sorcery and science 04.5 - masquerade (15 page)

Marin wasn’t sure if he was quizzing her or making an attempt at small talk. She answered anyway. She really couldn’t help herself. It was just so sloppy to leave questions dangling. They
had
to be answered. They were practically screaming for it.

“Wings are constructions of light metal—or fiber, as in carbon—that are pointed at the back. You know, they split the air into lower and upper streams. Think of an egg. Then imagine you cut a slice out of the middle of it. If you were to cut a thin strip out of this slice, then stick the other two halves together, the shape you’d get looks pretty much like if you’d look through a wing. In any event, the airstream has a longer path to go around the bulkier top. That means that the air pressure is lower on the top. Logically, that creates the uplifting force.”

Marin chewed on the tip of her thumb, wondering if she should have said more. Before she could add to the explanation, however, Leonidas hit her with his next question.

“Marin, what color was Nightstalker?”

Nightstalker was Leonidas’s childhood pet. The cat was so sneaky that he’d tripped over it at least once a day.

“Black with white paws,” she said.

“And what did you always call him?”

She chuckled. “Mittens, of course.” The cat might have been stealthy as an assassin, but he was also super cute and cuddly. “That was
obviously
his name, Leo. But as always, you had to go and disagree.”

Leonidas’s shoulders relaxed. He was relieved. The question was why. Maybe it was just a game he was playing. Isn’t that what agents of the Selpe Intelligence Network did—play games? Her eyes panned over his silver suit, stopping at the skin-tight black shirt beneath his jacket. The top button was undone, showing off just a teasing preview of skin. The look must have been working for Leonidas. Last time she’d seen him in Orion, he’d been surrounded by adoring women. She swallowed a snicker.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “So, what do you say?”

“To what?”

“To checking out that museum this afternoon. I have the day off.”

“I’ll have to pass. I’m quite busy.”

“I thought you were here for some time off.”

His dark brown eyes were cold and distant. “I am. And I already have plans to meet someone.”

He was acting really weird. The last time they’d seen each other, he’d behaved like he actually cared about her. Now he only seemed annoyed by her, as though he couldn’t wait to be rid of her. What a difference a few years could make.

“Then I’ll see you around, Leo,” Marin said, struggling to keep her tone steady. She had no intention of letting him know his meanness affected her.

He didn’t even respond. He just walked past her and disappeared through the gates of Emperor’s Park. Marin took a minute to clear her head of all thoughts of stupid, mean Leonidas. Then she continued walking down the sidewalk, whistling as though she hadn’t run into him at all.

~ 2 ~

526AX May 15, Orion

THE ORION INCENDIARIES used the stadium beside Emperor’s Park for their training sessions. That’s the sort of privilege you got when you were imperially sponsored. Marin had never set foot inside Emperor Stadium, so she wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe bare, utilitarian walls and floors. Lots of whites and greys. And definitely a hint of sweat in the air.

Instead, she found beautiful hardwood floors and satin-smooth walls painted red. The sun shone through the skylights, bringing out the floors’ warm, rich undertones. Photographs in ornate frames hung from the walls at exact intervals, the curving line of them extending as far as Marin could see. Which was far. The stadium was enormous. The outer ring alone was larger than the entire building where she worked. It made her feel like an ant standing before a mountain.

She walked toward the five men in hyper-modern exercise bodysuits. They stood behind lush leather chairs on one side of a long wooden desk. On the other side of the desk was a single chair. The hot seat. Marin stepped over the edge of a carpet woven with blue and silver threads, careful not to trip and fall on her face. That would end her Solstice Games endeavor faster than they could toss her out of the stadium. She sat down and waited for them to do the same.

They didn’t. They’d apparently decided that standing over her was more intimidating. On the plus side, she didn’t catch even the slightest hint of stinky sweat coming off of them. In fact, they smelled like soap and shaving cream. Thank goodness for small favors.

“Aquamarine Graunt, you have come here to try out for a spot on the Orion Incendiaries,” one of the men said. His short hair was neatly trimmed, his face cleanly shaven, and his voice resonating with authority. The team’s clear leader.

“Yes,” she said. “And it’s Marin.” She didn’t know what hallucinogenic drugs her parents had been smoking when they’d decided to call her Aquamarine, but they’d certainly left her the gift that just kept giving. She got to tell every single person she’d ever met to call her Marin instead.

The leader scanned over the front page of the stapled stack in his hands. “You are trying out just for the Solstice Games?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” he asked.

She folded her twitching hands together. Were they only considering people who would stay with the team after the Games? Their advertisement had only stated their immediate need for an additional team member to join them for the upcoming tournament, nothing more.

“Well, I work for Orion Explosives,” she said slowly. “I have some time off saved up, but they do expect me to come back afterwards.”

The leader flipped over the first sheet. “Let’s talk about Orion Explosives. It says here you’ve been working for the company for three years.”

“Yes.”

“Ever since you graduated from the Orion Technical Institute with a doctorate in…airship engineering?”

“Yes.”

“With that background, why did you decide to go into explosives research?”

As though she’d had a choice. “That’s where the jobs are.”

“Yes, I see here that even before graduation you already had six job offers, including from your own university. And in the last three years at Orion Explosives, you’ve been named in over thirty filed patents and have numerous publications to your name. A very impressive resume, to be sure.”

Marin didn’t have anything to add, so she just waited for him to continue. He clearly liked to talk.

“Our previous bomb builder died in an unfortunate accident.”

“I heard.” The man had blown himself while experimenting with some new designs. No one had said what exactly he’d been working on, but he couldn’t have been too clever if he’d managed that feat.

“He was working on this for us.” He handed Marin a sheet of paper. “We need someone to continue the work.”

Marin scanned over the sheet. A micro-bomb, the size of a bullet. And it had to be loaded and shot through a gun. Hmm. No wonder the man had blown himself up.

“I can do that,” she lied, even knowing the task was impossible.

“How long?”

She threw out a random number. “One week.”

The Incendiaries looked at each other, their faces blank but their eyes twinkling with boyish delight. Yeah, they were really excited at the prospect of shooting bombs out of their guns.

“I’ll need to clear it with my boss, though,” she said. “Technically, they own all bomb designs I create while employed with them.”

He waved his hand, dismissive and completely unconcerned. “We’ve already talked to them. They’ll retain the rights to any designs you create for us, and we get to use them as much as we want. They’d like to create a whole advertising campaign around the Orion Incendiaries using their bombs in the Solstice Games.”

“And using them to win the Solstice Games,” one of his teammates added.

The other Incendiaries grunted their assent. It sure sounded like they’d thought this through. And if they’d already talked to her office, Marin was as good as in. It was five weeks until the Solstice Games. Five weeks until she got to live her dream. Well, one of her dreams anyway.

“When do I start?” she asked.

The Incendiaries turned their heads and hit her with a single collective stare. The leader chuckled.

“Oh, you’re not in yet. We’ll have to test you first, of course.” He stood, indicating that she should follow. “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”

Yeah, she’d kind of thought it would be. But how hard could their test really be? She’d jumped out of planes. And gone heliskiing. Anything they threw at her would be easy by comparison.

As she passed into the inner circle of the stadium, her jaw dropped. Oh, how very wrong she’d been.

~ 3 ~

526AX May 15, Orion

THE DOORS SLAMMED shut behind her. Marin looked back to find she was alone. Just peachy. The Incendiaries had fallen back as she’d stood there, staring like an idiot at the obstacle course from hell. First of all, it was—for lack of a better description—damn-freaking ginormous. Then there was the bit about how it seemed designed to kill any person who dared to cross it.

She took a few steps, then stopped inside a spray-painted square in the fake grass. It was red with a white number one in the middle. Another step and she’d be on a wobbly balance beam bridge suspended over a pool of boiling water. It was hot. She didn’t need to see the gurgling bubbles to know that. She could feel the heat coming off the water. She was sweating just standing next to it.

“Pass this test, and you’re in,” the leader’s voice boomed over the stadium’s sound system. It came from all around her, like thunder in a rainstorm.

Marin tried not to think about the alternative outcome.
Fail and you’re dead.
No, no. That wouldn’t do. She had to stay focused. Focused and optimistic. She could do this. She would do this.

“Time starts now,” the thunderous voice said as a gigantic overhead clock roared to life.

It started counting down the seconds. Ten minutes. Nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Nine minutes, fifty-eight seconds. Crap, she was still standing there.

Marin eased up onto the balance beam bridge, extending her arms. She walked as fast as she could across a wobbling piece of plastic no wider than one of her feet, all the while keeping her eyes forward and her mind off the scalding water just a misstep away.

She hopped off the beam, landing on another patch of spray-painted grass. This one had a number two inside. Besides the two, there wasn’t much grass in front of her. It ended abruptly at a five-meter-high wall. Marin looked up, feeling really small beneath its shadow. But she didn’t stop. She reached up for the first handhold and pulled herself up. She’d climbed walls before. This was no different. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Usually, there had been a soft mat waiting below, not a boiling pool of water ready to swallow her whole. But other than that, it was no different. Really, it wasn’t. Marin repeated those words in her head, over and over again as she climbed higher. By the time she reached the top, she even nearly believed them.

She pulled herself up onto the platform at the top of the wall. A bridge waited to bring her to the platform at the other side. Not a rickety bridge or a wobbly balance beam—just a nice, normal, everyday bridge. Marin frowned.

Yeah, right. They aren’t going to make it that easy for me.

She took a closer look at the floor of the bridge. It was made up of a pattern of colorful square tiles. Every shade of the rainbow—and then some—was represented there. It was a puzzle. But what was the solution?

And it
had
to be solvable. She looked around, scanning for any sign of a clue. Her eyes paused on the ring of flags poking out of the top of the open stadium. Selpe blue. The Incendiaries were imperially sponsored. Selpe blue was their team color. She looked at the colorful tiles. The blue ones did match that exact shade. And weren’t they even glowing a bit? Marin took a tentative step on the first blue tile within reach…

She jumped back as it fell out from under her foot. The tile dropped straight down and hit the ground with a heavy thump, a corner cracking off on impact.

“Ok, new idea,” she muttered to herself, looking around again.

She couldn’t help but steal a peek at the gigantic clock. While she’d been playing with the tiles, the timer had dropped below eight minutes. The numbers on the readout had started out as green, but now they’d turned to yellow. As though she needed to be reminded that the seconds were ticking by. Well, at least they hadn’t gone red yet. Yellow was definitely better than red.

“Oh,” she gasped.

She touched the tip of her shoe against a yellow tile. It held, so she tried more weight. Holding her breath, she stepped all the way onto it. Then she went to the next yellow tile. And the next. She moved quickly, hardly touching one tile before she moved on to the next. Standing five meters up with nothing but a big drop below her made her feel really, really nervous. Her heart was pounding, threatening to break right through her chest. When she finally touched down on the platform at the other end of the bridge, she wanted to kiss the ground. But she didn’t have time for that.

So she looked out to stare down her next challenge. There was a bar she could use to slide down the rope that led to the ground. Well, perhaps ground was the wrong word. A better description would have been big mud pond with a few metal plates floating atop it and a small grassy island in the middle. Any of those plates would be large enough for her to stand on—and not much larger than that. On the plus side, one of the plates sat right beneath the path the rope took, so she’d only have to let go of the bar at the right moment to land on it. Timing that was easy, right?

The problem was what to do once she got there. The island was a dead end. No way to get there and it didn’t lead anywhere anyway. She looked down at the plates atop the mud. They weren’t close enough to each other to jump, but there had to be some other way across the pond. There just had to be. The Incendiaries wouldn’t have created an unsolvable obstacle course.