with you. Look for the TULIP marking across its torso.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find her,” Gabriel said. “There’s only about a million of them, and they all look alike.”

  Piper addressed the robots. “Are any of you named TULIP? Come forward now, please.”

  Gabriel looked at her like she’d lost it. “Uh, Piper, they can’t actually understand you.”