Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel (14 page)

He examined the notes closely anyway, tracing the rows of illegible symbols with his thumb. It certainly wasn’t Kari’s handwriting, but there was something about it that seemed familiar. Jake frowned, his brow furrowed in thought.

“I should know who wrote this,” he said, lifting his eyes to look at Des with naked frustration. “I’ve seen it before, I know I have! I just can’t think of where!”

Des let the tent flap fall and crossed the narrow room formed by the slanting fabric walls to stand at Jake’s shoulder. In the tinted light that penetrated the walls, he looked down at the parchment clutched in Jake’s hand and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. Reaching out a hand, he traced one finger along a column of number-like figures. “But I can tell you what it says. These are coordinates, and these over on this side are timestamps. It’s exactly how my football program keeps track of plays.”

Jake squinted at the figures Des had indicated, cocking his head to one side. Almost, the figures
did
look like numbers. As he stared hard at the parchment, willing the message to reveal itself to him, his vision began to blur and suddenly he saw it. It was like it had only been out of focus, and now he could read the same numbers Des had seen.

“You’re right!” Jake struggled to keep his eyes focused on the numbers long enough to read them all. “These are VR system timestamps. I’ve seen them in the error logs. Eleven digits, so that’s days, hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths of seconds. “

“And look,” said Des, pointing to another line of figures. “Fourth from the bottom. I’m not sure anymore, but that should be the timestamp for yesterday afternoon at two twenty-six and thirty-two point nine four seconds. And it lines up with the coordinates here…” Des slid his finger across the page, pointing to another grouping of digits.

Letting Des take hold of the parchment, Jake dug out his magical map. Unfolding it, he found the orange blips representing himself and Des and centered them on the map. Then he requested a coordinate display. When the numbers flashed at the top of his magic map, Jake compared them to the numbers on the parchment.

“We’re right on top of it,” he said. So whatever it was, it happened right here but yesterday. They must have come here when it happened, that’s why he said Kari didn’t know before.”

Lowering the map, Jake looked at Des with a slowly spreading grin. “All we have to do is find the next one, and beat them to it. What’s the next timestamp that hasn’t happened yet?”

“Well…” Des looked at the parchment again. “Here, there’s one almost exactly two days after the last one…so, tomorrow. Assuming time doesn’t go all crazy on us again. I mean, what if a thousand years goes by in the next ten minutes. Whoever’s against us did it once, apparently, so couldn’t they do that again? Seems like a pretty good way of getting rid of us.”

“No,” Jake shook his head. “Then this Prime character would miss the next event too. Besides, system time is fixed to the actual hardware. Maybe the coordinates are too, I’m not sure, but the time is. A thousand years, or a hundred thousand years, tomorrow will always be tomorrow.”

“Great.” Des wiped a hand across his brow. “One thing we don’t have to worry about then. So we know where they’re going next, and when they’re going to be there. We just need to figure out why.”

The two boys started going through the notes again, but the scribbled parchments offered little insight into the minds of Kari’s NPC captors. One peculiar drawing caught Jake’s attention. He picked it up from among the others on the wooden desk, puzzled. It was a pencil sketch, an elongated symbol of some kind like a plus sign with a loop at the top. Looking over the other pages scattered on the desk, he saw the symbol repeated on most of them, though never as large as it was on the paper he now held.

“This looks like a hieroglyph,” he mused, then snapped his fingers as he recognized it from Ms. Johns’Ancient History classes. “It’s an ankh. It’s a symbol that stands for life. We learned all about it when we were studying ancient Egypt.”

Des scrunched up his face. “History class,” he said, making the words sound as if they had left a sour taste in his mouth. “I was never any good there. What’s it doing in your game?”

“I used a whole bunch of hieroglyphs when I was designing the first module for Xaloria,” Jake said, thinking back to the earliest days of the project. As a matter of fact, the idea for Xaloria itself had grown out of the VR-based project on Ancient Egypt he’d done for Ms. Johns’class. “No, the real question is what’s it doing in these notes? Look, it shows up on almost every page. What’s so important about the ankh?”

“Weird,” Des agreed, but it was clear he did not see any solution. “I guess it means something, but what?”

Jake started to shake his head, starting to feel frustrated again. Just when it seemed like they were getting somewhere, another brick wall slammed down in his face. He was starting to feel like his whole life was going to be that way. Just when he got used to his situation, started to feel his way around and figure out how to live with it, something else would come along and screw everything up. Like his mother, bringing Gerald into his life just when he’d finally started to accept Leiner Hills. Like this incomprehensible mystery staring him in the face just when he thought he’d been about to rescue Kari. Jake’s hands clenched into fists. He was about to say a word his mother would be very disappointed by when inspiration struck him.

“That’s what they were looking for!” he shouted, throwing the parchment down on the table and running back out of the tent. Confused, Des followed after him shouting for Jake to wait up a minute.

“Help me look,” called Jake as Des came out of the tent. Jake ran over to the edge of the stream and bent over, staring into the water. “It could be anywhere. Under the water, in the rocks, carved in a tree.”

“What could be?” Des asked, feeling lost.

Jake stood up straight and turned to look at him, his face suddenly elated. “The ankh!” He motioned for Des to join him atop a large boulder that squatted over the stream, half buried in the riverbank and jutting out a few inches over the shallow water. Jake and Des looked down in awe. Through the clear water, thousands of tiny, dark pebbles colored the creek bed. The bottom was a gray mosaic broken beneath their vantage point by a pattern of lighter-colored stones arranged together. The design stretched from one side of the gray creek-bed to the other, a mosaic within the greater mosaic. The lighter colored pebbles formed a giant, white ankh that seemed to shimmer beneath the surface.

“Incredible,” Jake murmured.

Des pumped his fist in the air joyfully. “Alright!” he shouted. “That’s it, then! That’s why they came here, to see this thing.”

“Yeah, but what is it?” asked Jake. “They certainly didn’t seem to know.” He tried to remember the specific things Alys and Torin had said. As he replayed the overheard conversation a new piece of the puzzle clicked into place for him. “They think Kari knows what it means. At least, they think she’s
supposed
to know. That’s why they called her the Interpreter, and that’s why this Prime person is keeping her here!”

“I thought Prime was the guy messing around with your program, though.” Des sounded doubtful. “I mean, shouldn’t he already know what it is if he put it there?”

“Not if it’s an anomaly. Something he didn’t plan on.” Jake turned excitedly to Des. “Sometimes when you’re working the VR, trying something new, an older part of the code breaks down. The instructions are incompatible. You get weird glitches and anomalies, maybe stuff like this. Most of the time you don’t even realize you’ve broken something, and when you finally stumble across it you’ve got to spend hours and hours tracking the fault and figuring out how to fix whatever it is. That must be what Prime is doing!”

“I get it,” said Des slowly. “No, yeah, I get it. Like that time our water pipe was leaking in the wall over the fuse box. Any time somebody ran the kitchen faucet, the whole house shorted out. Took Mom and Dad forever to figure out what was going on.”

Jake laughed, clapping his hands. “Exactly,” he said. “Same principle. Prime knows there’s something out of whack, but he doesn’t know why, and he must think Kari can tell him.”

“We need to figure it out first, then,” decided Des, crossing his arms. “Then we beat Prime and get Kari back.”

Jake slapped Des on the shoulder, grinning wider than ever. He felt like they had reached a turning point and that from now on things were tipping in their favor. He was glad to have his friend along. He pointed to the scrap of parchment Des still held, crumpled in one hand.

“So where’s the next event?”

The two boys sat down on top of the boulder. Jake pulled out his map again, and Des slowly deciphered the coordinates for the next anomalous event. Jake looked for the coordinates on his map, his excitement growing by the moment.

“That used to be Indigo Fjord,” he said, pointing to a spot on his map. “Looks a little different now, like there’s a big lake there instead. Maybe the ankhs all show up underwater?”

Des shook his head, not caring how the ankh manifested itself. He was staring at the distance between Jake’s finger on the map and the two very small, orange dots at the bottom. “There’s no way we can get there in time,” he said. He glanced toward the skyline, even though he knew there was nothing there. “We don’t even know for sure how much time is left.”

“Display System Time!” shouted Jake.

Ten feet ahead of them, a small white box appeared with a digital clock. It hovered in midair for five second before disappearing. Jake was elated that at least this one feature still responded to his commands.

“How’d you do that?” asked Des, shocked. “Why didn’t you do it before?”

“VR system function,” Jake said. “I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it’s completely separate from Xaloria. Remember, tomorrow is tomorrow regardless of how much time goes by. And no matter what Prime does to time
inside
the game, we’ve still got just over twenty-four hours to get to Indigo Fjord.”

“What are we waiting for, then?” asked Des, bounding to his feet and slapping one hand against the other. “Let’s get moving!”

Jake handed off the reins to a stable boy in front of the Emerald Wing, glancing up at the chipped wooden sign swinging from its iron post out over the door of the inn. The wood was old, rotten in places, and the paint mostly chipped away. It matched the building, which was in a similar state of aged disrepair.

A dozen feet away, Des chatted easily with a local hawker he had flagged down as the merchant cruised up and down the street of broken cobblestones carrying a broad wooden tray on a strap around his neck. The man was selling “relics,” which he’d supposedly bought from adventurers. Since Jake had never seen this particular merchant before, and as far as he knew there weren’t any other true adventurers in Xaloria, he assumed the merchandise was all fake.

“Yeah,” he heard Des argue with the man. “But surely you’d know someone who’s interested, even in just a few of them?” Des held up a handful of the archaic gold coins, jingling them on his palm. “I’m telling you, we found them in a treasure chest buried deep within an ancient, forgotten tomb in the southlands. My friend over there had to slay a mountain troll, and we fought a spectral wizard to boot. Why, these coins here must be a thousand years old!”

He glanced over at Jake standing outside the inn, throwing him a wink as he told the merchant – truthfully, in a sense – the age of the useless coins. Jake shook his head, stifling a laugh, and headed for the heavy oaken door leading into the Emerald Wing. The door hung slightly askew in its frame, another sign of poverty and the passing time.

Unlike Everheart, which had blossomed into a rich and bustling city over the centuries, the township called Flight had dwindled into a pathetic scattering of two-room houses, many of them abandoned and all in varying states of disrepair. This village was dying, slowly drying up. In another few years, there’d be no one here at all. Jake paused at the door to the inn, looking around the sad village and taking in the boarded up windows and faded paint. He had designed Flight as a major crossroads for commerce, and the town had been rich and beautiful. All that was gone now. With a sigh, Jake pushed through the crooked door and went into the inn.

Like the rest of Flight, the Emerald Wing was worn out and tired. The yew tables were stained and scarred, and Jake thought there were fewer than there should be. A glance at the wide stone fireplace told him where at least some of the furniture had gone, though the blaze on the hearth was low and sputtering at the moment. The floors were scuffed from centuries of dirty boots and shifting tables. Grime clouded the windows, blocking out his view of the street and most of the light that should have shone through as well. The interior of the common room was draped in heavy shadow, pitifully illuminated by the dying fire and a handful of greasy oil lamps hanging from the heavy, sagging beams of the ceiling. The lamps cast a sullen, yellow glow over the dozen or so listless peasants lingering about the bar.

Jake straightened his shoulders as if the gloom were a physical weight he was trying to dislodge. Striding across the common room, he chose a table not too far from the door and sat down to wait for Des. Hopefully the thief would manage some kind of trade with the hawker. Otherwise, they’d be sleeping outside again.

He hadn’t been waiting long when a young man, not far from Jake’s own age, approached his table hesitantly. The young man wore clean, if threadbare, clothes of homespun wool. A dingy apron that hadn’t been white for years was belted about his scrawny waist. The boy eyed Jake’s shining chainmail and cleared his throat.

“Good day to you, noble sir,” he said in a childlike voice, keeping his eyes averted from Jake’s face as if afraid to meet the knight’s eyes. “I’m Gravin, sir, the innkeeper’s son. Can I get you an ale or any other refreshment?”

“In a minute,” Jake said distractedly, waving the boy away. “I’m waiting for a friend.”

“As you say, sir,” Gravin quickly agreed. “I’ll be off washing the bar, then. Come on up if you change your mind.”