Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel (12 page)

Jake sat up slowly, his body aching. Looking at his arm, he was glad to discover that Des’s salve wasn’t ruined after their battle with the crolorg because the wound was almost completely healed. That, or the “night” spent under the trees had taken up a lot more game-time than he thought. Jake frowned, wishing all of this could just make a little bit more sense. He and his friends were trapped in his world and he felt powerless.

His stomach grumbled noisily just as the sun rose in the distance. Jake’s frown turned to a hungry grimace, and he shook his friend awake. “Come on, Des,” he said. “Time for breakfast.”

Des rolled over, shrugging off Jake’s shaking hand. “Leave me alone,” he mumbled, still more than half asleep and sounding grumpy. “Tired.”

“Look where we are,” insisted Jake. “You have to get up. We can’t stay here.”

Des blinked his eyes sleepily for several moments, twisting his head to take in their surroundings. He finally sat up, still reluctant, and brushed his shaggy blond hair back out of his face with one hand. When it hit him, he froze with his hand halfway back over his head.

“We’re still in Xaloria,” he said, alarmed.

Jake just nodded.

“How long?” Des started to sound frantic. “Jake, how long have we been here?”

Jake pointed toward the horizon. After the way the real-time clock had behaved yesterday, Jake hadn’t expected it to be much help. It was even worse than he’d suspected. The time read
00:00.

“Oh, no,” Des groaned.

“This is stupid,” said Jake, standing up and making a fist with one hand. He pounded against the open palm of his other hand, and a slightly painful twinge in his upper arm reminded him of the close call he had with the crolorg. He felt his anger rise. “We can’t log out. We can’t tell what time it is, or how long we’ve been stuck here. We can’t find Kari. We don’t know who’s messing with the game, but it sure seems like they’re trying to kill us.”

Des’s eyes went to the mostly healed wound on Jake’s arm, and his friend nodded his head rapidly. “To top it all off, the safety systems seem to be turned off. I’d check, but Xaloria won’t let me into any of the settings anymore! This is ridiculous!”

“Jake.” Des’s eyes were wide and very round. His lip trembled as he looked up at his friend. “You think we’re not really here? You think we’re in the hospital with Kari?”

“That’s as good an explanation as any,” Jake muttered, not seeing what the point was. Stuck in Xaloria was stuck in Xaloria, it didn’t really matter where they actually were.

“Or what if we’ve all three been in a coma the whole time? What if we didn’t really see Kari?”

Jake looked at Des sharply. “Stop it,” he said, very seriously. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy. Besides, you and I are both here. We’re together.” He couldn’t hide his exasperation, and he threw his hands up over his head. “And as long as we are, sitting here isn’t doing us any good. So get up already!”

“Okay, okay.” Des held up his hands in defeated surrender. “Let’s go, already.”

The boys untied their horses and got them ready, then mounted up and started away from the mossy glade. Again, they headed toward the rising sun in the hope that Kari and her captors – surely they were that – had continued on in the same direction.

“You think we’re still going the right way?” asked Des when they had been riding for perhaps half an hour.

“They must be going somewhere specific,” said Jake. “If Kari’s a prisoner, I doubt they’re just wandering around with her. They’re taking her somewhere.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“We just have to figure out where.”

“Yeah.”

Jake pulled his mare to a halt, glaring over at Des. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

Des pulled his own horse to a stop, staring back at Jake with a mixture of surprise and anger. “What’s wrong with me? What’s
wrong
with me? Are you kidding me? Look around you, Jake! We’re
trapped
here in your stupid game. We’ve got no food. We slept
in the woods.
And here we are, wandering around blindly in the wilderness hoping we stumble across Kari because we don’t know what else to do. And, hey Jake? Just what is it you think we’re going to be able to do when –
if
– we even find her?”

“Des…” Jake began.

His friend threw up an angry hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Nah, look. I get it. You’re fine with all this, I bet. This is
your
place. You love Xaloria, you’ve been wishing you could stay here ever since the first time. You wish you could just live your whole life in Xaloria and never go home again. But count me out!”

“I never said that…” protested Jake, but he felt a sneaking suspicion forming in his gut that Des was at least partially right. But he had certainly never wanted his friends to be stuck in Xaloria against their will! How could Des think something like that?

“Jake,” said Des, talking right over him. “I
do not
want to live in Xaloria. This is your happy place, not mine. And you…you, who made the whole thing in the first place…you can’t even tell me why I can’t go home. So why don’t you get off my back and quit asking me what’s wrong?”

Before Jake could answer, Des wheeled his horse away and kicked it to a gallop. Racing across the low fields, he quickly left his friend behind. Jake watched the thief helplessly, angry at his friend for abandoning him. But he also felt something unpleasantly close to guilt.

Because it was true. He would like to stay in Xaloria. It
was
his happy place, a kingdom all his own where his mother or Principal Edward or especially Gerald could never get in and make him miserable again. The people of Xaloria – before they had forgotten him, anyway – respected him. They listened to him and they cheered for him and they never, ever made his decisions for him. This was the place where
he
got to make the decisions.

Except that wasn’t true anymore. Someone out there had hijacked his paradise.

“I wish I’d never even created Xaloria,” he whispered bitterly to himself.

As he spoke, the world around him wavered and shimmered and then cleared. It was exactly like what had happened the day before when Des tried to log out. Jake narrowed his eyes, wondering what could make the entire world shiver like that.
Not the world,
he reminded himself. The
program.

Suddenly, Jake knew what made Xaloria shudder.

Elated, he urged his horse to a gallop and pounded after Des. The thief was atop a nearby ridge, having pulled his horse to a stop when the program flickered. When Jake reached him, he was looking all about fearfully.

“Did you see it?” Des asked. “What was that?”

“It’s a hot fix,” explained Jake excitedly, reining in his horse beside Des. “I just figured it out. Somebody’s just changed the program again.”

“Hot fix what now?”

“It’s a small correction to the program. You don’t have to log out and recompile because it’s something small, so you can add or remove something while the game is still running.” Jake grinned. “The flickering thing…that was an update.”

“Okay…” Des said slowly. He made an elaborate show of looking around. “So what’s different?”

Jake scanned their surroundings as well, but neither boy spotted anything that had changed. “Maybe it’s not something visible. It could have just been one of the background settings.”

“Log out,” said Des hopefully. He remained in place, face falling. He started to try again.

“Hush,” hissed Jake, flapping one hand at Des for quiet. The muffled sound of voice had just reached him from somewhere over the rise. “Who’s that?”

Des glanced back over his shoulder, over the edge of the ridge. “Don’t know. I was trying to hear what they were saying when everything…you know, the update thingy.”

Sliding down from their horses, the two boys crouched low to the grassy earth and crept toward the voices.

“Careful,” Des whispered. His anger of a few minutes ago seemed forgotten, or at least set aside for the time being. He even smiled at Jake. “Could be bandits.”

Jake nodded silently, returning the smile although he didn’t feel happy. Still crouching, they kept themselves concealed in the tall meadow grass atop the ridge. Ahead and below, a thin line of forest extended in both directions. The voices seemed to come from within the trees. Jake and Des approached the edge of the trees and cautiously lifted their heads above the grass and wildflowers.

In a narrow gully hidden by the trees, several men scurried around a small clearing. They worked at taking down tents, loading them onto a group of pack horses. The shallow river had snaked its way around the hills and ran through the far side of the clearing. The camp had been pitched near the banks, and in the center of that camp stood a tall, burly man with long dark hair. He brushed dirt from his heavy, steel breastplate before donning it, the final piece of his armor. Next to him, a tiny woman with spiky blonde hair and cream-colored robes sat on a low boulder, staring intently toward the streaming river.

“It was a mistake coming back here,” grumbled the man, strapping on his breastplate and flexing his arms. “She didn’t know before, why should it be any different now?”

“Don’t question Prime, Torin,” answered the woman sharply, looking up from her contemplation of the burbling water.

Torin shook his head in angry disagreement. “Don’t question Prime,” he mimicked in a surprisingly high pitched voice for such a barrel-chested man. “And why don’t we question the Prime, Alys? What makes him so mighty? What knowledge has he that is not for the likes of us mere mortals, hm?”

“Without Prime, we would be as the Before,” snapped the woman called Alys. She rose from her seat, crossing her slender arms over her chest. “Only he will guide us to the Next.”

Torin slapped one meaty-fingered fist against his sturdy breastplate as he growled his response. “We are New Ones, Alys. We need no man’s guidance. Besides, I grow weary of your recitations of the Prime and his Doctrine.”

Alys reached for Torin’s arm, but the big man stalked away to leave her staring angrily at his armored back. When he’d gone, she glanced around anxiously. It was almost as if she knew Jake and Des were listening. Then Jake realized she was peering at the hired men, still busy breaking down the camp. Apparently satisfied they had not overheard, Alys set about gathering her own things for departure.

Des gave Jake a questioning look, but the knight shook his head and held a finger to his lips for silence. They waited as the men finished their work, and then led the pack horses off in the same direction Torin had taken. Alys stayed behind, along with the two burliest of the hired men. There was a single tent remaining, bright red where the others had borne blue and white stripes.

Alys gestured toward the red tent, and the two hirelings approached the flapped opening. Alys came up to stand between – but well behind – the two men.

“Interpreter?” she called. “Are you wakeful?”

A rustling from inside the tent startled one of the muscle men, and he took a quick step backward. A hand appeared from within, grasping the flap and flinging the fabric back to allow the tent’s occupant to exit. She came out with her head down, and the two boys could see the faintly glowing iron shackles on her wrists.

“Kari!” shouted Jake and Des in almost the same breath, both of them bursting up out of concealment.

Everyone in the clearing below spun around, astonished faces turned up toward the sound of the boy’s combined shout. Kari’s eyes widened.

“Jake! Des! Help me!” she screamed, breaking into a run. Torin must have heard the commotion, for he came running back into the clearing at that moment and intercepted the fleeing girl. Wrapping his massive arms around her, he lifted her high off the ground with her kicking feet churning the air uselessly.

“Let her go!” shouted Jake, dashing down the hillside with his sword drawn.

“We cannot,” Alys replied, her voice calm and even despite the impending battle. “Depart this place, young fools, or we shall be forced to remove you.”

“We’re not leaving without Kari,” shouted Des, readying an arrow as he ran behind Jake.

Alys moved closer to Torin, her cool expression unchanged. “Destroy them,” she ordered.

The half dozen henchmen abandoned their packhorses to rush toward Jake and Des, brandishing hooked short swords. Jake strode forward bravely to meet them while Des sprinted to the right. The thief ran to a nearby tree with several low-hanging branches. Hooking himself up by one, he swiftly climbed to the higher limbs where he would have a clear field of fire.

Four of the hired men came after Jake, while two broke off to pursue Des. They were too late to catch him, and together the two men fumbled up the tree after him.

Jake had no time to see how Des fared against his pursuers. He jerked his head back just in time to avoid a vicious chop from one of the hooked swords. Sidestepping and lunging forward, Jake swung his own sword in a backhanded arc that bit deeply into the man’s exposed throat. The henchman clutched at his bleeding wound, crumpling to his knees with a gurgling shriek. Continuing in the same smooth motion, Jake spun on his heels and brought his sword around again to decapitate the man.

“Easy pickings, Des!” he shouted to his friend without turning away from his remaining three foes. “No prob--”

A sharp blow to the temple stunned Jake before he finished speaking. One of the men had struck him with the hilt of his little sword. Stars flashed in Jake’s eyes and he staggered back, momentarily stunned. He lost his grip on his sword, and the blade fell to the ground with a clang as it struck a half-buried rock.

Seeing Jake’s distress, Des maneuvered around on his high branch and launched an arrow at the henchman closest to his friend. Ignoring the two men still trying to clamber up after him, Des sent arrow after arrow lancing through the air to cover his friend. Though his first shot flew wide, whistling past the men’s heads to disappear in the trees beyond, his second and third struck home. Jake’s attackers, one of them wounded in his thigh and shoulder, threw their arms over their heads and ducked away from the barrage.