“We need to break out of here.” Sadie wore a rut in the floor pacing the cell beneath the Colosseum. She counted every digital flake of rock to help pass the time, currently at one thousand three hundred and twenty-one.
After three hundred bajallion hours waiting for someone to come back, she should have waited for them to let her down because now she wasted even more of her limited time.
“Any ideas?” she continued.
“Well, the last plan worked splendidly,” Fawkes said.
“HEY,” Jiyu yelled down the corridor. “FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.”
No one responded.
“Worth a shot.”
“They’re going to be busy with the prelim mech fights.” Fawkes laid on his back, feet kicked up on a loose rock. The ceiling above rumbled from mechs stomping around. “If you can get that cell open, we can stroll out of here.”
And that was the problem. They’d tried everything.
God, it was already Wednesday morning. She’d been in cyberspace, inside a video game, since Saturday and still felt no closer to Mom, or this stupid key.
At least we’re alive, Sadie kept repeating to herself. If they were alive, they could find a way out of this mess. Three and half days. That’s all she had left in the deadline after being knocked out by the jellyfish and spending time in this dungeon.
“Would you three stop yelling, please,” a voice called out. “Some of us are trying to work.”
“And some of us are locked in a freaking dungeon,” Sadie snapped back. “Let us out already. Isn’t it, like, against some rule to lock people up like this?”
Steps clicked closer until a scrawny boy not much older than Sadie with a low fade and dense curly hair falling in his eyes appeared. He wore basic raider gear with leather armor plates on his shoulders, knees, and forearms over a Brazil soccer jersey. Flecks of yellow dust from the shaking structure peppered his dark brown skin.
“That doesn’t apply to travelers who go around stealing airships from the PIGs and attacking other travelers, and we’re all stuck in cyberspace for the time being either way.” He coughed in an attempt to hide a chuckle. “But seriously, I have a test. Can you stop yelling, please?”
“I didn’t attack him. I fell on him,” Sadie said matter-of-factly. “If I attacked him, he’d be in a hospital.” The Mech Raiders weren’t typically known for fighting skills.
In-game, you could buy crazy builds from the Raiders if you could afford it, and according to Fawkes they also helped run the infrastructure of both the Gate app and Brink’s entire money-making apparatus—from conducting video streams of Sky Fortress raids to operating Mech fights—to make sure everyone in Brink was paid a salary. She asked Fawkes if Brink was a non-profit or co-op, but he didn’t know.
“OH, YOU HAVE A TEST.” Jiyu tapped her chin. “INTERESTING. YOU WANT QUIET AND WE WANT OUT.”
The boy covered his ears. “Can you make her stop yelling? Please!”
“I would if I could.” Sadie shrugged helplessly. “Maybe she’s claustrophobic. You could just let us out.”
The boy scowled at her and pulled out a screwdriver with far too many buttons and gizmos.
“You’re going to let us out?” Fawkes balked. “Just like that? We should have tried screaming earlier.”
“God, no.” He pointed the screwdriver at the floor and hit a button. A blue light glowed beneath their feet before fading. “I tried the polite way.”
“And we—” Sadie stopped when a howling screech emitted from the floor. She uncovered her ears when it subsided. “What the—” The screech started and stopped just as suddenly again. She threw a look at the boy that asked “What did you do?”
The boy, who appeared unaffected by the noise, waved his screwdriver. “Gus here activated the sound defense system. So no more yelling.” He looked pointedly at Jiyu. “And no escaping.”
“You named your screwdriver?” Jiyu scoffed under her breath.
“So what if I did? It’s a great name!” Clearly, anyone outside their cell could speak normal volumes.
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“If you say so.”
“You’re just jealous because I have a screwdriver like Doctor Who.” He clicked a button and a top popped out. “It even doubles as a ballpoint pen.”
“Doctor…who? What Doctor?” Jiyu looked completely confused.
“You’re a bunch of idiots.” The boy turned away exasperated. ”I can’t work with you.”
“It’s some British TV show that’s been going on forever,” Sadie whispered. She gulped as memories of Dad watching the show crashed into her, and the time Mom laughed and cheered on a cosplay he did of one of the doctors. She never liked the show, but now she wished she’d watched with them. “Like a fantasy time travel kind of thing.”
Jiyu hmphed. “Fine. You and your dorky pen can leave.”
Sadie called after him, well whispered after. “Wait! Wait, please.” He looked back and raised an eyebrow. “You’re on a deadline to study? So are we. We have information for Vidar, and you’re the first person to speak with us in ages.”
“Look…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m just an initiate. I can’t really help you out with anything. The prelims will be over soon, and I’m sure someone will be down after that to go over the next steps and rules for the mech suits.”
“Next steps?” Fawkes asked. He rubbed his temples. “You mean they’re going to make us compete?”
Sadie vaguely recalled talks of the colosseum raiders making regs pay off fines or “sentences” by testing out mech suits. In a way, it made sense. Coercing regs into trying out potentially combustible and dangerous gear only risked lost items instead of potentially a life.
Except they weren’t regs.
“Uh, no.” Sadie vigorously shook her head no. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”
“I’m kind of cool with it,” Fawkes said. Sadie shot him a dagger-look and he added, “If we weren’t on a time crunch, that is.”
“You can’t make people compete. That’s insane. Those suits blow up sometimes!” Sadie said the last bit a little too loud, and the screeching started again.
Jiyu made an explosion noise and exploding ball with her hands to emphasize the point.
“Helpful,” Sadie said.
She imagined her body blowing up into smithereens just like her eardrums currently and shivering.
The boy shrugged. “Those are the rules. Someone gets stuck or crashes around us, they compete in the Colosseum testing new mech suits.”
“Made-up rules.”. Sadie gripped the bars and placed her face closer. “And we’re not regular players who will just go back to Rudi Flats if you idiots blow us up.”
The boy pulled out his phone and sat down on the bench. “No one’s blown up in ages.”
“That’s helpful.” Jiyu paced behind them. “Can we opt out? There has to be a way to opt-out.”
“Talk to the next guy. I need to study.”
“It’s about the missing people,” Sadie added. She winced at having to tell another person. Every additional person she told risked putting her mom in further danger. The boy stopped again. “Our information, that is. Just tell Vidar that. It’s about Rebecca Wall.”
Worry passed over the boy’s face. “You know about that? Have you heard anything about—”
A boom erupted from above followed by a nails-on-chalkboard rip tearing through space. The entire colosseum shook, and the screech pierced the room. The blue glow beneath their feet danced to the beat of the tearing like it was mocking them.
“Turn it off,” Sadie shouted, but the screech made it hard to tell if she spoke out loud or screamed it in her head.
The boy fumbled with his pants pocket reaching for Gus, but the screwdriver slipped through his fingers and rolled away.
The ripping sound from above persisted, reverberating even through the screeching. The vibrations pulled at her chest attempting to snatch her heart right out, and the screeching escalated higher and higher until she might collapse again. Smoke rose from the floor, and the blue glow flickered like an out-of-control strobe light. She felt on the edge of fainting.
Twice in one week was very un-pirate-like.
And then silence and darkness fell over them.
Sadie gasped as the screeching continued to echo in her ears. “Everyone okay?”
“Super,” Jiyu said from the floor.
Fawkes held up a thumb from a hunched-over position. The boy breathed heavily as he lay on his stomach reaching under a work bench for his screwdriver. The floor still smoked, and a crackling sound filled the cell.
Sadie inspected the cell door where the crackling sound was loudest.
The silence only lasted a moment. An alarm blared through the halls.
A booming voice came over the colosseum. “All unnecessary personnel, evacuate immediately. Raiders, man your mech suits. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill.”
“Yeah, you should definitely let us out now,” Jiyu said.
“Or,” Sadie said. She pushed open the sizzling door.
“That works. We out!” Jiyu busted through the door followed by Fawkes and Sadie.
“Hey, wait!” the boy called out from behind them. “You can’t escape!”
“Don’t think that’s your choice, my man!” Sadie yelled over her shoulder.
They ran through the halls taking turns they thought would lead them up and out, but every turn only left Sadie more spun around and confused. The boy’s steps clacked not far behind them.
To Sadie’s left, she spotted movement from someone else running. “This way!” She turned to them assuming they must be trying to evacuate from whatever caused that noise.
Following the person’s footsteps, they ran out into a gigantic room at least five stories tall with people scrambling around like ants underneath standing mech suits lined against the wall.
“I think we followed the wrong guy,” Fawkes said as the boy from the dungeon cell caught up yelling after them.
“We’ve got bigger problems.” Sadie pointed out to the center of the colosseum.
A tear the size of a mech suit hovered over the center ring. Its center glittered white while blood red tendrils crawled their way outward making the rip bigger and bigger. Other rips sounded in the distance. They ran to the edge and saw multiple tears splitting open in every direction.
“Well, that’s not good,” Jiyu said.