The other players were not always glad to see him, but most of them said nothing to his face. They all knew that someday soon he would be invited to participate in the holographic tournament held every year on Bruja Prime, the smallest moon of Rio Boca, a moon leased exclusively to the Brujartisano Corporation, who had invented and controlled the game. Also, at six feet five inches, Jalonzo towered over most of the other players, who saw him as just a little scary. Heavy and powerfully built, with black hair and the faint black shadow of an incipient beard, he looked far older than he was.
He had no idea when the first death occurred in the outside world, as he had been busy for the preceding three days slaying the characters of his opponents. The first real death he was aware of was the nacho guy. Camazotz the Bat God was the one who found him. Camazotz, known outside the game as Jaime Martinez, a nervy, thin, redheaded kid who had been losing often enough to have lost interest in the game in favor of food, came into the gym yelling that there was a dead guy on the sidewalk outside the gym. A dead guy with the thermal case of Mucho Nachos, the only place in this part of the city that delivered.
"Is he really dead? How do you know?" Apocatequil the Thunder Bringer, who was also the Prince of Evil, asked, sounding just like Jalonzo would have expected his character to sound: bloodthirsty and excited.
"Is he all bloody?"
"Why would the nacho place send a dead guy, anyway?"
"Can we still get the nachos, or did he do something gross to them?"
Jalonzo almost suspected this was a trick to get him to quit, go outside to check, then they'd shut him out so he wouldn't win anymore. But that was silly. Somebody had to win, and it was a tournament after all. The fun was in playing the game.
And even if it was a trick, he had to look, didn't he? The guy might still be alive.
Jalonzo rose and quickly walked through the sweat and strong-soap-smelling locker room, through the front hall to the entrance. He didn't have to open the door to see the guy. The door was clear plas, as were the side panels on either side of it. The guy really did look dead. There were flies for one thing, but then, they'd swarm around anyone living or dead. But there were an awfully lot of them all over the guy's face. So, yeah, dead probably.
But if he wasn't and the curanderos could still save him? The other contestants crowded against the panels and the door, gawking at the maybe-dead guy.
Jalonzo, mindful of his size and powerful build and careful not to push or hurt anyone, gently moved them away from the door and opened it. Fanning at the flies, he reached for the guy's wrist to find a pulse, as Abuelita had shown him how to do when he was a boy. As soon as his fingers touched the guy's skin, Jalonzo could tell that he was already gone. The skin was way too cool on such a hot day. Also, he stank of something a little more rotten and less rank than most people smelled when it had been hours since they last washed.
Backing away from the guy, he pulled out his hola to call the curanderos. But he couldn't even get a tone. Funny. He had juice, the power cell was full. The little hola looked as if it was eager to talk to him, eager to find who he wanted, all ready to go, but it couldn't. It just sat there in his hand. He looked down the street, thinking, and he noticed that everything was really very quiet for a holiday in that part of town. Usually there'd be a lot of loud music blaring from flitters and maybe some guys who'd had too much pulque, people in costume headed uptown to join in one of the Carnivale parades.
The only flitters on the street were silent and grounded, including the one with the Mucho Nacho logo docked a few feet from the door. Where was everybody? Looking back at the gamers, with their faces and hands pressed against the glass, he shrugged. Some of them were scanning the street as he had. Others turned away and were frowning into their holas.
Mucho Nacho's logo was emblazoned like a heraldic device on the thermal container cushioning the upper half of the dead guy's body. Jalonzo could see the hail number and tried it. This time there was a tone but no answer, which was very weird since Mucho Nacho was a busy place, three or four people at least there in the restaurant part to serve customers as well as the delivery guy. The smell of food made Jalonzo's stomach rumble, but he didn't much want any of the nachos under the corpse. He wandered over to the flitter to see what was there, half-expecting someone to yell at him to get away from there. But nobody did. There was nobody, but nobody, to yell anything actually.
He found another order of nachos, also in a thermal container, and took it. After all, the one they ordered was under the delivery guy, through no fault of theirs, and they were owed an order. Then he saw there were five other thermal containers as well, tamales in cornhusk wrappers, a huge basket of taquitos, more nachos, a couple of complete dinners, and some cinnamon churros. And drinks. Well, it wasn't theft. All that food was just going to get cold and rot out there by the time anybody came to see to this guy, so the gamers could eat the stuff and pay for it later.
The containers were easy to lift, and he lugged all five of them plus the drink cooler back to the gym. At least, burdened as he was with food, there was no question about the others letting him back in.
They stood away from the door when he came in, then three tried to push past him to go outside. He shoved the food into their arms, keeping them inside the building. "No, man, wait," he said. "It's no big deal. Nothing we can do. Nothing the euros can do. I called them."
"How, man? I couldn't even get a ring!"
"Me, neither. But I tried. We'll try again later. Must be a sunspot or something. Or maybe the Carnivale lights have overloaded the grid."
"What was wrong with him, man?"
Jalonzo shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe a heart attack? He wasn't bleeding or anything. Anyway, we got eats. We gonna play or what? We haven't finished the game. And it's dead out there."
Chapter 9
It wasn't until the end of the first week on the Moonbase that things began to go wrong. Up until then, while Shoshisha's public fawning over Khorii was annoying, and there were a few more mean looks from the one boy, looks that were not only for Khiindi but for Khorii and even Elviiz, classes were, if not challenging academically, at least good opportunities for studying human nature.
And then, before she realized it, Khorii's psychic ability began to manifest itself, and she was studying human nature far too closely for the comfort of most of the humans involved.
Furthermore, without realizing it, the human students in her applied astrophysics class were privy to some of her thoughts. This became apparent after a test, when the teacher, Captain Bates, reviewed the results. Shortly afterward, the captain, a pleasant-faced woman with soft, wavy, brown hair, a smile as quick as her keen intelligence, and a pantherlike prowl when she was unhappy about something, prowled back and forth in front of the class. Her expression said that this panther had found more prey than she knew what to do with and was just considering how to use them up without ruining her digestion.
"If I were going to plagiarize a test paper," she said, "I would have sense enough to change some of the words and at least a couple of the answers, especially if I were dumb enough to plagiarize answers from the paper of someone else in this class. I would not pass out the test answers to everyone else in the class ahead of time either."
Everyone looked baffled. At first Khorii was, too, but when she saw the papers, she understood what had happened. The answers on the paper she turned in were hers-and so were everyone else's. All of her classmates thought the answers they'd turned in were theirs because they had put down the answers that were in their heads. She'd put the answers there. Her answers.