Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel (6 page)

Guess that I was going to find out just how capable they were pretty quickly.

But if we’d all been involved with Alive Action Games, and if their policy for only recruiting the very best in young, beta-testing talent was true, then I guessed that I might be best off keeping an eye on all of them . . . or,
maybe
, both eyes.

Like had happened at the Ignition Tournament the day before, we were all sorted into specific groups, this time ranging from A to Z.

I ended up right in the middle of M.

And I saw, with a touch of apprehension, that the black kid was in my group.

The purple-shirted invigilator in charge of Group M handed out all the information we would need, the times for each of our fixtures, and the places we needed to head, and then left us alone.

When I checked over my name, I was a little annoyed to see that I wouldn’t be playing till three o’clock in the afternoon.

Though I hate the expression, I knew that I was ‘in the zone,’ that I was raring to get going with things, to brush off all the crap that had gone on before.

I wanted to start into the Grand Tournament, do my best to go as far as I could.

I was just wondering what to do, whether I should go back up to the room with Dad, maybe have a lie down till game time, when I caught the sight of the black kid coming towards me.

For some reason, I got myself kind of fixed onto his dreadlocks, and those multi-coloured beads hanging from each strand.

Like I was a five-year-old at his first day of school, I glanced back over my shoulder to Dad, as if he might be able to protect me from an incoming potential
friend
.

But Dad, of course, was already fixed back on his mobile, working out his next chess move.

When I looked back to the black kid, he was standing right in front of me.

He stood so close that our noses almost touched.

And he was grinning from ear to ear.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, not sounding so enthusiastic.

I checked over his shoulder and saw that his dad was deep in conversation with another adult—a gamer, I think, rather than a parent of a gamer.

“You, uh,” he said, “wrapped up with Alive Action too, huh?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, and then, thinking that it was appropriate, I added, “My name’s Zak Steepleman.”

“I’m James,” he said, “James Gonnerall.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Back there’s my dad.” He nodded over my shoulder. “And I guess that must be
your
dad.”

I couldn’t help but smile back in reply. I kind of liked his tone. He was making fun of both of us, for us both being like a pair of pathetic little school boys . . . which I guess, on reflection, was just what we were.

“You, uh,” James said, “wanna run off for a while?”

“Huh?”

“Come on,” James said, motioning with his head in the direction he was already heading off in.

For some reason, I followed after him.

I only looked back to Dad right when we were rounding the corner and heading out of his line of sight. I dug into my pocket and thought about sending him a text. And then, seeing that he was still just as engrossed in his chess game as he had been this entire weekend, I decided that it was probably better not to rock his concentration.

He could call me when he broke out of his daze.

11

“I GUESS this isn’t your first time here, then?” James said, turning side-on so as not to bump into the constant stream of people passing along the corridor.

I shook my head. “Nah, I’ve been coming here for five years—this is only my third time in the Grand Tournament, though.”

James looked at me with wide eyes. “Really? I mean, how old
are
you?”

“Thirteen.”

James smirked. “I’m fourteen and this is only my first time in the Grand Tournament.” He paused, turned side-on again to miss a pair of toddlers barrelling past at knee-level. “What are you, some kinda prodigy?”

I smiled back. “Nah, first year I got knocked out in the First Round, second year I got through to the Second, then headed off.”

“Still,” James said, “that’s better than I did those two years.” He turned his attention out to the space in front of him, to the corridor that he was walking. “Didn’t even enter, did I?”

We walked on for a good while.

I noticed, quite a few times, James glancing back over his shoulder as if he was afraid that his dad might’ve been following after us—ready to catch him and haul him back.

Maybe it was because I was just so certain that
my
dad would be wrapped up in his chess match till kingdom come that I didn’t have such worries, but James seemed just a touch paranoid to me.

James seemed to catch onto my observation, though I didn’t say anything out loud. “Yeah,” he said, “it drives me crazy—coming with him . . . I mean, it’s
embarrassing
all the questions he goes about asking, messing with the gamers, with the developers, I mean, and like how he keeps asking everyone
how much
they make, if they’ve got a house, what they studied at university, you know, stuff like that.”

“Yeah,” I said, not really knowing what he was talking about at all.

“He doesn’t believe that it’s a career yet, that’s the thing, but whatever, right?”

“Yeah.”

We reached a railing which looked out over the floor of the conference centre, where people were streaming back and forth, moving about from one place to another. Together we stood at the railing, the two of us holding onto it.

James stared off into the distance for a long while, squeezing the railing so tight that I watched his knuckles go white from the effort.

It reminded me a little of intermediate gamers when they’ve either reached the limits of their abilities right in the middle of an intense matchup, or that they’re concentrating so hard that they’re about to lose their entire sense of themselves.

Though James had been nothing but kind to me so far, I couldn’t help but put that one away for later on.

After all, it could happen that we’d end up facing off later on in the competition.

Even
early on
considering that we were both in Group M.

When James turned to me, he wasn’t smiling anymore. There was a little steel in his eyes, and it was almost like he was looking right through me. “You, uh, get that package in the post too—from Alive Action?”

“What?” I said, not thinking for a moment.

And then I remembered.

Thought of
Halls of Hallow
and then nodded.

“Some weird crap, huh?” James said, looking back over the railing, out across the crowd.

I shrugged.

“What was the point of it?” James said. “What I mean is, if they were shutting down, why’d they bother to send us anything along at all? If they couldn’t so much as give us a phone call to let us know that they weren’t spotting us for those All-Access Passes, couldn’t they have at least, you know, sent a note along with that crappy game?”

“Yeah,” I said, staring off over the heads of the people in the crowd.

Though I wanted to add something more, I didn’t want James to think that I was a weirdo right off the bat.

. . . Maybe I wanted to give him some time to work
that one
out for himself.

“Zak?” James said. “Did you see that kid at the Winners’ Breakfast—I mean the ginger kid, you know, the one who came in later on?”

I felt a quiver pass through my stomach, and I was worried—just for a second—that those pancakes might be coming up for an encore . . . a
vomity
encore.

“Yeah?” I said, now feeling deeply worried.

“Well,” he said, turning to face me, “don’t you think it was weird, like, how he sort of appeared in that cut scene, you know, with that guy in the cloak?”

My stomach tightened itself up into a knot and I could feel my mobile buzzing away in my pocket. As I reached down for it, saw that Dad was calling me, James reached out, squeezed my shoulder and then said, “Look, we’ll speak later, okay? After the First Round?”

I nodded to him and picked up the call.

12

“DAD?” I said, holding the phone up to my ear.

“Where are you?”

He sounded a little more brisk than I would’ve thought he’d be—as if he’d just come home after a
long, hard
day at work rather than if he’d just been tapping away at his mobile playing computer chess with his best buddies.

“Uh,” I said, looking about me, trying to establish my coordinates using the giant letters that hung from the ceiling. “F,” I eventually said.

“Why did you go wandering off?”

I gave a shrug though I knew we didn’t have any sort of video chat going on here. “Dunno, you seemed busy, I kinda got talking with one of the other kids—one of the gamers—and we just got walking away, I guess.”

“Oh, all right,” he said, “wait there,
I’ll
find you, okay?”

That seemed to lighten his tone just a little—I noticed it in his voice.

Though maybe the one thing that me and my dad have in common is that we’re just about the most introverted of introverts—that video games are to me what chess is to him—he always seems pretty pleased when I’m actually, you know,
interacting
with other people.

With other kids.

Even if they’re
video- game
kids.

I guess that’s something he’s picked up from my mum, and how she’s almost always harping on at me to ‘go outside’ and ‘play in the real world.’

Yeah, but what she doesn’t realise about the Real World is that it has sharp corners, and bullies, and crap like that . . .

I gave Dad a bit better description of my surroundings, what with the railing, and the people down below, and how I was
right below
the letter F, and I hoped that would help him get about the place.

That was when I realised, back not ten or fifteen minutes ago, the invigilator—as part of our briefing—had told us that there was an app we could download which featured a map of the whole of Gamers Con . . . and, of course, our current location too.

Though all that info was right there in the brochure we’d got given the day before, along with the Open-Access Pass, I guess the invigilator had thought that since we were
hardcore
gamers we might not have thought to dirty our minds with something so base as
reading
.

I got onto the internet on my mobile and got it all downloaded. I guessed that Dad had already downloaded his own copy. That’s the strange thing about him. He goes along appearing to have that chess app open on his mobile twenty-four hours a day, and then he’ll turn around at some random time, point to his mobile screen and show me some app that I’ve never even heard of that he’s downloaded on the sly.

Guess that says something about my coolness that my dad can beat me when it comes down to cutting-edge technology . . .
outside
of video games that is . . .

“Hi.”

I flinched at the word. Glanced about me. Caught sight of the person who’d spoken.

I recognised her right away, of course.

The blond girl.

The girl who’d also been working with Alive Action Games.

I couldn’t help but stare right back into her light-green eyes.

And those eyes of hers seemed to strip all the words off the surface of my tongue.

“Uh, uh,” I just about got out.

She grinned back at me. “Yeah, I know, right? A
girl
. And not
only
is she at a gaming convention—at
Gamers Con
—but she’s got the audacity to take part in the Grand Tournament, something’s not right with the world, is it?”

Actually, I was more focussed on how she was using words like ‘audacity’ which made me feel a thousand shades of stupid.

Made me wonder if—maybe, just
maybe
—I should revise my attitude towards reading and English class in general.

She hunched her shoulders up so they almost came level with her ears, and then she let loose a deep breath.

Her breath smelled a little of almonds: the rich kind that they put in chocolate.

I swallowed hard catching an aftertaste of sugar from those pancakes.

I would’ve liked to follow what she said next, but my heart near enough pounded her words right out of my eardrums.

I felt
cold
all of a sudden—
really
cold.

She stared out over the crowd with that same mid-air stare that James had used, and then she snapped back onto me, as if she was expecting
me
to make conversation. Then, seeing that I
obviously
wasn’t, she said, “So, aren’t you going to at least show off some
surface
-level politeness?” She was wrapping her long blond hair about her index finger now, knotting it so tight that it cut off the blood flow to the end of her finger—made it turn a dark purple.

“Uh,” I started again, somewhat poorly, “you, uh, you were with Alive Action too?”

She rolled her eyes, and actually fixed a look of disgust across her features—bunching up her nose in a way that reminded me of a cat giving its food a sniff and deciding that it won’t lower itself to
eating
it. “Unfortunately.”

I found myself growing just a little more confident.

That
chilly
feeling was just about leaving my bones.

“Uh,” I said, “that was pretty annoying, wasn’t it? Like how they made us take part in that
beginners’
tournament.”

She shrugged. “Oh I dunno, guess it was the best that Gamers Con could do for us.” Her eyes crossed over mine, and then she said, “What’s your name?”

I told her.

“Huh,” she said, “what’re your family, some sort of church-roof specialists?”

It was funny, though I’d had to live with my name my entire life, though I’d had to suffer through many—
many
—classes, and many different iterations of my name in varying comical contexts, the kids at school had never come up with that one.

I was so taken aback that I didn’t feel at all anxious when I replied, “I’ll have to add that one to the book.”