‘I will,’ he replied, desperately. ‘I mean, I won’t, I promise!’
‘You won’t tell anyone?’
‘Not a soul,’ he said.
‘Not even your parents?’ she went on.
‘Of course not,’ he said irritably. ‘They don’t believe a word I say anyway.’
‘You’ve got to be careful, Mika, if these people realize you know anything, they will hurt you.’
‘I will, I’ve promised!’ he went on, feeling as if he was going to explode with impatience. ‘I’ll be good, just tell me what you know.’
She leaned forward and whispered, ‘If you play the game, I think you will find Ellie.’
‘How?’ he asked urgently. ‘How can I find Ellie by playing a game?’
‘I’m not saying any more,’ said Helen, adjusting her rain bonnet. ‘You’ve nagged too much out of me already. Just play their game and keep your mouth shut. Right. I’m off. I don’t think it was nail polish or pasta I wanted, I think it was cream for my bunions.’
Mika watched her shuffle towards the lift, like a tent with yellow rubber legs, feeling waves of relief and happiness wash over him. All the nightmares, the mockery and the paranoia he had been burdened with for so long seemed to lift up and leave him and he felt as if he was floating in the doorway, despite the weight of the detention collar. Helen turned and smiled as she entered the lift and Mika smiled back, the broadest, happiest smile he had smiled for a very long time, and far above his head, Ellie smiled too without knowing the reason why.
9
OR DIE TRYING
Mika realized that Helen’s advice to ‘play the game’ meant more than just learning Pod Fighter in the new arcade – the most important thing he had to do was keep his suspicious thoughts to himself and convince everyone he had changed his mind about the Fit Mix and was sorry. By the time his parents came home from work that day, he was a different person – he apologized for causing them so much trouble, promised to drink the Fit Mix and cooked tea and tidied up afterwards for the first time ever. He even tidied the floor in his bedroom.
‘So how did it go with Helen?’ David asked, watching in amazement as Mika dropped an armful of dirty socks and pants into the laundry bin.
‘OK,’ Mika replied.
‘What did you talk about?’ Asha asked.
‘Not much,’ Mika said, walking quickly towards his bedroom to get away from their questions. ‘I’d better get on with the sorting beads.’
Asha and David looked at each other and smiled and shook their heads.
‘That woman deserves a medal,’ David whispered.
On Monday morning when Mika returned to school after his exclusion, he drank the Fit Mix while Mr Grey glared at him with eyes like frozen pebbles. It ran down his throat slimy and cold, making him want to gag with disgust, but he knew he mustn’t show how he felt. The last thing he needed was to give Mr Grey an excuse to pile on more punishments, and judging by the reluctance the Headmaster showed whilst removing the detention collar, the slightest whiff of dissent and it would be straight back on again. So Mika saved his grimace of disgust until he’d left the Headmaster’s office, and then it was no more than a flicker across his face. He was playing this game to win.
‘I’m going to find you, Ellie,’ he whispered under his breath, ‘or die trying.’
His senses were particularly keen that night as he walked to the arcade in the centre of town with Kobi. Every detail felt as sharp as the January frost. He was a week behind everyone else learning how to play Pod Fighter, and he was anxious to catch up.
‘What do you think of Pod Fighter?’ Mika asked.
‘It’s brilliantly designed,’ Kobi replied, thoughtfully. ‘It feels so real you really do forget it’s a game, just like it says in the advert. But it’s having a weird effect on everyone, half the class have bought the T-shirts already and no one talks about anything else. They’re obsessed. And it’s really competitive. How come you want to play all of a sudden? A week ago you didn’t want anything to do with it.’
Mika shrugged and looked away. He could feel Kobi’s intelligent eyes searching his face through his hair. ‘Haven’t got anything better to do,’ he said stupidly.
‘I’ll help you catch up if you like,’ Kobi offered. ‘I’ll show you everything I’ve learned.’
‘Thanks,’ Mika replied, gratefully.
Kobi took something out of his pocket and fiddled with it.
‘What’s that?’ Mika asked.
Kobi held it up so Mika could look at it. It was a tiny giraffe, a mini borg. It blinked at Mika and moved its mouth as if it was chewing leaves. Kobi stood it up on his palm and it walked around. A gust of wind caught it and Kobi only just stopped it falling off on to the walkway. He put it carefully back into his pocket.
‘That’s amazing!’ Mika said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘I made it,’ Kobi said, ‘out of bits of vacuumbot.’
‘That’s clever—’ Mika stopped suddenly, remembering. He wanted to go on, he wanted to tell Kobi how much Ellie would like it, and only just caught the words before they left his mouth. Kobi didn’t know about Ellie, he’d never met her, didn’t even know Mika had a twin sister, and Mika realized it was better that way. It was easier, less complicated to have a friend who didn’t know. But Ellie would have liked Kobi Nenko and his giraffe and Mika felt treacherous not mentioning her.
It was a cold night and the wind was wet and cruel, but Mika noticed there were loads more people out than usual and everyone was heading towards town. Three girls ran past them, then stopped and turned, their eyes bright and their long hair whipping across their faces in the wind.
‘Hey, Kobi!’ one cried. ‘Are you going to the arcade?’
‘Yeah,’ he muttered.
‘Oh good! See you there!’
Mika watched the girls run on, wondering who they were. ‘When did you meet them?’ he asked, remembering that girls were usually scared of Kobi.
‘Last week in the arcade,’ Kobi said. ‘If you’re good at the game, people get to know you.’
‘So you’re good at the game?’ Mika asked.
‘’Spose so,’ Kobi said, shrugging. ‘They put up the scores on a screen at the end of the night so you can see how you’ve done.’
‘Who’s the best?’ Mika asked hungrily, feeling a surge of competitive lust.
‘Ruben Snaith.’
At the mention of Ruben’s name, Mika felt his face grow hot. ‘It would be, wouldn’t it,’ he said, bitterly. ‘Nobody would dare be better than Ruben.’
They entered the town square and Mika saw the arcade for the first time. The building used to be the Bargain Mart store, selling stuff that fell to bits within minutes for one or two credits, but it had been closed for a year. The arcade was twice as tall as the old building and bathed the whole square in pulsing blue light, and for the first time since Barford North was built, forty-three years before, it felt alive. Even the puddles and the stagnant old fountain looked beautiful, and every droplet of water on the rainy glass shop fronts glittered like a jewel. The fluorescent light, in rows of curved neon, rippled up the building to erupt in a cascade of blue at the top, and below, crowds of people were pouring through the great glass doors into the arcade. There was an air of enchantment and anticipation that was contagious, and Mika felt it as a shiver down the back of his neck, enhanced by the cold wind.
As they approached the doors, they were hit in the face by hot air, food smells, shouting and music. Mika let Kobi walk ahead and watched as he was stopped by two men wearing dark blue uniforms with the Youth Development Foundation logo, YDF, on the pockets. One of the men scanned Kobi’s retinas then nodded him in. Mika followed, feeling briefly anxious as the hard light searched his eyes. Once inside, he looked around, trying to take it all in. The entrance area of the arcade was a shopping mall, with a polished white floor, open-fronted stores and fast food restaurants on either side: Tank Meat Express, The Banghra Balti, The Kosha Snack
Shack and the Ra Ra Shake Bar, as well as stores selling clothes, shoes, sweets, make-up and jewellery. The place was packed and noisy, every store and restaurant playing different music, every table squirming with bodies and laughter. The Youth Development Foundation logo was written on everything: the uniforms of the staff, the backs of the chairs, even the straws in the Fabshakes, and Mika felt a wave of mistrust seeing it. It was weird watching how everyone was behaving and he felt as if he’d been away for a year, not just a week; the atmosphere was so different in this place than school, gone was the lethargy that made people drag their feet and yawn all day, replaced by an almost hysterical excitement. There had never been anything like this for them before and it seemed like a desert mirage – Mika felt as if he could close his eyes, open them again and it would all be gone and he’d be standing alone in the rainy town square. He watched kids shout to each other across the mall, a girl splutter with laughter, Fabshake dribbling down her front. He didn’t like it.
‘Told you they’ve all gone nuts,’ Kobi said. ‘Follow me.’ He walked quickly towards a pair of huge, dark doors at the end of the mall. Above them was a screen playing the advert for Pod Fighter. They walked through the doors and paused just inside to let their eyes adjust to the darkness, and as the shadows of the Pod Fighter simulators took shape, Mika felt as if he was looking into a rock crevice full of giant spiders. The eight-legged simulators were eerie and menacing. They were set out in rows with four of their robotic legs fixed to the ceiling and four fixed to the floor, with their egg-shaped black bodies in the middle. Some of the simulators were motionless and silent and looked as if they were hiding in the darkness waiting for unlucky, human-size flies. Others were rocking and rotating, their robotic legs contracting and expanding as the people inside played the game. Mika walked slowly towards them with his heart thumping.
‘Weird, aren’t they?’ Kobi said.
Mika nodded, but couldn’t speak.
‘They don’t look like Pod Fighters on the outside,’ Kobi went on, ‘but apparently, inside they are exactly the same down to the slightest detail: the control panels, the seats, the headsets, everything – and not only that, they feel the same too, the robotic legs make them move as if you’re really flying. But it’s when you flip the Pod Fighter into a corkscrew spin that things get really interesting. Watch that one.’ He pointed to a simulator that was moving particularly frantically. After thirty seconds an amazing thing happened: the legs detached themselves from the body, leaving it floating in mid-air, and it began to spin. At the end of the spin, the legs locked on to the body again.
‘How does it float like that?’ Mika asked, watching avidly.
‘Magnetism, I reckon,’ Kobi replied. ‘Similar to that of a hover car: the magnetic force keeps a hover car off the ground by pushing a negative force against another negative force, or a positive against a positive.
‘We need to go down the end.’ He pointed to the red walk-way, which ran down the centre of the arcade and melted into the darkness. Mika began to make out the shadowy forms of people milling around the legs of the simulators. Kobi began walking and Mika followed.
At the far end of the room there were a few motionless simulators and a large group of people standing around them. They turned and watched Mika and Kobi approach, and to his dismay, Mika saw Ruben.
‘Ignore him,’ Kobi murmured, walking quickly past without allowing himself to be caught by Ruben’s glare. ‘What a perp. Let’s take this one.’
Mika cursed his bad luck. The arcade was easily big enough to avoid Ruben, yet they’d bumped right into him within minutes of arriving. Kobi pressed his ragged foot on a metal plate on the floor next to a simulator and the lower legs contracted so they could climb into the cockpit. Next he touched a dark, almost invisible icon with his pale fingers and the door slid open, but before they had time to climb in, Ruben appeared with a pair of girls behind him.
‘You teaching him?’ Ruben said to Kobi, jerking his head in Mika’s direction.
Kobi ignored him and began climbing into the cockpit.
‘Good luck,’ Ruben smirked. ‘You’re going to need it.’
As he walked away Mika felt his chest contract with anger. The girls were laughing, mocking him.
‘Get in,’ Kobi said. ‘Ignore them.’
‘I’m trying,’ Mika said, climbing into the simulator. But he wasn’t doing very well – inside he was burning up with a powerful desire to squash Ruben like a fly. But suddenly, all thoughts of Ruben were extinguished and he faltered for a moment. He had this feeling they were climbing into the cockpit from the wrong angle – that they should be getting in from above, not the side.
‘You get in the gunner seat,’ Kobi said. ‘It’s best you learn that before you try to fly, it’s a bit easier.’
There were two seats in the cockpit, one behind the other, and Mika climbed into the one at the back. It was higher than the front seat, so he was looking down on Kobi’s mop of tangled black hair. As he settled into the seat, he felt it wrap around the sides of his body, holding him down.
‘The seats feel freaky,’ Kobi said.
‘Yeah,’ Mika lied – the seat felt comfortable and familiar to him and he was reminded of the way he had felt while he watched the advert with Helen, as if he had experienced this before – but something wasn’t right. He looked around.
‘Where are the control panels?’ he asked. Apart from two pairs of simple hand controls, there was nothing inside the cockpit apart from the seats. Kobi touched a red circle next the door and suddenly there were hundreds of brightly lit icons covering every surface around them, each one with a different symbol.
‘Put the headset on,’ Kobi said, pointing behind Mika’s head to where it was hanging on a hook. The headset was a black helmet with no back and a curved glass visor across the face. It was surprisingly light, the back cut away so it was comfortable to wear when his head was leaned back against the seat. As soon as he put it on, a display appeared on the transparent visor – he could see a grid of green lines surrounded by green icons and he felt a dark thrill looking from one to another. They looked alien, but familiar.
‘Don’t blink yet,’ Kobi warned.
‘Why not?’ Mika asked.
‘You control the icons in your visor with your eyes. It took me a whole day to figure that one out. You have to blink at them.’
‘What if you blink without meaning to?’ Mika asked.
‘Don’t,’ Kobi replied. ‘It’s not that hard, you learn not to look at the icons unless you need them.’
‘OK,’ Mika said, trying not to blink. ‘Where are the instructions on how to play?’
‘There aren’t any,’ Kobi said, laughing. ‘That’s half the fun.’
Kobi touched an icon above his head and the windshield appeared in front of them. Mika could see they were on the battleship landing strip with the sea heaving around them.
‘Ready?’ Kobi said.
‘Yep,’ Mika replied, feeling waves of excitement as he gripped the hand controls.
A few seconds later a blistering roar ripped from the engine behind them.
‘Whoah,’ Mika said.
He felt a rush of air through his headset and the roar built in intensity until his teeth were rattling. They lifted off, hovered over the ship for a moment, then tilted the nose up, and with a sudden jerk, shot into the sky.
‘I can feel the drag in my gut!’ Mika shouted.
‘I told you it feels real,’ Kobi said. ‘Wait until you see above the clouds – it’ll blow your mind.’
There was a solid bank of grey clouds overhead, and as they shot through it they were blind for a second, but when they came out the other side, they were looking down on it and it was transformed by the sunlight into a glistening blanket of pure white snow. It was beautiful. Around them the sky was clear and blue and Kobi hung the Pod Fighter for a moment, slowly rotating, so Mika could enjoy the view. There was so much space around them, Mika felt vulnerable and a little af
raid, it felt so real, he’d already forgotten he was playing a game. Kobi pulled back and they shot up again, higher and higher until the pale blue of the sky deepened into the liquid blue blackness of space and they were floating with the stars and looking down on the planet.
‘Get ready,’ Kobi said. ‘We’ll get the first assault immediately. Watch out to your left.’
Mika heard them before he saw them. He steeled himself, determined to impress Kobi with a display of natural talent. A high-pitched whine shot past his left ear. He turned to look and saw a bank of red fighters looping round to come back at them.
‘What do I do?’ he asked, panicking.
‘Shoot them,’ Kobi said. ‘I’m turning.’
It happened too quickly. Mika gripped the controls of the gun and felt over the buttons under his fingers, but by the time he had managed to fire a few bolts of laser fire it was already too late. There was a bright flash, then darkness.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘We got hit,’ Kobi replied, taking his headset off.
A red ‘Game Over’ icon appeared on Mika’s visor.
‘Already!’ Mika said. ‘Dammit!’
‘Don’t worry,’ Kobi replied, grinning to himself behind his hair. ‘It happens to everyone the first thirty or so flights.’
‘I want to fly,’ Mika said, moodily. ‘I’m not enjoying being the gunner.’
‘OK,’ Kobi replied, patiently. ‘Let’s swap places.’
They climbed out of the simulator and Kobi swung his long legs into the gunner seat. ‘I’ll talk you through it step by step,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot harder, flying.’
Mika climbed into the pilot seat and as it curved around the sides of his body, he felt immediately better. He jammed on his headset, jabbed the button above him to turn the windshield view on as he had seen Kobi do, then hit another, which gave them a three-dimensional mapping system in the corner of their visors so they would be able to see everything around them, deep into space. Mika blinked at it and it enlarged to fill the screen, showing about a dozen Pod Fighters drawn in green lines of light, sitting in rows around them ready to take-off from the ship.