Page 20 of Immortal Longings
“Hey,” Calla shouts. She grabs ahold of the ladder, hauling herself out of the storage passage. “I know you’re still here!”
The people around the market stare at her in horror when she emerges. She stares right back, easing herself up from the hatch, sword still in her grip. He left his knives down there. More importantly, he left his wristband down there, and when players jump in the games, they need to move their wristband from body to body too, or else they face elimination at the twenty-four-hour mark when they haven’t entered their identity number.
Calla stands, her knee twinging. She must have been hit at some point. She hardly noticed.
“Come out, come out,” she sings, searching the faces before her for some signal of recognition. The lighting is too dim to find his black eyes. She turns on her heel…
Calla was expecting the player to return to the hatch so he could retrieve his belongings. Except at that moment, she catches a blur of movement farther down the market, and spotsanotheropen hatch in the floor.
Shit. There’s more than one.
She breaks into a run. The crowd gets in her way immediately, as does a stack of chicken cages squawking one atop the other. When she finally circles around both roadblocks and skids to a stop beside the other hatch, it has slammed closed and won’t lift when she tugs.
Not good. Too long has passed. Calla whips around, the hairs at the back of her neck standing ramrod straight, eyes pinned on the first hatch, now in the distance. The player would have to leave through that one, but has he come out already?
The people around the market shrink back as she lifts her sword in preparation. Where is the player, and how did he—
Calla feels a pressure on her left arm. Then a lack of weight when her wristband is plucked right off.
She whirls around.
“Goodbye!” the boy cries, his black eyes flashing under the market lights as he turns and runs.
Calla blinks. She is so taken aback that the player managed to occupy achildthat she doesn’t give chase until he is almost out of sight. By the time she sprints after him, he has already turned the corner. By the time she turns the corner too, the child is in the middle of climbing out through an unpaneled window.
They’re six floors up from the ground. What does he think he’s doing?
“Hey!”
He leaps. Calla rushes to the window, unable to believe her eyes. Once she glances down, however, she realizes the building has a net at its side, catching all the trash and debris to protect the temple below. The child bounces on the net, facedown, but the two wristbands slip through the gaps, dropping to the pavement around the temple. There’s a flash of light.
The player has gotten away.
Calla touches her bare wrist. He has eliminated her from the games without killing her. She can count on one hand the number of times a player has madea non-lethal elimination over the years, not out of kindness but out of strategy. If someone absolutely cannot make a kill, they can force a withdrawal instead. Most players prefer the blood spilt. This one clearly recognized that he could not best Calla and chose to wait out the twenty-four hours until her wristband is deemed inactive.
“Well, that was fucking annoying,” Calla mutters. She forces herself to take a deep breath. She’s not a regular player; she has August to keep the wristband active. So it doesn’t matter. She can get it back and stay in the games.
But she certainly underestimated whoever she just came in contact with.
One room in the palace controls all the surveillance cameras across the cities, and so it is in a constant state of upheaval, each cubicle barely managing its responsibilities by the skin of its teeth. There used to behalfthe number of wires jutting out from the middle of the room and running across the floor like live snakes. Then the Palace of Union took in Er’s control centers too, and now the electric companies break into a cold sweat every time they have to check the gauge for this part of San.
At the far cubicle, Pampi Magnes taps a series of commands on her bulky keyboard, eyes tracking the security cameras and conciliating them with the screen to her left. Her wrist itches, but she doesn’t scratch. Even as a wisp of hair slides out of her ponytail and irritates the side of her cheek, she only resolves to tighten her ponytail tomorrow, maybe slick back her pin-straight black hair with gel.
She stays focused, her mouth puckered. Where the larger screen peruses footage of the twin cities, shuffling between different streets under her watch and showing movement from both outside and within the buildings, the small screen propped above her desk is a lay plan of the sector, showing only pinpoints that move when the players and their wristbands do.
Number Ten and Number Sixty-Four start to get nearer and nearer. She waits, observing whether Twenty-Three—lingering at the very border of her surveillance sector—will move in the same direction, but Twenty-Three walks away before long. Pampi hits the arrow keys until she can see Ten and Sixty-Four on the larger screen.
She presses more commands. The location pings go out.
14 meters to the left.
14 meters to the right.
The bright dots start to surge toward each other. The chaos on the larger screen is instant, food carts and trash bins overturned as the players break into a run and hurry to spot their opponent first. Pampi finally scratches her wrist, glancing over her shoulder. When she sees that the cubicles to either side of her are occupied with their own pings, she drags the clicker along her screen and sends a command over to the printer in the corner of the room.
Just as she is rising from her chair to go fetch the papers, the palace guards filter into the surveillance room.
“Pull up the border,” Leida Miliu demands, and Pampi quickly slides her chair back into her desk again, hunching into her stall. She won’t be seen. Not now, not yet.
