Chapter 60: Chapter 60 - Unraveling

[2:56]

Zoe turned the cube in her hands. It had multiple slots, like an esoteric Rubik's Cube. Each side showed a face composed of heavy brass and iron plates. Zoe tried an experimental twist to line up brass lips with some brass horns.

Nothing.

She turned with all her strength. Her shoulders burned as the edges of the cube cut into her fingers. Air groaned past her scarred lips as she strained. Nothing moved except the ticking clock.

[2:54]

[2:53]

How the hell would she solve this thing?

Anton tapped her shoulder.

“Let me look,” he grinned.

Zoe handed him the cube and a little of the tension faded from her shoulders: she wasn’t alone anymore.

“How can you be calm?” she asked.

[2:51]

He held the cube up to his eye.

[2:50]

“I’ve been in stickier situations.”

Zoe couldn’t help sharing a smile with Bella at Anton’s cavalier attitude. It helped that at least one of them was calm.

“Oh!” the Gambler cried. “I almost forgot to reactivate your Skein,” he raised his finger as though to snap them, but paused. “Should I do it? What do you think, audience?”

The audience dissolved into warring choruses of cheers and boos. Anton rolled his eyes.

“What’s the point of this if we can’t use our Skein?”

The Gambler’s eyes snapped to Anton.

“A wonderful point from our lowest-level contestant.”

He snapped his fingers, and Zoe let out a sigh of relief as her Skein flowed through her body. It felt as though training weights had evaporated, which was curious, as she was now once more aware of the chain wrapped around her neck.

The Gambler spread his hands and turned to address them all.

“This is all about Skein, isn’t it? Anton is full of such wonderful insights. He’s one of the few people to figure out how to change his name for his user status. Just Anton, and nothing else, isn’t that right? Of course, I know your last name,” he leered at Anton. “Should I share your secret shame with the others?”

[2:48]

Pearlescent orbs floated away from Anton’s eyes as he shrugged.

“Do your worst.”

The Gambler cackled.

“I love big balls,” he wiped away a tear. “You could even say I’m in the big ball business. Let’s detract fifteen seconds from team 1 for insolence.”

Zoe’s heart skipped a beat as her clock dropped.

[2:30]

Stella — Trent’s redheaded girlfriend — cast Zoe a sympathetic look. But nobody else spared her team any attention as they crowded around their respective cubes. Zoe didn’t know what was on the other screens, but she imagined it was more of the same.

Desperate people begging for help. How many like them must exist on the planet? Crying out for salvation that would not come?

How many had already perished under the Gambler’s watchful eye?

Bella squeezed her hand. Zoe met the blonde, tattooed woman’s eyes.

“I knew you’d make it out of the hole,” she said.

“I don’t know if this counts…?”

“Is this where you fell?”

Zoe shook her head as weeks of purgatory sifted through her mind like pale sand on the evening wind.

“No. I went elsewhere.”

“Then congrats on getting out. We’ll get out of this too,” she leaned in conspiratorially and winked. “We’re a great team.”

“I’ve figured it out,” Anton said as his eyes hovered around the cube. “There’s a mechanism on the inside, but they made the gears from… ghosts?” he frowned, concentrated, tilting his head as though listening to his eyes. “We need to activate it with blood, but we need Skein to turn the mechanism.”

“What do you mean?” Zoe asked.

Bella placed her hand against the cube’s side. The grooves puckered at her touch. Bella shivered. Her fingers twitched.

“It’s like my runeblade,” she said. “It wants to connect to us, but it’s so hungry,” she drew her hand away. “It would drain our Skein dry.”

Zoe nodded at the other groups as they turned their puzzle cubes.

“They’ve found a way.”

“We can’t assume their cube is the same as ours,” Anton said.

[2:20]

Zoe brushed her fingers. She felt it now that the others had pointed it out. A slight suction. As though she held a box filled with a deep dark hole. She pushed her Skein, and it brushed against the hole, circled, and fell. A barb shot out from one of the staring eyes on the side of the cube. It stung Zoe’s palm, and retracted, pulling a long thread of bloodied Skein along. The grooves bubbled and burbled as blood lubed the tracks.

Zoe grimaced at the sensation — like pulling on a loose thread if she was the shirt.

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She pulled her hand away, but the Skein still flowed. A shimmering, every-hued thread twisted through the air as it vanished into the hungry cube.

[Skein 150/177]

It reminded her of the fight in the dark with Gool. Every instinct told her to sever the connection, but she eyed the clock and decided.

“I’m feeding the mechanism,” she said. “You two turn it.”

Anton’s eyes bounced with approval.

“Bella,” he said. “Please, turn the cube so that the hollow eyes match the hollow mouth.”

Bella gripped it, her fingers finding holds and grooves that Zoe hadn’t noticed, and turned the cube. The pieces slid easily, though they scraped like steel against steel. Sparks flew out from the grooves and hollows.

A face clicked into place, and a small surprised hole of a mouth became a smile with a horrendous groan of twisting metal.

The pulling on Zoe’s Skein doubled. She leaned against the podium and focused on maintaining her connection to the box. Her Willpower flexed, strained, as her Skein slipped through the fingers of her mind like a burning rope.

[2:01]

[Skein 120/177]

[1:59]

[Skein 110/177]

She was losing Skein twice as fast, but from the looks of concentration on Bella and Anton, she could tell they were just as intent as her. She gritted her teeth and bared her share of the load.

If she had leveled up properly, she would have far more Skein. But Trinch’s lockdown meant she only incorporated the two fragments. So, she was level 25 but only had the Skein of someone at level 15.

The Gambler must have placed a restraint upon her hunger because she knew ten levels worth of emptiness inside her would be enough to devour this stage. Whenever she returned to regular reality, this was going to be a problem.

Her Skein slipped, and she shook her head. She had to focus on the moment.

Anton whispered instructions to Bella, and she turned. The movements came faster. The cube clicked, whirred, and scraped as the faces snapped into place.

[1:52]

“Done!” Yvonne cried out as her cube flashed with the dull white of Faith essence. “We’re done!”

The Gambler danced a rug-cutting jig.

“A stellar performance by team number 3! Can the others catch up? Can they even finish at all? Time will tick and time will tell!”

Zoe ignored the cheers of team 3 and the corresponding cries of the audience. She focused on her Skein, keeping it steady as it fed into the whirring mechanism. Another face clicked into resolution. The strain on her Skein increased.

[1:45]

[Skein 50/177]

Sweat dripped down Anton’s brows.

“Turn, turn, stop, the gears flipped, turn back the other way… yes. Yes!”

Another face clicked into being and a long leaf-tipped tongue lolled out of the rusty iron lips. The strain on Zoe’s Skein increased, and she felt something — a thinning — like her soul was being stretched out into a scream.

[1:43]

Zoe wasn’t panicking. There was no space in her mind for panicking. Only the task at hand. Only the unspooling thread. Only purpose.

[Skein 28/177]

Only purpose.

[Skein 7/177]

[1:37]

The last face clicked into place.

“Yes!” Anton punched the air before his poker face returned. “We’re done.”

“As expected of the wonderful team one!” The Gambler somersaulted before leaping into the air. “Only team 2 remains, but can they crack the cube before it cracks them?”

Zoe’s thread of Skein stopped. She felt — vaguely, almost not at all — a click at the furthest edge of her consciousness and then —

[Skein 177/177]

She stumbled as her Skein zipped back into her body, but Anton caught and steadied her. His eyes floated around her.

“How high is your Skein?” he asked as his eyes floated around her. “That would have killed the two of us.”

Zoe couldn’t help but grin at the faint, childlike jealousy in Anton’s voice. So, he wasn’t above such things just yet.

“It’s high,” she said, “But I have ten levels worth of incorporation waiting in the wings. If I can find the right element, it will be higher still.”

He shook his head.

“I can’t wait to buy you that drink. Sounds like you have several stories to share.”

The cube pulsed with milky light as Bella placed it on the podium. Each cruel face leaked the wispy glow, and the metal twitched as though keeping the expressions still was a chore.

Bella wiped her bloody hands on her torn shorts. She seemed more exhausted than when Zoe last saw her, but the cheerful grin remained.

“Do you think that will be enough time?”

Zoe eyed their team’s clock.

[1:36]

“I hope so,” she said. “How can you two be so cheerful? Lives depend on us.”

“I disagree,” said Anton. “Haven’t you ever been in a hostage situation? It’s all an act. Without us, the fatties in that treehouse will die. So, we can only improve their situation, not make it worse.”

“Which is why we have to try our hardest,” Bella frowned at Anton. “Which we did. Don’t worry, Zoe,” she winked. “Boss. We’ll save them all.”

“Not all,” Anton said as he pointed at team 2. “They’re crumbling.”

Zoe looked where he was pointing, and her heart sank. The clock read just under a minute, but that didn’t matter at all. Team 2 had two faces completed, but Stella had been the one to feed the cube.

And she was out of Skein.

Zoe looked away. This wasn’t something she wanted to see, and it was a mercy, she thought, to let the woman die without people staring, but the game show was not called Mercy, it was called The Magnifying Glass.

The Gambler snapped his fingers.

The audience hushed. The world curved. Bent. No matter where Zoe turned, no matter where she looked, she saw Stella’s emaciated, drained body huddled in Xavier’s arms. She closed her eyes, but reality bubbled, and the distance between her eyelids, that atom-thin crack between folds of skin, became a mile high.

Stella couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t sob… she couldn’t do anything. Her Skein emptied, and the thread kept pulling. The line of Skein became blood, became flesh and skin and hair. She unraveled as she shivered. Tears rolled down her cheeks until her cheeks were gone. The tears fell to the sandy floor, and then they fell no more.

Xavier howled as Stella vanished from his arms. The box fell and clattered onto the ground. No glowing light. The faces whirred and clicked, and the box returned to its starting state.

The clock ran down. Trent looked at the cube with sick, dull horror. He reached out but did not touch it, and kept staring. Xavier did nothing. He stared at his scarred hands.

How much had he and Stella been through since the system arrived, only for things to end like this?

The world unbuckled, and Zoe’s head swam as her vision returned to normal. The Gambler danced and counted down the last seconds of round 1.

“Three! Two! Ba ba ba bam! Round 1 is over and let’s see how we did. Looks like team 3 took the lead at one minute and fifty-two seconds. Team 1 was close behind with one minute and thirty-six. And, oh no, it breaks my heart,” he grinned like a dragon’s hoard. “Team 2 did not complete the challenge! Their survivors — really a misnomer at this point — will have absolutely no warning. In the spirit of ripping off the bandaid, let us go now to the survivors of team 2 as their Mubilashi spawns.”

He snapped his fingers, and the stage disappeared.

Zoe’s consciousness floated above a small town on the edge of a sweltering jungle. She had no body, only sight, but she felt others brush against her consciousness like the fluttering of moths.

Moth…

Her heartache continued as she spiraled down on the tracks of the Gambler’s control. He brought them to a car park in the center of the town. Bugs screeched against the humidity, but no lights shone in the buildings. No people on the streets. A dead town. Zoe kept moving.

A rusted, yellow school bus sat in a parking lot.

No, please no…

Four children sat huddled in the center aisle of the school bus. The youngest seemed about six. The oldest couldn’t have been over fourteen. They had their hands together, crouched in a circle, lips moving in silent prayer.

Above them, in the sky that Zoe floated through, a spiral emerged. A pattern imprinted upon the clouds and the stars and the black night hot and sticky as molten tar. The pattern tightened, something like words emerging, and then the fabric of reality split into a thousand holes as though someone took a grater to the world.

From these holes, eyes blinked and swiveled with palpable ecstasy. A thousand eyes in the sky, the trees, the hot pavement, and on the peeling bus. The children saw the eyes, and for a moment, a horribly comic moment, they gazed at the Mubilashi and the Mubilashi gazed at them.

Though her body was a ghost, Zoe’s heart raced. She couldn’t watch this. Couldn’t witness this slaughter.

But then the children screamed, and the Mubilashi attacked.