The girl who’d won the contest began to point and laugh, as did the other children, hooting from the sidelines, and calling down from their perches atop the nearby signs. Green Boy held his arms out in front of him, studying his hands and palms, flipping them back and forth, before he looked to his friends and shot them a wide grin of blinding Day-Glo teeth.
“Okay, Landon. Elena,” Hunter said, nodding to the children. “Show them how to exit the game.”
Roaring, the boy dropped his weapon to the ground, bent his knees, and was suddenly arcing through the air, arms cycling wildly as he directed his descent to land directly in front of his victorious enemy. Once down, he growled again. Elena squealed, dropped her own gun, and bounded to the top of the Slipper in an impressively elegant leap, ducking for cover behind her ward mother’s robes. I watched the horseplay and smiled. At least some things were normal around here.
“How long does that shit last?” Riddick asked, meaning the paint. The jump was something we all could do, and yeah, it came in handy.
“Twenty-four hours,” Micah answered, confirming my suspicions as to the paint’s origins.
Hunter crossed to the front of the concrete maze. “I’ll sit out so we have an even number of players-”
“Chicken,” Felix said, shooting him a boyish grin. Vanessa supplied the clucking sounds.
“Another piece of advice,” Hunter said, ignoring them both. “And this direct from Tekla. Sight is actually the least valuable sense here, so use your hearing, your sense of smell for tracking, but most importantly, use your sixth sense. That’s the only way to get out of this alive.
“As this is the first time running this, Warren wants to know operative times and where we all place, so remember the purpose of this exercise. There’s a way to get to the center of this maze in seconds, without detection. The Tulpa knows it, and he’s mastered it, which means you must as well.”
I looked at Riddick and Jewell, and could practically see nervous energy rising off them in waves. Riddick’s knuckles were white as they gripped the butt of his gun, and Jewell had hers pressed against her heart. They had yet to encounter even a Shadow agent, so the mention of the Tulpa had gained their full attention. Then again, I’d run headfirst into the Tulpa, and the memory still had me waking up in cold sweats.
“Now, the guns won’t fire until I press this button, and in order to give you each time to spread out, I won’t do that for sixty seconds from…” Here he looked at his watch. “Now.”
They all stared at him.
Hunter stared back. “That means go.”
They scattered, pushing into one another, scrambling in effort to be the first into the maze, and looking less like a troop of superheroes than a gang of unruly schoolyard kids.
“Bang! Bang, bang, bang!”
I whirled, heart in my throat, to find two sets of fingers pointed like guns and trained on my midsection. I lifted a brow.
Little Marcus raised his own six-year-old brow in response. “We got her, mother Rena!”
How embarrassing. Caught snooping by a couple of rugrats. Linus, the one who’d shot me with his index finger, waved me out from behind the busted star, and into the clearing where I could be seen by Hunter and Rena, the only adults left in the boneyard.
“Someone wants to talk to you,” Linus said, maintaining his tough-guy stance, legs spread the way he’d seen the agents stand thousands of times before. “And she doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, clearly not wishing to be left out. “So we can do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s up to you.” They looked up at me expectantly, and for a moment I saw twenty years into the future when these two would take up star signs and hunt Shadows. Then, keeping one hand trained on me, Linus reached down and yanked up his drooping pants.
My lips twitched. “Uh…the easy way, please.”
“All right,” Marcus said, like he was doing me a grave favor. “But take it slow, sister. Any sudden moves and we’ll drop you like a used-up ho on the corner of Fifth and Bridger.”
“Marcus!” Rena chided from her spot in the clearing. She was standing now, head tilted our way, though her eyes weren’t trained on us. Probably because she didn’t have any. “I heard that!”
“Shit,” Marcus muttered.
“She probably heard that too,” I said, grinning at him.
“Silence, prisoner!”
“Gentlemen,” came another voice, this one as deep as they were imitating, and I reluctantly shifted to face Hunter. He nodded at me, then at the boys. My two guards trembled in their Keds. My knees were often weak in Hunter’s presence too, though not usually from awe. “What do we have here?”
“An intruder, sir!” Linus answered, prodding me forward with his gun finger. I stumbled a bit, and snickering erupted behind me.
“I see,” Hunter said, giving my disarrayed state a quick once-over. “And how did she get inside the compound unnoticed?”
“We don’t know,” Marcus admitted, but quickly put the troubling question behind him. “Should we kill her?”
Hunter did smile at that. “Not just yet.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, and heard Rena laugh from her perch on the Slipper. She might not be able to see, but her other senses were razor-sharp.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Hunter said, before turning back to my captors. “I propose we throw her into the game with our brave and noble agents, see how she fares against the finest of the Light. Hand her over to me now, and I’ll make sure she receives due justice.”
By giving them a choice, Hunter had made them co-conspirators in determining my fate, and the two boys looked at each other like they could hardly believe their luck. Besides, there was only so much more they could do. Their fingers weren’t really loaded.
“Into the maze with her!”
“Yeah, let the agents of Light have their way with her!” And Marcus’s face began to glow, literally, like a globe lit from within. Hunter and I turned away as rays of light began to shoot from his face. Once I was secured at Hunter’s side, the boys went whooping and hollering back to Rena, who congratulated them on their catch and got Marcus to stop glowing like an oversized firefly so they could all settle in to watch the competition.
“Do I even dare ask what happened to you?” he said, plucking a chunk of cement from my hair.
I winced as it came free. “I’d rather you not.”
“Chandra said you didn’t make it over,” he said, leading me to the playing field. I shot him an irritated glance, knowing he found my ongoing spat with her amusing.
“She was wrong,” I said shortly. No way was I going to let him know I’d nearly gotten stranded at the Peppermill, run down by Gregor’s cab, and trapped in a brick wall. So I waved at the block maze instead. “When did this get here?”
“The museum cleared the space to make room for some new signage. It hasn’t arrived yet, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to run some outdoor drills.”
Opportunity, I thought, inhaling deeply. I located Chandra easily. She was left of the center of the maze, deep in the thick of it. Pulling my conduit from my waistband, I headed that way.
“Hold on,” Hunter said, and yanked my bow from my hand, replacing it with a bright plastic squirt gun. “No missiles more deadly than the paintballs.”
“I wasn’t really going to kill her. Just scare her.”
“The look on your face alone should do it.”
“Fine.” I cocked a fist on my hip, trying to look tough despite the toy in my other hand. “Any other rules?”
“One. You have twenty seconds.” He pumped a cartridge into another gun’s chamber, and his eyes narrowed meaningfully on mine. “Then I’m coming after you myself.”