his vision like a white bomb. He blinked and looked away, the stalks of his eyes aching.
Michael tried to sit up, and saw he already was. Fell asleep sitting up? Huh. Hadn’t done that in a long time. Not since the night before Halloween, when he’d stayed up so late putting the finishing touches on his wonderful and 100 percent foolproof escape.
His arms were stretched above his head. Reeeeach fer the skyyyy, he thought dimly. And when he tried to lower his arms, he couldn’t. There were glittering loops on his wrists. Metal.
He was handcuffed to a wicker pole that stretched above his head.
Jopek, across from him, blew smoke in his face.
“God!” Michael shouted. He tried to dance back. The wall behind his back was solid, but shifted at his push; the floor swayed.
Jopek said nonchalantly, “I get that a lot.” Behind him, clouds dipped and nodded.
He sat on a short stool across from Michael, his hand draped over his crossed legs, his flak jacket casually open, his presence impossible. This couldn’t be real. Michael had been scratched, and the captain had left him behind. Michael’s bad blood was now just showing him a nightmare, that’s all, because he was in the Capit—
Not the Capitol.
Balloon, Michael thought. I’m in the balloon.
“So, soldier—”
“What’s going on? Where’s Patrick?”
“—hope you’re rested up ’cause—”
“What happened?” blurted Michael. “Am I still infected?” He recognized the desperate hope in his voice: it was the same that Bobbie’d had in the moments before her death. That feeling made him sick, but he could not stop it.
“I know I said it before, but shoooo,” Jopek replied as if to just make conversation, “you sure sleep like the dead.
“So Mike, did I pick the right size? Hope it ain’t uncomfortable—just gotta make sure you don’t bite or scratch nobody.”
Size?
Jopek indicated the space suit Michael was wearing.
In his shock, Michael had not even noticed. He had seen such things in newspaper photographs before: a camouflage, full-body biowear suit. His breath bounced off the plastic faceplate and hissed back on his cheeks. The sleeves were clammy and tight, an alien skin pasted on his own. When Michael jerked in surprise, Jopek threw back his head and laughed.
“Boyyyyyy, you’re funny, but you’re sure not sayin’ much today. You learn that stealthiness from the soldiers you saw? You like tryin’ to sneak up and kill people?”
A single cloud shaded the sun, then fled.
Michael gulped, dizzy with confusion and fear. Where was Patrick? Where was here? The view over the top of the basket’s walls was only empty sky, the balloon so elevated he could see neither buildings nor coal company–blighted mountaintops. He sniffed, desperately searching for any clue . . . and what he smelled made him nearly gag. Even inside the suit, the scent of the Bellows—amplified, at least quadruple the worst he’d ever smelled—was overpoweringly, sickly rich.
“Where . . . where are we?” Michael said.
Jopek took a final drag and flicked his cigarette out of the basket.
He’s gonna do that to me.
Michael held Jopek’s gaze. He held it as carefully as he would hold a bell jar filled with poison gas that could cause a nightmare death at the slightest mistake.
“Why am I here?”
The edges of Jopek’s grin hardened. “’Cause you and me got business, Mikey.”
He drew out from within his jacket a handgun, tugged back the slide then let it bite forward, chambering a round from the banana clip. “Would you like to talk? I’d love to talk.”
Michael had precisely zero idea what he should say: He wasn’t sure about anything with Jopek just now. He had believed, before, that he understood the captain: that Jopek was nothing more than an army-issue Ron who only wanted to be worshipped and in control, and God help anyone that got in his way. Yet by that logic, Jopek should have abandoned the skinny kid who had aimed a gun at him last night. But I’m still here, strapped in the freaking sky with this psychopath. Michael did not even try to feel his blood; yes-yes and the Game Master had failed him last night; they had been shredded by the cry and claws of an impossibly resurrected boy who carried a virus that now quite probably lived inside Michael. No, Michael couldn’t decipher the captain, not any more than the field mouse can fathom the lion.
But he had no choice: he nodded.
Jopek returned it.
And the air between them electrified.
“What I want to talk about,” Jopek said, “is a game. I reckon that