Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman Read Free Book Online Page B

and I ran toward him, just as his bird reached the edge of a gully and lost its balance. It tumbled, disappearing down the ravine along with Russ. By the time we got to him, Russ was already picking himself up out of the dust. He was fine, but the peacock wasn’t.
    “I broke my bird.” It lay in splinters around him. The bird’s wooden head and neck were still intact, pecking at Russ’s ankles. He kicked it away in disgust.
    Now that the ride was over, my legs gave out, and I had to sit down on a boulder. I looked at my hands, my feet, the ground around me. I looked at the boulders and at the bright red sky. Nothing I had experienced before stepping on that carousel had prepared me for this. I knew it couldn’t be happening, and yet it seemed so real— more than real. There was a heightened sense of reality to everything around us, as if this place truly was made up of whole new dimensionsbeyond the three that filled up the rest of our lives. My senses were so unaccustomed to it, I didn’t know whether to feel wonder or terror.
    Maggie came up beside me. “You okay?”
    “Why are you asking him ?” said Russ. “What about me? I’m a wreck! I want to go home! I didn’t sign up for some weird, communal acid trip.”
    But Russ was wrong to call it that. This was the exact opposite of some drugged-out experience. We still had our senses. Our minds were sharp and clear. It was the rest of the world that had gone crazy.
    “The rules have changed,” I told them. “We’ve got to accept it and learn to deal with things the way they are now.”
    I stood up, feeling my strength return and feeling my senses adapting to the dimensions of this new reality. “It’s kind of like learning to swim. The first time you were in water, it must have felt like this.”
    “So we’ve got to learn to swim through this place?”
    “Either we make all the right moves, or we drown.”
    Russ shook his head quickly, nervously. “No. No. We’ve just got to stop this.”
    Maggie ignored him and turned to me. “Who was that girl on the killer pig? You talked to her like you knew her.”
    “You know her too. She ran the ball-toss booth. She was the one who gave us the invitation.”
    “Gave you the invitation,” Russ said. “I wasn’t invited. I should get to go home.”
    “You heard what that guy at the entrance said,”Maggie reminded him. “We can’t get out until we ride seven rides.”
    Russ started pacing in circles like a gorilla in a cage. “I don’t get this ride, anyway. I mean, what’s with these weird animals?”
    “I don’t think you’re supposed to get it,” I told him. “I think ...” I hesitated. “I think it’s for me. You’re just along for the ride.”
    “What? How could they make an entire ride just for you?” Maggie asked.
    “Not they— her. Cassandra.” The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that she was at the bottom of it all. “It’s like she gets inside your head somehow. She takes what she finds there and whips it up into this.”
    The thought stopped Russ in midpace. “Well, dude, maybe I don’t want some witch-chick picking the corners of my brain.”
    I forced a smirk. “Why? Y’think she’ll find something there besides toe-jam?”
    “Hey, you’ve got rides you’d rather skip, and so do I.” He looked up to the red sky as if some rescue might come by helicopter. “We’ll find her, and we’ll bargain our way out. That’s what we’ll do.”
    But I already knew what I had to do. “No. We go on to the next ride.”
    “You’ve picked a hell of a time to grow some guts,” he said. “Do us all a favor and go back to being a coward.”
    I could have hit him for that. I could have hit him and hurt him; and although he was stronger than me back home, I knew things were different here. This place wasdifferent. Here, it seemed muscle wasn’t made of flesh and blood; it was made of will and anger. And at that moment I had enough strength to hurl him into the