Under pressure, p.1
Under Pressure, page 1
Dedication
For Chris,
my B.E.S.T. boxmate
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Level One: Midnight Zone
Grayson: Prologue
Leo: 1
2
3
Jayla: 4
5
6
Grayson: Interlude
Level Two: Twilight Zone
Leo: 7
8
9
Jayla: 10
11
12
Level Three: Sunlight Zone
Leo: 13
14
15
Jayla: 16
17
Leo: 18
Pick Your Perfect Aug: Bod, Boost, or Brain
Aug Track: Bod
Aug Track: Boost
Aug Track: Brain
About the Author
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
Level One: Midnight Zone
Grayson
Prologue
Grayson Bix woke up from his aug surgery on the other side of the world.
He got up sluggishly and looked out the window and into a black night complete with unfamiliar stars. The crisp peaks of snowy mountains crowded the horizon like maybe he was somewhere in the Swiss Alps. He blinked, refocused. The image was fake. A three-dimensional screen. The window wasn’t even a window.
How could he know that? He glanced down at his hospital scrubs and the brand-new red circle tattoo on his wrist. He was Bod augged now with VisionX, what Ace would call super eyes.
Speaking of, where were his friends? And why had he been taken away after his surgery? Did they know where he was? Were they worried? Had something gone wrong?
Gray used the full power of his augged eyes for the first time, peering through the projection window to the wall and then through the forty feet of concrete beyond that. Even after managing to see through all those impenetrable things, he had a hard time believing what he found on the other side. There must be some mistake.
How could he be in the darkest zone at the bottom of the ocean?
Leo
1
HAIL MARY:
Welp . . . this better work
Leo dreamed of BESTBall.
Lime-green faces shone through a sudden blackout. Roaring cheers and their coach’s shout ground over the court noise. Eyes closed tightly, Leo imagined the hardwood floor beneath their wheels, a sharp, last-minute impulse to pivot, to see through the other player’s fake out and spin an interception. They could feel the weight of the stolen ball tucked between their knees, their gloved hands bursting with speed, driving downcourt with the arena shouting Go go go . . .
The daydream was so convincing that Leo jolted when a rolling wave tossed the hoverpod. Their stomach lost gravity for seconds, which was a lot less fun than it sounded but did make them forget their hunger for a few minutes.
Leo had to glare out the window to remember that they weren’t on the court or at ToP, the Tower of Power, with Gray or even home with their family.
They were bobbing on the surface of the ever-changing ocean in Grayson’s stolen hoverpod, now with a dead battery. They’d been following a signal they believed was coming from Grayson on Jayla’s aug, getting closer and closer . . . and then the signal had just disappeared.
Someone or something was messing with them.
Leo swallowed back center-court nerves just as a piping shout and small splash confirmed that Ace had fallen in the water. Again.
Jayla sat up from the back seat, rubbing her eyes. She’d been trying to get a signal out all night, to call friends for help. As soon as she was fully awake, she ran through the interface on her arm, the small screen that helped control her body’s network.
Leo didn’t have to ask to know that she was hoping for a response. Jayla’s continued silence wasn’t great news.
Leo cracked open the hoverpod door and leaned out to see what was happening below. The heat off the water was strong from the hazy morning sun. It stuffed up the cockpit like a blanket of humidity.
Ace was swimming like a tiny frog. He pulled himself up onto the landing gear, his clothes all suctioned to him. His light brown hair was plastered over his eyes, and he swiped at it. “I saw the shadow of a big fish! Maybe a whale!” he said as if that explained his shout, splash, and swim.
“So you tried to catch it with your hands?” Jayla teased, leaning out the other door.
Ace looked around until he found a white line of shoestring floating near the landing gear. He scooped at the iridescent blue water until the string started to move toward him, and he nabbed it. He held it up, complete with a fishhook he’d made from . . . was that one of Jayla’s barrettes?
“You’re fishing.” Leo was almost impressed.
“It’s not the worst idea!” Ace was the only one who still believed they were doing the right thing. Leo was a little too realistic, and Jayla was way too realistic. The truth was that Grayson had gone missing, and they’d gone running after a faint signal that could be him, spanning the entire country, and then? They were way out at sea, with only a couple of cartons of water that disappeared faster than the contents of the hoverpod’s fuel cell. And now they were going to starve in the middle of the ocean.
Or worse: be forced to eat whatever Ace caught with his shoelace.
Leo leaned back in and glanced at Jayla. They were both still impressed that Ace had been able to land the hoverpod at all, and now they were going to have to let him keep this daydream of becoming a self-taught fisherman.
“I now know why people get the MegaMetabolism aug!” Ace’s voice came up from beneath them, as enthusiastic as ever. “Imagine if we could dial our metabolism down right now.”
“Need water,” Jayla grumbled. She was using all her energy to keep her network running, but her aug only worked as well as her body, and they were all hungry and really thirsty at this point.
They’d been adrift for a whole day now.
Leo had to admit that they probably would munch something Ace caught at this point. They formed a question in their mind, and then combed through it a few times before asking, a nervous habit that kept them a fraction as talkative as everyone else.
“Our options?”
Jayla sighed. “Well, I was blasting an SOS to all my contacts, but the signal isn’t strong, and it’s hard to keep up when I’m tired. I’m afraid Bixonics will pick it up instead.”
Jayla didn’t have to explain. If Bixonics found them, they’d all be in the biggest trouble. Jayla would get her aug recalled because she’d deleted ToP’s firewall when they’d left campus in order to follow Gray’s signal. She wasn’t supposed to even know how to do that. Not to mention that Ace’s and Leo’s dreams of getting augged would vanish if they were branded troublemaking runaways.
There had to be help somewhere that didn’t mean getting busted.
Leo hated having so little information. “Can you send a different kind of message? A direct one that can go farther?”
Jayla chewed on her bottom lip, tan without her usual berry-colored gloss. “In theory, I could. Although I’m too thirsty. And who would we even call?”
“What about your family?” Leo asked, knowing this was no small question, no matter how quietly they asked it.
“I thought the Resistance might’ve been involved with Gray’s disappearance, but why would they be out in the middle of the ocean?” Jayla always said resistance with a capital R. The movement was more real to her than to the others. In Leo’s mind, the Resistance was little more than the people with the protest signs outside of ToP. Just upset about change and standing in the way. Emma acted like the Resistance was a secret agency, a threat to the tide of Bixonics progress, but that always seemed like melodrama for her show.
“So your parents are in the Resistance?” they asked for the first time.
“They are the Resistance. It’s how they met and it’s pretty much their entire lives.” Jayla sighed even harder, so frustrated. “Even if I could get ahold of them, this is not how I wanted to go back. I always thought there’d be fireworks and a soundtrack with timpani.”
Leo smiled. They liked picturing Jayla like that. All heroic and powerful. Leo didn’t know the details of what had made Jayla run away to ToP. To be honest, they had a lot of trouble pinpointing why families did any of the things that families do. Their own parents were too focused on what other people thought of their lives, and their twin, Emma, was like a different species of tween.
Leo missed Gray; he always understood how hard family could be.
How hard people could be.
“What about direct messaging Ace’s moms?” Leo suggested. Only Ace seemed lucky enough to be friends with his parents, although maybe that would change when he got older. Maybe it already had when he busted up Finn’s face before they flew off. Leo still couldn’t believe he’d done it.
Jayla leaned forward with a lowered voice. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to reach out. Not with Finn spying all the time. He’s got too many connections to the Bix marketing corps. He’s their favorite poster boy now. Gray didn’t trust him, and that’s good enough for me.”
Ouch. Just hearing Leo’s best friend’s name stabbed at their soft feelings. Where was he? What had happened to him? Had he been saved by his mom? Stolen by a rival company? Bixonics was the biggest corporation on the planet, but that didn’t mean some other business hadn t abducted the heir to the Bixonium throne in hopes of getting their hands on the secret alchemical formula.
Anyone could have taken Gray. Anyone.
“Hey, you okay?” Jayla leaned closer. “You’re hyperventilating.”
Leo stopped fast. They hadn’t done that in years. They tucked each breath away, determined not to let their anxiety spill into this ridiculous lost at sea situation. “I think . . . we’re close to desperate, Jayla.”
Jayla was quiet for a long minute. “We’re going to find Gray. If he’s not okay, we’re going to save him. And if he is okay, we’re going to completely level him for not saying goodbye.” Leo heard the words Jayla didn’t say. That Grayson would never leave without saying goodbye. “We’re going to find him,” she said again.
Leo latched onto that idea as if it were a ball and their life depended on scoring.
The pilot’s door popped open, and as if determined to be comic relief on some spiritual level, a very wet Ace crawled up into his seat, awkwardly clutching something in his balled-up jacket.
“You two are going to love me.”
“We already do, Ace.” Jayla leaned forward. “What’d you source from the water?”
He spread out his drenched jacket, revealing a matted hunk of seaweed.
“Yeah,” Jayla confirmed. “I’m not eating that.”
“But you eat it all the time when we have sushi!”
“When it’s cleaned and prepared. And we don’t have water, and you’re not supposed to eat salty things when you’re dehydrated. Have you two read a single book about pirates? Treasure Island? Pirates of the Caribbean?”
Leo and Ace shook their heads. The answer was definitely no. Superheroes, yeah. BESTBall almanacs, of course. Pirates? Like with parrots and scurvy and planks? Not in either of their canons.
Ace squirmed, a sign that he was trying not to shout. “But . . . Look!” He clawed at the hunk, breaking away the seaweed a bit at a time. The whole mass was tangled around a furry rock.
Not a rock.
“You found a coconut.” Leo’s mouth hung open with legit surprise.
Ace held up the treasure for all to admire. “Now we just have to figure out how to get it open. You know what’s inside, Jayla?”
“I know what’s inside, Ace.”
Ace shook it, filling the hoverpod with a beautiful sloshing sound. “Water!”
And thus began the most complicated two hours of their lives. How could they all be smart and strong enough to get into the aug program only to fail at breaking a coconut open? Every single idea to crack the seed also seemed to mean that they’d most likely dump the water out in the process.
“What if we whacked it open in a bucket?”
“Do you have a bucket, Ace?” Jayla’s tone reminded Leo of the classical music she was always listening to, that lull in the orchestra that indicated it was about to crescendo. Of course, Ace did not have a bucket, and was asked—once again—to keep his ideas based on available materials.
Finally, Ace found a small bundle of tools in an access panel no one had discovered previously, and Leo was nominated, as the strongest of the three, to drill a hole through the husk with a screwdriver. It took another hour.
When the screwdriver finally popped through, all three of the boxmates held their breath.
Jayla looked at it with eyes wide with longing. “We should all have some.”
Leo and Ace exchanged glances and shook their heads together. Leo handed the coconut back to Jayla with enormous care. Time for a Hail Mary. A last attempt on the BESTBall court to turn it all around. “Take it all. We trust you.”
“Okay, I’m going to send someone a direct message. He might not be nearby, but I think he’s our best bet.” She took a sip from the coconut and made a face. “Ack! That is not like the coconut water from the cafeteria!” She drank the rest of it, making the same face the whole time. When she finished, Jayla handed the coconut back to Ace, then she began plugging away at her interface. Her breath was gusty and impatient.
Leo thought they might know who she was calling but didn’t want to say.
Ace cradled his coconut. “Wish I could fly us away. I could save everyone if I had my wings already.”
“How could you have your SuperSoar wings already? You haven’t even started your second semester,” Leo tried. “Besides, no one has ever figured out how to use that aug in real life. Grayson thinks no one ever will.”
Ace was still staring at his coconut. Leo wondered how much of his brainpower went toward trying to figure out that one glorified aug.
Leo touched his shoulder. “Hey, now we get to whack it open.” They spoke quietly, not wanting to disturb Jayla’s concentration. “So we can eat the stuff inside.”
“Really?” Ace whispered. “How?”
Leo smirked, knowing exactly how to open the coconut: treat it like a court celebration in BESTBall. Slam it against something hard. Which was exactly their forte.
The two of them shimmied down to the landing gear of the hoverpod. Leo dropped their knees in the water. It was so warm. By the time the sky was giving them just the best orange and purple sunset Leo had ever seen, they’d cracked the coconut open on the hard metal corner of the landing gear and were digging out pieces to nom with the screwdriver.
See? Easy as scoring.
Leo wished everything else were that easy. The setting sun painted the horizon with orange fury. A few stars blinked out from the deepening blue above. They found the brightest star in the sky and made a wish like in a story.
Wherever you are, be safe, Gray.
“Do you think Jayla’s message will work?” Ace asked, crunching coconut. “Who do you think she sent it to?”
“I think—” Leo’s words vanished faster than Grayson’s signal had on Jayla’s interface.
The star that Leo had wished on grew brighter and larger. It turned into an unmarked silver helo and dropped silently, setting down next to where the hoverpod bounced lightly on the open sea.
2
RINGER:
An advantage in disguise
The rescue happened fast. The door to the silver helo was hauled open, and an adult in a jumpsuit reached across the distance between the two vehicles, locking them together with a wire tether.
“Jayla!” Leo heard a high, firm voice call out.
“Mom?!”
Leo glanced at where Ace clung to the bobbing landing gear and they both mouthed Mom?
“We better get up there.” Leo began to pull themself up, but they couldn’t get in through the pilot’s door because the silver helo was blocking it. Leo motioned for Ace to go around to the passenger side. They both scurried up together, piling in in time to find Jayla arguing with her mom.
“If you give me two minutes to explain I’ll—”
“We don’t have two minutes! Get in the helo. Now.”
“That was a fast rescue!” Ace had this way of talking to adults so easily. “We thought we’d have hours to kill.”
“You two are staying here. Jayla is coming with us.”
“I’m not leaving my friends!” Jayla shouted, but she was close to fainting, and everyone knew it.
“Their ride is inbound. We need to move quickly. You need medical attention.” Jayla’s mom looked a lot like her daughter, except she wore her hair in braids and her jaw was set in a way that relayed a professional and no-nonsense nature.
“Hey, how’d you get here so fast?” Ace asked. “Are you all nearby?” This was apparently the wrong question because all the adults started to move even faster. They hollered things back and forth, and Leo lost the thread on what was happening.
Inside the silver helo, several people sat strapped in seats along the cargo portion of the back. A couple of them were wearing Bixonics’s tech jumpsuits: older, out-of-style ones from the look of them. Leo was surprised to recognize a person. A grad aug who’d been a sort of big-shot cadet two semesters ago—a fellow XConnect like Jayla.
By the time Leo had placed him, Jayla was in the helo and an adult had tossed a crate of water and snacks into the hoverpod and unhooked the wire tether. Leo blinked and the silver helo was gone. So was Jayla.
Ace broke into the food without hesitation. “What did they mean by our ride is inbound? Do you think . . . You don’t think they’d call ToP to come get us?”
