"I needed a champion to defeat the dragon. I chose him."
"And I"m the dragon?"
"So it seems."
"You were the one who destroyed him. Not me." I took a good look at her. She stood so casually in the middle of the midway, dressed in simple jeans and a blouse-the way I"d first seen her when she gave me the stuffed bear and my personal invitation. But was I imagining it, or was something different about her now? She looked . .. wary. Could it be apprehension? Uncertainty? It wasn"t just her, but the park as well. I could suddenly hear it in the calliope music all around us, which sounded just a little flat and off-key, like it was slowly winding down. The park seemed to be losing some of its integrity and coherence.
But why? It couldn"t have been because of anything I"d done. All I"d done was make it through five rides.
Five rides. With only two left to go. Then something occurred to me....
"No one"s ever made it this far, have they?"
Ca.s.sandra didn"t answer, but she didn"t have to. I knew. I was the first one to get this far! What was it she had said before my Zero crashed? It was worth the risk to bring you here. The risk of what?
"What happens if I make it through all seven rides?" I asked, moving toward her. "Is this place like a video game that shuts down when somebody beats it? Is that what happens?"
She couldn"t look me in the eye. "I don"t know what happens."
I was face-to-face with her now. "What you"re feeling now, that"s fear," I told her. "Is it all you imagined it would be?"
She pulled back, speechless. I was more than a challenge to her now. I was a threat-perhaps the only one she had ever faced, and I still couldn"t understand why.
Her eyes clouded with hatred. "You really should be dead, Blake."
"Maybe your rides are just too easy."
"I"m not talking about the rides. I think you know that."
And there was a part of me that did know.
I should be dead. I should have been dead a long, long time ago.
I thought back to the b.u.mper cars, and finally something clicked. It was no coincidence that Ca.s.sandra had seemed so familiar to me when I first saw her, and that vision I had gotten of an orange sports car when she had sped past me in old Chicago wasn"t a hallucination. It was a memory.
"You were there!"
Ca.s.sandra smiled.
"You-You drove a sports car! You pulled in front of our bus, cutting it off, and that"s why the driver lost control. You made the bus crash!" My heart began to out-race my brain. I didn"t know which would explode first. "You"re the one who set the whole thing in motion!"
I didn"t know how it could be, and yet I knew that it was true.
Ca.s.sandra"s fear was all but gone now. "What I want to know is how you managed to survive."
I couldn"t look at her, so I looked down at the ride symbol on the back of my hand. It had all started ten years ago. Ca.s.sandra hadn"t singled me out tonight, I"d been on her list since the day of the bus accident.
Because I had survived when I wasn"t supposed to.
I knew what I had to do.
"Get out of my way," I told her. "I"ve got two more rides."
As I pushed past her my arm brushed hers, and I got another impression of her true form-that strange sensation of intense heat encased in intense cold, the living embodiment of two opposing extremes-and it finally occurred to me why I, of all people, was able to battle her!
Perhaps I am the balance! Maybe I was the one human being smack in the middle between her two extremes. And if there was anything that Ca.s.sandra could not abide, it was balance.
11.
The Wheel of Ra There was no easy choice as to which ride to take next. The ones that seemed to lure me were the ones most likely to trap me. On the other hand, the rides that gave me the worst feeling must have made me feel that way for a reason. I finally settled on the Wheel of Ra as my next ride, mainly because I had no feeling about it either way. It was what you would call a "vomit ride." You know the kind-you get inside what"s basically a big drum that spins you around and around, gluing you up against the wall with centrifugal force and making you so nauseous that you end up puking things you probably ate in previous lives.
The wheel itself had an Egyptian theme: There were pictures of guys with their shoulders turned sideways and hieroglyphics adorned in gold.
As I approached the turnstile my feet felt heavy. It was hard to move forward, as if a wind were pushing against me, but the air was dead still. I figured it was just the park trying to slow me down and prevent me from finishing my sixth ride. My arm on the turnstile felt like lead; I could barely lift it. I fought gravity, got my hand high enough to slide it across the scanner, and forced my way through the resisting stile.
Something"s wrong, I told myself, and then told myself to shut up. Of course something was wrong. Everything was wrong in this place.
"Have you ever been on this ride before?" asked a clueless kid in front of me as we stepped up to the wheel. The kid looked a little nervous. His eyes were so big, he looked like something from one of those j.a.panese cartoons.
"On it before? This must be your first ride."
The kid shrugged. "Well, the lines were too long everywhere else. I couldn"t pick which one to go on first, so I"ve just been walking around most of the night."
I wanted to offer the kid some advice, but I couldn"t think of anything to tell him.
"I hope it"s not too fast," he said as he took his place in the wheel beside me. I looked across the circle at the other riders. They were all excited and mesmerized in antic.i.p.ation of their next thrill.
It was only as the wheel began to grind into motion that it occurred to me why this ride felt so terribly wrong.
This was not my ride.
The symbol hadn"t been glowing when I swiped it over the scanner. The turnstile didn"t want to admit me because this wasn"t a ride meant for me. Was that to my advantage, or would it only make the ride harder? I"d find out soon enough, because the ride had begun, and I was committed to seeing it through. The lights around me now spun and strobed, making the eyes on the Egyptian pictographs appear to move. I was pressed against the wall, feeling dizzier by the second.
This is not my ride!
Faster and faster. I saw glimpses of the outside world though the slits in the drum, like one of those old-fashioned spinning movie drums. A zoetrope, it"s called. Through those slits, I saw the world change. The predawn black sky of the amus.e.m.e.nt park turned a rich indigo blue.
The ride never felt like it actually slowed, but the world stopped spinning around it. We were no longer pressed against the padded walls of the wheel. In fact, there was no padding behind us at all. We were standing against the stone pillars of a circular temple, and the pictographs that had been decorating the walls had become Egyptian warriors, each with more muscles than those Russian guys that lift eighteen-wheelers on the Extreme Sports Channel. They began to round us up with whips and brute force.
"Don"t let them catch you!" I shouted.
"Well, duh!" said a girl dressed in filthy rags. Actually we were all dressed in filthy rags. Our costumes for the ride.
The other riders raced around the temple in confusion, trying to get away, but the guards must have been through this a thousand times. They caught each rider easily, rounding them all up, shackling them at the ankles, and forcing them to the ground.
I saw an unguarded opening between two pillars. It was my chance to get away, but as I began to run, I saw the clueless kid-the one with the buggy cartoon eyes-with a whip wrapped around his neck, held by a monster of a guard with the neck of a linebacker, who looked mighty fierce, even in a skirt.
The kid"s eyes bulged even more than they had before.
I cursed my stupid conscience, then I raced over to the kid, grabbed the whip, and unwrapped it from his neck. The guard looked at me like I was a quarterback he was about to sack. He was too big to fight, but guys that big can also be clumsy. Still holding the end of his whip, I ran straight toward him, then, at the last second, I slid beneath his legs, coming out the other side. He didn"t let go of the whip, which is what I was counting on. My momentum pulled the whip and his arm between his own legs, leaving him off balance. I rammed into him, toppling him, then I wrapped his own whip around his muscle-bound neck and pulled tight until his eyes were the ones bulging. Touchdown!
And then I heard another kid behind me.
"Kill the creep," he said.
"Yeah," said another.
I could have done it. The guard was gasping for breath, and, as strong as he was, he couldn"t pry me loose. But the malice in those kids" voices got to me. Rather than finishing him off, I let him go.
By now I"d attracted the attention of the other guards, but the rest of the kids were getting some nerve of their own and fought back. Some of them had already been captured, but more managed to get away, running from the hilltop temple in all directions.
I ran until I knew I"d outrun my pursuers. Then I stopped to take in my surroundings. It had to be the most spectacular of Ca.s.sandra"s worlds. It was Egypt, but not the real Egypt. It was an exaggerated, absurd vision of everything you might imagine Egypt to have been in its glory but many times larger than life. To the north the Pyramids of Giza towered into the sky. The Great Pyramid"s solid gold tip shone like an illuminatus-you know, that pyramid eye on the back of a dollar bill. It shone against a twilight sky painted in hues of deep indigo blue. The entire sky looked like a bruise across heaven.
In the valley before me, along the bank of the Nile, stood a great city of stone and gold. Hundreds of workers hauled ma.s.sive stones and obelisks. They were also dressed in tattered rags, but the shirts on their backs were bloodied and torn by the whips of their brutal taskmasters. Ca.s.sandra had said that these worlds were built on the souls of those trapped here. Watching this human machine of construction, I believed it.
I hid behind stones and scaffolds, darting in and out of shadows, trying to keep out of the taskmasters" lines of sight. This was not my ride. There was no place for me here, no secret terror to tackle. All I had to do was pa.s.s through the city undetected and find the seventh ride.
At the edge of the city a team of workers pulled on ropes, dragging a statue that lay on its back. It was the statue of a pharaoh, his stone image decorated with diamonds and silver. Even lying on its back, the statue was two stories high, and the workers dragging it couldn"t move it more than a few inches at a time. When the coast was clear, I darted into the gilded city, where more workers labored joylessly, setting tiny jewels into the lines of pictographs. It was a world of opulence, that was clear. But for whose benefit?
"Idols here!" a voice shouted, and I turned to see, of all things, a street vendor. He held a tray before him like a peanut vendor at a baseball game. "Get your idols here! Ra . . . Horus . . . graven image of Tutankhamen, king a" da Nile-better likeness here than on the Great Sphinx."
"The face on the Great Sphinx isn"t King Tut"s," I told him, sounding way too much like a know-it-all.
"It is here," he said. He glanced at my filthy clothing. "Escaped from the mud pits, huh?" he said. "Good for you. Better change out of those clothes, or you"ll be caught for sure. I wouldn"t want to be in your sandals then."
"Can you tell me where the next ride is?"
He laughed at me. "I just sell idols, kid."
"But you didn"t always sell idols. You were once a kid like me, weren"t you? How many years have you been here, playacting for Ca.s.sandra?"
He looked at me sternly, like we were on stage and I"d forgotten my part. "Do you want an idol or not?"
"If you help me, I"ll be the first one to make it through," I told him. "I"m on my sixth ride."
"Yeah, right, and I"m Cleopatra." Then he turned and continued on, shouting, "Idols here!"
I was about to let him go, but my mind hooked on something I had seen on his tray. No-it can"t be what it looked like, I told myself. It"s just coincidence, right? Just my mind playing tricks on me. It has to be! I hurried after him, and he sighed, figuring I was going to keep on pressing him for information.
"I want to see your idols."
"Forget it. You can"t afford anything I have, anyway."
"So what? I still want to see them."
Wanting more than ever to be rid of me, he held up a jade cobra. "Tell you what. You can have this one for free. It"s Wadjet, the protector of kings. Guaranteed to bring you luck-although not always good."
I wasn"t interested in the cobra. Instead, I picked up a gold statue of a pharaoh.
"That"s my best-seller," said the vendor. "King Tut. He brings good fortune to crops and livestock. No plagues or your money back."
My hand shook as I held the little statue. The graven image was well carved. Its likeness was perfect.
I turned around, looking back toward the team of slaves in the distance; they were still pulling the giant statue on its back. Only the statue"s profile was visible, but the likeness was unmistakable. As I looked around I found the image of the king everywhere-in the jeweled artwork of the buildings and on the sides of the towering obelisks.
The vendor grabbed the little statue back. "Out of your price range, kid. No freebies on Tut."
Something he"d said came back to me. I turned to the north, where, between the jagged points of pyramids, I found the Great Sphinx. Its body was the crouching form of a lion, but its face was that of a pharaoh . . . a pharaoh whose stony face was adorned with silver earrings and nose rings and a ring jammed diagonally through his eyebrow. Just like the actual person.
Just like Quinn.
"The boy king," said the vendor. "Gotta love "im. His reign is always short, but believe me, it"s intense."
"That"s my brother!"
The vendor was only slightly moved. "Lucky him." My head was spinning, and I stumbled back against a wall to steady myself. My brother was King Tut. It gave whole new meaning to the term vomit ride.
"This slave insists on having an audience with you."
A brawny guard hurled me into a great room fifty yards long. A carpet of rose petals filled the chamber with a sweet rich aroma as I treaded toward a raised platform. Quinn was there, all right. He reclined on a silk settee while musicians played strange stringed instruments alongside him and richly dressed courtiers talked to one another, filling their plates with food piled high on a long table. Quinn didn"t come to the table; instead, beautiful women encircled him, feeding him from silver platters. He was dressed like a pharaoh, from the top of his gold and turquoise headdress to the soles of his sandals. I, on the other hand, still wore rags that smelled so badly of mildew and sweat that not even the rising aroma of roses could mask the stench.
Quinn saw me and sat up. "Hey, bro! Look who got the best seat on the ride!"
Our last encounter had been a hard awakening for me, having to face Quinn"s desperation and emptiness. I wasn"t sure this was any better. Quinn the G.o.d: emperor of all he surveyed.
A guard grabbed me by the neck, forcing me to my knees. The rose petals did little to cushion my kneecaps from the stone ground below.
"Humble yourself before Pharaoh."
"No, it"s okay," said Quinn. "Allow the slave to approach."
Reluctantly the guard removed his hand from my neck and let me rise. I stepped up to the raised dais, where Quinn luxuriated like a pig in a very expensive poke. He grinned and held up the pharaoh"s crook-the hooked scepter of the kings. "Hey, check out the back scratcher! You won"t find that at The Sharper Image!"
He was so full of this fantasy-so drunk on it-that I didn"t know if there was any way to reach him. It was like he was dangling from the hanging roller-coaster rails again, never seeing the train coming around the bend until it was too late. I can"t save you, Quinn. I can"t save you from yourself. That"s what I wanted to say, but no words came out.
He was all smiles. "Speechless, huh? I"m not surprised."
"Time"s running out," I finally said. "It"s almost dawn."
He looked to a huge window framing the timeless and unchanging indigo sky. "It doesn"t look like dawn to me."