Full Tilt (16 page)

Quinn brought his hand to his stomach. “I don’t feel so good.” He stumbled back onto his settee. A girl tried to feed him another date, but he pushed her hand away. “Why do I feel so dizzy?”

“The nature of the ride,” answered Cassandra.

I tried not to sound as desperate as I felt. “I’ll make you a deal: Let my brother go, and I’ll stop right here, on the sixth ride.”

A chorus of murmurs broke out behind me.

“Sixth ride, sixth ride, sixth ride, sixth ride . . .”

The crowd’s whispers dropped into silence, and courtiers were even more attentive than they had been before. They were clearly impressed by how far I’d gotten, and that fact was not lost on Cassandra.

“Self-sacrifice . . . I like it! But why should I bargain now, when I already have you both?”

Quinn fell to his knees, gripping his stomach. “Blake . . . help me.”

I lunged toward him, but the guards held me back. Even if I broke free, what could I do?

“You can’t save him,” Cassandra said. “You couldn’t save anyone ten years ago, and you can’t save your brother now.”

Ten years ago? My anger flared.
“You
caused that accident, not me!”

“But
you
were the one who let them die!”

“That’s not true!” It was as if I were shrinking down to be that child again, smashing, smashing, smashing against her accusations, like I smashed against the unyielding emergency exit door. . . .

The angrier I got, the calmer she became. “They died because you didn’t try hard enough to open that door.”

“I was seven years old!”

Quinn fell over groaning and curled up like a baby. Cassandra was right; I couldn’t save Quinn. Maybe I never could. But was it too late for him to save himself?

“There’s a way out of every ride, Quinn,” I shouted to
him, hoping he was still conscious enough to hear me. “There’s a way out of every ride!”

But as the guards dragged me out Cassandra shook her head and said, “Not for the king.”

The Egyptians did not have dungeons—at least not in the medieval sense—but they did have plenty of tombs. The place they dumped me was every bit as nasty as one of those medieval dungeons where people got tossed in the Dark Ages and were left there to rot. An
oubliette,
that’s the word. It sounds French, but five’ll get you ten it was invented by ancient Egyptians.

The guards said nothing as they threw me in. They merely ripped my watch from my wrist, figuring I’d have no further use for it. It was the one thing that had stayed with me from ride to ride, an ever present reminder of the passing night. Then they heaved a heavy stone over the opening, which sealed me in with an echoing boom. It didn’t seem like Cassandra to leave me here to die; but perhaps I had her so scared, she just wanted to be rid of me.

I heard something move in the cell just a few feet away from me, and I froze. Instantly my mind ran through all the things it could possibly be. Rats. Cobras. Scorpions.

There was a narrow slit in the roof, not wide enough to climb through but wide enough to bring in a small shaft of light from high above. My eyes adjusted to the light, and I strained to see what nature of creature I’d been entombed with.

It wasn’t a creature, but a person. Another prisoner. He was chained to the tomb wall and looked weak, as if he had been in this place for a very long time. Yet he didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“Hello, Blake,” he said. “Damn, you’ve grown.”

It was like being smashed in the head with a pole again.

“Dad?”

“So here we are,” he said. “At least
you
didn’t get chained to the wall.”

I closed my eyes. This was not possible. It was just another trick of the ride. It had to be. “You’re not really here!” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re a fake. My real father is somewhere in Oregon with his new family.”

“Idaho.”

“Shut up!” I opened my eyes again, trying to will the vision away, but it didn’t work. If there was anyone in this world I didn’t want to see—let alone ride with, it would be him. This man whom I locked out of my mind so long ago. This man whom I barely remembered.

“Are you real?”

“How the hell should I know?”

A whole host of unwanted, unhelpful emotions began to cloud my focus and reasoning. I didn’t need this. I had enough to face without facing
him.

“Too bad. You’ve got me, whether you want me or not,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t you?”

And that told me all I needed to know. He had read
my thoughts, which meant he wasn’t real. It was just the park, reading my mind again, throwing out yet another stumbling block to slow me down and keep me distracted until my time ran out. That explained why his face was hidden in shadow. It was because I couldn’t really remember his face, and the ride couldn’t spit back what my mind couldn’t feed it. I knew all this in my head, and yet I also knew it didn’t matter that he wasn’t real, because there’s a part of you that your mind can’t reach. It’s the part of you that jumps when the monster pops out of the darkness on a movie screen. It’s the part that’s endlessly amazed by magicians, even though you know their tricks are just sleight of hand. It believes what it sees, and right now it saw my father.

“If you think I’m gonna fight with you or forgive you for abandoning us, forget it. You’re not sucking me into some big emotional thing.”

“Who says I want to?”

I paced the tomb, stumbling over chunks of stone that littered the ground, angry at myself for feeling angry at all. Someday there’d be a time and place to face my father in the real world. But not here. Not now. I forced myself to stop pacing. I had to bring clarity to my thoughts. “I’m getting out of here.”

“This is a tomb,” my phantom father said. “It can only be opened from the outside.”

I concentrated on the massive sealing stone.
My strength comes from my will.
I hurled myself at the stone and pushed on it with every ounce of determination I had. I pushed
and pressed and rammed against it, bruising my shoulders and scraping my hands. The stone didn’t budge.

“You never did have much willpower.”

“Don’t talk to me!” I fell to the ground, crouching in the corner that was farthest away from him.

Time ticked by in silence. All I could hear was my own breathing, then eventually my own heartbeat and the occasional rattle of chains across the tomb as my fellow prisoner shifted positions. Was this eternity for me, then? A cold, claustrophobic hell, with a living reminder of why my life got so screwed up?

A few minutes more, then a sound grated against the silence. The grinding of stone on stone, followed by a sliver of light cutting across the chamber. The heavy stone door opened, and a burly, menacing figure entered with a torch. It only took a moment for me to recognize him. It was the linebacker guard from the hilltop temple—the one whose life I’d spared. The mark from the whip was still there around his oversized neck.

I stood up as he approached. “Is it true what they say?” he asked. “You’ve really made it through six rides?”

“This is my sixth,” I told him.

He smiled like a little kid. “I’ve never met anyone who’s made it that far. There are rumors about you spreading through all the rides.” The guard looked up at the small slit in the roof and the distant sliver of blue sky beyond. “Is it still out there?”

“What do you mean?”

“The real world. I keep trying to remember what it was like. Sometimes I can’t.”

I took a step closer to him. He was real—a rider who got caught in the park at dawn, like the bartender in that tavern. “How long have you been here?”

“I’ve lost track. There are no days here. The sun never moves in the sky. The clouds never change.”

A faint rattle from the corner reminded me that my “father” was still there. I turned, and although I looked directly at him, the glare from the torch had left a dark spot on my retina. I couldn’t see his face, and I knew that no matter how hard I tried to see it, I never would. The park couldn’t show me what it didn’t know. Even so, this phantom father could help me.

“You’re not real. You’re just another false face of this park, but that means you know things about this place that I don’t. So you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”

He shifted his arms, rattling his chains. “Why would I do that?”

My hands balled into fists, but I crossed my arms to keep myself from using them. “Because somehow you’re also my father, and you owe me and Quinn more than you could possibly imagine.”

He said nothing to that.

“So you’re going to tell me what I want to know,” I repeated.

The guard looked from me to him to me again.

“What do you want to know?” my father whispered.

“I want to know about Cassandra. Who is she?
What
is she?”

He sighed and looked down. “She’s the tidal wave that
wiped out the Minoans. She’s the eruption that leveled Pompeii. Whenever something horrible happens in the world—something senseless—whenever there are no survivors, Cassandra is there.”

The magnitude of what he was telling me was as heavy a weight as a pyramid cornerstone, but it was lightened by what I now came to realize.

“What if there was
one
survivor?” I asked.

He said nothing more.

The guard stepped between us. “What are you saying?”

My brain was whirling, but I did my best to explain. “There was an accident a long time ago, and she was there. A school bus spun out of control on an icy road and fell into a deep ravine. I was the only one who survived.”

I could feel the guard’s excitement build as he considered it. “So then, you were
supposed
to die?”

“But I didn’t.”

He looked at my “father,” who turned his shadowy face toward the stone.

“If no one survives Cassandra, and you did,” said the guard, “then you could be the only one who’s ever beaten her!”

I shook my head. “I didn’t beat her, I just survived.”

“So survive again! How did you survive the first time?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try! You must remember
something.”

I turned away in frustration. “I’ve been through it a
thousand times! The bus was spinning out of control. We crashed through the guardrail, and I couldn’t open the back door.”

“And then?”

“And then
nothing!”
I paced away, but there was nowhere to go in the small chamber. “There was nothing else! One moment I was there at the back of the bus, and the next thing I remember, I was home, and no one was talking about it, and no one has since.” I felt like pounding my head against the wall to shake loose the memory. There was a gap in there. I always knew it was there, but since no one ever discussed the crash, it was easy to ignore. The crash had knocked me unconscious. The concussion erased my memory of the trauma, and that was that. Why did it matter? Why should anyone care?

“If you’re going to be the one to make it out,” said the guard, “you’re going to have to remember what you did.”

He looked at me for a moment more, then motioned to the open door. “Come on. I can lead you to the seventh ride.”

But getting out wasn’t enough. “What about my brother?”

“Who?”

“The pharaoh—King Tut.”

The guard lowered his eyes. “You can’t save him.”

He was right about that. Only Quinn could save Quinn. I knew that. But if he was still alive, perhaps I could give him the means to save himself. “Where would
he be now? Where would they take him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “King Tut dies—King Tut
always
dies. You can’t change the ride.”

Well, we’d see about that. I started to follow the guard out, but in the corner of the room the phantom image of my father began to speak.

“Blake?”

His face was still fuzzy and unclear, but I had to admit his voice was the voice I remembered.

“I told you what you wanted to know. Now you have to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Let me out of here,” he said. “Please. I’ve been in this place for a long, long time.”

In the torchlight I could see how truly helpless he was in those shackles. It was a fair request. Whatever he might deserve, I didn’t think he deserved this tomb. I picked up a stone lying on the ground and smashed the chains until the links broke.

Once he was free, he left. Simple as that. Just like he did all those years ago. No apologies, no thank-yous, no good-byes. Still, it didn’t change the choice I made to let him go.

The room where they had taken Quinn was a long chamber full of stone tables, and you can guess what was on each of those tables. The process of mummification is not pretty. Making one mummy is bad enough, but here, where there was a new King Tut every evening, it was an assembly line—or a disassembly line, I guess you might say. On each table was another unfortunate rider in some stage of the process. Quinn was in the earliest stage, and still, to my relief, very much alive.

The temple guard and a few of his conspirators had smuggled me in, but in my current hiding place I couldn’t do anything to help my brother. Not yet, anyway. He was just a few yards away from me, but all I could do was watch. He was still groggy from the drugs he’d been given, but even if he’d had all his strength, he wouldn’t have been able to tear free from the ropes that tied down his arms and legs. He glanced at the fully wrapped mummy on the slab next to him.

An old woman with red cheeks tended to him. She seemed pleasant enough, humming to herself as she
removed Quinn’s facial rings, and put them on an alabaster tray.

“Who said you could take those?” Quinn said, defiant to the last.

“You just relax, dearie,” she said, sounding like someone’s grandma. “I’ll take care of everything.” She smiled at him and gently patted his hand. He pulled his hand away.