Qualify

  First, I call all the boards inside the great big bubble cavity in which we are huddling. And then I begin by lifting them one by one so they “stand up” and hover upright. Next, I stack them vertically with a “go forward” command so that they advance, smack hard against the walls, and cover the opening. Basically I am forcing them to move away from me and fly—while still in a vertical position—in the direction of the opening.

  Each board hums with angry force as it strains against the rock holding it back from its direction of movement, snagging it around the top and bottom ends. As the rows fill, I make sure the boards are as tightly squeezed against each other horizontally as they are against the edges of the cave bubble, so that there are no slats or openings for water to get through. But of course it’s likely insufficient to keep the water away, so I erect a second row of boards as an additional insulation wall, and then a third layer.

  When I am done, boards are pressing tight against each other, each one programmed to move, and unable to comply. The force of each board trying to move forward holds them all in place and against each other.

  “Okay,” I say, turning to the others. “Hope that holds. I think it will. Cross your fingers. . . .”

  “How the hell did you do that? What did you do?” a girl asks.

  “Hello? Shoelace Girl,” Laronda says. As if that explains everything.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I say with a sigh. And then I add, “Now we need to shut up, conserve air, and wait for the cycle to complete.”

  “But—how will we know when the water is gone again?” Claudia asks with a frown.

  “Easy. We will hear Team D in the tunnel. That should be a dead giveaway.”

  “Ugh, please, don’t say the word ‘dead,’ girlfriend,” Laronda mutters.

  Well, so far so good. After about ten minutes of trying to breathe slow and shallow, we hear only an eerie silence on the other side, which means that water has completely filled this chamber of the tunnel.

  And then we see tiny droplets and rivulets starting to seep through and creep down at the edges of the bubble opening where the boards struggle to “pass” and so keep the water out.

  “Oh, no! Water is coming in!”

  “Not too badly. It’s just a few drops. Should be enough to last us till the gate re-opens.”

  “You’d better be right, chica!” Claudia says. But her tone has grown milder, significantly so. I think Claudia is too frightened out of her head to do the alpha mean girl crap.

  And so we wait.

  Ten more minutes later, we hear the first voices outside, and the sound of rushing current.

  Team D has arrived, and so is our chance!

  I sing the command to remove the Aural Blocks and release all the hoverboards back to their “owners.”

  As it happens they all start falling, like a suddenly broken house of cards.

  As the boards fall away, ending up levitating inches off the floor, the tunnel is revealed. We see a whole bunch of Candidates flying past. The moment they see us, there are a few startled screams and a collision or two.

  And then we all come out and explain what happened. “USA Team Fourteen-C, here! You guys are Team D, aren’t you?”

  As we get back on our boards, Team C people start re-keying them, while everyone stares at each other. Team D looks exhausted as much as we are, and possibly more.

  And then I see Gracie.

  “Gracie!” I scream, as my bedraggled shivering little sister moves forward, lying flat and hovering low over the water.

  “Gwen!”

  And then we come together, and hug ridiculously across our boards, hands wrapped awkwardly around each other, patting down, checking each other’s limbs, making sure we’re all in one piece.

  But there’s no time for a proper reunion.

  Hastily I explain everything again, this time to Team D, about what’s going on with the defective lift-gate in front of us.

  Apparently it must have closed back down during the completion of the previous cycle. However, it is now back up to its small slit opening level, and the water is starting to pour in.

  “Okay, everyone!” I exclaim. “Now we move our hoverboards in there and program them to rise. This will lift the gate—I hope!”

  And in seconds Candidates get off their boards and everyone’s using the basic forward motion commands to guide their hoverboards into the narrow lift-gate opening, and then execute the rise command.

  At first there seems to be no effect. But after about twenty boards all jammed in between the gate, each one pushing upward, we hear a slow strange creaking of gears, as immense stone begins a deep low rumble.

  And then the ancient lift-gate makes a jerking motion, and then starts slowly rising.

  Candidates yell out happy woots, pump fists in the air, and people clap.

  And then at last, we retrieve our hoverboards, climb back on, and continue into the next tunnel chamber.

  The next few hours are relatively uneventful, a cold painful daze. Once again we all fly at a high speed in order to gain time that we lost while group-lifting that one defective gate. The fact that we have now fallen back to the Team D timeframe and schedule matters far less than just making the next gate at the right time in its cycle.

  On the bright side, at least Gracie’s with me now. She’s flying in the middle of our formation row, sandwiched between me and Laronda. That way I can be sure she is as safely away from both tunnel walls as possible. If anything happens, at least she’ll have us around her as a safety cushion. . . .

  As we move, Gracie can barely form words, but manages to tell us how their team’s been doing. The rest of Team D has integrated into ours, forming a single larger group, and it’s both a good and a bad thing. Good, because there’s strength in numbers. Bad, because, um . . . numbers. Now there’s twice as many of us and we still have to pass through each gate at a reasonable time, which now takes twice as long, with twice as many people. . . . Not to mention, it means we’ve got to maintain a higher average speed from now on, permanently, just to get all of us through every chamber.

  As I glance around, during each now-crowded stop we take while waiting for the next gate opening, I see more people I know, including Hasmik and Jai, both looking like they’re ready to keel over, but still hanging on, somehow.

  “Tsaveh tanem, janik, Gwen!” Hasmik mutters, reverting to her native Armenian from sheer exhaustion. I squeeze her in the same awkward board-to-board hug that involves reaching across to the other person’s board and sort of touching whatever part of them you can reach. It’s the best we can manage under the circumstances.

  “We’ll make it,” I mumble back. “You’ll see!”

  “I know! We totally will!”

  Team D also has Blayne Dubois, and I am happy to see him lying stoically on top of his board, keeping up with everyone else and then some. I think, as a well-practiced flyer in this position, he actually has an advantage over all of us here.

  “Hey, Lark, fancy meeting you here,” he deadpans, through slightly chattering teeth.

  “Hey, Dubois,” I reply, grinning through my own clenched teeth. “What can I say, it’s a small underworld.”

  And then, somewhere around hour thirty-two, just when it seems that we’ll be in this hell race forever, we pass yet another floodgate and emerge into a huge cavern filled with amazing, blinding, artificial light, blaring noise, and other teenage voices, speaking in various foreign languages.

  It’s the central hub super-cavern underneath Ancient Atlantis.

  We have arrived.

  I shoot out of the tunnel and into white, a horrible brightness. As I blink, squint, putting one hand up over my eyes that have been in the dark for thirty-two hours, my vision finally grapples with the overload and I can see stuff—many floodlight projectors illuminating every part of this monster cavern, and oh, the thousands of people!

  What am I saying? When all is said and done, there have to be millions! Probably mo
re are arriving soon, while others might have already left.

  I quickly sing a stop command to pull up my hoverboard, in order to not collide with the closest people nearby.

  Because Candidates on hoverboards fill the very air around me, jostling so close that we could be on parade, as we hover, “stacked” on top of each other, just to be able to find an inch of space.

  The din! And oh, lord, the screaming! In every frigging language on this planet!

  As the rest of Team USA, Section Fourteen-C and D pour out of our tunnel, I realize that our tunnel is just one of thousands that cluster on the walls like honeycombs in a beehive. And more and more people are arriving from other cells of the great honeycomb.

  The cavern itself—honestly, I am not really sure how big it is, because so many people are blocking my field of vision, all the way up to the remote ceiling. All I can tell is, there are floodlights shining on us, and that there’s a cavern ceiling generally above, and a floor far below.

  “Oh, man, this is crazy-huge!” several of my teammates exclaim.

  I see Laronda and Gracie and Hasmik levitate in formation next to me, as we stare around us helplessly.

  A foot away and right below me, a brown-skinned boy wearing a Middle Eastern keffiyeh on his head points up with his finger at the ceiling and makes brief eye contact with me before looking away. Next to him is a pale blond boy who looks Scandinavian. Another board over, I see a girl who is speaking either Polish or Russian to another girl next to her.

  Everyone is overwhelmed. And it really is impossible not to be.

  “What’s next?” Jai yells.

  “Who cares! At least we made it out of the tunnel from hell!” a girl from Blue says.

  We stare upward, and after a few moments it begins to make sense.

  Somewhere high up, in the general middle of this super-cavern, the cathedral ceiling disappears upward in a conical shape. That has to be it—the way leading up to the surface, the one we were instructed to go through.

  “Okay, so we go up. What’s everyone waiting for?” Derek grumbles.

  “Maybe we wait our turn?” I say.

  “What turn? There are no ‘turns’ here, Gwen-baby! We just push and shove, and blast and kill our way up, and go!” He stares at me in dark, street-tough sarcasm.

  “Okay,” I say. “Then go.”

  Derek shrugs. And then he in fact sings his hoverboard to rise and starts shoving his way past other people hovering over him. A few exclamations and a stream of what sounds like juicy cursing in French comes from overhead, and I see Derek start pushing aside boards and then clobbering another guy. . . .

  “Oh, jeez,” Blayne says in disgust, moving in near us.

  “Whatever, let him go, good riddance,” Laronda says.

  A few minutes later, as we wait, stuck in a strange holding pattern, we manage to learn what’s going on.

  According to a Candidate from New Zealand, the way up is a relatively narrow tube, about twenty feet in circumference. The bottom portion, making up about one third of the way up, is a natural stone tunnel of volcanic origins, formed by lava eons ago. But it ends well below the surface of the ocean, so a concrete extension has been built to accommodate us, and this is the part that we have to navigate to reach the surface.

  So, what’s the problem?

  The problem is contained in that first one-third, the natural tunnel. Not only is it convoluted like a tree branch, but it takes frequent curves and sharp side-turns while generally narrowing then widening again while moving up, so it is impossible to rise at a decent speed to pass through it without hitting the walls or getting hurt against the sharp rockside. Nor is it possible to go through it for more than six people at a time.

  Supposedly the original volcano channel was more straightforward. But with time and erosion and the shifting of the earth itself all around it—plus the immense weight of the ocean water, with no water on the inside to compensate, unlike the floodgate tunnel network we just traversed—it had been seriously degraded, and in places nearly collapsed on itself.

  So, basically, people really are waiting for their turn to get through. Even at the rate of high-speed hoverboard flight, it still takes a while for so many Candidates to pass the small, convoluted tunnel portion of this underground-to-surface chute.

  “Yo! How much longer do we have?” Claudia says, kicking a guy from Team C to make him check his clock app.

  “Less than two hours,” Emilio replies instead, glancing at the smart pin on his sleeve.

  Laronda snorts, wipes her mud-covered forehead with the back of her hand, then rummages in her backpack for food. “Great. Might as well have dinner while we wait. If these smarty-pants Atlanteans had time to install fancy-pants electric lighting in this joint, plus build a concrete tunnel, why couldn’t they just make it all nice and easy? And for that matter, some vending machines wouldn’t have hurt either . . . or a mini-mall. . . .”

  Many of us follow her lead and eat whatever stuff we have left. Every five minutes or so, there’s slight movement and new space clearing overhead as Candidates rise, a little burst of a few feet at a time, inching closer to the exit chute overhead.

  “Okay, stupid question,” Jai says, taking a huge bite of some kind of dried fruit bar. “But, what if you have to take a leak? Or what if you have to, you know, do Number Two? Are people going to be pissing on our heads now, as we wait?”

  “Oh, disgusting! Jaideep, you are so disgusting!” A girl makes a face at Jai.

  But he laughs like a neighing horse, and grins at her with a crazed expression.

  A few minutes later, a miracle happens. Suddenly, there’s my brother George followed by Gordie and Logan and Dawn, plus more, all levitating in a group, only a few feet to the right of us. Apparently it’s not that much of a miracle after all, since we all came out of the same tunnel hole, and Team A and B were only about an hour ahead of us. In this crowd, it’s not like they could scatter far and wide and go sightseeing. . . .

  “Gee One!” Gracie yells, with a burst of enthusiasm. And then, “And Gee Three!”

  I feel a wild smile coming on. . . . Joy bursts from inside of me as I see so many of the people I care about all present and accounted for, and reasonably safe!

  “Hello, ladies!” George says in a tired but flirty voice, maneuvering his board in our direction. We all collide and mingle and hug. Under the bright lights, everyone looks sickly, covered in wet mud-like gunk from the water in the tunnels, and just tired messes.

  After I practically squeeze George and then Gordie to death across our hoverboards, I turn to Logan. His warm dark eyes sparkle with renewed energy as he sees me, and we reach across and hold icy-cold hands, pressing hard, and not willing to let go. . . .

  “Dawn!” Laronda squeals. There is more hugging and touching and patting, plus a little bit of bodily displacement past a bunch of dark-haired frowning Candidates from what might be Team Greece, or Albania, or possibly Turkey.

  Looks like most of Team USA Section Fourteen is gathered here—in other words what’s left of the Pennsylvania RQC-3. We blab, share horror stories, and talk about bodies in the water and close calls.

  “Yeah, that was us, Team B, in that multi-chambered cavern from hell,” George says grimly. “I lucked out, just barely made it to the floodgate before it closed. So many other people didn’t make it out on time. . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, we had a rough time there too,” Logan says, taking a swig from his water bottle.

  But then I tell them about our stuck floodgate and how we barely made it with the hoverboards contraption.

  Logan gives me a triumphant steady look of admiration until I blush.

  “Gwen’s the man!” Jai exclaims.

  Gordie snorts, and attempts to lick dirt off his horribly smudged glasses. “Heh! Shoelace Girl, yeah. Nice going, sis.” And then he puts a granola bar wrapper in his mouth and sucks it.

  “Ugh! Stop eating paper, Gee Three.” I smile and sh
ake my head, patting him on the arm.

  “Yeah, I’m hungry,” Gordie says, raising one eyebrow.

  “Then eat!”

  “He ate everything in his pack.” George rolls his eyes, but shows a crooked smile.

  I shake my head then reach in my own backpack and pull out the last chunk of a granola bar and hand it to Gordie.

  “Nah, it’s okay, you need it,” he says.

  “No, I don’t,” I insist and press it in his cold sticky fingers.

  And then I remember. “Oh! Points!” I exclaim. “Quickly, Gordie, time to transfer some of your extra points to Gracie!”

  “Oh, yeah. . . .” Gordie shoves the chunk of granola in his mouth, wipes his fingers, then reaches out to Gracie and puts one hand on her ID token and the other on his own.

  “Wait!” I say worriedly, while George gives me an intense, equally worried look. “You do have enough points, right, Gee?”

  “Oh, yeah, tons. Two hundred-sixteen as of this morning.” Gordie talks with his mouth full then swallows the rest of the granola.

  “So, if you give your sister about sixty points, that should be enough—”

  “I can give her more, like a hundred.”

  “No!” both George and I say at once. “Don’t screw up your own score. That’s too risky.”

  “Okay, sixty then.”

  And Gordie says, “Transfer, sixty points to Grace Lark.”

  His token and Gracie’s both flash.

  “Done,” Gordie says.

  “Thanks!” Gracie mutters with a smile, and reaches across to board-hug Gordie. He skillfully evades her.

  “Phew. . . .” I exhale a long-held breath. “I guess that’s settled then—”

  “Terra Patria!”

  The insane shouts come from about a hundred feet ahead, from the general direction in the middle, right underneath the surface escape chute. They are followed in a split second by a horrible sound.

  The mega-cavern is rocked by a great explosion.

  Thousands of teens scream all around us—above, below, everywhere.

  I cringe and close my eyes, while Logan suddenly hurls himself on top of me, covering me bodily from the impact of flying rocks, debris, supply packs, people falling, more screams, general chaos. . . .

  The whole world seems to be swaying, rotating, as we barely hold on—as everyone around us latches on to their wobbling, spinning out, scattering hoverboards, or hangs by their hands, dangling in the air.