• • •
When her big brother Tonio returned home from the lunch shift, Lita was watching shaky cellphone footage of a tree swinging one of its roots in the air and sending a contestant careening into a ravine. Muted, the tree appeared to stand up off the ground while Tonio hung his keys on a hook and eyed her quizzically. “Hey. Thought you had an interview?”
“Did. Didn’t go well.” An office job. Not her thing.
“But you have another one lined up for tomorrow, right?”
“10:30.” Onscreen, the root knocked the camera to the ground. She was glad she couldn’t hear what happened next. She hid the video behind her open resume before Tonio crashed beside her on the couch, smelling of bacon grease and too much butter. His yellow armpit stains flashed against his white t-shirt as he smoothed his hair. “You working tomorrow?”
“No, but I can’t drive you. Helping Vince move.”
“That’s okay. I can take the bus. It’s right by the gym.”
“I thought you were going to cancel your membership.”
“It’s already paid for. It’s annual. Runs until December.”
“Well, can you cancel and get a partial refund? That’s like a month’s rent right there.”
“That’s not how it works. Besides, I told you I would pay you back. I have leads.”
“For what? Fucking Death Mountain over there?”
“Maybe.” She shut their shared laptop. “What would you know about it?”
“Enough to stay away from it. People go up and never come back. Or worse: they do.”
In her mind’s eye, that tree pulled itself free of the ground and lumbered toward her. Tall. Furious. Bark twisting into something like a face. “I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “It’s kind of the one thing I’m actually good at.” Climbing, she meant. Scaling a mountain. Maneuvering up a route at a gym. Somehow it had always come easy to her. Even as a little girl, she could look up at a rock wall or a boulder or even the side of a building and know exactly how to get to the top. Once, she almost gave her first-grade teacher a heart attack by climbing up onto a large barn during a field trip to a farm. Now everything else felt impossible. Email, laundry, working 9 to 5. She couldn’t bear it. She didn’t understand how anyone did.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re good at it. You know how few people actually live off of their talents? Most people just do what they have to.”
She dug a knuckle into a sore spot on her thigh. “Sounds boring.”
“It’s called surviving. And you’ll be lucky to do that much if you enter that contest.”
“What do you want me to do, Tonio? I’ve tried everything else. I promise I’m trying.”
“Don’t make promises. They don’t mean anything coming from you.” He said it so flatly, his hand on his t-shirt as he reclined, exhausted, across half the couch, that for a moment it didn’t hurt. It was like seeing a squirrel on the grass, then realizing, on inspection, that it’s half-eaten by worms. That was how her own brother thought of her. A flake. A failure. A foolish teenager who climbed her way to the Youth World Championship only to be spit off the wall at the eighth hold when a loose undercling ripped clean off the bolt. Her coach protested, but professional climbers had suffered the fate at World Cups and not been allowed do-overs, so she finished last place in a competition she could’ve won. Her coach refused to look at her the whole flight home. Wouldn’t review the tape from semifinals or strategize for the next comp. By the time she returned home to her dad’s long face and Tonio’s wall of silence, she knew there would be no next time. Her mom wouldn’t admit it, but they had been quietly counting on that prize money to pay for her climbing gym memberships and special shoes and the shortfall they expected when the layoffs her father’s employer announced finally hit. If only she had pulled less, she thought. If only she had relied on her feet like Coach told her. Pulled her hips into the wall. Her stupid hips, always getting her into trouble.
• • •
“Bullshit,” someone else said. “No way they’re giving tech like that to some rando.”
“He’s not a rando. He works for them. Or used to. Got laid off but still had a connect, and of course R&D was more than happy for free human testing. On company grounds, no less.”
“Jesus. Bet he had to sell his soul just to get near them.”
“Wouldn’t you, if you had the opportunity?”
Lita snuck a glance at the two gossips and noted they were like her: regular people. Shitty haircuts. Dirty tennis shoes. Maybe a hundred bucks in the bank, if that. One of them wore an old t-shirt with fading pink and purple dinosaurs and an earring that looked like a vial of poison. The other had donned a mechanic’s coveralls and a welder’s mask not yet lowered over his face. Lita asked them, “You think all these guys are getting sponsored by Colossus?”
“Oh, no. Most of these guys are just RoboCop wannabes.”
“Oh totally. Just a bunch of gearheads building WMDs in their basements.”
“They’ll blow themselves up next week — if they don’t die on the mountain first.”
“I mean, just look. Most of their gear’s janky as fuck.” He pointed at one of the gearheads attempting to show off his new favorite toy. It sputtered in his hands and let out a pathetic puff of purple smoke. Of course, their stuff was no better. Both their backpacks jangled with mismatched camping equipment: pots, canteens, and what looked like screwdrivers sharpened into knives.
Dino t-shirt looked Lita up and down and said: “You don’t have any gear.”
She carried a drawstring backpack but nothing else. “Oh, well, I guess I didn’t realize this was going to become a multi-day event,” she lied. What little advice she found online all said the exact same thing: pack like you’re going on the most dangerous trip of your life. Bring a sleeping bag. A water bladder. Everything you need to skin a squirrel and start a fire. Some people starved half to death on the mountain. Others died after consuming poisonous berries or mushrooms. She had brought only two peanut butter protein bars and one plastic bottle of water, having calculated that this was the absolute minimum she needed to survive the climb; anything more would weigh her down; any longer and she would be dead anyway.
Mr. Mechanic gave her a look like he fully expected the next time he saw Lita to be when she was being carted off the mountain in a body bag. “There’s still time to rethink, you know. Go home and come back next year with more equipment.”
“Yeah.” She worried her thumb under a drawstring. “But a year’s a long time.”
“Right about that,” Mr. Mechanic said, lowering his mask. “Right about that.”
Overhead, a voice blasted from a loudspeaker: “Racers: prepare yourselves!”
“Time to go,” Dino t-shirt said, dutifully pressing forward with the rest of the contestants, who crowded the gate, waiting for it to swing open. “A word of advice for you, newbie. Don’t let the start fool you: the only reason this isn’t an immediate bloodbath is because there are cameras on the lower trail. Colossus pays to be sure of that. Optics, you know.” A lopsided smile crooked the corner of their mouth, and they winked down at her, not with their eyelid but rather with a thin cloudy film, like the nictitating membrane of a reptile. For a split second, their pupils stretched, drawing a vertical line down the center of their irises, which flashed gold, then green — a kaleidoscopic vision of the horrors yet to come — then the gate opened, and they were off.
• • •
Her heavy boots combined with durable cargo pants, a long-sleeved workout shirt, a wool infinity scarf, and a five-layer face mask to protect against aerosolized viruses, particulate matter, and whatever else lingered in the air (the last thing she needed was a drop of wild boar-armadillo blood drifting into her mouth while she climbed the south face of the mountain). In truth, she had expected more of her fellow contestants to take this precaution, knowing how dangerous the path could be, but perhaps the jetpacks and body armor made them feel invincible. And perhaps it had simply never occurred to them that their bodies were permeable; that they could, like her favorite uncle, breathe the aerosolized brain matter of chickens at the processing plant he worked at under the table and develop a neurological disorder so severe, doctors were still baffled by it years after his death. As she tightened her mask, she thought, Miss you, Tío Berto.
Only then did she notice the buzzing.
For a moment, she thought it was the distant whine of a chainsaw, the work of a murderer chopping the competition to bits; but then it grew louder and higher-pitched, its unnerving shriek like the whine of a mosquito whipping by her ear. Reflexively, she swatted the air, ducking as if to dodge a bat, but nothing was there — yet. Even at a good distance, that buzz was so loud her inner ears vibrated with pain. She clasped her hands over the lobes, twisting left and right, desperate to find the creature before it found her. Just when the sound became unbearable, something flashed, a great pink tongue unfolding from behind a bush ten feet away to snatch at the air over her head. She heard a viscous crunch, then the tongue retracted, wrapping around the cracked carapace of a mutant mosquito with a proboscis as long as her arm. She watched it recede into the bush.
“Mmm,” a familiar voice said, between crackling chews. “Delicious.”
She saw them then: the dino t-shirt, the reptile eyes turned momentarily red.
“We thought you were a goner,” Mr. Mechanic said, trampling out of the brush.
“Yeah. Not many people go bushwhacking this deep in the woods. I’m impressed.”
“So am I.” She dropped her hands. “I’m guessing you two have run this race before.”
Their smile revealed teeth like arrows. “And picked up a few abilities for our troubles.”
Lita glanced at Mr. Mechanic, hoping she didn’t look frightened. “What’s your power?”
“All in good time, friend,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “All in good time.”
Lita blinked, then said, “I’m going to choose to ignore how ominous that sounds, because we’re burning daylight here and I have to get moving.” She hiked up her drawstrings and pointed herself resolutely toward the base of the crag, half-hoping they would take the hint and move on, even though she already knew better. “Are you two really going to follow me?”
“We’re curious,” Dino t-shirt said. “What’s your strategy?”
“Why did you only bring a day’s worth of supplies?”
“Have you discovered a secret? Tell us.”
“Okay. Look.” She turned to face them. “I’m really grateful you saved my life back there. Really. Truly. I know you could’ve just let me die. But where I’m going, you can’t follow.” That only stunned them for the time it took her to start walking; then they were after her again.
“What does that even mean? You don’t know what we’re capable of.”
“And why couldn’t we follow? We know this mountain better than you do.”
“Maybe so, but I’m willing to bet you don’t know this part of it — and don’t want to.”
Dino t-shirt threw up their hands with an aggrieved sigh. “I don’t understand. It’s like she speaks in riddles. I mean, what’s she going to do, tunnel into the mountain?”
“That would be very inadvisable,” Mr. Mechanic said. “No telling what the rock will do.”
“Trust me: I’m familiar with rocks,” she said, as they emerged at the base of the crag.
Mr. Mechanic lifted his visor to stare up at the sheer face. “What’s this rock, then?”
“Granite. The best kind, if you ask me.” She slipped the drawstrings off her shoulders and began unloading her backpack. Climbing shoes, chalk bag.
Dino t-shirt gaped at her. “You don’t seriously mean to climb this?”
“Ding ding ding! Now you see why you can’t come with?” She knelt to undo the laces on her boots. She would have to leave them behind to save weight, but no matter. She would be able to afford new ones with the $5,000,000 prize. Hell, she could probably build her own gym, if she wanted. Anything was possible with that kind of money.
“You know,” Dino t-shirt said, poking the rock experimentally, “I could climb this.”
No way, Lita thought, but already they were peeling off their socks, pressing their palm to a smooth stretch of granite, then following it with a big toe. Of course they could scale walls like a lizard. Of course they could scuttle up the mountain at unheard-of speed. Their fingers and toes must be sticky, covered in tiny hairs that allowed them to adhere to the smooth surfaces, to latch onto the flat areas of rock with no holds, no features, just sheets of untouched stone, paradoxically filthy and pristine. Part of her withered at the sight, all hope of winning slashed in an instant; but then, sixty feet up the rock face, they faltered. A heavy flake had torn loose, pulling their right hand down behind them, until they hung upside down by their toes. “Oh, fuck.”
Mr. Mechanic jumped out of the way of the falling flake before it crashed.
“No no no no no,” they repeated, even as they twisted in midair, stuck all four limbs back on the wall, and scuttled back to the ground. “I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.”
She squeezed their shoulder. “I’m glad you made it down safely.”
Their face was scraped and raw with fear. “You’re going to die up there.”
She smiled down at them. “No, I’m not. But I’m willing to take that risk.”
Disbelief passed over their face and mixed with trepidation — the expression of somebody who has just realized they’re talking to the most deluded person they’ve met and should get away from them fast. And maybe they were right. Maybe she did peak as a teen, like those former high school football stars who waste their lives trying to reclaim their lost glory, but she felt strong, in the best shape of her life, and she had nothing to lose. Nothing but dead-end jobs and dollar-store groceries. This country wasn’t built with her in mind. No one thought she would win. Least of all Dino t-shirt and Mr. Mechanic, who were slipping back into the forest, glancing back as if she might fall at any moment, as if in fact she already had.
• • •
This worked for the first one hundred feet or so. Beyond that, she had no intel. No beta.
When the skin on her left pointer finger split, she thought it was over.
She knew this might happen — had even hooked a whole roll of finger tape on a carabiner, which dangled from the straps of her chalk bag — but the holds here weren’t good enough to hang from one bloody hand while she unspooled the roll. Her heartbeat throbbed in her finger, and she worried that some spore or grit had infiltrated the wound, that a speck of dirt would prove to be a nanobot designed to drill into her bones, or that another mutant hybrid would smell her blood half a mile away and come crawling over the cliff to devour her; and she remained sure that she was a goner until the moment she discovered an off-width crack about four hundred feet off the ground and was able to wedge her entire body into the crevice. Only then did she allow herself to relax.
By wriggling, she managed to free her drawstring pouch and fish out the protein bars and water bottle. Nothing made food taste better than thinking it might be your last meal. She savored its salt. Its sugar. Its peanut butter layer. She closed her eyes for what could not have been more than ten seconds, and when she opened them the mouth of the crack seemed narrower. She rubbed an eye, afraid the dehydration and fatigue were causing hallucinations, but, when she opened them, the crack was smaller. No, she realized, reaching for it. Not smaller — farther away, receding by the second, until finally she blinked and the stone’s throat closed around her.
• • •
What was it? Her brain processed it variously as the intermittent sparks of lightning bugs, the bioluminescent greens of a glimmering fungus, or the blood-red smile of a demon in the dark. It spoke to her, not in a voice audible to ears but one understandable by blood. It thrummed like a vein touched for the first time in centuries. It asked, “How did you arrive here?”
She hoped that by talking she could endear herself to it. “I was climbing in a race.”
“A race? What kind of race?”
“A big one — the prize is $5 million. Do you know what that means?”
“Of course we do, child. The real question is: what does it mean to you?”
“Same thing it means to most people, I guess. Relief. Some temporary security.”
Here the thrum grew stronger, as if pleased. “What are you protecting yourself from?”
“Banks. Creditors. Money collectors. All of corporate America, I guess.”
“Are you sure?” A twist in the voice signaled a shift. A reversal of flow that almost made her sick to her stomach. Cold sweat beaded on her back as that voice questioned her, “Aren’t you really running from that man? That man in the gym?” Even before she could protest, his face was flashing in her mind. His messy hair. His wrinkled forehead, dusted with chalk. “Didn’t you trust him? Didn’t he tell you he would take you to Nationals?” She remembers him staying after hours for extra training before competitions. His hand pushing on her knee to stretch her quad, then her IT band, then her glutes — how by the end her legs were like a pretzel, with him knotted tightly in the center.
A familiar voice slithered into her ear: Don’t you want to make your coach proud?
“I’m not doing this for him.” She pushed against the rock, desperate for a way out now.
Its laugh felt like a mountain shaking. “Then who are you doing it for?”
“For me. My future. My dreams. I’m not doing it for anyone else.”
“Oh really? Then why are you coming apart at the seams?”
In the faint glow, she saw it: that cut on the side of her finger — expanding, widening, like a zipper coming undone. Black blood oozed out, trailing down her fingers to her wrist as her skin peeled open one digit at a time. “It’s not real,” she told herself, though she could feel that heat in her palm, the pain creeping up her arm, her flesh like a suit that needed to be removed. She repeated the words again and again as its voice laughed all around her. Its rumbling mirth jiggled something loose up ahead, and a crack of light fell through the ceiling. She scrambled for it. Half climbing, half clawing, unable to discern any features in the rock but not needing to at this gentle incline. In bouldering, this would be a V0 (if that). Like climbing a ladder at a 45° angle but with no guarantee this ladder won’t become a chute and flush you right toward your enemy.
She could hear it behind her, a malevolent presence rearranging itself into something solid and sinewy, with heavy limbs and a long, dangerous tongue lapping at her blood. She smeared it on the rock as she pulled herself up. Slipped in the puddle where her unzipped knee left a warm pool. How the creature was doing this, she did not know. She could not even say for sure it was the creature. Maybe it was a curse. Or perhaps an infestation that eats the skin, one inch at a time. Whatever it was, she couldn’t stop moving. She couldn’t let it win.
“Look at you. Still convinced you can be a champion. It’s pathetic.”
Its voice had morphed, becoming embodied, human — the voice of her coach.
“One look at you, and I knew. I knew how easy it would be to take advantage of you. Just another brown girl trying to climb the social ladder; to make something of yourself. I didn’t even have to work that hard to get in your pants; you were just waiting for someone — anyone — to give you some attention.”
She shook her head, pain unzipping her ankle. “I was fourteen. You’re a monster.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone. What does that make you?”
“Who I am,” she said, grabbing onto a loose stone and chucking it behind her, “is none of your business!” The stone hit with a satisfying but alarmingly close thunk, but the creature shook off the pain like raindrops on a jacket. And then it laughed.
“Is that so? Well then, why don’t you show me?” A clawed hand latched around her right ankle and yanked her to stop. She braced herself against the walls, planting her butt on a ledge to stabilize herself and build up leverage when she kicked down, kicked hard. Something crunched. Oozed under her climbing shoe. New flesh without years of muscle and training to protect it. She slammed on it with her heel, kicking a sticky blob of blood and cartilage she thought might be its head, and kept hitting it until her foot caved through and the hand around her ankle went slack. A hard shake freed her from the fingers, which fell, limp, to the ground, but she knew better than to poke around and make sure it was dead. She fled, scrambling on all fours, not worrying about her wounds or what she might encounter, just pushing herself up, up, up.
• • •
She recognized his face: the former Colossus employee with the rumored EMP.
After the body went still, he looked at her, at the blood on her limbs and the clumps of grey matter on her shoes. “How many people did you kill to get here?”
“I don’t know if you’d call it a person. A spirit, maybe. A malevolent spirit.”
“Last I checked,” he said, standing somewhat laboriously, “spirits don’t bleed.”
“And last I heard you had EMPs in those gloves. Why bother with all this?”
“Damn things crapped out on me an hour ago. Had to improvise.”
“I’m sure Colossus will be so pleased with your performance.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
To her left, not a hundred feet away, stood a bright red flag: the summit. All she had to do was punch the plunger installed at the top of the mountain and she would be declared the winner. It seemed so easy. So close. On a good day, with the right shoes on, she could sprint that distance in a matter of seconds — faster, she was sure, than this man with his heavy gauntlets and less than muscular calves; but, then again, he could be lying about the gloves. He could be the kind of man who likes to finish things with his bare hands, likes to watch the life drain out of someone’s eyes, feel women squirm under him. She could see it in his eyes: the calculations and counter-calculations. His assessment of how fast she might be, how hard she would fight. He was cocky that way. Underestimated her and the vine he left so carelessly on the ground, as if it could not possibly be a threat. It was marshalling forces behind him, adding another vine, then another. All she had to do was stall.
She tilted her head at the finish line, “Want to split the prize?”
That surprised him. “Why would I want to do that, after I’ve made it this far?”
“Think of it as hush money. I know what you’ve done. I can pick you out of a lineup.”
“Colossus wouldn’t allow that to happen; they’ll hush up all the deaths during the race.”
“Maybe so. And maybe their PR team will picture the headlines: Former Colossus Corp. Employee Accused of Murder, Top Executives Suspected of Rigging $5,000,000 Race. My guess is they’ll want to distance themselves from you. Protect the brand by making a symbolic gesture. Withhold the prize money, for instance.” She smirked at the ugly shade of red creeping up his cheeks, as the quartet of vines began to converge around his ankles. She adopted her most blasé tone and shrugged. “And even if they don’t, you’ll pay out the nose in legal fees, so you might as well split it.”
“Fuck you. I’m not splitting anything with you.”
She watched a vine wrap around his leg. “Guess it’s all mine them.”
He started forward, fist raised, but the vines were already pulling him down.
• • •
She attempted a grim laugh but found that she was shaking. “I came pretty close.”
“I can see that.” Their bug eyes studied her. “How much of that blood is yours?”
Glancing down, she half-expected to find her fingers split, her climbing shoes soaked in a puddle of blood, but when she was finally able to break through the shock and focus she realized: her wounds had closed. Where her finger had split before, a fresh seam of scar tissue had formed, fusing her skin back together where it had unzipped. She traced that seam up and down the peaks of her fingers, into the crevice of her elbow and the cave of her armpit, then down her hips to her left ankle, where the skin was smooth and smeared with blood. “I’m not sure.”
“What did you find up there?”
Her mind flashed to that blood-red smile. “Some kind of evil living in the mountain.”
“Good to know.” They waved a finger at the shield. “This is fascinating, by the way. I’ve never actually made it all the way to the top before, so I didn’t know this was here.” They rapped on it experimentally with one knuckle, finding it firm and warm, like newly molded plastic about to harden and set in place, to their great disappointment. “Seems impenetrable.”
Mr. Mechanic hummed disagreement. “Every lock has a key.”
“You think you can break it?”
He hiked one shoulder to his ear, uncertain, but eager to test his limits. He folded back his right sleeve, lifting it past the elbow, giving him more room to work. When he pushed down hard on the force field, it stretched around his fingers and up his arm, like a membrane. A sharp jolt of fear tugged on Lita’s brain, yelling at her to go, to run, to figure out an escape plan, but just when she thought the force field would snap open his skin started to sizzle. He snatched his hand away, waving off the smoke. “Damn.”
His friend still applauded gleefully. “That was so good! You almost had it.”
Mr. Mechanic nodded with determination. “Next year.”
“It’s going to be our year,” Dino t-shirt said with a dreamy expression, as they draped one arm over their friend’s broad shoulders and imagined the riches of their future. In time, their gaze drifted back to Lita and regarded her with mischief. “How does it feel to win?”
In that moment, with dried blood flaking off her fingers, Lita honestly had no idea how to feel or if she felt anything. A voice in the back of her brain said, You’re in shock; you lost a lot of blood, and maybe that was true and she should sit down, wait for her escort, but her body seemed like a separate thing, a puppet she had forgotten how best to manipulate, and she could no sooner force herself to sit than string together a coherent answer. Was that really what being a champion felt like? Once, as a child, she would have said winning was just getting to the top of a wall when nobody else did; that to be a “winner,” all she had to do was work harder, train longer, isolate her weaknesses, then grind them right out of existence; but that seemed wrong now, one of many lies she had told herself a thousand times to keep going, along with “that darkness isn’t a part of me” and “he can’t hurt me anymore.” Except it was. He had, and he still could. Last she heard, he was still coaching at the same gym. She would call them in the morning, she decided. She would take him to court, and she would win.
