Full Tilt

The Works, I thought. It must be The Works!

Beyond that hatch was the mechanism that ran every ride. But before I could get a better look, crazy Captain Carl slammed it shut with his foot.

“Nobody goes below!”

Just then the whale breached right beside the ship.

“Was that a whale?” Quinn asked, clueless as ever. “What’s up with that?”

As the whale with my mother’s eyes came down, the force of its wake threw the ship against the rocks with a shattering of wood.

“Blast ye!” yelled that strange blending of Captain Ahab and my mother’s fiancé. He threw his fists to the sky. “The madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood, and the smoking brow!”

“That’s it, we’re outta here.” I pushed Quinn to the railing. “Jump. Now!”

“Are we gonna ride the whale? Is that part of the ride?”

“Just jump!” I practically hurled him over the side, and followed right behind. I hit the icy water. Then, for an instant, I felt something huge and rough brush right past me. I fought my way to the surface, breaking through into the noise of the storm.

Quinn sputtered beside me. He wasn’t as strong a swimmer as I was, so I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. He kicked me away and began swimming toward the rocks. I turned back to see the ship, twenty yards away now . . . and then a blue gray wall rose in front of me. The whale breached again, but this time it came down right on the ship. Riders were thrown from the ratlines. The ship cracked in half, and in a few moments both whale and ship were gone into the darkness of the churning sea.

A wave hurled me onto the rocks, where brand-new faces were appearing. I tried not to look directly at them; I was afraid I’d be too horrified to move if I did.

When I turned to look for Quinn, he was scrambling away over the rocks.

“No!” I grabbed him by his collar as we reached a wide plateau. I was so mad, I would have grabbed him by his nose ring if I could get my finger through it. “You’re not getting away from me again!”

“Why did you have to come?” he yelled. “You ruined everything! You made me miss the best part of the ride!”

“Best part? What, are you out of your mind? If you went down with that ship, you wouldn’t be coming back up.”

And then Quinn looked me dead in the eyes. “Who says I wanted to?”

If my temper was a burning fuse, that pinched it right off. My head reeled from what he said. From what he meant.

“Who says I want to do anything but finish the ride?”

I took a deep breath, and another, as I stared at him. The sound of the ocean raged behind us, but right now I could hear only him. “What are you saying, Quinn?”

“You came here to save me from this place, didn’t you? But who said I want to be saved this time?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but all my words had been robbed from me. What could I say to him? What could I say to my brother, who came here not just for the thrills, but for something else? As much as I didn’t want to face it, I had to now. Somehow he knew where these rides would end. He knew that once he crossed through the gates, he wasn’t coming back. He knew, and still he had come.

“What’s out there for me, huh?” Quinn’s eyes flowed with tears, and those tears flowed with a dozen different emotions. “What’s ever been out there for me? When I’m at home, it’s like I’m . . . it’s like I’m empty on the inside. You don’t know what that’s like.”

They say that before someone takes their own life, there’s always a cry for help. Sometimes it’s loud, and you have to be seriously deaf not to hear it. Sometimes it’s just a word or a look, like the look Quinn was giving me right now. I might have been deaf to it before, but that look screamed louder than anything now. I had no skill in talking someone in from the edge, and that space between us was still a whole universe wide.

“Quinn . . .”

“It’s not your job to save me, so give it up, huh? Please . . . just give it up.”

“It’s not a job,” I told him. “It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that I need to do.”

“But why?” Quinn asked. “Is it because of what happened on the school bus?”

I looked away from him. “Mom shouldn’t have told you about that.”

“She didn’t. I just heard.” Quinn hesitated for a moment. I thought he might take a step closer. “Is it true that you’re the only one who survived?”

I took a deep breath. “Let’s go home, and we can talk about it there.”

Quinn thought about it and shrugged sadly. “Some people are survivors. Some aren’t.”

“And how do you know you’re not? Just because things stink now and you feel empty inside, it doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way next week, or next month, or next year!”

“That’s just words!” Quinn said, getting more frustrated. “Hell, I don’t have the patience to play a game of Scrabble, and I’m supposed to hang on your words for months and years?” He looked down. His shoulders dropped. I could see into his works now—the angry pistons, the overheated gears, and that pit inside of him. He kept it so well hidden back home with attitude, but here, it was bare and bottomless. A wave crashed behind me. I could feel it vibrating up my legs and into my joints.

“Sometimes I just want to disappear . . . y’know?” Quinn looked around at the tortured faces in the rocks around us. “Can you think of a better place to do it?”

“I’ll never let you disappear, Quinn.”

I locked on his teary eyes and imagined that I had tractor beams in mine, that my gaze would somehow pull him in. “Come on,” I told him. “We’ll ride out of this place together.”

He took one step closer, then another. I reached my hand toward him, he reached out his—

And then the symbol on the back of his hand began to glow.

From deep in a cave behind him came the distant, hollow cries of other kids in the middle of one last thrill.

Quinn backed away from me. “I kinda got used to riding alone.” Then he turned toward the cave.

I was losing him again. I didn’t know what else to say that would get through to him, so I leveled the truth at him with both barrels.

“You’re lying in a coma in the hospital!” I shouted. “They carted you away in an ambulance, and that’s where you are!”

It was harsh, like waking a sleepwalker; but it stopped him in his tracks. “At least that’s what Mom thinks,” I said, trying to ease the blow.

Without even turning to look at me, he said, “Maybe it’s best she thinks that.” Then he leaped into the gaping mouth of the cave and the darkness swallowed him.

I sat on the rocks among the silent stone faces, with no desire to go on. I could have leaped into the darkness after Quinn, following him to his next ride, but what was the point? How do you help someone who refuses to be helped? Was I supposed to knock him unconscious and drag him out of here? He was already unconscious.

There was a flash of yellow light. Far off in the ocean a new ship appeared out of nowhere, sailing closer. This time it was a Spanish galleon—somebody else’s nightmare. The swinging boat sailed again, filled with a whole new batch of riders headed toward some different adventure but the same fate.

“You’re not playing,” I heard Cassandra say. She sat on a rock just a few feet away, dressed in a bright yellow silk gown, a garland of flowers and shells woven into her hair. She looked like something from mythology: a beautiful siren, luring sailors to their death. “You made it through this ride. Now move to the next.” Although her voice was restrained, her words still sounded like an order.

“Why are you following me? You have a park full of riders, happy to hand their lives to you. Leave me alone! Like you said, I didn’t come for your rides.”

“No, you came for your brother. But he’ll be lost, just like everyone else.”

Her words echoed around inside my head a few times before catching on some receptive brain tissue. “What do you mean, ‘like everyone else’?”

She stood and came closer. “Seven rides, each one harder than the last. Think about it, Blake.”

“Are you saying that no one’s ever made it through all seven rides?”

She turned with only mild interest at the approaching galleon. “They’re lured by the thrill, and soon there’s nothing else. Even though there’s a way out of every single ride, they rarely find it, or even look for it. They let the thrill consume them. In the end either the ride takes them or they get caught at dawn. Either way, they never leave.”

In the sea beside us the galleon careened along the reef until something huge, green, and reptilian rose from the depths to grab its masts, pulling it over on its side, flinging riders into the sea. If there was a way out of every ride, like she said, these riders had missed their chance. The creature pulled riders from the ratlines with its clawed hands, shoving them into its tooth-filled mouth. Rocks eroded into astonished faces. Here be serpents, the medieval maps all warned.

“How can you do this to people? Lure them here, only to destroy them?”

“It’s a matter of balance,” she said coolly.

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed at me. “You don’t think this park grows out of nowhere, do you? It has to be built, attraction by attraction, on the spirits of those who visit.”

A roar from the serpent, and the last of the galleon was taken under the waves. So if this park was a living thing, a creature existing in the rift between dreams and the real world, then the riders—all the riders—were merely prey; and I had been watching the creature feed.

Cassandra took another step forward. “You’re afraid! Tell me about your fear, Blake.”

“I won’t tell you anything!”

“Please. I want to know what it’s like. I want to know fear.”

As I forced myself to look at her I could see she wasn’t just toying with me. She wanted to know. She wanted to feel what I felt. She studied me. I could feel her pulling at my thoughts, trying to get ahold of my feelings, and failing. She didn’t know fear. How could she, when the danger was always someone else’s?

This time it was I who took a step closer to her. I’ve always suspected that my life—maybe everyone’s life—is like an hourglass, in which the past and the future converge on a single point in time, that narrow channel where the sands pass. A single event that defines who you are. Until now I had thought that the bus accident was that event for me; yet here was a moment not of blind helplessness, but of decision. Everything could rest in the balance of the choice I now made.

Without daring to think about it, I reached for Cassandra, pulled her toward me, and kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss of passion—well, maybe just a little. But more than anything it was a kiss of defiance. A fear-conquering, do-or-die act of affirmation. Of determination.

In the instant that our lips touched, I felt what she truly was. Intense heat encased in intense cold. Two opposing extremes. But I was neither seared nor frozen by her.