Extraction (17 page)

“Hey,” I snap.

She smirks and walks away. A few other girls giggle.

I help Oliver to his feet, narrowing my eyes at the girl’s back. What’s wrong with her?

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

Beside me, Ariadne braids her hair and inspects the weapons compartments with curious eyes.

“You okay too?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I guess I’m the only one who’s not sure about this. Maybe because Sam hasn’t even explained the game yet.

I turn to search for a weapon and realize he’s coming over.

“You know, Extractions never get to do this before they complete their initial training,” Sam says with a wide, mischievous smile. His teeth are a perfect, polished line. “You should be happy I’m allowed to make exceptions.”

“How touching,” I say.

“Blondie’s grateful,” he says, taking a step closer to Ariadne. “Aren’t you, love?” He reaches for her hand.

She snatches it away from him, looking disgusted. But the color rises in her cheeks.

Amusement sparks in his eyes.

“Ignore him,” I say, and step to one of the cabinets. Round purple guns sit behind the glass, under a sign that reads
DEATH RAYS
.

“Stick with the coppers.” Sam stretches a hand to reach into a black net strung above the cabinet beside me. He removes a small copper-colored laser gun. “They have knives too.” A blade pops out when he clicks a button. “You can blast an enemy or stick one in the gut, and it’s just the right size for you.” He tosses it to me, his eyes dancing with malice.

The girl who tripped Oliver giggles. Several others glance at me, some smirking, others whispering to each other.

I tuck the copper between my legs and work my curls into a bun, ignoring the girls. “Tell me what the game is.”

Sam grins. “You don’t like surprises?”

“I want to be prepared.”

He tosses a copper to Ariadne, who blushes a deeper shade of pink. He turns away and squats to find something in a giant steel drawer. “We’re going to fight Unstables.”

Beside me, the copper Ariadne was holding a moment ago clatters to the floor.

I stare at Sam. “They’re not real,” I say, hoping he won’t correct me.

“They can’t be,” Oliver says, coming back over with a frown. He snaps on an armored vest. “We shot all the ones in the Core.”

The gunshots from the other night echo in my ears, and I flinch. But Oliver’s right. Unstables are usually kept in the Karum treatment facility on the Surface. That’s where they’re killed too, unless Commander Charlie decides to use them for an Extraction welcome ceremony.

“Of course they’re fake,” the annoying girl snaps. “It’s a simulation.”

“Be nice,” Sam says. He straightens with a silver gun in his hand that has a rounded barrel and lots of buttons on its side. His eyes meet mine. “An army of Unstables attacks both our teams. The team who kills the most wins.”

“How much time do we have?”

“It’s different every game.”

The computerized voice breaks in: “Thirty seconds to launch.”

The annoying girl and the others adjust their weapons and move toward the round door into the main dome, pushing against each other to get closer.

“Follow orders in there,” Sam says. “Do whatever I say. Got it?”

I lie and say, “Yes.”

“One more thing.” He takes a step closer to me, and his hot breath touches my ear. It smells acrid and smoky. “If you and Blondie make us lose,” he whispers, “my fingers might accidentally tap a button on my gun when the muzzle’s pointed your way. Any injuries you get in there will hurt like krite. So I wouldn’t make us lose if I were you.”

My stomach clenches.

“Ten seconds,” the voice says.

I grit my teeth, shove Sam away, and snatch two laser-proof vests. I throw one to Ariadne, who fumbles for it, but catches it.

Sam’s kidding. He’s angry I passed Colonel Parker’s test earlier, and he’s joking to mess with my head. But he still watches me, and the fire in his gaze makes my legs wobbly.

The lights dim, and a
whir
picks up. A round door in front of us slides open.

I snap my vest into place. I grip my copper.

The computerized voice offers two more words: “Launching Phantom.”

14

We step into the pitch blackness of the dome.

There’s a flash. Giant letters type their way onto a screen overhead:
MISSION OBJECTIVE: DESTROY UNSTABLES. MISSION TIME: TEN MINUTES.

“Ten minutes?” Oliver’s voice cracks, somewhere to my right.

I hold my breath.

The letters disappear and the blackness warps. Thick green stems rise out of the ground, higher and higher, sprouting purple petals that form curly and spiral shapes. Other plants and trees grow with spiny limbs and weeping veils of leaves. Mud squishes beneath my boots where water seeps into the dirt, more and more of it, flowing and flowing.

“Move it!” Sam shoves the butt of his gun into my arm.

I splash into the trees and bump into Oliver. Huffing, I narrow my eyes as fire slides through my shoulder. “You didn’t have to—”

“Shut up,” Sam says, stopping on firmer ground and scanning the jungle.

Where the water seeped into the dirt, there’s a river now, deep and murky. Members of both teams stand on the other bank. Ariadne’s over there. She’s looking wildly around, backing up into a tree. I have a bad feeling she won’t be okay over there. Some of the boys give her strange looks.

But the river looks too deep, and I can’t swim. I can’t cross it.

“What now?” Oliver says. He’s the only member of the other team on our side.

“You stay away from us.” Sam moves past him roughly. “Joe, you cover inside.”

The brawny boy with the giant orange gun nods and tramples off into the trees.

“Marcus, take the left,” Sam says. “Shorty, stick with me.”

“When does the timer start?” I ask.

“As soon as the Unstables appear.”

I clutch the copper to my chest and glance at Oliver. He’s a little shaky now.

A hollow choking sound reaches my ears, coming from behind.

I spin, pressing a knob on my gun so it’s ready to fire. Overhead, red numbers appear in the sky: 10:00:00, and the team scores: 0:0.

The clock has started.

“First kill is yours, Shorty,” Sam says with a smirk. “Think you can handle it?”

This is all in my head. All of this is fake.

“Of course,” I say.

Sam narrows his eyes. Guess he doesn’t like my confidence.

A broken, strangled sound bubbles up from the river. Strands of hair emerge, then the top of a head, dripping wet. Dark fingers stretch from the water, reaching for the mud of the bank. Eyelids, nose, and a mouth appear, grayish and wrinkled.

“H-help me,” a voice cries.

I freeze with my finger on the blast button. The bags under his eyes are dark, even darker than mine looked before my operation. When his eyes open, they’re the color of dusk. His limbs shake as he digs his nails into the mud and drags himself out of the river not five feet away from me, his bony chest heaving.

I’ve never seen an Unstable this close before—not even the woman I shot in the glass compartment. They’re dangerous, and we aren’t allowed to get this close to them. So why make a game where we have to fight them?

“Kill it,” Sam orders.

Pressing my lips together, I touch my finger to the blast button and start to press.

“P-please…”

The Unstable coughs, choking on phlegm.

An awful realization hits me—

Slaps me—

Shocks me.

He sounds like Laila did when the officials dragged her into the hov-pod, that day they took her to quarantine. She begged them to let her stay. She swore she’d try harder to raise her Promise, but they didn’t care. They dragged her away while she struggled to give me her shoes. Her shoes, her ripped-up
shoes
. That’s all they let her leave behind.

“I said kill it,” Sam hisses.

“What if we can help him—”

“He’s not real, you idiot.
Kill it
.”

I ease my finger over the button, readying to press but still staring at the Unstable.

Why does he look so real? His dusk-colored eyes lift to mine, and I see the sky in them. Vast, never ending, gray-blue. Starry-night eyes, like Logan’s.

Sam’s elbow knocks into my face.

Dots—dots—

Teeth clenched—

Stumbling—

A gunshot goes off in the distance.

Oliver catches me with clumsy hands. “Sam, stop it!” he says.

Another gunshot.

When my vision clears, I’m gasping for breath, and Oliver hasn’t let go of me. Sam is in my face. “You shoot them, for krite’s sake, or I will kill you.”

“It’s only a game.” Oliver tightens his hold on me.

“Phantom isn’t just a game,” Sam spits. “It teaches us how to strategize in combat. It trains us, like most things here do, in case there’s ever another rebellion in the outer sectors and we have to fight them.”

I stare at him. He said most things here train us for that. Extraction training, too? Colonel Parker’s obstacle course?

But it makes no sense. There won’t be any rebellion. Every person in any of the sectors who disobeys or seems like a rebel ends up in a detention facility, or marked Unstable. The officials take care of that.

Before I can reply, Sam wrenches me away from Oliver and throws me to the ground. I land hard on my hands and knees in shallow water. His boot smacks into my side.

“I said I’ll kill you if you don’t shoot. Do you think I’m joking?”

“No,” I sputter.

“Then shoot them.”

Through the curls falling over my eyes, I see Unstables everywhere. Piling like dead bodies in the river, staggering from the trees, all of them coming for us, moaning and crying. Lasers and cracks and zaps of guns fill the air on the opposite bank. The Unstables turn to mist when their hearts stop beating. Real people don’t turn to mist, so these definitely aren’t real. This is only a game.

I push off the ground and get to my feet.

“I said shoot them,” Sam says.

I’m already aiming. I press the blast button on my copper. The recoil makes me stagger back several feet, but I get an Unstable in the face. The laser blows her to bloody chunks that sink with a gurgle into the murky river before vanishing.

“Finally.” Sam growls, blasting his sixth or seventh to smithereens.

I stare at the copper in my hand, at the metal barrel that’s smaller than the gun I used to shoot a real Unstable. The welcome ceremony. Would Sam say that was supposed to train us for rebellion, too?

I remember what Ariadne said earlier before we entered the obstacle course:
They’re training us to be soldiers.

I laughed at her then. Commander Charlie trains some people to be soldiers, to keep order in the outer sectors. But he doesn’t need to train everyone because there isn’t any war. There’s no one to fight.

And even if there was, I could still refuse. He can’t train me to be mindless.

I don’t know why my hands are trembling.

Stumbling out of the water, I aim at another Unstable and hit it in the leg. It’s much easier when I don’t look at faces. When I don’t see Logan in their eyes.

“Clementine!” Oliver says. Two Unstables lurch toward him. He tries to back up from them and almost trips over a rock. His arms shake when he fires his gun, and his lasers keep missing.

I got him into this. I can’t let him get hurt.

“Duck!” I yell.

He obliges, and I aim at one, then the other. Their blood splatters on his face.

A searing pain shoots through my elbow. I cry out, spin around, and slash an Unstable’s face with my copper’s knife until its teeth loosen their hold on my skin.

“Speed it up!” Sam shouts. “Clock’s ticking.”

The timer overhead is already down to five minutes. The score is 34 to 47 with team one in the lead. We are losing.

Ignoring the soreness in my arm, I turn my head and concentrate on our environment. Giant flowers, jungle plants, turbid river water, weeping trees. There has to be something in here that can help me eradicate a bunch of Unstables at once. Something the other team won’t think of.

A child-size Unstable lunges at my leg. I jump back and blast him. Turning, I knock the butt of my copper into another Unstable and make for the trees.

I don’t know what I’ll find, but I will look regardless.

“What’re you—” Oliver starts, but something distracts him, and I don’t hear him anymore. Moss and jungle leaves muffle gunshots. I hope he’ll be all right without me.

The canopy of branches overhead makes it darker, harder to see where I’m running. I stumble; I pick myself up. A body appears behind a tree trunk, teetering toward me. Then another with an arm outstretched, reaching for my face. I try to shoot it down, but I don’t wait to see if it works.

I search for the tallest tree.

Branches snap beneath my feet. Vines slap my cheeks when I fail at ducking under them. Jungle smells seep into my nose: musk, stuffy air, and the sweet and tangy scents of pollen. If there are silver asters in here, I’ll be crippled and knocked out with fire bleeding through my body when Sam finds me and shoots me.

Maybe that would be for the best.

I duck underneath a web of leaves and spider silk, and the muzzle of the orange mega-gun points straight at my eyes. A scream escapes my lips before I even think it.

“Oh, krite. Sorry.” The muscular boy with the gun, Joe, quickly lowers his weapon.

“
Think
before you fire,” I say through gritted teeth.

“I think I just did.”

“Barely.” I wipe saliva off my mouth with the back of my palm.

He frowns at me. “What’re you doing here? Sam told you to stay with him.”

“I’m looking for something.”

“Vrux.” He pushes me out of his way, and a loud whooshing sound peals from his gun. A shriek, then the slam of a body hitting the ground.

“Come on, we’ve got like two minutes left.” He tramples off again.

Two minutes, and through cracks in the canopy, the numbers in the sky say we are falling further behind. I press my hands into my knees, doubling over. What can I do? Even if Sam doesn’t kill me, he’s going to hurt me if we lose. I don’t have any doubts.