The Skids Page 5

  If it didn’t speed up.

  “Ah, hole,” Torg sighed. “Live fast, die fast.” Torg poured on the speed, then his treads hitched as his voice hushed with fear. “Crisp Betty, you don’t think that’s the Hole, do you?”

  Maybe, Johnny conceded.

  Many skids believed in the Hole, a black place were the skids without names weren’t just vaped, they were vaped forever. Even if it existed, Johnny had always been pretty sure he wasn’t going to end up there himself, so he tended not to think about it.

  He was thinking about it now.

  Taking an angle, Johnny aimed for a purple-orange One. Torg swung a Three upslope.

  That’s when the black tear below . . . accelerated.

  “Vape me,” Johnny breathed. He could hear it now. A ripping sound, like a hundred treads geared up to full, slashing up the Pipe, threatening to take the entire right side. If he didn’t get off . . .

  “Help me!” the panzer squealed in terror.

  Ah snakes, at least I got my second name.

  A black spike of emptiness stretched towards the terror-filled skid. The white beneath its treads began to crumble away. Johnny gunned it, creating a windshear as he accelerated into the turn and sailed into the black.

  This is now the dumbest thing you have ever done.

  Stretching out a Hasty-Arm as far as he ever had, Johnny snagged the One by its own arm. Beneath it, nothing but black.

  No, not nothing.

  Amazed, Johnny’s eyes went wide. Deep inside the black, there were lights. Faint lines, distant pulses, all infinitesimally distant and dim. And broken. The lines ended, frayed and sparking into a black that seemed to eat the light. The darkness was eating . . .

  “Don’t drop me,” the One screamed, glitter streaming from her eyes. Her only glam.

  Workin’ on it. The speed from his turn bled away. He flung out his second arm but there was nothing there. The Pipe beneath him was gone.

  Really? Like this?

  At the very end of his second arm, a hand clamped onto Johnny’s own. He tore his eyes away from the horror below.

  Up into the face of Albert.

  “You are a grease-sucking spare,” the silver skid said grimly, his arm stretched out to its limit. Above him, clutching a ring floating in space, Torg hung on for his life, creating a chain.

  The panzer was screaming. Torg was trying to haul them up. There was a tearing sound . . .

  Albert swung all three of his eyes towards Johnny. “I hate that the last thing I see is going to be your stupid stripes.”

  “Then why do it?” Johnny asked.

  He didn’t get an answer. The tearing sound reached up and tore the world to shreds.

  Chapter Six

  This is not evaporation.

  That was the last clear thought Johnny had for a while.

  They fell into the black—faint lines of light flaring and dying far, far below—and then the black fell on them. The panzer’s hand tore free. Albert was there for a flicker more, then his grip ripped away.

  Johnny’s cells began to cleave apart.

  This is . . .

  Here’s how evaporation normally felt: cell-by-cell—too fast to realize it was sequential—the building blocks of a skid separated, connections sheared clean by millions of tiny scalpels, snapped each time in a single precise break. It sucked large, but it was clean. If you knew what you were doing, you could find the pieces, reconnect, and put the puzzle back together. Cell-by-cell. Provided there wasn’t another step.

  This is not . . .

  Johnny hit the black. His cells began to cleave. And then . . . the darkness began to eat his cells.

  . . . is not . . .

  Nothing clean. No cuts, no breaks. Just tearing, tearing, tearing—the knives were serrated, they had teeth—the building blocks were ripped and shredded and then consumed.

  Nothing ever hurt like this.

  . . . not this . . .

  Blind with panic, Johnny reached for colour.

  He’d said it to that squid in the Combine: the final thing you learned at the end of Two, when you finally figured out how to hold it together after getting vaped. Colour. Every skid identified with it. Levels change, skids die, but the stripes stick. Abstract and clear. Something to grasp when your brain was being cleaved in two with a knife.

  Or eaten by buzzsaws.

  Johnny reached for blue. Then he reached for white: perfect, flawless white, the opposite of whatever the hole surrounded him now. White: perfect and flawless and clean.

  Then he got mad.

  Vape this. The thought came through like a beacon—emotion following colour, anger filling the blue and white as it always did. Being vaped sucked, it sucked tread hard. No skid, no anything should ever go through this: it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t right.

  Johnny was still terrified—notthisisnotisthisnot-thisnotisnotisnot—so he rammed the fear into his rage and punched his consciousness into the black.

  Mine. Over and over. Mine. Lashing out and tearing his torn cells back from the darkness, ripping the ripped building blocks away from whatever the hole was filling the world. Mine. He seized piece after piece until . . .

  Johnny.

  Inside the dark, Johnny’s soul grinned. Not Johnny. Johnny Drop.

  Mine.

  He thought he heard screaming. A flash of magenta-gold.

  Torg?

  Inside his own terror, Johnny found a sliver of rage and hope and heaved it in the direction of the thought. Colour! he screamed into the darkness, flinging magenta and gold at the other scream.

  And then Johnny did something he’d never done before. Something he’d never even heard of. Drenching his soul in blue and white, roaring his name like a shield—DropJohnnyDropJohnnyDrop—Johnny followed the magenta-gold flash, latched onto it and hurled the name TORG! into the colour.

  Something reached out and caught it.

  A red-yellow smear in the darkness. Bian? Dragging the spar of Torg with him, Johnny plunged after the Level Seven.

  Again and again, Johnny caught flashes of colour and reached out. He lost most—he had Kass and then felt him shredded away—but he latched onto one . . . two . . . three and more. Too many to count—he still couldn’t think straight—but he was pulling himself together even as he grabbed more and more—helping them pull together—finding more, pulling them . . .

  Deep in the darkness a light flared, unbroken and white.

  Count it, thought Johnny Drop, dropping towards the light like a blade, pulling dozens of shattered skids in his wake.

  The light grew—falling?—and grew until the darkness peeled back and the colour white filled the world. And then they were falling, skid after skid falling through the light, away from the tearing dark . . .

  Impact.

  They landed hard, though it was nothing compared to the torture they’d just endured. Johnny felt his body flatten before snapping back into shape. That’s it? he thought, surprised at his own clarity. He blinked, surrounded by hazy white light, and dropped a thinlid.

  Beneath his treads, solid ground. The world was solid. The only question: which world?

  A scraping sound came from his left. Swinging an eye, he found Torg in the haze a few metres away. The Nine looked like he’d been in a bar-fight. Which was pretty much how Johnny felt.

  “That was unpleasant,” Torg coughed, shaking his eyes. His body had been completely stripped of any skins or glam.

  “Yeah,” Johnny agreed, trying to adjust to the light. The diffuse white seemed to saturate everything.

  “Thanks,” Torg said. “Whatever that was, I wasn’t coming back until I heard you scream my name.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Johnny said. The haze was peeling back. Either that or his eyes were adjusting. He did a three-axis sweep . . .


  His upper eye froze, staring up. “Crisp Betty,” he heard Torg whisper.

  Far above them—maybe a few hundred metres or maybe a few thousand—a black scar stretched across the white.

  “We came out of that?” Torg said, his voice hushed with awe.

  “Think so,” Johnny murmured.

  “Think it will . . . attack us again? Like it did on the Pipe?”

  Johnny stared at the scar in silence before he replied. “I don’t think it’s moving.”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe let’s not trust it to stay that way.”

  A sound came from their right. Johnny’s eyes adjusted a little more and he made out a red-yellow skid. Like Torg, she had no skins or glam.

  “Bian?” he said, treading in her direction.

  Her eyes came up, wide and full. “Johnny?”

  “Yeah. You okay?”

  “I think so.” She paused, eyes wide. “You saved me.”

  He didn’t want to keep saying don’t worry about it. Suddenly self-conscious, he said, “I’m glad you’re okay.” Nearby, other shapes began to appear.

  “You saved me,” Bian whispered again, as if to herself.

  He’d saved a few more than he’d thought. He recognized a brown-red here, a blue-green . . .

  A silver-white ball emerged from the haze.

  Huh, Johnny thought as a few hundred emotions washed over him.

  Albert rolled up. Stopped five metres away. Completely unable to think of anything intelligent to say, Johnny settled on the obvious: “You’re alive.”

  A familiar smirk worked its way over Albert’s face, although he looked shaken. “Apparently.”

  “I didn’t help you out,” Johnny said, amazed.

  Albert’s eyes swept over the other skids. “Surprise, surprise. Why? You keep this lot together?”

  “He saved my skin,” Gort, a green-white Five said.

  “Me too.”

  “Me too.”

  “He saved everybody,” Bian said. Her eyes were like satellite dishes.

  “Not everybody,” Albert murmured, two eyes swinging back to Johnny.

  “Yeah,” another voice suddenly spoke. A purple-orange skid rolled up.

  The panzer from the Pipe.

  “Albert saved me,” the Level One said. Her stripe was quivering. “I thought I was dying, it was horrible, then I heard him screaming my colours at me and he helped me find my pieces. It was awesome.”

  Johnny kept one eye on the panzer and one eye on Albert. “Sounds pretty awesome.”

  “Should have been more,” Albert said. “There were hundreds of skids on that side of the stands.”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said, thinking of all the flashes of colour he’d failed to save. “Yeah, it should.”

  Keeping the eye on Albert, Johnny tried to remember if he’d seen a silver-white flash anywhere in the black. It was hard to remember anything, he wasn’t even sure how long they’d been in there. Did I see him and ignore it? Did he do that with me? So much had happened so quickly; he’d lost far more skids than he’d saved . . .

  Albert was still eyeing him. Johnny considered making a joke about the numbers they’d each saved—something about Johnny beating him again—but Bian continued to stare and he’d said he would try to be nice.

  “Glad you made it out,” he tried. He thought the words weren’t very convincing.

  “Right.” The white stripes twitched. “You too.”

  “Anybody know where we are?” Shabaz, a grey-aqua skid asked.

  “Not a clue,” Johnny said, relieved to be able to take an eye off Albert.

  “Wherever we are, can we get out from under that?” Shabaz said, nervously scanning the scar above their heads.

  “That is a fine idea,” Torg agreed. “Only one problem, squid.”

  “What’s that? And I’m a Six,” Shabaz added sullenly.

  “My mistake.” The eye pointing in Johnny’s direction rolled. “Which way are we going to go? All I see is a lot of white.”

  Which pretty much summed it up. Except for the scar, every point on the compass was white; the colour so uniform it was impossible to grasp any scale. They had solid ground beneath their treads, but where it ended and the scarred sky began was uncertain. The scar above them seemed very large and very high and stretched out in one direction, but they couldn’t tell the vectors without anything else to . . .

  “What’s that?” Albert said abruptly, two of his eyes swinging up and off to Johnny’s left.

  Johnny swung an eye and followed the angle. “I don’t see . . . oh.”

  At the very edge of the scar, small black shapes were falling from the darkness towards the white floor below. Against the white backdrop they almost looked pretty, like black raindrops falling in slo-mo. Watching them, Johnny realized the space they were in was far larger than they’d thought. Scoping his eye, the shapes grew slightly.

  Crisp Betty, those are far off.

  “Whatever they are,” he heard Torg murmur, “they aren’t large.”

  “They’re large enough,” Albert replied.

  “What’s large enough?” the One said nervously. She wouldn’t learn to scope her eyes until at least Level Four.

  The first of the shapes touched down. “Crap,” Albert said.

  Johnny felt a warm tension sink through his body as he tried to see what Albert saw. Johnny had better reflexes, probably better peripherals, but nobody scoped like Albert. Swallowing his pride, he said, “What do you see?”

  “Whatever they are, they’re moving.”

  “Which way?”

  Albert gave him a look that pretty much said everything.

  Johnny sighed. “How long till they get here?”

  “Not long enough. They’re farther away than I thought possible when we landed, but they’re moving fast.”

  “How fast?”

  Albert apparently decided this question wasn’t stupid. “Hard to tell at this distance straight on.” His stripes twitched. “But I think they’re moving fast enough.”

  “Sounds like a good time to move,” Torg said.

  “Which way?” Shabaz said. “I don’t see anywhere to go.”

  So that’s why Albert gave me the look. Johnny popped an arm and pointed in the direction of the black shapes. “How about away from them?”

  “Oh,” Shabaz said, her eye widening with fear. “Right.”

  “Okay, skids, let’s tread.” Johnny pitched his voice to carry, and they rolled away from the shapes behind them.

  “Johnny,” Torg said as they picked up speed, “we should do a count.”

  He hadn’t even thought about that. “Good idea. Could you?”

  “On it.”

  The count wasn’t going to be easy; already, they were spread out. Some Fives and Sixes had rolled the second the black shapes hit the ground. Some took different angles from the group.

  Johnny sighed. Skids just didn’t do team.

  Behind them, the black shapes grew. He wasn’t sure, but he thought . . . “Albert, you see any light inside those things?”

  “Like the hole up there? No, I don’t think they’re the same stuff.”

  “Wonder if that’s a good thing?”

  “Why don’t you slow down and find out?”

  Johnny bit his tongue. He hated relying on Albert.

  “They’re moving a lot faster than we are,” Albert added.

  Behind them, the Ones and Twos were struggling to keep up. Whatever he’d done to save them wasn’t going to matter unless he did something. “Torg,” he said, turning on his com, “drop the count, just get the group in line.”

  “I’ll help,” Bian said.

  “Great. Get them moving fast, but don’t out-tread me. I’m going to grab the Ones and Twos.”

  Cutting
his speed, he swung around in a wide arc, dropping back to grab the stragglers. The black shapes began to grow in size a little faster.

  Albert dropped back with him. “What are you doing?” Johnny snapped.

  “Helping them,” he said, pointing towards the skids falling behind. “Or did you want to do that alone, Johnny Drop?” He spat the last two words.

  “Vape me,” Johnny replied, his anger rising. Then he realized going solo was stupid. Gritting his teeth, he said, “Come on.”

  The spread at least made it clear how many low levels survived. A couple of Ones, including the purple-orange panzer Albert had saved, three Twos, and one Three named Olli. Johnny was pretty sure he’d seen a few other Threes in the pack, but the emerald-bronze skid was struggling.

  “Gear it, Olli,” Johnny said, spinning and matching speed. “The bad guys are gaining.”

  “I’m trying,” the skid growled. “Speed isn’t my thing.”

  Johnny eyed the shapes. “Better make it your thing. I can’t stay with you, I need to grab the squids.”

  “Screw the squids.”

  Johnny couldn’t hold it against him. Johnny was fighting the instinct himself. “Keep moving,” he said, then dropped back some more.

  Torg’s voice came over the com. “Johnny, we got skids breaking off from the group. Alva, Jad, Peralta, some Fours and Fives I didn’t recognize. I can’t get them all.”

  “They’re trying to clear away from the target,” Albert said.

  “I know what they’re doing,” Johnny snapped. It wasn’t even that stupid on an individual basis. “But where the hole do they think they’re going to go?” To Torg he added, “Get who you can while staying on the line. We go straight until we find something to reference.”

  “And if we don’t find that?” Torg said. He didn’t sound scared, just asking the question.

  Hole if I know. “Worry about that later. Just keep them in line.”

  Albert matched the fastest squid and coached some more speed out of him. Johnny aimed for one of other Twos.

  Skids rarely used pure speed on level ground. In a game, dozens of factors beyond speed came into play, even in races like the Slope or the Rainbow Road. So the difference between the absolute strengths of the bottom and top levels blurred a little, particularly because there were talented Ones and Twos along with uninspired Fives and Sixes.