At the mouth of the boulder-choked cleft, a patch of gray weeds quivered in the quiet air. Silence pressed around her, deep and anticipatory, and a sense of being watched crawled up her back. She coughed, but the creepy feeling did not wane.
With one eye on her surroundings, she stuffed the Snak-Pak and water bottle back into her pack. Standing, she reshouldered the bag, then flipped through the manual’s thin pages one last time, hoping something might catch her eye. No luck. No index, either. She was on her own.
Pushing her glasses back up, she surveyed her two choices again. Surely most “participants” were not as stubborn as she and had eagerly received the orientation she’d disdained. No doubt the prescribed method of path selection was part of their counsel. Since the lower road looked the more traveled, it seemed the logical choice—and the easiest. There was no point in confronting her fear of heights unless she had no other options.
She slid the manual into the right rear pocket of her jumpsuit and was just starting forward when a sibilant hissing issued from the cleft. She froze, her heart once more pounding against her rib cage.
The silence returned.
Mottled red-brown to blend with their surroundings, rock dragons could supposedly sit motionless for hours awaiting their prey. But several careful inspections of the surrounding rock walls revealed nothing, and when no further sound followed the first, she exhaled deeply.
“Wimp,” she muttered, her voice grating in the quiet. “It was probably just—”
Something scrabbled among the boulders and burst from the gray weeds—a blood red lizard? Insect? Crustacean? Whatever it was, it scuttled crablike across the sand, zipping by her and back along the road, then darted left into a crack in the rock.
Callie stood very still, struggling to put a name to the creature and failing. Another engineered bioform? Curiosity prodded her to investigate, but caution stood in the way—she’d have to leave the road to do so.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” she reminded herself and set off briskly down the lower path. Only when she’d put a curtain of rock between herself and the gloomy cleft did her uneasiness abate.
She soon encountered a second branching where the canyon widened briefly. Again she chose the low option, proceeding along a small stream through a field of pungent yellow wild flowers. Six Ys later, however, she was decidedly uncomfortable. The sheer walls loomed close, and the sun—or whatever was substituting for it—was clearly descending. She’d been prudently staying on the canyon floor, but now impatience flapped its dark wings, demanding more results for the time and effort she’d expended. If she went up, maybe she could see the arched gateway she sought. “Okay,” she said. “Next opportunity, I’ll do it.”
Only now the opportunities stopped.
Worse, her road had acquired an unsettling dinginess. The incoming paths she’d passed earlier had been similarly discolored, which she’d taken as indications of heavy use. Now she wondered if they might have been tricks, side spurs to confuse and distract. What if, at that first juncture, she’d chosen the wrong path?
The thought of backtracking nearly brought her to tears. As far as she’d come, she’d never make it back before dark. And there was that rock dragon to consider as well.
But if she
was
off the path . . .
Maybe she was just being paranoid again. Maybe it was the light reflecting off the surrounding red rock. Or dust. She paused at yet another turn and squatted to rub her fingers across the pavement. Sure enough, they came away coated with a fine red grit. “See?” she told herself. “It’s still white underneath. Nothing to worry about.”
And then that sense of being watched poured over her again, thick and stifling. Nape hairs erect, she eyed her surroundings—sand, rock, a few weeds. Nothing at all alarming. Yet the feeling persisted. Creepy. Invasive. Almost . . . evil.
Slowly she arose, rubbing her fingers on her thigh.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw it standing twenty feet upstream, half hidden by a boulder. It jumped immediately out of sight, but the afterimage remained—humanoid, hairless, all arms and legs, with luminescent gray skin and two pitlike eyespots.
More alien than the cactus grass or the red crustacean—or even Alex and his vanish-into-thin-air trick—this thing’s very aura reeked of otherness. It struck a chord of such primal terror, she had backed ten yards downstream before she knew it.
She stopped and pulled herself together. It hadn’t attacked her. Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe it was in another dimension. Maybe it wasn’t even dangerous.
No. It
was
dangerous. Intuition, perhaps, but definitely as strong a feeling as she’d ever known.
Fighting panic, Callie hurried along the path, desperate now for an escape route. No matter what heights she had to brave, it was better than being down here with that
thing
.
But the canyon snaked on with no new branches—as if the creature had waited until she was trapped before revealing itself. It followed her steadily, and she glimpsed it now and then, peering from behind the rocks, an unnerving hunger in its “eyes.”
Finally, in the late afternoon, bone tired and increasingly desperate, she rounded a bend and found deliverance. Her narrow canyon descended sharply into another, the juncture marked by a stand of bright green cottonwoods. Stopping at the top of a twenty-foot limestone cliff, she spied the Y she sought. One leg continued down to the intersecting canyon. The other wound through the trees and switch-backed up the wall behind them.
Laughing with relief, she descended the switchbacks alongside the cliff and was just starting across the grassy swale toward the beckoning cottonwoods, when a low voice sounded behind her: “I don’t think you want to go that way, miss.”
Callie whirled with a cry. On the rock behind and above her crouched a brown-skinned, bearded man with glowing blue eyes.
He was not another alien after all, but human, like her. And his eyes didn’t really glow—they were just so blue, they contrasted dramatically with his beard and tanned skin. Dirty brown hair curled over his shirt collar, and he wore a scratched leather vest above filthy jeans and sturdy hiking boots. A sheathed knife as long as his forearm hung at one hip, a holstered gun at the other. He carried a rifle with a rubberized stock and a white ceramic barrel encircled with wire rings.
Was he another participant? Or one of the distractions that rule three instructed her to avoid?
“What’s down there?” she asked.
“Swarm of harries.” His voice was low and pleasant, at odds with his appearance. He dropped lightly to the ground before her. “Believe me,” he added, squinting at the trees, “you don’t want to stir them up.”
She inspected the cottonwoods doubtfully. He pointed past her, sleeve and forearm layered with dirt. The smell confirmed his need for a bath.
“There in the tallest tree,” he said. “That blob hanging in the middle.”
She finally saw it—a pale mass suspended from a stout, bright-leaved branch. Other smaller shapes hung scattered around it. She shaded her eyes. “Harries, you say?”
“They look like flying manta rays. Paralyze their victims with the venom in their stingers, then suck the blood out of them.”
Callie shuddered. Suspicion swirled through her. She turned back to him. “I thought the white road was a safe zone—a place where things like that can’t hurt you.”
“It is.” He eyed her appraisingly. “I figure you left it, oh, on the first or second branching.”
“Left it? What—”
“Look back the way you’ve come.” He gestured over his shoulder. “It isn’t white, it’s pink. You’re on a sucker path.”
She was well aware of the road’s dinginess, but the manual had said nothing about sucker paths. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Just another ‘participant.’ ” The man’s lips twitched bitterly.
“So why are
you
off the road?”
He shrugged. “After you’re here long enough, you realize there’s no point to it.”
“But if it’s a safe zone—”
“It goes nowhere.”
She regarded him with renewed suspicion.
Antagonists within the
Arena work to prevent you from attaining your goal . . . avoid all distractions
. “So, uh, where do
you
think I ought to go?” Callie asked.
“I’m headed for camp now. You can come with me, or go back and try to find where you went off. I wouldn’t advise that, though.”
“Naturally not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. You say you have a camp? There are others of you, then?”
“Yeah, we have a good-sized group.” He glanced past her shoulder. “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get going. I’ve got fresh meat with me.” He pointed up the rock, and Callie saw his backpack leaning where he’d left it. Twice the size of hers, it had a dog-sized lizard tied across its top. Rock dragon, perhaps?
“They’ll be hunting soon,” he added. “I’d rather not be here when they break.”
The old pressure-sale method
, Callie thought wryly.
Pitch your product
and give the customer five minutes to decide. Come on, Alex, do you think
I can’t see through that?
She motioned toward the canyon walls. “By all means. Don’t let me stop you.”
He frowned, regarding her with those intensely blue eyes.
She waved him on. “Go ahead. But thanks for the warning.”
“Those things will kill you, miss.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Callie headed toward the trees, feeling his eyes on her back.
Ahead, the pale blob fluttered and rippled.
Avoid all distractions
, the manual said.
Don’t leave the white road
.
Except . . . he was right about the first branching. She’d avoided the whiter path because of her fear of heights. A fear Alex must have known about, since she’d mentioned it to the receptionist.
She glanced back, but the stranger was gone.
Surprise gave way to smug assurance.
See? He was a distraction. If
these things were as bad as he said, he wouldn’t let me walk right into them
.
She’d nearly reached the grove now, the gray blob differentiating into pale lavender wings and flat manta-ray bodies. Layered onionlike, they slid over one another in a writhing mass, a translucent wingtip occasionally stretching out from the huddle. The sphere began to pulse. She slowed, staring up at it. Fear needled her extremities. Her intended route passed directly beneath the throbbing mass.
So what’re you going to do? Go back?
Callie chewed on her lip, waffling again, her stomach quivering. Irritation overwhelmed her fear.
He
was just trying to scare you off. Now get on with it
.
Resolutely she forced herself forward. A comb-and-waxed-paper trilling danced around her, and the breeze carried a sweet, musty odor. She walked faster.
The old cottonwood loomed above. As she drew under it the trilling mounted. Then the quivering blob contracted, throbbed, and burst like a grenade, flinging pale, purplish manta shapes into the air. They flapped up through the branches to the open sky, whirling like debris in a dust devil.
Callie wanted to run for the rocks, fifty feet away now, but that would take her off the path. Doggedly she followed the pavement as it curved away from safety. Her scalp prickled, and her hands shook. She broke into a trot, rounding the hollow and coming out into the flat.
The stranger’s voice rang out from the rocks across the clearing. “Here they come!”
A pale shape dove by her. She dodged sideways, glimpsing shiny, jointed appendages dangling wasplike from its posterior. A turquoise beam shot from the rocks to the beast, now a yard in front of her.
Thwip, thwip, thwip
. Its body deflated in a puff of purple smoke, fluttering to the path like an empty sack. Two more beams burst from the rocks, downing two more harries as they swooped.
Ahead, the stranger rose from his hiding place and told her to run. Again she was tempted to leave the path. But nothing had touched her yet, and she wasn’t convinced anything could.
A series of beams slit the air in a succession of rapid thwips. Callie was aware of more hits, more puffs of purple gas, more falling sacklike bodies. Car-sized boulders loomed ahead on the left. Maybe they would afford some protection.
But then a harry caught her from behind, tentacles slapping along the left side of her back in lines of tingling heat. She staggered, crying out more from shock than pain.
The lavender shape skimmed by and imploded in a puff of purple. She dodged the plume as best she could, coughing on the sickening-sweet smell.
But I’m on the path
, Callie protested, looking down through watering eyes to be sure. Nausea and dizziness churned in her. The heat on her back gave way to numbness.
More thwips. More beams. Tentacles came at her face. She spun away into another attack, and fire tracked along her upper arm. After that, reality devolved into nightmarish chaos. Shadow shapes whirled around her—malevolent wing flaps, hirsute tentacles, bulbous bodies bursting into purple at the ends of blue-green lines of light. Dead rays littered the ground, tripping her. One burst over her head, dowsing her with the eye-watering, stomach-turning gas. She doubled over, staggering on wobbly knees. Tentacles slapped across her back, and new waves of hot numbness sent her reeling. As she sought to regain her balance, a harry clamped on to her right hip, tentacles winding down her leg like a tetherball round its pole, a thousand burning needles pumping venom into her flesh. The wing flaps clutched her leg. The mouth bit through fabric and skin into her waist.
Panicked, Callie beat at the leathery body, white light spreading in amebic splotches across her vision. Someone was screaming hysterically.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die here, and I don’t even know where I
am!
She saw her mother. Lisa. Daddy . . .
Suddenly the stranger was looming over her, firing the rifle with one arm as he ripped the harry off her leg with the other. He lifted her effortlessly. Her legs and left arm were numb and useless, but she clung to his neck with her right arm as he carried her among the rocks, firing as he ran.