Achilles choice

Jillian put on a burst of speed. The sound had come from in front of her. Someone ahead of her had-At the edge of the mesa was a decline, steeper than the ascent but with better hand and foot holds. And a hundred feet below her, a rag doll crushed by an angry child, was Catherine St. Chair.

Halfway down the face was Mary Ling. The Taiwanese paused, glared up at Jillian, face tight with challenge.

Or concentration.

It could have been an accident.

Jillian’s own concentration was shot now. As she climbed down the cliff she had to pass within five feet of the woman’s body. She tried to confine her thoughts to her breathing, to the smooth flow of muscles in shoulders and hips. But then St. Clair, shattered on the rocks, suddenly moved. Her body arched, and her mouth made a wet keening sound.

From somewhere behind her came the burring whistle of a Medtech aircar coming in for a pickup. It was still seconds away. Catherine St. Clair tried to move, tried to turn. Her eyes stared at Jillian without focusing. Jillian was frozen to the rock face, unmoving, until the woman from Kenya descended past her.

She snapped out of her trance then, and started to move, but the Englishwoman stretched out her hand and tried to say something like “Help me…” except that the words came out as an indecipherable groan, all vowels and wet consonants.

Where was the Medtech vehicle? She couldn’t leave.

St. Chair’s eyes locked with hers, and Jillian saw her die, saw the lights go out, the body collapse into lifelessness.

Shaking now, Jillian completed her descent.

Her control was shattered. She was already breathing hard, her ankle felt swollen, and her shoulder had little strength.

It was a straight run now to the finish line, and she was in third place, with Mary Ling twenty feet ahead of her.

Jillian bore down, willed her legs to pump faster and faster, ignored the pain. Ignored everything but that final sprint to the finish line, to the reward that awaited her if she could only overcome the fatigue built up over the week of competition.

Her entire body was aflame now, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. She had cut the distance between herself and the Taiwanese to perhaps ten feet, still gaining, five feet now, three feet-Then, from some unimaginable well of hidden resources, Mary Ling seemed to go into another gear, and simply pulled away from her, crossing the finish line a full eight feet ahead of Jillian Shomer.

The shock of it almost drove Jillian off her feet. Her entire body began to shake, as if every strand of connective tissue were suddenly unraveling. She lurched the last few feet, collapsed across the finish line.

She tasted dust, and defeat, and death.

Chapter 13

A mile away, in the central stadium, the crowds were cheering.

Jillian watched as speeches were made. The winners paraded proudly alongside those losers who had, in Donny’s fevered phrasing, “the strength of character, the wisdom and depth of commitment to share in the true spirit of the games, to rejoice in the uplifting of the human race without the hunger for personal gain.” And she watched him present the gold medal to that little Taiwanese slut.

Abner had been awash in pain medication by the time she got to his room. He mumbled words that might have been comforting if they had been comprehensible. His eyes were closed-she’d thought he’d gone to sleep-when he said clearly: “Check the records. Check my records.”

“Records? Abner, which records?”

“0… lym… piad.”

He had slipped further and further away from her, into delirium. His words and thoughts became ever more garbled. Jillian sat beside him in a darkening room, feeling her bruises and scrapes, watching Abner Warren Collifax slide into the same pit which would, in five or six years, yawn to welcome her.

For twenty hours she sat there, a statue of flesh, watching him wither before her eyes. With all of her strength she willed him to speak, to breathe, to live.

In vain. After twenty hours he died.

Numb, Jillian tucked the sheet around his neck, kissed his forehead, and left quietly, almost on tiptoe, as if he were merely asleep.

More loss:

Walking back to the dorm along the edge of the island. A warm Mediterranean evening, falling swiftly. A sweet heavy breeze swayed in from the south.

Activity over next to one of the low sea walls. A half-dozen silver blazers, the sudden appearance of a Medtech tram.

Something wet and limp was hauled up from the ocean. Jillian caught a momentary image of flaccid, heavy muscle, dripping water. Vulnerable nakedness. Wet black hair, shadow-dappled by dying sunlight.

An easy death. Anesthetized by the cold, put to sleep by oxygen starvation-What was that, in the shadows off to the right? Broken, shattered: something in the darkness. Jillian stepped quietly to it, bent, watching her fingers tremble as she reached.

Half of Jeff Tompkins’s palace was still perfect, a study in ivory. Half was stove in as if by a sudden, terrible effort, one of those moments of madness which, once done, cannot be undone.