Rush The Game

Annoyance surges, but I tamp it down. I need to redirect, come at the problem from a different angle. So instead of pursuing that line of attack, I ask, “Where’d the weapons come from?”
    This time, Jackson’s smile is wider. Obviously he approves of my approach. Like I care what he thinks.
    “They’re here waiting for us whenever we arrive,” he says.
    “Right-handed?” he asks.
    “Yes, why?”
    “Now lift your arm. I’ll show you how the holster works. Next time, you do it for yourself.”
    I lift my arm and he slides the straps over my shoulder. It’s a complicated layout, with a strap going diagonally across my chest and a second loop resting on my hips. I pay attention to the way he settles the buckles and snaps down the holster. If there is a next time, I definitely want to be doing this myself. I don’t like feeling like a toddler who needs help putting on her coat.
    “You want your weapon on your dominant side. You don’t want to cross reach. It’ll slow you down.”
    Jackson holds out a metal cylinder that’s about eight inches long. It looks like the handle of the toy light saber I used to play with as a kid.
    “Please tell me a glowing blade doesn’t leap out of the end of this.” I hear a snicker to my left. I glance over and catch Richelle’s wink, then turn back to Jackson.
    He’s not smiling. “You point this and you fire at anything that comes at you.”
    “Anything?” I ask. “Bees? Wasps? Lost puppies?”
    His lips thin, confirming what I already suspected. “You have no sense of humor,” I point out.
    He ignores my observation. “Anything non-terrestrial.”
    “Non-terrestrial? As in . . . extra terrestrial?”
    He gives a short nod.
    “Of course. I died today, and now I’m going to fight aliens with a light saber. Maybe after that we can look for mermaids. Or unicorns.”
    “No,” he says. “Just aliens.”
    Was that the barest hint of humor in his tone? I narrow my eyes. “What if I don’t want to go on this alien-hunting mission?”
    “What makes you think you get a choice?” The words are harsh, but his tone is oddly gentle, like he knows I’ve been pushed almost as far as I can go. It’s the gentleness that undoes me.
    Words flow like water before I can muster the will to turn off the tap. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I woke up this morning and I was just a normal girl,” I say softly, my sarcasm deserting me.
    Jackson goes very still. After a long second, he says, “No, you weren’t. You were never just a normal girl.”
    I gasp, his words cutting me like a scalpel.
    “None of us were ever normal,” he continues, either oblivious to my pain or purposely ignoring it. “That’s why we’re here. We’re anything but normal.” One side of his mouth curls in a dark smile. “Some of us being less normal than others.”
    I open my mouth to protest, to ask—
    “Don’t ask,” he cuts me off before I can say a word. “We don’t have time for the answer.”
    I can almost hear the clock ticking.
    His tone turns fierce. “Make it through this, Miki Jones, and I’ll give you all the answers you want.”
    “Now, there’s incentive,” I murmur. Make it through this . The only thing that keeps me from freezing in terror is what Luka and Richelle said about being miraculously healed at the end of whatever it is we’re about to face. As impossible as their assurance seems, I believe them because I know what happened to me when the truck hit, but I woke up here with all my injuries gone. Is that the respawn Richelle was talking about?
    Jackson tucks the cylinder in my holster like I’m some sort of rebel gunslinger.
    I brush my fingers over the end of it. “How do I fire it?” I ask.
    “You point it and you think it.”
    “Think it. Right. And how do I use—” I hold up the black band on my wrist and turn it back and forth. “What did you call it? My con?”
    He nods.
    “Um . . . what does that mean? Con?”
    His brows rise, and then he shrugs. “Connection. Conversation. Contact. Connectedness. Take your pick. They all apply equally.”
    “You don’t actually know, do you?” When he doesn’t answer, I ask, “Who decided to call it a con?”
    Again, that dark half smile. “You could say the name was chosen by committee.”
    “So how do I use it?”
    “You don’t need to use it. It’s activated. It’ll do what it needs to do.”
    Before this moment, I never understood just how thin my patience