A Sinister Game Read Online Free Page A

leaders were not allowed to communicate while a Game was not running.
    So the young boy took the small wooden box that Black handed him and nodde d his assent. He left the Gray T eam’s headquarters at a brisk run, heading for the transporters that would shift him from Black’s quadrant to Red’s.
    Victor watched him go.
    Then he turned back to the tall windows that stretched from floor to ceiling along one wall of his massive quarters. He peered ou t over the lights of the Field and the sectors that stretched beyond the wall below.
    Then his gaze shifted and locked onto the tall Red tower in the far distance.
    Enough time had passed, he was sure. Now he just needed to lay the trap, s pin the web.
    And invite the butterfly in for a drink.
    * * * *
    Victoria read the note again. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and read the note with its scrawling black letters one last time.
    Then she placed the note on the table and took the coin out of the box. It was a solid platinum coin. On one side was the Gray crest. On the other was a single letter : “B.”
    Victoria turned the coin over in her hands a few times before straightening, pocketing the coin and the note, and turning bac k to the windows . She had an amazing view of each of the quadrants from up here.
    Her personal quarters wer e the highest rooms in the Red T eam tower. Looking out to one side, she could see the distant right angle o f the Field’s impenetrable wall and the forested sector beyond it. She often wondered what lived in that forest. It was dark at night, j ust a long patch of black that must have been hundreds of acres across.
    On the other side of the Field she could see the wall fade into nothing but darkness, blending with the ocean that it sliced into in the second quadrant.
    Victoria pulled her gaze from the darkness and the unknown and focused it on the Gray tower, which stood miles away , opposite of her own, and rose just as high. She thought of the man wh o lived within its highest rooms .
    This was probably a very bad idea.
    Victor Black was the d ark team leader.
    Victoria released a frustrated sigh. “Dark” was an overly simplistic and, in her opinion, incredibly misused term for what Black and his team had to do day in and day out. After all, there was nothing wrong with the dark. She preferred it to daylight, actually. She came awake at night. She loved the stars. She felt more energized beneath the softer, bluer light of the moon.
    But no one had ever come up with a better description for it, so “dark,” it stayed. In ever y Game, someone had to be the hero, a nd someone had to be the villain.
    The Gray Team had always been a dark team. Red had always been considered light.
    Hundreds of years ago, Victor Black’s aptitude exams had garnered the attention of Game Control and earned him the rank of Gray Team leader b ecause , as it would seem, that was where his talents tended to lie .
    It did fit him perfectly, Victoria had to admit. His Game plans were devious, trick y, deceitful, and underhanded. But then again, it was difficult to tell how much of that was really him and how much of it was the role he was forced to play. His plans had to be deceitful and underhanded . It was his job .
    It was the fact that he was so good at it and that it seemed to come naturally to him that worried Victoria.
    Because despite the fact that her entire team was at the TGB, celebrating what they thought was a well - earned break , and despite the fact that as far as Game Control was concerned, no new Game had begun, Victoria knew differently. Victor was Playing.
    The invitation she’d just pocketed was part of this new Game. She should have ignored it. But she’d weighed her options and she truly felt that she had no other choice. Black wasn’t a man to be ignored.
    Besides , h e claimed that he only wanted to talk. In a decade, despite all of his talents and darkness, one thing that Victor Black had never done was lie to her. Not once. It was