CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I feel my breath catching as my feet pound and slide against the crumbling gravel and dry grass, and I come rushing down the hillside in the direction of the nearest highway. The girl who cried warning is running about twenty feet away from me, her stringy hair tangling in the breeze.  

More shots and cries sound behind us.

Down, down, down, I go, past shrubs, and rocky inclines, barely missing sharp branches scraping against my loose uniform pants-covered legs.

As I run, a sense of despair comes to me, together with the realization of the immense distance that is before me that I will now have to cross on foot.

Because I don’t have a damn hoverboard.

Could Gracie and Gordie and George be here too, also running for their lives? Are they here now, somewhere on another distant Los Angeles hillside, maybe? Or did they choose some other cities?

For that matter, where is “here?”

From the looks of it, I make a wild guess it’s somewhere east of downtown, with the Pacific directly beyond it, as I’m facing in that direction.

I need to get my bearings, and quickly. . . .

Think, Gwen, think . . . try to remember. . . . This is L.A.

A vague memory comes to me. Mom and Dad had once mentioned some kind of 30-Mile Studio Zone which is a circular area used by old-time Hollywood film studios for union work zoning purposes. If I remember it right, this is the exact 30-mile radius around the center of Los Angeles, and the boundaries of this zone run in a circle pretty much where the Atlanteans have deposited us. So, if I am in a spot along that boundary to the east of the heart of the city, then I am most likely somewhere in Anaheim, or possibly further north in Fullerton, or Pomona. Had I been even higher up north along the circle boundary, I’d be in the middle of Angeles National Forest, but I am not, since I can definitely see populated areas at the foot of the hill.

One easy way to get my bearings is to find the nearest major freeway artery. Once I see it, I will get a better idea of where I am.

Needle in a haystack, is where I am.

This is hopeless.

This is hell.

You are dead.

Breathing fast, clutching the cord lasso in one hand, I keep moving at a light run down hill, and there is definitely a freeway up ahead.

At the place where the shrubbery ends, the hillside runs into a fenced area overhanging a multi-lane freeway. A couple of Candidates are milling around, looking dejectedly at the impassable section of concrete wall overhanging the freeway. The girl with long stringy hair and freckles is one of them. She turns around at me with a nervous glance.

“Hey,” I say. “Thanks for the warning back there. We almost got shot.”

“Yeah, sure,” she says.

The other teen is a skinny older boy with a tan, weather-beaten, sandy blond longish hair, and the vague look of a typical California surfer. He’s holding a long hunting knife, and his armband and token are red. He stares warily at both of us.

“I’m Gwen,” I say to the two of them. “I promise—I don’t want to fight either one of you, so how about we work together? They did say we can cooperate. Might as well pool our resources?”

“Okay,” the girl says immediately, with a look of relief. “I am Sarah. Sarah Thornwald. I certainly don’t want to fight, especially not using that dreadful Er-Du.”

“Me neither,” says the surfer guy. “My name is Jared. Screw this, I just want to get to downtown, you know what I mean. Don’t wanna fight you or anyone. Peace!”

“Ok, peace works for me. So let’s team up.” I wipe my forehead and squint in the hot sun. “Where are you guys from originally? How well do you know L.A.? Although I live in Vermont, I was born here.”

“Me too,” Jared nods. “Parents are in Arizona. But me, Venice Beach, dude.”

I smile. “You look it.”

He grins back crookedly. “He-he-he, like, yeah. Totally.”

I cannot help smiling, because that’s really old school, like fifty-year-old slang called Valley Girl slang. My grandma used to speak it back in her day.

Sarah says, “I’m from North Carolina, and my dad is British, but I lived here for many years, it’s why I chose it.”

“All right, can anyone see the nearest freeway overpass sign?” I stare out at the road where the cars are moving, and suddenly see something blinking colorfully along the wall fence. It’s a long ovoid light fixture, made of four stacked color sections, and I realize it’s a Semi-Finals zone beacon.

“Hey, I know where we are, it’s the 210 Freeway, and this is Glendora!” Sarah says.

But I point at the beacon.

“There,” I say. “That’s a new zone indicator, the wall’s a boundary, and I think we’ll need to cross the freeway.”

We move down closer to the wall, and now we see the rainbow beacon, one of several. They stretch out every thirty feet along the top of the wall.

“How the hell are we going to cross? Look at that crazy traffic!” Jared mutters. He then leans over the concrete wall and stares down on the other side.

Below, a stream of cars, trucks, and semis is roaring along the road in both directions. It occurs to me, there are probably hidden cameras all around.

“Um, is the red strip on the other side supposed to mean a hot zone?”

“Oh, crap, yeah.” Sarah leans in to stare over the freeway also.

I pause, utterly at a loss.

Suddenly behind us I hear more nose, more shots, wild screams, and the sound of more Candidates running down the long hillside toward us.

“Okay, we need to get the hell away from here, run!”

The three of us start moving, running parallel to the wall, having nowhere else to go but down, more than twenty feet and into the freeway traffic.

Meanwhile, I whirl around to look, and it’s the same Blues armed with rifles, and they’re basically picking off Candidates one by one, since we are all equally trapped by the boundary wall, with nowhere to go. Apparently that’s their technique, simply eliminate all nearest competition.

We’re all on foot, and we’re all screwed.

And then I get a wild idea.

I open my mouth and start to sing at the top of my voice.

* * *

Sarah and Jared stop running and whirl around to stare at me like I am insane. But my clear voice soars in the wind, and I am making a single, perfect, precise note, an F Major, which appears to be my trademark emergency “go-to” note. And then I follow it up by a chord sequence of several others, sustaining each one.

“Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing?” Jared exclaims. “You want to bring everyone down on us, here?”

Indeed, the Blues have heard me and seen us, and they are coming directly at us down the hill.

Fortunately, so is the closest hoverboard.

It’s coming from the west, the direction of the hot zone, over the freeway, past the tallest treetops. The girl riding it, a slim young teen my age, is balancing wildly, barely holding her upright stance, and flailing her arms, at the same time as she is desperately trying to sing her own keying sequence to regain hover control.

Poor thing. She has no idea I just re-keyed her hoverboard mid-flight and locked it away from her with an Aural Block.

Yeah, that’s my secret weapon.

“Whoa!” Jared says, seeing the approaching hoverboard. “Did you do that? Sweet!”

“Hey!” the girl on the hoverboard is screaming at me. “What is happening! Stop it! What is this?”

But I continue sustaining the note sequence, and the board comes to a stop right before me, a foot off the ground, with its rider flailing wildly.

I go silent. “Hi, I’m Gwen,” I say quickly. “Sorry to do this, but we really need your hoverboard, now.”

“No way!” The girl on the board glares at me. She is skinny, frail-looking, very young, but with a stubborn set of her angular jaw, and brave blue eyes underneath light brown bangs. “This is my board, I earned it fair and square! You can’t have it! Give it back! What happened to it? How come it doesn’t obey? What did you do?”

I notice she has a yellow token also, and there’s a cord wrapped around her waist that looks almost identical to mine.

“It doesn’t obey because it’s not a dog,” I say lightly, stepping forward.

“Don’t come any closer! I can really kick your ass!”

But Sarah and Jared and I have surrounded her.

Meanwhile, behind us the Blue Candidates with guns are coming fast, now that they have seen there’s a hoverboard involved.

“Look,” I say. “There’s no time to argue. This board can carry all of us, I swear to you, I know the poundage ratio for this amount of orichalcum, so yeah—”

“Shut up already and let’s just take her board,” Jared says grimly, and brandishes his big knife without much enthusiasm.

“No!” Sarah and I both exclaim, whirling at him.

“Whoa! Okay, whatever,” he says, throwing up his arms, so that the knife he’s holding is flipped back ineffectively and he almost loses his grip on it.

Then again I turn away and put a hand, palm out, to the girl in a calming gesture. “No one is taking away your board, but we can share it! Quickly now! Just let us all sit down on it, okay? We’ll ride together! It’s like a long bench, it will work great to carry us—you just sit down and hang on with your hands. We simply all straddle it, okay? Don’t hit me on the head, please, let me just show you—”

And then I swing one leg over the front of the hoverboard and take a seat, risking the fact that the girl stands directly behind me and over my head, and she might take the opportunity to clobber me senseless.

Fortunately for me, the girl is a decent person. Because she pauses, then sighs in resignation. She then jumps down to the ground, with feet planted on either side of the board, and takes a seat right behind me. “Okay, this better work!”

Sarah does not lose a moment and gets behind her.

“Jared, sit your butt down!” Sarah says in her pointed British accent, turning to stare up at him.

Jared shrugs, and gets behind us at the very end of the board, and sticks the long knife back into a holder at his belt. With four of us, it is definitely a tight fit along the six-foot length of the board. “Are you sure this is gonna work?”

In reply I start to sing. That way I don’t have to think about the fact that I am about to fly a hundred feet up in the air, like a witch on a broom, over a major L.A. freeway.

The broom—pardon me, the hoverboard—shoots straight up, and starts gaining altitude. Sitting behind me, the other passengers let out squeals and other noises of alarm, as they hang on. . . .

If the media cameras really are everywhere, they must be getting a seriously weird feed of us, all straddling the hoverboard, like a boat rowing crew, high up in the air.

I close my eyes momentarily, as I always do during hoverboard up-and-down riding practice to stifle my vertigo, and desperately clutch the sides with both hands, white-knuckled in controlled terror, as we soar forward into the abyss over the 210 Freeway.

My yellow token ID makes a sudden flashing blink, and I recall that the zone boundary has scanned me, and all of us, crossing it. . . .

I continue singing, mouth open into the wind, never faltering, repeating the hover sequence to move forward.

Below us at the foot of the hill, the Blues have arrived and are yelling in frustration and shooting up into the air, aiming at us.

But we are already many feet up and away, and their aim is not that great, especially with this high wind turbulence.

* * *

The hoverboard carries us deep into the hot zone, over the freeway and into a residential neighborhood. As we’re flying—going about thirty miles an hour, since I don’t want to risk any higher speed with a load of four people—the immense panorama of the City of Angels, covered in a delicate smog haze, is overwhelming.

I feel secure enough in our movement that I go silent at last. The hoverboard is perma-keyed to me and has been programmed to fly forward.

Which means, I can shut up and get my own fear of heights under control.

“So, yeah, this is effing awesome,” Jared yells from the back, and then makes a horsey laughing sound into the wind.

“Hey, did you just pinch me?” Sarah exclaims at Jared, squirming. “Jerk!” But she seems half-annoyed, half-amused.

“So, yeah,” I say, echoing Jared’s phrasing, and turn my face lightly to look at the poor silent girl behind me whose board I so shamelessly appropriated. She is staring at me sullenly and her face is pinched and tense. “My name is Gwen Lark, what’s yours? I’m sorry to have taken over your board like this, but it was kind of desperate there. . . .”

“That was horrible and scary,” the girl tells me. “I almost fell off. You had no right.”

“I agree. Again, really sorry. But this is a horrible situation we’re all in. Can we just all work together, please?”

“Do I have any choice?” The girl frowns.

“Well,” I say. “Sure, I suppose we can land a little farther over there and let you go on your own way on the hoverboard while we all just walk. But that would really suck for all of us—including you. Because, here’s the thing—together we can protect this hoverboard and make sure you and we all have a chance to make it. Without us, someone else much less nicer might come along and pop you in the head with a gun or gut you with a knife and take away the board and leave you to die.”

“I’m Zoe,” the girl says after a pause, with the wind whipping her thick brown bangs around her eyes. “And okay, I guess. . . .”

“Great,” I say through gritted teeth, as another sudden wave of vertigo passes through me, and I am suddenly reeling, clutching the seat of the hoverboard.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath of wind.

“Nice to meet you, Zoe,” Sarah says mildly, maybe recognizing my discomfort. “I am so glad we have you and your board. You saved us, you know, thank you.”

“Yeah, you did,” I add, recovering sufficiently to speak again.

“So, are we gonna just ride this board all the way downtown?” Jared says. “Because that would be awesome. At this rate, we’ll totally ace this Semi-Finals thing, and be there in just a couple of hours, max.”

Just as he says this, there’s a loud whoosh in the air. A fiery projectile passes about three feet from us. And then another one, this time just barely a foot overhead. Each is about five inches in diameter, and leaves a comet-searing trail of fire in its wake. What the heck is it? A rocket grenade? A firework?

“Damn, someone’s shooting at us!” Jared ducks in reflex.

“Well, yeah, this is a hot zone!” Sarah and Zoe are both “landlocked” between Jared and me, and both cringe in place.

Having crossed the freeway, we are flying vaguely alongside the path of it, next to the 210 Freeway artery, heading in the general southwest direction. I squint from the sun and wind and try to figure out where these fireballs are coming from, because it seems like they are just rising out of nowhere from the treetops and the residential areas along the way. Possibly they are coming from the several multi-story apartment or condo complexes right below us.

Since we are not much higher than the treetops anyway, it seems smart to rise a bit higher. On the other hand that might make us even more visible targets.

“How do they know where we are anyway?” Zoe mutters in my ear, still cringing away.

“I am guessing our tokens send out some kind of GPS coordinates.”

“Should we fly higher? Or lower?”

“Or how about just faster?” Jared grumbles.

Meanwhile, the fire projectiles are coming thick and fast. I see them rising like fireworks rockets and roman candles from various random spots on the ground below—buildings, street corners, trees.

In moments, the sky is thick with them.

“We have to go lower!” I exclaim through gritted teeth, and start singing a sequence to bring us closer to the treetops, and even street level. We begin the stomach-lurching descent.

“Are you crazy?” Jared is at it again. “This is going to make it worse! They’re gonna be able to hit us—”

“No, look up,” Sarah says. “Compare here and up there. There’s hundreds of them up there now, and if we rise back up, we will be hit for sure! She’s doing the right thing!”

“There’s Arrow Highway up ahead,” I say, as we whistle past the trees, about twenty feet above street level. “And there’s the 605 Freeway coming up, we can head southeast along the highway past Irwindale and I think there’s Baldwin Park somewhere here. . . .”

As we move close to the street, it becomes visible now, residents stand outside their houses and stare at us. . . . And now that we can see houses up-close, the windows and balconies of multi-levels are also filled with faces watching.

 Furthermore, we are not alone.

Apparently there are so many Candidates here today who chose Los Angeles that they are pretty much scattered all over the place. What are the chances there’d be Candidates on the same street as we are, in this huge sprawling monster of a city? Because even on this street below us I can see two teens in grey Atlantean uniforms same as ours, wearing color armbands, a Green and a Red, running with determination, slow marathon style.

They must’ve had a significant head start on us, because here they are, on foot, and have managed to make it this far.

Or they are just that good.

I try not to think about what kind of position I’d be in now if it hadn’t been for my ability to commandeer this hoverboard. I might still be running several miles back, near the hillside, along the wrong side of the 210 Freeway, unable to cross it. Or I could be shot dead by the Blues.

Stop it. . . .

I shut off that part of me and try to focus on the here and now.

We are in a hot zone. We are being randomly fired upon.

“Ok, here’s the problem,” Sarah says in that moment. “If we just fly low, along this street level, we will have a tough time getting our bearings and general direction.”

“And if we rise up higher to look around, we’ll get shot down,” Zoe puts in.

I turn my head slightly, my messy ponytail rifled by the wind. “So what’s the best solution?”

“There isn’t one. It’s all crap.” Jared sighs. “Man, I could use some water now. It’s getting damn hot. And we’re going to be dehydrated real soon.”

Oh, great . . . I didn’t even think of that.

Because Jared’s right. And the Atlantean shuttle Pilots mentioned nothing about food or water supplies. They only said we could not get help locally from the city population. Would getting water be considered getting help?

As I think this, I hear gunshots behind us.

“Oh, no! Go faster! Go, go, go!” This time it’s mellow Sarah who exclaims.

Apparently there are other hoverboards coming our way, and the Candidates riding them have firearms.

* * *