Salvation

“Oh, Saints,” he groaned as the arena shifted again. A hurdle came sweeping through the air at him. A munc caught his ankle. They spun end over end, and he just had time to crouch and bounce.

“Zero on Rello,” Tilliana commanded. “Quick quick!”

Dellian searched around frantically. He saw Rello cartwheeling next to their flashing flagball. Three Ansaru bundles were heading for him. Instinctively Dellian bounced another hurdle and flew, arms outstretched in summoning. In five seconds his cohort had coalesced around him again, and together they flashed across the arena to help Rello.

The Ansaru team managed to capture an Immerle flagball and dunk it into their goal hoop, then fifty seconds later Xante snatched the second Ansaru flagball. The arena stabilized, and both teams bounced gently down to the floor.

“Two minutes,” Alexandre announced.

Dellian and the rest of the team went into a delighted huddle. Getting the first point was always a good sign, and it demoralized the opposing team. Tilliana and Ellici started telling them everything they’d done wrong. They barely had time to snatch a gulp of juice before the referees called them back to play.

The four flagballs went zipping high into the arena. Alexandre’s whistle blew.

Immerle was up 11–7, and playing the next point, when things changed. The arena was producing centrifugal gravity at right angles to the axis—which Dellian always hated—when the hurdles themselves started tumbling.

“What the Saints?” Xante exclaimed in panic as he bounced off a moving surface in a completely unexpected direction.

Dellian just laughed in delight. The lights flashed violet, and the arena shifted again; it had been barely thirty seconds since the last shift.

“Concentrate, for Saints’ sake!” Tilliana yelled furiously, as a flailing Janc missed the Ansaru flagball he’d been aiming to snatch. He careered into a hurdle, whose rotation flung him away toward the arena’s center point.

Dellian glided toward a hurdle, manipulating his limbs carefully. His cohort bundle flexed responsively, and he could tell which surface they were going to land on, how it would be angled. He altered fractionally, and munc legs bent accordingly. The bounce propelled him straight up toward the Ansaru flagball. Four munc hands reached out as if they were lifting a trophy in victory.

Yirella sailed across his trajectory and snatched the flagball, curling around to land square on a hurdle.

“Too slow,” she chided, laughing—and bounced.

Admiration for her agility mingled with the annoyance of being beaten to the flagball, Dellian studied the tumbling hurdle he was now heading for and judged the rotation almost right. He bounced to follow Yirella down, ready to provide support against any Ansaru intercept.

Two Ansaru players tried. But the moving hurdles were an unexpected complication for them, too. Both missed, swishing ineffectually behind Yirella as she flew true toward the goal hoop below.

Violet light flashed again.

“Oh, come on,” Dellian groaned. If the arena kept this up, it would take them hours to get the final points. And he was already tired.

He could see from the course Yirella was on that she only had one more hurdle bounce planned out, which would put her directly on the floor. Then he caught sight of Ansaru’s number eight going for a last-minute intercept. The boy was good, he admitted grudgingly as he watched his munc bundle smack into a hurdle and break apart in a complex slingshot-spin that transferred a lot of kinetic energy to him. Number eight soared out of his collapsing cohort, alone and at a speed that startled Dellian.

Things came together in his mind as he examined number eight’s trajectory: that the boy would have to slow down, because to strike anything at that speed would hurt, maybe even break some bones. He couldn’t slow because there was no hurdle close by to bounce off and transfer momentum. The way he flew, with arms thrust out above his head, and hands clenched into fists, that was deliberate, calculated to injure Yirella. Then there was the sullen resentment number eight had shown throughout the game when Yirella scored a point, and she’d got six of Immerle’s total. That was back with a vengeance.

It’s not the flagball he’s going for, Dellian knew. His arms jerked around, hands in a grasping motion. The muncs reacted instantly, elongating the bundle shape. One of the muncs hit the side of a hurdle, managing to grab an edge for a brief moment. It was enough. The hurdle’s rotational velocity was transferred through the cohort, and they slung Dellian away.

Now he was the one going far too fast.

“What—?” Tilliana gasped. “No! Yi, Yi, look out!”