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“We made it!” I shouted. “We’re out!”
. . . But somewhere along the way, as we were passing through those last few mirrors, I’d let go of Maggie’s hand. When I looked beside me, Maggie wasn’t there. I turned around and saw her standing just on the other side of the final mirror. It was one-way. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her.
“Maggie, come on! Step through!” She couldn’t hear me, either, so I reached out—and bumped against glass. From my side, the mirror was solid.
“Blake?” she called. “Blake . . . where are you?”
“Maggie!” I screamed, and I pounded on the glass, but she couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear!
“Blake?”
And then she turned.
I don’t know what she saw in the mirror beside her, but whatever it was, it must have been horrible. It must have been the worst mirror of all, because it undid her. She put her hand over her mouth and let loose a wail so full of despair, it could blacken the sun.
“Turn around!” I yelled at her. “Look forward. Just one more step—just one more!”
But she couldn’t hear me. I pounded on the glass again and again, but nothing helped. She was locked on whatever she was seeing.
She stumbled back and fell through another mirror. I watched, powerless, as she looked around, trying to remember from which way she had come. She was sobbing now. Sorrow, fear, all her worst emotions were amplified, stretching her face again as she stumbled in one direction and then another and another.
“Maggie!”
I kept my eyes locked on her, pounding on the glass as she ran in a panic in every direction, passing through mirror after mirror, becoming more and more distorted and disoriented, her screams changing until they weren’t even human. Then she was gone, so lost in the maze that I couldn’t see her anymore.
“Nooo!” I beat the glass again with all my might. I wanted the glass to shatter—I wanted the whole cathedral to explode—but the glass held. I slid to the ground, and for the first time since arriving in this terrible place, I cried. I bawled like a baby. It was all my fault! I’d let her go. I’d stepped out before she had, and now she was lost and alone. I’d left her. Despite all my promises, I’d left her. Suddenly I felt the way I did all those years ago, when I had pounded against the emergency exit door at the back of the bus, unable to open it.
To be completely helpless in the face of life—powerless to do a single thing—that’s what I’d always feared more than anything. It was like I’d been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending life could somehow be controlled.
For a moment I felt like giving up. I closed my eyes. No. I would not give in. If it was my fate to keep smashing my fist against emergency exit doors, then that’s what I would do. Even if I saved no one. Even if I died doing it, this place would not beat me.
I opened my eyes. There before me on the barren salt plain was a turnstile in front of a freestanding stone arch. My failure to bring Maggie out of the maze weighed on me like an anchor, but I buried my feelings of loss, of inadequacy, and of failure. Those mirrors were behind me now. My path was forward. It had to be. Four rides down. I was more than halfway to seven. I put one foot in front of the other, forcing myself to move on, refusing to look back.
As I walked away from the distortions of the mirrored cathedral, the symbol on the back of my hand glowed blinding white, and for the first time I felt excitement instead of just dread. I was not going to be a victim; I was a challenger, just as Cassandra had said. I was going to be the best challenger this place had ever known.
I ran my hand over the scanner and pushed through the turnstile. I was no longer on the salt flat but was winding through an empty line, toward the ride ahead. I heard the ride before I saw it—an awful metallic click-click-click of a chain. I knew that sound. Oh, did I know that sound.
The next ride was a roller coaster. And it was called the Kamikaze.
9
Zero Tolerance
The coaster looked like a replica of the Kamikaze roller coaster I rode last night, back in the amusement park where people didn’t get killed—or, at least, didn’t get killed on purpose. There were two major differences to this coaster, however. First, there was only one seat in each row, not two. Nobody rode with a partner. On this Kamikaze everyone rode alone. Second, the steep climb didn’t stop where it was supposed to; it just kept going up into a bright blue sky speckled with clouds. I looked at my watch again: 4:15. Still long before dawn in the real world.
As with all the other rides, there were a dozen or so kids weaving through the maze of the line. They didn’t see each other, didn’t see anything but the ride. It filled their minds and spirits. They were already owned by this place and didn’t know it.
By the time I reached the front, the train was full. The ride operator was standing in front of a huge lever that grew from the ground. He had a sick leer on his face, like he’d just done something he wouldn’t tell his momma about. He also had only one arm—his left one—which was strong and muscular, I assume from working this lever since the beginning of time.
“Room up front,” he said to me, and let out a noise that was something between a giggle and sucking up snot.
I took another look at the train. Like I said, it was completely full.
“Sorry, Lefty. Guess I’ll have to ride the next one. ”
The guy looked at the kid sitting in the first car and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. With a single tug, he launched the kid skyward. I never actually saw that kid come down.
“Room up front,” Lefty said again, and smiled that I-got-bodies-in-my-freezer kind of smile.
“Yeah. Funny I didn’t notice it before,” I said, and took my place. Okay, I’m ready for this, I told myself, as if thinking it would make it so. Just a few minutes ago I was full of piss and vinegar, as my mom would say. But now I was just about ready to let loose some of the first ingredient in my jeans. Did it have to be a roller coaster?
I pulled down the safety bar, but it kept popping right back up.
“Hey, wait a second!”
Too late. Lefty grabbed the huge lever, hauled on it, and away we rolled, cranking up the insanely steep climb toward a windswept sky.
It took at least ten minutes to reach the top. My hands were freezing as I tugged on that stupid lap bar, which still refused to stay down. The peak rose above the clouds, and beneath it a massive lattice of wood dropped out of sight to the ground, which looked like it was a mile or two below us. In the world I came from, no one could build a structure like that, but here in Cassandra’s worlds there were all sorts of mystical feats of engineering.
My heart sped up, aching in my chest. What would the ride become once it began its first drop? Maybe it’s just a roller coaster, I tried to tell myself. A really BIG roller coaster.
As we reached the peak I turned to see the kids behind me putting their hands up in the air. That’s when I noticed the clouds below weren’t just random shapes. There were faces in them.
The drop came into view as we crested the peak. And then the train began its fall.
My teeth rattled in my skull, and my brain felt like it would come loose in my head. We were not just being pulled by gravity, we were accelerating faster than gravity could possibly pull us. I felt the skin on my face stretched by g-forces as we dove into the clouds. And then things began to change. The ride began to take on its true form.
The little space for my legs stretched as it had in the bumper cars, but the dashboard in front of me didn’t expand into the dashboard of a car. It became an instrument panel with dozens of knobs, buttons, and screens. A glass canopy grew over me, sealing me in, and the clatter of the track changed pitch, becoming the whine of an engine.
A stick with two handles grew from the floorboard, and when I looked to the side, I could see wings stretching out from under me: wings with a bri
ght red spot painted on each one.
This was a plane, and I was flying it.
I tried to crane my head around to see the kids behind me, and I saw enough to know that the train had broken apart into twelve separate cockpits. I was alone in my own propeller aircraft—the first in a line of a dozen planes plunging down through the clouds.
I flashed on an image of my American Airlines ticket to New York tucked so peacefully away in my desk drawer back home. All of a sudden an airline meal and an in-flight movie didn’t sound so bad.
Okay . . . okay, I told myself, trying to rein in my panic. So I’m flying a plane. I can do this. So what if I’ve never flown a plane before? So what if hundreds of people die every year in air disasters? I can figure this out, right? I can read all the markings on the instruments and figure out what they all do, right?
Well, maybe not. Because everything was labeled in Japanese.
That’s when it occurred to me exactly what kind of plane had big red spots painted on the wings. And why the ride was called the Kamikaze.
I’ve got a Japanese Zero in my room—or at least a model of one, perfectly glued and painted. Just like the real thing, with one big exception: The Zero in my bedroom wasn’t about to kill me.
My Zero shuddered violently as I dove down into the cloud bank, the other planes trailing behind me. A few seconds later we were through the clouds. The ground came into focus. . . . Only it wasn’t ground at all, it was ocean. More specifically, the Pacific Ocean, and I was headed toward a little cigar-shaped gray thing in the water.
It only took a moment for my brain to get up to speed and adjust for scale. That little gray thing wasn’t so little after all. It was far away but getting closer. It was, in fact, a battleship. As I recalled from my old Battleship game, it took four direct hits to sink a battleship. As I recalled from my World War II history, countless American ships were brutally disabled by pilots of the “Divine Wind” making suicide runs, crashing their planes into battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and even aircraft carriers.
I knew enough from Quinn’s flight-simulator games to know that you pull back on the stick to make the plane go up, and so I grabbed both grips and pulled. The stick shuddered and resisted, as uncooperative as that stupid lap bar had been. The other planes buzzed behind me, and all at once I realized I was not just one of a dozen planes, I was the squadron leader. They were all following me to their doom.
Once more this place had tapped into my secret fears. Fear of flying, fear of falling, but even worse than that, the fear of taking everyone down with me.
The battleship swelled before me as I dove toward it. Now I could see sailors scrambling on the deck, manning their big guns, and firing in my direction.
They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not quite right. It isn’t the flickering of life’s events that strikes you; instead, it’s the sudden realization of what your life has meant. Your whole life is captured in a single image that tells you who you’ve been. The image that came to me now were those stupid models hanging in my bedroom. The Zero, chased by a P-40, frozen in a pretend dogfight dive.
That was my life.