Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman Page B

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 oceana 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 theride 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