The Games

hello. Tonight he was just glad not to be recognized.

He’d been making calls from the vintage hotel phone when the news broke in on the lobby TV. The receiver had dropped from his hand, and a faraway voice cried out his name several times from the bottom of the swaying cord.

The news reporter on the screen sat with a stock picture of Silas pasted above his shoulder and said things that made the skin on the back of Ben’s neck sizzle. He’d had the same sensation once before, on his final day at St. Patrick’s Primary School for Boys, when he’d sat in the principal’s office awaiting his mother and wondering what she’d do to him when she learned he’d been expelled again. His neck had sizzled then, a strange tingle, his flesh crawling up behind his ears. It was a sensation that he associated with utter hopelessness. It was a sensation that told him that even his body recognized how bad it was. The clock had refused to move that day, too.

At the hotel, eyes stuck to the TV screen, he’d waited for his name to fall from the newsman’s mouth, but it didn’t. Officially, they were looking only for Silas. So far. He decided then it was time to leave town.

On the taxi ride to the airport, he asked the driver to turn the radio off. He knew Baskov was behind the terrorist accusations. They were so far-fetched, so ridiculous, that only someone with his kind of power would have a vested interest in shifting attention away from the commission. It was a method torn from the pages of the oldest propaganda books. Tell a lowercase lie, and people won’t believe it. Tell a standard lie, and people will doubt it. But tell a lie in all caps, a lie of truly colossal proportions, and that people will have to believe.

And although such a colossal lie, when told by a man of power and position, requires little in the way of actual proof, it is still vulnerable to a large enough burden of contrary evidence. Ben thought of the tests, and the screenings, and the investigational procedures they’d done on the gladiator at the lab—each testifying to their effort to make sense of a situation that they’d had little understanding of and even less control over. Most of all, he thought of the computer files, filled with data that could almost certainly prove if not what the creature was, then at least where its design specifications had originated.

Baskov may have screwed up. The heading of page two in those old propaganda books was always quite clear and written in bold: don’t ever, ever get caught in a lie of colossal proportions.

Ben heard the flight attendant clinking a cart up the aisle behind him, and this time he stopped her.

“Excuse me, miss.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

She glanced down at a wristwatch—a dainty metallic affair dangling loosely near her hand. “Two-thirty- five.”

“How long till we land?”

“We’ll be arriving at Ontario airport in about twenty-five minutes.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure.” She smiled and touched his arm. “If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to ask.”

This time, despite the weight of his troubles, he did watch her posterior pivot down the narrow walkway.

BASKOV OPENED the sliding glass doors and hobbled out onto the balcony of his suite. A cold wind buffeted him as he moved his stomach against the round metal railing, looking out, scotch glass in hand. The city spread darkly beneath him, eighty floors down. It was such a strange sight, Phoenix, with its lights put out. It occurred to him that he was seeing something that hadn’t been seen, by anyone, in quite some time. Something rare and beautiful. Phoenix adrift in the desert darkness, invisible.

Usually, when a city’s power went out, it went out in grids, but tonight the city was black as far as he could see. Which, from the eightieth floor, was quite a way. The only lights he could see were moving—the headlights of cars.

Baskov viewed the unexplained blackout as a fortuitous coincidence. He could see no possible connection between it and the escape of the gladiator, but it had done an excellent job of silencing the media. His men could do their work under the cover of darkness and media blindness. And once the power was back on, the papers and news stations would have several choice fish to fry. The blackout almost assuredly wouldn’t knock this Olympic debacle off the front page, but with any luck, the media outlets would find themselves splitting their time among several stories. Baskov couldn’t believe his good luck. He was secretly hoping for looting.

A gust of wind whistled through the iron railings, and Baskov shivered against the cold. In the distance, buildings stood as shadows, patches of dark between the stars.

Somewhere out there, he knew the gladiator lurked. Perhaps in the mountains. Somewhere it was flying or roosting or doing whatever escaped gladiators did. He had no doubt that it would be caught and killed tomorrow, if it wasn’t dead already. A creature that big couldn’t hide for long. This was man’s world, and the gladiator was an interloper. A most unwelcome interloper.

He took another drink, feeling the chill of ice against his upper lip as he finished the glass. He leaned out over the rail, squinting through his thick glasses. There was only blackness beneath him. The sidewalk he had noticed during the day was swallowed up by the night.

He extended his arm into the sky, holding the glass delicately by three fingers. This high up, the sky was anything one inch beyond the balcony. Another gust of wind rattled past. He waited until it quieted.

He wondered if anyone was standing below. A group of people, perhaps, entering or leaving the hotel. He imagined one of them stopping, looking up.

His fingers loosened around the glass, and he let it slip from his hand into the darkness. He waited, ears straining. But there was no sound. Nothing.

The wind gusted. Silence.

Disappointed, he went back inside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Willful optimism can take a man only so far, and when a truck passed in an angry sheet of wind and dust, blaring its horn, Silas could no longer pretend it wasn’t happening. The car was definitely slowing down.

The battery gauge had blazed red a half hour ago, but he’d talked himself into believing they could make another twenty-five more miles. Even after the headlights began to dim, he thought they could make it.

He looked down, and the speedometer told him he was going forty-seven. His foot sank the pedal into the floor. At first the needle didn’t move, then it dropped to forty-six. It was time they got off the highway.

It had been about an hour since they’d left the Brannin. It had been the headlights. He’d left them on while he and Vidonia climbed the stairs. Silas tried not to think about what had happened there. Vidonia wasn’t taking it well.

She sat reclined slightly in her seat, face turned out toward the open window. For a while he had taken her silence for sleep, but then he’d noticed her hands wringing in her lap and knew better. Her body was like that sometimes. It told him things she wouldn’t.

He lifted the turn signal and slid down the next exit into the darkness of the city. It was like descending into cold, murky water. There was no traffic here, and without the light of oncoming beams, the night settled over everything like a blanket. The ramp ended abruptly at a stop sign thrown up against a two-lane road. He glanced both ways, each appearing as unlikely.

“Don’t ask me,” Vidonia said preemptively, as the question was just forming in his mind. “This is your city. I’m the tourist, remember.”

“I’m not feeling lucky tonight.”

She leaned forward and squinted. “Go right.”

“Do you see something?”

“No.”

He looked at her. “Right it is.”

He spun the wheel and eased onto the accelerator. Small rectangular houses lined the street like tipped-over