Part 10 (1/2)

”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 cras.h.!.+” 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 pus.h.i.+ng against me, but the air was dead still. I figured it was just the park trying to slow me down and prevent me from finis.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.