Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel (10 page)

“Fine. Leave the money if it makes you feel better about stealing imaginary horses,” conceded Jake, rolling his eyes. He handed over some coins to Des, who pocketed them and then looked up at the sky.

“It’s just an hour or two until sundown. Let’s wait until then.”

The spent the time in an isolated hollow not far from the city, working out their plan for stealing the horses. Jake used his magical map, zooming in on the area just outside Everheart so they could get a good idea of the stable layout. By the time the sun fell below the horizon, the would-be thief and the make-believe knight were ready. Returning to the area outside the city gates, they crept into the shelter of a small copse of trees near the stable.

“We’re lucky,” said Des, peering around at the night. “It’s getting foggy, and that will help. I’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes. Stay out of sight, okay?”

Jake hid behind a large tree trunk and watched his friend creeping up to the darkened rear window of the stable-house He held his breath as Des slipped through the window, disappearing inside. The haze thickened as the minutes ticked slowly past – ten minutes…fifteen…twenty, and then thirty. Jake started to worry. He wondered if Des had been caught, and uneasy thoughts chased one another through his mind. Des was just one thief against who knew how many stable-hands? And what about the stable master? What if the guards had been roused somehow? Des might be injured, or he could have been captured and carried off to some dungeon beneath the pristine, white marble city.

What if what happened to Kari had happened to Des?

Dread gripped Jake, and he stepped out from behind the tree determined to find out what was going on. He started purposefully toward the stable, intent on finding answers.

“Hey, get back!” Des hissed from somewhere nearby in the darkness. “Are you crazy, they’ll see you!”

Jake ducked behind another tree just as his friend emerged from the misty gloom with two dark horses trailing behind him. Des shook his head at Jake.

“You gave up on me,” he accused.

“That was a lot longer than fifteen minutes,” Jake pointed out.

“Yeah, well…” Des nodded toward the horses. “It took me a while to pick the best ones. I chose darker colored ones so they’d be harder to see.”

“Good thinking,” Jake told him. “Did anyone see you?”

“Nope.” Des grinned, proud of himself. “They’re all playing cards in the back room.”

“Perfect. Then let’s get out of here.”

“Sure, hang on. Take these.” Des handed Jake something cold, hard, and jingly. Looking down at his hand, Jake recognized the coins he’d given Des earlier.

“You didn’t leave them?”

“Nah, I figured you were right about the imaginary horses.” Grinning, he added, “Des the Hand strikes again!”

Shaking his head, Jake chuckled softly in spite of himself. “Whatever, Des. You can do a good deed to make up for it later on. Right now, we’d better get going.”

They rode north, urging their horses in a soft canter while keeping as quiet as possible. No one pursued them and they were soon far enough from Everheart that Jake felt safe in making a little noise.

They spurred the horses on to greater speed, galloping over the increasingly rugged terrain. Rocky hills and jagged valleys replaced the rolling meadows around Everheart, and the boys carefully stuck to the road and relied on the weak light of the moon to spot hazards before their horses could stumble over them.

An hour or so passed, and the boys reined in their horses as they heard the rumbling of a waterfall in the near distance. It sounded like it was coming from just around a large, stone outcropping perched over a bend in the road and blocking their view of what was ahead.

“We must be near Yeir’s Grotto,” said Jake, guiding his horse toward the sound. “The stable-hand said it was under a waterfall.”

“I hear it. Let’s get on with it,” said Des.

They worked their way around the outcropping and saw the tumbling waters. The sound intensified, roaring in their ears like endless thunder. Jake reined his mare to a halt where the ground dropped away abruptly. Ten feet away, the surging wall of water plunged violently over a craggy cliff.

“Down there.” Des pointed down to the opening of a wide cavern near the base of the falls. A water-slicked stone path trailed down the cliffside near them. Jake nudged his horse forward and began a careful descent with Des close behind. Loose stones littered the narrow ledge, making the slippery footing especially treacherous in the feeble moonlight. Jake’s heart pounded in his ears with each sliding step, but he fixed his eyes determinedly on the path in front of him and refused to look over the edge until at last they reached the bottom. He had to find Kari.

The sky brightened in the east. Dawn approached as Jake and Des dismounted and tied their horses to a nearby tree. Jake watched the golden glow of sunrise and shook his head. It should have still been dark for hours.

Des shrugged when Jake pointed it out. There was nothing they could do about it, so why worry? Leaving the horses behind, they followed the stone path around behind the falling water. As they passed beneath, a strange stillness filled the air. The sound of the falls was suddenly and inexplicably muted. Before the two boys, no light shone from the cave. It was dark and apparently abandoned.

Jake peered into the blackness, not trusting his senses. “Hello?” he called tentatively into the shadows. “Is anyone there?”

“No!” answered a crackling, cranky voice. “There’s no one here!”

Jake fell back a step. He and Des looked at each other in surprise. “Who…who’s there?” Jake called.

“No one! No one is here.”

“Are you‘no one,’then?” Jake ventured a guess.

“No! No one is no one. That’s why it’s called no one rather than someone!”

Jake frowned and opened his mouth to retort, but Des stopped him with a hand on his arm and a smirking wink. Jake closed his mouth, waiting to see what Des had in mind.

“We were looking for someone,” Des said in a friendly, conversational tone. “The young and powerful Lady Alista. But you can’t be her, since you’re no one.”

“That’s right!” The cantankerous voice cackled with ill-humored laughter. “No one is here.”

“Right,” agreed Des, still in the same friendly tone. “Well, like I said, we’re looking for our friend Lady Alista. We asked after her in the city, and in the countryside. Everybody told us the same thing: no one knows where she is.”

There was silence from the cave.

“So, since you’re no one…” prompted Des, casting a helpless look at Jake when his plan did not seem to be working. “Well, has she been here? Do you know where Lady Alista is?”

The silence from within the dark cave continued.

“Well?” Des tried again, growing frustrated with the unseen speaker in the cave. “Has someone been here or not?”

“Yes!” cried the voice. “Someone has been here.”

“But not Lady Alista,” Jake said, realizing the voice hadn’t answered Des’s first two questions because they conflicted. His heart sank, thinking what else that meant. “Someone else was here, but not Kari.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” whispered Des, leaning closer to him. They had no idea how well the creature in the cave, whatever it was, could hear. Des spoke quietly, hoping only Jake could hear. “Maybe Kari’s not Lady Alista anymore.”

“Kari!” cried the voice from within the cave, then burst into an excited fit of giggling. The tittering laughter sounded girlish in contrast to the grouchy voice that had been speaking to them, and if it did not sound like Kari exactly it did sound like someone
trying
to sound like her. “Kari,” the voice said again when the giggling stopped. “Someone was here.”

Des’s hand tightened on Jake’s arm. “She
was
here!”

Jake nodded, feeling elated that they were getting somewhere at last. But how valuable was this information? Kari hadn’t been seen in Everheart for two years or more. Cautiously, Jake stepped forward and called a new question in the darkness. “How long ago was this someone here?”

“The sun shone twice upon the blue rock since then,” the voice told him at once.

“And it was Kari?” Jake pressed, ignoring the baffled look Des turned on him. “Was Kari the someone who was here before the sun shone twice on the blue rock?”

“Kari!” the voice repeated, growing cranky again.

“I’m not sure what that means,” Jake muttered, turning desperately to Des.

“Was one someone here?” asked Des. “Or some someones?”

“Some someones,” answered the voice, sounding delighted. Whomever – or whatever – they were talking to, it was a strange creature indeed. Jake got the feeling they were trying to solve a riddle, and he did not appreciate being played with when his friend could be in danger.

“Kari someones,” the voice added slyly.

“She was with a group, then,” Des said. “But how long ago? That bit about the sun shining on the rock, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“There must be a particular stone and the light has to be at a certain angle to hit it,” Jake mused. He glanced deep into the darkness of the cave, then spun around in place as inspiration struck. He peered around the edges of the curiously silent but still pounding waterfall. “It has to be visible from inside that cave, and if the light only reflects from the rock to the cave when hit by a certain angle then it probably only happens once a year.”

“Great,” said Des with a groan. “So, two years ago. Doesn’t seem to help us much.”

Jake tended to agree, but he turned back toward the cave for a final question. “Thank you for your help,” he started, hoping to butter up their mysterious helper. The voice could be delighted and amused, but it had mostly been cantankerous and ornery. “Say, can you tell me one more thing? Was Kari someone hurt?”

“No.” The reply sounded bored.

“Was Kari someone afraid?” Jake pressed.

“Yes,” said the voice with returning interest, drawing the word out in a sibilant hiss.

Both boys drew a sharp breath. Des turned to Jake, his face anxious. “We’ve got to find her,” he said. “She’s in trouble.”

“Where did the someones go when they left here?” Jake asked, feeling just as anxious as his friend but knowing that even when it was just game-time, two years was a long time.

“To the sun! They went to the sun!” The voice cackled at that.

As Jake puzzled over the meaning of that, the first sliver of the sun rose over the horizon. Sunlight sparkled and danced in the falling water behind the two boys, creating a brilliant prism of light the flooded into the cave. What in darkness had seemed a deep cavern was revealed as a shallow depression in the cliff behind the waterfall. Barely ten feet deep, the rising sun illuminated it with its fractured bands of multi-colored light, throwing overlapping shadows but revealing nothing of the creature they had been speaking to.

“There’s no one here,” whispered Des, who shuddered at the idea that they must have been speaking to a ghost or maybe even imagining the whole thing.

The cave was not entirely vacant, however. The shining obsidian of the cave’s rear wall was smooth and unbroken save for one enormous sapphire crystal embedded around the height of Jake’s shoulder. From the rainbow created by the sunlight passing through the waterfall, a solid beam of blue light fell directly on the massive gemstone, causing it to flicker and gleam.

Jake swallowed hard before he spoke, and even as he forced himself to remain calm his voice cracked. “Okay. Okay…whatever that was, it said Kari went to the sun.” He turned back toward the waterfall, pointing around the edge of the crashing water toward the distant, breaking dawn. “To the sun: they went that way.”

Des considered and then nodded agreement. “Great. So now we know where to go.”

As the boys climbed out from behind the waterfall, Des glanced toward one corner of the horizon by keeping his face straight and looking through the corner of his eye. A faint and shimmering digital clock hovered in the sky, ticking off the minutes that passed in the real world. “It’s getting late,” Des observed. “Let’s pick up here tomorrow right after school.”

Jake sighed, looking at the same time display. He could hardly believe so much time had passed, and he regretted every minute they had spent lying low and biding their time just to get this far. Still, they
had
made progress. He had hoped they would find Kari today, but…

“Right,” he gave in sadly. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

“Log out,” Des said at once.

Nothing happened. Jake watched, expecting Des’s image to dissolve or simply wink out, but Des remained firmly in place. Their surroundings wavered briefly and then solidified, but there was no other noticeable effect.

“Log out,” Des said again, impatiently. Still he remained, and this time there was no peculiar blurring of the environment. Des frowned, and for the first time Jake saw what looked like real fear growing in his friend’s eyes. “Uhm, Jake? Why isn’t it working?”

“Weird,” Jake breathed, starting to feel uneasy himself. “Okay, let me try. Log out.”

Nothing happened. The uneasiness Jake felt was turning quickly to panic. Jake fought it down. It wouldn’t do either of them any good to lose their heads. It was some kind of glitch, that was all. He’d never heard of a glitch like this, but that’s what it had to be.

“I’ll shut the game down, and it’ll have to boot us,” he told Des, then took a deep breath to steady himself. “Pause Xaloria.” The program ignored his command. The water still gushed over its cliff, crashing loudly into the pool below.

“Open Development Tools!” Jake shouted, his voice slipping up an octave as he started to get frantic. Still, no response from the VR. “Abort program! End VR simulation!” Jake’s shouts grew increasingly desperate, but to no effect. The VR room did not respond. Xaloria remained stubbornly all around them.

“Stop it,” Des yelled finally, when Jake had run through most of the voice commands available. He’d gotten as far as the Skill Tree Tools, which didn’t strike Des as being helpful even if they did work. “Just stop it. It’s not working.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it!” Jake shouted, practically exploding. He paced back and forth, racking his brain for some solution. “I don’t understand. Who’s doing this?”

Des grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing him to stop. For good measure, he gave his friend a quick, jolting shake. “It’ll be fine,” he said, not quite managing to hide the fear in his own voice. “Look, Jake, it’s cool. When I don’t make it to dinner, Mom will shut down our VR room. It’ll have to boot me then, and I can call your house to get your Mom to do the same for you.”

Jake blinked, breathing raggedly. Slowly, he nodded and his pounding heart slowed its mad beat. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, that’s true. Your mom can get us out. It’s just stuck, that’s all, but they can get us out from outside. No big deal.”

“Yeah?” asked Des. Considering it had been his plan to begin with, Des did not seem terribly confident that it would work. Jake forced a grin, feigning an unworried cheerfulness.

“Of course. No big deal.”

Jake groaned, shifting in his saddle. They decided there was no point staying put while they waited to be pulled back to the real world, so they set off for the sun, following a two-year-old trail that might lead them nowhere. Despite a growing sense of hopelessness, not to mention the boys’growing exhaustion, they continued riding east for hours on end. They had passed farms and towns, asking every person they encountered about Kari and the unknown group with which she traveled. A few recalled seeing the group, though not many. None of them had heard of “Lady Alista.” The two boys rode out of the last village, exchanging only the occasional yawn as they struggled to stay awake.

“Kari’s not playing her character anymore,” Jake said. In the real world, it was past midnight and Jake didn’t want to think about what that meant. He focused instead on the mission to find Kari. That was all that mattered for right now. “She must know something’s wrong with the program if she dropped her Lady Alista avatar.”

“Yeah, probably so,” agreed Des. “Or maybe somebody made her stop being Alista. Whoever’s capable of keeping her here in the game when she’s not even in her VR room could do just about anything, I guess.”

Jake had already thought of that. When he realized that he and Des were trapped in Xaloria, it hadn’t taken him long to put things together. In the real world, Kari’s parents had found her in a coma and taken her to the hospital. But in Xaloria, Kari had been seen
after
that must have happened. She must be trapped the same way they were, and that meant he and Des were probably lying in hospital beds themselves by now. Jake didn’t want to alarm his friend anymore than he already was, but Des would figure it out on his own eventually. For his part, Jake tried not to think about it.

Just find Kari. From what they had been able to gather so far, the party that Kari traveled with had stopped for some time in a small town not far from Yeir’s Grotto. Jake and Des had spent some time in the seedy common room of an inn called the Fickle Wench, asking questions. Rumors had it that the voice at the Grotto had given the party leaders – a man and a woman, neither of them Kari – unclear directions. They had spent many days in this town, spending coin freely like wealthy nobles, while they puzzled over their next action. Several weeks had passed before the group continued on, still traveling east.