Thieves of Light

CHAPTER THREE

For once, Christopher Jarvis awoke on a Saturday morning before his sister had a chance to invade his bedroom and wake him. There was none of his customary heavy-lidded groaning and stretching. His body was alive with energy and anticipation, as though it were ready for the tournament to begin that moment.

But the clock on his cluttered dresser advised him that it was just past 6:30, too early even to start helping with the family's traditional Saturday morning breakfast. The window of his bedroom faced east, and he sat on the sill in the T-shirt and briefs he'd slept in to watch the sun rise over the little copse of trees across the street.

As he sat, he thought a little about Mrs. Martini, a little about Denise. But most of the time he spent envisioning the arena he would enter at ten o'clock, cataloging its shadowed hiding places, visualizing his own success there.

In an idle moment in study hall, Jarvis had once paged through a copy of Sports Illustrated containing an article on the new breed of sports psychologists. Though he had skipped over the piece, he was nevertheless following the advice of one of the leading psychemasters profiled in it: Visualize the moment. See yourself in the act of hitting the clutch home run, breaking the tape in record time, sinking the winning free throw. Prepare your mind for the challenge, and your body will respond.

By seven, he was hearing the tell-tale sounds of other family members stirring and started to dress. It was one of the rules of Saturday breakfast that no one came to the table in nightclothes or robe. Mom insisted. It was her show, and had run three years without a missed performance. He remembered when she had instituted the now-entrenched ritual:

"We're all busy, every one of us, from Dad to Felicia, and that's good. But weekends have been just too crazy. Saturday morning is the only time in the whole weekend that I can be sure everyone will be here," she told the family. "So I'm going to see that we have at least one chance to talk to each other and one good meal in the weekend. This is how it's going to be-"

Standing at his dresser combing his thick, medium-short blond hair, Jarvis smelled coffee. By the time he reached the stairs, the irresistible smell of bacon frying had joined it. Downstairs, he found Felicia watching cartoons in the family room, and his mother in the kitchen. He joined her there and wordlessly started splitting English muffins with a fork.

"This is the big day," she said as she puttered at the stove. "Did I tell you that your father and I are going to come watch?"

More importantly, so is Denise. "It's not like the school gym," he warned. "The only place you can see the whole arena from is the rail of the observation deck. If you want a spot at it, you'll have to get there early."

"Well, what time are you planning to get there?"

"I have to leave right after breakfast. The team's meeting at the Center at nine, to go over things."

"Oh, that early? And when do you play?"

"Fight," Jarvis corrected. "In the first round, we're in the third match. Ten-thirty or so. After that, when we go back in depends on who beats who."

"I don't know, Chris," she said dubiously. "I have some things I promised to take over to Marjorie's this morning. I wasn't expecting to have to be there an hour and a half early to see you play."

Jarvis did not bother to correct her a second time. "You could probably see all right coming later." He hesitated, then added, "You guys really don't have to come at all if you're busy. I understand."

"No, no. We'll be there," she said, reaching out and patting his forearm. "I know it's important to you."

"It is. It's going to be a big day."

"And we'll be there to share it," she reassured him. "Tell you what. We'll leave right after breakfast and I'll drop you off on the way over to Marjorie's. Your Dad and Felicia can clean up the dishes, and I'll swing back for them later. We'll be there for your game."

Jarvis smiled. "Match, Mom."

"That's what I meant," she said, hands clutched together over her bosom girlishly. "Oh, the bacon. Where's my spatula?"

Despite good intentions, it was 9:15 before the Buick Century driven by Jarvis's mother coasted into the parking lot of the Photon Center. By then the asphalt was crowded with parked cars, players and their families on foot, and slowly moving cars whose drivers were jockeying for the remaining parking places.

"Just turn left here and let me out," Jarvis said, quickly sizing up the situation. "You don't want to get caught in that mess."

"What? Where?"

One hand on the door catch, he pointed out the windshield. "Just head for the exit," he said, opening the door and hopping out of the slowly moving vehicle. As his feet touched the pavement, he reached back in to snatch his gym bag off the seat, called, "See you later," then slammed the door shut.

As he turned toward the building, there was a whirring sound, and the passenger door window slid down."Christopher-good luck. I love you."

Jarvis turned back.

"Excuse me, good lady. You must have made an error," he said with mock dignity. "I am Bhodi Li, Photon Warrior." But before he dashed away, he bent down to peer inside the car and added, "But if I see this Christopher, I'll give him your message."

His mother smiled bemusedly. "Thank you-Bhodi."

Inside, Jarvis collected the other five members of his team from the couch they had commandeered in the lobby. He also collected from them some grief for being late.

"We were starting to think you weren't coming," David Reynolds said, standing as Jarvis approached. "Figured you'd be the first one here."

"My family slowed me up."

"Me, I figured maybe you hadn't gotten enough sleep during biology and were trying to catch up," piped Brian Duane from atop the back of the couch.

"Hey, that's my training program you're making fun of," Jarvis fired back with a grin. "Never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie down."

"I hope that's not your strategy for today," Greg Morse said worriedly. Morse was a wiry youth with jet-black hair and a premature collection of worry lines that he had come by honestly. "Can we talk about what we're going to do when we get in there?"

"We're going to win," Jarvis said pointedly. "Don't even think about any other possibility."

"I think Greg means he'd like to talk about strategy," Duane interjected.

"Strategy is very simple," Reynolds said drily. "Shoot them more often than they shoot us."

"Real funny, Dave," Morse said, his tone revealing his irritation.

"Jesus, another one with no sense of humus. Look, Greg, you tell me what good anything more complicated than that will be after thirty seconds in there."

Apparently trying to forestall the budding argument, Dennis Waverly spoke up for the first time. "I'll take the base goal. I don't mind."

"We ought to have two defenders," Morse said quickly.

"I'll stay back, too," offered Robert White, the sixth member of the team. White was also known as "Don't-Call-Me-Bob" White, for obvious reasons; he claimed that the three fender-benders he had had in his father's car were part of his long-delayed revenge on his parents.

"You can't just stand around there, though," Jarvis said warningly. "You've got to be active. If you wait for them to come to you, you're done."

"Should we go 2-2-2-two defenders, two snipers, two attackers?" asked Duane. "I'd like to go up front with Bhodi."

"I want David," Jarvis said, but the moment he got the words out Reynolds started shaking his head.

"I'll take the bunker and Greg can take the engine room," he said, ignoring Jarvis's hard looks. "If we're in this as long as we think we should be, everyone will get a turn everywhere."

Jarvis drew back wonderingly. "I hope you don't mean I ought to tend goal."

"I'd like to try it once," Reynolds said easily. "It'd probably drive the other team nuts trying to figure out where the hell you were."

"Well, we're sure as hell not going to try it today."

"I thought you'd say that," Reynolds said, and turned to Waverly. "I'm going to try to rotate back through the goal area off and on, and I think Greg ought to, too. I don't want them to be too sure of how we're deployed. If we can keep them wondering, we can slow them down."

"Come on," Jarvis said, his annoyance with Reynolds translating into impatience. "It's going to be crowded in the equipment room. We'd better get our gear. Some of us need to change, too-unless the Shrikes paid you to wear that white shirt during the match," he added, looking straight at Morse.

"Nope. It's coming off."

"Not here, please!" Reynolds said, leaping back and making a cross of his forefingers as though warding off a vampire. "There's women and children present. Spare their innocent lives-"

"Jesus," Jarvis said, rolling his eyes ceilingward. "I hope you're going to manage to take this seriously while the clock's running."

"I hope I manage not to," Reynolds said cheerily. "Let's go have some fun, boys. Shrike season opens today."

Bhodi's team called itself the Immortals, but in the first match they looked very mortal indeed. Right from the opening, they had trouble matching the energy level of the Shrikes, who came out of their end with a furious five-man attack. Shortly thereafter, Waverly and White were taken in by a diversion and surrendered a hit on their base goal-this before two minutes had gone by.

For his own part, Bhodi felt himself pressing, and neither his anticipation nor his shooting was as sharp as usual.

More than once he crossed paths with Duane at inopportune times, ruining a stalk or ambush. And not once, but four times did he suffer through the electronic raspberry that meant he'd been fried by one of the Shrikes.

Halfway through the match, the Immortals collected themselves and clawed their way back to an even footing with the Shrikes. The lead changed seven times in the last frantic minute, with the eventual winning shot coming not from Bhodi's phaser, but from Reynolds'. A moment before the lights came up, he scored against a Shrike huddled in a hidey-hole as though trying to run out the clock.

"That was fun for the people upstairs," a breathless Dennis Waverly said afterward, "but let's not have any more of them, okay?"

It didn't need saying. The close call seemed to bring them together, and in their second match they had a three-hundred point margin after three minutes and never gave the other team a chance to whittle it down. In their third match, they eliminated the tournament's only all-girl team in a low-scoring seesaw battle in which neither team reached the other's base goal.

That put them in the championship match against the Panzer Boys, a team of six men in their twenties whose progress through the tournament Jarvis and his teammates had noted with growing respect. During the long break between the semifinals and the championship, they sat together around a table in the center's snack bar and sipped at cold drinks. Most were looking ahead, but Jarvis could not stop looking back.

"I don't know what's wrong," he moped. "I haven't been over twelve hundred points all day. I just can't seem to get in the flow."

"I know. This team play is killing you," Reynolds said, and looked around the circle. "New plan, okay? Greg, Dennis, Robert, you run a three-man defense-like hockey, goalie and two defensemen. Brian, you take sniper duty." He looked back at Jarvis. "You and I will work a pair, like you talked about yesterday-remember?"

"That's what we should have been doing all day."

Reynolds smiled wisely. "And if we had, the Panzer Boys would have had a chance to study us and figure out how to handle it."

"Ah-" said White, understanding.

"So forget we're here," Reynolds continued. "Find the flow. I'll protect your back. Think about the record, if that's what it takes."

Duane threw his hands in the air. "That's all we need. Look, we've been winning, haven't we?"

"No, just a minute," White said. "I think David's got something. These guys have chewed 2-2-2's up all day."

"They haven't been up against ours," Morse said, leaning back in his chair with his arms across his chest.

"Look, if you don't want to do it that way, it's no skin off my behind," Reynolds said. "I only thought-"

"David's right," Jarvis said quietly. "I've been fighting myself all day trying to be a team player, taking that extra moment to try to sync what I'm about to do with whoever was nearby. It just isn't my way. Let's do it David's way. You'll all come out of it even, or even a couple hundred down a man. I'll get us the margin we need."

Jarvis was so collected and determined that there was no further argument. Instead, Morse glanced at his watch and stood up from the table.

"Time to go back," he said. "Let's do it. Let's get 'em."

Even before the match began, Jarvis knew how it would come out. Standing in the runway waiting to be called into the arena for introductions, he systematically shut himself off from the distracting stimuli and recaptured the clean focus of his early morning meditation. If he had been interrupted, he could not have said exactly what it was that he was thinking. He only knew that when the Klaxon sounded, he was ready.

And from the very beginning, the transformation was complete and miraculous. Bhodi Li ran, spun, dove, rolled, pounced. His attack was reckless, and his out-of-control style played havoc with the Panzer Boys' deliberate, structured strategy.

With Reynolds providing unacknowledged and often unrecognized help, Jarvis ambushed their ambushes, stalked their scouts, and picked off their snipers. He appeared behind them as they cautiously approached what they thought was his hiding place. When he could, he challenged an opponent's reflexes in the open floor, one on one, and usually came out best.

By the four-minute mark, the outcome of the match was no longer in doubt. The Panzer Boys had twice retreated in disarray to their base to regroup. The second time their discussion sounded more like a fractious argument, and when they came out that time, it was with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

The only remaining question was whether Bhodi Li could break Evan Kyley's arena record. As his total climbed past 2000, the game operator posted the record on the main score-board, and the audience in the gallery suddenly came alive.

"Bhodi, Bhodi, Bhodi!" The chant started with a half-dozen of Jarvis's friends and quickly spread through the gallery. Hearing it, two of the Panzer Boys started falling back toward their base goals as though they had at last found something to motivate them-denying Bhodi Li the base and the record.

Jarvis was aware of their movements, but only subconsciously aware of the crowd. Before the reinforcements could reach cover in front of the base, Jarvis burst from the alcove and surprised them from the side. He took out both on the run and dove into a shoulder roll that brought him directly in front of the base and its lone defender. Whipping his phaser up to eye level, he squeezed off two quick shots, ending the duel before it could begin.

Bouncing to his feet, Jarvis advanced on the base, savoring the moment, raising his weapon with triumphant deliberateness. Now he heard the chanting of his warrior name, the heavy rhythmic clapping from above somehow one with the thrumming of his own racing heart.

This is the way it's supposed to feel, he thought, and squeezed the trigger three times. The base's lights flashed to confirm the hit, and on the Scoreboard high above, Bhodi Li's score changed to 2520. Instantly, the cheers crescendoed to a roar, a roar that drowned out the music.

But in the next moment, everything changed. The roar was suddenly choked off, and all Jarvis could hear was a sound like a dozen operatic voices singing a dozen different floating melodies all at once. He smacked the side of his helmet with the flat of his hand, but the eerie chorus continued.

Spinning around, he looked at the enemy guards, and David standing beyond them. They all seemed to be frozen in place. One of the guards was scowling and toeing the ramp. The mouth of another Panzer Boy was puckered as though he were about to spit on the floor in disgust. David's hands were caught in mid-clap, his joyful grin as unchanging as though he were a marble statue.

Beyond the immobile figures, the arena was fast growing darker, and the remaining light was taking on a bluish cast. Jarvis turned back toward the goal and found it radiating a bizarre metallic blue light, like a neon floodlamp. The glow was spreading from the center to engulf the entire goal, and as it spread, the music grew louder.

He could not find his voice to plead for help or demand explanations. All he could do is stand, transfixed, as the blue light suddenly exploded from its source and swirled around him like a million Day-Glo fireflies. The swarm blended into a cloud so dense he could not see beyond it, then contracted into a blue light cocoon that held him gently but firmly in its embrace.

When at last the cocoon released him and faded away, the arena, his teammates, his family, everything that had surrounded him in the moment before the cheering stopped, was gone.