The computer complied, and the holograms shifted once more. Four distinct red dots throbbed in space, all clumped together in the southeast quadrant of the Playing Field. One was missing.
“Aside from Red leader, all players are currently located in Room 113 of the TGB,” the computer told him.
The TGB was the Team Gathering Building. It was a neutral ground for the teams; they could visit any one of its recreational rooms or clubs and consider themselves safe from attack by any other team member. Fighting within the TGB was strictly prohibited and, as far as Black could recall, it had never occurred.
Every player on the Field took its safeness quite seriously. Victor wasn’t surprised to find the Red Team there this night. The battle had been a trying one, and the Reds had barely won. Most likely, they were celebrating their victory and the break they’d well earned.
The red-glowing lights of the team were labeled with likewise glowing numbers. Victor’s gaze narrowed on the light labeled “1.”
Captain Maxwell Blood. Otherwise known as “Bloody Max,” and to Victoria, just plain “Max.” He was her captain and closest confidante.
Victor wanted to kill Maxwell Blood as he had not wanted to kill any other man in his long life. But out-and-out premeditated murder was forbidden by Game Control. True Death was a crime punishable by means best left unfathomed.
Victor was not necessarily afraid of Game Control and its punishments. Team leaders were chosen for their jobs because they were born with exceptional abilities, and Victor’s were more exceptional than most. Add to that the power that came with being a leader – authority over the entire Playing Field and everyone on it – and Victor Black was not a man who had much to fear.
Even from Game Control.
But killing Maxwell Blood would not go over well with Victoria Red. That and that alone was the reason Bloody Max continued to live and breathe and gaze at his team leader through those ice blue eyes that Black so badly wanted to spoon out of the captain’s handsome face.
Victor leaned back in his plush leather chair and brought his gloved hand thoughtfully to his chin. Inspiration had just struck him. There was a buzz and an unsettling at the base of his spine. The last Game had only ended hours ago, but he was more than ready for another to begin.
He smiled and the green in his eyes lit up like burning emeralds. He waved his hands expertly over the controls and gave the computer a new set of commands. It once more complied.
The holographic screen went blank, all lights disappearing from its virtual surface.
Let the Game begin.
Chapter Two
“We’re supposed to be on down time,” Victoria muttered under her breath, her hands moving quickly through the computer’s holographic interactive screen. Nothing she did would bring the lights back. And though it should be impossible, a buzzing at the back of her skull told her Victor Black had everything to do with it.
If she was right, then Black was crossing two lines, not just one.
The Game should have been at a halt at that moment. A battle had just been waged and won and team members needed a break. Game Control had granted a respite and when they did so, the edict was to be taken as law. No team leader was allowed to initiate another Game during that time.
Secondly, if Black had actually found a way to infiltrate her system in order to make it malfunction, there was no description for his actions other than to say that he was cheating. It was downright scary cheating, at that. It shouldn’t have been feasible. Team systems were supposed to be secure, hardened by years of bulletproofing by trained systems techs and their apprentices.
Time to notify Game Control. Victoria spun in the control seat and stood, striding across the room to the exit. There was a communications console in the next room. She straightened her uniform as she came to stand before it.
Contacting Game Control always made her very nervous. She wondered whether the feeling would ever go away. She also wondered whether she would be team leader long enough to find out.
“Summon GC intermediate for Red Team,” she commanded.
The computer complied. A few seconds later, a face materialized within the holographic space between Victoria and the console. It was not a face she recognized.
She frowned slightly as the image sharpened and the man before her peered at her through scowling, beady eyes. “What seems to be the problem, Red leader?” he asked, his tone bored and more than a touch impatient.
Victoria blinked. “I’m sorry, sir. What happened to MacDougal?” She’d grown accustomed to having the same intermediate contact for Game Control for the last decade. She’d never seen this man before, and it was unsettling.
The man blinked lazily and replied, “He has been reassigned. I am your new contact, Red leader. Now what is it you want?”
Victoria was surprised and a bit befuddled, but she recovered quickly and managed to hide the bulk of her disappointment. She straightened. “My controls are malfunctioning. This has never happened before. I suspect Black is at fault, and I believe he has initiated a new Game.”
The contact glared down at her over the fat of his cheeks and considered her words. For a half a second. Then he smiled a saccharin smile and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Red leader.” He seemed to turn away for a moment and appeared to be moving his arms around something that was not visible through the holographic transmission.
“My controls show that yours are working fine,” he told her, his words dripping with unspoken innuendo. He turned back to her, cocking his large head to one side. “Are you certain you are using them correctly?”
It was an insult beyond insults. Victoria had been using those controls for ten years. She knew them like the back of her hand. This man had to know that. She was the Red leader, for crying out loud.
He was baiting her. Something was wrong….
And then it hit her. If Black had control of her system, then he could control whom and what she saw when she attempted to contact her intermediate as well. This wasn’t real. This was part of his Game.
Victoria stared back into the stranger’s face and came to a decision. There was no recourse. What was done was done, and Black was already clearly in the lead. Best to play along.
“You’re probably right,” she sighed, at once affecting a rather tired voice. “That last battle took a lot out of me.” She ran a hand through her hair and pressed her fingers to her temples as if she had a headache. “I apologize, Mr.…”
He smiled an entirely unfriendly smile and supplied, “Stygian.”
Well, that confirmed it right there. Victoria nodded. “Mr. Stygian, I bid you goodnight.”
Stygian did not hesitate. “Goodnight, Red leader.” The connection was broken immediately.
Victoria stared at the blank space where the stranger’s face had been a second before and allowed herself a moment to contemplate the situation.
The Game was the heart of their world. To a certain degree, this was an almost literal truth. The Playing Field was at the dead center of their realm, sectioned off and separated from the rest of the land by a wall built long, long ago and of materials and means that no one living today fully understood.
What they did understand was that inside of that enormous square wall was a Field – a stretch of land containing mountains and oceans, deserts and valleys, plains and plateaus – upon which a Game had been played since time immemorial.
The Game itself was simple: One battle after another, waged by team against team. One team would win by laying claim to a quadrant, the other would lose, and the Field would be satisfied for a while. Play could stop and the world would not cease to exist as long as play continued before too much time passed.
The Game had stopped once. There was a tale about that time, passed down from generation to generation.
Victoria turned away from the blank console and paced slowly back toward the control room. It had been so long since she’d heard the tale told; she was fuzzy on
the details. But as she recalled it, long ago the teams of the Playing Field had decided to take a break. The break had gone from one day to a few days. And then it had lengthened into a week.
Here, the story tended to shift. Depending on which version was told, one of several things happened next.
People in the outside sectors began to get sick. They came down with fevers no one could break. The days and nights became longer; noon was too hot, midnight too cold. People became angry. Selfish. Commerce crumbled, and life as the world knew it simply ceased to exist.
What had changed? What was the one constant that was no longer constant?
Whispers became screams and then became riots and all of the world’s leaders gathered and decided that the Game must go on. It must be played once more and it must never falter again.
The tale tells that they formed Game Control to make certain it would go on, and it has never stopped since.
Victoria thought of the tale now, as she sealed the control room door behind her and took her seat. She had no idea how old the story was, but it was at least as old as the Game, surely. It was what the people of her world lived and breathed by.
Because of the legend, individuals were tested for Gaming skills at a young age. Those with proven aptitude for certain aspects of the Game were taken from their homes and secluded within the Field – within its otherwise impenetrable walls – to be trained and to ensure that the Game went on forever.
To be chosen for the Game was a great honor. A Gamer was given much and had to sacrifice little. Memory loss came with being chosen for the Game. Rumor was that this was done so that the Players would not miss their families and homes. In exchange, they were given the chance to see the famed Field, the ability to heal from wounds and sicknesses, and the gift of eternal youth. If you played your cards right, you could literally live forever.
Like Victor Black.
No one knew which sector of the outside world Black had been recruited from all of those years ago. Whichever it was, his home sector had given him an accent. After four hundred years, it was now so faint as to be barely detectable, but it was there. It seemed to grow stronger when he spoke with emotion, and it lent a charismatic quality to the team leader’s voice.
Not that Victoria would admit as much to anyone. It was just something she noticed. That was all.
Victoria tapped her fingers on the console in front of her. Black had essentially cleared the board and moved one of his pieces. She knew it. With every fiber of her being, she knew that he’d begun another Game.
But this one was different. With a cursory glance at her dead control screen, she had to admit that she was running blind. This Game was already beyond anything Victoria had ever played… and it felt… personal.
What was his plan? Why was he doing this now, after so many years of playing by the rules? Why would he break any of them at this juncture?
She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair. With a flush of warmth across her skin, she recalled his last words to her. Her team had just won the game, barely managing to make it to quadrant four before the Gray Team and despite all of Victor’s efforts.
And then, as if time had slowed down and the moment had become exponentially more vital, the light and dark leaders had faced off on the cliffs in quadrant four, the wind whipping their hair into a frenzy, Victor’s vivid green eyes burning a hole through her.
“Don’t you grow tired of it, Victoria? I know you do. I can feel your weariness. You can’t hide it from me.”
He’d moved toward her, closing the distance between them so that the bands they wore on their arms began to heat up painfully – a warning that barriers were being breached. A reminder of protocol.
He’d ignored it, and she had let him. She refused to back up as he came to stand a mere breath away, so close that she could smell the leather of his uniform and hear the ragged catch to his breathing as he implored her. “I see the questions in your eyes, Red,” he whispered, his very lightly accented voice wreaking havoc with her senses. “I have the answers. Give in to me. Join me. There need be no secrets between us.”
She could feel his words caress her lips and the world seemed to slow around them. She had the sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to reach up and touch his hair where the deep black shining locks brushed against the collar of his jacket.
Victoria felt stunned as he raised his right hand and pulled off his glove. She held her breath as, in a move utterly belying all regulatory codes, he touched her very gently, brushing the backs of his fingers across her cheek.
Max had stepped in then. He’d drawn his sword and swept between them, knocking Victoria back several paces. She’d caught herself in time to see Black and her captain standing boot to boot, head to head, their gazes locked in silent challenge.
When her silver wristband flashed brightly and Black’s did the same, the end of the Game was signaled and both teams were instantly transported back to their headquarters.
It was sudden and it was harsh and, this time it was oddly painful. It had been the fourth time that Black had approached her as he had and told her to give in to him. To surrender.
This time, upon returning to their headquarters, Victoria had gone straight to the control room, shaken and uneasy. She hadn’t wanted her team to see the emotion in her face or notice the tension riding her body. She frankly hadn’t wanted to face the truth of what had just transpired.
What he was asking for – it went beyond giving up and losing this Game. It was something more. She felt it in her gut, and she knew that Black was well aware that she could feel it. There was something unspoken transpiring between them.
He’d really pushed it this time. By all rights she could have turned Black in for daring to touch another team leader on the Field. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Because it wasn’t just one team leader touching another. It wasn’t just Black breaking a rule.
It was Victor. Touching her.
And that was different.
* * * *
“I need you to deliver a message to the Red leader.” Victor Black strode across the room to the messenger who had been summoned there. As far as the messenger was concerned, the Game was on downtime. He would be allowed into each territory and there was nothing in the rules that stated team leaders were not allowed to communicate while a Game was not running.
So the young boy took the small wooden box that Black handed him and nodded his assent. He left the Gray Team’s headquarters at a brisk run, heading for the transporters that would shift him from Black’s quadrant to Red’s.
Victor watched him go.
Then he turned back to the tall windows that stretched from floor to ceiling along one wall of his massive quarters. He peered out over the lights of the Field and the sectors that stretched beyond the wall below.
Then his gaze shifted and locked onto the tall Red tower in the far distance.
Enough time had passed, he was sure. Now he just needed to lay the trap, spin the web.
And invite the butterfly in for a drink.
* * * *
Victoria read the note again. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and read the note with its scrawling black letters one last time.
Then she placed the note on the table and took the coin out of the box. It was a solid platinum coin. On one side was the Gray crest. On the other was a single letter: “B.”
Victoria turned the coin over in her hands a few times before straightening, pocketing the coin and the note, and turning back to the windows. She had an amazing view of each of the quadrants from up here.
Her personal quarters were the highest rooms in the Red Team tower. Looking out to one side, she could see the distant right angle of the Field’s impenetrable wall and the forested sector beyond it. She often wondered what lived in that forest. It was dark at night, just a long patch of black that must have been hundreds of acres across.
On the other side of the Field she could see the wall fade into nothin
g but darkness, blending with the ocean that it sliced into in the second quadrant.
Victoria pulled her gaze from the darkness and the unknown and focused it on the Gray tower, which stood miles away, opposite of her own, and rose just as high. She thought of the man who lived within its highest rooms.
This was probably a very bad idea.
Victor Black was the dark team leader.
Victoria released a frustrated sigh. “Dark” was an overly simplistic and, in her opinion, incredibly misused term for what Black and his team had to do day in and day out. After all, there was nothing wrong with the dark. She preferred it to daylight, actually. She came awake at night. She loved the stars. She felt more energized beneath the softer, bluer light of the moon.
But no one had ever come up with a better description for it, so “dark,” it stayed. In every Game, someone had to be the hero, and someone had to be the villain.
The Gray Team had always been a dark team. Red had always been considered light.
Hundreds of years ago, Victor Black’s aptitude exams had garnered the attention of Game Control and earned him the rank of Gray Team leader because, as it would seem, that was where his talents tended to lie.
It did fit him perfectly, Victoria had to admit. His Game plans were devious, tricky, deceitful, and underhanded. But then again, it was difficult to tell how much of that was really him and how much of it was the role he was forced to play. His plans had to be deceitful and underhanded. It was his job.
It was the fact that he was so good at it and that it seemed to come naturally to him that worried Victoria.
Because despite the fact that her entire team was at the TGB, celebrating what they thought was a well-earned break, and despite the fact that as far as Game Control was concerned, no new Game had begun, Victoria knew differently. Victor was Playing.
The invitation she’d just pocketed was part of this new Game. She should have ignored it. But she’d weighed her options and she truly felt that she had no other choice. Black wasn’t a man to be ignored.