‘Hey,’ Mika said.
‘Hey.’
On the boat, the men helped them into their stab jackets as they cruised around the island. Their boat dropped anchor by a red buoy with the number ‘5’ on it and in the distance Mika saw the boats that had left before them, dotted at regular intervals. On the closest beach he saw a pair of ambulance pods, the para-medics sitting on the sand with their faces tilted towards the sun.
The men spent a long time checking over the equipment. Mika’s harpoon gun was found to be faulty and taken away and replaced with another. They tested the displays in his mask and checked his breathing equipment.
He watched the gold boy, Leo, tie his dreadlocks at the nape of his neck. The boy was joking with the men in a warm Canadian accent as their fingers worked deftly on his equipment and Mika wished he could feel so confident.
When they were ready, the ten competitors stood in line, waiting for instructions.
‘You will swim down to the ten markers on the seabed and stand facing in the direction of the arrows,’ said one of the men, his eyes scanning them seriously. ‘Your targets will be borg fish. The object of the game is to shoot as many fish as you can in ten minutes. You are not to leave the marker until you are told to do so by one of us. If you leave the marker without permission, you will lose your points. You can communicate with us through your masks if you have any problems during the game. Are there any questions?’
Nobody spoke.
‘OK. Let’s get on with it.’
The markers were set out in a curve on the sandy seabed and the arrows pointed towards a cluster of coral teeming with fish. The water was the palest green, rippled like marble by the sunlight on the surface. The visibility was good and Mika could see at least a hundred metres beyond the coral. He chose the marker at the right end of the curve and Leo took the one next to him, his dreadlocks wafting out of the back of his headset like snakes. Mika watched the gold ring on his finger glint as he adjusted the straps on his headset and enabled his gun. A few moments later the men took their positions behind them and Mika felt the tension in the water rise until it was almost unbearable. He looked down the row at the other competitors. Apart from their wafting hair and the streams of bubbles rising from their masks, they were completely still, rooted to the markers, their eyes fixed on the cluster of coral in front of them, guns raised and fingers hovering over the triggers.
A voice spoke in his headset.
‘Mika, are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘The game will begin in thirty seconds.’
A clock appeared in the corner of his display and he watched it count down. The sea looked like an empty film set waiting for the action to begin. Five, four, three, two, one. The clock reset itself and began to count down from ten minutes. Mika gripped the harpoon gun, struggling to control the anxiety that threatened to paralyze him. He remembered he had Ellie’s holopic of mountain lions in the pocket of his swim shorts and dared to remove his hand from the gun for a moment to touch it through his wetsuit. He breathed deeply and focused on the light-rippled water before him.
At first sight, the shoal of borg fish looked like glitter dust; so far away, it was no more than fragments of light. Bright as stars one moment, then gone the next, the shoal made lightning-quick, synchronized twists and turns through the water towards them.
Mika supposed there were a couple of hundred. They were fast and erratic with no pattern to their movement, and all he could do was try to guess when the shoal would turn to be side on to him so he had a chance of hitting one. He waited until the shoal had reached the coral before he fired, then shot twenty bolts in as many seconds. For a fleeting moment the fish were close enough for him to see their needle-like teeth and glowing red eyes, then they snapped round and darted away, leaving several falling to rest on the seabed with bolts embedded in their sides. The ten competitors were a blur of motion as they reloaded their guns from the cartridge of bolts strapped to their thighs. Mika reloaded his then checked his hit counter. He’d hit one fish. Only one.
‘Frag,’ he muttered.
They had eight minutes left. Mika watched the shoal glitter and shift in the distance and prayed it would come back soon. The moment it turned the other competitors began to fire, but Mika waited until it had crossed the coral. He had only seconds before the fish snapped round and darted off, but this time he hit four.
Six minutes left. He had a strategy now and he waited eagerly for the shoal to return, but nothing happened for over a minute. He had an itch on his nose, which made it difficult to concentrate. Then something appeared in the distance: a mass of dark shapes cast shadows on the seabed. They moved slowly through the water and as Mika began to make out their forms he felt confused – they weren’t fish, they were mammals. They had mottled brown and black fur and flippers, bulbous heads and snouts covered in rolls of loose skin. Their silent, rhythmic movement was eerie and they looked so heavy it seemed a miracle they could swim. As they reached the coral Mika recognized them from one of Ellie’s pictures; they were elephant seals. He wondered what to do. They had been told to shoot fish, not mammals. Some of the competitors began to fire, but he lowered his gun so it was hanging at his side and he glanced over at Leo and was relieved to see he had done the same. Some competitors fired one shot then stopped, unable to make up their minds, some let off the entire contents of their barrels. Nine of the elephant seals fell and Mika felt the vibration in his feet as they hit the seabed.
He was expecting the rest of the herd to swim away as the shoal of fish had done, but they kept coming and Mika froze on his marker as their enormous hulks passed silently through them. Leo reached out his hand to touch one and Mika was so distracted by this gesture, he didn’t notice what was happening in the distance until Leo’s head suddenly snapped round and Mika followed his gaze.
Another shoal was swimming towards them and this time there was no doubt in Mika’s mind what they were; the ghostly, pale forms of white sharks, each at least three metres long. They wove quickly through the water, their snouts jerking from side to side, and as soon as they reached the herd of elephant seals, they attacked. Mika gasped and felt his head spin as he got an overdose of oxygen and the water suddenly became a boiling mass of teeth, borg bits and fragments of fur. A shark swam within metres of him to attack a seal, shaking its head like a dog as it ripped it to pieces. He got a close-up view of its dead, black eye and was so scared he nearly peed in his wetsuit. Remembering he’d been told not to move from the marker, he struggled to control his instinctive urge to get away from it. He looked around to see several of the other competitors had left theirs and were firing wildly into the midst of the chaos.
They’re not real, Mika thought desperately. This is a game. He aimed and fired and shot the closest shark through its eye. It went crazy, whipping the water milk-white as it tried to shake the bolt from its head. It was dangerously close, but Mika kept his feet firmly rooted to the marker hoping it would swim away, and eventually it did, still lashing its head from side to side until it froze and sank to the sand. Immediately Mika’s hit counter shot up twenty points and he prepared to fire again. His next target was further away, its razor-sharp teeth ripping into the flank of an elephant seal that seemed dead already and swung limply in the water as it was savaged. He shot the shark through the gills with the first bolt. It jerked with shock, let go of its prey and snapped round to swim straight at him as if it knew who had shot it. Rigid with fear Mika shot it again in the mouth, closing his eyes as it continued to come towards him, its nose jerking from side to side and strips of ripped skin wafting from its teeth, and at that moment he felt a terrible pain in his leg, so sickening, he almost vomited in his headset.
He opened his eyes and looked down to see blood pumping out of his thigh into the water. He felt confused. The shark wasn’t real, how could it have bitten him? He had no idea what had happened and felt so shocked, he could do nothing but watch as the ribbons of blood pumpin
g from his leg transformed into a cloud of red smoke in the water. Later he remembered thinking that his leg looked as if it was on fire.
He felt something touch his arm and looked up to see Leo’s worried face through his mask, his mouth moving, though Mika couldn’t hear any words. Moments later he was surrounded by men.
‘What happened?’ he asked dreamily. He felt disconnected, foggy and a bit tired. He wanted to lie down on the seabed and go to sleep for a while.
‘Someone shot you, Mika,’ one of the men said. ‘We need to get you out of the water because you’re losing a lot of blood.’
‘Shot me?’ Mika repeated, confused. He looked down again and this time he saw a bolt sticking out of the marker just behind his left leg. It still had bits of his flesh attached to the end of it and they were waving around like pink and red seaweed. It had gone straight through his thigh and out the other side.
‘Come on,’ the man said, holding his arm.
‘No,’ Mika said, feeling himself well up with panic. ‘If I leave the marker I’ll lose the game.’
‘The game’s over, Mika. You can leave now.’
They grabbed him by the arms and dragged him away from the marker to the surface.
* * *
The first thing Mika heard when his head broke the water was screaming.
‘Get off me! Get off! I want to go home! I hate you! I’m not doing this any more! You’re psychos! You’re trying to kill us!’
Strong arms came over the side of the boat to drag him on board. He heard himself slap wetly on the deck and was vaguely aware of motion around him. He struggled with his mask and someone helped him get it off and he took a lungful of warm air. A man’s face appeared.
‘Stay calm, OK?’ he said. ‘The ambulance pod is here. The paramedics are going to look at your leg.’
He felt tugging on his legs and he struggled to lean up on his elbows so he could see what they were doing to him. One of the paramedics was cutting the wetsuit off his leg and another was pressing something on the wound. Blood spurted between his fingers and spattered his sunglasses.
‘Lie down and try to relax,’ said the paramedic. ‘Don’t watch.’
Mika didn’t want to lie down. He didn’t trust them. But he felt too weak to sit up so he lay back and turned his head in the direction of the screaming. It was Ruben’s game partner, Yee. She was pinned to the deck by two men and thrashing around like the sharks, her wet hair lashing their faces.
‘Stop screaming, Yee. It’s over,’ one said, but she didn’t stop screaming and she struggled even harder.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked Mika anxiously.
‘She freaked out down there. She’s the one who shot you. It’s all right, they’re going to give her something to calm her down.’
Moments later Yee fell silent. Mika watched her eyes lose focus and close, her body relax. She sighed as if she was lying down in a warm bath. Mika closed his eyes. The pain from his leg was everywhere – he felt it from the tips of his toes to the top of his head and it washed over him in delirious waves, sweeping up his body, and he wanted it to stop.
‘Make the pain stop,’ he muttered.
‘OK.’
He felt a brief prick on his arm.
‘My holopic,’ he whispered. ‘The lions in my pocket.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve found it. We’ll keep it for you.’
A second later he was falling with Yee into a warm bath of nothing.
27
KEEP THE BOY IN THE GAME
Mal Gorman sat forward in his chair. A close-up image of Ellie’s brother lying in a hospital bed filled most of the screen on his desktop, but in one corner was the image of a man with whom he was discussing Mika’s accident.
‘He looks just like his sister,’ Gorman said, thoughtfully. ‘What is it about this boy? He was the only one to refuse to drink the Fit Mix and now he’s got himself shot. Looks like trouble runs in the family.’
‘And so does talent,’ the man said. ‘He’s one of the best, sir. He could be just what you’re looking for.’
‘Really?’ Gorman was quiet for a moment, not sure if this was good news or bad. ‘Well, he’d better not be as difficult to handle as his sister. One stroppy little bog rat is quite enough.’
‘He seems calmer than Ellie,’ the man said. ‘And he works incredibly hard; his scores for focus and perseverance are the highest in the group. There is one thing though . . .’
‘What?’ Gorman asked.
‘When we did the memory scan on him we hardly found anything. It was as if he was fighting against us even though he didn’t know what we were doing to him. He must have an incredibly strong will. The few scraps of memories we did find are so dark, we can’t work out what’s happening.’
‘Let me see them,’ Gorman demanded.
‘It’s hardly worth it, sir. They’re no more than a couple of hours of moving shadows.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Gorman. ‘Send them to me.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the man replied. ‘What do you want us to do about his parents? They’ve been yelling their heads off since the accident and they want to take him home as soon as possible. It was chaos in here; the mother was screaming, there was blood spattered up the walls – when we took the compress off the blood was pumping out the wound like a fountain. The harpoon bolt severed the main artery at the top of his leg.’
‘Why did you let the parents see that?’ Gorman said, angrily. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘We had no choice, sir,’ the man said, defensively. ‘The boy needed his father’s blood; without it he would have died. But now, of course, they don’t want him to compete any more.’
‘I don’t care what they want,’ Gorman said, coldly. ‘Think of a way to shut them up and keep the boy in the game. If he’s as good as you say he is then he must compete in the final round. We can make the parents disappear if necessary. If they haven’t changed their minds in a few days, let me know and I’ll arrange it. And don’t forget to send me those memories; I want to see what’s going on in his head.’
‘Yes, sir.’
28
THE HEALING CHAMBER
Mika heard a hum, a warm comforting sound, and he felt vibrations in his leg. He tried to open his eyes so he could look at it, but he felt as if his lids were glued shut and after a while he gave up. He could hear talking somewhere, quiet voices, and for a while he allowed the sound of the conversation to merge with the hum and he didn’t try to listen to what was being said. The vibrations in his leg tickled and as his mind drifted further into consciousness he remembered the blood and the pain and felt a sting of panic as his head filled with sharks, their jagged teeth wafting strips of skin, and their dead black eyes metres from his own. But the pain was gone and the light through his eyelids was warm and bright. He tried to move his hand but couldn’t and had no choice but to relax and feel relieved that the nightmare was over. But was it? The voices belonged to strangers, a man and a woman. He decided to listen to their conversation and the first sentence hit him like a bucket of ice water so he was instantly alert, praying they didn’t realize he was conscious.
‘His parents want to take him home as soon as he wakes up.’
‘Do they?’
There was a moment of silence.
‘But Mal Gorman said we have to keep him here, whatever it takes. He has the potential to be one of the best.’
‘So what do we do? The parents are already suspicious; they’ll go ballistic if we tell them they can’t take their son.’
‘We don’t have to say they can’t take him. We just need to buy some time. If we can keep them here until after the prize-giving dinner so they realize they’ve won a hover car and are in the running for a home in the Golden Turrets, they should change their minds. What if we tell them it will take until tomorrow evening for his leg to heal? They’re poor, they’re not going to know how fast the healing chamber works – they’re still using stitches and bandages in the r
efugee town hospitals. We’ll let him out today in a hover chair, but we’ll tell the parents he has to come back tomorrow after the prize-giving dinner for another treatment.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Look.’ The voice sounded closer, as if the woman had moved nearer the bed.
Mika’s heart started to race.
‘His fingers twitched, do you think he’s coming round?’
‘Possibly. His heart rate’s gone up. We’ll talk more later.’
Mika listened to the squeak of their shoes on the floor as they walked away, and his first response to what he’d heard was anger. How dare they speak so disrespectfully about his parents? As if they were stupid because they were poor and wouldn’t realize they were being tricked! But when his anger subsided, he felt a dark thrill.
They think I’m one of the best, he thought. I’m still in the game! He smiled inside, relief and happiness crowding out his fear.
But what about his parents? What would he do if they didn’t change their minds and they refused to let him continue?
Mika worried himself to sleep and several hours later opened his eyes to see a white fan gyrating above him, bathing his face in cool air. He turned his head to see Ellie’s mountain lions leaning against a jug of water by the side of the bed and he felt relieved he hadn’t lost it.
A nurse stepped quietly towards him with a tablet in her hand.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can you feel any pain?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It tickles.’
Mika lifted his head to look at his leg. It was encased in a glass bubble.
‘Good,’ said the nurse. She looked at the control panel on the glass bubble and pressed a couple of icons.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
‘A healing chamber,’ she replied. ‘It’s a sort of microwave oven for wounds. It heals in super-quick time.’
‘How long will it take?’ he said, waiting for the lie.
‘You’ll be able to go back to the beach today, but you’ll need another treatment tomorrow night before you go home,’ she replied, without looking at him.