ALEX

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙰𝙼𝙰'𝚂 𝙱𝙾𝚈, as Alex would later deem Braeden—though she didn't dare mention that to his face out of the fear that he'd copy her weather-caster ability and use it against her—was a bit of a strange individual. But his want for his mother did make sense: he was new, afraid, and going batshit crazy. Alex didn't realise she was staring right at him until later when they crossed a wooden log bridging a rivulet. His trench coat was drenched from the journey, and his face and hair were matted with dirt. Up ahead some three miles, blending with the horizon, was a darkening sky, petering from purple-red to pitch-black. Edging across the log, arms outstretched for balance, she followed Braeden and Scarlet.

  Mama's Boy had explained his story as they ventured, beginning with the spiky, snow-crested mountain back in the glade division, progressing to the man with the clock, summing up just about everything that happened until he came across Alex and Scarlet. Braeden was new, just like Alex. He said, when he first got here, that he had to jump off a mountain to escape a man who could summon spikes out of his arms.

  Alex dropped off on the other side of the river. She'd anticipated that she would trip off the log, what with her terrible balance, which would have totally sucked considering how cold the water was. "How did you survive the fall?" she asked, tending to her scarf, making sure it wouldn't blow off, because by that time a faint wind had arisen.

  Mama's Boy looked back at her with glassy, green eyes, without expression. There were pitted dark circles under each eye. "I used the shield," he said, and when he reached into his pocket, he pulled out a piece of paper. "I got this leaflet when I got here. Do any of you know what it means?" There was a slight unsteadiness in his voice, though that was probably due to the cold as opposed to nervousness.

  Scarlet stopped, turned, and gripped a tree with her right hand. Her eyes widened just a little, then sharpened. "That's the document. God gives it to everyone. There's no way to get rid of it." She popped a hand into her own inside jacket pocket and pulled out the same piece of paper. She grabbed it by the top corners and ripped it in two.

  "What are you doing?!" asked Alex. "You, you might need—" Would she need it, though? The aim of the game (if you wanted to call a world run by some crazy god-complex creator a game) was to reach the Spiral. What else was there to explain? Maybe if there was a set of complex rules to abide by then it would make sense as to why God would want His participants to hold on to the leaflet, but there was no way to cheat, therefore no rules. So what was the point of it?

  A kind of answer came later when Scarlet said, "Oh, don't worry, it won't go anywhere," and stuck her same hand into her same inside jacket pocket. Another piece of paper came out, the same size and having the same words scrawled out from top to bottom. She held it in her left hand, brow creased. Her waxy pallor reflected the purple-hued sky, lips glazing, hair nicely upswept. "You can't get rid of them."

  A moment of pause. "Why's that?" asked Alex, and Braeden nodded in agreement, as if he too wanted the answer to the same question. Pulling out her own leaflet, she began reading the text in her mind.

  "Honestly," began Scarlet, "I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with remembering why we're here."

  That made sense. If they were going to be here awhile—more like a long while, beyond a decade, at least—then it would be important that they remembered why they were travelling towards the Spiral. To escape. Alex thought about this occasionally, like how one sometimes thinks about dying in the far future, that she'd eventually have to reach the Spiral. And when that happened . . . then what? There could only be one winner, so what would happen to Scarlet? Just for argument's sake: if they were both to get there—to the Spiral—before anybody else, that meant one of them would die, along with the rest of the project. So how would they decide who got to win? Who would get the chance to leave this shitty world and make it back to Earth? Alex hadn't the slightest clue, but she did think it was likely to happen. As a weather-caster, she had an advantage: an ability that could help claw through the world, making sure nobody else could get in her way. But when all was said and done, she'd have to make a difficult decision.

  Just thinking about this made her tear up slightly. Resisting the forks of emotion stabbing into her, Alex sighed, and said, "I think I can understand that." Despite her best efforts, a quaver slipped into her voice.

  Scarlet didn't seem to notice. She wrapped her face in a wan smile. "I'm sure you do. You're a smart girl."

  "But why am I here? I didn't agree to no Reach Project, and I sure as hell didn't agree to nearly dying to crazy people." Braeden threw the paper down onto the muddy earth. He stamped on it a couple times before adding, "This is torture. I don't want to take part in this shit game. I just wanna find my mama and get the hell out of here."

  "Well," said Scarlet, "if you die in here, you die in real life, so far as I know."

  "How do you know that?" asked Braeden quickly. Again: there was that audible unsteadiness. "The way I see it, the leaflet says nothin' about dying in real life. Hell, it doesn't even say the game will kill us if someone reaches the Spiral first."

  "That's true," said Scarlet. She took a step forward and shielded her eyes from the purple skylight, grimacing a little. "But are you really willing to take that chance? The truth is, nobody knows much about the game, only that we have to get to the end. We have powers to help us, and in your case, you have perhaps one of the best out there. So why throw that away?"

  "Because—" began Mama's Boy, and suddenly he was at a loss for words.

  After receiving no response, Scarlet nodded impassively. Yet Alex had been sure there was a hidden emotion in there, perhaps fear. That'd make sense, too, considering she wasn't sure what would happen after death either. And even if God told her on the leaflet, would it be worth trusting? Alex thought she saw a gleam of tears in the woman's eyes.

  "You're looking for your mother," said Scarlet. "That's a bitch. Alex is looking for her parents, too. And so have I, for the last ten years. I came here as a kid and have yet to see them. My thought is that they're back home, wondering where I went for the past decade."

  "But . . ." said Alex. ". . . if you've been here for ten years, and you're from Canada, how come there weren't reports of thousands of missing people along with you?"

  Scarlet looked at Alex thoughtfully. "That's a good question," she said. "A very good question, actually. To be clear, I haven't met anyone from Canada, let alone from my home city. I guess God just took people from all across the world, one by one. I don't know. My memory of life is a little muddled."

  There was also the possibility that there were reports on thousands of missing people, and Alex couldn't remember it. If there were, had they all gone here? And if so, how would that have happened? What she had seen on the day she was with Phoenix, the last memory she had with him, on the balcony of his apartment would have garnered a lot of attention worldwide. The flicker of black movement, the flash that forked the sky like a thick lightning bolt, and the temporary blindness. After that, all she could remember was darkness.

  Braeden began pacing forward towards the tree Scarlet had been standing in front of. He crossed her, eyes ahead, and said, "I think there's a new area ahead." He shivered, stuffing his forearms deep in his pockets (they were deep enough for that to happen). His footsteps tore wide mounds of mud from the ground, making short, almost soundless squelches. When he crossed the border of the tree trunk he continued. "I ain't used to temp this low. I'm from Florida."

  "You're from Florida?" said Alex.

  "Orlando," he said. "Born and raised with my mama and sister. I was just about to graduate high school before this shit happened."

  "How old are you?"

  "Seventeen. I skipped a year."

  Mama's Boy turned away only to have silence descend. His footsteps broke it later.

  They followed the purple light to the next subdivision, marked by a line separating noonlight and pitch-black, crossing miniature escarpments in the woodland. It was during this time that Braeden had brought up his encounter with Chrono. Alex looked at him with a burning interest. She had known that the encounter wouldn't have gone well, but anticipating the story still brought waves of sickness that couldn't just be coughed off. She was afraid of that man just as much as she was afraid of spiders or, despite saying otherwise, the dragon. Yes, she knew she was stronger in some regard, but did that really matter? Humans had an instinct to fear much weaker things. Spiders, for one, made Alex intensely uncomfortable. And throughout her seventeen years, she never understood why; perhaps it was the unpredictability in their movements, those squishy little buggers, or maybe it was the possibility of them crawling up your sleeve never to be seen again. Only now, there was no spider of course. Her fear was a man with the ability to control time, who not too long ago almost killed Scarlet. It was only luck that Alex found that limited stroke of bravery and took him down long enough to escape. . . otherwise, who knew what could have happened?

  "He said I was brave to wander the Reach Project alone," said Braeden. "And I couldn't move, I couldn't tell him I was scared and didn't know what the fuck was going on. I ain't never been that scared in my life."

  "But you said you could copy him?" said Scarlet. "What then?" She folded her arms and shivered.

  With every tree they passed, the cold seemed to lessen.

  "I didn't even know I could copy people's powers till then," confided Mama's Boy. "All I knew was that I could summon shields. I sort of figured it out not long after coming here, like it was engraved in muscle-memory. But, anyway, I copied his power and . . . Jesus, it felt funky as hell. I could hear my mama speakin' to me. I could hear her voice, and when it stopped, I could move. More than that, instead of the Man with the Clock freezing me, I froze him."

  "Then what?" asked Scarlet. She read Alex's mind like a book.

  "Then . . . I left. I didn't wanna fuck with this guy. And I felt so weak after using his power, like, you know how you sometimes feel with the flu? Yeah, that sort of weak. I had a headache, and my muscles were so tired."

  With a hand plastering a yawn, Alex said, "He attacked us as soon as we got here—in this division."

  "It's not the first time I've seen him," said Scarlet. "He's been around for as long as I've been, I'd say. He's a real evil bastard."

  Alex's stomach churned. "Oh, man," she murmured. She began feeling dizzy and a good bit nauseous, though she refrained from speaking about it, and tried her best not to show it.

  "Did you get to keep his power?" asked Scarlet.

  "Naw," said Mama's Boy. "It don't work like that. If I want to keep someone's power, I have to kill them. I had to do it with the first guy. I thought it was the same for everyone, but I guess not."

  "That's really useful," said Scarlet.

  And before she could say anything else, Braeden stopped in his tracks. "Yeah, uh . . . yo, we're somewhere."

  Alex had been too busy looking down at her feet, the feeling of sickness gnawing and tearing at her tummy with its heartless shark teeth, to notice that they'd been approaching the next subdivision. She didn't even notice that the purple ocean sky had darkened significantly, segueing into a savagely spotty undertone of greyish black. A thin rain popped down, thickening into pellets as time went on, metamorphosing into slabs of sleet upon scratching the surface.

  Looking up, she witnessed a flash of movement in the distance—a twirl, more particularly, sitting underneath a pitch-black sky. Seeing night and day sit next to each other without a seamless break was madly disorienting, unlike anything Alex had ever seen, on TV or in real life. But this was unreality, and so things like this were to be somewhat expected. Suddenly, not being able to hold on any longer, Alex fell to her knees and drew her chest into them before vomiting. She thought, If I walk any longer I'm gonna end up dead, and not by Chrono, by my own stomach.

  Right.